Rich Man's War (41 page)

Several of the men and women around him nodded. Others would not let go of their scowls. Harris wanted to make sure his point got across. “You wanna be Rangers? You wanna impress me? Then do this job like getting it done and living through it is more important than what the evaluator thinks. You had to be a cut above the rest to make it this far. You’re motivated and you’re skilled. Time now to show me you can keep your heads. Cunningham won’t be the last buddy you bury in this job. It’s time you learned to manage that. Stay cool. Get it done.”

Harris gave the hand signal to mount up. The team donned their helmets and walked past him to take their seats on the assault shuttle. Harris walked on last, looking over each trooper to make sure they would be ready to go when their seats fell out from under them. They needed each weapon loaded and ready, their armor amped up and secure comms assured. Most of all, they needed cool heads. Rage and indiscriminate destruction were for amateurs.

Satisfied with the team’s readiness, Harris gave the team leader and the shuttle’s crew chief his nod of approval before moving into the cockpit. The port side operations chair remained open for him behind the pilot and co-pilot seats. The starboard station already held his co-trainer.

“You give them the speech?” asked
Soldan.

“Yeah.”

“Think any of them got it?”

“A couple, which is about all I can hope for. Some of them will figure shit out before too long and they might remember what I said. You can’t win ‘
em all.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t been told not to say things like that,”
Soldan commented as the shuttle lifted off into the night. Powerful antigrav engines all but negated the vehicle’s weight, allowing for quiet propulsion through the night sky. The atmosphere within the cockpit encouraged Soldan to keep his voice low, as if someone a thousand feet below might hear him. “Isn’t ‘real talk’ like that bad for morale? For the
espirit de corps
of the Rangers?”

“I
have
been told not to say things like that,” Harris shrugged, his eyes on the map of the city and their target zone on his screens. “And if I thought I had a chance of getting promoted again, I might give a fuck what some jackass from Human Resources or Risk Management thinks of my attitude.”

“You think you won’t be promoted again?”

“Nope. Because I’ve got a piss-poor attitude and I encourage the same in subordinates.” He keyed a control on the comms panel. “Security team, we are one hundred seconds out.”

“Assault team,” a voice replied, “still all quiet here. Exits are covered at street level and below. Flush ‘
em out and we’ll take ‘em.”

“Understood.” Harris keyed the
mic off. “I mean, I put operations on hold at the last second to give a pep talk on how they should separate their personal feelings from their work. It’s not exactly something the HR people like to hear. Those assholes think you should be emotionally invested in all of this because you should love the company so damn much.”

“And then you bitch about it on the way to the drop,”
Soldan concurred. “Classy.”

“Hey,” spoke up one of the assault team members sitting just beside the cockpit partition, “you know some of us can hear you, right?”

“Well, yeah,” Harris snorted, leaning back to look at the team. “Like I said, it’s a job. People talk at the office. Show me you can handle it. Twenty seconds to drop. Remember, there’s no bonuses for shooting non-combatants. Three strikes and you’re out.”

He turned back to his tactical display, activated a series of screens to show him the feed from each team member’s helmet and rifle cameras, and waited for the pilot’s cue. “Dropping in five… four… three…”

Arriving over the rooftop of a seven-story apartment building, the assault shuttle came to a sudden stop in mid-air and instantly switched from anti-grav to the vertical thrusters built into its wings. Natural gravity reasserted itself, and the pilot activated the drop switch that pulled the assault team’s seats out from under them. Each of the ten armored men and women fell through the shuttle’s floor and onto the roof. This, along with the thrusters, made for more than a little noise, but the insertion was complete. The shuttle flew off, leaving its passengers to blast and tear through the roof with a combination of weapons and their armored hands.

Harris watched and listened for call-outs over the comm net while
Soldan reported the insertion to the guys at street level. The assault team broke into smaller groups, everyone sticking close to their partner like they’d practiced. With the optics offered by their helmets, they didn’t need to flash around much light to move through the building, and given the strength enhancement offered by their armor, most of the doors wouldn’t be a problem, either.

The apartments at the top corners were priorities, as they likely contained lookouts. Harris watched Finch kick a door right off its hinges, flanked on either side by team members whose gaze and aim swept the entry room. Finch kept low as he entered, his teammates following his lead, and at first it seemed as if there would be no trouble.

Blue bursts of light changed that. Someone opened up on the team with a pulse rifle, which only resulted in four guns coming back on him in quick succession. The apartment furniture offered poor cover; it broke lines of sight, but it didn’t block high-powered slugs. Harris saw the gunman fly back in an explosion of blood.

The team split into pairs and checked each bedroom. They found a screaming, terrified boy, whom one of the other troopers—Clark, Harris noted—hit with an electrical stunner to shut him up. Someone else thought to grab the pulse rifle and break it. The
chem sniffers in their armor led them right to the anti-vehicle rocket launcher laying against one corner and the pair of rockets with it. One team member collected the weapons. Another covered the door, while a third quickly put restraints on the kid. They would be ready to move on in seconds.

The other teams
encountered much the same. Unable to watch three firefights at once, Harris relied on the computer-assisted analysis to evaluate their performance. Another team recovered an additional rocket launcher. Bishop blew away some woman who had no firearm in hand, which would be a strike against him; two more and he’d receive failing marks for this evaluation.

“Jesus, look at the weapons these people are using,”
scoffed Soldan as the team moved on through the floor and down to the next. More flashes of lasers and pulse weapons split the darkness, most of them poorly aimed but a few striking home. Wilbourne caught a blast against his shoulder, but his armor deflected most of it. He went down and called out for a medic. He surely had nasty burns and perhaps a serious injury, but Harris guessed he’d live. Evans wasn’t so lucky; the laser that lanced through his helmet put him down instantly. Soldan didn’t get upset by the casualties. “That building is all wood and plaster on the inside, plus all the furniture. What do they want to do, set the place on fire?”

