Steel Gauntlet (36 page)

“Madam Ambassador.” He bowed and gracefully brushed his lips over the back of her hand.

“Brigadier,” she drawled, dragging the title out into three long syllables, looking down her nose at the Marine. “It seems,” she drew the word out into two syllables, “I shall be spending some time in the com-pah-nee of your Marines.” Her lips curled in a brief smile. Popinjay; size thirty-two waist, size five hat, she thought, and then: Still, he really looks splendid in that uniform. He did, bloodred tunic over gold trousers, his decorations splashed over his left chest; on each side of his tunic stock collar shone the bright rampant-eagle emblem of the Confederation Marine Corps. The brigadier introduced the other Marines. When he came to Bass, and he stepped forward to take J. Wellington-Humphreys’s proffered hand, she wrinkled her nose as an expression of annoyance came over her face. Bass had smoked a cigar just before leaving that evening, and the fabric of his uniform was still redolent with—to him, anyway—its fragrance.

“I’m very pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Bass said, his voice just a little too loud.

“You are the one,” she whispered involuntarily.

“Ma’am?” Bass asked.

The Ambassador shook her head. “Nothing,” she said, catching herself.

When she arrived on Diamunde she had reviewed the files of the men picked to accompany her.

She’d glanced, half amused, at the files for Vanden Hoyt, Dean, and MacIlargie; earnest, sincere-looking young men, inexperienced in everything important, good only for military or police details. But she lingered over Bass’s file. She hardly noticed the citations for bravery, which were mostly meaningless to her. But what stuck with her was the fact that when on a peacekeeping mission on a place called Elneal, he had killed a formidable warrior chieftain in a knife fight. “Nobody fights with a knife anymore!” she had exclaimed aloud. That fact both excited and repelled her. And now that knife-fighting throwback was standing there, eagerly expecting her to give him her hand.

She glanced at the resplendent uniform tunic covering the expanse of his chest. Under that tunic was a man of considerable physical power, a man like her, used to getting, within certain limits of course, his way every time.

Bass took the Ambassador’s hand awkwardly and self-consciously gave it a brief shake before letting go. His hand was warm, she noted, but callused. So this is the hand that drove the knife home, she thought as Bass passed on through the reception line.

Her greeting of the other Marines in her escort was perfunctory, and they continued on through the line feeling very much that they had been summarily dismissed from the royal woman’s august presence.

The Marines passed into the huge reception room where drinks and hors d’oeuvres were being served. Waiters flitted everywhere, hoisting silver platters heaped with tidbits or stacked with drinks.

Bass snatched a long-stemmed glass of some effervescent wine and gulped it down.

“Charlie, you’re supposed to sip that stuff, not chug it down,” Captain Conorado cautioned the platoon sergeant.

“Aw, I’m dry as the Martac Waste, Skipper,” Bass explained, grabbing at another glass.

“Well, that’s Katzenwasser ’thirty-six, Charlie,” the captain said, slowly savoring his wine, “a vintage imported champagne.”

“Imported from where?” Bass asked, making a face as he sipped it.

“Wanderjahr, Charlie.”

“Jesu!” Bass exclaimed loudly, and several heads turned in his direction. “I should’ve known it. No wonder they’re so fucked up back there. This stuff tastes like a liquid fart!” Again Conorado and the brigadier exchanged nervous glances. Then the brigadier laughed. You tell

‘em, Charlie! he thought. If he’d had his way, this war would be over now, St. Cyr dead or in prison, his forces smashed, no need for all the diplomatic playacting, all this bowing and scraping and

“madam-may-I-introduce” crap. But the Confederation had ordered a negotiated settlement. Anger welled up again in the brigadier’s breast. Half the Confederation Council was in St. Cyr’s pocket; no wonder they voted to spare the bastard. All those good men dead, and for what? Worst of all, every man in the 34th FIST knew what was going on. Gunny Bass was only saying what he himself was thinking.

Dinner, served after Charlie Bass had consumed eight more glasses of Wanderjahr Katzenwasser ’36

than were good for him, started as a minor disaster and went downhill quickly thereafter. The Marines were seated opposite and a few places down the table from Ambassador J. Wellington-Humphreys.

