Star Soldier (11 page)

Marten gave him a wan smile. Then he sprinted back for the overturned police cruiser. He soon lay panting behind it. Turbo and Stick chewed on protein bars, a pile of them at their feet. Marten noticed that some of the wrappers were bloody.

“You didn’t get them from in there?” Marten asked in outrage, jerking his thumb at the dead infantrymen.

Turbo shrugged.

Marten blanched. “That’s… that’s ghoulish.”

“You grabbed the guns,” Turbo said, his mouth full of chewed bar.

“I’m not eating my gun!”

“Relax,” said Stick. “It’s not like we’re cannibals.”

Marten dropped it. He inspected his assault carbine, figuring out how it worked.

Omi shook his shoulder. “The red-suits must have gotten caught before they made it to the emergency elevator. My guess is they’ve having a tough time ordering people out of their way.”

“You think the red-suits are in charge of Sydney?” asked Stick.

Omi jerked his thumb at the firefight. “The Highborn are deep in the city. Bet they know, or guess at least, what the PHC are capable of.”

“So what?” said Stick. “What I wanna know is how to get around this battle and to deep-core.”

Marten cudgeled his mind, thinking back to his planning meetings in Construction of Level Sixty. There were three different types of levels, each conforming to a preplanned pattern. The ones with power generators like here on Level Thirty-eight were business levels, so…. He snapped his fingers. “There should be a maintenance shaft….” He glanced at the ceiling to get his bearings. “South,” he said, pointing away from the firefight.

“Down to Level Forty?” asked Omi.

Marten nodded.

Omi took off running the direction Marten had pointed. Stick and Turbo followed, getting away from the firefight as fast as possible.

Marten glanced at the leftover pile of bloody protein bars. He wrinkled his nose, shrugged and grabbed a fistful, shoving them into his pockets. Then he took off after the others.

15.

Conflicting emotions, fear predominating, warred within Major Orlov as she bulled through a terrified sea of civilians—they choked the streets with their masses and kept pouring out of the complexes. As loud and elemental as thunder, their combined shouts echoed off the ceiling and rolled from one building to the next. It created an emotional, supercharged atmosphere that drained everyone of reason. Individuals weren’t strong enough to resist such power, and a new entity had been born: the mob. Primeval, powerful, pregnant with horror, the mob paralyzed the lower sections of Sydney. The hordes within it surged like waves first one way and then another. Eddies, currents and treacherous riptides developed without apparent reason, which was deceptive. A rational mind couldn’t comprehend, but the grim thing that yet reeked of the primordial slime—the mob—understood perfectly.

The beings who had once been human—and who would be again if they survived this night—bore tightly strapped packs or clutched onto prized heirlooms. Their hysterical faces spoke more eloquently than words. Children were often torn from their parents’ grasp and became flotsam in the fleshy ocean. The major, as best she could, used her bulk and bearish strength to shove toward the Deep-Core Station. Behind her followed the picked men of her flying squad. The screaming crowds flinched from her killers. The crowds retained enough sense for that. Women and children cringed. Some men, however, dared to scowl behind their backs.  Terrified, the major knew that one thrown bottle, or any hard object in fact, could send the mob howling upon them.  She shoved more brutally. Mercy would only be seen as weakness, or even worse, as fear.

Each of her men wore the red uniform of Political Harmony Corps. Beneath it they wore body armor. Silver packs attached by wires joined the slim pistols in their fists. Behind their clear visors, glazed eyes showed their post-hypnotic conditioning, and so perhaps did the set of their lips. They marched to death, to supreme suicide, and it had turned them into something akin to zombies. That in turn gave them an aura even the mob dreaded.

Wherever the squad went, they had left a litter of the dead and dying. The major had ordered scattered army formations directly into the fray against the Highborn with orders that no one retreat in face of the enemy. A few times the lasers flared and stubborn police units fell dead at their posts. The truth was that nobody had expected the Highborn to fight with such grim élan underground. In Greater Sydney, everybody had agreed, the traitors from space would learn what real fighting was all about. Once the Highborn crawled in the Earth like moles, their vaunted superiority would prove false. That thought had been the illusion.

