Pale and shaking, skin clammy with ice-cold sweat, Michael was still in shock when Yazdi finally got the truck’s antique holovid to work. She found a news channel, and they listened as a stunned commentator described the awful scene that had greeted the early arrivals for the day shift at the Barkersville police station. The local police commander came on and in a voice that was equal parts shock, horror, and bafflement admitted that they had no idea who might have caused the carnage. He could not comment further. Because one of their troopers had been killed, the matter was being handed over to DocSec for investigation.
“Got away clean,” Yazdi said laconically. She flicked off the holovid.
Michael grunted. There had been nothing clean about it at all. He was ashamed to admit it, but he had enjoyed knifing the DocSec trooper. The fierce burst of exhilaration exploding through his body as the knife went home had been pure ecstasy. But not the rest. They were ordinary coppers, with wives, kids, dogs, houses, mortgages, all that sort of stuff. He felt soiled by the sheer brutality of what he and Yazdi had done.
Michael got out of the truck and walked a little deeper into the woods in which they were hiding. He needed to be alone. He needed to get away from Yazdi. The realization that a large part of Yazdi was an utterly ruthless, totally amoral killing machine had come as a huge shock. He never had thought of her that way. Up to then, she had been only another marine, another green uniform, another reliable NCO. Yes, they needed guns, but did those guns have to come at the cost of five lives?
The life of one DocSec trooper would have been enough, surely.
Ten minutes later he made his way back. Yazdi looked at him sympathetically. “I know it’s not easy, but they are the fucking Hammer. So tuck it away, sir, and let’s start thinking about what comes next.”
Michael nodded. Yazdi was probably right. Christ, she had better be, though he knew he would never be able to tuck it away.
Saturday, December 18, 2399, UD
With a screech of ancient brakes, Yazdi stopped the truck safely under the cover of a thick stand of trees, its nose rammed firmly into a clump of bushes.
“This’ll do,” Yazdi declared after a good look around. “I’ll cut some branches to screen us from the track.”
“Okay. I’ll take a look at the base.” Michael climbed stiffly out of the truck. It had been a long and tense drive up from Barkersville, but surprisingly, they had not been stopped once. A small convoy of DocSec trucks that had ignored them completely while racing south had been the only evidence of a response to their attack on the Barkersville police station.
According to Michael’s neuronics, they were on the far side of a small rise overlooking Kraneveldt Planetary Defense Force Base. He stood for a moment to enjoy a rare sense of peace, the last rays of a slowly setting sun warm on his back, the western sky a lurid mass of gold and scarlet slashes shot haphazardly across a blue sky deepening slowly to black. He had left the stolen police handheld in the truck; it was quiet now except for an occasional laconic report. However hard the Hammers were looking for what they were calling the Barkersville terrorist gang, they were not looking anywhere near Kraneveldt. Until they kicked the Hammers again, Michael reckoned, he and Yazdi were safe.
Crawling up to the crest of the rise, he turned his attention to the Hammer base. The place was enormous, an ugly mass of ceramcrete that sprawled out across the shallow valley in front of them, orange floodlights coming on all across the huge Hammer base to mark the end of another interminably long Commitment day. Nothing moved; the base was quiet to the point of being dead. Weekends were weekends, Michael thought, even for those godless Hammer sons of bitches.
He settled down to have a long hard look at what he thought might be their next target.
The flight lines lay beyond the clutter of hangars and plascrete buildings of all sizes that infested the airbase. There, two long rows of aircraft were tucked away from the weather under open-sided plasteel-roofed hangars that stretched down one side of the runway. Most were ground attack aircraft, together with a squadron of air superiority fighters. Michael dismissed them as of no interest. He was confident he could fly a lander; Hammer planetary defense aircraft were an entirely different matter. Toward the far right-hand end of the runway was a small collection of dark gray lumps parked out in the open, seven of them in all. Aha, Michael thought.
Hoping to find an easy way in, he studied the base’s defenses at length. In the end, he gave up. The Hammer knew how to build fences, that was for sure. He rolled onto his back and handed the glasses back to Yazdi.
“You have a look. I can’t see any obvious way in.”
Taking the binoculars, Yazdi looked long and hard before shaking her head. “Nor me. We’d need an assault lander to get through.”
Michael nodded. “So, if we’re going to get in. .”
“It’s through the front gate.”
“Thought you might say that. Let me have another look.”
In the fading light, Michael studied the landers with interest. The binoculars Yazdi had stolen were not much good, but they were enough for him to see that at least two were ground attack landers. Judging by the slight flare in their after hulls, they were Hammer Space Dynamics LGA-44’s; Fed intelligence had codenamed them Lanyards. Introduced into front-line service just in time for the Third Hammer War, the Lanyards had been the backbone of Hammer ground attack forces ever since; even now they were regarded with respect by the FedWorld military. The Lanyard might be crudely engineered by Fed standards, but it was simple, tough, reliable, and heavily armored.
Michael grunted in satisfaction. The Lanyards, with their massive blunt noses and brooding bulk, might be obsolescent, but they were all business. They were brutally capable machines, and Michael was happy to see them. He handed the binoculars to Yazdi. “Give me a moment, Corp. I want to look at something.” Closing his eyes, he started to look through everything the TECHINT knowledge base in his neuronics could tell him about the Lanyard ground attack lander.
He had an idea.
Saturday, December 18, 2399, UD
Four little flybots that had been thrown out hours earlier from a fast-moving Fed embassy people mover sat unmoving in a rock-littered field.
At last, with infinite care, one of the flybots, lying upside down against a large tree stump, got to work. First, a tiny wand barely a centimeter long emerged from a belly port, the tip a microvid camera no bigger than a pinhead. Moments later, a second wand appeared, this one tipped with a tiny radio frequency sensor. After a short pause, the two sensors began an excruciatingly careful scan of the area. Then, for good measure, they repeated the entire process one more time, the onboard AI programmed to make absolutely sure that nothing remotely man-made was watching. There was another short delay before the flybot, happy now that the coast was clear, began the painful process of getting itself right side up. Extending its rotor blades, it slowly levered itself first onto its side and then, with the tiniest of pushes, onto its belly, the two sensor wands snapping back below its skin as it did.
There was another long pause before two more wands emerged to carry out another painfully careful scan to make sure nothing had changed. Reassured, the flybot bent the tips of its lower rotors down until they touched the ground and, lifting itself up, crawled the meter or so it needed to be clear of the tree stump for takeoff.
A final check was followed by another pause as it signaled to its brothers that the coast was clear. Then, without warning, the rotors ran up to speed, and the flybot was up off the ground. Accelerating hard, its rotors bit deep into the late morning air, driving the bot low across the broken ground before it climbed steeply to track southeast at a steady 120 kph. Seconds later, it was followed by its three partners.
The little flybots had a rendezvous with the survivors from the
