Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER FORTY

Euboea Island

Planet Odysseus

Bellerophon System

Free Worlds Alliance

January 17, 2553


The assault shuttle squatted low over the moon-silvered waters of the Thálassa Krasioú. Eumaeus, the larger of Odysseus’s two moons, was about half the size of Earth’s Luna. It hung off the shuttle’s starboard wing tip as it rose in the east. Arcos, Odysseus’s smaller moon, was barely two thirds the size of Eumaeus and low in the west, which did interesting things to shadows. Not that shadows were particularly important to Sergeant Major Anniston Logan at this particular moment. He was far more interested in the pair of shuttles flanking his own, and he watched the optical feed on his Hoplon armor’s HUD as the trio of sleek transatmospheric craft raced northward at twice the speed of sound, so close to the ocean they left visible wakes.

They probably didn’t need to come in quite this low, Logan reflected. Their target was too busy lying low to screw around with radar or lidar or anything else that might be detected and give away his hidey hole. But the mission plan hadn’t made any assumptions.

Logan approved of that. He wanted this one. Wanted it so badly he could taste it.

He felt the anticipation rising again, felt it bubbling like lava under the professional calm someone who’d been at his trade for twenty years knew to maintain going into combat.

“Comms check,” he announced.

“Faeran, check,” Sergeant Lorna Faeran replied. She’d been a corporal when they left New Dublin for Jalal, but she’d also been long overdue for promotion. It had taken Logan a while to find the notation in her file that explained why she hadn’t been, and he was pretty sure the dipshit Heart World lieutenant she’d slugged had had it coming. He was only a sergeant major, of course, so his opinion might not have mattered under most circumstances, but when the endorsement to his memo suggesting the long-ago black mark might be set aside came from Terrence Murphy, things happened.

“Steiner, check,” Private Ismael Steiner announced a heartbeat later. Steiner had also been a corporal. In fact, he’d been a corporal twice, Logan reflected. One day he might be again.

“Kavanagh, check,” Corporal Philip Kavanagh, the Crann Bethadhan who’d replaced Rodrigo Chavez after Diyu, chimed in. Logan had interviewed over two dozen candidates looking for Chavez’s replacement in Murphy’s personal security team. It wasn’t easy to find someone to fill Chavez’s boots, and the team’s chemistry had to work. He’d stopped looking after he interviewed Kavanagh. Unlike Steiner, who seemed to have a lot of ferret in his ancestry, Kavanagh was a bear. Almost as tall as Logan, with coarse black hair, eyes so dark they looked like coal, and the hooked nose of a fairy-tale highwayman, he looked like a blunt object, but he’d turned out to have very sharp edges indeed.

There should have been one more, Logan thought grimly. Lance Coporal Eira. No last name—just “Eira.” She wouldn’t have been fully geared up as a Hoplon—she needed another thirty hours or so in the simulator before he’d sign off on that—but she should have been here, sitting in her nest of displays, anchoring her teammates, monitoring their communications and their armor telemetry. Only she wasn’t this time. Not physically, anyway. The docs wouldn’t let her out of sickbay for a while yet, and that was fine, in some ways. It gave Logan a little longer to rethink the implications of her relationship with Lieutenant Murphy. But it wasn’t fine with her, because she was champing at the bit to return to active duty and finish that Hoplon sim time. She didn’t seem to realize—and he’d made damned sure no one told her—that she was on the brink of setting a new record for completion of Hoplon training. He’d known the half-starved waif from Inverness had the killer instinct when he first met her, but not even he had realized just how true that was. She might not be here in person, but she was damned well here in spirit. Part of his team, the way she always was.

It wasn’t very big, his team, but it was solid, and he’d never had a more satisfying assignment in his life. He really ought to be holding down a first sergeant slot in a battalion somewhere, of course. In fact, that was where he’d been before he’d been sliced off and assigned to ramrod the bodyguard for another useless Five Hundred asshole headed for a ticket-punching stint as system governor in some podunk Fringe system. God, he’d been pissed!

Now, he thought, not so much.

“Remember,” he told them. “Anybody’s unarmed or doesn’t resist gets taken alive. I know you’d just as soon waste them and be done, but those are the rules, and we’ve gotta play by ’em or the Admiral will have our asses. And don’t anybody forget we want Alaimo alive. Everybody got that?”

Acknowledgments flashed on his visor, and he grunted in approval. He did, indeed, know how badly they wanted to just kill them all and let God sort them out. As a matter of fact, that last sentence was at least as much for himself as for any of the others.

“Feet dry in five mikes,” the copilot’s voice said in Logan’s earbud.

“Copy,” he replied, then turned his head in his armor’s turret-like helmet dome to look at his team. “Five minutes,” he said, and right fists were raised, gauntlet thumbs extended, in acknowledgment.

