Bodyguard Page 15
Burns led us through a canyon of sealed machinery, past a river of pulverized rock, and out into a valley of man-made lava. It moved snakelike through the artificial gullies provided for its use and caused the atmosphere to shimmer with radiated heat. Burns spent a lot of time waving at workers who didn’t wave back.
Then the vast bay was behind us, and the deck vibrated in sympathy to the nearest engine room. We entered an alcove. It was empty except for the layer of soil that covered everything and an empty cable spool. “This is as far as I go,” Burns said happily. “The colonel owns sixty thousand shares of company stock. He can live anywhere he wants and chose this. Nobody knows why. Be careful, and watch for snakes.”
“Snakes?” What the hell did that mean? I looked to see if he was kidding, but the visor obstructed his face. Sasha moved towards the stairs and I hurried to get there first. The stairs turned in on themselves and trembled under our weight. Darkness engulfed us.
Then, just as I fumbled with my helmet light, a pair of ruby-red eyes appeared. They blinked and moved closer. I reached for a weapon that wasn’t there and found the switch. A cone of hard, white light located the snake and pinned it in place. The creature had a triangular head, flared hood, and long, sinuous body. It looked like a snake but was actually robotic. Its mouth opened, fangs gleamed, and a man spoke in my helmet.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes, Maxon…welcome to Mars.” Things happened in my head. Dreams flickered, voices spoke, and pain lanced the center of my brain. The voice spoke again. “Follow Kaa. He’ll bring you to my quarters.”
I looked at Sasha. She shrugged. We followed the snake. Light gleamed off metallic scales as the robo-serpent turned and slithered downwards. It wove in and out of the rail like a shuttle on a loom. I stayed well back, taking my time and feeling my way. A pair of luminescent eyes peered down from a ledge, blinked, and disappeared. Dirt rained down on my helmet.
The stairs ended, and a matrix of crisscrossed laser beams materialized around us. It was part of a security system, and we must have passed the test, because a blastproof door slid open. Kaa reared back, hissed through my helmet speakers, and swayed as we passed. The hatch closed and we found ourselves in a lock. It had been spacious at some point in the past but was now half filled with junk.
A robotic mouse scurried across my boots, squeaked, and scooted under a box of mother boards. The lock cycled open. I looked at Sasha, shrugged, and made my way down the tunnel. There were alcoves to the right and left. All were full.
Whatever else Wamba was, or had been, he was someone with an affinity for junk. Not just any junk, but robotic junk, of every conceivable shape and size. Walking through the passageway was like touring the android equivalent of a meat packing plant. Robotic cadavers were piled every which way, their arms, legs and torsos all akimbo, their long-dead sensors staring blankly from the shadows. One of them sat up, tilted its head to one side, and opened its eyes. The voice grated in my helmet. “Stop. Remove your suits. Leave them here. Have a nice day. Stop. Remove your suits. Leave them here. Have a nice day…”
We did as the cadaver ordered and continued on our way. The tunnel came to an end and opened into a large chamber. It, like the alcoves before it, was nearly filled with robo parts. Only these had been sorted into hundreds of carefully labeled bins and were stored in the racks that lined three of the four walls. An enormous drive gear obscured most of the fourth wall. It moved an inch at a time. The “Lube Here” sign was self-explanatory. Less understandable were the things that hopped, walked, crawled, slid, and flew about the room.
Some, like Kaa, and the mouse I’d had seen earlier, looked like Earth animals. Others, like the foot-high pogo stick that bounced across the deck in front of me, or the gossamer-winged flyer that lit on my shoulder, were entirely fanciful. And there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of them, all moving around the compartment in concert with whatever propulsion system and programing they’d been given.
And at the center of all this movement, on a dais that was part control console and part throne, sat something that made me seem normal by comparison.
It had been human once; evidence of that could be seen in the kinky black hair, the brown, almost black skin, and the eyes that glowed like coals in deeply shadowed sockets.
