Malaveda hadn’t seen the fucker move!
Vierziger slipped the pistol back into a cut-away holster that rode high on his right hip. It wasn’t an issue rig, and it looked like it ought to be uncomfortable for driving; though he’d driven all right too.
He sat down again and smiled faintly at Malaveda. “Just a rat,” he said. “Jumping onto the manhole cover back there. Where you have humans, you have rats.”
Malaveda nodded in the direction of the pistol, now out of sight again. “Where the hell did you learn to do that?” he asked.
Vierziger shrugged. “Practice,” he said. His face was unlined. He looked like a choirboy in this soft illumination, street lights shimmering from the damp brick walls of the alley. “And I had a—talent for it, I suppose you’d say.”
“Bloody hell,” Malaveda said.
A slow-moving car went by, the first traffic since the MP jeep took its pre-dawn station in the alley. The vehicle’s windows were polarized opaque. They reflected the knife-edged whiteness of the hood-center headlight.
Malaveda didn’t want to speak, but he heard himself say, “Could you teach somebody to do that? To—draw that way?”
“It’s just practice, Sergeant,” Vierziger said.
He looked at his companion again. Malaveda couldn’t have explained what was different about the newbie’s expression, but this time it didn’t make him shiver to see it.
“It isn’t hard to shoot people, you know,” Vierziger said. “The hard part is knowing which ones. They don’t always come with labels.”
He smiled. Malaveda wasn’t sure if the statement was meant for a joke. He smiled back.
The artificial intelligence in Malaveda’s commo helmet projected a sudden emptiness through the earphones. The non-sound was the absence of the static which would otherwise have crackled when somebody opened the push but didn’t speak.
“We’re going in,” a radioed voice whispered; Lieutenant Hartlepool or the squad leader, Sergeant-Commander Brankins. You couldn’t tell in a brief spread-band transmission.
Malaveda threw the sub-machine gun to his shoulder again. Vierziger flicked him a side-glance and smiled faintly, but he didn’t otherwise move.
Malaveda hadn’t heard how they’d located Soisson. Chances were the tech boys had swept the low-rent district till they picked up the signature of the electronics in the powergun Soisson ran with. The deserter might have sold the weapon or traded it for something more concealable, but even so it was a link in the chain that would lead back to him.
Whoever had the sub-machine gun would be bent outta shape when a squad of armed men rousted him at this hour. Watching the back door wasn’t necessarily going to be a tea party, but Malaveda was just as glad not to be in the snatch team.
All hell broke loose.
The initial gunfire was from the front of the apartment building. Malaveda couldn’t see who was shooting, but the hisscrack! of powerguns and reflected cyan light quivered over and around the structure.
It didn’t sound like a raid, it sounded like war.
The back door opened halfway. A man peered through the crack.
Malaveda aimed his sub-machine gun. The holographic sight picture stuttered around the man. “Come out with your hands up!” he shouted.
The man started to duck back inside. Vierziger blew his head off in a flash of saturated blue.
The quality of light reflected from a third-floor window above the doorway changed. Malaveda noted the event subliminally, but his brain hadn’t processed it into somebody just slid opaque blinds open behind the polarized pane in order to see me/shoot me when Vierziger fired again. The window shattered. The 2-cm round smacked a belt of powergun ammo slung around the man aiming a sub-machine gun. Hundreds of charged disks gang-fired, touched off by the 2-cm bolt. The blast must have cleared the room.
Soisson had made contact either with fifth columnists set up by the Front, or with a criminal gang that might as well be a government for the weapons in its arsenal. Either way, the snatch squad had walked right into a hornet’s nest.
Malaveda ripped out half his magazine with no better target than the whole rear of the building. He hadn’t expected things to blow up this way. It had spooked him.
Vierziger fired at another of the top range of windows. He must have seen something or he had the devil’s own luck, because there was a man behind the disintegrated pane. The fellow had been pointing a shoulder weapon.
He’d been wearing body armor too, but that didn’t help him against the energy a 2-cm bolt packed. The body hurtled backward, propelled by the shock of its colloid structure suddenly vaporizing. The victim’s sleeves were burning.
The sub-machine gun recoiled against Malaveda’s shoulder. That and the quivering gaps across his field of view, his visor blacking out the cyan dazzle to save his eyesight, combined to focus him on the job at hand. It’s not like this is my first firefight.
The back door was still ajar. The first victim’s feet stuck out of it. Malaveda sensed motion within the building. He aimed, squeezed. His three-round burst lighted the torso of a gunman. Vierziger center-punched the fellow with a bolt at the same instant, then fired again.
The second round was apparently to clear the magazine. The delicate-featured killer turned his weapon up with his left hand and stripped a fresh five-round clip through the loading gate. The gun’s iridium muzzle glowed from the amount of plasma energy it had been channeling downrange.
Malaveda’s commo helmet spluttered with clicks and hisses, sign of a lot of panicked activity that wasn’t addressed to him. The people at the front of the apartment building—the survivors of the snatch team—were calling for serious backup.
The hostiles inside must know that, and know besides that when a platoon of combat cars—or even tanks—arrived, it was all over for them. They had to break out fast, before the FDF came down with both boots.
When Malaveda was sure his partner had reloaded, he emptied the sub-machine gun into two windows chosen at random on the top floor. He thumbed the release button and reached down to his belt pouch for a fresh magazine.
Sirens and screams clawed what had been the night’s stillness, punctuated with the slapping discharges of powerguns. A blast too loud for a grenade shook the opposite side of the apartment. Windows facing the alley shattered. Shards of the panes snowed onto the sidewalk.
Vierziger—
Malaveda’s mind flashed with a montage of his partner in various stages of what had happened next.
First Vierziger’s left hand lifted his 2-cm weapon up toward his shoulder, the girlishly perfect fingers of his right hand curving to the grip. Then Vierziger faced the back of the alley, the shoulder weapon out to his side and the pistol, again the pistol, pointing.
Three shots, strobe-light quick, winking on the face of the man lifting the manhole cover from beneath. Cratering the flesh, rupturing the skull itself with the pressure of gasified nerve tissue. The eyes blanking, the sub-machine gun dropping back into the utility passage converted to an underground escape route; the cover clanking down, catching the dead man’s fingers for a moment before gravity tugged them loose.
Vierziger holstered the pistol. He bent, switched on the jeep’s drive fans, and hopped out beside the vehicle. “Come on!” he ordered. “Watch our back.”
“What?” Malaveda said. He jumped clear of the jeep. He felt as though he was partnered with a ticking bomb. He didn’t understand what was happening, but he was afraid not to obey the newbie absolutely.
Vierziger revved the fans to full lift and reached for the steering yoke. The bottom half-meter of a second-floor window across the street blew outward, shattered by the muzzle blast of a machine gun firing explosive bullets.
Distortion through the window pane caused the gunner to aim his initial burst high. Chunks blew off the facades of the buildings to either side, hiding the alley mouth for an instant in a cloak of brick dust. Other projectiles burst in vivid red florets on the walls and among the garbage well behind the jeep.