by David Weber
“Sometimes I wish he didn’t have to work so much, too,” she said warmly.
“Well, what if I told him to stop working so much?” Veronika asked.
“I don’t think that would go over very well, doroga.”
Yulia watched Diana begin selecting blocks and stacking them carefully. Her expression was intent and she stuck out just the tip of her tongue as she worked. Yulia shook her head, smile broadening, then glanced back at “Uncle Misha.” He arched an eyebrow, and she nodded at the corridor behind him. He nodded back, stepped back out of the safe room, and swung the door shut behind him.
It made a very solid sound as it closed.
“Mommy?” Veronika said.
“Yes, doroga?”
“Does Daddy love us?”
Yulia frowned, then sat down on the couch next to Veronika.
“Now why would you ask a question like that?”
“Because he clearly loves working more than us,” she proclaimed.
“Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong! The reason he works so hard is because he loves you.”
Veronika frowned and beat her doll against the arm of the couch, looking thoroughly unconvinced by this argument.
Yulia put a gentle hand on her head and was about to continue when she stiffened and her eyes narrowed. The sudden, strident whoop was faint through the safe room’s thick, armored walls, but she knew exactly what she was hearing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Ukraine
1958 CE
“What do we do, sir?”
Nox hunkered down at the edge of the tree line north of the Provisional Residence and took stock of the situation. The half-liquefied remains of Pathfinder-6 glared in his virtual vision like the hellspawn of Yanluo, and markers denoted each fallen comrade. None survived.
I failed, he thought and turned away from it. His mind existed within the mechanized shell of the combat frame, and he possessed no tears to shed for the fallen. But somehow that made the sting of his failure even worse.
How could he ever face Shigeki again? How could he ever face himself after this?
“Agent Noxon?” one of the special operators asked.
“Pathfinder-8 has drawn the TTV away,” he heard himself say in a cool, even voice that flowed easily from the combat frame’s hardware. “And we still have a job to do. So we do it.”
“What are your orders, sir?”
“Pathfinder-8 may not survive its engagement.” Cold. So cold. Why were his words this cold? “We must take that into account and act accordingly.”
“Meaning, sir?”
“We cannot know what the professor’s objective inside is, and so we must be as thorough as possible. Anything and anyone in there could be important to his cause. Therefore, all of them must be eliminated.”
There was an uncomfortable pause, and then someone said, “There are women and children in there.”
“We take no chances. The residence will be swept clean.”
No one else responded.
He passed his enhanced gaze across the surroundings. The two-story building sprawled out in three wings with the central, north-facing wing closest to his position. An iron fence surrounded the entire perimeter, and the alarm from earlier had sparked fresh activity in the form of guards and guard dogs patrolling from inside the fence.
“Take up these positions.” He marked locations around the perimeter of the residence. “Wait for my orders.”
The operators and drones spread out in both directions, sticking to the forest as they formed a loose circle around the building.
He checked Pathfinder-8’s position. The chronoport had successfully led the TTV hundreds of kilometers away to the east, but then damage indicators from the chronoport scrolled down his vision, and he knew his time was short. His troops wouldn’t last long without the time machines backing them up.
The operators and drones all reached their containment positions. The sturdy stone construction of the mansion would provide a reasonable level of protection against their weapons, but anyone who tried to flee would be gunned down.
No one was getting away from this fight.
He activated his weapons, powered up his boosters, and faced the residence once more.
*
Landser Roderich Garlesch watched the road from the gate kiosk as he crouched on the concrete floor with his MP44 leveled across the stone counter. The floor made his knees ache, and he wished he had a blanket or a pillow to throw under them. He didn’t know what that strange crack of lightning had been earlier—or that weird dirigible, for that matter!—but he assumed they were part of why there’d been no stand-down order.
Balthasar’s ears perked up. Then they flattened, and the dog stood on his haunches. His lips curled back to reveal long rows of yellow teeth, and he threw an angry bark toward the darkening woods.