But the machinery that had been built around it came close to obscuring the thing’s human origins, and it was only through an act of will that I was able to think of it as a “he.” It was, I decided, only right and proper that the one person in the universe who considered himself to be my friend qualified as a freak as well.
He regarded me silently, as if aware of my emotions and waiting for me to deal with them. His head, or what was left of it, was surrounded by a metal cowling. A variety of lenses had been mounted on the sides of the cowling and could be moved by means of servo-controlled arms. His neck, shoulders, and arms were his own, but surgical steel had replaced most of his chest. A metal housing stood in for his hips, and tracks replaced his legs. They whirred and threw up roostertails of reddish soil as he came down the ramp to meet me.
Dozens of small robots hopped, scurried, and jumped out of the way. Something the size and shape of a centipede squeaked and was crushed under Wamba’s tracks. The colonel’s eyes locked onto mine like laser beams, and his grip was strong. His voice was identical to the one that spoke through Kaa. “Damn, you look good. I missed you.”
Suddenly, and much to my surprise, I was overcome by emotion. It was as if something deep inside me recognized the cyborg and felt a kinship for him. I stepped between his tracks, put my arms around his shoulders, and gave him a hug. He hugged me back, and it felt good. Good to be valued, good to be welcome, good to be missed. Even if I couldn’t remember who the hell he was. I released him and took three steps backwards.
Machinery whined as Wamba turned towards Sasha. “Hello, Ms. Casad, and welcome to my humble abode.”
I had never seen the kid look shy, but she did now. “Thank you. It’s nice to be here.”
Wamba smiled. “I doubt that, but it’s nice of you to say so. Now, tell me about the ambush, who staged it, and why.”
I looked at Sasha. She managed to avoid my eyes. It was as if something kept her from talking about what we’d been through. Something she knew and I didn’t. It made me angry, so I started at the beginning and spilled my guts. Wamba listened without comment. Finally, when all the words had been said, he nodded.
“You are, as my daddy liked to say, standing in deep weeds. And, while I don’t know what’s going on any more than you do, I might be able to offer some clues.”
The cyborg paused for a moment and looked me in the eye. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
I hung my head in shame. “No, I don’t.”
Machinery whined as his head nodded up and down. “I thought not. You were one of the craziest and most insubordinate officers I ever had the pleasure to command. And you’re, well, different somehow. Changed in ways I can’t quite put a finger on. What do you remember?”
I looked to Sasha for help, but her one good eye was focused on a spot three feet over Wamba’s head. She made no attempt to help or interfere. “Nothing. Nothing prior to my discharge, anyway.”
Wamba nodded as though he had expected as much. “Let me tell you a story. A story about the last time I saw you. We drew a mission, one with lots of hair on it, and were headed for a research station known as T-12. It was right in the middle of the asteroid belt and very well defended. There were three boats in all. We drew straws. You pulled the first, Captain Daw drew the second, and I came last. You led us in…”
My head began to throb, a door creaked open, and the dreams returned. Wamba’s voice droned on, but I was somewhere in the past, living it, feeling it, being it.
The ejection tube worked the way it was supposed to and blasted us away from the ship. Stars whirled, then stabilized as I brought the battle suit under control and oriented myself to the target. It looked like a mountain that had been pl
ucked from the Himalayas and set free in space. Sunlight rippled across the planetoid’s surface as it tumbled end over end. I saw light glint off metal and felt something heavy fall into my stomach. Even the best suits leak heat, and I could damned near feel their missile launchers swivel in my direction. I triggered the command freq and gave the command.
“Go!”
The team arrowed in like sharks in search of fresh meat. I was vaguely aware that Daw and Wamba had cleared their ships and were headed in the same direction. It made damned little difference, though, since we were committed. The Loot would extract us if she lived long enough to do so, or we’d wait for relief. Not a pleasant thought.
A fire requires oxygen, and a battle suit contains damned little thanks to the endless vacuum around it. So the fireball that consumed Private Naglie lasted less than a second. I swore, but gave thanks too, knowing his death would give the team another surge of adrenaline. Adrenaline they needed to survive.
