Extremis (45 page)

Which burst open, revealing two rows of flickering muzzle flashes that sent a deafening wave of explosive, chattering gunfire breaking over and through him.

* * *

“Cease fire,” called McGee.

The two Marine fire teams—one standing, one kneeling—lowered their weapons slightly.

“Deploy.”

At that command, the two teams sped out into the second tier of the library, moving at a half crouch, weapons held up close to their cheeks, pace steady as they checked the flanks and then the path to the snoop room using a hurried leap-frog advance.

“Clear.” Wismer’s voice, from the point position of the lead team, was as certain as it was calm.

“Hold your positions. Cover us in and out of this level, Jon.”

“Roger that. Whenever you’re ready, Tank.”

McGee waved for the other eight Marines to follow him, and he sprinted to the concealed door of the snoop room, hustling the two rescued artists along with them.

Breathless, the thickset woman knocked on the door. Nothing. She knocked again, waited, then spoke loudly. “Matilda, get your fat, quivering ass over here and open this door. The Marines are breaking us out of this dump.”

Unless Matilda was, in fact, a gaunt, hairless man who stood as tall as McGee, it was someone else who opened the door. “Marines!” he exclaimed, as if he hadn’t believed his own eyes—or what he’d been told.

“Yes, sir,” confirmed McGee as he pushed past and into the room. Six translators—and two Baldies. McGee snapped his weapon up to his shoulder—just as the Baldies lay down, limbs spread out, clusters open and empty.
Well, hell.

“They don’t mean any harm,” supplied a rather dumpy woman with a head of wild, flowing blond hair.

“The hell they don’t,” muttered Matto.

“Well, right now,” said the gaunt, depilated man, “they seem more worried about their own kind.”

That seems true enough.
“Everyone up.”

Danilenko shouldered into the doorway. “The Baldies, too?”

“No. They stay here.”

“Permanently?” asked Danilenko, hefting his rifle and preparing to enter.

Ready to do the job yourself, eh, Igor?
“No. We secure them and leave them.”

“Alive? They seem to be able to—well, to signal each other. If so, then that leaves us in grave danger.”

“Yes, Igor. But unless I’m wrong, they’ve probably been signaling for quite some time—before we arrived, in fact. So they’re not going to be bringing down any more heat than what they’ve already called in.”

At which moment, the command circuit toned: Simonson, at the front door.
Well, speaking of heat coming in
—“Mei, sitrep.”

“We’ve got company, Tank. A defense sled.”

“What? Haven’t any of the ready defense blisters tried rushing the building on their fans?”

“Nope. Never a sign of them.”

Well, that didn’t make any sense—unless the Baldy assassins had been aided and abetted by a little treasonous sabotage of the local defense units. If that’s what had happened, then someone in the Baldy security organization might have forced the local weapon blisters to stand down. Or maybe some sympathetic officer had sent the blister operators off on the Baldy equivalent of an extended coffee break. Either way, the weirdness the Marines had encountered during their attack thus far had just become more weird, more unpredictable, and therefore, definitely more dangerous. But for now, all McGee needed was few more minutes to exfil. “Mei, are you telling me the Baldies have sent only
one
sled?”

“Affirmative, and this bunch looks more like they are from an Enforcer group, not a Security unit. Either way, they seem pretty unsure what to do next.”

“Have any of the Baldies dismounted?”

“Yeah—and now it looks like they’re trying to get manual control over two of their own vehicles’ defense blisters—neither of which seems to be responding.”

“How many Baldies have come outside the sled?

“I’d say all of them—except the driver. And maybe a weapons/sensor operator.”

“You’ve got a good angle on the Baldies outside the hull?”

“Straight and unobstructed.”

“Then burn ’em.”

* * *

Mei Simonson looked out around the side of what had once been the security desk in the lobby of the Psych Annex. The Baldies were still milling around near their sled, trying some kind of direct override on the two portside defense blisters. If they suspected that any humans were watching them from inside the lobby, they gave no sign of it.

Well, that makes my job a lot easier
, thought Mei as she removed the HEAT rocket grenade from her rifle’s under-muzzle launch ramp. She replaced it with a high-explosive fragmentation grenade. “Okay, Bart,” she whispered over the team channel to Chakrabarti, “Let’s light ’em up. On three. One, two, three—”

The two grenades jumped off the two Marine carbines. Then their rockets kicked in, and they rushed out the shattered glass expanse to explode in the midst of the Baldy Enforcers. Several were blown—quite literally—to bloody bits. The others toppled, missing pieces. None moved or made a sound.

