Star Risk - 04 The Dog From Hell (28 page)

Grok ripped the blaster out of the hands of the general, lifted him high, then, while the man was screaming, tore his throat out with his fangs.

Then he vanished back into the woods, spitting to get rid of the unpleasant taste.

The troops went looking for an animal, not someone who hurried to a hidden lifter and was kilometers away before the first searcher reached the brush line.

Two generals murdered in four days�the Second Division was in a bit of shock. Or, at least, its officers were.

The shock was worsened the next day.

The assistant division commander was ordered to take charge of the formation while a suitable official leader with the appropriate number of stars was found, and cozened into accepting appointment to command of the Second.

The troops were told to hold in their encampments and send out patrols looking for the monster. When the new general had assumed command with the appropriate amount of ceremony, the war games could rebegin.

That day, just after the noon meal, an aircraft swooped across the division camps.

It looked like a standard Alsaoud military medium lifter, but for some reason its markings had been hurriedly obscured with what looked like mud.

The lifter sprayed a thin mist as it overflew the camps, then disappeared.

No one had an explanation for who the lifter belonged to.

Redon Spada had found the near-duplicate of the military model in a seedy back-alley lot, bought it with high-quality counterfeit credits, and had it hurriedly painted like it was service issue, then muddy paint sprayed over the paint. He wasn't about to offer explanations, nor say just what slough he'd sunk the craft into after its single mission.

Soldiers started getting sick with a rather disgusting virus that caused a high fever, spots and diarrhea. Almost no one died, but everyone who caught the bug wished they would.

The only fatality was Division Commander III, who supposedly died of the virus, although rumors insisted that his body was found in his rather comfortable field quarters in several parts.

Morale in the Second Division was at rock bottom.

It was bad enough not only for other units to hear of the Second's jinx, but wonder if bad luck was contagious.

The Alsaoud Command and Cerberus realized that the Second was up there with leprosy when it came to morale-building, to the point that the glooms were communicable.

Walter Nowotny was getting angrier and angrier, trying to figure out what the hell was going on, particularly the repeated stories about some strange goddamned monster stalking the Second.

He even thought for an instant that this nonsense might somehow be the doing of that damnable Star Risk. They did have a resident alien, one who'd worked briefly for Cerberus. But the records showed he'd been no more than an electronics technician, hardly the mobile slaughterhouse the Second was terrified of. Besides, the descriptions of the monster were of a creature far larger than this Amanandrala Grokkonomonslf. Nowotny looked elsewhere, found nothing, and assumed it was a mass delusion.

But something had to be done.

The first step that Fearless Leaders normally take to make the troopies happy is to provide alcohol or drugs in staggering amounts for free.

It may appear cynical, but it seems to work a lot of the time.

It didn't, in this case. Big bubble shelters were flown in, barrels of beer rolled up, and the troops were given a stand-down to celebrate a freshly made up holiday honoring something the Second did before living memory.

It didn't work very well.

First, Grok made a couple of flashing appearances, was seen by panicking troops, then vanished before anyone could even fire a shot in his general direction.

The beer had been adulterated by agents with a variety of interesting, tasteless liquids. Some made the drinker evacuate his bowels, others caused parabolic vomiting, still another simply turned the teeth bright magenta.

The soldiers started grumbling, then someone took a swing at someone else.

Several satisfactorily bloody riots ensued, and the military police came in with truncheons.

Someone didn't like it, and had a few live rounds and a weapon to voice his discontent.

The MPs retaliated, and some thirty-four soldiers were wounded, only one fatally.

M'chel now held her breath, waiting to see if the Alsaoud Command responded as she hoped they would. She was assuming they were no brighter than the average set of generals and admirals.

They did just what she'd hoped.

For some reason, soldiers above a certain rank really believe that everyone loves a parade.

Maybe spectators do, but the poor bastards who've got to spitshine their very souls and march up and down and back and forth in endless rehearsal getting screamed at, do not.

