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Pinnace Nike One

and

Roualeyn Lodge

Arduus Mountains

Planet Gryphon

Manticore Binary System

March 28, 1906 PD


“nike flight, this is nike two.” Major Susan Hibson’s voice was clear and composed in Iris Babcock’s earbug. “Nike Two has lost track on Nike One and is assuming command until Nike One reestablishes contact. Two, clear.”

The sergeant major smiled thinly. As a member of Prince Adrian’s Marine detachment, her skinsuit’s com wasn’t supposed to be plugged into the Nike com net. No doubt she should see about getting that glitch fixed as soon as she got back aboard ship. For the moment, she’d just have to make do, she told herself, and her smile broadened.

If her suspicions had required any confirmation, the captain’s lack of surprise at Nike One’s abrupt departure from her planned flight profile would have provided it. Not that she had required confirmation. Harkness had been a tougher nut than she’d expected. In fact, he’d been tough enough to crack that she’d been almost—almost—tempted to accept his protestations that he didn’t really “know” anything for certain.

The fact that he’d disappeared into the pinnace’s flight deck to join Lieutenant Tremaine just before Nike One separated from its borrowed slot in Prince Adrian’s boat bay suggested she would have been in error if she had. And the fact that Nike One had almost immediately veered away from the other six pinnaces involved in the drop exercise and shaped a course into the heart of an enormous storm system—the sort of storm system pinnaces on training exercises normally avoided like the plague—had been equally suggestive.

After all of that, Major Hibson’s lack of surprise was really just icing on the cake. It did confirm that Hibson was in on whatever was about to happen, although Babcock supposed the official recording might cover the major’s ass if this thing went as badly sideways as it had the potential to go. Not that Hibson’s involvement was any great surprise to Babcock, either.

Despite all of that, the sergeant major had to admit that security on this had been pretty damned tight. She’d known François Ivashko, Ramirez’s command sergeant major aboard Nike, for a lot of years, and Frankie hadn’t said a word to her about it. They were going to have a little discussion about keeping secrets from old friends later, but for now, she’d chosen to let him get away with it, because as long as he didn’t know she was sniffing around, he was unlikely to do anything about it. But he had to be fully in on it, and so did Lieutenant Karlal and the rest of the HQ Platoon’s noncoms. The entire platoon was armed with stun rifles, not the laser-tag rifles and sidearms the rest of Ramirez’s people carried, which—officially—was because the HQ Platoon was supposed to be the local quick-reaction opposition force, and the Colonel had decided that equipping it with stun rifles would make things more “interesting” for his invading Marines.

And if anyone in Karlal’s platoon actually believed that, Babcock had some magic beans she’d like to sell them.

Not that any of them did. There was no way in hell the Colonel—and Ivashko—hadn’t fully briefed the entire platoon on what was really going down. And she was positive they’d given every one of Karlal’s people the chance to opt out, as well, given how totally off the books this entire operation was. Everyone involved had to know the consequences if it went sideways would be severe . . . and that obviously didn’t matter one damned bit more to any of them than it mattered to Iris Babcock. Not where Denver Summervale and Captain Harrington were concerned.

That thought brought her to a rather more immediate set of potential consequences. It was time to face the music, especially if she didn’t want to find herself confined to the pinnace with its regular flight crew when they reached their destination . . . whatever it was. Hopefully the Colonel wouldn’t be too pissed, but there was only one way to find out about that.

She drew a deep breath and climbed out of the aft jump seat into which she’d slipped just before the hatch sealed. The second-class petty officer on the inboard end of the pinnace boarding tube had twitched in surprise as she went sailing past him down the tube. He’d actually opened his mouth as if to ask her what the hell she thought she was doing, but his IQ obviously exceeded his shoe size, because he’d shut it again just as quickly. And the pinnace’s flight engineer had very carefully looked the other way as Babcock came through the pinnace hatch and disappeared into her little cubbyhole jump seat. From her expression, whatever happened to Babcock was the Marines’ affair, and no skin off her nose or any other portion of her anatomy.

Speaking of which . . . 

The sergeant major made her way up the central aisle as the pinnace began to buffet. Colonel Ramirez was looking down at his own display when she came to a stop at his shoulder, but then he must have caught sight of her in his peripheral vision, and his head turned toward her.

“Why aren’t you strapped in, Mar—?”

He broke off, and his eyebrows knitted ominously as he recognized her. Anger sparked in his dark brown eyes for just a moment. Then he sighed and shook his head.

“Sar’major Babcock, would you mind telling me just what the hell you think you’re doing here?”

