Redliners(7)

"Charlie Four-One, Negative," the voice said. Farrell wondered if it was an AI program speaking. No, a computerized voice would have more feeling. This was a human officer who wasn't going to let emotional loading get in the way of precise communication. "If possible, withdraw your unit to a site out of Kalendru observation and await pickup. Primrose out."

Out was the operative word. C41 was shit out of luck.



One of the strikers who entered the barracks behind Caius Blohm had clamped a line to the sash for them to leave by. It was about the only useful thing anybody in 1-1 had accomplished during the operation.

Blohm rappelled down the side of the building. First in, last out. The grenade launcher slapped against his breastplate each time he braked with his gloved palms. The weapon was heavy. He'd locked in a fresh magazine to replace the one from which he'd fired three rounds.

His boots hit the ground. The ship that brought C41 was a shattered wreck, the upper half molten. Another missile hit the derelict, lifting a mighty fireball. The Spooks used chemical explosives. The general level of noise was so high that the blast didn't sound particularly loud.

Blohm glanced up the way he'd come. Flames wavered sluggishly from several of the third-floor windows. The fuel-air bombs had ignited fabrics, paper, splintered furniture. Spooks didn't have hair to burn, not really, but the explosions had charred the victims' flesh deeply.

There'd been a lot of them on the top floor of the barracks. Over a hundred, Blohm figured, judging from the one room he'd taken a good look into after Gabrilovitch shouted at him.

Kalendru females were shorter and even slimmer than the males, and they were never members of the fighting forces. Some of the burned corpses were females but most were children. Maybe dependents, maybe overflow from civilian facilities on the south side of the field. Certainly not combatants. But certainly dead.

And very certainly killed by Caius Blohm. He'd completed the job before anybody else arrived. Nothing wrong with his reflexes, no sir.

He ran past the shattered transient compound, following Gabrilovitch. A Spook missile hit twenty yards away and blew a hole in bare concrete. Again a red fireball pulsed upward through sooty black smoke. The air zinged, but none of the fragments hit Blohm.

If a missile went off at his feet, it might burn his shattered body as black as that of the Spook child on the threshold of the room Blohm had looked into.



The good news was that the hangar door ruptured when the truck hit it. Stiffeners sang like guitar strings, parting the welds that anchored them to the edges of the track.

Horgen skidded all eight wheels as she braked. There was nothing to hit in the left bay except bodies and whatever gear the Spook repair staff had dropped when the strikers drove into them shooting.

Abbado's visor reacted automatically to the lower light levels within the structure. He pointed his stinger toward a group of Spooks trying to get behind a large toolcart and held the trigger down. The fishtailing truck ripped the stream of pellets across the Spooks and they all dropped.

The bad news was that a Kalendru corvette filled the hangar's central bay.

This was a land-force logistics base, not a fleet repair facility. There weren't supposed to be naval vessels present, not even relatively small ones with their Tokomak powerplant lifted half out of the cylindrical hull on a gantry. Spooks swarmed up the ramped hatchway. Mostly they were maintenance staffers clothed in motley blues and grays, but a few were mauve-uniformed naval personnel.

An officer with a tuft of black feathers on either epaulet fired a laser pistol at Abbado. The Spook blew two divots from the truck's door before Abbado killed him. Glasebrook leaned through the shattered windshield and fired a rocket into the corvette's airlock, shredding the officer's body and a half dozen other Kalendru. Horgen had dived from the truck, so the backblast didn't fry her.

The hatch rotated closed. The edge mated solidly with the coaming despite the fact that a Spook's arm lay across it.

Abbado jumped. There'd been nearly a hundred Spooks in the hangar when the heavily-armed strikers entered. Now, seconds later, the only Kalendru still visible and moving were those who thrashed in their death throes.

Some Spooks hid beyond the corvette or behind pieces of equipment, but they weren't an immediate concern. The ones still alive aboard the vessel were a real threat.

The corvette's armory probably held enough small arms to outgun all the strikers in C41, but even that was a secondary danger. If the crew got the ship's main battery in operation, it was Katy bar the door for the whole operation.

"Fire control!" Abbado said. The code phrase keyed his words to Lieutenant Whichard of Heavy Weapons Platoon. "Give me a rocket soonest, mark!"