March Upcountry

CHAPTER THREE

Pahner tossed the electronic memo pad onto the desk in the tiny office of the Assault Complement Commander.

"I think that's about all the planning we can do without actually seeing the dirtside conditions," he told Kosutic, and the sergeant major shrugged philosophically.

"Well, frontier planets full of rugged individualists rarely spawn assassins, anyway, Boss."

"True enough," Pahner admitted. "But it's close enough to both Raiden-Winterhowe and the Saints to have me twitchy."

Kosutic nodded, but she knew better than to ask most of the questions that came to mind. Instead, she fingered her earlobe, where the sun-painted skull and crossbones glittered faintly, and then glanced at the antiquated watch on her wrist.

"I'm going to take a turn around the ship. Find out how many of the posts are asleep," she announced.

Pahner smiled. In two tours with the Regiment, he'd never found a post other than fully alert. You just didn't make it this far if you were the type to even slouch on guard duty. But it never hurt to check.

"Have fun," he said.

Ensign Guha finished sealing her ship boots and looked around the cabin. Everything was shipshape, so she picked up the black bag at her feet and touched the stud to open her cabin hatch. Somewhere in the depths of her mind a little voice was screaming. But it was a quiet voice.

She stepped out of the cabin, turned to the right, and shouldered the ditty bag. The bag was unusually heavy. The materials within would have been detected in the security sweep of the ship which was standard operating procedure before a member of the Imperial Family took transit... and they had been. And then accepted. The assault ship was designed to take a full Marine complement, after all, which included all of their explosive "loadout." The six ultradense bricks, formed out of the most powerful chemical explosive known, should do the job perfectly. The thought was a pleasing one, and, of course, her own position as logistics officer gave her full access to the material. Even more pleasing. Taken all in all, she practically scintillated with pleasure.

Her cabin was on the outer rim of the ship, along with most of the personal quarters, and she had a long trip to Engineering. But it would be a happy trip... despite the quiet little screams within.

She strode down the passage, smiling pleasantly at the few souls about in the depths of ship-night. They were few and far between, but no one questioned the logistics officer. She'd been taking deep-night strolls for her whole tour, and it was put down to simple insomnia. And that was fair enough, for she did suffer from insomnia, however far from "simple" it might be on this particular night.

She traveled the curved passages of the giant sphere, taking elevators to lower levels on a circuitous route that brought her closer and closer to Engineering. The route was designed to avoid the Marine guards scattered at strategic locations around the ship. Although their detectors wouldn't spot the demolitions unless she got very close, they would easily detect the fully charged power cell of the bead pistol in the same bag.

The horizon of the gray painted passages shrank as she neared the center of the vast ball. Finally, she exited one last elevator.

The passage beyond was straight for a change, the far end sealed by a blast-door. To one side of the blast-door, covering the controls, was a single Marine in the silver-and-black dress uniform of the House of MacClintock.

Private Hegazi came to attention, one hand sliding automatically towards his sidearm as the elevator opened, but he relaxed again almost immediately when he recognized the officer. He'd seen her any number of times on her perambulations of the ship, but never by Engineering.

Guess she got bored, he thought. Or maybe I'm about to get lucky? Nonetheless, his duty was clear.

"Ma'am," he said, remaining at attention as she neared. "This is a secure space. Please exit this secure area."

Ensign Guha smiled faintly as an aiming grid dropped across her vision. Her right hand, hidden inside the bag, flipped the bead gun off of safe, and triggered a five-round burst.

The five-millimeter steel-coated, glass-cored beads were accelerated to phenomenal speeds by the electromagnets lining the barrel. The weapon's recoil was tremendous, but all five of the beads had cleared the barrel before recoil began to take effect. Ensign Guha's hand was thrown violently out of the now smoking bag, but the beads continued their flight towards the Marine guard.

Hegazi was fast. You had to be in the Regiment. But he also had less than an eighth of a second between the instant his instincts shrilled a warning and the impact of the first bead on his upper chest.

The outer layer of his heavy uniform was a synthetic that simulated buff wool but was fire resistant. It wasn't ballistic resistant. The next layer, however, was kinetic reactive. As the beads struck, the polymers of the uniform reacted instantaneously, their chemical bonds shifting under the imparted energy to change the textile from soft and flexible to solid as steel. The armor had weaknesses and was vulnerable to cuts, but it was light, and well-nigh impregnable to small-arms fire.

