The glossy black shaft was as smoothly bored as my Kalashnikov, probably a gas vent. The floor had been paved, painted and lit like an airport runway. It plunged several hundred meters into the hill at a thirty-degree angle. We did too, as fast as we could.
Near the bottom, three hijacker riflemen appeared, heading our way. We all spotted each other at the same time, and opened fire. Our shots echoed hollowly in the blizzardless silence.
I emptied my clip into the lead hijacker, blowing his left leg off at the hip. He dropped. Schmidt nailed his hijacker too.
But the third one kneeled, aimed, and fired a short burst. Schmidt was knocked backwards. Blood gushed from his chest, subsided, then stopped.
Ejecting and slamming in a new clip, I fitted the last hijacker with a new eye between the other two. He slumped as I ran by him.
I stumbled to a stop at the bottom of the shaft. My legs were just about all out. Hugging the stone wall, I edged around into the cavern beyond.
The "hill" must have been formed by a giant volcanic gas bubble. The gas had vented, leaving a cavern about two hundred meters across. The hijackers had simply moved in and set up shop. Floodlights in the bowl ceding lit a circle of tarmac. Prefab buildings, fuel tanks and equipment ringed the perimeter. In the middle three more Yak VTOLs were being prepped by ground crews, to deal with the attack. They didn't seem to know that I was it.
Slugs chipped the rock wall over my head. Two hijackers in ground crew outfits were running across the tarmac toward me, firing their rifles as they came.
I dove, rolled, and scuttled under a truck. More slugs chopped up the tarmac in front of me. I cut loose with my Kalashnikov, driving the two hijackers to cover behind a pile of crates. More armed hijackers were converging on us from the buildings.
I looked around for the ammo dump, but it wasn't wearing a sign. The golden haze was now almost blinding. I felt so good that I just wanted to lie here enjoying it. But I still had a job to do.
Only one option left. I headed for the nearest Yak.
I zigzagged across the open tarmac, firing wildly, hoping to interfere with the hijackers' aim. The closer pair stayed behind their pile of crates, but the charging group sent bursts of slugs my way. A ricochet off my back knocked me down. I managed to get up and keep going.
Thirty meters to the Yak. My last clip scattered the crew prepping it. I dropped the dead weight of the Kalashnikov, and kept going.
Twenty meters. A slug punched through my right shoulder, shattering the joint. It was the best thrill yet. I found myself rolling on the tarmac, moaning ecstatically. I lurched back to my feet, and kept going.
Ten meters. I heard yelling behind me, getting louder. Something exploded to my left, probably a grenade. I staggered, but kept going.
I hit hard, curved duralloy. The Yak. The shooting stopped. Afraid of damaging their expensive fighter. I slid along the fuselage to the hatch. Opened it with my good hand. Jumped halfway inside.
Somebody grabbed my leg. It wasn't working very well, but well enough to lack free. I squirmed the rest of the way in. Wrestled other hands to get the hatch sealed. Fists banged. Voices yelled.
I crawled forward to the cockpit. Into the pilot's seat.
The hijackers had surrounded the Yak. Skoda fire hammered the fuselage, spiderwebbing the windshield glassite. My good hand fumbled with the controls. I had never flown a fighter, a few hours of sim-training had been considered adequate to cover such a low-probability scenario.
That was okay. I wouldn't be going very far.
Skipping the checklist, I swung the wing and tail jets into VTOL mode and fired them up. Thrust pushed the hijackers back. The Yak rose a couple of meters and hovered sloppily.
The hijackers were running toward the shaft mouth, to keep me from leaving. Two of them were prepping shoulder-launched SAMs. The Yak bristled with firepower, all operated from the weaponry officer's board out of reach behind me.
The flow of blood from my shattered shoulder was filling the inside of my suit. I could hardly move, but I managed to bring the Yak's nose around.
I felt better than I had ever felt before. Better than I had thought I could feel. And the best was yet to come. The golden haze was darkening. I could barely make out the cluster of towering aviation fuel tanks.
Somebody finally figured it out. An explosion rocked the Yak. Red displays flashed. Smoke filled the cockpit.
What had it been like for you, grunts? Fire and ice merged. The ultimate orgasm, resisted yet lusted for. Just like I lusted for it.
I shoved the throttles in all the way. The jets swung to flight mode. Screaming, the Yak leaped forward.
The dim tank-shapes grew. Filled the windshield.
Flam/shock/crush/blind/tear/burn/flay-
YEEESSSSS!!
Somewhere in Haven's equatorial region there was a well-hidden facility which didn't officially exist. Certainly the CoDominium didn't know it existed, or else the sky would have filled with warships paying an unsocial call. For it was a military research center sponsored by the government of Sauron. To circumvent the CoDominium's strict technology restrictions without giving away its ambitions prematurely, Sauron established such facilities in out-of-the-way sites. Haven was about as out-of-the-way as you could get.
