Or he’d never have been talking to a line Marine this way.
“It looks like we still don’t have all the bugs out of the A-Pot intrusion system,” Grant said. “The best we can figure now, the second pass was early. Thirty-five years early.”
He spoke to the voice control of the holographic reader. The image paused, then expanded.
The face of the woman who’d escaped was slightly distorted by the faceshield of her helmet, and she was considerably younger—
But the features were beyond doubt the same as those lowering down from the portrait of Vice-Admiral Teitelbaum on the wall behind.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
A Story of The Fleet
Nick Kowacs laughed to imagine it, him sitting at a booth in the Red Shift Lounge and saying to Toby English, “That last mission, the one that was supposed to be a milk run? Let me tell you what really went down!”
* * *
“Come on, come on, come on,” begged the Logistics Officer, a naval lieutenant. “Your lot was supposed to be in the air thirty minutes ago, and I got three more convoys behind it!”
“Keep your shirt on, sailor,” said Sergeant Bradley. “We’ll be ready to move out as soon as Major Kowacs gets this last set of voice orders–”
Bradley nodded toward the blacked-out limousine which looked like a pearl in a muckheap as it idled in a yard of giant excavating machinery. The limousine was waiting for the Headhunters when they pulled into the depot. Bradley didn’t know what the major was hearing inside the vehicle, but he doubted it was anything as straightforward as verbal orders.
“That’s faster than you’ll have your equipment airborne even if you get on with your job,” he concluded.
Bradley acted as first sergeant for the field element of the 121st Marine Reaction Company, Headhunters, while the real first sergeant was back with the base unit on Port Tau Ceti. Bradley knew that before the lieutenant could punish him for insubordination, the complaint would have to go up the naval chain of command and come back down the marine side of the Fleet bureaucracy . . . which it might manage to do, a couple of lifetimes later.
As if in answer to Bradley’s gibe, drivers started the engines of the paired air-cushion transporters which cradled a self-contained excavator on the lowboy between them. The yard had been scoured by earlier movements by heavy equipment, but the soil of Khalia was stony. As the transporters’ drive fans wound up, they shot pebbles beneath the skirts to whang against the sides of other vehicles.
One stone hit a Khalian wearing maroon coveralls. He was one of thousands of Weasels hired to do scut work in the wake of the Fleet’s huge logistics build-up on what had been the enemy home planet—when the Khalians were the enemy. The victim yelped and dropped to the ground.
Sergeant Bradley spit into the dust. If the Weasel was dead, then the universe was a better place by that much.
Drivers fired up the engines of the remainder of the vehicles the 121st was to escort. Four lowboys carried 3-meter outside-diameter casing sections. The final piece of digging equipment was a heavy-lift crane to position the excavator initially, then feed casing down the shaft behind the excavator as it burned and burrowed toward the heart of the planet.
All of the transporters were ground effect. The noise of their intakes and the pressurized air wailing out beneath their skirts was deafening. The lieutenant shouted, but Bradley could barely hear his, “You won’t be laughing if the planetwrecker you’re sitting on top of goes off because you were late to the site!”
Corporal Sienkiewicz, Kowacs’ clerk/bodyguard, was female and almost two meters tall. This yard full of outsized equipment was the first place Bradley remembered Sie looking as though she were in scale with her surroundings. Now she bent close to the Logistics Officer and said, “We won’t be doing anything, el-tee. It’s you guys a hundred klicks away who’ll have time to watch the crust crack open and the core spill out.”
The Syndicate had mined Khalia. If the planet exploded at the crucial moment when Syndicate warships swept in to attack, the defenders would lose the communications and logistics base they needed to win.