Grimmer Than Hell

by David Drake

  He held it out for the others to see. It was a sovereign, snapped in half and mounted for an ear stud. The legend and lower portion of the bust of George III were worn to shadows.

  Janni began to laugh. The sound started normally but rose into hysterical peals.

  Bruchinsky, the only man in the room who didn't get the joke, looked in growing puzzlement at his Draka companions.

  COMING UP AGAINST IT

  The Grantholder's Palace was five hundred meters ahead of Milligan when the artillery prep landed, just as planned. The first rounds were high-capacity shells detonated by zero-delay nose fuzes, so that the blasts blew chunks from the exterior walls instead of going off inside the six-story building. The shockwaves rocked Milligan about a second after the orange flashes.

  The shells were to provide entry for the assault squad, not to kill the occupants. The squad would do the killing.

  The city's power grid went out at the same time, though occasional vehicle headlights marked the streets Milligan skimmed over. The AI of Milligan's suit sharpened the amplified-light view of the palace with mapped images from the data bank. So far as the squad was concerned, this mission was a scramble with no time for practice, but the intelligence base was remarkably complete. Somebody'd known what was coming.

  The windmilling figure in powered battle armor flung skyward by the ground-floor shellburst wasn't part of anybody's plan. The cyborg who was supposed to go in low on the south face while Milligan hit the top floor had hot-dogged. He got to the target just as the entry salvo did, and the shockwave flung him out of control.

  The cyborg had a name, all four of them did, but the humans of the squad's Fire Team One used letter calls in the rare instances they had anything to say to members of the other fire team. This cyborg was Gamma. He was at roof height, flailing in smoke and the debris of terra-cotta cladding, when the remainder of the artillery prep arrived: cargo shells delivering anti-armor sub-munitions to clear the palace-roof defenses.

  The Grantholder had a small particle-beam weapon and a pair of powerful lasers, all in separate turrets. The sub-munitions chose specific targets and punched self-forging fragments through them, destroying the weapons and killing the crews.

  The blast-formed uranium projectiles riddled Gamma's powered battle armor with similar ease. The scuttling charge sucked the suit in with a white flash and a blast more powerful than those of the artillery rounds.

  "My shell was a dud!" shouted Porter. "Cap'n, shall I cut my own?"

  A shell that didn't burst would only knock a head-sized hole in the light brick that covered the building's load-bearing concrete frame. Porter could blow an entrance in the wall herself, but she'd have to hover on her jets while she did so. That would make her an easy target for everybody in the Gendarmery camp adjoining the palace to the north and east.

  "Hit the ground floor south, Porter!" Milligan called. He paused before the smoke-streaming hole, a rectangle three meters wide framed by concrete beams, revectored his jets, and jumped for his own entrance five stories up.

  "Roger that, Porter!" Wittvogel agreed. Porter was already correcting her curved approach to bring her around to the south of the building.

  Porter had been supposed to go in on the east side of the fifth story. Captain Wittvogel had the roof and Platt—who was new, plenty of simulator time but no combat missions—would take the fourth story, believed to be servants quarters.

  The cyborgs had the three lower stories and the basements, as much as anything to keep them out of the way of the humans of Fire Team One. The cyborgs weren't really squad members any more than they were really human. They didn't take orders well, and they didn't worry about damage to friendlies so long as their own kill rate stayed high. Putting Porter in with Fire Team Two was dangerous, but not as dangerous as wobbling fifteen meters in the air like a shooting-range pop-up.

  The hole into the top floor was identical to the one at ground level. Because the building's cladding didn't support any weight, it was the same thickness at all levels. The palace had its own generator. Lights were on inside, though they merely backlit swirls of smoke from bedding ignited by the shellburst. The suit switched to Imaging Infra-Red before Milligan had a chance to.

  Milligan hesitated in the air, letting gravity and his upward inertia come into balance before he made the next move. He jetted his suit forward, chopping the fuel-feed with the same motion. When his foot touched the crossbeam, he was walking rather than flying.

