David Drake - Redliners

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Redliners

David Drake

Fout! Onbekende schakeloptie-instructie.

ISBN: 0-671-87733-X

Cover art by Gary Ruddell

First printing, August 1996

Drake, David.

Redliners / David Drake

ISBN 0-671-87733-X (HC)

I. Title

PS3554.R196R43 1996

813'.54—dc20 96-17559

CIP

PROLOGUE

When I entered Category 4 of the Unity civil service thirty-seven

years ago, I gave up my former name and life to become a servant

dedicated to all mankind. There are those who say I ceased to be

human when as part of the process a computer was embedded in my

central nervous system.

I am called John Smith, though my name might as easily have been

Xiang Quo or Krishna Singh or Ali Nasr. I am now Chief of

Administration, the highest permanent official of the Unity. There are

those who say I have the powers of a god and the ruthlessness of an

avalanche.

Since I entered Category 4, my only desire has been the long-term

good of mankind. Since I became Chief of Administration, my will has

been the only will of mankind.

There are those who say I have no more mercy than a surgeon

treating cancer.

There are those who say my planning has been mankind’s only

salvation during these seven years of war with the Kalendru, who

understand the concepts of “master” and “slave” but not of “equals.”

There are those who say that even such as I must retire, as a blade is

retired when grinding use wears it to a sliver—be that sliver ever so

sharp.

They say, they say . . .

And they are all of them correct.

Operation Active Cloak

—1—

Major Arthur Farrell’s bones vibrated to the howls of the generators

braking the captured Kalendru starship to a soft landing in the main

military port of the world Unity planners had labeled Maxus 377. The

engineers hadn’t bothered to jury-rig displays after they gutted the

ship’s hold for the assault force. If the strikers of Company C41

wanted, they could tap visuals from the flight deck onto their helmet

visors and look at the warped-looking Spook structures they would

attack in the next few seconds.

Farrell didn’t bother to watch. Instead he rechecked his stinger. He

wore crossed bandoliers of ammo packs and dangling blast rockets; a

medical kit; two supplementary communication units; two knives—

one of them powered, the other with a shorter fixed blade that could

double as a climbing spike; and a packet of emergency rations. The

integral canteen of Farrell’s back-and-breast armor held two quarts of

water, but he carried an additional three gallons in a backpack. The

weight slowed him and made his armor sag brutally against his

shoulders, but the cost was worth it to him.

When you’re pinned down in the hot sun, thirst is the worst torture.

Worse than the ripping pain of your wound, worse even than the

stench of your friend’s half-burned corpse on the ground beside you.

Art Farrell knew.

The starship quivered, still twenty feet above the ground though she

was nearly in equilibrium with the field her generators had induced in

the magnetic mass on which she was landing. “Wait for it!” ordered

Captain Broz, C41’s executive officer, over the command channel.

Nadia Broz was following standard operating procedure, but on this

mission there wasn’t any risk that a striker would unass early.

Normally C41 inserted aboard a purpose-built landing vessel. The

hatches opened minutes before contact. For Active Cloak camouflage

rather than speed was the requirement. At touchdown the flight crew

would blow explosive bolts to separate the outer bulkheads from the

skeleton of support members, but until then the freighter’s hold was

sealed like a prison cell.

“Hey, I think I changed my mind,” a striker called over the ship

noises. There was brittle laughter.

Kurt Leinsdorf stood stolidly at Farrell’s shoulder as he always did

during an insertion. On C41’s table of organization, Leinsdorf was a

communications specialist. In reality he was Farrell’s bodyguard, a

huge, strong man who carried a single-shot plasma cannon in addition

to his other weapons and equipment.

“I wanna be a Strike Force ranger . . .” sang Horgen, a Third

Platoon striker. “I wanna live a life of danger . . .”

The starship sank the last few feet like a leaking bladder. Wait for it,

Farrell mouthed, but no sound passed his dry lips.

A locator chart overlaid the upper left quadrant of Farrell’s visor:

seventy-eight green dots, each one a striker. They were crammed too

closely together at the moment for him to count them individually.

Every one was a veteran: not only of combat, but veterans of C41

itself.

Strike Force companies were prefixed B, C, or D depending on their

size. C-class units had a nominal strength of one hundred personnel.

C41 had received eight replacements since the last operation, but

Farrell decided not to bring them along on a mission as rough as

Active Cloak looked like being. The replacements were good people

or they wouldn’t have passed Strike Force screening after they

volunteered, but they hadn’t worked with C41 before. There was no

margin here for somebody who misunderstood an order or reacted in

an unexpected way.

