High-security ward, McNair Memorial Hospital, Commitment
Michael was bored rigid.
Even the prospect of appearing in front of Investigating Tribune Marek Kostakidis was not enough to get him excited. In fact, he was looking forward to it in a strange way. It would be a change from the tedium of being locked in a secure cell inside a secure ward with nothing to do and nobody to talk to. It also would give him a chance to say his bit, even though he knew full well he would not be given more than a minute or two, if that, to say anything.
The trial would be a farce. That much was not in doubt. The attorney appointed by the tribunal to defend him had handed him the brief of evidence only the day before. The meeting that followed had been a complete crock, and the attorney not much better. Over and over, he had refused to respond when Michael had pointed out inconsistencies in the evidence, saying only that the brief had been prepared by DocSec, was accurate, and could not be questioned.
Michael had never met a man so spineless. A jellyfish would have been more useful.
He pushed himself upright and swung his feet out of the bed before standing up, doing his best to ignore the protests from his abused body. Thanks to the best medical care the Hammers had to offer-as good as anything the Federated Worlds could provide-he was well on the way to recovery, his system still loaded with nanobots busy repairing the damage Hartspring’s interrogators had inflicted over the course of those terrible hours of unremitting punishment.
Michael stood swaying until the light-headedness had passed. He slipped on his plasfiber half boots before forcing his body into its regular routine of pacing out the few meters his cell afforded him, stopping every few circuits to do squats and push-ups. It was a huge effort, but he forced himself to move, relieved to feel his muscles loosening in response to the exercise, the pain that had wracked his frame the first few days now reduced to a mass of dull aches.
An hour later, his body had made it clear that enough was enough. Five more minutes, he told himself, and then he would stop. For the umpteenth time, he reached the wall and turned, but as he did, the floor shivered, a fleeting tremor that was gone almost before he realized what was happening. An instant later, the air filled with a heavy rumble that rolled on and on. Puzzled, Michael stopped, his head swinging from side to side as he tried to work out what the noise was and where it was coming from. It was an impossible task with the heavy plasglass windows and the thick ceramcrete walls robbing the sound of all life. There was a short pause; then the noise returned, louder, and this time it did not stop, building into an irregular thudding that shook Michael’s cell.
His mind raced. Only one thing made that noise: high explosive and tons of it. It had been almost two weeks since Hartspring’s men had captured him; could the NRA have broken through the Hammer’s defensive line along the Oxus River since then? They must have; why would the NRA be using its precious air assets over McNair if they hadn’t?
Without any warning, the door banged open. “Stand back!” the DocSec sergeant in charge of Michael’s security detail barked. Lojenga was the man’s name. Like every other DocSec trooper Michael had ever met, he was a brutal psychopath who was way too fond of using his baton and stun pistol.
Michael did as he was told, and Hartspring appeared. The colonel looked down his nose at Michael for a good minute. He made Michael feel like he was a piece of dog shit on the sole of one of his mirror-polished boots. Finally he nodded. “He’ll do,” he said, turning to Lojenga. “Talk to-”
“Wait, Colonel,” Michael said. “I’ll do for what?”
Hartspring’s lips thinned to bloodless slashes. “Did I speak to you?” he hissed.
“I don’t give a shit whether you did or not,” Michael snapped. He stepped back as Lojenga unholstered his stun pistol. “What will I do for?”
Hartspring waved Lojenga away. “Your trial starts tomorrow,” he said.
“No way. The doctor said I couldn’t be moved for at least another three days.”
“The doctor?” Hartspring smiled. “You think I care what the doctor says? Now shut your damned mouth or I’ll let the sergeant’s stun pistol finish this conversation.” He turned to Lojenga. “Have him ready to move out in ten minutes.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wrists flexicuffed to leg restraints, Michael watched Hartspring’s second armored personnel carrier reverse up to the hospital’s prisoner transfer dock. He wasn’t bored anymore; the opposite, in fact. His heart pounded as he contemplated his return to the Gruj and the start of his trial the next day.
It was the beginning of the end. He knew that. After all the humiliation and embarrassment he had heaped on Chief Councillor Polk and the Hammers, they would finish him this time. Their determination was obvious; an APC blocking the access ramp to the transfer dock was just the start. Outside, in the harsh glare of massed floodlights, waited four all-terrain vehicles, cannon- and missile-armed, their crews dressed in full combat gear and carrying assault rifles. Beyond them were two more APCs. Decoys, Michael supposed, and probably packed with yet more marines.
It would take an entire NRA battalion to get him free of the Hammers.
Hartspring was taking nothing for granted. His briefing over, he was walking the line of vehicles to have a final word with each of the commanders. Michael could understand the man’s obsessive attention to detail. If Hartspring let Michael get away, Chief Councillor Polk would tear his heart out with his bare hands.
Hartspring took a final look around; he nodded and walked back where Michael waited. “Mount up,” he shouted, waving a hand. “Sergeant Lojenga! What the hell are you waiting for? Get that bloody man into my APC!”
“Sir!”
Lojenga pushed Michael down the ramp to the waiting vehicle. Too hard. Unable to move his feet fast enough, Michael stumbled a few halting steps before gravity took over, dragging him down in an awkward, twisting fall that his flexicuffed hands could not break. His body crashed into the ceramcrete dock, tumbled down the ramp, and came to a stop at Hartspring’s feet, newly healed injuries screaming in protest.
“You bastards,” Michael hissed through clenched teeth.
Hartspring ignored him. He pulled out his pistol and stepped over Michael. In a single fluid movement, he ran up the ramp, put the pistol to Lojenga’s head, and pulled the trigger. The shot echoed around the transfer dock, a flat crack that faded into the silence.
The DocSec sergeant stood for a while, eyes wide open in shocked surprise. With a sigh, he crumpled to the ground at Hartspring’s feet. “You always were a useless turd, Sergeant Lojenga,” Hartspring said. He spit on the black-jumpsuited body and stood back. “You! Rajith, Craxi!” His finger stabbed out at two DocSec troopers. “Get that bloody man on his feet and into the APC. Move!”
The two men sprinted down the ramp. They dragged Michael to his feet and bundled him into the APC, and none too carefully. They ignored Michael’s protests and followed him in. It was hot; the air smelled of hydraulic fluid, burned gun oil, and spent ammunition and was filled with the muted chatter of radio circuits. The interior was cluttered with weapons racks, storage boxes, comm equipment, and workstations. The marine operators looked like they’d much rather be somewhere else; the glances they threw at the two troopers were loaded with contempt.
The men pushed him into a crash seat and strapped him in, securing his arms and legs to small rings on the bulkhead and the floor, the restraints pulled so cruelly tight that he could barely move. “Thanks so much, you pair of DocSec dipshits,” Michael muttered.
One of the troopers put his face close to Michael’s. “Enjoy the ride, you Fed cocksucker. Where you’re goi-”
With all the force he could muster, Michael smashed his forehead into the bridge of the man’s nose. The blow hit with a terrible crunching thud that sent the man howling back across the cramped compartment with his hands to his face and into one the marines, who pushed him to the deck with a curse. The man sat whimpering, blood spurting scarlet from between his fingers.
“Big mistake,” Michael said, smiling though the pain.
The smile did not last. The second trooper whipped his stun pistol out and jammed it into Michael’s stomach. The charge jolted Michael’s body rigid, his entire nervous system screaming in protest.
“What the Kraa is going on?” It was Hartspring. Even through pain-slitted eyes Michael could see he was seriously pissed.
“The prisoner attacked Trooper Rajith, sir,” the DocSec trooper said. “I have the situation under control.”
“You’d better, Corporal Craxi. Rajith, get your useless hide out of here. I’ll deal with you later.”
Hartspring ignored Michael. He made his way up the compartment and slipped on a headset and boom mike. He climbed into the commander’s position behind the driver, a center-mounted crash seat flanked by two large holovid displays; fingers flew across a small control console.
Finally Hartspring nodded, obviously satisfied that everything was as it should be. “Tango Niner, this is Box Cutter,” he said. “Move out.”
