Platt stared at Porter and said, “No, Corporal. It’s a secret mission because until we get the proof that the Grantholder is communicating with the Throgs, Grant Dupree is still an ally so we can’t move openly. Don’t you remember? The ambassador explained it all herself.”
Even Milligan blinked at that. Porter shook her head and said, “My God, kid, you really are as stupid as you look.” She rapped her knuckles on the concrete wall. “Here, I’d like to sell you this building, hey? A nice, solid place. You can make a bundle on resale.”
Platt blushed. “There’s no call to insult me just ’cause I’m new,” he said.
“Porter, Platt,” Captain Wittvogel said. “Get your gear on, all right? We load on the truck in one-five minutes, and I want time to bring everything up to spec if it doesn’t check out.”
A plus of the mission was that they didn’t have to insert from orbit. A slightly modified civilian semi-trailer would carry the squad to within a klick of the unsuspecting target.
“You won’t have to wait for me,” Porter muttered, slapping closed the inspection port on her railgun magazine. As she tested joint movement manually, she went on, “Look, Platt, there’s no way Razza would come in on this drop with us if it was Hegemony intelligence we were after. This is for her bank account, pure and simple, and she doesn’t trust anybody else to oversee that.”
“Corporal,” Captain Wittvogel said.
Porter grimaced but didn’t turn to face him.
“Corporal,” Wittvogel repeated.
The captain was tall and rangy. The gray in his reddish hair could have been a genetic quirk, but he certainly wasn’t a kid. He didn’t raise his voice often, but neither did he expect to be ignored.
Porter turned and braced to attention. “Sir,” she said.
“Politics aren’t our job, Corporal,” Wittvogel said softly. “OK?”
“Sorry, sir,” Porter agreed. “I—mission nerves, I guess. I talk too much.”
Captain Wittvogel grinned tightly. “If you weren’t nervous,” he said, “I’d think you didn’t have the sense God gave a goose. But don’t let’s go spooking the newbie, OK?”
The squad finished check-out and suiting up without further discussion, except for the cyborgs. Two of them argued about whether or not the greater hardness of tungsten penetrators was a good trade-off for the higher sectional density of depleted-uranium railgun ammo.
If there’d ever been a time to worry about the why of this mission, that time had ended when the sides of the semi fell down and the assault squad launched from the heart of Dupree City. Right now, Sergeant Terrence Milligan shared a building with over a hundred people who wanted him dead. It wasn’t just Ambassador Razza’s orders to ‘Leave no witnesses!’ that kept his trigger fingers twitching.
The office proper was clear. Enhanced IIR, reading body temperatures through the walls, indicated a swarm of locals in the chamber beyond. Heat from the grenade blasts had melted a fusible link, sliding an armored fire door across the double-width archway joining the rooms.
“Milligan!” Captain Wittvogel ordered. “Prep an entrance down to five, but don’t blow it yet!”
“Sir, I haven’t cleared—” Milligan began, though his hands were already unlimbering one of the three frame charges he carried for this mission.
“Now, dammit!” Wittvogel ordered. “I know what’s clear, and I know nobody’s dealt with five yet!”
Milligan flopped the charge on the flooring, hardwood over a base of structural concrete. He spaced his weapons’ selector down one and toggled on external.
A local fired an anti-armor grenade that punched a head-sized mousehole from the other side of the cinder block wall. Milligan looked up from an echo-sound of the floor, making sure that he wasn’t setting the frame charge above an internal wall on the fifth story. He spat three railgun rounds to either side of the mousehole.
Folded for carriage, the frame charge deployed into a meter by two-meter rectangle of explosive tape as soon as Milligan pulled it from its holder. The objective side was convex, with capsules of adhesive which the operator could release with a slap to the top if the charge had to be tacked in place.
A local with a back-pack laser fired through the hole, searing away half Milligan’s helmet sensors and sending his armor’s environmental system into overload before he could lurch away from the swept area. The office was full of smoke. The suit went back on IIR, and the short laser pulse Milligan directed at the mousehole diffused badly in the murky atmosphere.