Use of Weapons (46 page)

'No
thank you, sir. Would you come with us please?'

'Whassa
matter?' he said, sniffing, then draining his glass. He wiped his hands on the
lapels of his jacket. 'Captain need some help steering the ship, yeah?' he
laughed, slid off his bar stool, turned to the woman, took her hand and kissed
it. 'My dear lady; I bid you farewell, until we meet again.' He put both hands
to his chest. 'But always remember this; there is forever a piece of my heart
that belongs to you.'

She
smiled uncertainly. He laughed loudly, turned and bumped into the bar stool.
'Whoops!' he said.

'This
way, Mr Sherad,' the first one said. 'Yeah; yeah; just wherever.'

He'd
hoped they'd take him into the crew-only section, but when they got into the
small lift, they pressed for the lowest deck; stores, non-vacuum luggage, and
the brig.

'I
think I'm going to be sick,' he said, as soon as the doors closed. He bent
over, retched, forcing out the last few drinks.

One
jumped out of the way, to keep his shiny boots clean; the other, he sensed, was
bending down, putting one hand to his back.

He
stopped throwing up, slammed one elbow up into the man's nose; he crashed back
into the elevator's rear doors. The second man hadn't quite recovered his balance.
He straightened and punched him straight in the face. The second one folded,
knees then backside hammering into the floor. The lift chimed, stopped between
decks, its weight-limit alarm triggered by all the commotion. He thumped the
topmost button and the lift started up.

He
took the guns from the two unconscious officers; neural stunners. He shook his
head. The elevator chimed again. The floor they'd left. He stepped forward,
stuffing the two stun guns into his jacket as he braced his feet in the far
corners of the small space, straddling the two men, and pressed his hands
against the doors. He grunted with the effort of holding the doors closed, but
eventually the elevator gave up the struggle. Still holding the doors with both
hands, he twisted his body until he got his head to the topmost button, and
pressed it with his forehead. The lift hummed upwards again.

When
the doors opened, three people stood outside, on the private lounge level. They
looked at the two unconscious guards and the small watery pool of vomit. Then
he zapped them with the stun guns, and they fell. He pulled one of the officers
half out of the elevator so the lift couldn't close its doors, and used a stun
gun on both men too.

The
Starlight Lounge door was closed. He pressed the button, looking back down the
corridor, where the lift doors pulsed gently against the fallen officer's body
like some unsubtle lover. There was a distant chime, and a voice said, 'Please
clear the doors. Please clear the doors.'

'Yes?'
said the door to the Starlight Lounge.

'Stap;
it's Sherad. I changed my mind.'

'Excellent!'
The door opened.

He
went quickly inside, hit the shut button. The modest lounge was full of drug
smoke, low light, and mutilated people. Music played, and all eyes - not all of
them in their sockets - turned to him. The doctor's tall grey machine was over
near the bar, where a couple of people were serving.

He
got the doctor between him and the others, stuck the stun gun under the little
man's chin. 'Bad news, Stap. These things can be fatal at close range, and this
one's on maximum. I need your machine. I'd prefer to have your co-operation,
too, but I can get by without it. I'm
very
serious, and in a terrible hurry, so what's it to be?'

Stap
made a gurgling noise.

'Three,'
he said, pressing the stun gun a little harder into the little doctor's neck.
'Two,...'

'All
right! This way!'

He
let him go, following Stap across the floor to the tall machine he used for his
strange trade. He kept his hands together, stun pistols hidden up each sleeve;
he nodded to a few people as they passed. He spotted a clear line of fire to
somebody on the far side of the room, just for an instant. He zapped them;
they fell spectacularly onto a laden table. While everybody was looking there,
he and Stap - prodded once to keep going when the crash came from the distant
table - got to the machine.

'Excuse
me,' he said to one of the bar girls. 'Would you help the doctor?' He nodded
behind the bar. 'He wants to move the machine through there, don't you, Doc?'

They
entered the small store room behind the bar. He thanked the girl outside,
closed the door, locked it, and shifted a pile of containers in front of it. He
smiled at the alarmed-looking doctor.

'See
that wall behind you, Stap?'

The
doctor's gaze flicked that way.

'We're
going through it, Doc, with your machine.'

'You
can't! You...'

He
put the stun gun against the man's forehead. Stap closed his eyes. A corner of
handkerchief, protruding from a breast pocket, trembled.

'Stap;
I think I know how that machine must work to do what it does. I want a cutting
field; a slicer that'll take molecular bonds apart. If you won't do it, and
right now, I'll put you out and try it myself, and if I get it wrong and fuse
the fucker, you're going to have some very, very unhappy customers out there;
they might even do what you've done to them, but without the old machine here,
hmm?'

Stap
swallowed. 'Mm...' he began. One of his hands moved slowly towards his jacket.
'Mmm... mmm... my t-t-tool k-kit.'

He
took the wallet of tools out, turned shakily to the machine and opened a panel.

The
door behind them chimed. He found some sort of chromed bar utensil on a shelf,
moved the containers in front of the door aside - Stap looked round, but saw
the gun was still pointed at him, and turned back - and jammed the piece of
metal into the gap between the sliding door and its housing. The door gave an
outraged chirp, and a red light blinked urgently on the open/close button. He
slid the containers back again.