The APC lurched forward. Michael craned his head to look at Hartspring’s displays. They were clearly readable in the subdued light. “You’re not taking any chances, are you?” he said under his breath when he worked out what the clutter of icons meant. And Hartspring wasn’t. His APC was accompanied by three more. Two ATVs led the convoy, two brought up the rear, and two more covered the flanks. Surveillance and attack drones orbited overhead.
It was an impressive amount of firepower to keep one man in plasticuffs and leg restraints in custody. Michael allowed himself a moment of satisfaction. Better all those assets and men were tied up escorting him across McNair than facing the NRA, he thought.
Satisfaction turned to jubilation when Hartspring opened out the range scale to reveal an ugly red line slashing down across the northeastern suburbs of the city.
Yes, yes, yes, Michael thought. The NRA has broken the Hammers’ defensive line between Yallan and Cooperbridge to cross the Oxus. Now it’s only a matter of time before the Hammer of Kraa is history.
His jubilation vanished. Behind the front line, red icons marked the positions of the attacking NRA units. And there was the only icon that mattered, the icon for a mechanized infantry battalion: a rectangle enclosing a cross, the symbols | | above, and the numbers 3/120 to the right. That’s Anna’s battalion, Michael thought, and they are only 10 kilometers outside McNair.
Knowing she was that close almost tore him apart. She might as well have been a million klicks away.
Michael forced himself to look away. His head went back, and his eyes closed in despair. He was slipping into sleep when, with no warning, the brakes slammed on, bringing the APC to a shuddering halt.
Something is up, Michael thought, and I’ll be it’s something Hartspring hasn’t planned for.
The colonel’s body language told the same story. He sat crowbar-straight in his seat, one hand locked into a grab handle and the other stabbing at the command display while he muttered orders into his boom mike. Whatever Hartspring was saying got the APC moving again, only this time it was really shifting. It swayed from side to side, its tires scrubbing as it was pushed hard into corners. And over the noise of the APC came the heavy concussive thud of bombs, the metallic racket of heavy machine guns, the heavy thump of cannon fire.
I’ll be a son of a bitch, Michael thought. Hartspring’s convoy is being gone over by NRA ground-attack landers. An image of a smart bomb coming down through the roof of the APC right into the man flashed across Michael’s mind.
Without any warning, a single massive explosion picked up the APC and tossed it high into the air. The blast crushed Michael down into his seat and drove the back of his head hard into the headrest. For a moment, the APC hung weightless. Then it rolled onto its side and plunged back to earth, hitting in a sickening crunch that tossed men around the crew compartment like so many straw dolls.
The last thing Michael remembered was the butt of an assault rifle hurtling toward him before it punched into his forehead and sent him spinning down into darkness.
Michael ignored a blinding headache and opened his eyes. Groggy with pain, he looked around the APC. It was a shambles, a terrible sight in the feeble glow of emergency lights. The front of the crew compartment was jammed with bodies. They lay one atop another, piled in awkward disarray against the side of the APC in a tangle of arms and legs. The air was filled with moans of pain. Michael thought the two DocSec troopers and most of the marines were dead.
He realized how lucky he had been. Unlike the crew, he had been strapped in tightly when the APC was blasted skyward by what must have been a very close miss, his hands and feet restrained, his head and body cradled by the crash seat. Michael reckoned a glancing blow from a wayward rifle was a small price to pay for surviving the mayhem.
But surviving had left him with a small problem. The crash seat and restraints might have saved him, but he had to get out before help arrived. But how? He twisted his head around to look at Hartspring’s body. Was the man alive? If he was, Michael wanted to be long gone before he woke up. Michael could see no way to get free. He swore long and hard under his breath, his frantic attempts to wrench his arms free only making bruised muscles protest in pain.
He swore some more when the side hatch opened. The sound of cannon fire and explosions flooded in. A head sporting a bloodstained field dressing appeared. “Anyone alive in here?” it shouted over the racket.
It was Corporal Haditha. “Just me, I think,” Michael called up. “Rest are either dead or unconscious.”
“Hold on.” Haditha’s feet replaced his head. The marine lowered himself. He looked around. “Kraa!” he hissed. “What a fucking mess.”
“Can you get me out before this thing goes up?”
“It won’t,” Haditha said. He was already checking for survivors. “I’ve shut everything down.” He paused, turning to Michael. “Besides, why would I help you? What I should do is blow your fucking head off, you piece of Fed crap.”
Hope vanished, replaced not by fear but by anger. “You think this is what I want?” Michael shouted. “It’s not. I just want you fucking Hammers to stop killing each other and to leave the rest of us alone.” His head slumped back. “I don’t care what you do,” he muttered, closing his eyes. And he didn’t. He had given all he could; he had nothing left.
Haditha worked his way over to Michael. “You think I’m just another stupid Hammer, don’t you?”
“Piss off,” Michael muttered. “If you don’t kill me now, that son of a bitch Hartspring will, so what do I care?”
“Believe me, nothing would make me happier than to kill you.”
“So do it.”
Haditha sighed. “No,” he said. “I won’t. You can give me a hand to see who’s alive, and then I don’t give a shit what you do. This fucking war’s over-” They both flinched as a second explosion punched the wrecked APC bodily to one side. “-and there’s the proof. I never thought I’d see the day the NRA would be bombing the shit out of McNair. But today’s the day, and it is. Now shut up and let me get you out of there.”
It was the work of only seconds for Haditha to cut away the restraints. “That’s it,” the marine said. He threw off the safety harness that had kept Michael alive. “Now help me see who’s still breathing. You can start with your friend, the colonel. I’ll take the humans.”
Michael wanted to kiss the man. Instead he grabbed a medical kit off the bulkhead. He pushed past Haditha to where Hartspring lay, moaning softly. For an instant, Michael’s hands were around the man’s throat, but sense prevailed, and he let his hands fall away.
Hartspring’s eyes opened. He peered up at Michael. “Couldn’t do it, then?” he croaked. “You Feds always were piss weak.”
Michael put his mouth to Hartspring’s ear. “Don’t worry,” he whispered, “it’s only a postponement. I need you.”
He was wasting his time. The man had slipped back into unconsciousness, so Michael turned his attention to the rest of the survivors, though not before relieving Hartspring of his pistol.
Fifteen minutes later, he and Haditha had done what they could. It wasn’t much. Only one of the marines was conscious; the rest were either dead or so severely wounded that they would be if they did not get medical attention soon. Michael did not fancy their chances. By the sound of it, the NRA had launched a full-scale assault on McNair. The noise was incredible, the hull of the APC shaken repeatedly by near misses, its hull battered by a relentless shower of shrapnel and wayward gun and cannon fire.
“I think we’ve done all we can,” he said to Haditha, “but these guys need help and fast.”
“I know,” the marine said, rubbing his face with a bloody hand. “I’ve radioed for the medics, but Kraa knows when they’ll get here.”
“What now?”
“Up to you.” Haditha waved a hand at the hatch. “It’s not too good out there, so I’m not going anywhere. This is the safest place to be right now.”
“I can go?” Michael asked.
“If you want to. I don’t give a shit.”
“But I do,” a voice said from the front of the APC.
Michael and Haditha swung around to find themselves looking down the barrel of an assault rifle held in the wavering hands of Colonel Hartspring. Michael cursed his own stupidity; he’d assumed that Hartspring was too badly wounded to pose a threat.
“Now, Corporal Haditha,” Hartspring went on, his voice weak, “I will give you an order, and if you do not obey me, I will shoot you. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Haditha replied.
“Find some flexicuffs and make sure that little shit can’t go anywhere.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You don’t have to do this, Corporal,” Michael hissed.
“Shut up,” Haditha snapped, rummaging through the DocSec troopers’ jumpsuits. “Bear with me, Colonel,” he said, moving away from Michael. “I need to get cable ties from the spares-”
Haditha moved so fast that it was all over before Michael even realized what was happening. As if by magic, a stun pistol appeared in his hand, and he shot Hartspring right in the chest. The shock dropped the colonel into a trembling, shaking heap, his face a rictus of pain before his head went back and he passed out. “Fucking piece of DocSec garbage,” Haditha said. He scrambled forward to take the gun from Hartspring’s hand. “I think you’d best go,” he said to Michael.
“I will, but I’m taking Hartspring with me. I need him to get me a meeting with Chief Councillor Polk.”
