“Gwalia?” Michael frowned. He shook his head to try to clear the mush from his brain. “But the missile base wasn’t on the target list. It’s too far north to be a priority.”
“Maybe Admiral Moussawi changed his mind about that. Anyway, I don’t give a rat’s ass. Whatever it was, it didn’t do the bad guys any favors.”
“They’re gone?”
“Not gone, dead. I don’t think they’ll bother us anymore. Anyway, it’s time we moved on. Can you stand?”
“Get me free of this damn hole and I will.”
Michael’s mouth dropped open when he saw the damage the blast had done. In every direction, the sparse vegetation had been stripped. The ground was littered with shattered trunks and shrubs piled in haphazard heaps along the foot of the reef wall. A body lay wrapped around a tree stump. More were scattered across the dirt. “What the hell,” he whispered, awestruck by the devastation.
“No time for sightseeing,” Shinoda said. She pulled Michael to his feet. He stood, swaying and unsteady. “The Hammers will be mighty pissed by all this, and I don’t want to be here when they arrive to see what the hell just happened.”
“Wait one,” Michael said. He pointed to an object, a white splash in his neuronics-boosted infrared vision, something hot against the cool of the ground. “There; what’s that?”
“Does it matter? We do need to go.”
“Bear with me, sergeant. I’ve a got a bad feeling about this.”
“Five minutes.”
“Two will be plenty.” Michael walked over to where the object lay. It was a jagged piece of flame-seared metal. He tried to lift it; it refused to move. “Shit, that is heavy,” he said. “Ceramsteel armor, I’d say.”
Shinoda frowned. “Ceramsteel armor?” she said. “Where the hell did that come from?”
“A warship, I think.” Michael straightened up and scanned the area around the piece of armor. “There,” he said. He set off through the debris. He stopped alongside a second piece of metal. “Damn them all to hell,” he said softly a moment later.
“What’s up?”
“See those?” Michael pointed to a meter-square cluster of holes punched into the metal fragment. “Those are pinchspace vortex generator ports.”
“So?”
“Hammer ports are hexagonal; ours are circular.’
“Oh!” Shinoda breathed in sharply. “One of ours?”
“From the size of the array, I’d say a deepspace heavy cruiser. Fucking Hammer bastards. Have a quick look around. It’d be good to identify her if we can.”
“Here,” Shinoda called out a minute later. She waved Michael over.
“What … Oh, no,” Michael said when he spotted the distinctive shape of a skinsuited body. “Who is it?”
Shinoda bent down to turn the body over. Michael was thankful that the helmet visor was so scorched and scarred that he could not see the face. “Chief Petty Officer … N … g … u … Nguyen,” she said, reading the name woven into the suit with some difficulty. “Poor bastard. Let me see if I can access the ID. Okay, she was Chief Petty Officer Maddi Nguyen, female, thirty-seven years old, posted to the Recognizant two years ago.”
Michael’s head snapped up in disbelief. “Did you say Recognizant?”
“I did.”
Michael shook his head in despair. “Recognizant was Admiral Moussawi’s ship.” He took a deep breath to fight back a sudden rush of anger. “Let’s go, sergeant. There’s nothing more we can do for any of them.”
They set off without another word, a pair of smoke-blackened, blood-soaked wrecks. What a sight we must be, Michael thought. And how will we stay out of the Hammer’s hands? We’ll be lucky to get ten klicks …
He stopped. “Sergeant, hold on.”
Shinoda looked around. “What’s up?” she asked.
“Look at the blast pattern,” Michael said. “The way the trees are lying, I’d say the Recognizant blew up somewhere to the northwest and was close to the ground when she did. That means the reef will have deflected some of the blast wave. Our mobibot was in a gully. It might still be there.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Shinoda said. “Let’s go see.”
The approaches to Gwalia were a sprawling master class in mindless devastation; the town itself was not much better.
“This’ll teach the bastards to fuck with us,” was all Shinoda said as they were waved through a DocSec security point without so much as a cursory ID check. They rolled on through the Grand Plaza. It was a rubble- and rubbish-strewn wasteland lit with clusters of arc lights. The temple to the might and power of the Hammer of Kraa had been reduced to a mound of debris, and everywhere emergency services teams were crawling over the ruins looking for survivors. Michael felt like cheering at the sight.
Just past the edge of the town, the mobibot came to a stop behind a line of mobibots drawn up at another DocSec checkpoint. The troopers were visible only as black cutouts against their mobibots’ headlights.
“Looking for looters?” Michael said.
“I reckon,” Shinoda said. “Some people can’t help themselves. Hey, what’s happening?”
“I don’t believe it,” Michael said.
Three DocSec troopers were laying into the occupants of the first bot with boots and truncheons. It was a merciless attack. Deep inside Michael something snapped. “Screw this,” he snarled. He reached for his rifle with his good arm and climbed out of the bot. He tucked the butt of the rifle under his armpit. I hope those DocSec pigs don’t fight back, he thought. We’d have trouble dealing with a bunch of schoolkids. “You coming?” he asked Shinoda.
“Just try to stop me,” the sergeant replied.
Faces stared open-mouthed at the two blood-soaked apparitions. Michael and Shinoda walked down the line of bots to where the DocSec troopers were kicking the life out of the three people on the ground.
“Hey, assholes!” Michael shouted. He lifted the barrel of his rifle to cover the men.
The troopers stopped and looked around. “Who the fuck are you?” one of them snarled.
“We’re NRA,” Michael said, his voice flat, “and you’re dead.”
The troopers reached for their pistols. They were three seconds too slow. With clinical efficiency, Michael and Shinoda shot the men. The impact toppled the troopers away and onto their backs. Shinoda walked over. She took a pistol from a dead fist. She checked each man in turn and dispatched the two who were still alive with single shots to the head.
She stood back and spit on the ground. “DocSec scum,” she said flatly.
Michael turned. “Go,” he shouted at the line of bots. “You weren’t here, but never forget that the NRA is your best and only hope of destroying Doctrinal Security. Now go!”
For a moment nobody moved. Then, one after another, the bots accelerated away. Their occupants, wide-eyed with fear, stared back at the specters standing over the dead troopers.
Michael looked around once the last bot had disappeared. “Maybe this wasn’t the smartest thing we could have done,” he said. “What the hell do we do with this lot?”
“We’ll dump the bodies into their bot, then put it on auto and send it to McNair,” Shinoda said. “We’ll be long gone by the time anybody pulls it over.”
Ten backbreaking minutes later, the DocSec vehicle had been dispatched with its grisly load, though not before Michael had stripped the sunburst insignia from their collars, and they were on their way north to Martinsen.
Shinoda’s plan was simple. They would head for the hills, and if DocSec tried to arrest them, they’d blow them aside and keep going. That was one hell of a plan, Michael had said: short, sharp, and simple enough for even the dumbest marine. “That’d be you, sergeant,” he’d added, dodging a halfhearted kick from Shinoda.
The mobibot hummed on into the night. “You look like you’ve had it,” Shinoda said. “I’ll keep an eye on things.”
Michael wanted to argue but could not. He was utterly exhausted. “I’ll take over in two hours, sergeant,” he said.