Dogs of War Read online

  “Somebody shot his way into the China Doll,” said the voice. “He's holed up in the back.”

  The bone-conduction speaker hid the identity of the man on the other end of the radio link, but it wasn't the switchboard's artificial intelligence. Somebody on the street was cutting through directly, probably Stecher.

  “Droids?” Jolober asked as he mounted his chair and powered up, breaking the charging circuit in which the vehicle rested overnight.

  “Chief,” said the mastoid, “we got a man down. Looks bad, and we can't get medics to him because the gun's covering the hallway. D'ye want me to—”

  “Wait!” Jolober said as he bulled through the side door under power. Unlocking the main entrance—the entrance to the office of the port commandant—would take seconds that he knew he didn't have. “Hold what you got, I'm on the way.”

  The voice speaking through Jolober's jawbone was clearly audible despite wind noise and the scream of his chair as he leaped down the alley staircase in a single curving arc. “Ah, Chief? We're likely to have a, a crowd control problem if this don't get handled real quick.”

  “I'm on the way,” Jolober repeated. He shot onto the street, still on direct thrust because ground effect wouldn't move him as fast as he needed to go.

  The entrance of the China Doll was cordoned off, if four port patrolmen could be called a cordon. There were over a hundred soldiers in the street and more every moment that the siren—couldn't somebody cut it? Jolober didn't have time—continued to blare.

  That wasn't what Stecher had meant by a “crowd control problem.” The difficulty was in the way soldiers in the Division Legere's mottled uniforms were shouting—not so much as onlookers as a lynch mob.

  Jolober dropped his chair onto its skirts—he needed the greater stability of ground effect. “Lemme through!” he snarled to the mass of uniformed backs which parted in a chorus of yelps when Jolober goosed his throttle. The skirt of his plenum chamber caught the soldiers just above the bootheels and toppled them to either side as the chair powered through.

  One trooper spun with a raised fist and a curse in French. Jolober caught the man's wrist and flung him down almost absently. The men at the door relaxed visibly when their commandant appeared at their side.

  Behind him, Jolober could hear off-duty patrolmen scrambling into the street from their barracks under the port offices. That would help, but—

  “You, Major!” Jolober shouted, pointing at a Division Legere officer in the front of the crowd. The man was almost of a size with the commandant; fury had darkened his face several shades beyond swarthiness. “I'm deputizing you to keep order here until I've taken care of the problem inside.”

  He spun his chair again and drove through the doorway. The major was shouting to his back, “But the bastard's shot my—”

  Two Droids were more or less where Jolober had expected them, one crumpled in the doorway and the other stretched full length a meter inside. The Droids were tough as well as strong. The second one had managed to grasp the man who shot him and be pulled a pace or two before another burst into the back of the Droid's skull had ended matters.

  Stecher hadn't said the shooter had a submachine gun. That made the situation a little worse than it might have been, but it was so bad already that the increment was negligible.

  Droids waited impassively at all the gaming stations, ready to do their jobs as soon as customers returned. They hadn't fled the way human croupiers would have—but neither did their programming say anything about dealing with armed intruders.

  The Dolls had disappeared. It was the first time Jolober had been in the main hall when it was empty of their charming, enticing babble.

  Stecher and two troopers in Slammers’ khaki, and a pair of technicians with a portable medicomp stood on opposite sides of the archway leading into the back of the China Doll. A second patrolman was huddled behind the three room-wide steps leading up from the main hall.

  Man down, Jolober thought, his guts ice.

  The patrolman heard the chair and glanced back. “Duck!” he screamed as Sergeant Stecher cried, “Watch—”

  Jolober throttled up, bouncing to the left as a three-shot burst snapped from the archway. It missed him by little enough that his hair rose in response to the ionized track.

  There was a man down, in the corridor leading back from the archway. There was another man firing from a room at the corridor's opposite end, and he'd just proved his willingness to add the port commandant to the night's bag.

