Kill Station (27 page)

He felt the gee forces beginning to pile up again as Joss started the second pass, the really close one. "I'm going to be firing," Joss shouted at him, "so for pity's sake, don't get in my way!"

"The first thing they taught us in Para was to jump backwards," Evan said, as he climbed into the airlock and sealed his helm.

"Oh? What was the second?"

Evan told him. Joss laughed so hard he started to choke.

"All set," Evan said.

Joss finished his choking and said, "Are your comms on scramble?"

"Yes, they are."

"Good. Never hurts to check. Fifteen seconds."

Evan sealed the inner door of
Nosey's
airlock, waited for the air to exhaust, and opened the outer. Stars wheeled past it; Joss was turning hard.

"Ten seconds. Backward and to your left as you're facing the lock," Joss said. "That's the far end of the asteroid, and the first mast."

"Right you are."

"Five seconds. Three, two, one, jump!"

Evan pushed himself out the lock, hard, and kicked his

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jets in downward and leftward. The ship slipped silently by behind him; he saw the gleam of dim sunlight off the broad silvery parabolic scoop of the iondriver. Evan tucked himself into a ball, gave himself another push of the leg jets, and

"fell" toward the asteroid's surface as quickly as he could.

Off to his right, he could see
Nosey
diving around toward the first of the huge airlock apertures, not intending to go straight in, but to pass over low. As she did, two bright streaks leapt away from her, down into the hole. A moment later, a huge bloom of blue fire and dust came billowing out. The fire only lasted a second, but the dust kept rising from where the missiles had fallen, a plume already a quarter-kilometer long and still growing. Evan uncurled a bit, eyeing his first target, the comms mast at the narrow end of the asteroid. There was no point in waiting; he could manage a precision strike very well from here, and not have to wait around.

He turned one arm forearm-up, pointed it at the base of the mast, and curled a finger back to hit the patterned release in his palm. The missile kicked out of his arm, pushing him back a little with the recoil. Without thinking, he bent his knees as he fell, corrected with his leg jets, and fired off another, just to be sure.
You can never tell, sometimes the
cable that serves things like this is armored. . . .

Evan counted silently. On five, the mast blew off the end of the satellite in a rain of splinters of metal and stone. The second missile hit the place where the mast had been anchored, dug a two-meter-deep hole in it, and revealed a thick buried cable, now snapped off short.

Good,
Evan thought, and turned his attention to the business of landing. The surface of the asteroid was some three hundred meters below him now and coming up fast. This was no problem; landings in zero gee were something a suited sop was trained in until they presented no more problems than jumping off a bottom step. He landed, bounced hard; the suit's restringing had been a good job,

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and he got much more bounce out of the landing than usual. The first leap bounce was fifty meters long at least, and carried him almost to the next set of antennaes, a dish grouping.

What is it about architects that makes them put all the antennae together in the same place?
Evan thought absently, as he pointed another small missile at the middle of the grouping.
Sure, the cabling is
simpler, but people can come in the middle of the night and do stuff like— this—
The dish antennas shattered, leaping off the surface of the asteroid and flying in all directions.

That's the VHP and UHF done, then, and any tight-beam micro they may have. As soon as I get
the other one—
He bounced faster, concerned that no one had even come out to shoot at him yet. What were they all doing in there? Playing pinochle?

A shudder ran all through the surface of the asteroid when Evan next touched ground.
Here comes Joss,
he thought, and sure enough in less than thirty seconds the sleek long shape of
Nosey
came swooping around again, in a tighter approach even than last time, barely fifty meters above the surface, and heading straight for another of the big airlock apertures. Evan saw the bombs rocket down into it, saw the dust and flame come streaming out again, as Joss skimmed past around the other side of the asteroid and was gone.

Diw,
but he can fly that thing,
Evan thought admiringly as he made his way swiftly across the grey-brown surface to the second mast. He got another missile ready for it. Odds were he wouldn't need them inside the station; for doors and walls he had grenades, and for anything else, his beamer was charged.

"News in from Lucretia," said a voice in his helmet. "You're not going to like it. Details later. Meanwhile, just got the third big hole, and all five of the chicks in the nest. She's all yours."

"Right-o," Evan said, and let his missile loose at the

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second mast. The missile hit it hard, at the base, and the whole thing toppled.

He bounced over to the base just to make sure. The cable had in fact not been severed. He beamed it; it split in a brief haze of smoke and sparks. Then he turned and headed for the nearest of the shattered airlocks.

The hole itself was still intact. Evan swan dived off the edge of it, using his jets to give him some extra push. The airlock doors below had been massive semicircles. They were now a ruin, the thick metal bent back inward. He continued his dive down through them, through the second set of doors—which Joss's bombs had also taken out—and down into what had been the hanger.

The hangar was a spherical area which had been slagged out of the rock; ships had been tethered to its walls and floor. There were hulks there that had been miners' ships once. Joss had beamed them. How he managed it, Evan wasn't sure. He hadn't seen it happening. The hangar had airlocked pressure doors hi several of its walls. Evan chose the middle one, opened it, ducked inside.

There were still lights here, and power; Joss had not yet found the power plant, which was all right with Evan. Alarms were howling all over the place. Well, it could hardly be avoided, with Joss blowing the doors in, and five ships dead in their hangars.
No matter.
Inside his helm, Evan did the pattern of eyelid-flickers that brought down the radiation-sensitive filter. It was RF he was looking for: computers of the kind Joss was after still tended to leak it. There was a dun glow to his left.

He started off that way, looking around him as he bounced through the corridors. This place was everything that Willans should have been and wasn't: neat, clean, new. Surprisingly new; these hallways could hardly be more than a year old.

