Grimmer Than Hell Read online

  Grimmer Than Hell

  David Drake

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2003 by David Drake.

  "Introduction: Coming Home By the Long Way" copyright © 2003 by David Drake. "Rescue Mission" copyright © 1988 by David Drake; first printed in The Fleet. "When the Devil Drives" copyright © 1988 by David Drake; first printed in Counterattack. "Team Effort" copyright © 1989 by David Drake; first printed in Breakthrough. "The End" copyright © 1990 by David Drake; first printed in Sword Allies. "Smash and Grab" copyright © 1990 by David Drake; first printed in Total War. "Mission Accomplished" copyright © 1991 by David Drake; first printed in Crisis. "Facing the Enemy" copyright © 1992 by David Drake; first printed in Battlestation. "Failure Mode" copyright © 1993 by David Drake; first printed in Vanguard. "The Tradesmen" copyright © 2000 by David Drake; first printed in Drakas! "Coming Up Against It" copyright © 2003 by David Drake; original to this volume. "With the Sword He Must Be Slain" copyright © 1998 by David Drake; first printed in Armageddon. "Nation Without Walls" copyright © 1977 by The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.; first printed in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, July 1977. "The Predators" copyright © 1979 by David Drake; first printed in Destinies, Vol. 1, No. 5 (Oct.–Dec. 1979). "Underground" copyright © 1980 by David Drake; first printed in Destinies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Feb.–March 1980).

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 0-7434-3590-7

  Cover art by Steve Hickman

  First printing, February 2003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Drake, David.

  Grimmer than hell / by David Drake.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-7434-3590-7

  1. Science fiction, American. 2. Life on other planets—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.R196 G75 2003

  813'.0876208—dc21

  2002034194

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Produced by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Edmund D. Livingston, Sr.

  Ed was proud to have served as a Marine rifleman on Okinawa and been part of the unit which landed in Yokosuka—without ammunition—two days before the Japanese surrender.

  I'm equally proud to have been his friend in later years.

  BAEN BOOKS by DAVID DRAKE

  Hammer's Slammers

  The Tank Lords

  Caught in the Crossfire

  The Butcher's Bill

  The Sharp End

  Paying the Piper

  RCN series

  With the Lightnings

  Lt. Leary, Commanding

  Independent Novels and Collections

  Seas of Venus

  Foreign Legions, edited by David Drake

  Ranks of Bronze

  Cross the Stars

  The Dragon Lord

  Birds of Prey

  Northworld Trilogy

  Redliners

  Starliner

  All the Way to the Gallows

  Grimmer Than Hell

  The Undesired Princess and The Enchanted Bunny

  (with L. Sprague de Camp)

  Lest Darkness Fall and To Bring the Light

  (with L. Sprague de Camp)

  Armageddon

  (edited with Billie Sue Mosiman)

  Killer

  (with Karl Edward Wagner)

  The General series:

  Warlord, with S.M. Stirling (omnibus)

  Conqueror, with S.M. Stirling (forthcoming)

  The Forge, with S.M. Stirling

  The Chosen, with S.M. Stirling

  The Reformer, with S.M. Stirling

  The Tyrant, with Eric Flint

  The Belisarius series:

  (with Eric Flint)

  An Oblique Approach

  In the Heart of Darkness

  Destiny's Shield

  Fortune's Stroke

  The Tide of Victory

  INTRODUCTION

  Coming Home by the Long Way

  A few years ago I collected my humorous stories in All the Way to the Gallows. In my introduction I admitted that I wasn't best known for writing humor.

  This is what I'm best known for writing.

  The impetus for this book was a fan suggestion that with surveillance cameras becoming increasingly prevalent all over the world, it would be a good time to get the Lacey stories back in print. I thought about the notion.

  I only did three stories in the series, in the late '70s. Lacey is a man with all the ordinary human feelings—which he suppresses ruthlessly, as he suppresses everything else that might prevent him from accomplishing his task. He has no goals, no dreams, no friends; but he's very, very good at his job.

  A friend once suggested that the Lacey stories were even clearer descriptions of how I felt about Viet Nam and what I'd become there than the Hammer stories I was writing at the same time. She may have been right.

  I don't want to get back into that mindset, but neither did I want to turn the setting into a shared universe. Lacey is, if you'll forgive me, a more personal Hell than that.

  The original collection, Lacey and His Friends (with an absolutely wonderful Steve Hickman cover, by the way), bound in a couple novellas which showed the kinder, gentler, David Drake. There is a kinder, gentler David Drake; but I'm not as defensive as I used to be about the other parts of me, and they're real too.

  The remaining pieces in the present collection are close in tone to the Lacey stories. They're military SF of one sort or another, though "or another" covers a pretty wide range.

  Three are odd-balls. Billie Sue Mosiman and I edited an original anthology titled (and about) Armageddon. I wrote "With the Sword He Must Be Slain" for that volume.

  Steve Stirling's Draka series is set in an alternate universe in which Evil wins. Steve turned the setting into a shared universe with the volume Drakas! and asked me to contribute.

