Changer of Worlds

Tsakakis’ team members reacted almost as quickly as he had. They were already opening the special wall lockers for the heavy weapons stored in them and assembling in the secretary’s outer office by the time he made it out of the surveillance room. But just like him, their reaction was one of trained reflex and guard dog instinct which scarcely consulted their forebrains at all. They had no idea at all what was happening.

“Someone just attacked Citizen Chairman Pierre!” he barked, and saw his own shock in their expressions. “I don’t know what’s happening at that end,” he went on tersely, “but it didn’t sound good. And if this is some kind of coup attempt, the Citizen Secretary has to be on the same list, so—”

The office door flew open, and half a dozen weapons swung towards it. The uniformed citizen sergeant who’d opened it flung out his hands to show they were empty just in time, but he scarcely seemed to notice that he had just come within a few grams of trigger pressure of dying.

“They’re coming up from the garage!” he gasped. “Don’t know how many. They blew their way in. At least a dozen of them—in battle armor! Not more than one level away!”

The door to Saint-Just’s inner office opened, and the citizen secretary stood in the opening, a long-barreled military style pulser in his right hand, but Tsakakis barely glanced at him.

“John! You and Hannah are right here on the Citizen Secretary. Al, you, Steve, and Mariano take the lift shafts. I want Isabela and Janos on the emergency stairs. Nobody gets through without my personal authorization—is that clear?”

Heads nodded, and taut-faced bodyguards dashed for their assigned positions.

“What about me, Sir?” the citizen sergeant demanded.

“If they’re in battle armor, you need a bigger gun, Sarge,” Tsakakis told him with a grim smile, and reached back into the locker for a plasma carbine. “You checked out on this thing?”

“Not in the last nine or ten months, Sir. But I guess it’ll come back to me in a hurry, won’t it?”

“It better, Sarge. It damned well better.”

* * *

Gricou forged ahead down the hallway. Somehow, Jackson had managed to get in front of her anyway, and her armor audio pickups brought her the whining thunder of the sergeant’s flechette gun as he spun to fire a short, professional burst down a cross corridor.

A thin haze of smoke eddied down the hall, and she heard the sound of small arms fire from behind, as well. So far there was nothing dangerous behind her, but she didn’t begin to have enough people to hold open a line of retreat to the parking garage, so she wasn’t trying to. Her rearguard’s job was just to keep the lightly armed regular security types off her back until she got her hands on Saint-Just. Once they had him, they’d have the only door key they needed. But if they didn’t get him…

She checked her HUD schematic again, and grunted in satisfaction. Less than three minutes since they’d detonated the breaching charges, and they were only one floor below their objective.

Ahead of her, Jackson charged the lift doors. A stream of pulser darts cascaded off his battle armor, but he turned straight into them and triggered his flechette gun. Someone shrieked in agony, and the pulser fire chopped off abruptly. The sergeant started to punch the lift button, but Gricou’s sharply barked command stopped him.

“We’re taking the direct route!” she told him, and beckoned for Corporal Taylor and her demolition charges.

Tsakakis checked the charge on his plasma rifle again, and then scrubbed sweat from his forehead. Was he making the right call? Or was his decision to fort up the worst one he could have made? It had been automatic, made without any true consideration at the conscious level, but that didn’t necessarily make it wrong.

One set of instincts screamed at him to get the citizen secretary the hell out of here. No one seemed to have a clue about what was truly happening, and the earbug of his personal com brought him only confusion and panic while State Security’s duty personnel tried frantically to somehow bring order out of chaos. The only things he knew for certain were that someone had attacked the head of state and that other attackers were actually here, inside the building. That should have made putting distance between them and his charge his number one priority. But he didn’t know where else there might be attackers, and he did know that there was nowhere else on the planet where there were more StateSec reinforcements than right here in this building. All he had to do was keep Oscar Saint-Just alive until those reinforcements could arrive.

Corporal Taylor’s charges exploded, and the ceiling of the corridor disappeared. Flame and debris erupted out of the sudden breach, and one of Tsakakis’ team members became a mangled corpse. But two others were waiting, and Sergeant Amos Jackson died instantly as two plasma bolts slammed into his armor almost simultaneously.

Alina Gricou swore harshly as what was left of the sergeant fell back through the hole. Pulser darts and flechettes were no threat to battle armor; plasma rifles certainly were, and what the hell were they doing here?

Fresh alarms wailed as the thermal bloom of the plasma which had killed Jackson started fires, both here and on the floor above, but that was the least of her worries. It would take more than a fire to inconvenience someone in battle armor, but if there were plasma rifles waiting up there, then things were about to turn really ugly.

“Taylor, Bensen, Yuan! Grenades—now!”

Tsakakis recognized the sound of exploding grenades, and his jaw clenched. They were coming from the lift shafts. He’d been afraid of that, and a sharp spasm of grief twisted him. StateSec’s institutional paranoia over its commander’s security meant his people were probably more heavily armed than their attackers had anticipated, but aside from the limited protection from the anti-ballistic fabric of their tunics, they were completely unarmored.

More grenades exploded, and he heard someone screaming endlessly, terribly over the team’s dedicated channel.

“John! Take Hannah and get out there and back up Al!”

Citizen Corporal John Stillman nodded curtly and jerked his head at Citizen Private Flanders, and the two of them headed out into the smoke.

“Now!” Gricou barked, and another pair of Marines vaulted up to the next floor. Even in a planetary gravity, their armor’s exoskeletons made it a trivial feat. What was not trivial were the acquired gymnastic skills which made it possible for them to twist like bipedal cats in midair to bring their weapons to bear. Their flechette guns whined and thundered, belching death, but it took precious instants for their armor sensors to find a target. They tried to compensate by laying down suppressing fire, but the sole surviving bodyguard covering the waiting area around the lift shaft wasn’t where they’d expected him to be. Their flechettes blew corridor walls into fragments and dust, and one of them saw him and swung his weapon towards him in the same instant that he pressed the firing stud.

The Marine died a fragment of a second before him… but only because plasma bolts traveled at near light- speed and flechettes didn’t.

John Stillman and Hannah Flanders raced past the uniformed citizen sergeant and flung themselves to their bellies with their plasma rifles trained down the hallway. Neither of them liked lying in the middle of the corridor that way, but without battle armor, they had to respect the danger zone of their own weapons. The thermal bloom from a plasma rifle was vicious, which meant neither dared to get in front of the other, and that they couldn’t get too close in against the walls. It also explained why having a citizen sergeant they didn’t know and had never trained with behind them was one more worry. The last thing they needed was to have him start blasting away over them with his plasma carbine!

But then the citizen sergeant suddenly became a very minor concern. Stillman just glimpsed the vague loom of a figure through the wavefront of smoke rolling down the passage towards him, and raised his heavy weapon. Unfortunately, he was dependent upon the unaided human eye, while the Marine headed towards him had the full capabilities of her armor’s sensors. She “saw” him—and Flanders—before he’d even realized she was there, and the blast of flechettes tore both of them apart.