Voyage Across the Stars (85 page)

Ned shot the guard in the throat and, as the Telarian toppled backward, sprayed the doorway and the further guards clus tered there. They fell or scattered. He knelt and replaced his magazine, though there were still a few rounds in the one he dropped into his pocket.

Lissea climbed out of the casket, holding the pistol she’d scooped from the floor where a dying guard flung it. “Stairs!” she cried. “There’s stairs behind you!”

“Go!” said Ned. He saw movement through the open doorway and shot, aiming crotch-high in case the guard was in body armor. Return fire chewed the door panel and jamb, but none of the security people outside were willing to rush the scene of sudden carnage again.

Lissea ran to the stairs, bending over as if she were in driving rain. She hesitated once, to tug a submachine gun out of the hands of a fallen guard. His fingers twitched mindlessly for the missing weapon.

Ned backed after her. The
hisscrack!
of bolts wove fiery nets across the changing room. Bits of stone exploded from the walls like shrapnel, stinging and even drawing blood. The door to the nave exploded in a welter of splinters and cyan as a dozen Telarians opened fire on it together.

More klaxons sounded outside the chapel. Many more klaxons.

The firetruck slowed.
“Hold your fire,”
Herne Lordling ordered. “
I’m not going to commit till I know what we’re getting into.”

“Who died and made him God?” Josie Paetz muttered, but the three tense veterans on the tailboard with him were nodding grim agreement to Lordling’s words.

There was heavy firing to the front of them, small arms and at least one tribarrel; no high explosive. Rushing into a doubtful situation was a good way to get killed. It wasn’t a good way to accomplish anything useful, either, and staying alive was a higher priority of most of the
Swift’
s
complement than a grand gesture was. They’d lived to become veterans, after all.

The truck plowed through a bed of white-flowering bushes. The bluff cab crushed the shrubs down, and the tracks supporting the rear of the vehicle chewed up foliage and spat it out behind.

The firetruck hadn’t attracted dangerous attention in the midst of so much violence and confusion. Westerbeke was driving a straight vector to the rendezvous point. He didn’t want to take chances with a road net designed for scenic vistas rather than high-speed communication.

As a sensible security precaution, there were no openly available maps of the Doormann estate. The team didn’t have time or the proper equipment to break into the estate’s data base now.

Besides, the data base had probably been housed in the central spire.

In the cab, Lordling called up a chart of recent powergun discharges onto his visor display. The weapons’ bursts of ionized copper atoms threw high spikes into the radio-frequency bands. The energy of each discharge was closely uniform within classes of weapon, permitting easy correlation between signal strength and range. Though the sensors built into a commo helmet were rudimentary in comparison to those of dedicated packs, they gave Lordling a fair schematic of the fighting half a klick ahead of the firetruck.

Shots had been fired from thirty-one points during the past five minutes, though some of the locations might have been alternate firing positions for a single weapon. Most of the points formed a pair of inwardly concave arcs a hundred meters apart. A gun or guns were also being fired frequently from the point squarely at the center of the common radii.

“
Set your helmets to receive,”
Lordling ordered. “
Now!”

Copies of the display Lordling had summoned echoed on the visors of his team, then vanished. The men could recall it from their helmets’ data storage if needed.

“
Yazov,”
Lordling continued, “
take four men and jump off in thirty seconds. Leg it into position. Don’t start shooting until I give the signal from the other side. And don’t forget, they may be getting reinforcements so you need to watch your back. Clear?”

“Worry about your end, Herne,”
Yazov said.
“I’ll take care of mine. Harlow, Coyne . . . Hatton, I suppose.”
He didn’t bother naming his nephew to the team he would lead. “
Execute
—
now!”

The five men stepped off the truck’s tailboard at the edge of a glade. The trees were forty meters high and waved brilliant streamers into the air to attract winged pollinators. The team quickly melted into the manicured shadows among the trunks.

The firetruck made a sharp turn in order to curve around the firefight. It growled out of sight.

Using hand signals, Yazov sent Harlow and Coyne out on the flanks. He didn’t especially trust Hatton, an engine-room crewman, but he supposed the fellow would be all right if they kept an eye on him.

