The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III (26 page)

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Jameson sat there, eyes clouded and vague, a slight tremor in his hands as they sat on the arms of the powerchair. The effort of removing the helmet, even briefly, had sapped all his energy.

But that would not last, Spencer knew. Jameson was not quite sucked dry just yet. In a few minutes he would recover enough to move, to talk, even to think again, after a fashion. But his soul was utterly lost, enslaved to the thing he wore. He was a puppet on a string, pulled this way and that by the merciless whim of the helmet.

Spencer had changed his mind a half-dozen times, and still was not sure if the thing was alive or a machine. But whatever it was, there was something about it, something almost palpable. It was the adversary, it was the essence of anti-life, anti-thought made corporate and real. It was the relentless machine opponent of all living sentience.

It was a parasite. And one that had ridden its current host almost to destruction.

A horrifying thought blossomed in Spencer’s skull. This parasite had caused two healthy new host-bodies to be brought before it. He thought again of that ancient, insectoid hero, even the name of its species lost to time. It had acted aright.

Better suicide than Jameson’s fate. Spencer prayed that he would have the chance, and the courage, to do what the insectoid had done.

But not yet. Their own situation was desperate, even hopeless, but perhaps they could still accomplish something for others. They might be able to kill Jameson, for example, and leave the helmet without a host.

Spencer struggled against his bonds once again. No chance. There wasn’t even a knot to work on.

He looked down at his feet. They were held not by rope, but by what looked like a thick, seamless strip of milky-grey plastic, wrapped in a figure-eight around his ankles, the two ends melted perfectly together. Spencer recognized the material, and knew that he could never hope to break free of it without tools. Maybe he could chew through the bonds on Sisley’s wrists in a week, but they had minutes, not days. Forget it.

“Any bright ideas?” he asked Sisley in a quiet voice, trying to make light of it all.

She shook her head, and seemed to be holding back a sob. Spencer realized with a shock that, as bad as things were for him, they had to be infinitely worse for Sisley. Spencer had years of military training and discipline, years to get used to the idea that he might die unpleasantly. Less than a day ago, Sisley Mannerling had been a stately matron with a steady, respectable job, with a harmless undercover assignment that added the spice of excitement to her life and provided a bit of extra income. Now she had been chased; shot at; spent a sleepless night being brutalized, captured, stripped of clothing, rank, and dignity; and left alone with a stranger and a madman.

Her Kona Tatsu training must have been some help, but she was no professional. She was unprepared for what they now faced. Her shame, her fear, her humiliation must be deep. Spencer felt guilty for not thinking how bad this would be for her.

Jameson picked that moment to stir, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the helmet chose that moment to rouse its host. His eyes cleared and focused, and he seemed about to say something.

Then the wall exploded.

A hideous flash of light illuminated the room, like a too-close lightning strike, and the sound of a thousand thunderclaps blasted the room. The room was suddenly furnace-hot, and the air was gaspingly rich in ozone and smoke. The viewscreen behind Jameson blacked out with the smoky sizzle of burning electronics, and a huge, glowing wound appeared in the middle of the screen. It widened rapidly, melting its way through the outer wall and the plastics of the screen, until clear honest daylight was stabbing through a fist-sized hole in the wall.

With a warrior’s reflexes, Spencer took cover behind the couch before his conscious mind even registered that something happened. He looked up and realized that Sisley hadn’t moved, was staring at the hole in the wall, too stunned to react. He lunged back up onto the couch and butted her with his head, urging her down on the floor. She dropped alongside him. Spencer’s mind was racing.

He recognized the sound and the look of a plasma cannon’s work. And who but the Navy had plasma weapons? Suss. Somehow, impossibly, it had to be Suss. Another burst of plasma fire blasted at the wall, on a lower setting this time, working to slice a hole in the wall.

Spencer pulled his head down. Friendly fire could kill you just as dead as the enemy’s. As if to prove his point, some wrecked component of the wall screen chose that moment to explode, sending white-hot fragments blasting across the room, setting fires in a half-dozen supposedly fireproof pieces of furniture and carpeting. Anything will burn if you get it hot enough.