A buzzer buzzed, and my heads-up display (HUD) indicated the tool heads were coming out to meet us. The gunny confirmed it.
“M-dog two to M-dog one. We have four-zero, repeat, four-zero T-heads outbound our sector. Over.”
Wamba had a command freq that could override the rest of us. He used it. “B-dog one to M-dog one. Team two owns twenty right. You take twenty left. Team three will cover. Over.”
I switched to the team freq. “M-dog one to M-dog team. Twenty right belong to us. Three will cover. Mark ’em and take ’em. Over.”
Though not supposed to take an active role, I had no desire to watch while my team fought. I picked a blip, marked it as my own, and checked to make sure that the rest were accounted for.
The tracking tone went off. A missile was headed my way. I dumped chaff, hit the electronic countermeasures (ECM) booster switch, and did a backward flip.
Bodmods Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of General Dynamics, makes one helluva battle suit, but Krupp “We arm business so they can do business” Industries makes some top-of-the-line antipersonnel missiles. One of them followed me down. I spent a fraction of a second wishing I had a suit with more offensive weaponry, realized it was a waste of time, and launched a decoy.
The decoy was the size and shape of a pocket stylus and had been programed to radiate heat, radio, and radar signals identical to those emitted by my battle suit. My onboard computer dumped ninety per cent power and waited to see what would happen. The missile bought it, chased the decoy, and exploded.
Thus freed, I entered the battle sim, checked to make sure that my team had held its own, and searched for my target. He or she was busy pushing a deactivated M-dog suit up the seam between Daw’s team and mine. They might have been trying to fool us, or shield themselves from attack, or who knows what. My battle sim informed me that the suit belonged to Private Kim, a tough little troop who’d been brought up in the lower levels of the London Urboplex, and played folk songs on the harmonica.
Using Kim’s body as a shield pissed me off, and I fed the T-head’s coordinates to one of our free-floating missile racks. They had been ejected at the same time we were, and mounted four missiles each. I knew the rack would draw fire the moment I launched, so there was no point in conserving ordnance. I put two missiles on the tool head, one on a blip I wasn’t sure of, and one on T-12’s antenna farm. I knew the strikers would destroy the fourth missile long before it reached the asteroid’s surface, but knew the effort would cost them two or three missiles. Missiles they wouldn’t be able to launch at me or my team.
I gave the order to fire. The missiles left the launcher and made dotted lines across my sim. Both the tool head and what remained of Kim’s body vanished in a cartoonlike ball of flame. The enemy suit, a ridiculous-looking stick figure, disappeared a fraction of a second later. The launch rack, plus the last two missiles it had fired, were destroyed moments after that.
I switched to the big picture. The first thing that jumped out at me was that most of the strikers were dead. They were pretty good for amateurs, but we were pros, and that makes a difference. Or so the company hopes. Most of their suits, or what was left of their suits, had started the long, slow drift to nowhere. But five or six of the bastards had taken refuge behind a large chunk of free-floating rock. I saw a missile explode against the boulder’s outer surface and push it towards the asteroid beyond. The tool heads answered with a crew-served laser cannon, and the battle continued.
I frowned. The team should have bypassed the rock rats and pushed for the asteroid itself. Daw’s squad was damned near there. I checked, saw the gunny’s light had gone out, and understood what had happened. The gunny was dead, and it was payback time. I chinned the mike.
“M-dog to M-dog team. Break, I repeat, break. You know the objective. Take it. That’s an order. Over.”
Sergeant Habib had filled the gap left by the gunny…or had tried to. He knew things were out of hand and said so.
“M-dog five to M-dog one. Sorry, sir. Breaking now. Over.”
The battle sim took twenty cubic miles of space and compressed it to a single 3-D image. I saw the team break, re-form, and arrow towards the target. It looked as if they were inches apart, but at least a half-mile separated them.
I switched freq’s, called the Loot, and applied full power. The team would land on T-12’s surface in nine, maybe ten, minutes. I wanted to arrive at the same time they did. The Loot had survived, so far anyway, and sounded solid.