The fire team moved through the glade in line abreast, with a five-meter interval between troopers. Birds twittered invisibly, but the only sign of human beings was a woman’s shoe caught in a branch high overhead. It looked badly weathered.

The estate was enormous, and the people working in it were concentrated in a relatively few nodes. With all that was going on, there shouldn’t be many strollers out, either.

On the far side of the glade was a narrow path. It appeared to be made of brick laid in a herringbone pattern, but it had a rubbery resilience underfoot. They trotted across it.

The path was bordered by waist-high clumps of pink and magenta flowers, interspersed with saw-edged grasses that shot tufts up six or seven meters tall. Yazov had fought in vegetation like that before. He couldn’t imagine anybody having the stuff around if he employed gardeners—or owned a flamethrower.

“Yase, the shooting’s died down,” Josie called. “What do you think that’s because?”

Yazov signaled his nephew angrily to shut up. The kid was good, no question; but he hadn’t lived long enough to have good
sense.
Well, that was why Josh Paetz had sent his bastard brother Yazov along with Josie.

They’d come to a two-meter hedge growing along a low stone curb. Yazov signaled Josie to watch their backs: they didn’t need a squad of locals jumping them from behind. The rest of the team flattened behind the curb and peered through the scaly lower branches of the hedge.

They were looking into a rectangular garden, fifty meters by one hundred. Walkways from corner to corner and down the long axis met at a stone fountain of four stacked bowls in the middle. Each quadrant had at its center a tree sculpted into a slim green spindle. The trees and stone benches scattered among artistically ragged plantings made it impossible to see everything within the garden from one point, and perhaps even from four points.

Yazov’s team was arrayed on a long side of the garden. Within the rectangle and facing in the same direction along the parallel hedge on the far side were eighteen or twenty Doormann security personnel.

The guards had a three-wheeler. They’d parked the vehicle so that a large marble urn gave it a modicum of protection, but no one was crewing the pintle-mounted tribarrel at the moment. Instead, several Telarians crouched behind the trike, muttering over a casualty sprawled in a bed of variegated flowers.

The hedge had sere yellow scars where powergun bolts had pocked it. Portions of the foliage still smoldered. The large scallop which outgoing bolts from the tribarrel had cut was twenty meters from the trike’s present position.

Other guards lay tensely prone, well back from the hedge so as not to draw fire. The fighting certainly wasn’t over, but no one was shooting at the moment.

The hedge was thorny and impenetrable, at least to anything short of a bulldozer or some minutes’ work with a cutting bar. There were arched bowers at each corner, however, giving access to the garden. The terrain on Yazov’s side of the barrier was flat, with regular beds of knee-high flowers. They didn’t provide any cover, but they were decent concealment.

Yazov keyed his commo helmet.
“Harlow and Coyne, opposite corners,”
he ordered. “W
ait for it. Paetz and I’ll drive them to you. Hatton, watch our back. Paetz, take the crew around the tribarrel when you get the signal. Nobody get early or we’ll get somebody killed. Move out.”

The end men scuttled into position. Both of them carried 2-cm weapons. At this range and these conditions, Yazov would as soon they had submachine guns, but they were pros. They’d manage.

Hatton faced around with an obvious air of relief. Josie thrust his left hand into the hedge to broaden his viewpoint. Yazov was ready to snap an order, but the younger man was merely eager, not rabid.

Nothing to do now but wait for the signal.

“Yase, why aren’t they shooting?”
Josie said over the spread-band radio net.
“Why’re they just sitting there?”

“They’re waiting for something,”
Yazov explained. “
And don’t ask me what it is because I don’t know.”

What Yazov did know was that
“it,”
whatever it was, was nothing he wanted to be around to see. He took four fresh magazines out of their pouches and set them by his left hand, behind the stone curb.

“It would be nice if you got your thumbs out of your ass, Herne,” he mouthed, but the thought wasn’t even a whisper.

“Go,”
said the command channel, and Yazov’s trigger finger had blasted the head off a Telarian security man before his ears caught the
whop! whop! whop!
of powerguns firing from Lordling’s side of the double ambush.

Yazov swung to the next target, a guard lying prone who lifted her head to look at the comrade who’d died a few meters from her. Yazov’s bolt converted her startled expression into a cyan flash.