“Polk?” Haditha’s eyes flared in surprise. “You’re joking.”
“No, I’m not. Now, help me get the dirtbag out of here.”
“I hope he breaks his fucking neck,” Haditha muttered as they manhandled Hartspring’s limp and unresponsive body up to the hatch and pushed him out.
“He’ll live,” Michael said, grabbing a rifle and a pistol before scavenging everything else he might need and jamming it all into a pack. “People like that always do. Right, I’m off. I’ll see you.”
“I hope not. You’re too dangerous to be around.”
Michael grinned. “True. Look after yourself, Corporal Haditha.”
Ignoring the inevitable complaints from his badly abused body, he climbed out of the hatch and dropped down to land beside Hartspring’s unconscious form. He looked around. “Holy shit!” he whispered. He was in a scene from hell. The road was littered with the shattered remnants of Hartspring’s convoy. The vehicles had been ripped apart; now their carcasses burned fiercely, sending thick clouds of acrid black smoke boiling skyward. Only one was still recognizable as an ATV. Its snout was buried under the rubble of a collapsed building. Its occupants, shocked and dazed, had taken what cover they could beside the wreck. A marine bent over one of the survivors, lurid green woundfoam on his hands as he struggled to deal with an ugly gore-spattered chest wound. Intent on his work, he ignored Michael.
Spurred on by a wayward bomb that ripped the street apart only a hundred meters away, Michael slung the rifle across his back. Stripping Hartspring of his personal comm, he took the man by the collar. With every last grain of energy he possessed, he dragged the colonel’s dead weight away, then down a side street and into the dubious safety of a half-collapsed office block. The effort was almost too much. Dropping Hartspring, he collapsed. His lungs heaved, and his heart pounded; he could only lie there, oblivious to the battle raging outside.
“This won’t do,” Michael said out loud, forcing himself to sit up. “This won’t do at all.”
Ferreting around inside his pack, he found the medical kit. Inside was what he was looking for: a blister pack of autoject syringes marked in red with the words “CAUTION: EMERGENCY USE ONLY. MORE THAN 1 DOSE PER DAY MAY KILL.”
“One dose per day? Well, screw that,” Michael said. He broke three out. Taking one, he smacked it into his arm. In an instant, an unholy cocktail of ampakine-derived stimulants and painkillers flooded his system. A tsunami of energy and exhilaration flushed the fatigue and pain out of his body. He turned his attention to Hartspring. Working fast, he propped the man up against the wall, flexicuffed him, and ripped the sleeve of his black jumpsuit off. He drove first one and then a second autoject home.
For a moment Michael thought that he’d overdone it, that the drugs had killed Hartspring. The colonel lay motionless. Then, to Michael’s relief, his eyes opened. He looked around in wild confusion before his body shuddered upright, quivering and shaking.
“What the hell did you just do to me?’ Hartspring asked, his voice firming as the drugs took hold, eyes now alert but wary.
“I smacked two of these babies into you,” Michael said, waving an empty autoject.
“Kraa! No wonder I feel so good.”
“I’m pleased to hear it,” Michael said. “Now it’s time to talk about how you’re going to help me.”
“Hah!” Hartspring snorted his derision. “Me? Help you?” he said with a sneer. “Why would I do that?”
“How about this?” Michael raised the laser pistol and fired into Hartspring’s shin, the sharp, metallic crack of the hair-thin laser pulse loud even over the noise of the battle raging outside. “Will that do for a reason?” he said.
Hartspring did not flinch. “You’re wasting your time,” he said. “I didn’t even feel that.”
Michael swore under his breath; he should have known Hartspring’s drug-laden system would absorb the shot without complaint. “Okay, then. Let’s try this.” Michael shot Hartspring again, this time in the stomach, low down and to one side. “I don’t suppose you felt that, either,” he went on. “Now, I’m no doctor, but my guess is you’ll be dead inside six hours if I don’t get you to a hospital. And if not dead, then pretty close to it … and in agony as those drugs wear off.”
Fear flickered in Hartspring’s eyes. “What do you want?” he said.
“I want you to set up a meeting with Polk for me.”
Hartspring stared at Michael in open disbelief. “Polk?” he said. He shook his head. “You’re kidding. Those Kraa-damned heretics are tearing McNair apart, and you want me to set up a meeting with Polk? Dream on, sonny boy. I can’t do that.”
Michael shot Hartspring in the stomach again. Hartspring looked down in disbelief at the tiny smoking hole punched through his black jumpsuit.
“How’re your guts going?” Michael said. “Not too good, I’d say. I think I’ll try for the liver next time. You’d better hope I don’t hit one of those big blood vessels, because you won’t have six hours left if I do. Hell, you might not even have one. Now, will you help me or not?”
Desperation joined fear in Hartspring’s eyes. “It’s not possible,” he said.
“That’s crap. Polk wants me real bad, remember?”
“Not anymore. Please believe me. The man’s paranoid about security. He won’t let you get anywhere near him, and even if he did, what would be the point?”
A tendril of doubt slipped into his mind. Let it go, it whispered. Polk’s not worth it. Michael stomped down hard on the slender thread. This was not the time for second thoughts, he told himself. A promise was a promise, and if he didn’t kill Polk, the man would get away. Besides, Polk would want to see him; he too was obsessed by thoughts of revenge, and that was the lever Hartspring would use.
“This is what we’re going to do,” Michael said. He tossed Hartspring’s personal comm over. “Call the man. Tell him that you’re bringing me in. Let’s start with that, and we’ll see how it goes. Come on, Colonel. Time’s running out, and don’t try anything stupid or the next shot will be through your throat.”
“Okay, okay,” Hartspring said. He fiddled with the comm, then put it to his ear. Primitive, Michael thought. There was a long pause. “Polk’s not answering. Nobody from his office is answering. He’s gone.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Michael shouted. “So where is the bastard?”
“No idea. Probably off-planet by now if he’s got any sense.”
“Get back on your comm and find out where he is or I’ll leave you here to rot. Do it! Now!”
“How am I going to do that? It’s chaos out there.”
What was left of Michael’s self-control vanished. Without a second’s consideration, he shot Hartspring in the gut a third time. “I don’t care. Just do it,” he said. He ignored the man’s whimpering protests.
“Polk was last seen in his office around midday,” Hartspring said ten minutes later. “After that, nobody’s seen or heard from him. I’m sorry; that’s the best I can do. Get me to a hospital, now! For Kraa’s sake.”
“You’re lying. He’s there, isn’t he?”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so,” Hartspring bleated. His face was twisted with pain. “The NRA attacked the Supreme Council complex this morning; the place is a ruin, and the Hammer of Kraa is finished. Why would he still be there?”
This is not good, Michael thought, angry and frustrated. What the hell do I do now?
The sudden appearance in the road of a Doctrinal Security colonel pointing a rifle at a disheveled man brought the mobibot to a screeching halt. A window opened. A man poked his head out. “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded. “Get out of my … oh … ah, sorry,” the man stammered when he realized who he was looking at. “How can I help?”
“Get out!” Hartspring said. “I’m commandeering this vehicle.”
The man could not get out of the mobibot fast enough; he did so without a word of protest.
As they set off, Michael took his assault rifle back from Hartspring and replaced the empty magazine with a full one. “Now, Colonel,” he said, “you sit there and enjoy the ride. We’ll be at the complex soon.”
Hijacking the mobibot had been too much for Hartspring. His face was now a death mask of pasty, sweat-slicked white. “You promised,” he whispered. “You promised to take me to the hospital.”
“Yes, I did promise,” Michael replied, “and I will, though let me see now-” He frowned, a finger tapping his lips. “-I don’t think I ever promised to get you there alive. No, I’m pretty sure I didn’t.”
“You bastard,” Hartspring mumbled. His voice was so soft that Michael had to strain to hear him.
“Yeah, yeah.” Michael shook his head. “Anyway, after all you’ve put me and Anna through, did you really think I’d let you live? You’re a damn fool if you did. But let’s look at the upside,” he continued. “Chief Councillor Polk ordered you to bring me in, and that’s exactly what you’re doing, though it’s a pity the bastard won’t be there to say hello. When he finds out, I think he’ll give you a medal. Mind you, you’ll be dead when he pins it on, but then, you can’t have everything, can you?”
