That’s what a UAC project was like. Pristine on the outside. Even glamorous. Just don’t get too close. Or you’d find out where the bodies were buried…
Maybe even end up carrying a woman’s severed arm down a corridor on Olduvai.
He went through another series of hallways…thinking that this woman’d had no idea a part of her was going to end up being carried by a soldier as just another field tool.
Was this the turn? Yeah. He was starting to get to know this hellhole. There was the sign:
SPECIAL WEAPONS LABORATORY
He went to the door panel, opened the hand print pressure pad.
“Please provide DNA verification.” A friendly woman’s voice, robotic but sounding like a real person anyway. One more in a stacked deck of ironies.
Sarge slapped the hand of the mangled limb against the pressure pad.
No response. Maybe the tissue was too decayed to provide an accurate DNA reading.
But then the invisible nonlady chirped her welcome: “DNA verification confirmed.”
The security door to the weapons lab slid open, and Sarge dropped the decaying limb, wiped his hand on his pants, and went in to find some of that seriously scary balls-out ordnance. He smiled and his fingers twitched; he could almost feel that kill power in his hands already.
He went into the innermost chamber.
Some religions had their holy of holies. This was Sarge’s.
The gun was hanging in a luminous high-intensity electromagnetic cushion, floating in midair — rotating there, as part of the display. A bioforce gun. He’d heard a rumor about the new weapons being developed out here, based on technology discovered on Olduvai — some gabby lab tech returning from this hell planet had shot off his mouth about them. And if the size of that gun was any indication, it was more than enough bioforce to kill an elephant.
That thing could kill a small herd of them.
The question was — would it kill Sarge, too?
Portman and Destroyer were standing guard outside Carmack’s lab. Portman was wondering just what the hell they were guarding. Sometimes Sarge gave them arbitrary assignments just to keep them busy. Maybe that was for morale. But Portman’s own morale was in the dumpster, right about now.
“This is bullshit,” he told Destroyer. “I enlisted to serve my country, not to protect some corporation’s goddamn science project.”
Destroyer ignored him. As per orders.
Portman fidgeted, thinking that if they didn’t get some backup out here, they were all going to die. He’d heard chatter on the comm about what had become of Mac. His head gone, swish, just like that. One second he’s there, thinking about pussy no doubt, next moment he’s a bowling ball. And Mac had been the closest thing Portman had had to a real buddy in this group. Hell he knew these bastards didn’t like him. He tried to prove himself, tried plenty, but that only seemed to make it worse.
Mac had invited him along to chase tail on furlough, one time. They’d ended up alone in a saki bar, only Mac’s .45 keeping the bartender from closing, but it was okay, they were drunk enough they didn’t care — Mac teaching him drinking songs from the homeland. Mac was okay. Now the only guy who’d been anything like friendly was smoked — and his team was pretending it didn’t matter.
Not me, Portman thought. I’m not gonna be the next one to die — and be forgotten in the time it takes to take a short piss. Uh-uh.
Portman made up his mind. But he needed some way to get off by himself…
“I gotta take a dump,” he announced.
Destroyer looked at him. His eyes like chips of flint. “Now?”
“Unless you want me shitting in my pants right here.”
Destroyer snorted and nodded toward the lab door. They’d seen a bathroom off Carmack’s main lab room.
Portman stepped into the lab, pointing his gunlight into the dark corners. Nasty things in here…
But nothing was moving now. Could be, though, that something was waiting in that bathroom.
Come on, he told himself. This is your shot. You won’t get another…Sarge’ll be watching you too close…
He took a deep breath and hurried across the room to the bathroom door. Licked his lips — then stepped through, swinging his gun this way and that, half-expecting an attack. Nothing. Seemed empty.
He kicked open a stall, gun ready — nothing to shoot in there but the toilet.
He went in, closed the booth door, sat down. He put his gun on the tiled floor.
“Portman,” came Pinky’s voice, crackling out almost immediately on the comm. “I got floor and wall on your vid…”
“Gimme thirty goddamn seconds,” Portman snarled back, “I’m taking a shit!” Though he wasn’t.
Pinky started to say something else, but Portman twiddled the frequency knobs on his comm and chestcam, cutting him off. He pulled out the little input, keyed in a code. Then spoke quietly into the comm:
“This is Subcorporal Dean Portman with RRTS 6 Special Ops on Olduvai, 0310 hours. We have encountered hostile activity, require immediate RRTS reinforcements…”
Ten
DESTROYER WAS GETTING tired of waiting for Portman. But he didn’t feel like going in there and inhaling the gaseous residue of Portman’s meals, either. Portman was a fuckup — but he had a point. This mission had the feel of being a one-way ticket.
Not that Destroyer was going to tell him that.
He hoped the Kid would get out of it all right. Portman was screwing the youngster over by giving him dope — another thing the asshole had to answer for.
Destroyer had come to feel a kind of responsibility for the Kid — he’d taken on the young soldier’s secondary field training himself. The Kid wasn’t particularly good, but he was eager to please. Making Destroyer think of himself at age seventeen…
He was an up-and-coming gangster in the East Side ghetto, sure of himself, feeling immortal, invulnerable — which was of course when he got shot by the cops while robbing a liquor store.
Superficial wound, but it had put him out of the fight, then a grinning white cop had busted his head with a nightstick.
He’d awakened in a hospital, to find himself staring up at a RRTS Field Recruitment Agent standing with arms crossed, at the foot of his bed. This Privatized Marine was all spit and polish, standing there, looking flatly down at the boy known on the street, then, as Steppin’ Razor. The agent was a man blacker than Destroyer, about forty-five. His broad shoulders straining at the material of his dress blues.
“So they call you Razor?” the guy was asking. His nameplate said CANNER.
“Steppin’ Razor,” the teen had corrected him. “Who the fuck are you, and what the fuck you want?”
“I’m here to offer you a choice. Jail or RRTS Field Recruitment. We’ve got a deal with the courts, boy. Word is you’re good with weapons. Got nerve. But you’re using it all wrong.” Canner’s eyes had glinted; other than for that, no expression. Just…waiting. Watching and waiting. Never taking his eyes off the boy — who would someday be a man called Destroyer.
“That right? Fuck you.”
“That’s it — that’s the all-wrong part. That ‘fuck you’ bullshit. Man doesn’t get far that way. Serve your country, you serve yourself.”