Hampered by the gate, Michael was not fast enough. His hands flailed the air, but now Kowalski was toppling to one side, his head and chest already over the guardrail, the rest threatening to follow. With one last desperate effort, Michael locked one hand into the man’s assault vest, the other grabbing the probe an instant before Kowalski’s hands let it slip.
“What’s up now, Kowalski?” the corporal shouted.
“Having trouble with this damn probe, corp,” Michael said, wincing at his piss-poor attempt to copy the man’s voice. He pulled Kowalski back and let the body slump forward over the safety gate. “I’ll be a while.”
Michael might have been unhappy with his impersonation, but the corporal wasn’t. “Just get a move on, you fat fuck,” he yelled.
“Yes, corp.”
The boots walked away; Michael urged him on. He let a minute drag past. Gun in hand, he ran along the catwalk, half climbing, half sliding down the ladder until his feet crashed into the ground. He turned and headed for the door, then stopped.
Killing Kowalski had changed nothing. He was still trapped with nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
Corporal Whatever-His-Name would be waiting outside, wondering what the hell had happened to Kowalski. He would come back, Michael would shoot him too, and then all hell would break loose as the rest of Team Victor came crashing in and shot the shit out of him.
The corporal did come back. “Kowalski, you useless toe rag, what the-”
Michael shot him, the racket of the assault rifle shockingly loud, then dived for cover. “Come on, you fucking Hammer bastards,” he shouted. “You want me, you come and get me.”
The silence was complete. It dragged on. Michael wondered what was going on. Where were they?
He got his answer soon enough. A series of flat cracks preceded the arrival of more microgrenades than Michael could count. The small black shapes arced through the warehouse door and landed on the ceramcrete floor, bouncing for a few meters before bursting into boiling clouds of smoke.
Pain hammered at Michael’s skull, his mouth and throat burned, and his chest was a searing ball of flame. When he tried opening his eyes, he wished he hadn’t. It just made things worse.
A pair of hands dragged him upright; the pain redoubled. “Come on, you little bastard. I know you’re awake. Throw some water on him, sergeant.”
The water hit Michael full in the face. A hand followed, a stinging slap hard across his cheek. He cringed back, hands coming up to keep his unseen attacker away.
“Open your Kraa-damned eyes, Helfort, or I’ll make you wish you had.”
Michael did, squinting through agony-filled eyes at a face he had hoped to see only on a dead man, a face dominated by eyes so pale that only a hint of amber remained, the eyes of a killer.
“Fuck you, Hartspring,” Michael whispered, “you asshole.”
Hartspring’s fist lashed out, stopping only millimeters from Michael’s face. For an instant, it hung there, utterly still. Then it pulled back. “You are lucky, Helfort, that Chief Councillor Polk has ordered me to deliver you to McNair without a single scratch on that pretty face of yours.”
“Good for Mister Polk, you piece of Hammer sh-”
This time Hartspring’s fist did not stop. It smashed into Michael’s stomach with tremendous force, hitting just below the ribs to blast the air out of his lungs. The enormous power of the blow lifted him bodily into the air to drop with a sickening crash on the floor.
Thin, bloodless lips pressed tight in a sneer of disdain, Hartspring leaned over Michael as he lay on his back with his mouth working to drag air back into tortured lungs. “Unfortunately for you, Helfort,” he said, “Chief Councillor Polk said nothing about not hurting you.” He straightened up. “Let’s get you cleaned up, and then I’ll tell you what happens next. I’ll come back in an hour, and when I do, I suggest you cooperate. If you don’t, I will hurt you, and I will go on hurting you until you do.”
“Screw you,” Michael whispered to Hartspring’s back.
“A public trial?” Michael said.
Hartspring nodded. “That’s what I said. A public trial in front of the full bench of the Supreme Tribunal for the Preservation of the Faith.”
“Why bother? Everyone will know it’s a farce.”
“We both know that,” Hartspring said, “though I’d prefer, let me see … yes, I’d prefer to call it a piece of political theater. You’re a celebrity, you see, a bit of hero to many, so we can’t just shoot you out of hand. We need to be seen to be doing things in the right way.”
“What a crock.”
“It certainly is a crock, but what do I care? There will be a trial, you will be found guilty, and you will be sentenced to death, only this time your friends won’t be there to help you escape justice. Oh, no; when the Hammer of Kraa sentences someone to death, they die.” Hartspring paused. “The only difference with you,” he continued, “is that you won’t be shot. No, that’d be too quick. No, we’ll make sure you die the slowest, the most painful death a man can suffer …”
Michael shivered, the fear all-consuming.
“… because after all you have done to us, it’s the least we can do to you. Now, enough talk. We leave for McNair in an hour.”
“Where am I being taken?” Michael asked the man sitting opposite him as they waited for the armored personnel carrier to take him to McNair. As much as he could like any Hammer, he liked Corporal Haditha. He was one of the few marines to treat him with any consideration, not that he deserved any. He had shot one of Team Victor right between the eyes, after all.
Haditha took a while to answer. “The Gruj,” he said at last. “Where else?”
Of course, thought Michael, his pulse accelerating as a frisson of fear shivered its way up his spine. Where else? He had spent long enough with the NRA and the Revivalists to know all there was to know about the Councillor Carlos C. Grujic Building. There were precious few born on the Hammer worlds who did not know some poor unfortunate who had been through the place-there had been tens of millions of them over the years-and every last one of them feared and hated it.
The Gruj’s reputation as the very heart of the Hammer’s all-pervading system of state terror was well deserved.
Michael had talked to an NRA trooper who’d been through the place, one of the very few to survive the experience. Her story had been one of pure horror, and Michael was not looking forward to sharing the experience.
Below what looked like an office block no different from any other lay a cold world, a world silent apart from the subdued hiss of an air-conditioning system set to maintain a temperature not far above freezing, a world that never slept, a world created for the endless stream of black trucks that shuttled DocSec’s prisoners into the Gruj.
Hounded mercilessly from the arrival dock down bleak corridors, the new arrivals were fed through the heavily armored security post, then down to the first of four levels of unpainted, bare-floored plascrete rooms and into the massive in-processing center on Level A. There the bewildered and terrified sweepings of three worlds were stripped naked, searched with callous indifference, doused in icy water, and microchipped before being bundled, dripping wet and shaking with cold, into orange coveralls and plasfiber boots, their identities torn away along with their clothes and dignity, their identity a number stenciled front and back.
From Level A, prisoners would be herded down to the holding cells on Levels B and C by silent but always brutal guards who were never slow to use their plasteel batons. There they would stay, sometimes for minutes, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks. But in the end, they all ended up being dragged to Level D for interrogation in rooms harshly lit by banks of halogen overheads that threw a pitiless white light from which there