Major Orlov staggered through the last of the shoulder-to-shoulder masses, which now surged toward Stairwell One hundred and six to Level Forty-one. Groups of people huddled together on the street in shock or dashed off to points unknown as fast as they could. Slowly the size of the mobs thinned. Still, wherever Major Orlov marched, people ran by screaming or grimly silent or stood numb as they gazed intently at the ceiling, as if expecting it to collapse at any moment.

The major squared her massive shoulders and tugged her uniform straight. The berserk hordes frightened her. Some people had actually dared to hiss as they’d passed. Terror, as she well knew from those she’d tortured, often destroyed a lifetime of social conditioning. She shook her head, silently berating herself. She had played too long with Marten Kluge, had wished too fervently to see him broken. That was why Highborn had gotten so far into Sydney before she’d moved, why they had been able to block the normal route to her destination. It amazed her how efficient the enemy was. How extraordinary their martial accomplishments. She’d   wasted time with Marten Kluge. And there had been something else, something she wouldn’t allow herself to admit. It’s why she hadn’t killed him in the interrogation room. She glanced at her men. No matter. Marten Kluge along with everyone else in Sydney would serve the greater good by their sacrifice.

Yet…

Major Orlov ran a dry tongue over equally dry lips. She didn’t want to perish, to become nonbeing. The idea made her guts churn. After this life, nothing, blank, deleted. But… sweat prickled her collar. What if the old legends—the nonsense from the ancient world—really were true? That was foolish. There was no Hell, no Judge in the afterlife. There was this one life, then nonexistence. She’d lived well. But she wanted to live still! And maybe Hell was real. Maybe for all the wretched evil she’d done—

“I did it for the good of the State,” she told herself.

Major Orlov removed her cap and wiped sweat from her forehead. The she placed the cap firmly on her head. A sick feeling thumped in her chest. What if the Great Judge didn’t view it that way? What if He consigned her to Hell for her errors of judgment?

She left the blocks of barracks-like living complexes and entered a financial zone. In the distance roared the mobs. It made her shiver and hope with everything she had that they didn’t turn this way. The buildings changed from long edifices to smaller cubes of credit unions, banks, repo-houses and travel agencies. Plants and trees abounded in greater profusion. The streets and sidewalks switched from plain ferroconcrete to colorful bricks. They made eye-pleasing plazas with umbrellas, and table and chairs outside small eateries.

The major stopped and tried to get her bearings. Being out of the mob was like leaving a high-pressure cage. She could breathe again, normally, but she felt funny just the same. Every so often, a group of people raced by, running to join the mob or to get far away from it. They avoided her, but they no longer seemed in awe. She didn’t like that. They thought perhaps that they had a new master to fear. Well they were wrong! She snarled at her zombies. They stiffened to attention, alert, eager to kill again before their finality.

A sergeant hurried beside her and brought an electronic map. She traced her blunt finger over it, tapping the red dot.

“Here.”

He gazed at the buildings around them. Then he grunted, “Seven blocks over. That way.”

“Yes.”

“Major?”

She squinted at him, a little man with a deadly laser. Not that he was so small really, just that all her life she’d been bigger, larger than practically everyone. Sometimes she found it annoying; mostly it proved useful for intimidation purposes.

“They will be wary,” the sergeant said. “They might shoot first.”

Major Orlov bit back the retort that maybe it would be just as well if they did shoot.
That
thought she mustn’t allow herself, not after such an illustrious career. So she lifted a haughty chin and rapped an order. The squad, their trigger fingers overly sensitive, jogged behind at the double as she marched to face down the Deep-Core Personnel.

Deep-Core took orders straight from the SU Directorate and no other. Neither the Army nor the PHC nor the Political Action Committee had any authority over them. To ensure Deep-Core’s independence and protection from terrorists they had their own police units and security directives. Some called them a state within a state. The practically limitless energy that came from this advanced technology and the awful risks it entailed demanded such a condition. Deep-Core Security guarded the emergency elevator on Level Forty that sank far into the Earth. The Regular Army had demanded reinforcements from them. The answer, as always, had been, “Don’t be absurd.”