'Hurry
up, Stap,' he said.

'I'm
doing all I can!' the little doctor yelped. The machine made a deep buzzing
noise. Blue light played around a cylindrical section about a metre from the
floor.

He
looked at the section, eyes narrowing.

'What
are you hoping to do?' the doctor said, voice shaking.

'Just
keep working, Doc; you have half a minute before I try doing it myself.' He
looked over the doctor's shoulder, saw him fiddling with a circular control
mapped out in degrees.

All
he could hope to do was get the machine going and then attack whatever parts of
the ship he could. Disable it, somehow. All ships tended to be complicated,
and, to a degree, the cruder a ship was, paradoxically the more complicated it
was too. He just had to hope he could hit something vital without blowing the
thing up.

'Nearly
ready,' the doctor said. He looked nervously backwards, one shaking finger
going towards a small red button.

'Okay,
Doc,' he told the trembling man, looking suspiciously at the blue light playing
round the cylindrical section. He squatted down level with the doctor. 'Go on,'
he nodded.

'Um...'
The doctor swallowed. 'It might be better if you stood back, over there.'

'No.
Let's just try it, eh?' He hit the little red button. A hemi-disc of blue light
shot out over their heads from the cylindrical section of the machine and
sliced through the containers he had stacked against the door; fluids spurted
out of them. The shelves to one side collapsed, supports severed by the humming
blue disc. He grinned at the wreckage; if he'd still been standing, the blue
field would have cut him in half.

'Nice
try, Doc,' he said. The little doctor slumped to the floor like a pile of wet
sand as the stun pistol hummed. Snack packets and drink cartons showered onto
the floor from the demolished shelves; the ones falling through the blue beam
hit the floor shredded; drink poured from the punctured containers in front of
the door. There was a thumping noise coming from behind the containers.

He
rather appreciated the heady smell of alcohol filling the store room, but hoped
there weren't enough spirits involved to cause a fire. He spun the machine
around, splashing through the drink gradually collecting on the floor of the
small store room; the flickering blue half-disc cut through more shelves before
sinking into the bulkhead opposite the door.

The
machine shook; the air filled with a teeth-cracking whine, and black smoke spun
round against the wrecked shelves as though propelled by the cutting blue light
and then fell quickly to the surface of the sloshing drink filling the bottom
decimetre of the store room, where it collected like a tiny dark fogbank. He
started manipulating the controls on the machine; a little holo screen showed
the shape of the field; he found a couple of tiny joysticks that altered it,
producing an elliptical field. The machine thumped harder; the noise rose in
pitch and black smoke poured out around him.

The
thumping from behind the door got louder. The black smoke was rising in the
room, and already he felt light-headed. He pushed hard against the machine with
his shoulder; it trundled forward, howling; something gave.

He
put his back against the machine and pushed with his feet; there was a bang
from in front of the machine and it started to roll away from him; he turned,
pushed with his shoulder again, staggering past smoking shelves through a
glowing hole into a wrecked room full of tall metal cabinets. Drink spluttered
through the gap. He held the machine steady for a moment; he opened one of the
cabinets, to find a glittering mass of hair-fine filaments wrapped round
cables and rods. Lights winked on a long thin control board, like some linear
city seen at night.

He
pursed his lips and made a kissing sound at the fibres. 'Congratulations,' he
said to himself. 'You have won a major prize.' He hunkered down at the humming
machine, adjusted the controls to something like the way Stap had had them, but
producing a circular field, then switched it to full power.

The
blue disc slammed into the grey cabinets in a blinding maelstrom of sparks; the
noise was numbing. He left the machine where it was and waddled away under the
blue disc, splashing back into the control room. He eased himself over the
still unconscious doctor, kicked the containers away from the door and removed
the metal tool from the door. The blue beam wasn't extending far through the
gap from the control room, so he stood up, shoved the door open with his
shoulder, and fell out into the arms of a startled ship's officer, just as the
field machine blew up and blasted both of them across the bar and into the
lounge. All the lights in the lounge went out.

III

The
hospital ceiling was white, like the walls and the sheets. Outside, on the
surface of the berg, all was white as well. Today was a whiteout; a bright
scour of dry crystals wheeling past the hospital windows. The last four days
had been the same while the storm-wind blew, and the weather people said they
expected no break for another two or three days. He thought of the troops,
hunkered down in trenches and ice caves, afraid to curse the howling storm,
because it meant there would probably be no fighting. The pilots would be glad
too, but pretend they were not, and would loudly curse the storm that prevented
them flying; having looked at the forecast, most would now be getting profoundly
drunk.

He
watched the white windows. Seeing the blue sky was supposed to be good for you.
That was why they built hospitals on the surface; everything else was under the
surface of the ice. The outer walls of the hospital were painted bright red, so
that they would not be attacked by enemy aircraft. He had seen enemy hospitals
from the air, strung out across the white glare of the berg's snow hills like
bright drops of blood fallen frozen from some wounded soldier.

A
whorl of whiteness appeared briefly at one window as the snow flurry circled on
some vortex in the gale, then disappeared. He stared at the falling chaos
beyond the layers of glass, eyes narrowing, as though by sheer concentration he
might find some pattern in the inchoate blizzard. He put one hand up, touching
the white bandage which circled his head.