The little man was using Malaveda as a pack train; which was perfectly appropriate under the circumstances. Now that he was sure of the sergeant’s obedience, the edge that had earlier promised, “Do this thing, or I will kill you without hesitation,” was gone from Vierziger’s voice.
Vierziger nodded to the knife he’d already thrust into the juncture of the doors closing the elevator shaft from the first floor. He placed his boot along the edge, ready to thrust the door fully open as soon as Malaveda broke the seal. The top of the cage was eighty centimeters beneath floor level, not a serious problem.
The knife was a sturdy tool with a single edge on a thick, density-enhanced blade about twenty centimeters long. It could serve for a weapon, but it was obviously intended for more general purposes than killing. Here it made a functional prybar.
Malaveda gripped the knife with his left hand, crossed his left leg over the hilt to push the other door, and aimed his 2-cm weapon at the crack. Vierziger nodded approvingly.
The sergeant levered the knife with all his strength, using the thrust of his left boot as both anchor and supplement. The doors banged open to their stops. Vierziger was through the doorway like a lethal wraith, the sub-machine gun snarling. Malaveda heaved himself over the floor ledge, feeling like a hippo in comparison to his partner’s grace.
But he got there without stumbling. The torso of a startled man in a business suit vanished in the huge flash of a 2-cm bolt, though Malaveda wasn’t really conscious of pulling the trigger.
According to the plans and 3-D holograms with which the squad prepared for the raid, the apartment building’s foyer faced the street through a wall of clear vitril. No longer. Armored shutters with firing slits had slammed down moments after the shooting started.
Vitril now covered the floor like a field of diamonds. Powergun bolts had shattered the former expanse into bits ranging from pebbles to dust. It was rough, but it didn’t have dangerous edges.
A trooper in light-scattering Frisian battle dress lay under the crystalline debris. Malaveda couldn’t tell which of the squad it had been, because an explosive bullet had decapitated him/her.
Three men and a woman crouched by the slits, shooting outward or preparing to when the pair of Frisians appeared behind them. All four of them were dead by the time Malaveda stepped into the foyer. Vierziger had shot them in the back of the head. The purple-haired man on the left of the position was on the floor. His three companions were slumping in various stages of the same motion, like a slow-motion image of a single event.
The armored shield glowed in several places where it had absorbed plasma energy, but all those strikes had been on the outer face. Vierziger hadn’t wasted a bolt.
A dozen more people of both sexes tumbled out the stairwell door. Despite being in various stages of undress, they were slicker-looking types than the shooters had been. Malaveda had killed the first of them. The woman behind that victim was shrieking, “The basement’s full of gas!” when the 2-cm bolt sprayed her with the remains of her companion.
A tremendous blast shook the building. The shock wave down the stair tower projected the last would-be escapee into the foyer like the cork from a champagne bottle.
Nothing the snatch squad had on hand would have packed that wallop, and there hadn’t been time enough for support to arrive. The residents themselves had planned to blow the place from the top down to cover their tunnel escape route.
The foyer lights flicked off, then on again but with a yellowish hue. The system had shifted to emergency power. The building was a fortress. It could have held out for hours against almost anything but what had arrived—the devil in the shape of a new recruit.
A woman knocked to the floor drew a pistol from the sleeve of a garment apparently too diaphanous to hide anything. Vierziger shot her hand off. Chips of vitril, now pulverized, erupted in the cyan jolts as the flimsy target vaporized at the first round of the burst.
Malaveda noticed movement and swung. A man threw down a carbine as though it were as hot as the white, glowing muzzle of Vierziger’s sub-machine gun. “No!” he screamed. His eyes were closed.
“No,” agreed Vierziger, touching Malaveda’s hand on the forestock. He lifted the 2-cm weapon to a safe angle.
The armored shutters rang under multiple powergun bolts. A thirty-centimeter splotch went from gray to red to bright orange. The survivors of the squad were concentrating their fire, but the armor remained proof against small arms.
“That’s the, the s-s-switch,” said a small man whose beige suit would have paid Malaveda’s salary for a year. He pointed to a short baton. The man the sergeant shot had flung it onto the vitril in his dying convulsions. “To set off the bombs.”
Vierziger nodded to Malaveda. Malaveda scooped up the device, careful not to touch the red contact points.
A grenade went off outside. The concussion lifted dust from the foyer floor without affecting the armor.
“Now,” said Vierziger. “We’ll need the controls to raise those doors. And we’ll need a white flag, because our colleagues don’t seem ready to accept my radioed assurance that we’ve captured the position.”
He gestured to a man wearing a tunic that glittered as if diamond studded. “Your shirt will do, I think.”
“The controls are here, right here, mister!” a woman whispered, tugging Malaveda’s sleeve to get his attention. “Right here!”
She pointed to what looked like a trash chute in the wall between elevator and stairs. The cover plate was lifted to display a keyboard.
“Besides,” Vierziger continued, smiling at the captive stripping before him, “I’d like a better look at your pecs, handsome.”
He laughed. It was the most terrifying sound Malaveda had ever heard in his life.
Mahgreb
“I’m looking for a piss-ant named Barbour!” roared the stocky man who slammed open the double doors of the officers’ canteen. “Lieutenant Robert Barbour? He thinks he’s lifting out of here today!”
The man’s gray hair was shaved into a skullcap. He wore his rank tabs field-fashion—on the underside of his collar, where they wouldn’t target him for a sniper. His aura of command obviated the need of formal indicia anyway.
Barbour set down the chip projector he was reading and got to his feet. The projector was loaded with an off-planet news feed, nothing Barbour cared about one way or the other. It was just a means of killing time while waiting for the boarding signal of the ship that would return him to Nieuw Friesland. Killing time and taking his mind off other things.
“I’m Barbour,” he said. His voice squeaked.
The dozen or so other officers in the canteen stared at Barbour when he stood up, then quickly looked in any direction except that of the two principals to the encounter. Conversations stopped, and the four poker players at a corner table huddled their cards between their cupped palms. The lights twinkling in enticement from the autobar looked loud.
“Do you know who I am, Lieutenant Barbour?” the stocky man demanded. When the canteen doors flapped, Barbour saw two nervous-looking aides waiting in the starport concourse. Unlike their principal, the aides wore scarlet command-staff fourragères.
Via! Barbour did know the fellow. Know of him, at any rate. Tedeschi didn’t spend a lot of time in the headquarters in Al Jain, where Barbour had worked until six days previous.
“Yes sir,” Barbour said. He restrained himself from saluting. Field regulations again. In order to encourage his command into a war zone mentality, General Tedeschi, commanding the FDF contingent on Mahgreb, had forbidden salutes. “You’re General Tedeschi. Sir.”
“You’re bloody well told I am!” Tedeschi snapped.