After a brisk walk, Major Orlov rounded the last corner and marched toward the entrance of a low-built building that looked just like the others in this district. A spacious plaza fronted the glass entrance, not for gracious living, but to provide a wide field of fire. The building looked like a bank, but that was illusion. It would be a vault over a vault, in other words, a well-constructed fortress. Apple trees rustled along the brick-laid plaza, while soft music played overhead. The war hadn’t yet reached here, although a bloodstain here and there showed where Security had slain refugees foolish enough to head here for safety. And of course, Security had quickly removed the bodies, undoubtedly dropping the corpses down the chute to the core waste dump.

Major Orlov knew weapons tracked her. Security operatives watched their every move. It made her back itch, and she wondered if they would simply cut her down without a warning. The farther she walked, the more certain she became they waited until none of them could get away before they opened fire. Her belly muscles clenched and her mouth grew drier. It became agony to take another step.

“Halt!” rumbled a command, as if out of the very air.

Major Orlov almost collapsed right there. She froze in the middle of the plaza and waited. The short hairs on the back of her neck prickled. Her red-suited zombies halted behind her, their programmed eyes absorbing every detail. She vaguely wondered if being so near to death heightened one’s senses. Did knowing that she would soon not-be make her want to live these last few hours with all the zest she could muster? The seconds dragged, and she wondered if security personnel debated about talking first or just going ahead and killing them. She wanted to scream, ‘Wait, we’re PHC!’ Yet maybe that fact was going against them in the debate.

Her thoughts stopped as the glass door opened. Her knees felt weak, and she felt absurdly happy that she could live a few more hours.

Out marched a slender man in a brown uniform. He smoked a stimstick, the tip glowing red, and he wore his cap at a rakish angle. He smiled at them, but his mean little eyes took in their lasers, their red uniforms.

He smiled to show her she didn’t frighten him. Major Orlov was certain of it, the arrogant prick! He probably relished his position. He no doubt delighted in cowing people when he knew snipers would back his every word. So she took a wide stance and put her hands on her heavy hips. She glowered at him with the PHC look.

It didn’t impress. He saluted, allowed himself another drag on his stub of a stimstick, then took it with his slim fingers and flicked it far. In fright, Major Orlov and her men watched the smoldering stub. It seemed too much like a signal. When the stub hit the bricks and broke into sparks they all winced. But nothing bad happened.

“It’s major, I believe,” he said, with a cursory glance at her epaulets.

Major Orlov maintained her glower, and she hated him more by the nanosecond. She wasn’t used to such disrespect and she silently damned him for scaring her.

He darted a glance at her killers, and the down turn at the corner of his lips said he saw something nasty about them that one shouldn’t really talk about. So he regarded her again. “This is a restricted area, as I’m sure you know.”

Major Orlov drew a plastic computer card from her side. It was her directive. She thrust it at him.

He made no move to take it. “You must move along now, Major, and, uh, take your
men
with you.”

“This is direct from Beijing.” The first hint of uncertainty entered his eyes, and oh, that thrilled her.

“This is Deep-Core.” He spoke reverently.

“The SU Directorate supersedes Deep-Core.”

Momentary awe flickered across his face—that she could bear orders stamped by a Director. He suppressed the awe, and then he snatched the card and dropped it into a scanner slung on his belt. He stared at the scanner longer than necessary. Finally, he glanced at her, murmuring, “This is highly unusual.”

“Notice the seal.” She couldn’t keep the glee out of her voice. “SU Directorate.”

“Hmm.” He spoke into his cuff. Then he drew a second stimstick from his uniform.

Her men stiffened, as if this slender officer would actually do the killing. He need merely twitch his finger and lasers would cut them down. He had no need to draw a gun, not out here.

The Deep-Core officer inhaled, and the end of his stimstick glowed into life. He blew narcotic smoke into the air. Suddenly he cocked his head as if he heard an inner voice. No doubt, an implant communicator had been embedded in his skull. He lifted his eyebrows, glanced at Orlov. It took him a moment to formulate the words. “This way then,” he said, “but your goons stay behind.”