Empire of Man 01 - March Upcountry Read online

  Despite early gains in processing, it had taken humanity nearly a millennium after the invention of the first crude computers to develop a system of implanted processors that interfaced completely with human neural systems without adverse side effects. The "toots" were still cutting edge and being constantly refined . . . and they were a security planner's nightmare, because they could be programmed to take over a person's body. When that happened, the unfortunate victim had no control over his own actions. The Marines called people like that "toombies."

  Some societies used specially modified toots to control the actions of convicted criminals, but in most societies, including the Empire of Man, such a use of the hardware was illegal for all but military purposes. The Marines themselves used the system to the fullest as a combat aid and multiplier, but even they were wary of it.

  The big problem was hacking. A person whose toot had been "hacked" could be forced to do literally anything. Just two years ago, someone had mounted an assassination attempt on the prime minister of the Alphane Empire by using a human official with a hacked toot. The hacker had never been found, but once the security protocols were solved, it had been a ludicrously simple thing to do. The toots were designed for radio-packet external data input, and a small device disguised as an antique pocket watch had been found in the official's possession. It was speculated that it had been given to him as a gift, but wherever it had come from, it had taken his toot over. It was as if the official had been possessed by a demon hidden in the ancient Pandora's box.

  Since then, all members of the Regiment and all close servitors of the Imperial Family had been required to go through random scans, and the security protocols of their toots had been updated yet again. Kosutic knew that, but she also knew there was no such thing as a perfect defense.

  She made a note to hunt down Gunny Lai on her toot and smiled at the ambiguity of her own actions. She'd started off in the Marines before the day of the devices; but she'd become as dependent on them as everyone else. It was a humorous irony, in a bitter sort of way, that she now saw them as the single biggest threat to her charges.

  She stepped onto the elevator and checked the duty roster again. Hegazi was on Engineering. Good troop, but new. Too new. Hell, they were all too new; eighteen months was just enough time to get very good at their jobs, then most went on to Steel. The few who stayed were rarely the best. She thought of Julian and laughed. Of course, there was best and best. But she intended to remind Hegazi, who was a good troop overall, that he needed to be totally one hundred percent paranoid at all times.

  * * *

  She stood in the pool of the Marine's blood. She hadn't bothered to check his pulse; nobody who'd lost that much blood was alive, and she was too busy considering what to do to waste time on pointless gestures. She didn't consider for long—the Marines didn't exactly pick ditherers as the senior noncoms of The Empress' Own—but there was always enough time to screw up, so there had to be enough to make the right move, as well.

  She tapped her communicator.

  "Sergeant of the Guard. Full load out to Engineering. We have a breach. Do not sound General Quarters."

  She cut the communication. The guards would contact Pahner, and the assassin wouldn't be alerted, for the Marine communicators were encrypted. Of course, the saboteur—and sabotage had to be what the killer contemplated—could have left any of half a dozen telltales along his backtrail to warn him that he'd been discovered.

  Kosutic plucked the sensor wand off the dead guard's belt and swept the hatch. No obvious traces there. She keyed in the entry code and went through the hatch fast and low as it opened. The blood was already coagulating, and the body was cooling, so the assassin probably wasn't on the far side of the hatch. But Eva Kosutic hadn't survived to be a sergeant major by depending on "probably."

  "Engineering, this is Sergeant Major Kosutic," she said into her communicator. "Do not, I say again, do not sound an alert. We have a probable saboteur in Engineering; your guard is dead." She swept the sensor wand around. There were heat traces everywhere, but most went straight ahead. All except one. A single trace split off from the pack, heading to the sergeant major's left, and it looked fresher.

  "What?" the communicator demanded incredulously. "Where?"

  "It looks like somewhere in quadrant four," she snapped. "Get on your scanners and vids. Find them."

  There was a moment of silence from whoever was on the other end of the line. Then—

  "Roger," the communicator responded.

  She hoped like hell it wasn't the saboteur.