But Hartspring had stopped listening. His head fell back. With a soft choking rattle, his lungs emptied for the last time.
Hartspring was dead.
Still wide open, his eyes looked back at Michael in silent reproach. Michael leaned over, closed them, and sat back. His mind was filled with a confused jumble of emotions. Nothing made sense anymore. He had killed Hartspring, so why didn’t he feel … whatever he should have felt? Fulfillment? Satisfaction? Pleasure? He felt none of those things. He just felt flat and empty.
All he wanted was for it to be over, to go home, to be with Anna, to live a normal life.
But it was not over, not while Polk still lived. The nightmare would end only when the man was dead. Michael took a deep breath and forced himself to think straight.
In the chaos raining down on McNair-as if to make the point, the mobibot shook as a flight of NRA ground-attack landers swept overhead, the air torn apart by the howling screech of rockets as they pounded some unseen target-finding Polk had to be close to impossible. Unless Hartspring had been lying, of course. But if Polk was in the complex, how would he ever find a way past his security detail to kill the man?
And even if he managed to kill Polk, that still left the small problem of getting back out alive.
You’re making this up as you go along, Michael told himself. You have no fucking plan and no fucking idea. He would have to take things one step at a time, he decided. Much as he hated winging it, what choice did he have?
But I will find Polk, he promised himself, and then I will kill him, and if I can’t do that without getting myself killed, I should-I will walk away.
There was too much to live for not to.
The mobibot swept around a long, sweeping bend. Ahead the road climbed up to the Supreme Council complex. It braked hard and stopped.
“Shiiiit,” Michael hissed. He was looking at what once must have been an imposing collection of buildings: classical in style, massive, designed to overawe the people of the Hammer Worlds, each one a monument to the brutality of Hammer power. Most had been reduced to blast-shattered shells that were sending thin skeins of smoke drifting into the sky. He’d thought the NRA would leave the place alone, and for good reason. This place was the single most heavily defended site on all of the Hammer Worlds. That might well have been true, but it hadn’t stopped ENCOMM from sending in the landers to give the place one hell of a pasting.
Except for one wing, the Supreme Council building, the heart of the Hammer of Kraa, remained standing. I hope you’re in there, Polk, Michael thought, because I’ve come a long way to see you.
The mobibot could go no farther. The blockhouses flanking the entrance through the outermost ring of razor wire had been blown apart, scattering ceramcrete rubble across the roadway as it threaded its way through an elaborate chicane of dragon’s teeth, massive pyramids of ceramcrete big enough to stop an Aqaba main battle tank. And it was not just rubble, Michael saw. There were bodies everywhere in the black uniforms and gold brassards of DocSec’s elite 201st Assault Regiment, the unit responsible for protecting the Hammer’s senior apparatchiks. For a moment Michael considered trying to clear a way through, but that idea died when he spotted a double row of meter-high metal bollards spanning the road. He’d have to lower them before the mobibot could get past, and because the controls probably were buried in one of the wrecked blockhouses, he did not fancy his chances.
Time to walk, Michael, he said to himself.
He opened the door of the bot and eased himself out, rifle swinging from side to side. He looked around. The only Hammers he could see were dead ones. Where was everybody? This checkpoint might have been trashed, but there had to be more DocSec troops around if Polk was still holed up inside the complex. He swore under his breath. Where was the 201st?
Hard as he searched, there was still no sign of anyone. Michael swore some more. Hartspring had been right. № 201st meant no Polk, and without Polk he was wasting his time.
What the hell, he said to himself after thinking things through. I don’t have anything better to do, so I might as well go have a look, and if Polk has already abandoned McNair, then I’ll call it a day.
Staying low, Michael scuttled over to the shattered remains of the nearest blockhouse and peered in. It was a charnel house. The sight and smell of what was left of the DocSec troopers caught inside made him retch. Forcing his body back under control, he dropped to his stomach and squirmed past the jagged remnants of the building until he could see up the roadway to the next checkpoint. It too had been trashed, and so had the one beyond it. With all the concentration he could muster, Michael scanned the area for any signs of life. But nothing moved amid the luxuriant flower-studded foliage, not even the leaves, the humid air still and thick with dust and smoke from the battle raging across the city.
The road up into the complex was horribly exposed. Michael hated the idea of using it, but he had no better option. He’d read the ENCOMM intelligence reports. Ten meters on either side of the road, where the greenery started, the ground was seeded with antipersonnel and antitank land mines backed up by laser autocannons positioned to provide interlocking fields of fire. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the entire area was patrolled by groundbots-the NRA called them pigs-with optical sensors linked to pulsed lasers. Without the right IFF patches, Michael’s chances of getting past them were nil. If the mines didn’t get him, the pigs would.
So the road it was.
Michael took a few deep breaths to settle a sudden attack of nerves. A soft sobbing broke his concentration. He swung around. He cursed himself for not checking that the DocSec troopers littering the area were all dead.
Michael slithered back to where the wounded man lay. The trooper stared up at him. “Please … drink,” he whispered through blood-encrusted lips. He looked young and afraid; for a moment, Michael was able to forget that the man was Doctrinal Security.
Michael found a canteen and held it to the man’s mouth. The trooper drank greedily, dragging at the water in great gulps. “Thanks,” he said, letting his head fall back.
Michael leaned over him. “What’s your name, son?” he asked.
“Rossi, Lance Corporal Rossi.” The man’s voice was as soft as falling dust.
“Where’s the rest of the 201st, Corporal?”
“All gone. After the NRA smashed us … couple of hours ago, not sure.”
“What happened?”
“Everyone ran … They ran like rats; they-” Rossi broke off. A choking cough wracked his body, and fresh blood bubbled from his mouth. The scarlet froth was shocking against bloodless lips. “We didn’t know what to do,” Rossi went on when he had recovered. “They were afraid of the NRA … I’m afraid of the NRA. We were just leaving when those heretic bastards came back again. Their damn landers … blew us all to hell.”
“So who’s left? What about the chief councillor? Did he leave?”
“Don’t know … I don’t feel so …” Rossi’s voice faded away. His eyes closed. He sighed, a long sigh that took him by the hand and led him quietly into death.
“You poor bastard,” Michael murmured, getting to his feet, “even if you were a piece of DocSec shit.” He stripped the body of its armor and microgrenades. He abandoned all caution and walked up the middle of the road. Fear turned his stomach over the whole way.
Michael arrived, unchallenged and, he hoped, unseen, at the innermost ring of razor-wire fencing that protected the most senior Hammers.
How, he asked himself as he scanned the debris-littered ground around the complex, did it ever come to this?
The men who had squatted like obscene toads at the blood-soaked peak of Hammer power had gone. There was not a living soul to be seen anywhere, just more bodies. He walked through the chicane, heading for the largest of the inner compound’s buildings. A scarred brass plaque proclaimed it to be the offices of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of the Faith. It had been badly damaged, one entire wing reduced to a smoking shell, the walls pocked with cannon fire and slashed by shrapnel, glassless windows gaping empty-eyed at the world.
Michael slipped past the security point and stopped in the main entrance. A pair of impressively large doors lay on the floor, ripped off their hinges. He stopped, stunned by the arrogance of the huge atrium. The floor was black granite with flecks of gold; it was littered with splinters of glass from the roof. The far wall, also of black granite, was dominated by a Hammer of Kraa sunburst that was a full 20 meters high. Recessed lights had been arranged to strike brilliant spears of light off the beaten gold surface. Two staircases led off to left and right. Amid shattered glass and granite was the evidence of panic-stricken flight: shoes, coats, personal comms, uniforms, papers, a security briefcase complete with chain, the chairs behind the elaborate reception desk pushed away and toppled onto their backs, the desk itself thrown back against a wall, bottles, broken cups and mugs, a pot that had toppled over, spilling a dusty lake of coffee across the floor.
The place was a shambles. The miasma of defeat hung thick in the air.
Michael stopped in the center of the atrium. He looked up and turned slowly on his heel. The hubris was breathtaking. He stood at the center of Chief Councillor Polk’s megalomaniac universe. It was hard to believe.
Except Polk wasn’t there anymore. Nobody was. The place was empty. Everyone had gone.
