There were over a hundred channels in use in the command headset, even for this limited raid. In addition to direct voice contact with the Ariel, Thorne, and every trooper, there were battle computers on the ship, in the shuttle, and in the helmet itself. There were telemetry readouts of every sort, weapon power checks, logistics updates. All the troopers' helmets had vid pick-ups so he could see what they were seeing in infra-red, visual, and UV bands; full sound; their medical readouts; holovid map displays. The holomap of the clone-crèche had been specially programmed in, and the plan of attack and several contingencies pre-loaded. There were channels to be dedicated, on the fly, to eavesdropping upon enemy telemetry. Thorne already had Bharaputra's security guards' comm links locked in. They could even pick up commercial entertainment broadcasts from the planet they were approaching. Tinny music filled the air momentarily as he switched past those channels.
They finished, and he found himself and Thorne staring at each other in an awkward silence. Thorne was hollow-faced, apprehensive, as if struggling with some suppressed emotion. Guilt? Strange perception, surely not. Thorne couldn't be on to him, or it would have called a halt to this whole operation.
"Pre-combat nerves, Bel?" he said lightly. "I thought you loved your work."
Thorne came out of its lip-sucking abstraction with a start. "Oh, I do." It took a breath. "Let's do it."
"Go!" he agreed, and led the way at last out of his isolated cabin-cave into the light of the corridor and the peopled reality his actions—his actions—had created.
The shuttle-hatch corridor resembled his first view of it, reversed; the hulking Dendarii commandos were filing out, not spilling in. They seemed quieter this time, not as much clowning and joking. More businesslike. They had names, now, too, all filed in his command headset, which would keep them straight for him. All wore some variety of half-armor and helmet, with an array of heavier equipment in addition to such hand-weapons as he bore.
He found himself looking at the monster sergeant with new eyes, now that he knew her history. The log had said she was only nineteen years old, though she looked older; she'd been only sixteen, four years ago when Naismith had stolen her away from House Ryoval. He squinted, trying to see her as a girl. He had been taken away at age fourteen, eight years ago. Their mutual time as genetic products and prisoners of House Bharaputra must have overlapped, though he had never met her. The genetic engineering research labs were in a different town from the main surgical facility. House Bharaputra was a vast organization, in its strange Jacksonian way almost a little government. Except Jackson's Whole didn't have governments.
Eight years . . . No one you knew then is still alive. You know that, don't you?
If I can't do what I want, I'll at least do what I can.
He stepped up to her. "Sergeant Taura—" She turned, and his brows climbed in startlement. "What is that around your neck?" Actually, he could see what it was, a large fluffy pink bow. He supposed his real question was, why was it around her neck?
She—smiled, he guessed that repellent grimace was, at him, and fluffed it out a bit more with a huge clawed hand. Her claw-polish was bright pink, tonight. "D'you think it'll work? I wanted something to not scare the kids."
He looked up at eight feet of half-armor, camouflage cloth, boots, bandoliers, muscle and fang. Somehow, I don't think it'll be enough, Sergeant. "It's . . . certainly worth a try," he choked. So, she was conscious of her extraordinary appearance. . . . Fool! How could she not be? Are you not conscious of yours? He was almost sorry now he had not ventured out of his cabin earlier in the voyage and made her acquaintance. My home-town girl.
"What does it feel like, to be going back?" he asked suddenly; a nod in no particular direction indicated the House Bharaputra drop-zone, coming up.
"Strange," she admitted, her thick brows drawing down.
"Do you know this landing-site? Ever been there before?"
"Not that medical complex. I hardly ever left the genetics facility, except for a couple of years that I lived with hired fosterers, which was in the same town." Her head turned, her voice dropped an octave, and she barked an order about loading equipment at one of her men, who gave a half-wave and hustled to obey. She turned back to him and her voice re-softened to conscious, careful lightness. In no other way did she display any inappropriate intimacy while on duty; it seemed she and Naismith were discreet lovers, if lovers they were. The discreetness relieved him. She added, "I didn't get out much."
His own voice lowered. "Do you hate them?" As I do? A different kind of intimate question.