He was distracted by a man coming out in front of him, with a gun. The man shot at him.

Slugs?
Evan thought with surprise, as the stream of high-velocity bullets piled into him. Normally one didn't use
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slugs in an airtight environment, preferring beams. At any rate, the servos took the difference, helping him keep his balance. He staggered slightly, walked straight into the stream of bullets. The man looked at him in shock and his ammunition clip abruptly ran out. He turned to run away and change it.

Evan lifted his right arm and let the built-in machine gun do the talking for him. The man fell twitching to the floor in a spray of red.

Evan headed past him and looked at a sign on the wall of the T-junction of the corridor. It was in Japanese, both
kanji
and
katakana.

So much for the classical education,
Evan thought sadly. He didn't understand Japanese. He consulted his RF detector: it still said left. Experimentally, he tilted his head first up, then down, to see if there was a variation of reading.
A little more on the up side,
he thought.
All right: I want a lift, then.

He jogged along the corridor, warily watching the doorways. No one came out of them, which slightly surprised him.
This place must have really emptied out.
But that suited him, too.

From around a corner ahead of him, a group of men burst out, all armed. Evan noticed that they were each wearing a sort of coverall that amounted to a uniform; there were what seemed to be rank tags on the sleeves, and possibly name tags as well. But then he had other things to think about, as they opened fire on him.

It was beams as well as slugs this time, and relatively high-powered ones at that. But that was one of the things reflective armor was for, and Evan hadn't kept polishing it for his health. The shine was as much a part of the defense as the ablative coating underneath. He walked right into the stream of fire, the bullets bouncing off all around him, the reflected beams glancing harmlessly off.
All right,
he thought,
let's see if
I can't leave one of you lads alive.

He began shooting, with care and resolution: head shots.

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One by one he picked them off with short bursts of the machine gun, wanting to conserve his own ammunition, until there was only one man standing. The look of panic in that man's face was awful, and Evan could understand it perfectly; the horror of the faceless, invulnerable suit bearing down on you was a weapon he had learned to exploit a long time back. The man fired his gun uselessly until it was empty, then turned to run. With great care Evan swept his beamer across the backs of the man's knees, effectively hamstringing him. Screaming, the man fell down.

Evan bounced over to him, grabbed him by the back of his coverall, and jerked him to his feet, shaking him to keep him from going into shock. "Where are the master computers?" he said.

The man stared at him in utter terror. "Where are the computers?" Evan repeated, and for good measure put his hands around the man's neck and began to squeeze. That was something most people understood, especially when they knew something of the power inherent in a suit. Nobody wanted his head twisted off like a chicken's.

"Uh-uh-up one," the man said, "far end."

"Thank you," Evan said. He clouted the man on the side of the head hard enough to keep him asleep for about a day, and dropped him. It was always nice to know that your equipment was giving you the right information.

He turned down what looked like a major corridor and ran into some more people, about ten of them this time. They all had high-intensity beamers, and Evan walked into them firing, not wanting to let too many of them get to work on his armor at the same time. It might have gotten hot inside.
And I just had
this foam replaced, after all,
he thought.
No use smelling it up.
One by one they fell, not being armored against the beams of his Winchester as he was against their guns.

As he started walking through the bodies, he paused to pick up one of the guns, curious. It was of very good make, a Toshiba by the looks of it, though it didn't have

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the usual brand name flash on the barrel.
Private manufacture?
he wondered.
Very, very interesting.

If I didn't know there was a lot of money involved in this venture, I'd know now.

He came to a lift. Generally, Evan preferred stairs, but this would do for the moment. The lift was still sitting at this floor, probably having been ridden down here by the group of people who had just attacked him. He got in, looked at the controls-in Japanese again, but this time with Arabic numerals as well. This floor was six, to judge by the number that was presently lit. He punched for seven, and waited.

The doors closed, and the elevator hummed quietly to itself. Then it stopped, and its doors opened.

Someone threw a grenade in.

That's antisocial,
Evan thought. He picked up the grenade and walked out of the elevator.

The small group of men in coveralls standing there looked at Evan in tremendous shock, then in worse shock at the grenade he flipped back at them. It went off.

When the smoke had cleared a bit, he checked his RF detector and went on, to his right this time, stepping over the shredded meat. He paused, looking down at what remained of one of the bodies. It was mostly trunk, with an arm and shoulder still attached by a few strings of muscle and ligament. On the shoulder was one of the rank tabs he had seen before, and below it, an insignia. Evan bent close to look.

It was a stylized blue dragon.

He straightened up, frowning. He had seen that insignia—that logo—many times, as had everybody else who lived on Earth: hundreds of products wore it somewhere in their packaging, from cars to food. Evan hunted in his mind for a moment, then came up with the umbrella corporation's name: TKB International, it was. One of the multinationals. Japanese-run, he thought.

He thought of the Japanese signage on the walls, frowned, and went on.

No one else came to meet him for a while, which suited

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him.
Somehow I would have thought there were fewer people here,
he thought.
But it argues the presence of a large
support force. What have they been building here besides weapons, I wonder? Or what have they been preparing
for? They're certainly well-enough armed.

As he came around the curve in the corridor, he was met by a stream of bullets.
Now, this really is annoying,
he thought, as he actively had to fight against the stream to keep upright. Someone down there was using a fixed-mount gun instead of the little portable stuff they had been using on him. He waded into the bullets, pushing harder and harder as he got closer to the gun, and slowly raising one arm as he got nearer. It was one of those machine guns that hit you with six hundred slugs a second, and there was a large shield behind it to keep you from picking off the person who was doing the firing.