A fraction of a second later, the sled seemed to flinch back a few meters. Then it lifted on its thrusters and circled up and away. Simonson watched it go as she put the HEAT grenade back on her weapon’s launch rail, and thought,
Well, son of a bitch.

* * *

Visible beyond what looked like two treatment bays in a hospital emergency room was the massive door of the hyperbaric chamber. The chamber itself looked like a pint-sized version of the radiation-hardened habmods that Sandro used to shelter in when Bellerophon’s flares interrupted his off-world mining stints. At last, safety—

But then Ankaht spun in mid-stride, guiding Jennifer past her with one cluster and raising the other—

Just in time to lock
skeerbas
with a Death-Vowed who had noiselessly drawn so close in his pursuit of Jennifer that he had been able to strike at her. Over her shoulder, Jennifer saw that the strike was an awkward one—overextended—and as the two Arduans broke apart, little Ankaht managed to get a claw strike into the vicinity of the attacker’s groin. He stumbled back; Ankaht sprinted the other direction, trying to catch up to Jennifer.

Who, in reaching the hyperbaric chamber, found it closed. The heavy handle resisted her tugging: she didn’t have enough leverage with one hand. Put down Zander? Was there time? She turned to check—

—just in time to see all three of the black-garbed
Destoshaz
swarm around Ankaht, who stood, broad-legged, at the last choke point in the corridor. Once they pushed Ankaht back from that position, Jennifer could see that the Death-Vowed would be able to reach both herself and Zander.

As she put Zander down, Jennifer caught another glimpse of the furious melee taking place only a few meters away from her. Strike, block, counterstrike, bits of flesh flying free—some of it Ankaht’s—as the assassins fought with utter disregard for their own safety. However, what made them most unnerving was their utter silence. Because, Jennifer realized—even as she cinched both hands around the lever that opened the hyperbaric chamber—when such boundless ferocity was also perversely calm, it suggested a governing intellect so monstrously alien that no human could ever hope, or want, to fathom it.

Jennifer got the door open and spun back to sweep Zander into her arms—but saw that the combat had entered its final second. Ankaht, bleeding from at least three significant wounds, had finally taken down the Death-Vowed she had wounded at the beginning of the fight. But, exhausted now, she had not managed to withdraw her
skeerba
in time: as her opponent slumped over, she was tugged sideways, and then had to release her weapon. The last two—one of them an uncommonly tall and bright
Destoshaz
—reared up, arms back to deliver bone-severing death blows—

—when, behind and to the side of the large one, she saw the small, fine figure of Harry Li wearing a wetsuit, shiny where it was still damp. Single shots spatted archly: 6 mm rounds went through both of the assassins’ torsos. The first exit holes that Jennifer saw were small, crisp: pass-throughs by discarding sabot rounds. But the next bullets fairly erupted as they cut through the Arduan bodies, blasting out craters that spewed blood and chunks of flesh and bone.

The
Destoshaz
fell. Harry and the two Marines with him advanced at the ready, weapons still leveled—

—at Ankaht.

“
No!”
shrieked Jennifer, who jumped up from her crouch next to Zander and landed beside Ankaht.

“Jen—” Harry’s eye was down along the barrel.

Jen moved so that her midriff was between Harry’s unblinking brown eye and Ankaht’s spent, bleeding body. “No.” Jennifer’s voice was sharp, ragged, even brutal in its insistence.

Harry looked up, stared at her, then looked at his two men. Who—smiling smiles that were anything but smiles—began to move around and to either side of Jennifer. Harry kept his eyes on her, but his focus flicked away for an instant, evidently noting that Ankaht was finally rising to her feet. “What’s wrong with you, Jen?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me. She—Ankaht—is our friend.”

“That’s crazy talk, Jen. And I don’t think Sandro will want to hear it.”

“Sandro? He’s here?” She felt tears well up and a sob surged out of her gut. “He’s here?”

“Sure he is. He’s right back there.” And Harry turned to look behind. She craned her neck to stare over his shoulder—and realized her mistake at the same moment she hated her gullibility. The Marine to her right side made a grab in her direction, the one on the left brought up his weapon to bear on Ankaht—who had chosen the moment of confused motion to leap backward into the hyperbaric chamber, out of his field of fire.