“Dodger-one to M-dog one. Shoot.”
“I have five or six bad guys hiding behind a rock. Over.”
“Roger that, M-dog one. Light the rock. Over.”
I checked to make sure my team was clear, “lit” the rock on my sim and knew the Loot had it too. The response came right away.
She came out of the sun, fed the strikers a missile, and pulled out with a pair of surface-to-air (SAM) missiles hot on her tail. I wanted to watch, wanted to see her escape, but kept my eyes focused on the target. The Loot’s ship-to-ship ordnance was a hundred times larger than the little squirts we used, and the explosion was bright enough to darken my visor. The gunny would be happy. It wasn’t much as trade-offs go, but it was better than nothing.
The asteroid was closer now, close enough to fill my vision and block the star field beyond. The rock had some spin, but not a lot, so the landing would be soft.
But staying down, especially during combat, would be more difficult. Just one overenthusiastic leap and I’d be orbiting T-12 like a target balloon. Yeah, I could blast my way down, but that would take time. Time enough to track my ass and blow it clean off. Another unpleasant thought.
The strikers were out in force. Strafing runs by the Loot and a buddy softened the bastards up but antipersonnel missiles, laser beams, and bullets stuttered up to meet us nonetheless.
The major lit a sector and ordered us to converge on it. Daw’s team would arrive first and have the dubious honor of securing the landing zone (LZ).
We were closer now, close enough for an honest-to-god visual, and I didn’t like what I saw. Roughly half my team, about fifteen effectives, had made it through. One of them, a trooper named Raskin, took a hit and spun out of control. A vapor plume outgassed and disappeared as the suit sealed itself. A buddy called him.
“Hey, Raskin! Can you hear me? Pull out, pull out or you’re going to…”
Raskin hit the ground, bounced, and came apart as the strikers hit him with everything they had.
I swore, added my fire to that generated by the rest of the team, and cut power. We drifted in like those puffy things that dandelions produce in the spring. Fountains of dust spurted upwards as our boots hit, paused for a moment, and drifted sideways.
Fire lanced in from three sides, and what was left of Daw’s team did their best to cover us. I slo-moed my way to a crater and resisted the temptation to pull the edges in around me. I had elbowed my way to the rim and was peeking over the edge when something nudged the side of my helmet. A voice filled my ears. “Maxon?”
I felt Wamba grin. “Serves your ass right for sleeping on duty. Gather your team. We came to take T-12, and we’re going to do it. Capish?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. You lost about fifty per cent of your team, ditto for Daw, but about seventy-five per cent of my people made it through. We’ll attack the dome. You hold the LZ and have the coffee ready when we get back.”
I looked, saw he was serious, and shook my head. “Sorry, Major. No damned way. We’re coming with you.”
Wamba looked me in the eye. “Captain, am I to understand that you’re refusing a direct order?”
I nodded. “Yes, sir. You sure as hell are, sir.”
Wamba grinned. “That’s what I thought. You’re a dumb shit, Maxon, but a brave dumb shit, and what more can the share owners ask? Come on. The dome awaits.”
There was a reason why the major was a major and not a captain like me. He had smarts, lots of smarts, and knew how to use them. He had analyzed the defensive fire, identified three sectors where it was relatively light, and picked the one that was inside the tool-head perimeter.
Yeah, that meant we had enemy troops on three sides, and T-12’s main dome on the other, but it also meant that about a third of the strikers couldn’t fire without hitting the dome—a dome built to withstand normal wear and tear, but not the rigors of combat.
So, while they spent time trying to readjust their lines of fire, we leapfrogged towards the dome. It was a standard tactic drilled into us from our first days in the crotch. The evolution begins with the formation of dispersed square—dispersed to lessen the casualties caused by modern weapons, and square because squared-off corners place attackers in a crossfire. During large unit actions, such a square might be spread out over five or ten square miles and would have been impossible were it not for the battle sims that allowed each trooper to monitor his or her position relative to everyone else’s.