A Perseus-class shuttle’s normal loadout was a hundred and fifty troopers in battle dress or a hundred in light powered armor, like the Mark 12. Logan’s team had the entire troop compartment to itself for this operation, and the four Hoplons took up only about ten percent of the available volume. If everything went well, quite a bit of that space would be occupied by unwilling guests in an hour or so, he thought, and called up the real-time overhead imagery of Euboea Island as the shuttles howled towards it.

The fisheries along the long, narrow island’s southern tip worked twenty-six hours a day, seven days a week, and the docks and processing sheds were a brilliant sea of light. He wasn’t interested in those, and the display’s filters prevented the light glow from overwhelming the details he was interested in.

The buildings of their objective looked incredibly out of place in Euboea’s lush, semitropical vegetation. They would’ve been more at home in a ski resort somewhere, in Logan’s opinion, but he wasn’t there to worry about the aesthetics. What mattered was that the target chalets were a blaze of power sources, and there seemed to be an extraordinary number of air cars on their landing apron.

He zoomed in. The atmospheric drone driving his display circled lazily at five thousand meters, but the night air was crystal clear. Despite its altitude, Logan could have counted the leaves on the trees he’d really wanted to, and his eyes narrowed as he spotted the sentries spotted around the compound. The rifle-armed, unarmored guards were unlikely to make a difference, and he wondered what genius on Alaimo’s staff had decided putting them out there had been a good idea in the first place. Nothing could have been better designed to scream “Hey! Here we are!”

“Two minutes,” the flight deck announced.

“Dismount in two!” he told the team, and magnetic restraining clamps thunked open. All four Hoplons lumbered to their feet, and Logan’s eye ran one last check of his armor’s telltales. Then he banished them from his visor display and stepped closer to the hatch as the Perseus deployed its spoilers and its turbines shrieked as the pilots reversed their vectored thrust to kill airspeed.

It wasn’t the stealthiest arrival in the history of warfare, Logan reflected, but he’d been on the receiving end of that sort of sudden banshee scream. He knew how even elite troops reacted when the hell howl of an incoming assault announced itself out of a calm, still night, and he bared his teeth as he reflected upon how these troops would react.

The light above the hatch flashed once and the door hissed sideways into its recess. The spoilers deployed around its leading edge created a pocket of stillness, despite the fact that the Perseus’s speed was still somewhere north of two hundred fifty kilometers per hour. Logan watched the digital timer spin downward on his visor.

It reached zero, and he stepped out into the night.

* * *

Major Tony Bisgaard sat in his comfortable bedroom, glaring at the document on his display. He wasn’t remotely as confident as his general that he’d ever have the opportunity to file it, but he had to do something while they hid out on this miserable, pissant excuse for a planet, and as Alaimo’s ops officer, the rough draft was his to write. Of course, the report in question wasn’t going to say what he’d expected it to say when they shipped out.

His scowl deepened.

Like most of Alaimo’s staff, Bisgaard had been on Gobelins with the General. And he’d spent the years since effectively in limbo, shuffled aside, hidden and ignored like some sort of unsightly excrescence. They’d done what needed doing, shown the uppity Fringers the error of their ways. And as soon as they’d finished, their reward was to be banished. Bisgaard’s little corner of limbo had been pleasant enough, in many ways. Not as luxurious as the General’s, perhaps, but he couldn’t honestly say any of his wants had gone unprovided for. Yet it had burned, that exile. That unspoken but abundantly clear contempt for the men and women who’d made the hard choices. The ones who hadn’t been afraid to get down in the mud and the blood if that was what the job required.

And like Alaimo, Bisgaard had known—known—Bellerophon would be their vindication. The operation that would “rehabilitate” them and prove they’d been right all along in Gobelins. If the gooey-hearted idiots who ran the Five Hundred had listened to them then, made Gobelins the clearly enunciated consequence of Fringe rebelliousness, none of this shit would have happened. But had they done that? No, of course they hadn’t! They’d actually tried to sweep it under the rug, keep it under wraps. And now that Bellerophon had gone south on the General through no fault of his own, Bisgaard knew exactly who’d end up carrying the can.

Again.

He read back through the last section and tweaked a few words, then nodded. Not so much in satisfaction as in the awareness that it wasn’t going to get any better if he kept poking at it. The entire thing would be disassembled and picked to pieces by Hepner and the General himself before he got to compose the final draft, anyway, and—

His head snapped up as something shrieked in the night. It took him only an instant to recognize that earsplitting howl, and he swore with suddenly panicked savagery as he came to his feet.