Yet any material has a breaking point. In the case of the Marines' uniform armor, that point was high but not infinite. The first bead shattered on the surface, the metal and glass bits flicking out in a fan to pepper the underside of the Marine's chin even as his hand reached once more for his own sidearm. The weight was coming off his feet as he started to drop to a kneeling position when the second bead hit a few centimeters above the first. This bead also shattered, but the extra energy began to splinter the molecular bonds of the resistant material.

The third bead did the trick. Coming in on the heels of the second and slightly lower, it shattered the kinetic armor like glass, finally throwing some of its mass into the now unprotected Marine's sternum.

Ensign Guha wiped the blood off of the keypad and attached a device to the surface temperature scanner. She shouldn't have had the codes to enter Engineering, or the facial features, for that matter. But any system is subject to compromise, and this one was no exception. The security systems saw the IR features of the DeGlopper's chief engineer and received the correct codes timed in just the way the chief would have tapped them. She stepped through the open blast-doors and looked around, pleased but not surprised that there was no one in sight.

The engineering spaces of the ship were huge, taking up well over one-third of the interior volume. The tunnel drive coils and the capacitors to feed them took up the majority of the space, and their keening song filled the vast compartment as they sucked in energy voraciously and distorted any concept of Einsteinian reality. The light-speed limit could be violated, but it required immense power, and the tunnel drive gobbled up internal volume almost as greedily as it did energy.

But the field of the tunnel drive system was more or less fixed and independent of mass. Like the phase drive, there was a specific limit to the maximum volume of the field which could be generated, but the mass within that field was unimportant. Thus the huge ship carriers of the various Imperial and republican navies that battled among the stars. And thus the vast size of the interstellar fleet transports.

But all of it depended on power. Enormous, barely controlled power.

Ensign Guha turned to the left and followed the curving passage as the tunnel drive thumped out its keening star song.

Kosutic nodded at the guard on the magazine deck as she stepped back out the hatch. The guard, a newbie from First Platoon, had stopped her at the hatch and insisted that she pass the facial temperature scan and key in her code. Which was exactly what she was supposed to do, which was the reason for the sergeant major's nod of approval. However, Kosutic also made a mental note to talk to Margaretta Lai, the trooper's platoon sergeant. The trooper had clearly loosened up when she recognized the sergeant major, and she needed to learn to doubt everything and everyone. Eternal paranoia was the entire purpose of the Regiment. There was no other way to guard effectively in this day and age.

Despite early gains in processing, it had taken humanity nearly a millennium after the invention of the first crude computers to develop a system of implanted processors that interfaced completely with human neural systems without adverse side effects. The "toots" were still cutting edge and being constantly refined... and they were a security planner's nightmare, because they could be programmed to take over a person's body. When that happened, the unfortunate victim had no control over his own actions. The Marines called people like that "toombies."

Some societies used specially modified toots to control the actions of convicted criminals, but in most societies, including the Empire of Man, such a use of the hardware was illegal for all but military purposes. The Marines themselves used the system to the fullest as a combat aid and multiplier, but even they were wary of it.

The big problem was hacking. A person whose toot had been "hacked" could be forced to do literally anything. Just two years ago, someone had mounted an assassination attempt on the prime minister of the Alphane Empire by using a human official with a hacked toot. The hacker had never been found, but once the security protocols were solved, it had been a ludicrously simple thing to do. The toots were designed for radio-packet external data input, and a small device disguised as an antique pocket watch had been found in the official's possession. It was speculated that it had been given to him as a gift, but wherever it had come from, it had taken his toot over. It was as if the official had been possessed by a demon hidden in the ancient Pandora's box.

Since then, all members of the Regiment and all close servitors of the Imperial Family had been required to go through random scans, and the security protocols of their toots had been updated yet again. Kosutic knew that, but she also knew there was no such thing as a perfect defense.

She made a note to hunt down Gunny Lai on her toot and smiled at the ambiguity of her own actions. She'd started off in the Marines before the day of the devices; but she'd become as dependent on them as everyone else. It was a humorous irony, in a bitter sort of way, that she now saw them as the single biggest threat to her charges.