Her outslung lips twisted in thought. "I suppose . . . I was terribly manipulated by them when I was growing up, but it didn't seem like abuse to me at the time. There were a lot of uncomfortable tests, but it was all science . . . there wasn't any intent to hurt in it. It didn't really hurt till they sold me to Ryoval's, after the super-soldier project was cancelled. What Ryoval's wanted to do to me was grotesque, but that was just the nature of Ryoval's. It was Bharaputra . . . Bharaputra that didn't care. That threw me away. That hurt. But then you came . . ." She brightened. "A knight in shining armor and all that."
A familiar, surly wave of resentment washed over him. Bugger the knight in shining armor, and the horse he rode in on. And, I can rescue people too, dammit! She was looking away, fortunately, and didn't catch the spasm of anger in his face. Or perhaps she took it for anger at their former tormentors.
"But for all that," she murmured, "I would not have even existed, without House Bharaputra. They made me. I am alive, for however long . . . shall I return death for life?" Her strange distorted face grew deeply introspective.
This was not the ideal gung-ho frame of mind to inculcate in a commando on a drop mission, he realized belatedly. "Not . . . necessarily. We're here to rescue clones, not kill Bharaputran employees. We kill only if forced to, eh?"
This was good Naismithery; her head came up, and she grinned at him. "I'm so relieved you're feeling better. I was terribly worried. I wanted to see you, but Captain Thorne wouldn't allow it." Her eyes warmed like bright yellow flames.
"Yes, I was . . . very ill. Thorne did right. But . . . maybe we can talk more on the way home." When this was over. When he'd earned the right . . . earned the right to what?
"You got a date, Admiral." She winked at him, and straightened, ferociously joyous. What have I promised? She bounded forward, happily sergeantly again, to oversee her squad.
He followed her into the combat-drop shuttle. The light level was much lower in here, the air colder, and, of course, there was no gravity. He floated forward from handgrip to handgrip after Captain Thorne, mentally dividing up the floor space for his intended cargo. Twelve or fifteen rows of kids seated four across . . . there was plenty of room. This shuttle was equipped to carry two squads, plus armored hovercars or a whole field hospital. It had a first-aid station at the back, including four fold-down bunks and a portable emergency cryo-chamber. The Dendarii commando-medic was rapidly organizing his area and battening down his supplies. Everything was being fastened down, by quietly-moving fatigue-clad soldiers, with very little fuss or conversation. A place for everything and everything in its place.
The shuttle pilot was at his post. Thorne took the co-pilot's seat. He took a communication station chair just behind them. Out the front window he could see distant hard-edged stars, nearby the winking colored lights of some human activity, and, at the very edge of the field of view, the bright slice of the planet's curvature. Almost home. His belly fluttered, and not just from zero-gee. Bands of tightness throbbed around his head beneath his helmet-straps.
The pilot hit his intercom. "Gimme a body-check back there, Taura. We've got a five-minute thrust to match orbit, then we blow bolts and drop."
After a moment Sergeant Taura's voice returned, "Check. All troops tied down, hatch sealed. We are ready. Go-repeat-go."
Thorne glanced over its shoulder and pointed. Hastily, he fastened his seat straps, and just in time. The s
traps bit deeply, and he lurched from side to side as the Ariel shuddered into its parking orbit, accelerative effects that would have been compensated for and nullified by the artificial gravity generated between the decks of the larger ship.
The pilot poised his hands, and abruptly dropped them, as if he were a musician playing some crescendo. Loud, startling clanks reverberated through the fuselage. Ululating whoops keened in response from the compartment behind the flight deck.
When they say drop, he thought wildly, they mean it. Stars and the planet turned, nauseatingly, in the forward window. He closed his eyes; his stomach tried to climb his esophagus. He suddenly realized a hidden advantage to full space armor. If you shit yourself with terror, going down, the suit's plumbing would take care of it, and no one would ever know.
Air began to scream over the outer hull as they hit the ionosphere. His seat straps tried to slice him like an egg. "Fun, huh?" yelled Thorne, grinning like a loon, its face distorted and lips flapping with deceleration. They were pointed straight down, or so the shuttle's nose was aimed, although his seat was attempting to eject him into the cabin ceiling with neck-breaking and skull-smashing force.