The Spooks had a civilian colony of five hundred thousand on

Maxus 377 in addition to the logistics bases that served their military

on fourteen worlds. There was no margin at all when C41 seized the

planet’s main port ahead of the full-scale Unity invasion.

The tripod landing legs touched the ground in sequence. The

freighter rang in three descending notes. “Go!” Farrell shouted,

unheard over the clangs of the bolts shearing. He and a dozen other

strikers shoved at the toppling bulkhead.

They’d landed just before local noon. Sunlight quivered through

heat waves from the port’s white concrete surface. Anti-emitter

missiles launched in snarling cacophony from the freighter’s upper

cargo deck, homing on every operating radio-frequency antenna within

their ten-mile range.

Major Arthur Farrell hit the ground running, headed for the port

administration building with his headquarters group and two squads of

Third Platoon. C41 had begun the invasion.

The rest of the Unity armed forces better follow soon.

The pair of Spooks in the cab of the maintenance vehicle goggled to

see the recently-landed freighter fall apart as they drove past. Sergeant

Guilio Abbado killed them both with a single burst from his stinger

before he jumped to the ground.

“Three-three to the truck!” Abbado shouted. Most of his squad was

already running toward the eight-wheeled vehicle. It slowed but still

coasted forward after the driver died in a spray of coppery blood.

Horgen and Glasebrook leaped aboard, flinging the dead Spooks out of

the way. Horgen managed to turn the vehicle before it plunged into an

open sump, but she couldn’t seem to find the brakes.

One of the Spooks hung out the open door. Abbado kicked the body

the rest of the way to the ground as he climbed into the cab beside Flea

Glasebrook. The other five strikers of Third Squad, Third Platoon

clambered onto the back of the vehicle, shooting at any visible Spook

to keep the enemy’s panic boiling.

Horgen goosed the throttle. She steered east and accelerated without

needing orders.

The truck was a godsend if you believed in God, which Abbado

more or less did. The navy flight crew had landed the captured

freighter on the magnetic mass nearest the port’s northwest corner

according to plan. Abbado could see the sense of that, since the port

garrison’s compound and the administration building were

immediately north of the site and the transient military barracks were

adjacent on the west.

The trouble was 3-3’s objective, the huge maintenance hangar along

the east edge of the field, was almost four hundred yards from the ship.

That was a hell of a long way to run across bare concrete with a

combat load. By the time the exhausted strikers got to the hangar, the

Spooks would have had time to wake up.

They were waking up already. A hundred-foot-wide segment of

hangar door had been open when C41 appeared. It was closing now,

rolling down from the building roof. “Don’t stop!” Abbado said, not

that there was any likelihood Horgen had planned to.

Abbado hooked his left arm around the frame of the shattered

windshield and sprayed a crackling burst from his stinger across the

shadowed figures moving within the hangar. Two of them flopped to

the ground; one sprang up again and limped out of sight behind his

fellows.

The stinger’s coils accelerated 15-grain projectiles to 10,000 feet per

second. The pellet wasn’t effective beyond 500 yards, but the strikers

carried rockets to handle the occasional distant target. Stingers had the

impact of a grenade on a target at short range. With thousand-round

ammo packs containing both pellets and a fresh power supply, they

were the weapon of choice for the sudden assaults in which C41

specialized.

The truck had a three-man cab, but the three weren’t supposed to be

humans in battle gear. The Kalendru were long-limbed, gray-skinned

humanoids. From a distance they appeared hairless, but if you looked

closely you saw that their skin was covered with fine down.

Kalendru were on average taller, slimmer and significantly quicker

than Terrans. Because Spooks weren’t as strong, their troops carried

lighter, less-powerful weapon loads. A striker learned fast, though, that

if you missed your first shot the Spook was going to get in the second

one.

Horgen had the truck up to forty miles an hour. Immediately ahead

the hangar door closed with a rattle that Abbado hoped meant it was

fairly flimsy. “Hang on, boys!” he said as he pulled himself into the

cab and crossed his arms over his faceshield. “The party’s about to

start!”

They hit the quivering door with a crash louder than the battle going

on all over the spaceport.

Each of the two 16-round cannisters of plasma cartridges weighed a

hair over forty pounds, and there was the weight of the air-cushion

dolly besides. Striker Esther Meyer liked to tell herself she was as

tough as any man in C41, but right at the moment she was glad

Sergeant-Gunner Bloch and Santini, the other loader, had paused to lift

her dolly from the hold instead of leaving her to struggle with it alone.

Meyer could keep moving despite the heat and constriction of her hard

suit as long as anybody, sure; but hefting a full ammo dolly was

largely a matter of mass and peak strength.