But she was still well within Harry’s, who had stepped forward, sighting along his barrel, and was directly in front of Jennifer—

Who pitched backward against the Marine clutching her arms, shrieking “My baby!” The sudden shift of focus, and the desperate cry, froze the three Marines for a fraction of a second: obeying a prosocial male impulse as old as humanity itself, their lethal intent was momentarily overridden by an impulse to shield the child against some unseen threat.

A threat which was not there. Jennifer, still struggling backward, pitched sharply forward; the sudden reversal of momentum caught the Marine by surprise, carried him over with Jennifer. They half fell, half stumbled into Li, knocking his carbine aside.

“RUN!” Jennifer both shouted and signaled at Ankaht—who quickly reached over to grab the door’s handle. Harry untangled his carbine from Jennifer’s desperate grasp, leveled it, and fired—just as Ankaht slammed the door. The DS round cut a deep gouge in it, but failed to penetrate. Ankaht had not stopped moving: she leapt out the other side of the chamber; she was now in the Post-Abaria Recovery Center. Harry bounded after her, stretching for the door he had just dinged—as Ankaht slammed the far side door shut.

Harry had his hand on the near-side handle—just as Ankaht smacked the control panel on her side: lights flashed, alarms sounded—and the emergency-depressurization indicator illuminated.

Even as Harry was trying to yank open the door on his side, he heard a fateful clank: activated, the chamber had autolocked—and could only be overridden by a manually entered command code. A command code which he did not know.

Through the tiny windows centered in the chamber’s two hatchlike doors, they could see Ankaht already fleeing down the corridor in the other Recovery Center.

Harry rounded on Jennifer. “Open it. Now.” Zander—never having heard such a sharp and threatening tone—promptly wailed.

Jennifer looked up at Harry from the ground. “I can’t.”

“You mean you won’t.”

“I mean I
can’t
, Harry. I don’t have the code. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. You won’t catch her. It takes thirty seconds for the chamber to complete a full cycle, and the door won’t open before then. She’s gone.”

“And you helped her get away.”

“She’s our only hope for peace.”

“She’s a damned Baldy.”

“Yes—and she’s my friend.”

* * *

McGee checked his watch: Harry was a minute overdue. He looked at the rest of his team, clustered in the Marine Species Behavioral lab, down on the basement level. The artists they’d retrieved—eight in all—were being given simple instructions on how to use the essential escape gear. All but two of them—Mr. Gaunt and Ms. Thickset—alternated between looking bewildered and petrified. Back near the empty holding tank, Kapinski and Battisti were affixing puttylike demo charges around the circumference of a large hatch.

Damn it, Li. A minute and a half overdue? Gotta risk the com-link.
“Harry—”

Who interrupted as if he’d been waiting. “Coming. And I’ve got Jennifer. We’re half a minute out, at most.”

Somehow, McGee gave the necessary orders even as his brain refused to think about anything other than the image of Jennifer and her blue bundle. To his own ears, his voice sounded miles away as he rapped out, “Final test on the gear, and then equip it. Everyone in exit sequence. Sea-scooters ready. Kapinski, I need that sedative and the child-sized evac ball.” He toggled the command circuit over to—“Simonson?”

Static.

Damn it.
“Simonson?”

A new channel opened. “Chakrabarti here, Sarge. Mei is—she’s KIA, Tank.”

McGee thought he might throw up. “You okay?”

“Yeah, but not for long. About a minute ago, the local blisters came back online. All at once. Six of them rushed us. We were ready, blew ’em all down—but there were so damn many, shooting so damned fast, and so damned much ordnance—”

“You did Bravo Zulu, Chakra. And Mei, too. Can you hold on for another thirty seconds?”

“Hell, I might manage forty. They’re quiet right now.”

“Good. Sit tight, get the smokes out to cover your fallback on the exfil point.”

“Got ’em lined up like apples ripening on the sill, Sarge.”

“Good man. Hold on.”

Harry came through the door. And Jennifer was with him. McGee felt a rush of both elation and vertigo and his vision tunneled down so that all he could see was her face.
One second,
thought McGee.
One second can’t hurt anyone
. He reached out, grabbed and hugged Jennifer so hard he thought he might break her. But he didn’t—and she had rotated the baby to the side of her body: although whimpering a moment before, the infant grew suddenly and strangely quiet. McGee looked up to thank Harry—but saw that Light Horse and his fire team were wearing long faces and dark looks. “Harry? What’s wrong?”