He snatched his sidearm from the holster hanging from his desk chair, for all the good it was likely to do, and reached for his comm with his free hand even as he turned toward the door.

“Incoming!” he shouted into the comm. “We’ve got incom—”

Thunder bellowed, lightning struck, and Tony Bisgaard staggered back as the massive, hulking Hoplon crashed through the chalet roof and the ceiling of his room.

The Hoplon’s impact shook the bedroom floor like an earthquake. Its breastplate bore a pair of broken marshal’s badges and a black shield with a silver tree and a balance scale, and through the domed helmet he could just see the operator’s tattooed face and the dark prosthetic orb in her right eye socket.

His gun hand rose without conscious thought and he squeezed the trigger again and again while she just looked at him through that dome of armorplast. It was pointless, of course. The bullets simply bounced, screaming as they ricocheted around the room. One of them gashed his own cheek, but he went on squeezing the trigger until the magazine emptied and the slide locked back. Then he stood there, the useless weapon in his hand, staring at her…and she smiled.

“Thank you,” she said over her external speakers.

His eyes widened in confusion. Even through his panic a corner of his mind knew that was the stupidest thing anyone could possibly say at a moment like this. What the hell did she think—

Lorna Faeran squeezed the trigger and a three-round burst of hollow-nosed expanders tore Bisgaard’s torso apart. The butchered corpse hit the bedroom’s expensive wooden floor with a sodden thump, and she keyed the comm with her chin.

“Ratcatcher Two,” she said. “Confirm Tango Three, but he didn’t want to come easy. One armed target neutralized.”

* * *

Ismael Steiner heard Faeran’s report and tried not to feel jealous. They wanted any of Alaimo’s troops they could lay hands on, but his staffers were primary targets. Just like Faeran to land right on top of one of them! And for the stupid bastard to give her an excuse. Some people had all the luck.

He thudded up the staircase, his suit’s heavy feet shaking the chalet while small-arms fire whined and skipped from his armor. It was noisy, even with the sound-deadening earbuds, but he’d heard it before. He pivoted his carbine and a quick burst took down the idiot with the rifle on the landing above him. Then he topped the stairs and charged straight through the door at the top. It was locked, which meant exactly nothing to a Hoplon moving at the next best thing to twenty-six kilometers per hour.

He crashed through the rain of splinters into a palatial sitting room just as a naked, fair-haired man charged out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. A corner window in Steiner’s visor flashed as his armor’s computer IDed the newcomer.

“Ratcatcher Three has eyes on Tango Two!” he announced jubilantly, and thumped forward with one enormous armored “hand” spread wide. “Come to Papa, you bastard!” he said over his external speakers.

The naked man dropped his towel, squirming frantically as he tried to avoid the Hoplon, then squealed in anguish as that armored hand closed on the calf of his right leg. Steiner yanked, and the squeal segued several octaves higher as the captive found himself hanging upside down from one leg while his arms flailed uselessly.

“In case you hadn’t already noticed,” he said, “you’re under arrest.”

* * *

Anniston Logan heard both reports and smiled. He had a pretty fair notion of what had happened to Bisgaard, but if the idiot really had been armed, Faeran was covered. And Steiner might just get to be a corporal again—for a while at least—if he really did have Rayko Hepner. But Logan himself was after bigger fish. There was a reason he’d assigned himself the largest and most luxurious chalet of all.

Now he stormed across the entry foyer, armor shrugging aside the hurricane of small arms fire while his carbine blazed back. The incoming fire died abruptly, and he jogged across a pair of bodies as he headed for the stairs.

“Ratcatcher Six, Sweeper Six,” his earbud told him. “Getting some leakers out here, Smaj!”

“If they’re packing, shoot the bastards,” he said. “If they wanna roll over and make nice, we gotta let ’em, but I’m fine either way, long as they’re not on the priority list.”

Officially, “Sweeper Six,” Major Tarasoff, who commanded the Marines from the other two shuttles, who formed the perimeter around the chalets, outranked Logan significantly. But the Admiral had made it clear this was Logan’s op, and Tarasoff was far too wise to get between Logan and his prey.

“That’s affirmative, Ratcatcher,” he said.

There were two doors at the head of Logan’s stairs, and Cuvillier had had no idea how the chalets had been divvied up by Alaimo and the other fugitives. The door to the right would have a better view of the ocean; the one to the left would have a better view of the island’s mountainous spine.

Logan flipped a mental coin and went right.

He crashed through the door and slid to a stop.

Taskin Alaimo’s dress uniform was perfect. He looked like someone headed for a formal dinner, not someone surprised in his bedroom in a chalet hideout, and he looked at Logan with almost casual indifference.