“These aren’t exactly professionals,
Soldan,” Harris pointed out. “Smart enough to bar the doors, though. You see the one that Finch kicked down?”

“You’d think if they knew they were gonna get hit, they
’d have cleared out the families.” Soldan’s disdain was evident. “Shit, then they could’ve trapped up the place without worrying about anyone’s kid setting off a bomb while chasing his ball or whatever. Patrick just wasted a grandmother, by the way.”

“Shit.
” Harris keyed the mic. “Assault team, this is Harris! Check your fire, dammit!”

A buzz on Harris’s wrist indicated a priority message. Harris check
ed the sender info and then disregarded the rest. Traffic from HQ could wait until the shooting stopped. If they needed him to rush his team to another zone, they’d have gone through the pilot with a voice message. Harris turned back to the action.

Most of the team did fine. Within another minute or two, Harris ascertained that the insurgents within the building outnumbered his team, though those numbers rapidly dwindled. The room-to-room fighting briefly intensified
, and there Harris saw signs of growth. Narendra charged right into a guy firing a light pulse pistol, trusting her armor to deflect the blasts as she clobbered him with a solid elbow to the chest. She left him practically embedded in the drywall, not only neutralizing him but saving her from having to hose down the room and hit the unarmed people inside. Finch learned to shoot through the furniture in another apartment, ending a firefight just as it began. Back upstairs, Wilbourne managed to self-medicate, and reported himself stable without any prompting from anyone else.

“
Woah, get a load of number nine,” said Soldan. That drew Harris’s eyes to another screen, where he saw the group’s other designated door-kicker hoist a combatant up over his head and pitch the guy down the center of the stairwell. The falling man’s head hit one banister on the way down, bounced off and fell against the next one. The view then shifted as trooper nine turned back toward the hallway.

“What the hell was that?” Harris demanded irritably. “You
showin’ off for someone?”

“You said to check fire, sir,” came the response. “The guy had a gun, but you gave an order.”

“Which one is that?” Soldan asked.

Harris flicked off the mic. “You know exactly who that is,” he sighed. “Two strikes, every time. I’m half tempted to wash th
e kid out on general principle, but he gets shit done. Might be better off as a shock trooper, but I think he knows he wouldn’t see as much action that way. Or make as much money.” He checked the tactical boards again. The team had only two more floors to go. Nobody on the street-level security team reported anyone fleeing the building. Harris flicked the mic back on. “Eickenberry, we’re gonna have another talk later.”

“Yes, sir,” the tall young man acknowledged.

“Well, he’s got the chops,” said Soldan. “Can’t argue that. What’s his story, anyway?”

“Ah, he washed out of basic in his home system militia a year or two ago,” Harris said. “Dunno why. I don’t really care. Probably looking to salvage his pride in the Rangers, but he obviously likes combat. And he’s in debt up to his eyeballs like the rest, so he needs a job like this to take care of him. This is who we pick up these days.”

“How were we any different?”

No answer came to mind right away. Harris scowled, watching the team move through the last few rooms. He heard his people call out, “Clear,” one by one. The security team stationed at s
treet level sent in a couple of squads to help with mop-up.

Harris turned his attention to the message from HQ. “Cease any further operations immediately and return to base for redeployment,” read his instructions. “Route any questions
from local forces or client authorities to HQ. Engage in combat only to protect company assets on an emergency basis. Instructions for handing off operations will follow. Personnel and gear will be collected and ready for transport to
NSS Hercules
within 24 hours.”

The message
surprised him. The battleship
Hercules
was the flagship of NorthStar’s fleet. A rapid pullout like that could only mean that some higher-priority mess awaited. Harris glanced up at the message routing instructions before continuing further. The note had gone out to a majority of combat units in his area of operations. It looked like a full-scale pullout.

Below the first paragraph, Harris found further instructions specific to his unit—which, given the familiar text, had gone through an automated filter. “Advise personnel of optional transfer:
Eickenberry, Kevin P.; Wilbourne, Theodore J.”

Harris pulled up their personnel files. Instructions like that held to a company standard: no security fleet personnel were ever ordered to go into a combat action targeting their homes of origin. Rangers were something of an exception. As an elite unit, the company expected a higher
degree of loyalty. They could participate in such operations on a voluntary basis.

“Archangel,” Harris murmured, sinking back into his chair. The implications fell into place right away. Harris hadn’t caught any news recently, but he knew there was supposed to be some sort of negotiation back on Earth with NorthStar and the other big companies. If things had been smoothed over and the security fleet was going back on the job in Archangel, there would be no need to screen out anyone. The more native sons and daughters sent in
to patch things up, the better. These orders implied that the negotiations had not gone well at all—and that the situation was worse for the company than anyone knew.

That was all far above Harris’s head. He had only his people to worry about.
Wilbourne was hurt and might well end up transferred. Harris wouldn’t know until the docs saw to him, but the prospect left some concern as to the team’s numbers. Harris needed to have a chat with Eickenberry sooner rather than later.

* * *

“Ease up, folks. The passageways out of here can’t handle more than three abreast,” Tanner called out over the crowd. Marines and navy crewmen shuffled past or stood waiting for a chance to head out, their conversations creating enough volume that no one could hear announcements over the PA system. Though none of the men and women shoved or pushed, the mood leaned toward a grim sense of urgency.