“What is it, boy?” Garlesch asked as he swung his machine pistol in the same direction. He squinted but didn’t see anything besides dirt, snow, and trees beyond the road.
Balthasar barked again, then rumbled a long, throaty growl.
“You hear something?”
A shadow shimmered in the distant gloom, and Garlesch brought his machine pistol around to face it. He lined up his iron sights and rested a finger on the trigger. Something had Balthasar spooked, and he was almost certain he’d seen movement in the trees.
A strange noise caught his attention.
“Hold it.” He sat up a little and strained his hearing. “Do you hear that?” he asked the other guards.
Balthasar started barking like mad, which made it hard to concentrate on anything else, but Garlesch could have sworn he’d heard something faint. Sort of like a small desk fan, he thought.
And then he heard it again. Only clearer and growing louder.
The guided grenade flew through the open window of the gate kiosk on tiny malmetal wings, propelled by a small malmetal propeller and shrouded in variskin. It dispersed a thick aerosol that filled the kiosk and poured out the open windows. When its reserves registered empty, the grenade exploded.
The incendiary aerosol ignited in a violent blue flame that cooked flesh and blackened rock. Roderich Garlesch died instantly, and Balthasar’s charred, flaming corpse flew out the window and bounced limply down the road.
*
Flames whooshed out of windows across both floors of the residence. Screams and shouts pierced the air, and the alarm rose once more.
“Deploy Condors,” Nox commanded.
The closest operator to his right took the bulky launcher off his back, stabilized it atop his shoulder, and then aimed it straight up. He fired the first Condor skyward, loaded the second rocket-shaped drone into the launcher, and sent it up after the first.
The Condors soared into the air, higher and higher until they reached the operator-programmed altitude. Then their aerodynamic outer shells split and unfurled to form trios of malmetal blades that lengthened and spun up to hold the altitude. Sniping rail-rifles actuated from the bottom of each drone and took aim on targets far, far below.
“Condors in position, sir.”
“Provide me with targeting authority.”
“Transferred.” The permissives lit up in his virtual vision.
Nox unfolded from his crouch and stood straight and tall at the edge of the woods. Admin ground forces followed a two-tier philosophy of direct and indirect combat. Special operators tended to perform their duties indirectly, either by controlling drones or engaging their targets at long range, because, even with their armor and weaponry, they were still squishy, vulnerable humans. Drones and, more importantly, STANDs formed the direct-combat side of that same coin.
Nox locked his weaponry onto two men and their German Shepherd racing back toward the residence across a half-empty parking area.
He lit his shoulder and leg boosters, cleared the distance to the fence in four booster-assisted strides, and vaulted over it. The dog bolted straight for him teeth bared, and
the two guards turned and brought their rifles up.
He tagged both men, and the Condors fired in perfect unison. Magnetically accelerated darts pierced the tops of their heads and didn’t stop until they shot out their groins. The men flopped to the ground, and the dog leapt for him with flecks of drool flying from its jaws.
Nox snatched the dog out of the air by its face, rammed a long finger into one of its eye sockets, and crushed its skull. Bits of brain oozed out between his spindly, mechanical fingers, and he tossed the dead animal aside.
“Wolverines and Raptors forward. Operators suppress.”
Sixteen drones charged out of the tree line, and the hypersonic cracks of rail-rifles ripped the air. More screams and shouts came from the residence, and primitive, sporadic fire chattered in response. A sniper rifle barked from the rooftop, and a Wolverine went down. One of the Condors swiveled its own weapon and punched a hole through the sniper’s head.
Nox boosted across the parking area, smashed through a first-story window in a shower of glittering glass, and tackled a man cowering on the other side. The man wore all white with a white cap and a white apron, and they both hit the tiled floor of a room lined with metal ovens and refrigerators. Heavy pots and pans hung from the ceiling, clattering against each other, and half a dozen men and women in white fled to either side.