  * * *

  Ensign Guha paused and looked left and right. She brought up a measuring grid and used it to locate the precise point she needed on the right-hand bulkhead, then reached into her satchel and extracted a one-kilo shaped charge. She stripped the covering plastic off the bottom, affixed it to the bulkhead with the provided adhesive, and examined her handiwork for a moment, to ensure it wasn't going anywhere. Then she pulled a pin and depressed a thumbswitch. A small red light blinked on, then went out; the bomb was armed.

  She turned to her left once more and continued her circuit. Only three more to go.

  * * *

  Captain Pahner closed the front of his chameleon suit and configured his helmet to seal the whole system as the elevator descended. Gunnery Sergeant Jin, already suited, stood beside him with Kosutic's helmet slung at his side and her chameleon suit over his shoulder. The standard issue Marine suits offered better ballistic protection than dress uniforms, faded the wearer into the background, and were designed for vacuum work. They weren't as good as combat armor, but there wasn't time for full armor. He had one platoon warming theirs up anyway, of course, but if this didn't go down in the next few minutes his name wasn't Armand Pahner.

  "Eva," he snapped into the helmet mike. "Talk to me."

  "Three so far. One-kilo shaped charges right over plasma conduits. They've got anti-tamper devices in them. I can smell it."

  "Captain Krasnitsky, this is Captain Pahner," Pahner said sharply. Surprise is a mental condition, not reality, he reminded himself. "We have to shut down those conduits."

  "We can't," Krasnitsky answered. "You can't just shut off a tunnel drive. If you tried it, you'd come out at a random point somewhere in a nine-light-year radius sphere. And the plasma has to be slowed down, anyway. If you just try to shut off it . . . backfires. We could lose everything."

  "If we were about to be hit in Engineering by enemy fire," Pahner asked, "what would you do then?"

  "We'd be under phase drive!" Krasnitsky snapped back. "You can't be hit in tunnel space. There's no procedure for this!"

  "Shit," Pahner said quietly. It was the first time anyone had ever heard him swear. "Sergeant Major, get the hell out of there."

  "I don't see any timers."

  "They're there."

  "Probably. But if I can get the shooter . . ."

  "They could be on a dead-man's switch," Pahner said, gritting his teeth as he stepped off the elevator. "This is an order, Sergeant Major Kosutic. Get out of there. Now."

  "I'm closer to getting out going through the shooter than going back," Kosutic said mildly.

  Pahner looked at the first bomb. As Kosutic had said, there were no telltales but it smelled like it had anti-tamper devices. He turned to the sergeant of the guard, Sergeant Bilali from First Platoon, who looked as cool as a cucumber for someone standing within a few feet of a bomb that could go off at any moment. The private next to him wasn't quite as cool; she was watching the sergeant's back and breathing deeply and regularly. It was a common method of dealing with combat stress, which she obviously was. Pahner arched an eyebrow at Bilali.

  "Demo?"

  "On the way, Sir," the sergeant replied crisply.

  "Okay," Pahner said with a nod and a glance around. If the bomber gave them time, they could try blowing the bombs in place. The explosion of a charge placed next to one of them would tend to break up the plasma jet from a shaped charge, and the
bulkheads were armored to protect the plasma conduits. Without a shaped-charge jet, there was no way the explosions would penetrate. Of course, that assumed that they didn't go off before the demolition teams could get to them.

  " 'If you can keep your head when all about you . . .' " Pahner whispered, thinking furiously.

  "Excuse me, Sir?"

  "Is there someone following up the Sergeant Major?"

  "Yes, Sir," Bilali said. "There are teams coming from either end, and we have one cutting across the middle of Engineering, as well."

  "Okay, we all know we're brave, but there's a fine line between hardcore and stupid. Let's get the heck out of here and seal this passage in case these things go off."

  "Roger that, Sir." The expression on Bilali's midnight-black face didn't even flicker as he touched his communicator. "Guard. Everyone but the point teams, out of the passage. Seal it at both ends." The passage made a circuit of the ship. Although there were side connections, those stayed sealed as a matter of course. It was only the central passageway hatches that remained open. And the intervening blast-doors. If worse came to worst . . .