  There were three doors into the huge bedchamber by which Milligan entered the palace. The explosion had blown off the doorpanels. Somebody stepped into the center doorway, shouting a question. Milligan riddled him/her with the railgun in his right forearm. He meant it for a short burst, but he fired a full hundred rounds before the AI shut the circuits down to cool.

  OK, he'd been spooked, but he was all right n—

  Movement in both the other doorways. Snap-shot right, railgun again but the trigger-pull as gentle as a mother's kiss. The target was wearing a breastplate that absorbed kinetic energy from Milligan's ring penetrators. As a result, they flung the body backward instead of simply killing him/her.

  The local in the left doorway fired an electron beam. Milligan's sensor displays flared white, though the internal read-outs didn't jump.

  Later in the mission there might have been a problem, but for the moment Milligan's suit was in blueprint condition. The shielding held. His weapon switches were live, however. A transient tripped a pulse from the laser in Milligan's left forearm, pointed at nothing in particular.

  The palace's interior walls had a cinder block core. That glowed white when the laser ripped the sheathing away. Upholstery and ornate wooden furniture exploded into flame. The local ducked or was driven back by the fireball. Freed from the electron beam's overload, Milligan's sensors clicked back on.

  He fired a short burst waist-high through the wall—the core was tough, but it wouldn't stop depleted-uranium ring penetrators moving at 5.5 kph. The local staggered into the open again, stumbling over his/her dropped electrogun.

  This time Milligan's laser was aimed and waiting. His pulse ripped the target.

  Milligan strode through the corpse, burst by its own super-heated body fluids, and into the large office beyond. His shoulder jounced the edge of the doorway, deforming the metal jamb and crumbling cinder blocks.

  The suit had switched back to straight optical. The carets Milligan didn't have time for indicated there were people in the office, half a dozen of them, ducking behind desks and consoles. Trying to hide, trying to find cover from which to snipe at the unexpected intruder . . .

  Milligan toggled his weapons' switch to frag, pointed with his left little finger to select a five-meter range, and twitched the finger six times across the arc of the room.

  The anti-personnel grenades choonked from the launcher on his left shoulder. They burst in the air with saffron flashes, hurling out a sleet of glass whiskers. The shrapnel wouldn't do more to powered battle armor than buff the paint, but it carved flesh from the bones of unprotected humans.

  When screaming figures leaped from where they'd hidden, Milligan snapped railgun projectiles through them to finish the job. Because of Ambassador Razza's orders, he didn't want to rake the consoles themselves with his penetrators.

  Porter had a friend in the Earth Embassy here on Monticello. For 'friend' read 'lover'. Milligan didn't know which sex, and that sure-hell wasn't a question he was going to ask Porter.

  While the squad suited up for the mission, Porter said, "You bet Razza wants to keep this operation secret. She wants to secretly transfer Dupree's credit accounts to her own bank."

  The cyborgs must have heard the comment, but none of them reacted. Even if true, it was non-essential information so far as they were concerned, like the color—gray-green—of the walls here in the embassy basement.

  Milligan looked at her. "Do you know that?" he'd asked.

  "Do I know the sun's going to come up tomorrow?" P
orter sneered. She was blond, stocky and very short—less than a meter-fifty. Maybe because of that, Porter made a point of being the toughest person in any group. With the force multiplier of her powered battle armor, she could come pretty close.

  Platt stared at Porter and said, "No, Corporal. It's a secret mission because until we get the proof that the Grantholder is communicating with the Throgs, Grant Dupree is still an ally so we can't move openly. Don't you remember? The ambassador explained it all herself."

  Even Milligan blinked at that. Porter shook her head and said, "My God, kid, you really are as stupid as you look." She rapped her knuckles on the concrete wall. "Here, I'd like to sell you this building, hey? A nice, solid place. You can make a bundle on resale."

  Platt blushed. "There's no call to insult me just 'cause I'm new," he said.

  "Porter, Platt," Captain Wittvogel said. "Get your gear on, all right? We load on the truck in one-five minutes, and I want time to bring everything up to spec if it doesn't check out."