Babcock popped to recruiting-poster sharp attention.

“Sir! The Sergeant Major respectfully reports that she seems to have become confused, Sir! I was under the impression this was one of Prince Adrian’s pinnaces, Colonel!”

“Won’t wash, Gunny.” Ramirez shook his head again. “Prince Adrian doesn’t even have the Mark Thirty yet.”

“Sir, I—”

“Hold it right there!”

Ramirez held up his right hand, forefinger raised in a “Silence, Marine” gesture, then turned to glare at François Ivashko. Ivashko looked genuinely surprised to see her, Babcock reflected—which either spoke well for her own stealthiness or poorly for his situational awareness—and he looked back at Ramirez more than a bit apprehensively.

“I don’t suppose you happened to log Sar’major Babcock as an observer supernumerary, did you, Gunny?” Ramirez demanded sternly.

“Uh, no, Sir. But—”

“Well, in that case, get her logged now. I’m surprised at you, Gunny! You know how important the proper paperwork is. Now I’m going to have to clear this retroactively with Major Yestachenko and Captain McKeon!”

“Yes, Sir!” Ivashko grinned hugely. “Sorry, Sir. I guess I just dropped the ball, Sir.”

“Don’t let it happen again,” Ramirez growled, then shook his raised forefinger under Babcock’s nose. “As for you, Sar’major, get back in your seat. And stay where I can keep an eye on you to make sure you behave dirtside. Understood?”

“Aye, aye, Sir!”

* * *

The Arduus Mountains were famous throughout the Manticore Binary System for their ski slopes, and almost equally famous for the regularity and severity of their blizzards. By their standards, tonight’s weather wasn’t actually all that bad.

That was a low bar, however, and touchdown was more energetic than even most rough field landings. Given the howling, sixty-kilometer-per-hour gale into which Nike One had flown, though, it wasn’t bad at all. And RMN pinnaces were designed for rough landings. Nike One rocked drunkenly until Petty Officer Hudson, its pilot, brought up the ventral tractors and locked it down, but then it sat rock steady and the red lamp on the forward bulkhead turned green. The sharp “clacking” sound of seat harness releases filled the interior, and Babcock looked up as Lieutenant Tremaine emerged from the flight deck. Harkness was at his heels, and somehow the pair of Navy types had acquired stun rifles of their own.

“Sorry about that, Colonel.” Tremaine shook his head. “I knew the nav systems were throwing potential fault signals, but I didn’t think they’d pack up entirely.”

He had not, Babcock noted, said that the navigation systems had packed up; only that he hadn’t thought they would.

“It happens, Scotty,” Colonel Ramirez said philosophically.

“Well, as we were heading in, I noticed some kind of hunting or ski lodge two or three klicks east of here, Sir. I’m sure they’d be able to give any poor, lost spacers who knocked on their front door a position fix.”

“East, you say?” Ramirez cocked his head, then shrugged and turned to Lieutenant Karlal. “I guess we should go knock on that door, Gunnar,” he said.

“Makes sense to me, Sir,” Karlal replied.

* * *

The trek from the pinnace to the hunting lodge was less than pleasant.

Officially, Babcock knew, Ramirez had moved his drop to Gryphon because he’d wanted a winter-weather exercise, and no one could deny he’d gotten it. The temperature was twenty degrees below zero . . . which the screaming wind converted to an effective minus forty degrees. A little thing like that was no problem for anyone in a Marine skinsuit or even the less rugged Navy skinnies Tremaine and Harkness wore, but meter-deep snow drifts, the solid sheets of fresh snow howling almost directly into their faces on that merciless wind, were something else entirely. Their skinsuits maintained a comfortable interior temperature and even wicked away and absorbed excess perspiration, but the sheer, exhausting exertion of slogging across mountain terrain under those conditions had to be experienced to be truly appreciated.

Not even the Marines’ helmet systems see clearly through that howling snowfall, but the recon drones Sergeant Major Ivashko and First Sergeant McElroy had deployed were designed to operate under even worse conditions. They fed the Marines’ tac displays from overhead as they bucketed through the gale, and Babcock frowned as the icons of human heat signatures appeared on her HUD. There were ten of them, five pairs spaced around the deliberately archaic-looking hunting lodge’s perimeter, despite the weather.

Obviously, they had to be equipped with excellent cold-weather gear of their own, but as Babcock studied the display, she realized all of them were also huddled into the lee of whatever windbreaks they could find. The fact that they were there at all in this kind of weather said a lot about the paranoia of whoever had ordered them out to mind the perimeter, but they clearly weren’t the most alert sentries in human history.