A bodyguard came charging in behind Logan, carbine firing on full auto. The sergeant major’s visor popped up a view from the camera mounted between his shoulder blades, and he swung his left arm almost casually. The massive limb crunched through the doorframe—and a meter and a half of the wall beyond it—and scythed into the unarmored bodyguard like the hammer of Thor.

The shattered body flew back off the landing and crashed brokenly to the floor below, but Logan never looked away from Alaimo, and the general cocked his head quizzically.

“Please.” Logan’s voice was soft, almost caressing, over his armor’s speaker. “Please. Try to run.”

“I doubt I’d get far against a Hoplon,” Alaimo replied, seating himself in one of the luxury suite’s sinfully comfortable armchairs.

“You might. Then again, you might not.”

“How did you find me?” Alaimo asked.

“You may find that out at your trial. Probably not.” Logan bared his teeth. “I expect it to be too short for a lot of information to be exchanged.”

“You don’t sound like one of the local peasants,” Alaimo said thoughtfully.

“I’m not.”

“I thought not.” Alaimo crossed his legs. “Look, do you have any idea who I work for?”

“I don’t care.”

“Gerard Perrin. Perrin! The richest single guy in the entire Five Hundred. When he says jump, the only thing the rest of them ask is ‘how high?’ And the Five Hundred run the Federation. Do you understand what I’m worth to him?”

“What part of ‘I don’t care’ failed to register?” Logan asked quietly.

He thudded across the floor, reached down one massive powered gauntlet, and closed his armor’s hand around Alaimo’s neck. Not tight enough to strangle him, but tightly enough to be uncomfortable.

“No! Wait, wait, wait, wait! You look away, forget what happened to me, and I can get you anything. Anything! Perrin—Perrin he set me up in paradise, with all the drugs and booze and ass and—”

Logan tightened his grip slightly.

“—any…thing!”

Logan keyed his helmet and the visor slid up. His slate-gray eyes were granite hard, boring into Alaimo’s.

“Did she beg?” he asked softly. “The mother with three children you personally picked up at Checkpoint Bravo outside Capital City on Gobelins? The one who’d surrendered to the Marines to save her kids from your butchers? One of them was three years old. Tell me, did she beg, General?”

Alaimo’s face hardened.

“I don’t have the slightest idea who you’re talking about. I don’t remember her—whoever she was—and I don’t remember you, either. Is that what this is all about for you? Some Fringer bitch and her worthless kids? Is that—urrrrk!

His eyes widened, his face darkened, and Anniston Logan looked down at him with a basilisk glare of death. Alaimo arched backward over the chairback, both hands clutching uselessly at the Hoplon’s mechanical arm. But then Logan’s nostrils flared, and the servo-mech vise around the general’s throat relaxed…slightly.

“I don’t remember her.” Alaimo’s voice was hoarser, his hands still clung to the Hoplon’s arm, but there was a strange light in his eyes. “But she probably begged. They always beg, and it never matters. Tell you the truth…I like it. All that control. All that power. That’s how you’re feeling right now, isn’t it? All you have to do is close your hand, and I’m dead, and that…that’s a high nothing else comes close to, isn’t it?

“But the thing is, I never did it. Not on my own! I always followed orders from the Five Hundred. Perrin wanted Gobelins back under control. So did the Zaibatsu and the O’Carroll families. It was them! They told me what they wanted, and I gave it to them. Just following orders. You do what they want, and they’ll always take care of you. That’s how it works for men like us. You see?”

“I—” Logan released his grip on Alaimo’s neck “—am nothing like you.”

“Then take me into custody.” Alaimo shrugged. “Perrin will pay a fortune to get me back. A prisoner exchange, even a—”

Logan reached out with both hands, gripped Alaimo’s upper arms, and raised him effortlessly until his toes dangled six centimeters from the floor and the pain of the Hoplon’s merciless gauntlets flared through him.

“I could rip you apart right now,” Logan told him. “All I have to do is twist. Your arms would come right out of the sockets. I bet I could rip your head off before you bled out, too. Should I? What would you do, General?”

Alaimo clamped his jaw against a pain sound, and Logan smiled a thin, cold smile.

“I want to,” he said. “God, how I want to hear you scream all the way to hell. But Admiral Murphy’s got other plans. And justice won’t grind quite as slowly out here as it usually does. So I can wait just a little bit longer. Meanwhile, I’m not giving you the chance to ruin what he has in mind.”

A small port opened in Logan’s breastplate. A flexible arm extended itself and a jet of gas from the dispenser at its end squirted into Alaimo’s face. The general’s eyes rolled back, and he went limp.

“Ratcatcher Six,” Sergeant Major Anniston Logan said over the comm. “Jackpot on Tango One. Repeat, jackpot on Tango One.”



Back | Next
Framed