"I sure hope there's nothing in our way," the pilot yelled cheerfully. "This hasn't been cleared with anybody's flight control, y'know!"
He pictured a mid-air collision with a large commercial passenger shuttle . . . five hundred women and children aboard . . . vast yellow and black explosions and arcing bodies. . . .
They crossed the terminator into twilight. Then darkness, whipping clouds . . . bigger clouds . . . shuttle vibrating and bellowing like an insane tuba . . . still pointed straight down, he swore, though how the pilot could tell in this screaming fog he did not know.
Then, suddenly, they were level as an airshuttle, clouds above, lights of a town like jewels spilled on a carpet below. An airshuttle that was dropping like a rock. His spine began to compress, harder, harder. More hideous clanks, as the shuttle's feet extended. An array of half-lit building bulked below. A darkened playing-court—Shit, that's it, that's it! The buildings loomed up beside them, above them. Thud-crunch-crunch. A solid, six-legged landing. The silence stunned him.
"All right, let's go!" Thorne swung up out of its seat, face flushed, eyes lit, with blood-lust or fear or both he could not tell.
He tramped down the ramp in the wake of a dozen Dendarii. His eyes were about half dark-adapted, and there were enough lights around the complex, diffused by the cool and misty midnight air, that he had no trouble seeing, though the view was drained of color. The shadows were black and sinister. Sergeant Taura, with silent hand signals, divided her squad. No one was making noise. Silent faces were gilded by brief staccato flashes of light as their helmet vids supplied some data bit or another, projected to the side of their vision. One Dendarii, with extra 'scopes on her helmet, rolled out a personal float-bike, mounted it, and rose quietly into the darkness. Air cover.
The pilot stayed aboard, and Taura counted off four other Dendarii. Two vanished into the shadows of the perimeter, two stayed with the shuttle as rear-guard. He and Thorne had argued about that. Thorne had wanted more perimeter. His own gut-feel was that they would need as many troopers as possible at the clone-crèche. The civilian hospital guards were little threat, and it would take time for their better-armed back-up to arrive. By then, the Dendarii would be gone, if they could move the clones along fast enough. He cursed himself, in retrospect, for not ordering two commando squads instead of one, back at Escobar. He could have done so, just as easily, but he'd been caught up in calculations about the Ariel's passenger capacity, and fancied himself conserving life support for the final escape. So many factors to balance.
His own helmet framed his vision with a colored clutter of codes, numbers, and graphs. He'd studied them all, but they flicked by too fast; by the time he'd taken one in, and interpreted it to himself, it was gone, replaced by another. He took Thorne's advice and with a whispered word reduced the light intensity to a bare hallucinatory murmur. The helmet's audio pick-up was not so bad. No one was doing any unnecessary chatter.
He, Thorne, and the other seven Dendarii followed Taura at a trot—her stride—between two adjacent buildings. There was activity on the Bharaputran security guards' comm links, he found by keying his helmet to their audio bands. The first What the hell. Did you hear that? Joe, check sector four, stirrings of response. More to follow, he was sure, though he had no intention of waiting around for it.
Around a corner. There. A three-story, pleasant white building with lots of plants and landscaping, big windows, balconies. Not quite a hospital, not quite a dormitory, vague, ambiguous, discreet. the life house it was labeled in Jacksonian double-speak. The death house. My dear old home. It was terribly familiar and terribly strange. Once, it had seemed quite splendid to him. Now it seemed . . . smaller than he remembered.
Taura raised her plasma arc, adjusted its beam to wide, and removed the locked glass front doors in an orange, white, and blue spray of flying, spattering cullet. Dendarii bounded through, splitting right and left, before the glow of the spattered globs of glass died. One took up station patrolling the ground floor. Alarms and fire alarms went off: Dendarii killed the noisy speakers they passed with more plasma fire, on the fly, but units in more distant parts of the building kept up a muted clamor. Automatic sprinklers made steam and a mess in their trail.