Anger erupted into incandescent fury. The assault rifle in Michael’s hands exploded into life; he emptied the entire magazine in a sustained burst at the sunburst. Hypersonic rounds chewed a jagged path of destruction across its golden frame. Shards of metal and fragments of granite blasted outward to tumble and spin through the air.
“You are such a dumbass,” Michael said, angry with himself for losing control. He dumped the empty magazine and slotted home a new one. If any of Polk’s people were around, they’d be-
“Welcome, Lieutenant,” a voice boomed. “I was just thinking about you.”
Polk, Michael thought, spinning around, searching for the man. It’s Polk. But there was nobody to be seen. “Is that you, Polk?” he shouted. “Where are you? Hartspring said you’d left.”
“That fool! I’m in my office. Where else would the chief councillor be at a time like this? Take the stairs. You’ll find me on the other side of the building.”
“I’m on my way,” Michael shouted, elated now. He had him. The blood roared in his ears. “And when I get to you, I’ll blow your goddamned head off.”
“Now, now,” Polk chided. “Let’s not be too hasty.”
“Just watch me,” Michael muttered, half convinced that he had slipped into a crazy parallel universe where enormously powerful men like Polk sat alone amid the ruins of empire even as retribution bore down on them.
It was insane. If the Hammer of Kraa was good at anything, it was producing fanatics, so where were they all? Surely Polk could have scraped up a few to protect him.
Michael started up the stairs, nerves jangling in anticipation. Reaching the top, he checked every door and every passageway with care to make certain he was not walking into an ambush. But still there was no sign of life.
There was no mistaking Polk’s offices when he came to them. The embossed gold sign was hard to miss. Michael moved past the security desk and into a sprawling reception area studded with chairs and low tables. He walked on and into a second reception room. This one was smaller, more intimate, the lighting soft. He followed a short corridor with rooms off to both sides, some elaborately furnished and some set out as simple meeting rooms. The corridor led to a sprawling open-plan office. It was as stark and functional as the public rooms had been relaxed and comfortable. Michael headed for a door on the far side. He eased it open with the toe of his boot.
Instinct had Michael’s rifle up before his brain had worked out that the man waiting inside posed no threat. “You!” Michael hissed between gritted teeth.
It was Polk.
He held his arms out wide, hands empty, a disarming smile on his face. He was smaller than Michael remembered, his lean, wiry body dressed in a pale gray one-piece jumpsuit and sporting a small Hammer sunburst in gold on his lapel.
“Oh, for Kraa’s sake,” Polk said, “put that gun down. Come into my office. Come on, Michael. It’s over, so let’s at least try to be civilized.”
“On your face, Polk, with your arms out, and do it unless you want me to shoot you.”
Polk sighed. “You’ll find I’m clean,” he said, dropping to the floor.
“We’ll see.”
Polk lay there in silence while Michael searched every last square centimeter of the man’s body, ignoring Polk’s muffled protests. “Okay,” he said finally, “you can get up.”
“I told you I was clean,” Polk said, getting back to his feet and brushing himself down. “Come on; my office is through here. We can talk. I’d like that.”
“Go through. I’ll be right behind you, and if I think you’re about to pull anything, I’ll blow your brains out.”
“Michael!” Polk protested. “Please relax.”
An enormous plasglass window dominated the chief councillor’s office. It looked out across luxuriant gardens below a dust-filled afternoon sky thick with towering columns of smoke. It was sparsely furnished: a desk empty of anything but a comm box, two armchairs flanking a coffee table, a pair of Hammer flags, a wall-mounted holovid screen, a small coffeebot in a recess. Nothing personal, Michael noted: no memorabilia, no paintings, no pictures. It was strange. It looked as if Polk rented the place by the hour.
“What’s through there?” Michael said, pointing to a door in one of the walls.
“My private rooms, the VIP entrance, and the elevator. Up to the lander pad. Down to the garage, war room, and emergency shelters.”
“Show me.”
Again Polk sighed. “There’s nobody out there. Everyone’s gone. It’s just you and me.”
“Move!”
Polk was right. The place was empty.
“Okay,” Michael said. He allowed himself to relax a fraction. There might be fifty Hammers holed up in a room he hadn’t spotted, but there were limits to what he could do on his own. “Let’s go sit down. No, not your desk-there.” He pointed to one of the armchairs. “And keep your hands where I can see them.”
“Fine, but first some coffee?”
“Yes, please,” Michael said, struck by the sheer absurdity of it all. Coffee and small talk with a power-crazed lunatic. It was beyond absurd. “You know why I’m here, don’t you?” he asked as Polk placed two steaming mugs on the table and sat down.
“Of course,” Polk replied. “You want to kill me.”
“I do, and I will. I wanted to look you in the face first.”
“Well, we’ll see.” Polk paused, a thoughtful look on his face. “I had it all, you know,” he went on, “the chief councillorship, my councillors where I wanted them, you Feds on the ropes.” He stopped and shook his head. “You know,” he said a moment later, “I’ve never met anyone quite as stupid as that Ferrero woman. Did she ever stop to think what she was doing, what she was risking?”
“I don’t think she did.”
“No, she didn’t. We were only months away from getting our new antimatter plant. Nothing could have stopped the Hammer of Kraa. I was going to be humanspace’s first emperor, you know. I got so close … and then you came along.” Polk’s face, which had been animated up to then, soured into a bitter scowl.
“You give me too much credit.”
Polk shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. You were the catalyst. Without you, the Feds and the NRA would have screwed around until it was too late. You made things happen. That’s your genius.” He stopped, a faraway look in his eyes. “I would have destroyed the Federated Worlds, you know. I’d already given the orders. The operation was scheduled for December. Did you know that?” Polk’s eyes glittered. He had a half smile on his face; his tongue flickered across thin, bloodless lips. “The Hammer fleet would have reduced your planets to smoking wastelands.”
For the first time, Michael saw the evil in the man. It was a terrifying sight. With sudden certainty, he knew he would not live to see Anna again. Polk’s depraved soul would never allow it.
“I’d have enjoyed that,” Polk went on. He shrugged as if the destruction of an entire system and the deaths of millions were matters of no great import. “I hate you Feds. I always have.”
“You’re mad.”
Polk laughed. “Looks that way, doesn’t it?” he said. “But I’m not. After we’d dealt with the Federated Worlds, how much of a fight do you think the rest of humanspace would have put up? I’ll tell you: none. They’d be on their knees begging for mercy, which I, Emperor Jeremiah the First, would of course have been happy to grant.”
“Emperor Jeremiah the First,” Michael said; he shook his head. “You really are mad.”
“I’m the madman?” Polk said. He waved a dismissive hand. “I don’t think so. I’m not a Fed renegade sitting alone in the office of the Chief Councillor of the Hammer of Kraa Worlds. Oh, no; you’re the one’s who is mad. And for Kraa’s sake, stop pointing that rifle at me. Put it away! It’s no good to you.”
“I don’t think so.”
Polk’s eyes scanned the room. “Let me see … Yes, there are twelve lasers pointed at you right now, and they will kill you the instant your finger tightens on the trigger.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You should. My laser system is very good. It was a present from the Pascanicians. It’d take a battalion of marines to get past it.”
“Your lasers didn’t stop me from getting to you.”
“You idiot! That’s because I let you walk in. You are no threat to me. From the moment you walked up to the building, your life has been in my hands. Now I decide whether you live or die.”
Michael’s stomach knotted, his every instinct saying that Polk was telling the truth. “Okay, so you have lasers on me,” he said, tapping the butt of his rifle, “but I can still blow your damn head off before they get me.”
Polk shrugged. “I doubt it. The system has motion sensors, and it monitors heart rate, blood pressure, brain activity, pupil dilation, skin conductivity. And if you do fire at me, the lasers will destroy the bullet before it even gets close to me. I’ve seen them kill men who are better and faster than you’ll ever be. Trust me, Michael; it’s a very good system, and that’s because it’s all controlled by an AI.”
“Now I know you’re lying. AIs are proscribed by the Word of Kraa.”
“They are, but I’m chief councillor.” Polk shrugged. “If I want an AI, I’ll have an AI, and the religious primitives out there can go screw themselves,” he added, angry now, his forefinger stabbing out at Michael. Polk took a deep breath before continuing. “And the AI is very, very smart; I can see why you Feds are so fond of them. It knows when you are about to shoot me long before you do.”
