Redliners(18)

Abbado slapped trays up on the bar behind him. Matushek was emptying another cooler. Two of the bartenders huddled at the far end, their hands clasped over the back of their necks. The remainder of 3-3 was hauling the loot outside or chewing more of the building apart with their stingers. One good thing about a rear-echelon base was you could count on weapons being locked in armories. Even strike companies had to turn in their hardware.

Some of their hardware.

Abbado jerked the last tray out of the cooler and shouted, "Let's go!"

He grunted as he rolled himself back over the bar. Enough of the hormones had worn off that he was aware of his armor's weight again.

One-handed, Abbado tugged down his stinger and put half a magazine into coolers there hadn't been time to empty. Chrome-faced doors flew apart. At the other end of the bar Matushek paused to pat the upraised fanny of one of the bartenders, an even better way to increase the REMFs' demoralization.

Abbado ran for the door. Glasebrook was ahead of him with a stack of dispenser trays so high that the transom scraped the top one off. Abbado caught it as it fell without really thinking about what he was doing. He dived with his burden into the waiting APC.

"Go!" Methie yelled, keeping count from the turret as 3-3 reboarded. The coil gun put another twenty rounds into the bar ceiling. The burst must have severed a major beam because a quarter of the roof twisted and sagged with a tortured moan.

The APC lifted. The side panels were still lowered. Abbado saw movement—an aircar with a pulsing red light closing fast from the west.

"Goose it, Horgen!" he said. "The Shore Police's woke up!"

There was a bang from above him. Abbado thought for an instant that the SPs were shooting; then he saw a spark curving in the direction of the cops' flashing party hat. "What the fuck was that?" he demanded.

Methie looked down from the cupola. "We got two anti-emitter missiles with the bus," he said. "I figured this was a good time to use one."

The red light spun like a flipped coin and vanished from the sky. Abbado didn't see the flash of an explosion. He felt the future opening before him like a black cone: a complete absence of experience, stretching on forever.

"You blew up a carload of cops?" Caldwell said. "Ah, they'll shoot us for that."

She didn't sound excited. They were all too flat after the operation to be excited.

Horgen kept the APC low so it would be harder to track if anybody was trying. They were flying fast enough to keep ahead of the dust they raised. The compound was still a few minutes out.

"Hey, I'm an expert, remember?" Methie said. "I tuned it to home on the RF signals from their front fan, not the radio in the cab. I didn't even arm the warhead! They just had an engine failure."

Glasebrook laughed in a deep rumble.

"They may still have broke their necks when they went down, you know," Abbado said.

"Hey, they took that risk when they got out of bed in the morning," Methie replied.

Abbado'd been sitting on the floor. Now he swung down a seat from the central spine.

"Somebody pass me a beer, will you?" Horgen called from the cockpit. "You got the beer, right?"

"You bet your ass," Glasebrook said with deep satisfaction. He pulled one of the dispensers apart and began tossing cans to the other strikers.

Abbado looked out into the night and sipped his beer. There wasn't a lot to see as the APC roared across a darkened waste of stone and lichen.

There'd be hell to pay in a couple hours, Abbado knew from experience. But for the moment, he was home.





Interlude: Earth


Miss Chun's eyes were slightly crossed while she took the data dump. They focused again. "I see what you mean, sir," she said. "I'd expected that the psychological casualties would have been reported."

She shook her head in amazement that formal reports had been faked. Real information on C41 had to be extracted from second-order effects.

"The entire strike company engaged on the ground has redlined," Miss Chun continued. "We may be able to return some of the personnel to combat duties in the future, but frankly I don't regard that as more than a .3 probability."

"Acceptable parameters for strike force personnel are looser than regulations might suggest," I said. "Sergeant Third Class Guilio Abbado has been broken to Basic twice already in the past six years for conduct like this most recent incident. Broken to Striker, I should say, since he's remained in the Strike Force throughout the period."

"Then you believe these personnel are still functional, sir?" Miss Chun said. She spoke in a perfectly flat voice. If there had been any tone coloring the words, the question would have become an insult.