Jameson—or the helmet using Jameson’s voice—suddenly shouted, crying out a hideous, inhuman scream of anger no human throat should have been able to form, shrieking out the helmet’s rage. That alien war cry from a human was somehow more shocking than the plasma gun blasting into the room.

A jerky puppet on an alien string, Jameson reached into a recess of the powerchair and pulled out a repulsor. Moving awkwardly, even spasmodically, Jameson pulled the trigger and waved his arm wildly in a hopeless attempt at aiming the weapon as he squeezed the trigger. The helmet, Spencer realized, was trying to control Jameson’s body directly, perhaps for the first time. And it wasn’t very good at it.

Spencer’s reflexes rolled him out of the way, but the repulsor traced its deadly line of fire across the floor and into Sisley, ripping into her lovely body, slicing her neatly in half across the waist, the dragon’s teeth of the repulsor beads turning living, breathing flesh into an obscene mass of exploding gore and splashing blood. The repulsor slashed widely around the room, blasting apart the surviving wall screens, ripping into hidden power conduits.

Huge power-shorts arced the room into darkness.

The stuttering bull-roar of the plasma cannon opened up again; the room turned sun bright with the actinic glare of the fusion flame. A thin tongue of precisely controlled sunfire sliced at the wall. The plasma tongue pulsed as the cannon’s blast chamber recycled to fire again. The gunner must be running the cannon at maximum speed and lowest power, Spencer thought. A very tricky control problem.

Suss. It had to Suss. Who else would be that good with a plasma weapon?

The plasma jet had cut open a meter-wide circle in the wall. A few weakened bits of concrete, left where the cannon was between pulses, held the plug in place. Suss, either impatient with her progress or not wishing to risk vaporizing the interior of the room, opened up on the plug with repulsors, slamming the slab of wall back into the room. Sunlight streamed into the room.

And the powerchair
moved,
negotiating the littered chaos of the room at speed. Jameson, still wielding his hand gun, was screaming again, his arm struggling to control the weapon. A huge pair of disguised blast doors snapped open in the far wall of the room. The chair shot through the twin doors, which slammed shut as abruptly as they had opened. Spencer heard the whirling hum of a high-speed elevator behind the doors and knew that the chairman was already a hundred floors below, heading for a private bomb shelter far underground.

Hurtling into the room through the hole in the wall, Suss did a perfect regulation dive and roll into the room and came to rest on her feet, back to the wall, crouched down to provide a smaller target. In one hand she held a repulsor, in the other a hand laser.

Spencer had never seen a lovelier sight in his life.

“Status!” she snapped, all business.

“Sisley’s dead,” Spencer said, struggling up to his feet. “The opposition’s escaped, and if there are automatic weapons in this room, they haven’t shown themselves. Probably trouble on the way in about thirty seconds, but we’re alone right now.”

Suss holstered her repulsor and came over to Spencer. “Pull your feet as far apart as you can.” Spencer strained against the bonds holding his ankles, and Suss fired a slicing laser beam between Spencer’s feet, cutting through the plastic bond material. The plastic fell apart, sloughing from Spencer’s ankles, as soon as its integrity was broken.

Suss spun Spencer around roughly and cut through his wrist bonds the same way. “We go,” she said. “I think we’ve got company headed our way from the outside, too.”

Spencer rubbed at his wrists for a moment, surveyed the wreckage of the room, and spotted his AID under the shattered remains of a coffee table. He scooped it up and made ready to go before he thought of Sisley. He turned and looked at her, staring straight up at the ceiling, staring dead eyes looking up out of a death-pale face, her rich chestnut hair streaming out in all directions, a trickle of blood coming from her open mouth.

Sick at heart and deeply ashamed to be alive when Sisley had been killed, he turned and made for the hole cut in the wall. Suss, he noticed, had not concerned herself with Sisley at all, once she heard the word
dead.

Suss grabbed cushions off one of the couches and slapped them over the lip of the glowing hole in the wall. She gestured for Spencer to scoot through the hole. The cushions were already smoldering. Spencer boosted himself up into the hole, to see the gig hovering no more than a meter or two away from the building, her hatch lined up with the hole.

