Netlink (23 page)

But then, if she and Lechenko found themselves in a fire-fight, they would be dead if it lasted more than a few seconds or a few rounds anyway.

Japanese security men emerged from the doorway just as Vasily and Kara approached it, clinging to the guide line.
“Ugoku na!”
the one in the lead yelled. “Don’t move! Both of you! Don’t move!”

“Dare-ni mukatte mono itten-dayo!”
Lechenko barked. A rough translation would have been something like, “Who do you think you’re talking to?” but it was rude in its bluntness, and his sheer bulk carried undeniable threat. The guards stopped, bewildered—but then the one in the lead raised the ugly little hand laser he held in his right hand, his expression shifting from confusion to one of stubborn determination.

Lechenko’s dart gun had been concealed in his hand. He fired it before the other could aim his weapon, the round giving a soft
chuff
as it emerged from the gun’s stubby barrel, then making a sound like crisply tearing cloth as it streaked toward the surprised-looking guard and impacted squarely in the center of his chest, exploding in a messy spray of blood and hurtling tissue. The man screamed; the impact, high on his chest, was hard enough to send him tumbling backward to collide head-on with his partner.

Lechenko fired a second time before the two men, one living and surprised, the other now very dead, could disentangle themselves. Blood misted in the air around them as the round hissed home, and the other guard’s head split in a gory splatter of blood, bone, and grey matter.

“Come on!” Lechenko called, pushing off from one of the hand lines stanchions and gliding toward the room’s exit.

Kara was still feeling unsteady, both physically and mentally. It was always tough readjusting to the real world after a deep involvement with a simulation, and her emergence from the Aresynch Net had been a lot more sudden than she would have preferred. Too, Kara had never been in a point-blank firefight in zero-G before, even in simulation, and the bloody display jolted her, threatening to overload senses already close to shutdown from sheer psychological shock. Her warrior’s training in microgravity had stressed the need for maneuver in three dimensions in a zero-G hand-to-hand, but she’d had no idea that such a fight could be so damned
bloody.

Somehow, though, she kept up with Lechenko as the two of them hauled their way along the travel line, moving handover-hand as quickly as they could back toward the access hub of their hotel.

They had two possible options now. One was to try to get the whole team back aboard a different passenger liner, one of several outbound ships that would carry them to worlds where they could make the passage, possibly with different faces, back into Confederation space. The other, riskier in its implications, but perhaps safest in the long run, was to actually remain at Aresynch for a week or two, blending in with the other civilians, going about carefully prepared ordinary business, until the excitement generated by the assault at Noctis Labyrinthus had died down.

Together, they emerged from a transit tunnel, entering a spherical, microgravity lounge area with numerous exits to other parts of the station. This was where they were supposed to meet the others. Several civilians were there, crossing from one tunnel to another or floating in front of the immense viewall that dominated one bulkhead, the screen displaying a vertiginous view straight down the brightly lit sky-el into the Martian night. Had they heard something about the battle being fought down there already?

The tunnel to the Sorano Hoteru, marked by a large, holographic sign, was just ahead.

“Tomare!”
a uniformed security guard cried. “Halt!”

It was too late to duck back down the tunnel; Lechenko had already emerged into the open, and Kara was clinging to the travel line just outside the tunnel’s mouth. Word about their escape from the comm module room was clearly out. Probably one of those guards had been linked into Central Security when he’d died, and their images had been captured and relayed.

Two guards confronted them from just ahead, lasers drawn. Two more emerged from a side passageway, wearing light armor and communications helmets. Lechenko and one of the guards ahead fired almost simultaneously, the soldier’s laser slashing into the New American’s stomach at the same time as a nageyari rocket made its ripping-cloth sound and streaked toward its target. Lechenko screamed and clutched at his belly; Kara smelled burned flesh and hair mingled with the coppery odor of blood and the stink of feces. Kara fired an instant later, hitting a second guard in the throat with her rocket… and suddenly jittering globules of scarlet blood were drifting everywhere, exploding in crimson cascades when they hit an obstacle.

