“I have my reasons.”
“Any other CEO would have had me in a labor camp long before this,” Gaiene remarked. “As one of the guards or as one of the inmates.”
Drakon nodded. “And that would be a real waste.”
“A waste. Yes. We know all about that, don’t we? Scarred lives and damaged souls. We’re all damned, you know,” Gaiene went on in a conversational voice. “Everywhere we’ve fought, we’ve left a little piece of ourselves and replaced it with a small piece of the hell we found in that place. Now most of us is scattered in a hundred little pieces in a hundred places where death walked. I see those places. I see them all the time. Usually in my dreams, but sometimes I see them when I’m awake.”
Gaiene could be moody when sober, but this was worse than usual. “Are you all right?” Drakon asked. “Can you handle going into another fight?”
“I’m fine. The psychs say I will soon achieve emotional equilibrium again. They’ve been saying that for a very long time. I will go on, though,” Gaiene added, his tone now slightly distant. “I will go on until the day I end; then you will give me a proper warrior’s burial, and you will go on.”
“Unless we both end together that day,” Drakon said.
“Ah, no, General. It’s not for you to talk of endings. You still have a future.”
“So do you.”
But this time Gaiene did not reply. He sat, his eyes on the opposite bulkhead, but looking at another place and time.
There were a great many things that Drakon needed to be doing. But he sat next to Gaiene for a long time without talking, shoulder to shoulder against a future that was uncertain and a past too clearly remembered.
“Five minutes to docking,” the announcing system on the freighter declared. The operator of this particular freighter had chosen a woman’s voice using an odd and strong accent, producing an effect that combined attention-getting for the strangeness and annoyance over the difficulty of understanding some of the words.
“Probably the voice of the owner’s mistress,” Gaiene commented. He and all of his soldiers were in combat armor, ready to go when the freighter docked.
“I can’t think of any other explanation.” Drakon’s armor was tied into the freighter’s own systems, so he could monitor the approach directly. On visual, the shape of the dock ahead of them stood out brilliantly white against the black of space. “No sign of any special— Wait. Looks like a squad of local troops in armor.”
Colonel Gaiene sighed with exasperation. “Now we’ll have to waste ammunition on them.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. They don’t look tense.” The troops waiting on the dock were being careless, moving so they were clearly silhouetted against the bright white of the dock walls instead of keeping to shadowed locations or cover. And they stood holding their weapons casually, propped over one shoulder or resting nose first against the deck. He had seen similar carelessness and postures before, when commanding detachments who had felt what these soldiers clearly felt, though he hadn’t let them get away with those kinds of behaviors. “Looks more like they’ve been on alert too long. They’re going through the motions, but they’re bored by it all. They’ve probably been doing the same drill when every ship arrives.”
“Do you want to try to take them alive?”
Drakon thought for a moment, then nodded. “It’s critical that we keep the snakes on this facility from realizing what’s happening until it’s too late for them to trigger any self-destruct. The sooner we start shooting, the less time we’ll have. How do we surprise them with overwhelming force and keep them from sounding an alarm?”
Gaiene smiled. “Contraband in one of the freight compartments. The sort of contraband that bored soldiers would love to get their hands on. They’ll have to go check it out in person before anyone in authority confiscates it.”
“What kind of contraband?”
“Hmmm… happy dust.” A mythical drug, undetectable by any means, nonaddictive, no side effects, cheap, and the nearest thing to feeling like a god.
“Happy dust doesn’t really exist,” Drakon pointed out. “It’s an urban legend. Or I guess just a legend since I’ve never been anywhere that hadn’t heard of it.”
“Which means we don’t actually have to have any,” Gaiene pointed out in turn. “Sergeant Shand!”
A stout soldier trotted forward. “Yes, Colonel.”
“Get out of your armor and into a survival suit. You are a drug smuggler. You have a cargo of happy dust. You are willing to bribe the squad of local soldiers with some of it as long as they let you keep the rest. Get them all into this freight compartment.”
“Yes, Colonel.”
By the time the freighter shuddered gently as the grapples locked it into the dock, Sergeant Shand was ready, looking remarkably seedy and dissolute in a grubby survival suit pulled out of the freighter’s emergency locker. Shand went to the compartment access, while Gaiene dispersed his troops around the compartment itself, hidden behind anything that would serve.
Drakon watched, keeping his breathing even, his heart rate under control. Gaiene could be trusted to handle the assault, but Drakon had to remain calm and focused, ready to spot problems before they developed and make sure nothing hung up anywhere.
When one of the bored soldiers opened the access to plug in and check the manifest, Shand was there, talking suit to suit with the soldier on the crew circuit as he gestured in alternately enticing and pleading ways.
More soldiers showed up. Sergeant Shand waved invitingly inside.
They followed him. Drakon counted a full squad as the last cleared the access. His outside view showed no one visible on the dock.
A sudden rustle of motion marked a couple of companies of soldiers leveling weapons at the shocked local troops, all of whom were wise enough to freeze into total immobility.
Motion on the dock, a single figure in battle armor coming out, pausing long enough to take in the situation, then heading toward the freighter access like someone who was very unhappy and ready to unload that emotion upon others. “Is their squad leader with them in here?” Drakon asked Gaiene.
The reply took only a moment. “No.”
“He or she just figured out that the squad is all inside the freighter and is heading this way, no doubt mad as hell.”
A few seconds later the sergeant came storming through the access, then stopped as four of Gaiene’s soldiers near the door planted weapons against the sergeant’s helmet.
Gaiene clucked a disappointed sound. “The sergeant tried to send an alert. Our jammers blocked it inside the hull. She has an impressive grasp of profanity.”
“She can exercise it on her squad while they’re all locked up aboard here,” Drakon said, as the locals were disarmed and herded away. “We’ve got a couple of minutes more at best before somebody notices that they’re gone from the dock.” He switched to the command circuit that went to every one of his soldiers. “Don’t forget to let any of the soldiers defending the facility surrender if they don’t fight us. We need to move fast, and we don’t need any last stands holding up the attack. Move!”
The elements of the brigade exploded from the freighter, using the big cargo-loading hatches. Soldiers swarmed along the dock, heading for objectives loaded into their combat armor. There had been plenty of copies of the layout of the facility available at Midway, and the soldiers had spent a lot of their time on the trip running virtual assaults. Now they didn’t hesitate as they attacked the real thing.
Just inside the facility access, a snake sitting at the personnel screening desk died before she knew what was happening, her alarm untouched. A group of civilian workers fled in panic, some huddled against the deck in fright, but the soldiers ignored them until one reached for an alarm panel, only to be knocked sprawling against the nearest wall.