Stingers and the 4-pound rockets most strikers slung from their belts

already raked the port area. Fourth Platoon (Heavy Weapons) was the

last out of the ship. With their full armor and bulky loads they’d have

needlessly slowed less heavily equipped strikers.

There was no return fire as yet but it’d come soon enough. When it

did, the maneuver platoons would be damned glad of 50-pound missile

launchers and the plasma cannon.

Sergeant Bloch was a big man who looked gigantic in his polished

white armor. His dolly supported the cannon itself and a three-round

belt of ready cartridges. Twenty yards to the northeast was a pit

holding a transformer beneath surface level where it didn’t interfere

with starships being hauled across the port in giant cradles. Bloch

hunched toward it at a dead run. The pit was the best cover in his

sector.

All Fourth Platoon personnel wore hard suits. The crews handling

the triple launchers had to worry about the backblast of their own

heavy missiles, and a mist of ions as hot as a sun’s corona bathed the

cannoneers as soon as they began to fire their belt-fed weapons. The

armor’s protection from enemy counterfire was a secondary concern.

Meyer heard the high-pitched scream of Spook lasers in addition to

the snarl of stingers and the crackWHAM! of the strikers’ rockets. The

port’s surface flared white at the corner of her eye as a beam burned

concrete to glass and quicklime. The Spooks were awake, though for

the moment they seemed to be spraying the landscape in panic.

Bloch stepped into the waist-high transformer pit and wrestled the

gun onto its bipod in firing position. Santini simply pushed the ammo

dolly in ahead of himself. The cannisters were padded against shock,

but a direct hit from a laser might penetrate. The best result the crew

could hope for then was a low-order explosion that might not kill

them. If the bead of deuterium at the heart of each cartridge detonated,

hard suits weren’t going to make any difference to the resulting

thermonuclear explosion.

The captured freighter erupted smoke and another sheaf of anti-

emitter missiles. Those were launched automatically when the unit’s

artificial intelligence sensed Kalendru-type radio frequency emissions.

The streak of light that ended in a lightning-sharp explosion in the

transient barracks was a missile from one of 4th Platoon’s triple

launchers. That was fast work, but the team had set up beside the ship

because there wasn’t any cover in their direction anyway.

Meyer jumped her dolly into the transformer pit and followed it.

Bloch fired his ready ammunition in three ravening pulses as fast as

the gun would cycle. The ringing air glowed like the heart of a

rainbow.

“Feed me!” the sergeant screamed as Santini dragged a 16-round

belt from one of his cannisters. “Feed me!”

As she opened a cannister one-handed, Meyer looked over the rim

of the pit. She dialed up her visor’s magnification. The gun was placed

to cover the main highway entering the starport from the north. Seven

miles up that road was the planet’s largest military base, code-named

Active Grid for this operation. That was probably where the tank at

which Bloch was hammering had come from.

The plasma bolts had grounded the huge vehicle in an iridescent

fireball, but they hadn’t destroyed it. Air shimmered in a corona

discharge as the tank’s generators rebuilt its magnetic shielding.

The Spooks were awake, all right.

The front door of the guard barracks started to open while Striker

Caius Blohm was still twenty yards from the building. He fired one of

his penetrator grenades through the panel. An instant later the

warhead’s atomized fuel mixed with the air and detonated, blowing

splinters of the door in one direction and the charred fragments of the

Spook in the other.

Blohm liked to be on point. In this war the choice was to be quick or

dead, and the Spooks were plenty damn quick. Your best chance of

survival was the Spook’s hesitation, and if you hesitated you were

handing him your head as well as maybe the heads of the strikers

behind you. Technically the building’s ground floor wasn’t Blohm’s

responsibility, but this wasn’t a time to stand on ceremony.

Blohm trusted himself not to hesitate. Never. Not so much as a

heartbeat.

First Platoon’s objective was to clear the garrison’s three-story

barracks. The planners had nixed putting a heavy rocket into the

structure because the port command center might be either in the

barracks or in the administration building.

The command center would be hardened. Burying it in the rubble of

the upper floors wouldn’t keep the Spooks in the center from using

their outlying gun and missile positions to blow the hell out of first

C41, then any Unity vessel that appeared on this hemisphere of the

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RedlinersDavidDrakeFout!Onbekendeschakeloptie-instructie.Copyright©1996byDavidDrakeISBN:0-671-87733-XCoverartbyGaryRuddellFirstprinting,August1996Drake,David.Redliners/DavidDrakeISBN0-671-87733-X(HC)I.TitlePS3554.R196R431996813'.54—dc2096-17559CIPPROLOGUEWhenIenteredCategory4oftheUnitycivilserviceth...

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