“Bullshit!”
“You should also know that I only have to say a special code phrase and the lasers will kill you.’ Polk glanced at Michael, who stared back, stony-faced. “You still don’t believe me, do you?”
“No.”
Polk sighed. “There’s no trust anymore. Fine, have it your way. Watch this. Red Canal,” he said, and a microsecond later a laser pulse snapped from a recess in the ceiling and punched a small smoking hole in the carpet. Polk sat back, looking smug. “There you go,” he said. “That was a test pulse. The real thing is much more impressive, as you’d find out if you tried anything stupid.”
Michael nodded his defeat. He’d heard about these systems. They could be beaten, but that took months of training and a neuronics-linked needle gun. “Fine, I believe you now,” he said.
“Good, but we can’t just sit here swapping small talk. Come on; what’s your plan? You do have a plan, don’t you?”
Now, that is a very good question, Michael thought. What is my plan? “I will kill you,” he decided after a moment’s consideration, “and if you kill me, that’s the price I have to pay.”
Frustrated, Polk threw up his hands. “Haven’t you been listening? You cannot kill me. No matter how hard you try, the lasers won’t let you. Anyway, you don’t want to die, and we both know it. You’re young, you have a good woman waiting for you, and I must say your Anna is such a lov-”
“You mention her again,” Michael shouted, “and I’ll blow your fucking head off. You hear me?”
“For Kraa’s sake, relax,” Polk said, putting a hand out as if to fend Michael off.
“I’ll relax when you’re dead, you asshole,” Michael barked. “You think I’ve forgotten what you and that scumbag Hartspring had planned for her?”
“Michael, please. That’s all in the past.”
“Not for me, it isn’t, as Hartspring just found out.”
Polk’s eyebrows lifted. “You killed him?”
“I did.”
“Ah, I was wondering why he hadn’t shown up. Look, Michael, much as I’m enjoying your company-and I am-time is against us, so we need to move along.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I have a proposal for you.”
“I’m not interested,” Michael muttered, frustrated, consumed by impotent rage. He knew he sounded like a spoiled child.
“You should be, because it’s the only way you’ll escape from here alive. You are a fool: a fool for coming here, a fool for thinking you could kill me, and a fool for even imagining you can just walk away. You’ve let emotion tell you what to do. Unless you start using your brain, you’ll end up dead, and why would you want that?”
Michael knew Polk was right. He had let emotion take over, and he did not want to die. It was galling, but he would have to hear Polk’s proposal.
“What do you want, Polk?”
“To leave, both of us.”
“You could have left with all the rest of your loyal subjects.”
“That’s what everyone thinks I did, but me taking to the streets of McNair?” Polk shook his head. “Way too risky,” he went on. “The mob wants my blood, and they if they didn’t get me, the NRA would, so I stayed put. You see, with everything that’s going on out there, this is the safest place for me to be. Hiding in plain view it’s called. The NRA will think I went with my chief of staff and the rest of my people. This is the last place they’ll come looking.”
“So what’s the deal?” Michael said.
“An orbital shuttle is coming to pick me up … let me see … yes, in less than ten minutes. Thanks to friends of mine inside ENCOMM’s air tasking group and an obscene amount of money, I plan to be onboard a Kallian fast courier when it breaks orbit less than an hour from now. You see, Michael, I never expected it to come to this, but I always knew it might. So I made plans just in case. Oh, yes, I intend to have a very long and very comfortable retirement.”
“Why do you need me? Sounds like you have all the bases covered.”
“For heaven’s sake,” Polk said with an irritated frown. “Are you always this slow? Why do you think you’re still alive?”
“What, I’m a hostage now?”
“Of course you are. The NRA will never shoot down a shuttle that has you onboard.”
Michael shook his head. “You are delusional, Polk,” he said. “Have a look out the window. It’s a bloodbath out there. No shuttle will get within ten klicks of here.”
“An NRA shuttle will, a shuttle under orders to check that Kallian courier to make sure I’m not onboard. Those orders have come from ENCOMM, Michael. Why would anybody question them?”
“It won’t work, Polk, not when the shuttle has to drop in here to pick you up. Bit of a giveaway, don’t you think?”
“That’s why I’m so pleased to see you, Michael,” Polk said. A huge grin of self-satisfaction animated his face, a grin Michael wanted badly to wipe away with the butt of his rifle. “Now, instead of putting down to deal with battle damage, it’ll respond to a comm from you, a comm to say you’ve been wounded-nothing too serious, of course-and need to be casevaced. And you, Michael, are the best insurance I could ask for.”
Michael could only stare. Polk had him by the balls. All he could do was hope that fate would give him the chance he needed to kill Polk without being killed in the process. “Fine,” he said eventually. “If I agree to go with you, then you’ll let me go?” Even to his ears, he sounded pitifully weak, but what choice did he have? He needed time for something to turn up, and if he had to beg to get it, he would.
“Once I’m onboard that Kallian courier, yes. You have my word on it.”
“Your word? That’s fine, then. What are we waiting for?”
“Don’t be sarcastic. The crew will be coming with me; the shuttle’s AI will fly you back. All of this is finished-” Polk waved a hand around the office. “-so what do I care? What you did, it’s history now and I’m over it. Now we need to go. Either come with me or I’ll give the word and the lasers will kill you. Last chance. Coming or not?”
“I’m coming.”
Polk got to his feet and made for the door to his private rooms, Michael close behind. “We’ll take the elevator to the roof,” Polk said over his shoulder. “Once the shuttle appears, we need to be quick or it will leave without us. And in case you’re tempted, don’t try anything. There are lasers everywhere, even covering the pad. Those Pascanicians are very thorough. It’s the only thing I like about them.”
“I just want to get this over with,” Michael replied.
The elevator opened into a small reception room. Polk checked a wall-mounted holovid screen showing the rooftop landing pad. “Good,” he said, tapping a small data window superimposed on the image. “Our shuttle has received the message about you and is inbound.”
The holocam tracked the shuttle in. Its nose reared up for landing. Belly-mounted thrusters blasted jets of incandescent gas into the pad. It slowed into a hover and started to drop to ground.
“Let’s go,” Polk said the instant the machine settled onto its undercarriage. He pushed through armored doors and walked briskly across the pad to where the shuttle waited, its ramp down. Michael struggled to keep up; belatedly he worked out why. The cocktail of stimulants he had injected into his body was wearing off. By the time he reached the ramp, it took a huge effort just to keep moving. His body was beginning to collapse with frightening speed. He staggered up the ramp and into the shuttle. A crewman-the only one Michael could see in the cargo bay-waved him into a seat, his pistol trained on Michael’s chest, as it had been from the moment he had appeared at the foot of the ramp.
“I’ll have the gun,” the man said. Pistol in one hand, he reached forward to take Michael’s rifle. But, as he did, the pilot fed power to the thrusters for liftoff and the artgrav twitched, forcing the crew member off balance for an instant.
Michael had his opportunity, and he took it. Purely on instinct, he pushed himself out of his seat and whipped his rifle up, driving the butt into the crewman’s stomach with sickening force. The impact doubled the man over, and he half fell, half stumbled back. It gave Michael enough room to bring his rifle to bear, and he shot the man full in the chest, the noise of the gun shockingly loud even over the roar of the shuttle’s main engines.
Shock had frozen Polk into immobility. Before the crewman even reached the deck, Michael was bringing his rifle up. Polk saw death coming for him. He threw his body to one side as Michael fired. The burst plucked at Polk’s sleeve and smashed into the bulkhead, spalling metal and plastic into the air. Michael tried to get the gun to follow Polk around, but he was too slow.
Polk ducked under the rifle barrel and launched himself into a desperate leap that threw Michael onto his back, the rifle ripped out of his hands as he cannoned into the deck.
Now Polk was on top of Michael. One hand was around Michael’s throat; the other arced down in a glitter of quicksilver. Michael only had time to bring his left arm up to deflect the attack but not fast enough to stop the knife from slicing through his DocSec-issue coverall. In a searing blaze of pain that shocked Michael into a frantic, scrabbling fight to win the knife, it opened a gash across the corded muscle between neck and shoulder.