  Jolober's chair leaped the steps to the broad landing where Stecher crouched, but it was his massive arms that braked his momentum against the wall. His tunic flapped and he noticed for the first time that he hadn't sealed it before he left his quarters. “Report,” he said bluntly to his sergeant while running his thumb up the uniform's seam to close it.

  “Their officer's in there,” Stecher said, bobbing his chin to indicate the two Slammers kneeling beside him. The male trooper was holding the female and trying to comfort her as she blubbered.

  To Jolober's surprise, he recognized both of them—the commo tech and the driver of the tank which'd nearly run him down that afternoon.

  “He nutted, shot his way in to find a Doll,” Stecher said quickly. His eyes flicked from the commandant to the arch way, but he didn't shift far enough to look down the corridor. Congealed notches in the arch's plastic sheath indicated that he'd been lucky once already.

  “Found her, found the guy she was with and put a burst into him as he tried to get away.” Stecher thumbed toward the body invisible behind the shielding wall. “Guy from the Legere, an El-Tee named Condorcet.”

  “The bitch made him do it!” said the tank driver in a scream strangled by her own laced fingers.

  “She's sedated,” said the commo tech who held her.

  In the perfect tones of Central's artificial intelligence, Jolober's implant said, “Major de Vigny of the Division Legere requests to see you. He is offering threats.”

  Letting de Vigny through would either take the pressure off the team outside or be the crack that made the dam fail. From the way Central put it, the dam wasn't going to hold much longer anyhow.

  “Tell the cordon to pass him. But tell him keep his head down or he's that much more t'clean up t'morrow,” Jolober replied with his mike keyed, making the best decision he could when none of ‘em looked good.

  “Tried knock-out gas but he's got filters,” said Stecher. “Fast, too.” He tapped the scarred jamb. “All the skin absortives're lethal, and I don't guess we'd get cleared t’ use ‘em anyhow?”

  “Not while I'm in the chain of command,” Jolober agreed grimly.

  “She was with this pongo from the Legere,” the driver was saying through her laced fingers. “Tad, he wanted her so much, so fucking much, like she was human or something …”

  “The, ah, you know. Beth, the one he was planning to see,” said the commo tech rapidly as he stroked the back of the driver—Corporal Days—Daisy …. “He tried to, you know, buy ‘er from the Frog, but he wouldn't play. She got ‘em, Beth did, to put all their leave allowance on a coin flip. She'd take all the money and go with the winner.”

  “The bitch,” Daisy wailed. “The bitch the bitch the bitch …”

  The Legere didn't promote amateurs to battalion command. The powerful major Jolober had seen outside rolled through the doorway, sized up the situation, and sprinted to the landing out of the shooter's line of sight.

  Line of fire.

  “Hoffritz, can you hear me?” Jolober called. “I'm the port commandant, remember?”

  A single bolt from the submachine gun spattered plastic from the jamb and filled the air with fresher stenches.

  The man sprawling in the corridor moaned.

  “I've ordered up an assault team,” said Major de Vigny with flat assurance as he stood up beside Jolober. “It was unexpected, but they should be here in a few minutes.”

  Everyone else in the room was crouching. There wasn
't any need so long as you weren't in front of the corridor, but it was the instinctive response to knowing somebody was trying to shoot you.

  “Cancel the order,” said Jolober, locking eyes with the other officer.

  “You aren't in charge when one of my men—” began the major, his face flushing almost black.

  “The gate closes when the alarm goes off!” Jolober said in a voice that could have been heard over a tank's fans. “And I've ordered the air defense batteries,” he lied, “to fire on anybody trying to crash through now. If you want to lead a mutiny against your employers, Major, now's the time to do it.”

  The two big men glared at one another without blinking. Then de Vigny said, “Blue Six to Blue Three,” keying his epaulet mike with the code words. “Hold Team Alpha until further orders. Repeat, hold Alpha. Out.”

  “Hold Alpha,” repeated the speaker woven into the epaulet's fabric.

  “If Condorcet dies, ” de Vigny added calmly to the port commandant, “I will kill you myself, sir.”