  "Captain Krasnitsky," Pahner said, "what happens if we shut all the doors and the bombs detonate anyway?"

  "Bad things," a female voice snapped. "This is Lieutenant Commander Furtwangler, Chief Engineer. First of all, the blast-doors aren't designed for multiple plasma failures. They might not stop it from flooding Engineering. And even if they do keep the plasma from killing us all, we still drop out of TD. We probably don't get the drive back with that much damage, and even if we do, we lose most of our range. Satan only knows what secondary damage would occur. Bad things," she repeated.

  Pahner nodded as the blast-doors shut on his Marines. Bad things seemed to be happening all over.

  * * *

  Kosutic had noted the pattern of placement, and as the sixth blast-door came up, she leapt forward, skidding on her stomach into view of where the next bomb would be.

  Ensign Guha triggered a burst of beads that shrieked through where the sergeant major would have been had she come around the corner running upright. The kick from the powerful pistol threw it up over the ensign's head despite her two-handed grip, and she never had time to get back on target.

  Eva Kosutic was a veteran of a hundred firefights and fired thousands of bead rounds every week just to keep in practice. No hacked assassination program, however well-designed, could beat that experience. Her own bead pistol tracked onto the young ensign's throat, and she triggered a single round.

  The five-millimeter bead was accelerated to four kilometers per second in its twenty-centimeter flight up the barrel. When it struck the ensign's neck, one centimeter to the left of her trachea, it shattered, converting all of its kinetic energy to explosive hydrostatic shock in a fraction of a second.

  The ensign's head exploded off her body and was thrown backwards as the severed carotids jetted blood all over the unarmed bomb at her feet.

  Before the decapitated body had hit the floor, Kosutic was up and running. The armed bombs were probably remotely triggered, but they would also have a backup. Any plan this meticulous was bound to have a backup. The simplest would be a timer, but a good addition would be a dead-man's switch controlled by the assassin's toot. When the ensign died, which she more or less had just done, the toot would send out a signal—probably when all brain activity ceased—to detonate the bombs. But although the ensign-zombie was for all practical purposes dead, brain activity in a case of severance continued for a few seconds. Which was why the sergeant major had shot her in the throat, not the head.

  All of the bombs were behind Eva Kosutic, and she intended to ensure that they stayed as far away as possible. She keyed her communicator. "Fire in the hole! Shut all blast-doors!" she shouted as she leapt over the sprayed blood and past the ensign's head, still accelerating.

  * * *

  Captain Pahner had just opened his mouth to repeat the sergeant major's order when there were a whole series of thumps, and the world went sideways.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Roger was never sure afterwards if it was the General Quarters alarm or the rough hands of the Marines that startled him awake.

  The Marines' faces were unfamiliar to his mostly sleeping brain in the dim red emergency lights, under the banshee howl of the alarm, and he reacted violently as he was slammed roughly into a bulkhead. As a member of the Imperial Family, his toot was equipped with several bits of software not available to the general public, including a complete "hardwired" hand-to-hand combat package and an "assassin" program which did several interesting things. Moreover, the prince had always been athletic. He held black belts in three separate "hard" martial arts, and his sensei (not surprisingly) was one of the best in the entire Empire of Man.

  With all of that going for him, he was not a safe person to jump upon, without warning, in the dark, whatever Bravo Company might have thought of him. Even taken by surprise in a sound sleep, he managed to kick backward, trying for a knee strike as one arm was wrenched to the left and inserted in a sleeve. Considering his surprised, sleep-groggy state, it was a remarkably well-executed attempt . . . and accomplished absolutely nothing.

  If the members of The Empress' Own were surprised by his response, they had a surprise or two for him, as well. Like the fact that their toots offered hardwired booster packages of their own . . . and that all of them had spent even longer training in the martial arts than he had. He was spun around and struck in the solar plexus for his troubles.