In a well-equipped but otherwise spartan private office, a man known to most of the staff only as the General sat behind his big desk. Switching off his computer terminal, he leaned back to consider the report he had just read.
The goal of Project Fury was to augment the performance of a soldier by surgically reversing his pain and pleasure centers and suppressing his shock reactions, on the theory that if he enjoyed rather than feared suffering he would be more aggressive. From a strategic point of view the field test's telemetry and follow-up data seemed to validate the theory. A lightly armed commando squad had defeated an overwhelmingly superior force and destroyed its base of operations.
Unfortunately it had been a triumph of utter recklessness over good soldiering. The men's behavior had been erratic, to say the least. They had sought engagement at every opportunity, even when avoidance would have served the mission better. They had wastefully expended their minimal manpower. Casualties had been one hundred percent.
A death wish was the psychologist's term. The assumption that survival instinct would offset the self-destructive tendency of the pain/pleasure reversal had proved incorrect. The men had become addicts, subconsciously seeking more and more intense experience of all.
The problem was inherent and insoluble. Expensive super-soldiers who kamikazied in combat would be unreliable as well as unaffordable. So, insofar as augmenting the performance of the Homeworld's military forces was concerned, Project Fury was a failure.
The General stared into the half-lit gloom. His mouth twisted into a grim smile.
But not a total failure. In any war there were certain high-risk objectives which required elite, strongly motivated commando units. So-called suicide missions. Whenever the need arose, he would have the tools for the job.
FAREWELL TO HAVEN
His Excellency Arthur John George Waltham, the last CoDominium Consul-General ever assigned to the Byers' System, gazed out the quad-glazed windows of Government House at the last Haven sunset he would ever see. Behind him, workmen bustled busily, finishing the herculean labor of packing ten years of diplomatic life into crates for shipment back to Terra. He sighed. His baggage was packed and the diplomatic niceties were almost completed. Soon, fifty-four years of CoDominium governance would end. At noon tomorrow, on the seventieth anniversary of the discovery of Byers' Star, he, Allison, and the children would take the dubious honors of the Haven Volunteers, turn the government over to the locals, and embark upon the first leg of their long journey home.
Home to Terra. Now he smiled. He had missed the civilized days and nights of Earth, the civilized climate of Victoria, the civilized people of Melbourne.
It was the people he missed most of all, he decided. Haven harbored nothing but barbarians and criminals: boorish religious fanatics, crude hafnium miners, angry, volatile transportees. God, how glad he would be to leave behind the problem of what to do with a million new political and criminal deportees each year. Or the tougher one of how to enforce the writ of the CoDominium Senate now that the Marines had left to deal with worse problems elsewhere, and he had only the Haven militia, the "Volunteers" to back him up. His smile grew broader. Let the locals solve their own problems now, and see how they liked it.
"I know that smile, you've been smiling it entirely too much recently."
He turned, smiling even more broadly at a beauty that even ten years of marriage on Haven (and four children) had not been able to mar.
"You always could read my mind, Allison. Yes, I was thinking how wonderful it will be to get you and the children back to civilization and civilized people once again. Haven is not the place to raise a family, not a sane one anyway."
"Now, Arthur, you know not all Haveners and transportees are evil psychotics. What would the children be like by now if we didn't have Nanny Kinaston to look after them? She hasn't just seen to them while we have been off being Diplomatic, she has given them a better education than they got in the government schools. I'm just wondering how we will be able to get along without her."
"Yes, dear, I know she has turned them into a fine set of young gentlemen and ladies, but you must admit that she is one in a million. With three generations of conservative-Havener-religious and radical-transportee-political fanaticism behind her, it's a wonder she managed to get an education, learn civilized manners, and keep her sanity. I'm wondering what we can do to thank her."
Allison stood pondering that problem for a moment, her head tilted to one side, her long black hair drilling down over one shoulder. "I don't suppose we could arrange to take her back to Terra with us this late in the game? She could take care of the children on the trip home." She smiled her own private smile, the one with the left corners of her mouth and left eye trying to come together. "It would be just like the trip out . . . a second honeymoon."
He was delighted with the idea. "Of course! I've never met a Havener who didn't want to get off this rock." He frowned briefly. "The waiting list for emigration is about two million names long, and they only let a thousand or so get off in any given year." He slapped the windowsill with a happy violence that had heads turning and his aide rolling hurriedly to his side. "What good is it being the Consul-General of an entire planetary system if you can't let someone leave it? I still have sixty hours in office, and by Jove, I'll see it gets done if it is my last official act!"