“Colonel,” Lieutenant Karlal said over the com, “I don’t want to sound suspicious or anything, but I’ve got to say that that looks like a security perimeter. Does it look that way to you, Sir?”

The youngster clearly had a future in holo drama. He’d managed to sound genuinely surprised.

“Now that you mention it, it does, Lieutenant,” Ramirez replied. “What do the drones see, Gunny?”

“Actually, Sir, I think the Lieutenant has a point. Look at this.” Ivashko threw a readout into Ramirez’s—and Babcock’s—HUDs. “Whoever these people are, they’re not just standing around ass-deep in the snow, they’re packing some serious hardware. I’ve got pulse rifles, sidearms, and even a pair of crew-served light tribarrels. That’s one hell of a lot of firepower for a batch of civilians.”

“I’d have to agree,” Ramirez said. “That’s the kind of firepower somebody who’s actively expecting trouble deploys. Not too sure I want to just walk up to them, especially in this kind of visibility. It wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t realize we were Marines at first, and if they’re already proddy for some reason, that could be bad. Be messy if they decided to shoot first and ask questions later.”

“Well, we do have the stun rifles, Sir,” Ivashko pointed out helpfully. “Wouldn’t hurt ’em, ’cept possibly for the headache when they come to. And it would make sure nobody on our side got accidentally shot.”

“A valid observation, Gunny.” Ramirez nodded inside his helmet. “Gunnar, I think Gunny Ivashko’s onto something here. I’ll take responsibility, of course.”

“Aye, aye, Sir! First Sergeant, let’s get our people deployed.”

“Aye, aye, Sir,” McElroy acknowledged and began giving orders of his own.

It seemed to take far longer than it should have, thanks to the way the deep snow and atrocious weather delayed things, but Karlal’s people were good. Babcock stood at Ramirez’s back, flanked by Harkness and Lieutenant Tremaine, watching her time display, and her HUD flashed the readiness alert in barely seven minutes.

“Position,” Karlal confirmed quietly over the com a moment later.

“Take the shot,” Ramirez said calmly.

“Execute!” Karlal said, and Babcock nodded in approval as every one of the sentries went down so close to simultaneously it was impossible to tell which one actually hit the snow first.

“Let’s go make sure they didn’t hurt themselves falling down,” Ramirez said, and the Marines closed in on the downed guards.

“What do we do with ’em, Sir?” Sergeant Major Ivashko asked as he prodded one unconscious body with his toe.

“I’d like to let them freeze,” Ramirez replied, “but that wouldn’t be neighborly.” He looked around, then pointed. “There’s a storage shed over there, Gunny. Stack them in there out of the wind.”

“Aye, Sir.” Ivashko replied. “Coulter, you and Malthus have babysitter duty. Get these sleeping beauties tucked away.”

“And remember to plug their weather gear’s heaters into the power supply in the shed,” Ramirez added. “Gotta keep them nice and toasty till we figure out what’s going on here.”

* * *

The pretense that Nike’s Marines had simply happened across the lodge became increasingly threadbare over the next few minutes. Since Babcock had chosen to tag along, Ramirez decided he might as well make use of her expertise, and he tasked her with locating and disabling the emergency landline while Ivashko and McElroy deployed the drones’ jammers to take out the building’s satellite uplink. It took less than four minutes, and then the platoon fell in around Ramirez while he parceled out the doors he wanted covered.

It was obvious from the precision of his directions that he was intimately familiar with the architecture of the hunting chalet across which his people had just happened to “stumble,” and his Marines moved rapidly into position.

The colonel took the front entrance personally, and Babcock attached herself to his group. The colonel only glanced at her and shook his head with a resigned expression, then looked at Ivashko.

“It would appear that I’m stuck with Sar’major Babcock, Gunny,” he said. “Why don’t you go help Lieutenant Karlal on the north side while I keep my eye on her to be sure she stays out of trouble?”

“Aye, Sir,” Ivashko said with a chuckle, and Ramirez looked at Tremaine and Harkness, who had also attached themselves to him.

“Navy personnel have no business in this sort of operation, Lieutenant,” he said sternly.

“Of course not, Sir!”

“They aren’t trained for breaching operations against potentially armed opposition where they might get hurt.”

“No, Sir. They aren’t,” Tremaine agreed in an “and your point is?” sort of tone.

Ramirez glowered at him as the lieutenant gazed back with a politely attentive expression. Then the colonel exhaled gustily.