  “Do you have cratering charges warehoused here?” Jolober asked with no emotion save the slight lilt of interrogation.

  “What?” said de Vigny. “Yes, yes.”

  Jolober crooked his left ring finger so that Central would hear and relay his next words. “Tell the gate to pass two men from the Legere with a jeep and a cratering charge. Give them a patrol guide, and download the prints of the China Doll into his commo link so they can place the charge on the wall outside the room of the T of the back corridor.”

  De Vigny nodded crisply to indicate that he too understood the other. He began relaying it into his epaulet while Stecher drew and reholstered his needle stunner and Corporal Days mumbled.

  “Has she tried?” Jolober asked, waving to the driver and praying that he wouldn't have to …

  “He shot at ‘er,” the commo tech said, nodding sadly. “That's when she really lost it and medics had to calm her down.”

  No surprises there. Certainly no good ones.

  “Captain Hoffritz, it's the port commandant again,” Jolober called.

  A bolt spat down the axis of the corridor.

  “That's right, you bastard, shoot!” Jolober roared. “You blew my legs off on Primavera. Now finish the job and prove you're a fuck-up who's only good for killing his friends. Come on, I'll make it easy. I'll come out and let you take your time!”

  “Chief—” said Stecher.

  Jolober slid away from the shelter of the wall.

  The corridor was the stem of a T, ten meters long. Halfway between Jolober and the cross corridor at the other end, capping the T, lay the wounded man. Lieutenant Condorcet was a tough little man to still be alive with the back of his tunic smoldering around the holes punched in him by three powergun bolts. The roll of coins he'd carried to add weight to his fist wouldn't have helped; but then, nothing much helped when the other guy had the only gun in the equation.

  Like now.

  The door of the room facing the corridor and Horace Jolober was ajar. Beyond the opening was darkness and a bubble of dull red: the iridium muzzle of Hoffritz's submachine gun, glowing with the heat of the destruction it had spit at others.

  De Vigny cursed; Stecher was pleading or even calling an order. All Jolober could hear was the roar of the tank bearing down on him, so loud that the slapping bolts streaming toward him from its cupola were inaudible.

  Jolober's chair slid him down the hall. His arms were twitching in physical memory of the time they'd waved a scrap of white cloth to halt the oncoming armor.

  The door facing him opened. Tad Hoffritz's face was as hard and yellow as fresh bone. He leaned over the sight of his submachine gun. Jolober slowed, because if he kept on at a walking pace he would collide with Condorcet, and if he curved around the wounded man it might look as if he were dodging what couldn't be dodged.

  He didn't want to look like a fool and a coward when he died.

  Hoffritz threw down the weapon.

  Jolober bounced to him, wrapping the Slammers’ officer in both arms like a son. Stecher was shouting “Medics!” but the team with the medicomp had been in motion as soon as the powergun hit the floor. Behind all the battle was Major de Vigny's voice, remembering to stop the crew with the charge that might otherwise be set—and fired even though the need was over.

  “I loved her,” Hoffritz said to Jolober's big shoulder, begging someone to understand what he didn't understand himself. “I, I'd been drinking and I came back …”

  With a submachine gun that shouldn't have made it into Paradise Port … but the detection loops hadn't been replaced in the hours since the tanks ripped them away; and anyhow, Hoffritz was an officer, a company commander.

  He was also a young man having a bad time with what he thought was a woman. Older, calmer fellows than Hoffritz had killed because of that.

  Jolober carried Hoffritz with him into the room where he'd been holed up. “Lights,” the commandant ordered, and the room brightened.

  Condorcet wasn't dead, not yet; but Beth, the Doll behind the trouble, surely was.

  The couch was large and round. Though drumhead-thin, its structure could be varied to any degree of firmness the paying half of the couple desired. Beth lay in the center of it in a tangle of long black hair. Her tongue protruded from a blood-darkened face, and the prints of the grip mat had strangled her were livid on her throat.

  “She told me she loved him,” Hoffritz mumbled. The commandant's embrace supported him, but it also kept Hoffritz from doing something silly, like trying to run.