With an awful clarity, Michael knew that this was a fight he could never win. His adrenaline-fueled energy was fast running out, and Polk was attacking with a manic ferocity that was truly terrifying, his left hand battering punches into Michael’s face while the knife in his right slashed and cut and stabbed past Michael’s flailing hands, a desperate struggle that left both men drenched in Michael’s blood.
Michael rolled the dice for the last time.
Calling on the last of his reserves, he arched his back, a violent movement that brought his right leg up hard and gave him the space he needed to twist his upper body away from Polk’s fist. He lunged for the knife with both hands, forcing it down, the sudden move throwing Polk off and onto his back. Polk fought to regain the initiative, but Michael’s right fist was free now. A punch exploded upward into Polk’s jaw. The blow hit home with a sickening crunch of broken bone that drove Polk backward, screaming in agony.
Kicking to get clear of him, Michael broke free. He scrabbled across the deck to grab his rifle. He leveled the gun at Polk. “It’s over,” he shouted.
Polk wasn’t finished. His right arm whipped across his body. The knife was a blur that moved so fast that Michael had no time to react. It buried itself in Michael’s right shoulder. Overwhelmed by pain and shock, Michael staggered back across the cargo bay. He hit the bulkhead and collapsed into a seat, the gun still in his hand across his lap. He glanced in disbelief at the knife lodged in his shoulder.
Polk struggled back to his feet. Terrified, Michael watched the man come toward him across the deck, a bloody-jawed horror with death in his eyes. Polk scrabbled into a pocket and pulled out a pistol. “Yes, Michael,” he mumbled; scarlet froth dribbled from his mouth as he raised the gun, his hand shaking. “It is over, but it’s not-”
Michael needed to move the gun only a fraction. He fired. The shot hit Polk below the heart. Polk staggered backward. The second shot hit him in the center of his chest, and he slumped to the deck, arms out wide and legs twisted beneath his body. But his eyes stayed locked on Michael’s.
Michael stared back. “Where are your Pascanicians and their lasers now?” he mocked. “I know we had a deal, but I decided not to honor it. You should have killed me when you had the chance.”
“You’ll … never make it … Helfort,” Polk said, the effort it took to force the words out twisting his face into a grotesque mask. “The pilot will know … so you’re … dead too.”
“I’ll make it,” Michael said. He fired again and again into Polk’s body. “Unlike you, Chief Councillor Polk.”
Michael looked down on the bloodstained wreck of what once had been the most feared man in humanspace. It was done, and now all Michael wanted to do was lie down and sleep, but he knew he could not. Polk had been right. The pilot would have watched the fight on one of the cargo bay holocams; now Michael had to make sure not to let him finish what Polk had started.
Where he found the energy, Michael would never know, but he bullied an unwilling body to lean forward as he worked the straps off his shoulders, whimpering in agony when one caught on the haft of the knife that still stuck out of his shoulder. Free of the pack, he reached in and pulled out the packet of autojects. With a silent prayer that his badly abused body would cope, he injected a second shot into his arm.
The change was immediate. Stimulants and painkillers flooded his system. They scavenged the last reserves of energy from his abused body, and it jolted back to life. He sat there for a few seconds. He wondered what to do about the knife. A tentative attempt to ease it out of his shoulder gave him the answer: Do nothing. Despite the massive dose of chemicals he had just injected into his arm, the pain was all but unbearable. Working with one hand, he did the next best thing: He slathered his entire shoulder with woundfoam before packing a crude dressing around the knife.
Reenergized, he got to his feet to make sure Polk and the crewman were dead. They were. Michael looked around the cargo bay, dismayed to see a row of body bags laid out on the deck up forward. Now I know where the rest of the crew gotten to, he thought; he felt sick. He counted the bags and then did it again to be sure. He’d been lucky. Judging by the number of body bags, the shuttle had lifted off from McNair with only two crew members: the command pilot and the man Michael had killed just after he and Polk had boarded.
That was the good news.
The bad news was that the command pilot was tucked away safely behind the armored door to the flight deck. He’d need a thermic lance and an hour to get at him, whereas all the pilot had to do was-
Heart racing with sudden panic, Michael bolted to his feet and launched himself at the nearest emergency equipment stowage. He ripped the door open with his good hand and pulled out an emergency oxygen pack. He clipped it onto his belt, slipped the mask over his face, and switched on the gas.
And just in time, he realized when he checked the air pressure in the cargo bay. You are one slimy little shit, he thought when he saw the readout. The pilot had been depressurizing the compartment, but so slowly that Michael would never have noticed. Another few minutes and he would have been breathing air with too little oxygen to maintain consciousness. A few minutes after that he would have been dead.
He patched his neuronics through to the flight deck. “Nice try, shithead,” he said when the command pilot’s face appeared. “Now do us both a favor and turn this thing around and take me back.”
“Are they dead?” the pilot asked.
“Yes, they’re both dead. And so will you be if you don’t abort.”
The pilot shook his head. “No, I don’t think so,” he said with a self-satisfied smirk. “You’re a spacer; you know perfectly well you can’t get to me up here, so sit back and enjoy the ride.”
That was not an option. Michael knew what the pilot would do: override the airlock controls to trap him in the cargo bay while he transferred to the courier ship via the flight deck’s emergency hatch, but not before he had ordered the shuttle AI to head dirtside under full power.
Which is not going to happen, Michael told himself.
He would have to force the shuttle to turn back. That meant some creative destruction, and he understood shuttles well enough to know what to do. Whether he and the pilot would survive the experiment was another matter, but he was out of options. There was no way he would allow himself to sit back and wait for the end. If he had to die, he would do so looking death right in the face.
Michael emptied his pack and refilled it with his supply of microgrenades. He made his way aft to the ladder that accessed the hydraulically powered locks that clamped the shuttle’s massive ramp closed. Pack around his neck, he climbed the ladder. It was an awkward, jerky process with a knife in his shoulder and a useless arm, but he made it finally. He locked his left leg around one rung to hold himself in position, removed the pack, and set to work.
Even one-handed, it was easy enough to arm the grenades and place them behind a junction box directly below the shuttle’s port reaction-mass feed line, an exotic alloy pipe 15 centimeters in diameter pressurized to 3,000 atmospheres.
Michael had just finished when the command pilot called him. The man did not look happy. “What the hell are you up to, Helfort?” he demanded.
“I’ve asked you to turn back,” Michael said, working his way down the ladder, “and you won’t, so now I’ll have to make you.”
“And how will you do that?” The pilot’s voice dripped skepticism.
“Never underestimate a desperate man,” Michael said, his voice calm even though his heart was racing. “I’ve put microgrenades under the port feed line. If you don’t turn back, I’ll set them off.”
The command pilot’s face went dirty gray. “You wouldn’t,” he said.
“Oh, but I will,” Michael said. “Unless you want me to trash your main engines and a whole lot of other stuff as well, I suggest you turn back right now.”
“You’re bluffing.” The pilot had recovered his composure and some of his color. “There’s no way you’d do it. You’d kill us both.”
Michael swore some under his breath. He’d been so sure the pilot would turn back. “I might kill us both,” he said, forcing himself to sound nonchalant, “but since I’m a dead man either way, what have I got to lose?”
“You are so full of shit, Helfort.” The pilot sounded confident.
“I’ll take that as no, shall I?” Michael asked. “Right, Captain Asswipe; watch and learn.” Michael picked up his rifle and made his way to the very front of the cargo bay, stopping just short of the passenger galley. He clipped his safety line to a ringbolt, then brought the rifle up and rested it on a seat back, an awkward business thanks to his damaged shoulder. “Last chance,” he called out.
“Fuck off!” the pilot snapped. “You won’t do it.”
“I think I will,” Michael said. He took careful aim and put a single round into the junction box packed with microgrenades.
For one heart-stopping moment, Michael thought the grenades had failed to fire. Then they did. The blast filled the cargo bay with a sheet of intense white light and a cloud of ionized gas and smoke, the shuttle bucking under his feet as the shock front ripped through the airframe. “That should do it,” he said, throwing himself behind the galley bulkhead.