Civilians screamed and scattered. Two more soldiers closed in on Kara from high and to her right; a laser fired, burning close enough that she felt her hair just beneath the beam scorching and curling. She spun and fired… but the rocket went wild and her instinctive duck-and-twist threw her into a tumble. Another laser fired, aimed at her but striking one of the slow-spinning bodies nearby instead, loosing more scattering drops of blood. Lechenko was still screaming, his body curled into a fetal tuck, his arms folded across his stomach as he spun over and over well beyond Kara’s reach.

Kara extended her legs and arms as far as she could to slow her spin, then deliberately swung them against one of the floating bodies. The collision absorbed a lot of her rotational momentum, steadying her, though it also set the body tumbling away, robbing her of cover. She was ready with her weapon, though, as the corpse drifted clear. Another guard was in mid-flight, sailing toward her just meters away when she pulled the trigger. The rocket streaked into his face and exploded, slowing but not stopping his rush.

Then suddenly Daniels, Dolan, and Pritchard were there, emerging from another tunnel, rocket pistols in hand. A trio of white contrails scratched their way through the air, killing the last two security guards.

“Lieutenant!” Pritchard yelled. “Are you okay?”

“Okay!” she shouted back. Her rebound from the corpse had sent her drifting into a bulkhead. She collapsed against its surface, then gathered her legs beneath her and pushed off, sailing toward Lechenko. “Lech!” she called. He was no longer screaming, no longer moving at all save for a slow, continuing somersault as he drifted away from the scene of the battle.

He was dead by the time she reached him.

Chapter 15

That’s the way it is in war. You win or lose, live or die
—
and the difference is just an eyelash.

—G
ENERAL
OF
THE
A
RMY
D
OUGLAS
M
ACARTHUR

mid-twentieth century
C
.
E
.

Sergeant Willis Daniels gently pulled her away. “We’d better get out of here, Lieutenant.”

“Of course.” She felt numb. Lechenko had been one of the toughest, most experienced men in her squadron.
Why did he have to die?
She rubbed her ears; it was almost as though she could still hear that final, bubbling scream, a horrible sound she feared she would never be rid of.

Kara knew death; she couldn’t have served with the Phantoms for as long as she had without losing friends and comrades. But never had the encounter been like this, close and personal and screaming. She felt sick.…

“Lieutenant,
please!”

“We can’t just leave him.…”

“We can and we will,” Warflyer Pritchard said. She shook her head. “We
can’t
drag him along.…”

Daniels tugged at her shoulder. “Come on, Lieutenant Hagan! What would we do with him? Smuggle him out with our luggage?” When she hesitated, he added, “Gok it, L-T! Lieutenant Ferris told us he wanted us looking out for you! If you don’t come, he’s gonna have our heads on a platter!”

Reality reasserted itself, as cold as zero absolute. “Okay. Let’s go.”

The lounge area was deserted now, the civilians all fled to other areas. The four of them managed to get to the hotel’s hub, where Kara hid herself and her bloodstained coveralls in the stall of a public lavatory while Phil Dolan picked up a clean set of coveralls and a can of skinsuit spray from her room. Ten minutes later, presentable once more, she followed the others out to the spin gravity module, joining them in the room being rented by Daniels and Pritchard.

“Okay, Lieutenant,” Sergeant Daniels said. “Which way out are we taking? Long wait or short?”

“The short, I think,” she told them. She didn’t want to explain her reasoning. She just knew that, with Lech dead, she had to get
out,
get away from Aresynch, and the thought of staying here another week or two was too much to bear. “If we hurry, we might make it aboard one of the docked liners around the curve before they get around to sealing this section off.”

“I agree,” Daniels said. His persona as a Japanese businessman had given him a dark, blunt face with a long mustache, which lent him a somewhat sinister air. “I’m still worried that they might decide to start screening everyone in Aresynch for Companions.”

“Aw, they wouldn’t try that, would they, Sarge?” Phil Dolan asked.