  Evil doesn't win in my books (well, I'll admit it's sometimes hard to pick the good guys) and I was a little uncomfortable with the assignment, but Steve's a friend and has written stories for me. If I'd known he wasn't going to do a story for his own collection, I might have begged off; but I didn't, and "The Tradesmen" resulted. It has a very dense structure, so much so that my outline amounted to 60% of the wordage of the finished story. As a piece of craftsmanship, I'm proud of it.

  "Coming Up Against It" had a very strange genesis. Bill Fawcett got a deal for the two of us to consult on backgrounds for a computer game, for which we'd be paid an absurdly large amount of money. Part of the deal was that I would write a story in the game universe for binding in with the game. I wrote the story.

  We did commentary on the initial background and sent it in. The new version came back to us, not a refinement but a totally new scenario. We did more commentary. The response was yet again a totally new scenario. I don't recall how many iterations we went through on this, but I do remember that I was getting steamed. (I later heard the rumor that somebody in the company was keeping the meter running as a favor to the outside contractor doing the scenarios, a buddy who'd fallen on hard times.)

  My story, "Coming Up Against It," was based on a situation that was edited out of the game early in the process. I didn't even think I had a copy of the story (I'd tried to put t
he whole business out of my head; I was really angry about being dicked around), but it showed up while I was searching for other things. It appears here for the first time.

  And by the way, this is a prime example of a deal that was too good to be true turning out to be too good to be true.

  Bill Fawcett sold the Battlestation shared universe with me as co-editor. I'd been doing a lot of work in shared universes by that time, and I decided that the two volumes of the original contract would be my last for a while. I wrote my two stories, "Facing the Enemy" and "Failure Mode," so that they'd give closure to the series. You don't ordinarily get that with life, but it's something I strive for in fiction.

  And that brings me very directly to the six stories which open this volume. They come from a slightly earlier shared universe that Bill developed and I co-edited: The Fleet. They follow a special operations company in a future war against aliens. (Parenthetically, most of my Military SF doesn't involve aliens; possibly because I don't recall ever being shot at by an alien when I was in Viet Nam or Cambodia.) Each story is self-standing but they have a cumulative effect and are, I believe, some of the best Military SF I've written.

  What the Fleet stories don't have is closure; that too, I think, has something to do with me and Southeast Asia. The series ended and I thought I'd walked away from it, just as I thought I'd walked away from a lot of other things back in 1971.

  Then, years later, I wrote Redliners, a novel about a special operations company fighting aliens until things went badly wrong . . . except that in Redliners they got a second chance. They and their society got a second chance. They got closure, and in a funny way so did I. Since Redliners I've been able to write adventure fiction that's a little less cynical, a little less bleak, than what I'd invariably done in the past when I wrote action stories.

  I don't think I'd have been able to write Redliners if I hadn't previously written the Fleet stories. I'm awfully glad I did write them.

  Dave Drake

  david-drake.com

  RESCUE MISSION

  A Story of The Fleet

  "Is it true," demanded one of the First Platoon corporals in a voice that filled the echoing bay of the landing craft, "that this whole operation is so we can rescue Admiral Mayne's nephew from the Khalians?"

  Captain Kowacs looked at the man. The corporal stared back at the company commander with a jaunty arrogance that said, Whatcha gonna do? Put me on point?

  Which of course was the corporal's normal patrol position.

  Kowacs took a deep breath, but you learned real fast in a Marine Reaction Company that you couldn't scare your troops with rear-echelon discipline. Trying to do that would guarantee you were the first casualty of the next firefight.

  "No, Corporal Dodd," said Kowacs. "Admiral Mayne is planning coordinator for this mission, but neither he nor any nephews of his have anything behind-the-scenes to do with it."

  He glared at his assembled company.

  The behind-the-scenes order had come from Grand Admiral Forberry; and it was Forberry's son, not a nephew, who'd been snatched—no body recovered, at any rate—when the Khalians raided the Pleasure Dome on Iknaton five years before.

  Nobody else spoke up; even Dodd looked abashed.

  Kowacs gazed at the hundred and three pairs of waiting eyes—wondered how many of them would have any life behind them in twenty-four hours—

  Sighed and thumbed the handset controlling the holo projector.

  The image that formed above Kowacs' head was fuzzy. The unit was intended for use in a shielded environment, while the bay of the landing ship Bonnie Parker was alive with circuits and charged metal.

  No matter: this was the 121st Marine Reaction Company, not an architectural congress. The projector would do for the job.

  "Fleet Intelligence believes this site to be the Khalians' major holding facility for human prisoners on Target," Kowacs said, referencing the hologram with a nod. "Their slave pen. Reconnaissance indicates that slave ships land at a pad three kilometers distant—"

  A second hologram bloomed briefly, the scale of distance merging it with one wall of the big room.