Nox jammed the barrel of his heavy rail-rifle down the man’s throat and blew his brains out, then swung his other arm in a wide circle and swept the room with the incinerator. Pure blue flame shot out in a radiant arc that stripped flesh from bone, and the men and women collapsed screaming.
He boosted across the flame-spackled room, smashed shoulder first through the door—breaking it off its hinges—and found himself in a hallway lined with doors, some opened. A woman screamed at the sight of him, and he shot her through the heart. Gunfire rattled somewhere deeper inside the building. It might have been primitive, but there was a lot of it.
His sonic and infrared scopes identified which rooms were occupied. He kicked the doors down systematically and doused each room with flame that left charred corpses in his wake, not all of them adults. Smoke clouded the corridor when he finished, and he boosted deeper into the residence.
Rifles cracked from the left, and bullets zinged off his armor. Four men had toppled a heavy wooden table to form a makeshift barricade and fired steadily from behind it. He swiveled his boosters and retreated back into the hallway.
Even with the building ablaze and people dying left and right, these soldiers didn’t panic, didn’t run. Nox had expected the indigenes to break and flee from the residence, where his operators would gun them down in the open, but that didn’t seem to be happening.
A quick status check showed half the drones had been taken out. Troubling. Dozens of indigenes had been killed already, civilian staff members fled before his approach, but the soldiers among them were working in teams, communicating effectively, responding quickly to each disaster.
This wasn’t some motley security force. No, these men had seen combat and death before, and they stood their ground and fought against weapons and horrors they couldn’t possibly understand. What could inspire them to fight and die against thirtieth-century weaponry?
He pushed the question aside, because in the end, it didn’t matter.
He fired two grenades, and the projectiles flew around the bend. They detonated above the four soldiers and flayed them with twin showers of deadly shrapnel. He boosted into the junction.
If they’d formed a barricade here, then that meant there was something worth protecting behind it.
Or someone.
Good. I’m on the right track.
An alert popped up in his virtual vision, and he saw that Pathfinder-8 had been lost with all hands.
Damn.
The TTV would be back in minutes, and when it arrived…
He felt the seconds trickling through his metallic fingers and boosted ahead with reckless speed. Someone had closed the door at the end of the passage, and he smashed through it and flew out into a huge foyer. Wide, curving stairs lead up to a second-level balcony, and crystal chandeliers swayed under a high, vaulted ceiling.
Two waiting security troopers staged on the balcony with Maschinengewehr 42s caught him in a crossfire, and 7.62mm rounds pulverized his back. The individual jacketed slugs weren’t that heavy, but between them, the belt-fed MG42s spat out forty every second. He fell forward under the sledgehammer impacts and skidded across the red carpet, damage indicators flashing along his back armor and incinerator. Malmetal flexed quickly to close the gaps and he rolled back upright.
More of the twentieth-century troopers knelt in an arch across the foyer, two of them pouring fire at him. Then the riflemen went prone and a third man, standing behind them, leveled something across his forearm. Nox’s eyes would have widened in surprise, if he’d had any at the moment, as his sensors’ warning flashed in his virtual vision. Then his combat frame’s reflexes hurled him to the side as the Panzerfaust 250’s warhead scorched past and a shaped charge capable of penetrating two hundred millimeters of tank armor blew out the foyer’s outer wall behind him.
The Panzerfaust gunner dropped back and the men who’d gone prone to avoid the backblast came back to their knees, pouring fire at their bizarre foe while he reloaded the reusable launcher with frantic speed. More machine-gun fire ripped at Nox, and he engaged his boosters. He flew across the floor toward the arch and the gunners tracked him, blasting a hurricane of divots from the polished marble. Rifle fire hammered him from in front, as well, but he reached the arch. He flew through it, taking out one of the riflemen with a malmetal knee as he passed, and dropped on the man with the Panzerfaust.