He ran to catch up. A uniformed Bharaputran security guard in brown trimmed with pink lurched into the corridor ahead. Three Dendarii stunners simultaneously downed him as his own stunner beam was absorbed harmlessly by the ceiling.
Taura and two female Dendarii took the lift tube toward the third floor; another trooper passed them in hope of gaining the roof. He led Thorne and the remaining troopers out into the second floor foyer and to the left. Two unarmed adults, one a night-gowned woman pulling on a robe, were felled the instant they appeared. There. Through those double doors. They were locked, and someone was beating on them from the inside.
"We're going to break the door open," Thorne bellowed through it. "Back away, or you'll get hurt!" The pounding stopped. Thorne nodded. A trooper adjusted his plasma arc to narrow beam and sliced through a metal bolt. Thorne kicked the doors wide.
A blond young man fell back a pace, staring at Thorne with bewilderment. "You're not the firemen."
A crowd of other men, tall boys, filled the corridor behind the blond. He did not have to remind himself that these were a bunch of ten-year-olds, but he wasn't sure about the perceptions of the troopers. Every variation of height and racial mix and build was represented, much more motley than the Greek-god look one might have anticipated from their garden-and-fountain setting. Personal wealth, not personal beauty, had been the ticket for their creation. Still, each was as glowingly healthy as the particularities of his genetics permitted. They all wore uniform sleepwear, bronze-brown tunics and shorts.
"Front," Thorne hissed, and shoved him forward. "Start talking."
"Get me a head-count," he ripped out of the corner of his mouth as Thorne pulled him past.
"Right."
He'd practiced the speech for this supreme moment in his mind ten thousand times, every possible variation. The only thing he knew for certain that he was not going to start with was, I'm Miles Naismith. His heart was racing. He inhaled a huge gulp of air. "We're the Dendarii Mercenaries, and we're here to save you."
The boy's expression was repelled, scared, and scornful all mixed. "You look like a mushroom," he said blankly.
It was so . . . so off-script. Of his thousand rehearsed second lines, not one followed this. Actually, with the command helmet and all, he probably did look a bit like a big gray—not the heroic image he'd hoped to—
He tore off his helmet, ripped back his hood, and bared his teeth. The boy recoiled.
"Listen up, you clones!" he yelled. "The secret you may have heard whispered is true! Every single one of you is waiting in line to be murdered by House Bharaputra surgeon
s. They're gonna stick somebody else's brain in your head, and throw your brain away. That's where your friends have been going, one by one, to their deaths. We're here to take you to Escobar, where you'll be given sanctuary—"
Not all the boys had assembled in the corridor in the first place, and now ones at the rear of the mob began to break away and retreat into individual rooms. A babble started to rise from them, and yells and cries. One dark-haired boy tried to dart past them to the corridor beyond the big double doors, and a trooper grabbed him in a standard arm-lock. He screamed in pain and surprise, and the sound and shock seemed to blow the others back in a wave. The boy struggled without effect in the trooper's iron grip. The trooper looked exasperated and uncertain, and stared at him as if expecting some direction or order.
"Get your friends and follow me!" he yelled desperately to the retreating boys. The blond turned on his heel and sprinted.
"I don't think they bought us," said Thorne. The hermaphrodite's face was pale and tense. "It might actually be easier to stun them all and carry them. We can't afford to lose time in here, not with that damned thin perimeter."
"No—"
His helmet was calling him. He jammed it back on. Comm-link babble burst in his ears, but Sergeant Taura's deep voice penetrated, selectively enhanced by her channel. "Sir, we need your help up here."
"What is it?"
Her answer was lost in an override from the woman riding the float-bike. "Sir, there's three or four people climbing down the outside balconies of the building you're in. And there's a group of four Bharaputran security people approaching you from the north."
He sorted frantically through channels till he found the one out-going to the air-guard. "Don't let any get away!"
"How should I stop 'em, sir?" Her voice was edged.
"Stunner," he decided helplessly. "Wait! Don't stun any that are hanging off the balcony, wait'll they reach the ground."
"I may not have a clear shot."
"Do your best." He cut her off and found Taura again. "What do you want, Sergeant?"