“You kidding? Right now, they must be so goking mad the only thing to stop ’em from searching every person aboard this orbital is the fact they’re still under attack. Once our boys on the surface get clear, well, they could be desperate enough to try it. Or something just as bad.”

“Then let’s stop talking about it and odie,” Kara said, using the military slang term that meant to leave in a hurry.

They managed to leave the hotel without incident. They didn’t bother checking out, since they assumed that sooner or later, the TJK would piece together which of the hotel’s guests had been involved and would initiate arrest proceedings. Instead, they adopted new bodies, fall-back personalities prepared by the CMI’s Earth-based contingent. Dolan, Pritchard, and Daniels would be, again, traveling as Japanese businessmen; Kara, much to her disgust, was a ningyo, a sex-doll genie, wearing little but a jeweled collar and a flamboyantly revealing scarlet skinsuit. Following Daniels around at a respectful two-paces’ remove, she would be noticed—the skin-suit was designed to make certain of that—but it was unlikely that anyone would suspect that she was a Confederation agent. Ningyos, after all, were not expected to think, and in an illogical twist of commutative psychology, most people had difficulty imagining a full-human pretending to be one.

Kara didn’t like playing that role. It was demeaning; it was obscene; it might even make trouble for them if some overly libidinous Imperial on their liner decided to try to buy her from Daniels and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Still, it was necessary if they were to carry this off. The watchdog who’d wrestled with her in the Net almost certainly had been able to identify her as a woman, and the guards who’d tried to capture them afterward had probably uploaded full descriptions and images before they’d died. There were millions of civilians at Aresynch, and tens of thousands arrived or departed aboard commercial vessels each day, but, with the Nihonjin culture’s attitudes toward women, only a relatively small percentage of all of those travelers were female. It would be easier for the Imperials to stop and question all women aboard each outbound liner than it would be to question everybody. An identity as a ningyo guaranteed her a measure of invisibility, even when her outward appearance was anything
but
invisible.

Wearing their new identities, then, they slipped out of the hotel and boarded a ringskimmer for Aresynch’s second major civilian starport, nearly a thousand kilometers ahead of the sky-el in the synchorbital slot. The name of their liner—smaller and less luxuriously appointed than the Gold Star
Teikoku
—was
Seiku.

The name, Kara noted, was a bit of Nihongo poetry meaning “Clear Sky.” She hoped that that was an omen.

The nano QEC was failing fast, making gausslev floating an intermittent proposition. No matter. Ferris extended his warstrider’s legs and took to the ground again, stilting back across the ridge toward the grounded ascraft. The assault force was nearly reembarked and ready to go. The marines and civilian techs had been first aboard, carrying with them the mysterious package they’d looted from the main MilTech Labs building.

Now the warstriders were falling back, moving two by two as the defensive perimeter closed up. Local resistance was nonexistent, but enemy forces had been detected circling at the very edge of Sandman’s operational scanner area. Skymaster was off-line up in Aresynch now, and there would be no more timely laser bolts out of space.

Timing on this one was absolutely critical. The assault force would need help getting off Kasei and more help still getting clear of the Solar System. The ascraft was strictly for transport duty between orbit and surface and was not equipped for excursions through K-T space. Their ride, their ticket home to New America, would be waiting for them upstairs… if—a very big if—they could get clear on their own down here.

The clock was running, and time was trickling away now. A thump sounded from the north, deep and reverberating, and fresh smoke, illuminated by greasy yellow light, boiled into the sky. The warstriders were being reloaded aboard the ascraft, but the fighters and the surviving transport were being deliberately destroyed. It would take longer to fold them up and pack them back aboard the Artemis lander than the assault force could spare.

“Okay, Third Squadron,” Sandman’s voice said. “Let’s odie!”

Ferris did a quick check of his tactical screen, verifying that all thirteen of his people who’d survived the battle were still with him. He felt sad about Brewster. There would be time to toast him and share some remember-whens with the whole squadron later, when they were safely in K-T space and on the way back to New America. Altogether, the three squadrons had lost five striderjacks; ten marines had bought it as well, and eight Confederation Navy personnel had died aboard the
San Jacinto.