One of the Telarians ministering to the casualty leaped to his feet; his two fellows tried to flatten when the shooting started. All three of them were down now, their limbs thrashing in their death throes. Josie had taken them out in three aimed bursts, though the separation between trigger-pulls was scarcely more than the normal cyclic delay of his submachine gun.

Coyne and Harlow both fired, but Yazov couldn’t see their targets through his narrow niche in the hedge. A guard scrambled toward the tribarrel. Josie shot him in the cheek, ear, and temple. The victim’s cap flew off and he plowed a furrow through ankle-high flowers with his face.

Yazov dropped his weapon, braced his left hand on the curb, and tugged a fragmentation cluster from its belt carrier. Simultaneous pressure from thumb and fingertips released and armed the weapon. Yazov gave the thumb-switch another poke to change the setting from Time to Air Burst, then lofted the bomb high over the hedge. A third squeeze on the thumb toggle would have set the fuse to Contact.

A guard, either wild with terror or trusting in his body armor, jumped up in a crouch behind the fountain. He held his submachine gun at waist height.

Harlow and Coyne shot him simultaneously in the torso. The ceramic breastplate shattered like a bomb under the paired 2-cm bolts. The guard’s body did a back-flip, flinging his unfired weapon through the spray of the fountain.

The fragmentation cluster popped into three separate bomblets. They burst in red flashes two or three meters above the soil of the garden. Guards leaped up like a covey of birds rising. Five of them died in instantaneous gunfire from the waiting mercenaries.

A surviving guard waved his pistol from a clump of low-growing evergreens. Yazov shot the arm off and, as the screaming Telarian lurched upright, finished the job and the 2-cm weapon’s five-round magazine.

Yazov stripped in a fresh clip. Coyne and Harlow stood in plain sight in the archways, raking the guards who cowered among the low plantings. Most of the Telarians were dead already, but the muscle spasms of a beheaded corpse were enough to draw a bolt for insurance.

Josie Paetz got to his feet, wild-eyed with enthusiasm. His submachine gun’s iridium barrel glowed white.

“Wait!” Yazov ordered. He was still kneeling. He aimed his powergun at the gnarled base of the hedge plant. Six or eight stems twisted from the sprawling roots.

Yazov fired twice. The plant lifted on a blast of cyan plasma. The soil was moist enough to erupt into a cavity also. Splinters and microshards of terra cotta sprayed out in a circle.

The shrub’s fragments fell into the garden, still tangled by thorns and interwoven branches. Josie Paetz leaped through the gap without hesitation, dragging branches with him further into the killing zone.

Yazov reloaded and followed more circumspectly, brushing grit off his faceshield. His mouth smiled, but the expression had nothing to do with what was going on in his mind. “Hatton, you can come on through,” he said, “but keep your eyes on the back-trail.”

The whole team was in the garden. Coyne stood at the tri-barrel; Harlow checked the mechanism of the Telarian submachine gun in his left hand while he held the shimmering barrel of his 2-cm weapon safely off to the side.

Insects buzzed among the flowers. The firefight had done surprisingly little damage to the plantings, though the stench of the shooting and its results weighted the air worse than the miasma of any swamp.

A guard with no obvious injuries lay spread-eagled near the line Yazov followed across the garden. Blue flowers lapped her cheeks and neck.

Yazov swung his weapon one-handed, like a huge pistol. He fired into her back as he passed. Vaporized fluids turned bit of rib bone into shrapnel. The guard’s head and heels lifted waist-high, then flopped again. The point-blank charge had virtually severed the body at its thickest point.

Better safe than sorry.

Yazov knelt at the far hedge. “Coming through!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs. There hadn’t been any radio communication with Slade. “Coming through! Coming through!”

His own team was in position. Yazov held the powergun out at arm’s length and fired into the root-stem juncture of a plant beyond the one he crouched behind. Powergun bolts had little penetration; the twisted branches and foliage of the hedge provided almost as much protection as a steel wall could have done.

The shrubbery blew apart as before. Splinters blazed, but the raggedly severed ends of the stems themselves were too green to do more than smolder.