  “After what I'd done,” the boy was saying, “she tells me she doesn't love me after all. She says I'm no good to her in bed, that I never gave her any pleasure at all ….”

  “Just trying to maximize the claim for damages, son,” Jolober said grimly. “It didn't mean anything real, just more dollars in Red Ike's pocket.”

  But Red Eke hadn't counted on Hoffritz shooting another merc. Too bad for Condorcet, too bad for the kid who shot him—

  And just what Jolober needed to finish Red Ike on Placida.

  “Let's go,” Jolober said, guiding Hoffritz out of the room stinking of death and the emotions that led to death. “We'll get you to a medic.”

  And a cell.

  Condorcet had been removed from the corridor, leaving behind only a slime of vomit. Thank the Lord he'd fallen face down.

  Stecher and his partner took the unresisting Hoffritz and wrapped him in motion restraints. The prisoner could walk and move normally, so long as he did it slowly. At a sudden movement, the gossamer webs would clamp him as tightly as a fly in a spiderweb.

  The main hall was crowded, but the incipient violence facing the cordon outside had melted away. Judging from Major de Vigny's brusque, bellowed orders, the victim was in the hands of his medics and being shifted to the medicomp in Division Legere's bivouac area.

  That was probably the best choice. Paradise Port had excellent medical facilities, but medics in combat units got to know their jobs and their diagnostic/healing computers better than anybody in the rear echelons.

  “Commandant Jolober,” said van Zuyle, the Slammers’ bivouac commander, “I'm worried about my man here. Can I—”

  “He's not your man any more, Captain,” Jolober said with the weary chill of an avalanche starting to topple. “He's mine and the Placidan courts’—until I tell you different. We'll get him sedated and keep him from hurting himself, no problem.”

  Van Zuyle's face wore the expression of a man whipping himself to find a deity who doesn't respond. “Sir,” he said, “I'm sorry if I—”

  “You did the job they paid you t'do,” Jolober said, shrugging away from the other man. He hadn't felt so weary since he'd awakened in the Legion's main hospital on Primavera: alive and utterly unwilling to believe that he could be after what happened.

  “Outa the man's way,” snarled one of the patrolmen, trying to wave a path through the crowd with her white-sleeved arms. “Let the commandant by!”
r />   She yelped a curse at the big man who brushed through her gesture. “A moment, little one,” he said—de Vigny, the Legere major.

  “You kept the lid on good,” Jolober said while part of his dazed mind wondered whose voice he was hearing. “Tomorrow I'll want to talk to you about what happened and how to keep from a repeat.”

  Anger darkened de Vigny's face. “I heard what happened,” he said. “Condorcet was not the only human victim, it would seem.”

  “We'll talk,” Jolober said. His chair was driving him toward the door, pushing aside anyone who didn't get out of the way. He didn't see them any more than he saw the air.

  The street was a carnival of uniformed soldiers who suddenly had something to focus on that wasn't a memory of death—or a way to forget. There were dark undercurrents to the chatter, but the crowd was no longer a mob.

  Jolober's uniform drew eyes, but the port commandant was too aloof and forbidding to be asked for details of what had really happened in the China Doll. In the center of the street, though—

  “Good evening, Commandant,” said Red Ike, strolling back toward the establishment he owned. “Without your courage, tonight's incident would have been even more unfortunate.”

  Human faces changed in the play of light washing them from the brothel fronts. Red Ike's did not. Colors overlay his features, but the lines did not modify as one shadow or highlight replaced another.

  “It couldn't be more unfortunate for you, Ike,” Jolober said to the bland alien while uniforms milled around them. “They'll pay you money, the mercs will. But they won't have you killing their men.”

  “I understand that the injured party is expected to pull through,” Red Ike said emotionlessly. Jolober had the feeling that the alien's eyes were focused on his soul.

  “I'm glad Condorcet'll live,” Jolober said, too tired for triumph or subtlety. “But you're dead on Placida, Ike. It's just a matter of how long it takes me to wrap it up.”