the grenade went off. The carpet of the sitting room beyond was on fire. A man lay in the middle of it, screaming and beating the floor with the butt of his pistol. Huber's burst stitched him from the middle of one shoulderblade to the other. The man flopped like a fish on dry land, then shuddered silent.
There was a doorway ahead of Huber and another to the right, toward the back of the building. Huber went straight, into a small foyer around the elevator shaft. The top of the cage remained just above floor level.
Huber jerked open the door across the foyer. The room beyond was a mass of flame. It'd been a bedroom, and the buzzbomb had ignited all the fabric. Huber slammed the door again. His hands were singed; and only his faceshield had saved his eyes and lungs from the fire's shriveling touch.
At the back of the foyer was a window onto the grounds; concussion from the warhead going off in the bedroom had blown out the casement an instant before it slammed the connecting door. Through the empty window, Huber heard the lift fans of an aircar spin up.
He jumped to the opening. To his right a closed car with polarized windows sat on a pad cantilevered off the back of the building, trembling as its driver built up speed in the fan blades. It was a large vehicle, capable of carrying six in comfort. The front passenger door was open and a uniformed man leaned out of it, firing a heavy slug-thrower back toward the sitting room. The aluminum skirts that propelled the osmium projectiles vaporized in the dense magnetic flux, blazing as white muzzle flashes in Huber's thermal vision.
Huber aimed between the hinge side of the car door and the jamb, then shot the guard in the neck and head. The fellow sprang forward like a headless chicken, flinging his gun away with nerveless hands.
The aircar lifted, the door swinging closed from momentum. Huber fired, starring the windscreen but not penetrating it. Deseau and Learoyd were in the doorway now, pocking the car's thick plastic side-panels; their sub-machine guns couldn't do real damage.
The car half-pivoted as its driver prepared to dive off the edge of the platform and use gravity to speed his escape. A buzzbomb detonated on the underside of the bow, flipping the vehicle over onto its back. The instant the warhead hit, Huber saw a spear of molten metal stab through the car's roof in a white dazzle. The driver would've been in direct line with the explosion-formed hypersonic jet.
The blast rocked Huber away from the window, but the car had taken the direct impact and the building had protected him from the worst of the remainder. Deseau and Learoyd, running toward the vehicle when the warhead went off, bounced into the wall behind them and now lay sprawled on the deck. Learoyd had managed to hang onto his sub-machine gun; Deseau patted the tiles numbly, trying to find his again.
A man crawled out of the overturned car. The right side of his face was bloody, but Huber recognized Senator Patroklos Graciano.
The senator stood with a look of desperation on his face. Huber braced his left elbow on the window opening and laid his ring sight at the base of Graciano's throat. He fired a short burst, flinging the man backward. Tufts of beard trimmed by the pellets swirled in the air, falling more slowly than the corpse.
There were figures still moving in the car. A stunningly beautiful woman tried to squirm out, hampered by the necklaces and jewel-glittering rings she clutched to her breasts with both hands. She wore a diaphanous shift that accentuated rather than hid her body, but on her a gunnysack would've been provocative.
Huber aimed. She looked up at him, her elbows on the chest of her lover so freshly dead that his corpse still shuddered. A powergun bolt blew out her left eyesocket and lifted the top of her skull. Her arms straightened convulsively, scattering the jewelry across the landing platform.
Major Steuben stood in the doorway from the sitting room, his pistol in his delicate right hand. His faceshield was raised and he was smiling.
The girl still in the car was probably a maid. She opened her mouth to scream when she saw her mistress die. The second pistol bolt snapped between her perfect teeth and nearly decapitated her. Her body thrashed wildly in the passenger compartment.
Learoyd was getting to his feet. Steuben grabbed the collar of Deseau's clamshell armor and jerked the sergeant upright; the major must have muscles like steel cables under his trim exterior. The muzzle of the powergun in his other hand was a white-hot circle.