Sitting directly opposite Bass was none other than Professor Jere Benjamin, whom Bass had seen around headquarters and knew by reputation. In a too-loud voice he began a conversation with the academic about the operation of the Straight Arrow antitank rocket.

When the sautéed tenderloin tidbits in creamy Bernaise sauce were served, Bass looked down at his plate in alarm and said, in a voice loud enough that J. Wellington-Humphreys heard him clearly, “Jesus Muhammad, Skipper, looks like some bastard blew his nose on this shit!” The croissants had been served, Vanden Hoyt was enjoying his enormously and Bass was working on still another glass of Katzenwasser ’36, when the lights suddenly went out. At first there was shocked silence in the dining hall as the 150 guests contemplated sitting in the pitch-darkness, then a few nervous laughs and someone shouted, “Who didn’t pay the light bill this month?” followed by more laughter.

Vanden Hoyt leaped from his seat onto the table, scattering food and tableware as he went, and jumped down between Ambassador Wellington-Humphreys and Degs Momyer. He put his arms around the startled woman and dragged her away from the table before she could even scream. “Dean! Mac! To me! To me!” he shouted. The two enlisted men, orienting themselves on the sound of Vanden Hoyt’s voice, followed their officer noisily across the table top. Vanden Hoyt whispered into Wellington-Humphreys’s ear, “Don’t make a sound, Madame! This is a kidnapping attempt. We’re going to get you out of here.” Vanden Hoyt silently prayed that he was right, otherwise he’d probably be spending the rest of his career counting rations on a supply ship.

A few other people around the huge table had produced glowballs and there was now a dim light in the hall, just enough illumination to see the outlines of people’s figures.

“Remember how to get out of here?” Vanden Hoyt asked the two enlisted men.

“Sure,” MacIlargie said.

“Then you and Dean run interference for me, because we’re getting this lady the hell out of here.”

“Just a moment,” Degs Momyer said, laying a restraining hand on Vanden Hoyt’s shoulder. Vanden Hoyt threw a punch in the direction of Momyer’s voice. His fist connected solidly and sent Momyer thudding to the floor, incidentally saving the Minister of Finance’s life. At that very moment, the wall a few meters down from where they were standing suddenly blew inward with a brilliant flash. Someone had detonated an implosion device, so the tremendous force of the blast was not accompanied by much noise, which left the survivors able to hear. Debris followed by a terrific blast wave swept into the hall, tossing body parts across the table and into the people sitting on the opposite side. Armed men dressed in black charged through the gaping hole the blast had left, coming straight at the Ambassador’s little group, firing blasters up and down the table as they went.

Bass lay in the debris underneath the table. He felt around and armed himself with the only weapon he could find, a metal serving tray still smeared with a sweet chocolatey substance. He skittered out from under the table and began swinging.

Dragging and pushing the Ambassador, Vanden Hoyt and the two enlisted men ran through the semidarkness of the dining hall. Hell reigned behind them as the attackers, evidently frustrated when they found the ambassador’s position at the table empty and unable to spot her in the pandemonium, began firing aimlessly into the crowd. Plasma bolts cracked and hissed throughout the great hall. Dignitaries, reduced to terrorized animals, trampled one another in an effort to escape the blaster bolts.

MacIlargie led them into a corridor off the main hall. It was pitch-dark. Cautiously they felt their way along the walls. “What’s going on?” Wellington-Humphreys asked.

“St. Cyr’s attempting to kidnap you, ma’am,” Vanden Hoyt answered. “Looks like they knew just where you’d be sitting and came through the wall to get you. They set the charge far enough down the outside of the building so it wouldn’t kill you when it went off.” He stopped to get his breath.

“Who the hell are you?” Vanden Hoyt asked suddenly as a figure came sliding into the corridor.

“Benjamin,” the figure wheezed.

“The professor?” Vanden Hoyt exclaimed.

“Yes. I just followed you. I figured you knew how to get out of here.”

“Okay, Professor. Just stay calm and follow us.” They walked cautiously down the corridor.

“Door,” Dean whispered ahead of them. He shoved it gently. “It’s locked or jammed, sir.” MacIlargie joined Dean and they put their shoulders to the door and pushed.

Vanden Hoyt added his own weight. “What the fuck?” he muttered, and then, “Oh, excuse me, ma’am.”