“All right, you can come. But you watch your ass in there, Scotty! Dame Honor will be really, really pissed if I let anything happen to you. Harkness”—he looked at the senior chief over Tremaine’s head—“she could probably live without, but she’s fond of you. So bear that in mind.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Sar’major.”

“Yes, Sir?”

“You’ve got my six. Try to stay between any potential trouble and our two enthusiasts here, please.”

“Aye, aye, Sir.”

Ramirez shook his head yet again, then turned back to the door and tried the latch gently. It was locked, and he shifted his stun gun to his right hand while his left pressed a small, flat box to the door.

A green LED blinked, the latch sprang, and Ramirez toed the door open. Somebody objected—loudly and profanely—as cold wind blasted through it.

Ramirez just squeezed the stunner’s trigger and the complaint stopped abruptly.

“One down,” he murmured over the com as he stepped through the door and across the man who’d objected.

“Make that two,” Corporal Hansen said over the same circuit as Babcock followed the colonel through the door.

“Three,” PFC Huan said.

“Four,” McElroy said quietly a moment later.

Tremaine followed Babcock into the chalet’s tastefully paneled interior while Harkness brought up the rear. All of the designated breaching teams were inside now, as well, advancing with quick, efficient stealth and taking out the chalet’s inhabitants as they went.

As Captain Corell’s mysterious informant had warned them, there were quite a few of those inhabitants. But however experienced at visiting violence upon others the Outfit leg-breakers might be, they weren’t even in the same league as the Royal Marines, especially where things like situational awareness were concerned. Besides, it was the middle of the night. Most of those inhabitants who hadn’t already been picked off as part of the exterior guard force were sound asleep, and gas grenades tossed through quietly opened bedroom doors wafted them gently into even deeper slumber.

They cleared the ground floor of the main building without triggering any alarms. That should have accounted for most of the staff, since the second and third floors were largely reserved for paying guests, and Ramirez led the way quietly up the central spiral stair while the rest of his Marines climbed stealthily up the emergency stairs, avoiding the lift shafts.

So far so good, Babcock told herself as they reached the second-floor landing, then shook her head quickly. Damn it, she knew better than to tempt fate that way. As sure as she decided everything was going—

“What the hell?!”

Babcock’s helmet audio sensors picked up the voice from behind her, and she turned her head just as Harkness spun around to face the big, beefy thug who’d chosen that moment to emerge from the hallway bathroom. He was in shirtsleeves, the shirt in question was unsealed, and he needed a shave, but he obviously had some serious paranoia issues, since he’d taken his shoulder-holstered pulser into the head with him.

Now he reached for it even as he gawked at the intruders.

The newcomer was too close for Harkness to get the muzzle of his stun rifle around in time, so he brought its butt up in a flashing arc that landed on the other man’s jaw . . . and sent him crashing to the floor.

“Aw, shit!” someone muttered as the impact shook the hall. And then other doors began to open as the lodge’s “guests” roused.

Harkness dropped one of them with a quick shot. Lieutenant Tremaine stunned a third, but then a single pulser shot whined past him and skipped off Babcock’s armored skinsuit. Colonel Ramirez took down three more—two men and the woman who’d fired—with a wide-angle shot, but Babcock found herself directly in front of another door when it jerked open.

The man and woman on the other side of that door had clearly been engaged in something besides sleep. Aside from the woman’s briefs, they were neither clad nor armed, but they were wide awake, and the woman grabbed Babcock’s stun rifle.

She pulled hard, and her eyes started to widen as Babcock let her. But then both of the sergeant major’s feet left the floor. She pivoted on the weapon her adversary was kind enough to hold steady, and the other woman flew back with a gurgling grunt as two combat boots hit her in the belly. The impact flung her into her fellow, who opened his mouth to shout—just as Babcock touched the floor once more and her left elbow struck his skull like a hammer.

He went down without a sound, and Babcock stepped back, still holding her stunner, and shot the woman before she stopped whooping for breath.

It was over in a heartbeat, and the sergeant major glanced into the bedroom her victims had come from. There was no one else in it, so she stepped back and gave the man an insurance stun bolt of his own, then looked over her shoulder at Harkness.

“Next time, bring a goddamned drum and bugle band along!” she snarled over the com.

“Can it, Gunny!” Ramirez snapped. He stood still, running his skinsuit’s external sound pickups up to max, then relaxed.

“No damage done, I think,” he said, and did a quick count of the unconscious bodies littering the hallway.