  "—and their cargoes are carried to the holding facility by air trucks which touch down on the roof of the Administration Building," Kowacs continued as the image of the outlying spaceport disappeared. The building in the center of the main hologram brightened and began to rotate in three dimensions while the Marines squinted.

  "Based on analysis of captured Khalian structures," Kowacs said, "Intelligence believes the building is an integral polyborate casting, probably of two above-ground levels—"

  "That high and the weasels only got two floors?" demanded a sergeant from the Heavy Weapons platoon. She was concerned, not gibing like Dodd earlier. "Them little bastards, they like low ceilings."

  "Good point, Sergeant Rozelle," Kowacs said, as if he liked to be interrupted . . . but soldiers who were too dumb to think for themselves were too dumb to trust with your life in a reaction company. "Intelligence believes the building is scaled to the needs of human—slave—intake. But there aren't any windows, and there may well be a third level inside."

  Kowacs cleared his throat. Before any of the half dozen Marines poised with further questions could interrupt again, he continued, "The walls and roof are rigid enough to withstand considerable stress, but they're apt to shatter once their integrity is breached. Intelligence believes that strip charges will hole them and that plasma bolts should crumble sections large enough for easy entry."

  Almost the entire complement of the 121st was veteran. Even the scattering of newbies were aware that Fleet Intelligence believed a lot of things—but all Fleet Intelligence knew for sure was that no analyst's butt was going to be on the line if his belief were false.

  "The admin building is separated from the camp proper by double fences with a fifteen meters between them," Kowacs continued as the hologram of the building froze and that of the fenced area brightened in turn. "The intermediate separation is believed to be mined and is swept by automatic weapons sited on the building's roof coping. The fence may be electrified."

  Marines nodded, easy in the knowledge that barriers impassible to a bunch of unarmed civilians were going to be a piece of cake to them.

  The forty-eight buildings splayed like a double row of spokes around the hub of the admin building, twelve and thirty-six, brightened as the hologram fence dimmed.

  "Beyond that are the slave pens and workshops themselves," Kowacs said.

  Just for a moment he paused, his mouth half open—prepared speech interrupted by memories of Khalians and slaves. . . . Memories of his father and mother, dead on Gravely, and his sister's body left behind two weeks later on LaFarge when the same raider landed to replenish its stock.

  Its larder.

  "Intelligence doesn't even guess at the structure within the compound," Kowacs forced his tongue to continue, though it was several moments more before his eyes were focusing again on the Marines. They were draped over folded bunks and the equipment crated to deploy with them. Some of them looked back at their captain with vacant expressions that Kowacs knew must mirror his of a moment before.

  "There may be guards in the barracks, there may not," he continued thickly, damning the emotion that clogged his throat and made him less able to do his job—

  Of erasing every living weasel from the universe.

  "If there are guards, they probably don't have weapons; but most of you know an unarmed Khalian can still be a dangerous opponent."

  "It's still a fucking pelt, too," growled someone from a corner of the bay.

  "Yeah, it's that too," Kowacs said in a voice with an edge. "And any Marine taking trophies while there's still a job to do, I'll take his ears myself. Do you understand?"

  The newbies thought that was a threat. The veterans knew it was a promise.

  Kowacs took a deep breath and, fully in control of himself and the situation again, continued as the hologram changed, "The outer perimeter is
a double fence again, but with guard towers on the exterior."

  The tower images glowed like strung jewels.

  "Most of them are automatic weapons," Kowacs said without expression, "but there are rapid-firing plasma guns—"

  Six of the jewels stood out from the rest.

  "—for anti-vehicle defense; and there are a pair of missile batteries. Ship-killers."

  "Fuckin' A," said Dodd. He wasn't interrupting, just vocalizing what all the Marines in the bay were thinking right now.

  Kowacs included.

  "Sir?" asked Sergeant Atwater of Third Platoon, a black Terran who was in line for a slot in the Officer Training Unit. "What forces are being committed to this assault?"

  "Right," said Kowacs. "The Carol Ann Fugate and the Ladybird Johnson will land as close to the perimeter as they can. The One-Twenty-second is responsible for the west half—"

  That portion of the hologram brightened.

  "—and the One-Twenty-third handles the rest. Kamens and Eckland think their companies are nearly as good as mine—"

  The back of Kowacs' mind wore a smile at the scene in Admiral Mayne's office, when he and his fellow company commanders had been told their assignments.

  "—so I guess they'll be able to take care of the job."

  "Ah, sir?" said Atwater, his eyes narrowed on the completely-highlighted perimeter of the slave compound. "Ah—where will we be?"

  "The Bonnie Parker sets down on the roof of the admin building," Kowacs said quietly.

  He didn't bother to change the hologram; everyone else in the bay was staring at the face of their commander, including the platoon leaders who'd already been briefed on the plan. "You're the best there is in the Fleet, Marines. Anybody doubts you, tell him suck on that."

  Nobody said anything at all.

  "Yeah, well," Kowacs continued after a moment. "Your platoon leaders will give you your individual assignments in a moment. Ah—"