“Those were my sentiments exactly, Lieutenant Vanderman,” the Ambassador replied dryly.

“Ensign Vanden Hoyt, not Lieutenant, ma’am.”

“We could stay in here until help comes,” Wellington-Humphreys suggested.

Vanden Hoyt thought about that possibility for a moment. His mind was made up by a blaster bolt that caromed off the ceiling and slagged the marble behind them. “On three, we all hit the door as hard as we can,” he said. “One, two, three!” The Marines slammed into the door with all their weight. It shook but still held. “Again!” They assaulted the door a second time. It still held.

“Goddamnit!” MacIlargie shouted, braced himself on one leg and slammed the other into the door.

Cool night air engulfed them as the door came off the frame and hung by its hinges.

“Good thing you had me along, eh, Mr. Vee?” MacIlargie said. He held the broken door aside as he went through, and the others followed him down the steps into the darkness outside.

“Good thing this is one of those old-fashioned doors and not a pneumatic one,” Dean muttered as he followed the others.

Suddenly, brilliant light illuminated the quintet, freezing them on the stairway like feral animals caught in the hunter’s sights. Marston St. Cyr, surrounded by dozens of heavily armed men, stood smiling in the street outside, a tiny radio-tracking device held in one hand.

“ ‘Welcome to my lair,’ said the spider to the flies.” St. Cyr smirked.

CHAPTER 29

The foothills of the Chrystoberyl mountain range began their gentle rise from the Pryhrotite salt flats some thirty kilometers north of New Kimberly. Some of the peaks reached in excess of four thousand meters, and the residents of New Kimberly were treated to spectacular sunrises over their perpetually snow-capped tops every morning. But that mountain range was far more to the people of New Kimberly and Diamunde than a beautiful example of the planet’s ancient tectonic activity.

Generations of miners had made their living exploiting the mineral deposits that lay under the mountains, and Diamunde had become wealthy on the ores and gems they brought out of the rock down there. The range was honeycombed with shafts, chambers, and thousands of kilometers of tunnels. So extensive and so deep had the excavations gone over the centuries that no one really knew anymore where they all led. Once a vein or deposit was used up, it was sealed off and the miners moved on. Over the years, as companies went out of business or were absorbed in mergers, many site maps and plans were misplaced or deleted from databases, and when operations moved on from one sector to another, nobody spent the money or the time needed to go back and remap the excavated areas.

So the chambers, some of them hundreds of meters high, lay dark, silent and unknown, forever hidden from the sunlight. Rumors and legends grew up around the abandoned works: they were haunted by miners’ ghosts; strange creatures native to Diamunde and never seen by humans had taken up their abode down there. The rumors were handed down from one generation to the next, each embellishing the stories as they passed them on, and they had become so wild over time that eventually no one gave them any credence—while aboveground, that is.

But Diamundean miners never ventured far from their current operations; miners’ lives in the active excavations were dangerous enough without them taking risks wandering around in the abandoned diggings. To most of Diamunde’s hard-working people, the abandoned mines became places of mystery and potential danger, and no one cared to go into them anymore. Until Marston St. Cyr came along, that is.

Completely immobilized, unable even to speak, the hostages were aware only of constant motion that seemed now to have been going on for hours. Dean tried to calculate the passage of time and the direction in which they were being taken, but that proved impossible. In the first few minutes of their capture, just after they were injected with immobilizing drugs, he had thought they were being taken north. Now he had no idea where they were. The way the engine noise seemed to echo around him, it seemed most of the trip was in a tunnel.

And then the vehicle stopped and Dean lay in total darkness, listening. He heard men dismount, then loud metallic noises as doors slammed somewhere. All was quiet for a moment, and then it seemed the bottom of the world fell out from under him as he plunged rapidly downward. After a moment of panic, he assumed the vehicle had been loaded into a high-speed elevator of some kind. After what he judged was a good two minutes, it began to slow and then stopped. More doors clanged, and then he could hear men talking and walking very near where he lay. He was lifted into the air, and from the way the body pod in which he was encased moved, he knew he was being carried somewhere.

Wham! He was dropped on a solid surface. Wham! Someone else was dropped onto a solid surface.

Wham! Wham! Wham! The chamber in which they were being unloaded echoed loudly as each hostage’s pod was unceremoniously deposited on the floor.