It's worse when it's a pass in review, with full equipment, since that means not only do the crunchies have to be polished and buffed, but so does their gear and vehicles.

And so the Second washed, brightened, and burnished in a state of numb rage. A handful of sensible soldiers, given a bit of luck and an opportunity, went over the fence until the goddamned mess was over.

The others massed, sullenly, on a great plain with their lifters and ships and such.

It would be a famous show.

And to especially honor the Second Guards Division, Premier Toorman and a very high-ranking advisor from the Alliance itself would attend, plus full media attention.

After the pass in review, there'd be a serious crowd-pleaser�a live-fire demonstration of the Second's, and its supporting arms', awesome capabilities.

M'chel heard this gleefully, and seriously considered renewing her faith in a handful of gods she'd abandoned over the years.

Chas Goodnight needed no more of a kick-start.

The day before the review, he entered one of the ancillary fields where an aerial support battalion was based.

He was quite familiar with the small, in-atmosphere tactical support craft there, derived from Alliance ships he'd trained on years ago.

He slid to the flight line, where rows of attack ships waited. Since there weren't enough barracks to go around, the pilots and crews of the ships had been ordered to sleep aboard, and mess from iron rations, which also didn't help morale, already lowered by the seemingly endless preparations for this goddamned parade.

Sentries were posted on the flight lines, but as a formality�for who, a dozen kilometers from the field, would bother with anyone in this unit?

Goodnight would and did, not even needing to go bester to slip past the guards to the small, four-man ship he'd chosen at random.

He triggered bester as he went through the ship's lock.

In a blur, he killed the two crewmen who were awake, then the two sleeping men.

Goodnight had tried to deal with them as neatly as possible, since he'd be in the company of corpses for a while.

He dragged the bodies into a cargo room, closed it off, then sat down to consider the ship's command computer.

The parade instructions for the parade were not only at hand, but neatly printed off.

He studied the orders, then the ship controls.

Everything was most straightforward and well-remembered.

There was only one glitch, early the next morning, when the ship's section leader wanted to come aboard.

Goodnight let him in, broke his neck, and put him with the other bodies, hoping no one would come looking. Or, that if they did, they would look somewhere else.

Commands began chattering an hour later, and Chas obeyed them, starting his ship's engines, setting a course, and taking off.

He wasn't very pleased with his flying abilities, but he wasn't the sloppiest pilot that day.

The Alsaoud didn't have much of a parade ground tradition.

The squadrons swept out over the sea for one hundred kilometers, then formed up in very sexy combat vees to sweep over the great parade ground, then reform once more a kilometer distant, for the live fire part of the parade.

Goodnight didn't plan on taking part in that.

He had not only the required links to his commanders on, but a pair of coms on commercial channels. These showed the lines of troops, the lifters, and the reviewing stand.

Not that Chas needed them�other screens showed the bands, fireworks and panoply around them.

But one channel did show Toorman� and beside him, finally winkled out of his goddamned palace, Walter Nowotny, looking a bit uncomfortable in the poorly fitting uniform of an Alsaoud general.

Chas Goodnight, busy as he was at the controls, found a moment to blow him a kiss.

"All Voortis elements," one com sent. "We are approaching the stand� hold your formation precisely� this is our chance to shine."

"Yeah, right," Goodnight said, flipping on autopilot for an instant while he slipped over to the late weapons officer's console, and armed up the ship.

Then he had the stand on a target screen, just as one of the commercial channels cut away to a long shot of the V formations approaching in a nice, slow, stately manner.

"Have fun, boys and girls," Goodnight muttered, and hit full power, and sent his ship screaming in a dive toward the stand.

Every frequency he had on was screaming, either at him or for somebody somewhere to do something.

He paid no mind, but put a sight pipper on the center of the stands, and fired every missile he had.

As he closed on the boil of hell the stand had become, he locked a chaingun trigger back, and emptied its magazine over the chaos.

