Two Draka troopers had vaulted down from the terrace. The building above it had been the HQ offices of Chandragupta Base; now it was burning rubble, after the cluster-shell hits. The troopers were bulky and sexless, visored helmets and articulated cermet armor; they went to their stomachs and scanned back and forth across the flat runway before them. Nothing moved on it, nothing except the smoke and flames from smashed aircraft that had been caught on launch. One had gotten into the air before the homing missile hit, and its ruins sprawled across half a kilometer. The air was heavy with the oily smell of burning fuel and scorched earth.
There were smashed revetment hangars across the way. Something was moving there. A trio of low beetling shapes moved out onto the pavement, their gun pods swiveling: light tanks. The two Draka infantrymen rose and trotted toward them, and more followed over the retaining wall. They moved with impressive ease under their burdens of armor and equipment, spreading out into a dispersed formation. Good, Marya thought. They’ll be concentrating on the link-up. She waited a hundred heartbeats, then a hundred more. Waiting was the worst. Running and shooting you didn’t have time to be frightened . . . Mission first, she reminded herself. A bollixed-up mission to save remnants from the worst disaster in decades. There was data in the base computers which must not be allowed into enemy hands.
Marya rose into a crouch. She was wearing a standard Alliance base-personnel gray coverall, with Indian markings. That fitted her cover identity; the bomblet launcher in her hands did not . . . Runway to her left and rear, hectares of it, swarming with enemy troops now. HQ complex ahead, and she would just have to take her chances. A deep breath, and now. She sprinted back along her path, leapt, caught the lip of the wall and rolled over it. Nothing on the way back, nothing but a steamcar in the middle of the gardens, bullet-riddled and . . . not empty. A body lying half-out the driver’s door, a pistol in one hand. She moved quickly from one cover to the next, feeling lungs hot and taut despite the dry-season cool of the air.
In through the front doors, and there were more bodies, enough to make the air heavy with the burnt-pork-and-shit stink of close combat. Past the front offices, and the light level sank to a dim gloom, shadows moving with uneven flamelight. She stopped in a doorway long enough to pull the filter over her nose and mouth, then froze. Steps coming down the hall, booted feet.
Sorry if you’re a friendly, she thought, and plunged out into the corridor with her finger already tightening.
Schoop. The launcher kicked against her shoulder, and the 35mm projectile was on its way as the Draka assault rifle came up. Marya went boneless and dropped, as the round impacted on the center of the soldier’s breastplate. That was a ceramic-fiber-metal-synthetic sandwich . . . but her bomblet was a shaped charge. The finger of superheated plasma speared through the armor, through vaporizing flesh, splashed against the backplate. Body fluids turned to steam and blew outwards through the soft resistance. Marya threw herself upright and ran forward; she tried to leap the corpse and the spreading puddle around it, but her boots went tack-tack on the linoleum for a minute afterwards.
Nothing moved as she tracked through toward the command center. Critical window, she thought; the moments between the assault landing and the arrival of the Intelligence teams. Soldiers had a natural preference for dealing with the things that might shoot back at them, and so might leave an area already swept lightly guarded. She turned another corridor, came to a makeshift barricade. The bodies beyond were Indian, a scratch squad of office workers and one perimeter guard in infantry kit; they bore no wounds, but lay as if they had died in convulsions. Marya’s skin itched, as if insects were crawling under it. Contact nerve agent, she thought, and put an antidote tab between her back teeth. That might work . . .
The stairs that led down into the control center were ahead. It would be guarded, but . . . She turned aside, into an office. It was empty, with a cup of tea still on the desk and the screen of the terminal flickering, as if the occupant—Ranjit Singh, from the nameplate on the door—might return any second. A quick wrench with her knife opened the ventilation shaft. The American pulled a pair of lightmag goggles out of a pocket and slipped them over her head. Darkness vanished, replaced by a peculiar silvery flatness. Marya slung the bomblet launcher down her back, took a deep breath, and chinned herself on the edge of the ventilator.
Just wide enough, she thought. Just.
* * *
The Draka working over the base computer had the gear-wheel emblem of Technical Section on her shoulder; so did the two gray-uniformed serf Auxiliaries helping her. They were all in battle armor, though, a technical commando unit tasked with front-line electronic reconnaissance. Marya could see them all, down the short section of vertical shaft; she was lying full-length in the horizontal passageway above, with only her head out. That ought to make her nearly invisible from below, with the wire grille in the ceiling between her and them. And . . . yes, movement just out of sight. Probably troopers, guarding the tech. The peripheral units of the Alliance computer were open, and boxes of crackle-finished Draka electronics set up about it, a spiderweb of plug-in lines and cross-connections.
The OSS agent strained to hear.
“Careful, careful!” the Draka was saying. “Up ten . . . Fo’ mo’. Right, now keep the feed modulated within ten percent of those parameters, and she won’t blow when Ah open the casing.”
Another figure, a middle-aged Indian in uniform, with his arms secured behind his back. A bayoneted rifle rested between his shoulder blades, jabbed lightly.
“Yes, indeed,” he babbled in singsong English. “That is the way of it.”
Too bad. The black-uniformed TechSec specialist pulled the visor of her helmet down and took up a miniature cutting torch. Cracking the core unit, Marya thought grimly. The embedded instruction sets of a central computer and the crucial hard memory were physically confined in its core, even on civilian models. This was a maximum-security military Phoebos, and it would be set to slag down unless you were very careful.
Careful is a word, Marya thought. This mission was important enough to make her expendable . . . but there was no point in being reckless. Her lips moved back from her teeth behind the mask. What was it Uncle Nate used to say? “A good soldier has to be ready to die. A suicidal one just leaves you with another damned empty slot to train someone for.”
If I push the launcher over the edge at arm’s length, she thought, and then drop the satchel charge right away, the ceiling should shelter me from most of the blast. That would certainly take care of the mission, now that the Draka had conveniently opened up the armored protection around the core. Then I can go back up the shaft, and try to make it out.
Soundlessly, she mouthed: “And maybe the horse will learn to sing.”
Millimeter by millimeter, she inched backward until only the end of the launcher tube was over the lip of the vertical shaft. Her other hand brought the explosive charge up, plastique and metal and soft padded overcase. It scraped gently against the tube wall in the narrow space between hip and panel, and the sound seemed roaringly loud. No louder than the beat of blood in her ears. Stupid, stupid, a voice called at the back of her mind. You volunteered, you’re too stupid to live, you could be home now.