  The two Bravo Company privates seemed unconcerned by his chokes and gasps as they expertly stuffed him into an emergency vac suit, and once they had him in the suit, with his helmet on, they sat on him. Literally. He was pushed roughly to the deck, where the two bodyguards pinned him down and sat on him, weapons trained outward.

  Due to the oversized cretin sitting on his chest, he couldn't reach his suit controls, and since the com was in its default "off" mode, he couldn't even call Captain Pahner and order him to get these slope-browed bruisers to let him up. Although he was technically their commander, the privates paid no attention to his first few queries, shouted through the plastron of the helmet. As soon as he realized his efforts were ineffective, he gave up. The hell if he was going to be ignored by these goons.

  After what seemed an eternity, but couldn't have been more than ten or fifteen minutes, the compartment hatch opened to reveal two Marines in battle armor. The guards sitting on him stood up, one of them giving him a hand to help him to his feet, and left the compartment. The two new guards, faceless nonentities behind the flickering visors of their powered armor, sat him on the bed and sandwiched him between them, weapons trained outward once again. But in this case, the weapons were a quad-barreled heavy bead gun and a plasma cannon trained, respectively, toward the door and toward the next compartment. If boarders came slicing through the wall, they were in for an uncomfortable surprise.

  He now had time to examine the vac suit and found that—surprise, surprise—the com was limited to the emergency "Guard" frequency only. It was an unforgivable sin, roughly comparable to eating one's own young, to use that frequency in anything but a true emergency. That was a lesson (one of the few) he'd learned quite painfully during his mandatory ordeal at the Academy, and since the troopers didn't seem to be hostile—just very, very determined to keep him safe—this probably didn't count as a "true" emergency. So no communicator.

  Which left him to ponder what was going on with virtually no data. There was air, but the emergency lights were on. He reached for the latches on his suit to take the helmet off, but one of the armored Marines tapped his hand away from them. The tap was obviously intended to be polite but firm, but the pseudo-muscles of the armor turned it into a stinging slap.

  Rubbing his knuckles, Roger leaned over until his helmet was in contact with the Marine's.

  "Would you mind telling me what the hell is going on?"

  "Captain Pahner said to wait until he got here, Your Hig
hness," a female soprano, badly distorted by the helmets, responded.

  Roger nodded and leaned back against the bulkhead, flipping his head inside the helmet to try to make his ponytail lie flat and smooth. So, either there'd been a coup, and Pahner was in on it, or there'd been some sort of emergency, and Pahner wanted to be able to give him a complete report rather than a garbled version second- or third-hand.

  If the second scenario were correct, well and good. He would just cool his heels here for a while, then find out what the problem was. If it was a case of the first scenario . . . He looked at the armored Marine with the bead cannon pointed at the door. There was probably a snowball's chance in hell that he could actually wrest it away from the Marine and kill Pahner with it, but if this was a coup, his life was worth less than spit anyway. Might as well go out like a MacClintock.

  He walked mentally back over every step of the event, and noticed that the floor had stopped vibrating. The background hum of the various life-support and drive systems had become so familiar that it was unnoticed, but now, with it gone, its absence was obvious. If those systems were off-line, they were in deep trouble indeed . . . which at least militated against the coup theory.

  Then he thought about the two troopers who'd dragged him out of bed. They'd suited him up and literally sat on him for a good ten minutes before anyone showed up to relieve them. And they hadn't had suits. If the cabin had lost pressure, they would have died rapid and unpleasant deaths. So the privates, at least, thought he was worth keeping alive. Which also argued against the coup theory.

  They'd also risked their lives to protect him, and while that willingness to risk or lose their lives to keep their charges alive was assumed on the part of the Imperial Family, Roger had never been in an emergency. There'd never been a situation in which his bodyguard's life was threatened. Well, there'd been that one disastrous encounter on a vacation, but the bodyguard was never actually in danger, whatever the young lady had threatened. . . .