The force of the impact crushed his victim’s ribs, and Nox ripped his head off. He hurled it at the second rifleman. The indigene was halfway to his feet, already rising, trying to bring his rifle to bear, when the hurled head struck with sufficient force to bowl him over. Nox dropped his rail-rifle’s muzzle and shot the prone man, then staggered as still more fire ripped into him from the corridor directly ahead. More soldiers poured into the foyer behind him, and more rifles and another machine gun opened fire.
He launched a trio of grenades back into the foyer and engaged his boosters yet again. The men at the end of this corridor wouldn’t be standing their ground with such determination if they weren’t protecting something vital.
*
Yulia von Schröder knelt to one side of the safe room’s armored door.
Her expression was stone and her blue eyes were frozen, but no colder than her heart as she listened to the thunder sweeping toward her and closed her ears to her daughters’ terrified cries. The girls—especially Veronika—had clung to her desperately. For the first time in their lives, she’d screamed at them, actually slapped them, to make them obey her as she thrust them frantically into the storage cabinet, slammed the door behind them, and then heaved the bookcase against that door to jam it shut.
Now she crouched behind her improvised barricade of furniture, the .45 automatic from the holster under her sweater heavy in her hands, and waited.
*
Nox expanded part of his malmetal armor into an ablative shield on his forearm, waded into the rifle fire, brought up his rail-rifle, and cut down the three-man fire team with a single, precise burst. The remote sensors he’d deployed in his wake warned him more of the indigenes had charged through the arched passage opening behind him, and he triggered the grenades he’d left to keep the sensors company, killing at least six more of them.
He slammed into the wall at the end of the passage, taking the impact on his shield, reorienting as he saw the stairwell. A tall, fair-haired man opened fire from its foot, and more 7.92mm slugs whined and sparked from his shield. The combat frame’s sensors reached out, and Nox snarled mentally as they probed the door behind that single rifleman. It was armored, and the wall into which it was set was reinforced cement sandwiched around a solid slab of armor.
>
*
“No!” Klaus-Wilhelm von Schröder cried.
Benjamin and Raibert turned toward him. The governor had the handheld radio to his ear. He’d taken personal command of the security force the instant the attack began, and his voice had been cold, clear, and calm, directing his men, steadying them in the face of the totally unanticipated horror. That voice was the true steely spine of the defense. The men at the other end of that radio knew that voice. Most of them had followed it straight into one side of Hell and out the other, and they trusted it. It had held them, carried them, and the ferocity of their response had stunned Benjamin. But now—
“No! Yulia!”
Silchenko had been crouched just inside the office door, directing the machine gunners on the landing outside it. Now he darted one look over his shoulder at Klaus-Wilhelm. His face went white and he exploded to his feet.
“Follow me!” he screamed to the men on the landing and sprinted down the smoke-choked stairs. The machine gunners and riflemen came to their feet, charging after him.
Klaus-Wilhelm was on the major’s heels, but Raibert’s hand shot out, locked on his arm, dragged him to a stop.
“Let go!” Klaus-Wilhelm snapped.
“Sir, we need you alive. It’s—”
“Let go!” Klaus-Wilhelm jammed the Magnum’s muzzle against Raibert’s forehead.
“No,” Raibert said flatly. “And I don’t keep my brain there, anyway!”
“No?” Klaus-Wilhelm’s eyes bored into him like twin augers. Then his wrist turned, the muzzle pressed his own temple, and he bared his teeth. “Well I do. So if you ‘need me alive,’ you fucking let go right now!”
Raibert’s eyes widened, but no one could possibly have misunderstood. He hesitated for one beat of the heart he no longer possessed, then opened his hand.
“All right, but in that case, stay behind me,” he grated, and charged out the door with Klaus-Wilhelm and his grandson right behind.
*
Nox’s sensors warned him that every surviving indigene within their reach was suddenly charging after him, and triumph glowed deep within. He’d been right. What he was looking for had to be on the other side of that armored door!