She stepped onto the elevator and checked the duty roster again. Hegazi was on Engineering. Good troop, but new. Too new. Hell, they were all too new; eighteen months was just enough time to get very good at their jobs, then most went on to Steel. The few who stayed were rarely the best. She thought of Julian and laughed. Of course, there was best and best. But she intended to remind Hegazi, who was a good troop overall, that he needed to be totally one hundred percent paranoid at all times.

She stood in the pool of the Marine's blood. She hadn't bothered to check his pulse; nobody who'd lost that much blood was alive, and she was too busy considering what to do to waste time on pointless gestures. She didn't consider for long—the Marines didn't exactly pick ditherers as the senior noncoms of The Empress' Own—but there was always enough time to screw up, so there had to be enough to make the right move, as well.

She tapped her communicator.

"Sergeant of the Guard. Full load out to Engineering. We have a breach. Do not sound General Quarters."

She cut the communication. The guards would contact Pahner, and the assassin wouldn't be alerted, for the Marine communicators were encrypted. Of course, the saboteur—and sabotage had to be what the killer contemplated—could have left any of half a dozen telltales along his backtrail to warn him that he'd been discovered.

Kosutic plucked the sensor wand off the dead guard's belt and swept the hatch. No obvious traces there. She keyed in the entry code and went through the hatch fast and low as it opened. The blood was already coagulating, and the body was cooling, so the assassin probably wasn't on the far side of the hatch. But Eva Kosutic hadn't survived to be a sergeant major by depending on "probably."

"Engineering, this is Sergeant Major Kosutic," she said into her communicator. "Do not, I say again, do not sound an alert. We have a probable saboteur in Engineering; your guard is dead." She swept the sensor wand around. There were heat traces everywhere, but most went straight ahead. All except one. A single trace split off from the pack, heading to the sergeant major's left, and it looked fresher.

"What?" the communicator demanded incredulously. "Where?"

"It looks like somewhere in quadrant four," she snapped. "Get on your scanners and vids. Find them."

There was a moment of silence from whoever was on the other end of the line. Then—

"Roger," the communicator responded.

She hoped like hell it wasn't the saboteur.

Ensign Guha paused and looked left and right. She brought up a measuring grid and used it to locate the precise point she needed on the right-hand bulkhead, then reached into her satchel and extracted a one-kilo shaped charge. She stripped the covering plastic off the bottom, affixed it to the bulkhead with the provided adhesive, and examined her handiwork for a moment, to ensure it wasn't going anywhere. Then she pulled a pin and depressed a thumbswitch. A small red light blinked on, then went out; the bomb was armed.

She turned to her left once more and continued her circuit. Only three more to go.

Captain Pahner closed the front of his chameleon suit and configured his helmet to seal the whole system as the elevator descended. Gunnery Sergeant Jin, already suited, stood beside him with Kosutic's helmet slung at his side and her chameleon suit over his shoulder. The standard issue Marine suits offered better ballistic protection than dress uniforms, faded the wearer into the background, and were designed for vacuum work. They weren't as good as combat armor, but there wasn't time for full armor. He had one platoon warming theirs up anyway, of course, but if this didn't go down in the next few minutes his name wasn't Armand Pahner.

"Eva," he snapped into the helmet mike. "Talk to me."

"Three so far. One-kilo shaped charges right over plasma conduits. They've got anti-tamper devices in them. I can smell it."

"Captain Krasnitsky, this is Captain Pahner," Pahner said sharply. Surprise is a mental condition, not reality, he reminded himself. "We have to shut down those conduits."

"We can't," Krasnitsky answered. "You can't just shut off a tunnel drive. If you tried it, you'd come out at a random point somewhere in a nine-light-year radius sphere. And the plasma has to be slowed down, anyway. If you just try to shut off it... backfires. We could lose everything."

"If we were about to be hit in Engineering by enemy fire," Pahner asked, "what would you do then?"

"We'd be under phase drive!" Krasnitsky snapped back. "You can't be hit in tunnel space. There's no procedure for this!"

"Shit," Pahner said quietly. It was the first time anyone had ever heard him swear. "Sergeant Major, get the hell out of there."

"I don't see any timers."

"They're there."

"Probably. But if I can get the shooter..."

"They could be on a dead-man's switch," Pahner said, gritting his teeth as he stepped off the elevator. "This is an order, Sergeant Major Kosutic. Get out of there. Now."