Goodnight's ship flashed low, less than a hundred meters, over where the stands had been.

Below him was a charnel house.

"Awright, Nowotny, you bassid." Goodnight muttered. "If you lived through that, you're an angel. Or a demon, anyway."

Then he went for the hills, where Redon Spada waited with the yacht.

Walter Nowotny's body was never recovered.

But Star Risk had a bit of trouble believing that their longtime nemesis was really gone.

There were at least six hundred admitted dead.

"A little in the way of overkill?" Friedrich inquired mildly of M'chel.

She shrugged.

"He didn't give us a chance to be surgical."

"No," von Baldur agreed. "He did not. Now, let us see how many more bodies we have to bounce before Cerberus decides it wants to go home to mommy."

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FIFTY-FOUR � ^ � This day, we have lost one of our best." Ral Tomkins intoned. He let his face show sorrow for an brief moment, then fierce determination and anger.

He was particularly proud of his speech�he'd even written parts of it.

"But Cerberus Systems, terrible as an army with invisible banners, will continue on, relentlessly helping bring freedom and justice to our client worlds."

He nodded, thinking how well his message would be playing to the thousands of coms on as many worlds, to the scattered operatives of Cerberus.

"And as I know Walter Nowotny would have said, were he still among us, now is not the time to mourn, but to strike back!

"To this end, I am personally going to go to the Alsaoud System, and take charge of the mopping-up operations there.

"Our foes will rue the day they stood against us, for we shall show no mercy.

"And our merciless hammer will be aided by the strong, secret anvil against which we shall be striking.

"I cannot tell you what this secret is, although you shall know it soon enough, as shall our enemies.

"Their doom is nigh� and our final victory is imminent!"

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FIFTY-FIVE � ^ � Ah-hah, yee-hah, so vee haffa haffa haffa da secrety weapon against da infeedel, eh?" Goodnight chortled from where he lay, drink in hand, sprawled on a sofa in Star Risk's quarters in the Maron Regions. "Soon dee foe shall fribble and frabble, and da secrety weapon shall no more be named, eh?"

Riss laughed, was about to gently chide Goodnight for being overly euphoric, even though he was entitled after all the time he'd spent dragging around the bushes waiting for Nowotny to target himself. Spada was curled at one end of her couch, sipping some sort of nonalcoholic tea.

Jasmine King lay on another sofa, a blissful smile on her face. She had a half-empty bottle of some high-alcoholic swill clutched in one hand, and wasn't bothering with a glass any more.

Friedrich appeared sober, watching his partners celebrate, tasting a large snifter of brandy from time to time.

"We now," he said, "with any luck, can help hammer the Alsaoud back into next week, and allow the People to reward us richly. I hope."

Grok sat at a com, its volume muted.

Suddenly he spun the set toward them.

"There is a secret weapon," he announced, and patched into a channel whose picture was streaky and frequently blurred.

Goodnight started to laugh, saw Grok's seriousness, and focused on the screen.

"This is somewhere on Khazia," Grok announced. "The transmission is from one of the People's agents."

The picture spun, swung, and steadied on a large landing field.

Settling down on it were ranks of starships.

Riss blinked.

"Those are Alliance-type ships!"

"Farragut-class destroyers, at least two Quon-type cruisers, three mother ships with a dozen or so patrol ships," Spada agreed. "This is not good. We surely aren't suicidal enough to go to war against the Empire."

The agent found the zoom button on his camera, and the view closed on the nose of one ship.

Blazoned across it was, indeed, the starry black sash of the Alliance.

There was complete silence for a very long moment in the Star Risk room.

"We," Goodnight said with finality, "are truly and completely screwed."

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FIFTY-SIX � ^ � Aw, crap." Riss said in considerable disgust. "Why does God always have to be on the side of the big battalions?"

She'd just returned from a futile attempt to convince the mercenaries she and Spada had hired to keep their words. None of them had done other than sneer and leave the Alsaoud System as quickly as they could.