He turned toward Huber, looking out of the adjacent window, and shouted, 'Come along, Lieutenant. We've taken care of our little problem and it's time to leave now.'
Huber met them in the sitting room. Steuben waved him toward the stairwell. Sergeant Deseau still walked like a drunk, so Huber grabbed his arm in a fireman's carry and half-lifted, half-dragged the man to the trucks. Every floor of the building was burning. The major was the last man out.
In all the cacophony -- the screams and the blasts and the weeping desperation -- that Arne Huber had heard in the past few minutes, there was only one sound that would haunt his future nightmares. That was Joachim Steuben's laughter as he blew a girl's head off.
If I buy the farm here on Plattner's World, Huber thought as he walked toward the open door of Major Steuben's office, they're going to have to name this the Lieutenant Arne C. Huber Memorial Hallway.
There's never a bad time for humor in a war zone. This was a better time than most.
'Come in and close the door, Lieutenant,' Steuben said as Huber raised his hand to knock on the jamb. 'And don't, if you please, attempt to salute me ever again. You're not very good at it.'
Huber obeyed meekly. The major was working behind a live display, entering data on the touchpad lying on his wooden desk. It wasn't a game this time: Steuben was finishing a task before he got on to the business who'd just walked in his door.
He shut down the display and met Huber's eyes. He smiled; Huber didn't try to smile back.
'This will be brief, Lieutenant,' Steuben said. 'The United Cities are in a state of war with Solace, or will be when the Senate meets in a few hours. There's been a second attack within UC territory by mercenaries in Solace pay. This one was directed against Senator Patroklos Graciano here in Benjamin.'
Steuben quirked a smile. 'It was quite a horrific scene, according to reports of the event,' he went on. 'Graciano and his whole household were killed.'
Huber looked at the man across the desk, remembering the same smile lighted by the flash of a powergun. 'If I may ask, sir?' he said. 'Why did the, ah, mercenaries attack the particular senator?'
'It's believed that the Solace authorities had made an attempt to turn the poor fellow against his own people,' the major said blandly. 'Graciano had gathered a great deal of information about Solace plans and was about to make a full report to the Senate. The attack forestalled him, but as a result of such blatant aggression even the former peace party in the Senate is unanimous in supporting military action against Solace.'
I wonder how many of the senators believe the official story, Huber thought, and how many are afraid they'll go the same way as Patroklos Graciano if they continue to get in the way of the Regiment's contract?
Well, it didn't really matter. Like he'd told Major Steuben last night, he wasn't a politician. Aloud he said, 'I see, sir.'
'None of that matters to you, of course,' Steuben continued. 'I called you here to say that a review of your actions at Rhodesville the day you landed has determined that you behaved properly and in accordance with the best traditions of the Regiment.'
He giggled. 'You may even get a medal out of it, Lieutenant.'
Huber's mouth was dry; for a moment he didn't trust himself to speak. Then he said, 'Ah, sir? Does this mean that I'm being returned to my platoon?'
Steuben looked up at Huber. He smiled. 'Well, Lieutenant,' he said, 'that's the reason I called you here in person instead of just informing you of the investigation outcome through channels. How would you like a transfer to A Company? You'd stay at the same rank, but you probably know already that the pay in A Company is better than the same grade levels in line units.'
'A Company?' Huber repeated. He couldn't have heard right. 'The White Mice, you mean?'
'Yes, Lieutenant,' Steuben said. His face didn't change in a definable way, but his smile was suddenly very hard. 'The White Mice. The company under my personal command.'
'I don't ...' Huber said, then realized that among the things he didn't know was how to end the sentence he'd begun. He let his voice trail off.
'Recent events have demonstrated that you're smart and that you're willing to use your initiative,' the major said. His fingers were tented before him, but his wrists didn't quite rest on the touchpad beneath them.
The smile became amused again. He added, 'Also, you can handle a gun. You'll have ample opportunity to
