Redliners by David Drake

Salvos of three or four shells each dived on the boat at intervals of a few seconds. Most of the rounds blew up in midair. Clouds of dirty black smoke spread above the vessel. The point defense system cycled flechettes so fast that the mechanisms screamed like saws instead of crackling.

Two of the Spook rounds hit the ground west of the boat. A striker went down; a buddy helped him to his feet. Because the missiles had been badly aimed, the defense system hadn’t bothered to engage them. The software targeted only threats to the vessel itself.

Pain crackled along the right side of Farrell’s chest. He flipped his visor up so that he could breathe without the constriction of the helmet filters. He should have switched to his oxygen bottle instead. The atmosphere was hot and metallic, sharp with ozone. His legs moved like wooden stumps.

The pickup boat was ten yards away. Strikers in the open bay fired toward the Spook infantry. Abbado and Glasebrook helped the hard-suited striker climb the high step and flop forward on the deck.

Nadia Broz was waiting at the flank of the ship. “Come on!” she screamed. The pilot blipped his air pumps. The thruster inlets honked air and a burp of iridescent plasma seared the ground.

“Go!” Farrell shouted to the pilot on the ground-to-air channel. He turned his head for one last check on any of his people who might be staggering toward pickup without the helmet that ID’d strikers on the locator circuitry. More shells were shrieking down.

Leinsdorf and Broz each grabbed an arm and together hurled their commanding officer aboard the pickup boat. An intense red flash silhouetted them and flung them after Farrell. A shell had landed just short of the vessel.

The boat lifted. The hatches were already closing.

“Medic!” Farrell shouted. He tried to sit up against the weight of Leinsdorf’s torso. “Medic!”

The strikers’ body armor had performed very well, but there was almost nothing left of either Leinsdorf or Broz below the waist.

“Medic, for the love of God!”

Interlude: Earth

My aide entered the office as I studied the holographic starscape filling the back wall. “I will be retiring soon, Miss Chun,” I said.

When I was aide to Chief of Administration Singh thirty-seven years ago, she always called me “Mr. Smith.” I have held many positions in the Unity bureaucracy since that time, but my first supervisor marked me more than I realized until I became Chief myself.

“You have several years left, sir,” Chun said. She glanced at the starscape. It was a raw blaze of color against blackness, all the stars within the volume the Unity called human space; whether or not the stars had planets, whether or not those planets had life, whether or not there was a permanent human presence in the system.

“I was thinking of Stalleybrass, Miss Chun,” I said with a smile. Her implant would have told her if I had careted one of the stars on the display, but even a biocomputer as sophisticated as a Category 4 civil servant cannot read minds.

“Not the choice I would have expected, sir,” she said, perfectly deadpan though she knew there must be a joke of sorts somewhere in my statement.

Miss Chun was not afraid of me, but she knew that if I ordered the guards outside to kill her, they would obey me without hesitation. Implants do not rob us Category 4’s of personality, but the .8 probability was that Miss Chun would commit suicide if I ordered her to do so. Any decision I made would be, must be, for the benefit of mankind.

“The learning curve ensures there will be a dip in the performance of this office when Ivanovitch replaces me as Chief,” I said. “Better that the change not occur in two years, after age and stress have made noticeable degradation in my abilities. The Kalendru leave us very little margin.”

Instead of repeating her comment about Stalleybrass, Miss Chun looked again at the starscape.

Stalleybrass is a fleet base. It has a permanent cadre of fifty thousand and a transient population of up to three times that number. Those civilians on the planet are as directly concerned with the war effort as the military personnel who outnumber them.

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