“Twelve, repeat, total twelve down,” he said over the com, then darted his own look at Harkness. From the senior chief’s expression, he obviously expected something memorable. But the colonel only shook a finger at him and then turned back to his front.

“Let’s try not to set off any more seismographs, people,” he said over the general net.

* * *

It took another five minutes to account for what should be every staff member and all of the “guests” in the second-floor bedrooms. The third floor’s larger, more luxurious suites were reserved for VIP traffic, and Ramirez positioned his people to cover the access routes to the central staircase, then led Babcock, Ivashko, and Tremaine up the stairs.

Harkness wasn’t invited, but somehow Babcock wasn’t surprised to find him at her elbow as she brought up the rear.

They reached the landing and filtered quietly down a short hallway to suite 301. The door was closed, and this time Colonel Ramirez’s magic box had no effect on the old-fashioned mechanical lock.

He shrugged and handed his stunner to Ivashko. It was no part of the plan to put this one to sleep, and he obviously had no intention of sharing the moment with anyone else.

He retreated to the edge of the landing, balanced for a moment, then took three running strides, slammed into the door, and went through the resultant rain of splinters like a boulder.

The man sleeping on its other side of that doorway reacted impossibly quickly, sliding one hand under his pillow even before his eyes had fully opened. Yet fast as he was, Ramirez reached him just as his fingers closed on the pulser’s butt, and the colonel’s hand fastened on the front of his expensive pajamas.

Tomas Ramirez had been born and bred on the planet of San Martin, one of the heaviest-gravity worlds humanity had settled. Its sea-level air pressure was high enough to produce near-toxic concentrations of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, and the colonel was built like a skimmer turbine with an attitude problem. The hand on Denver Summervale’s pajamas yanked, and he flew out of bed like a missile. His gun hand hit a bedpost in passing; the pulser spun out of his grasp; and Ramirez released him at the top of his arc.

The duelist managed—barely—to get one arm up to protect his head before he smashed into the opposite wall. He bounced back, but even totally surprised from a sound sleep, he managed to land on his feet. He fell into a defensive stance, shaking his head to clear it, and Ramirez simply stood there, giving him time to recover.

Not, Babcock thought coldly, because he had the least interest in fair fights.

Summervale charged, and although he might make his living with the anachronistic firearms of the code duello, he clearly knew what he was doing with his hands, as well. Unfortunately, he was in pajamas, and a native of the planet Manticore, whose gravity was barely one percent higher than Old Terra’s. Ramirez was in an armored skinsuit and his homeworld’s gravity was almost twice that of humanity’s birth world. The only reason Summervale got in even a single blow was because Tomas Ramirez wanted the opportunity, the pretext, to hurt him . . . and he did.

The colonel’s right hand drove into Summervale’s belly like a wrecking ball. The smaller man folded over it with a wailing grunt that ended in an explosive “crack” as Ramirez’s left hand slammed into his face in a vicious, open-handed slap. And then Ramirez snatched him up, spun him like a toy, slammed him belly down over his own bed, jerked one wrist up behind him, and locked an arm of iron across his throat.

Summervale fought to break free, then screamed as Ramirez rammed a skinsuited knee into his spine.

“Now, now, Mister Summervale,” he said softly. “None of that.”

The killer whimpered in combined anguish and humiliation, and Ramirez glanced at Ivashko. The sergeant major laid a small recorder on the bed and switched it on.

“Do you recognize my voice, Mister Summervale?” Ramirez asked then. Summervale gritted his teeth, refusing to answer—then screamed again as those stone-crusher fingers twisted his wrist.

“I asked a question, Mister Summervale. It’s not nice to ignore questions.”

Summervale screamed a third time, twisting in agony. Then—

“Yes! Yes!

“Good. Can you guess why I’m here?”

“F-Fuck you!” Summervale panted.

“Such language!” Ramirez shook his head reprovingly, and his voice was almost genial. “Especially when I’m just here to ask you a question.”

He paused a heartbeat.

“Who paid you to kill Captain Tankersley, Summervale?”

There was no more humor in that cold, hard voice.

“Go to—hell, you—son of a bitch!”

“That’s not nice,” Ramirez said again. “I’m going to have to insist you tell me.”

“Why—the fuck—should I? You’ll just—kill me—when I do. So fuck you!”

“Mister Summervale, Mister Summervale!” Ramirez sighed. “The Captain would have my ass if I killed you. So just answer the question.”

“Like hell!” Summervale panted.

“I think you should reconsider. I only said I wouldn’t kill you, Mister Summervale,” Ramirez whispered almost lovingly. “I never said I wouldn’t hurt you.”


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