  A plus of the mission was that they didn't have to insert from orbit. A slightly modified civilian semi-trailer would carry the squad to within a klick of the unsuspecting target.

  "You won't have to wait for me," Porter muttered, slapping closed the inspection port on her railgun magazine. As she tested joint movement manually, she went on, "Look, Platt, there's no way Razza would come in on this drop with us if it was Hegemony intelligence we were after. This is for her bank account, pure and simple, and she doesn't trust anybody else to oversee that."

  "Corporal," Captain Wittvogel said.

  Porter grimaced but didn't turn to face him.

  "Corporal," Wittvogel repeated.

  The captain was tall and rangy. The gray in his reddish hair could have been a genetic quirk, but he certainly wasn't a kid. He didn't raise his voice often, but neither did he expect to be ignored.

  Porter turned and braced to attention. "Sir," she said.

  "Politics aren't our job, Corporal," Wittvogel said softly. "OK?"

  "Sorry, sir," Porter agreed. "I—mission nerves, I guess. I talk too much."

  Captain Wittvogel grinned tightly. "If you weren't nervous," he said, "I'd think you didn't have the sense God gave a goose. But don't let's go spooking the newbie, OK?"

  The squad finished check-out and suiting up without further discussion, except for the cyborgs. Two of them argued about whether or not the greater hardness of tungsten penetrators was a good trade-off for the higher sectional density of depleted-uranium railgun ammo.

  If there'd ever been a time to worry about the why of this mission, that time had ended when the sides of the semi fell down and the assault squad launched from the heart of Dupree City. Right now, Sergeant Terrence Milligan shared a building with over a hundred people who wanted him dead. It wasn't just Ambassador Razza's orders to 'Leave no witnesses!' that kept his trigger fingers twitching.

  The office proper was clear. Enhanced IIR, reading body temperatures through the walls, indicated a swarm of locals in the chamber beyond. Heat from the grenade blasts had melted a fusible link, sliding an armored fire door across the double-width archway joining the rooms.

  "Milligan!" Captain Wittvogel ordered. "Prep an entrance down to five, but don't blow it yet!"

  "Sir, I haven't cleared—" Milligan began, though his hands were already unlimbering one of the three frame charges he carried for this mission.

  "Now, dammit!" Wittvogel ordered. "I know what's clear, and I know nobody's dealt with five yet!"

  Milligan flopped the charge on the flooring, hardwood over a base of structural concrete. He spaced his weapons' selector down one and toggled on external.

  A local fired an anti-armor grenade that punched a head-sized mousehole from the other side of the cinder block wall. Milligan looked up from an echo-sound of the floor, making sure that he wasn't setting the frame charge above an internal wall on the fifth story. He spat three railgun rounds to either side of the mousehole.

  Folded for carriage, the frame charge deployed into a meter by two-meter rectangle of explosive tape as soon as Milligan pulled it from its holder. The objective side was convex, with capsules of adhesive which the operator could release with a slap to the top if the charge had to be tacked in place.

  A local with a back-pack laser fired through the hole, searing away half Milligan's helmet sensors and sending his armor's environmental system into overload before he could lurch away from the swept area. The office was full of smoke. The suit went back on IIR, and the short laser pulse Milligan directed at the mousehole diffused badly in the murky atmosphere.

  "Fire the frame charge, Milligan!" Captain Wittvogel ordered.

  Was he standing on the rectangle of explosive? He hopped sideways again. Bullets raked the office, harmless but sawing on Milligan's nerves when they ricocheted from his armor. Locals were prising back the firedoor. He triggered his railgun toward the wall and detonated the frame charge with his left index finger.

  Though the trough shape focused the explosive's effect against the flooring, the blast still knocked Milligan another step sideways. That was good, because a local used the mousehole to fire a kinetic-energy hittile that wasn't a damned bit affected by the smoke which shrouded Milligan's laser into near uselessness. The rocket-driven tungsten slug snapped at Mach 5 through where Milligan should have been, through the block wall, through a concrete beam with a blast of sparks from the reinforcing rods, and out into the night.