Nothing happened. A few seconds later, a lot did and in a very short amount of time. A small explosion followed the first; then the shuttle shuddered as a massive blast ripped through the cargo bay.
There goes the reaction-mass feed line, Michael thought, cringing back while the cargo bay filled with pulverized driver mass, a malevolent black cloud that tore the cargo bay apart, the overpressure rupturing both of his eardrums in a blaze of agony even as flying debris ripped the flimsy gallery bulkhead apart and debris clawed at his body.
The shuttle lurched hard to one side into a slow tumbling roll as more explosions followed. Its overtaxed artgrav gave up the unequal fight. It shut down, and Commitment’s gravity took over. Thanks to the shuttle’s extreme nose-up attitude, the deck was now so steep that Michael could not stand up. His feet shot from under him. He dropped to the deck and into the shattered remnants of the galley. Around him, the whole shuttle shuddered, a hammering so violent that he thought complete structural failure had to be only seconds away.
Michael commed the command pilot. “Having fun now?” he asked through pain-gritted teeth, head spinning and nausea rising as his overloaded brain tried to work out which way was up, a problem thanks to his ruptured ears. He blinked the tears out of his eyes and wondered if he might not have overdone the microgrenades a touch. “I certainly am.”
“You’ve killed us all,” the man screeched. His face was white and beaded with sweat. Around him, the flight deck was raucous with the cacophonous racket of multiple alarms.
“That all depends on how good a pilot you are,” Michael replied. “Now, it’s only a guess, but I’d say you’ve lost the port main engine, the starboard main engine’s tripped out, and all of your primary and backup hydraulics have gone as well. Am I right?”
“You maniac,” the pilot snarled.
“I’ll take that as a yes, shall I? Michael said. “I hope you’ve been practicing your dead stick reentries, because that’s the only way you’ll get us down alive. Just thank your lucky stars I pulled the pin before we reached orbit.”
“I going to tear your fucking heart out,” the pilot screamed.
“Since that means we’d have made it dirtside, I look forward to you trying. Now shut up, get us down, and let me know when we can bail out.”
Michael cut the comm before the man could respond. He released his line and slid down the deck until he reached a crew seat. He dragged himself into it and sat down. Jury-rigging the safety harness to avoid the knife, he armed the seat’s escape capsule and sat back to wait, doing his best to ignore the pain that consumed his entire body. There was nothing he could do now. His life was in the hands of the command pilot. Provided that his little stunt hadn’t done more damage than he’d planned, the man had a reasonable chance of getting the shuttle down low and slowly enough that they could both bail out and survive.
A thought struck him. He commed the pilot. “Hey, asswipe,” he said.
“What?” The man still looked terrified.
“Settle down. You can do this.”
“You don’t know what you’ve done, do you?”
“Tell me.”
“As well as everything else, we’ve lost hydraulics, and that means I’ll never control this thing long enough for us to slow down and bail out. There’s a limit to what the reaction control system can do, you know. We’re dead, Helfort.”
Oh, shit, Michael thought. This is not good. “Patch me into the command AI.”
“Why would-”
“Because you want to live, you idiot! Now do it.”
“Okay, okay.”
It took Michael only seconds to see the damage for himself. The command pilot had not been exaggerating. The shuttle was doomed. Without hydraulics, the wings would stay fully retracted, and no wings meant no control as the air thickened. The problem was that the pilot had to do two things at once: keep the shuttle stable and slow down. If he failed, the shuttle would disintegrate and they were both dead men.
“Damn, damn, damn,” Michael swore under his breath. If only … An idea popped fully formed into his head. Michael put it to the AI, and ten seconds later he had his answer. It would be touch and go, but they might still have a chance.
“Captain,” he said. “Can you bring the starboard main engine back online?”
“I can, though it’s not in very good shape. I don’t know how long it’ll hold up.”
“We won’t need it for long. How’s the reaction control system?”
“The RCS is nominal, unlike everything else.”
“Okay; I think there’s something we can do.”
Hope brightened the man’s eyes. “There is?”
Michael forwarded the AI’s analysis. “Have a look at this,” he said. “The AI thinks it’ll work.”
“Mmm,” the pilot said. “Not sure if the RCS can keep us stable long enough, but I can use the main engine to vector the thrust, which will help. Anyway, it’s worth a try.”
Michael nodded. “Sure is,” he said. “Hey, look. I’m sorry about the Captain Asswipe thing. What’s your name?”
“Karroubi, Jakob Karroubi.”
“Good luck, Jakob.”
Michael sat back and patched his neuronics into the holocam behind Karroubi. It was if he were sitting on the pilot’s shoulder. He looked at the same screens, the same status boards, the same everything. It was unnerving, and for a moment Michael felt for the man. With the crippled shuttle now plummeting earthward, he had a huge challenge on his hands.
Karroubi fired the reaction jets to spin the shuttle around. Now the stern faced the onrushing air. A fresh set of alarms bleated in protest at a maneuver that appeared in no manual Michael had ever read. “Stand by,” the command pilot called. “This will be very rough.”
No kidding, Michael thought as the pilot fired the starboard main engine and rammed the throttle to emergency power, provoking yet more alarms. With the artgrav off, the airframe kicked hard in protest, the seat underneath Michael bucking as the pilot fought to keep the shuttle stable.
“Throttle down, Jakob,” Michael shouted. “Throttle down. Too much and you’ll lose her.”
“Roger,” Karroubi said; a moment later the vibration wracking the shuttle’s frame eased off a touch.
“Better,” Michael said even though it was still worryingly bad. But there was some good news: Karroubi was a natural on the sidestick controller. With a confident hand, he kept control of the stern’s tendency to slide away from the oncoming air, and the shuttle was decelerating hard, riding a pillar of flame down to earth.
“Looks good,” Karroubi said, “so stand by. It won’t be long before we can go.”
“Just say the word,” Michael replied. “I’m ready to-”
In one terrible instant, everything changed. Karroubi lost control. The stern whipped up and over with frightening speed, the airframe hammered by endless cracking bangs. “Shit!” Michael screamed as the status board told him the controls had been overwhelmed. Condemned, the shuttle tumbled to destruction; it was beyond anything Karroubi could do to reverse the situation.
“Sorry about that,” Karroubi shouted, his body a blur as the shuddering thrashed him from side to side.
“Don’t be,” Michael replied through clenched teeth, marveling that the pilot still was fighting against impossible odds to regain control.
“Go when I say … best I can … do.”
“Good luck, Jakob.”
Time ran out. The shuttle began to come apart. Damaged clamps failed, and the stern ramp sagged open far enough to let the slipstream grab it. The air tore the massive piece of foamalloy off and whipped it away.
“Now!” screamed Karroubi.
The ejection system took over. It blasted Michael out into the night and into a violence that overwhelmed his senses.
This is wrong, he thought as darkness claimed him, all wrong.
Michael awoke.
Rain hammered at the plasfiber capsule, the noise audible even over the insistent ringing in blast-damaged ears. It was light, a murky gray day thanks to the thick clouds that scudded overhead. He had been unconscious for … He tried to make his mind to do the math, but it refused. Since it had been early evening when the shuttle had picked him and Polk up, it was a long time. Commitment’s nights were prolonged affairs. He lay there for a long while, tired beyond belief. It was only with a huge effort that he summoned up the energy to get free of his safety harness and crawl out of the capsule, his shoulder and the rest of his body screeching in protest.
He tried to stand up. That was a mistake. He never made it past one knee before gravity reasserted itself and dragged him back down.
Guess I’m staying put, then, he said to himself. He pulled the survival pack out of its stowage and wrapped himself in a space blanket. He was almost asleep when a voice snapped him awake.
“Over here,” the voice said. It was a man’s voice, a Hammer voice. Michael’s heart pounded. Not now, he thought. Not after everything.
Every instinct urged Michael to get away, but he knew he could not. He lay there and stared up into the rain. A face appeared over his. “Here,” the man called out. He knelt down beside Michael. “You okay?”
“Don’t think so,” Michael whispered. “Who are you?”
“Corporal Singh, B Company, 2/284th, NRA.”
“Where am I?” Michael asked, overwhelmed by relief.
“Just outside of McNair.”
“McNair, that’s goo-”
At which point Michael passed out.