"I'm closer to getting out going through the shooter than going back," Kosutic said mildly.

Pahner looked at the first bomb. As Kosutic had said, there were no telltales but it smelled like it had anti-tamper devices. He turned to the sergeant of the guard, Sergeant Bilali from First Platoon, who looked as cool as a cucumber for someone standing within a few feet of a bomb that could go off at any moment. The private next to him wasn't quite as cool; she was watching the sergeant's back and breathing deeply and regularly. It was a common method of dealing with combat stress, which she obviously was. Pahner arched an eyebrow at Bilali.

"Demo?"

"On the way, Sir," the sergeant replied crisply.

"Okay," Pahner said with a nod and a glance around. If the bomber gave them time, they could try blowing the bombs in place. The explosion of a charge placed next to one of them would tend to break up the plasma jet from a shaped charge, and the bulkheads were armored to protect the plasma conduits. Without a shaped-charge jet, there was no way the explosions would penetrate. Of course, that assumed that they didn't go off before the demolition teams could get to them.

" 'If you can keep your head when all about you...' " Pahner whispered, thinking furiously.

"Excuse me, Sir?"

"Is there someone following up the Sergeant Major?"

"Yes, Sir," Bilali said. "There are teams coming from either end, and we have one cutting across the middle of Engineering, as well."

"Okay, we all know we're brave, but there's a fine line between hardcore and stupid. Let's get the heck out of here and seal this passage in case these things go off."

"Roger that, Sir." The expression on Bilali's midnight-black face didn't even flicker as he touched his communicator. "Guard. Everyone but the point teams, out of the passage. Seal it at both ends." The passage made a circuit of the ship. Although there were side connections, those stayed sealed as a matter of course. It was only the central passageway hatches that remained open. And the intervening blast-doors. If worse came to worst...

"Captain Krasnitsky," Pahner said, "what happens if we shut all the doors and the bombs detonate anyway?"

"Bad things," a female voice snapped. "This is Lieutenant Commander Furtwangler, Chief Engineer. First of all, the blast-doors aren't designed for multiple plasma failures. They might not stop it from flooding Engineering. And even if they do keep the plasma from killing us all, we still drop out of TD. We probably don't get the drive back with that much damage, and even if we do, we lose most of our range. Satan only knows what secondary damage would occur. Bad things," she repeated.

Pahner nodded as the blast-doors shut on his Marines. Bad things seemed to be happening all over.

Kosutic had noted the pattern of placement, and as the sixth blast-door came up, she leapt forward, skidding on her stomach into view of where the next bomb would be.

Ensign Guha triggered a burst of beads that shrieked through where the sergeant major would have been had she come around the corner running upright. The kick from the powerful pistol threw it up over the ensign's head despite her two-handed grip, and she never had time to get back on target.

Eva Kosutic was a veteran of a hundred firefights and fired thousands of bead rounds every week just to keep in practice. No hacked assassination program, however well-designed, could beat that experience. Her own bead pistol tracked onto the young ensign's throat, and she triggered a single round.

The five-millimeter bead was accelerated to four kilometers per second in its twenty-centimeter flight up the barrel. When it struck the ensign's neck, one centimeter to the left of her trachea, it shattered, converting all of its kinetic energy to explosive hydrostatic shock in a fraction of a second.

The ensign's head exploded off her body and was thrown backwards as the severed carotids jetted blood all over the unarmed bomb at her feet.

Before the decapitated body had hit the floor, Kosutic was up and running. The armed bombs were probably remotely triggered, but they would also have a backup. Any plan this meticulous was bound to have a backup. The simplest would be a timer, but a good addition would be a dead-man's switch controlled by the assassin's toot. When the ensign died, which she more or less had just done, the toot would send out a signal—probably when all brain activity ceased—to detonate the bombs. But although the ensign-zombie was for all practical purposes dead, brain activity in a case of severance continued for a few seconds. Which was why the sergeant major had shot her in the throat, not the head.

All of the bombs were behind Eva Kosutic, and she intended to ensure that they stayed as far away as possible. She keyed her communicator. "Fire in the hole! Shut all blast-doors!" she shouted as she leapt over the sprayed blood and past the ensign's head, still accelerating.

Captain Pahner had just opened his mouth to repeat the sergeant major's order when there were a whole series of thumps, and the world went sideways.