It must have been near impossible to hold station. Spencer could see a nervous ensign—Shuman? Shoemaker?—something like that, handling the controls. He got the best purchase he could and vaulted, bare-ass naked, into the gig, skinning his knee and bruising his dignity on the lip of the hatch.

Suss landed literally on top of him and pivoted, pulling something off her belt and tossing it back through the hatch.

“Go!” she shouted, and the ensign needed no further urging. He gunned the gig engines hard and swung it away from the building as the hatch closed. Suss was already in the co-pilot’s seat before Spencer could pick himself up. “Taking weapons control,” she announced. “We have company.”

There was a hugely loud explosion behind them, and the gig was peppered with bits of concrete. Spencer looked forward to the cockpit. He found a monitor displaying the rearward view and saw the top of the StarMetal pyramid ablaze. Suss had been able to do something for Sisley after all. A Viking funeral. Better her body was burned in the clean flames than to have it left behind as an ugly bit of butchery.

Spencer made his way to a passenger seat and strapped himself in, the fabric of the chair feeling strange against his naked body. He glanced across the aisle and, for the first time, noticed Dostchem there. She looked distinctly nervous, and who could blame her? What the hell was she—

Never mind, there was too much else going on.

There was a rattling series of bangs on the hull. Spencer looked out a side port to see an autocop there, an oversized chess pawn flying a kilometer in the air, canted far over in its direction of fly to let its hoverskirt provide forward thrust. Its repulsor was out. Suss hit the thing with the plasma gun. Spencer looked out across the middle distance, scanned the sky over the city. At least six autocops closing from the south. He peered out Dostchem’s window. Perhaps just as many coming from the north, as best he could see. He was about to shout a warning but thought better of it. Suss had radar, and a better window, and more than enough on her mind, without Spencer joggling her elbow. He heard a deeper
thoom, thoom, thoom
vibrating the hull and saw the still-distant cops breaking up as the gig’s repulsor found them.

He remembered the guards complaining that the autocops had vanished—had they all been held in reserve to attack any Navy move? Maybe the helmet-thing had been expecting a Marine ground assault. The cops would have been at least somewhat more effective against the marines, but they really weren’t meant as dogfighters. The gig made short work of them.

“We’re clear,” Suss announced. “Ensign, turn this thing back and fly us to the
Duncan.
Let’s get back aboard.”

The
Malcolm
swung about, headed her bow out to sea and the safety of the cruiser.

Spencer allowed himself the luxury of collapsing into the passenger seat, closing his eyes, and letting himself go. But—he had ordered the cruiser buttoned up as a guard against the parasites.

His eyes snapped open, and a sick feeling grew at the pit of his stomach. Who had countermanded, on what authority? Suss had never heard the button-up order, had she? Had Spencer ever mentioned it to her? Obviously she had asked for the gig—but why had they said yes? Had Wellingham found effective countermeasures?

Or had there been a class A standard naval-issue screw-up? Spencer sat bolt upright in his chair, about to demand answers from Shoemaker and Suss—

When the world erupted in a blaze of light.

“Father of God!” Shoemaker shouted, throwing his arms up to shield his face. The gig pitched over for a second before Suss grabbed the controls and brought them back to level.

The light was out on the horizon, out at sea, right about where the
Duncan
had put down. Spencer’s blood froze in horror.
Duncan.
The damn parasites had got aboard
Duncan,
and blown her up. The blazing fire of a fusion plant detonating lit up the morning sky like a second dawn, a dawn from hell.
 

But then the explosion started
moving, climbing,
heading for sky. Spencer looked and understood, forgot his fear, and let awe wash over him. This was no disaster, but a glorious sight. He had never before been privileged to see a warlord-class cruiser riding a sunflame toward orbit.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Ensign, shape for orbit yourself.
Malcolm
will have to do her own boosting. We’ll meet up with them there.”

The sound wave caught up with the gig and Spencer felt the bellowing thunder of her passage more than he heard it. Spencer watched the mighty ship climb, and wished her well, glad she was safe.

Had he then known the truth of
Duncan’s
condition, and known the consequences, he might have well wished for her to have exploded then and there.