  The hittile would have punched at least into the powered battle armor if Milligan had been in its path.

  The rectangle of floor sagged from one short side instead of falling cleanly. The concrete was reinforced by wire mesh, not rods. Strands the charge hadn't severed acted as a hinge, popping one by one under the weight of the 15-cm thick slab. A laser blazed up through the hole.

  "Get him!" screamed a local as the firedoor jerked up its sloping track against the force of gravity a hand-span at a time. The next room must be huge to have allowed the hittile's backblast to expand without the overpressure killing everybody enclosed with it.

  Milligan placed short bursts through the door opening and the riddled wall. His left hand snatched an incendiary bomb from the carrier on his right hip which balanced the frame charges. He didn't dare let the railgun overheat or he was fucked for good and all.

  He dropped the bomb through the opening onto the fifth story. As he did so, the chamber from which the locals fired at him belched flame past the firedoor, out the mousehole, and through every hole Milligan's penetrators had picked in the block wall.

  "Coming through!" Captain Wittvogel called. The hypersonic crack of his railgun firing single shots punctuated the words. "Coming through, Milligan. Don't shoot!"

  The firedoor, driven by the full strength of a suit of powered battle armor, shot along its track and banged against the stops. Wittvogel strode through the archway, troll-huge and the most beautiful thing Milligan had ever seen. The door slid down again, shutting off the sea of fire beyond.

  Captain Wittvogel surveyed the office. The chamber from which he'd entered was a conference room, wrapped now in flame but no danger to a fully-armored soldier. Air sucking through the mousehole helped to clear smoke from the office.

  "Clear to come down, sir," he called on the general channel. Switching to line-of-sight laser commo, he added to Milligan alone, "The pick-up boat's on the roof, and Razza's in it."

  Wittvogel's bomb satchel hung empty. He must have thrown his load of three incendiaries together. The railgun merely brought mercy to the locals still twitching in the flames. "Your charge and the missile backblast covered the hole I put in their ceiling," he explained. "It doesn't do to get too focused in this sort of business."

  The steel emergency hatch to the roof beside the building-center elevator shaft opened. A rope-and-batten ladder dropped. Two men carrying locked cases, technicians of some sort, wobbled down into the office. Their eyes through the goggles of their respirators looked terrified.

/>   Milligan's incendiary bomb had driven back the shooters on the fifth story briefly, but now a laser probed the hole in the office floor again. A workstation, constructed primarily of inert plastic, burst into flame. The technicians were hunched beneath an unbearable weight of fear. They crawled to a console served by armored leads.

  Milligan leaned toward the hole. He pulsed his own laser twice without bothering to aim. Wittvogel laid a frame charge on the floor three meters from the existing hole. "Wait till I go," the captain said. "Then come in, but don't forget I'm down there too."

  "No!" Ambassador Razza ordered as she dropped from the roof wearing a light powered suit. Because the ambassador didn't have experience with the servos, she overcorrected and banged into the elevator/utility column. "Wittvogel, you stay here and guard me."

  She glanced at the cowering technicians. They'd opened their cases and were attaching leads to the console's input slots. "Get to work, damn you!" she added.

  Milligan looked up. He couldn't make eye contact with his captain through their armored suits. As he tried, he realized there weren't any options anyway. He swore softly.

  Wittvogel took a bomb from Milligan's satchel. A lanyard jerked loose the safety pin. The charge would go off at its next contact. A fragmentation grenade, dangerous to the techs and the equipment, bounced up out of the hole but fell back onto the fifth story before it exploded.

  "Your choice," the captain said.

  "Mine," Milligan replied. With luck, the locals would concentrate on the new opening while Milligan dropped in through the original one. He fired his laser through the hole, keeping to an angle that protected him from a direct reply but might bounce his beam usefully from the wall of the chamber below.

  All hell was breaking loose in the Gendarmery camp. Somebody there had been alert enough to fire at Kappa, the cyborg who was supposed to enter the palace from the north and clear the basement while his partner—Porter, as it turned out—took care of the ground floor.