March Upcountry

"Roger," the communicator responded.

She hoped like hell it wasn't the saboteur.

Ensign Guha paused and looked left and right. She brought up a measuring grid and used it to locate the precise point she needed on the right-hand bulkhead, then reached into her satchel and extracted a one-kilo shaped charge. She stripped the covering plastic off the bottom, affixed it to the bulkhead with the provided adhesive, and examined her handiwork for a moment, to ensure it wasn't going anywhere. Then she pulled a pin and depressed a thumbswitch. A small red light blinked on, then went out; the bomb was armed.

She turned to her left once more and continued her circuit. Only three more to go.

Captain Pahner closed the front of his chameleon suit and configured his helmet to seal the whole system as the elevator descended. Gu

"Eva," he snapped into the helmet mike. "Talk to me."

"Three so far. One-kilo shaped charges right over plasma conduits. They've got anti-tamper devices in them. I can smell it."

"Captain Krasnitsky, this is Captain Pahner," Pahner said sharply. Surprise is a mental condition, not reality, he reminded himself. "We have to shut down those conduits."

"We can't," Krasnitsky answered. "You can't just shut off a tu

"If we were about to be hit in Engineering by enemy fire," Pahner asked, "what would you do then?"

"We'd be under phase drive!" Krasnitsky snapped back. "You can't be hit in tu

"Shit," Pahner said quietly. It was the first time anyone had ever heard him swear. "Sergeant Major, get the hell out of there."

"I don't see any timers."

"They're there."

"Probably. But if I can get the shooter..."

"They could be on a dead-man's switch," Pahner said, gritting his teeth as he stepped off the elevator. "This is an order, Sergeant Major Kosutic. Get out of there. Now."

"I'm closer to getting out going through the shooter than going back," Kosutic said mildly.

Pahner looked at the first bomb. As Kosutic had said, there were no telltales but it smelled like it had anti-tamper devices. He turned to the sergeant of the guard, Sergeant Bilali from First Platoon, who looked as cool as a cucumber for someone standing within a few feet of a bomb that could go off at any moment. The private next to him wasn't quite as cool; she was watching the sergeant's back and breathing deeply and regularly. It was a common method of dealing with combat stress, which she obviously was. Pahner arched an eyebrow at Bilali.

"Demo?"

"On the way, Sir," the sergeant replied crisply.

"Okay," Pahner said with a nod and a glance around. If the bomber gave them time, they could try blowing the bombs in place. The explosion of a charge placed next to one of them would tend to break up the plasma jet from a shaped charge, and the bulkheads were armored to protect the plasma conduits. Without a shaped-charge jet, there was no way the explosions would penetrate. Of course, that assumed that they didn't go off before the demolition teams could get to them.

" 'If you can keep your head when all about you...' " Pahner whispered, thinking furiously.

"Excuse me, Sir?"

"Is there someone following up the Sergeant Major?"

"Yes, Sir," Bilali said. "There are teams coming from either end, and we have one cutting across the middle of Engineering, as well."

"Okay, we all know we're brave, but there's a fine line between hardcore and stupid. Let's get the heck out of here and seal this passage in case these things go off."

"Roger that, Sir." The expression on Bilali's midnight-black face didn't even flicker as he touched his communicator. "Guard. Everyone but the point teams, out of the passage. Seal it at both ends." The passage made a circuit of the ship. Although there were side co

"Captain Krasnitsky," Pahner said, "what happens if we shut all the doors and the bombs detonate anyway?"

"Bad things," a female voice snapped. "This is Lieutenant Commander Furtwangler, Chief Engineer. First of all, the blast-doors aren't designed for multiple plasma failures. They might not stop it from flooding Engineering. And even if they do keep the plasma from killing us all, we still drop out of TD. We probably don't get the drive back with that much damage, and even if we do, we lose most of our range. Satan only knows what secondary damage would occur. Bad things," she repeated.

Pahner nodded as the blast-doors shut on his Marines. Bad things seemed to be happening all over.

Kosutic had noted the pattern of placement, and as the sixth blast-door came up, she leapt forward, skidding on her stomach into view of where the next bomb would be.

Ensign Guha triggered a burst of beads that shrieked through where the sergeant major would have been had she come around the corner ru

Eva Kosutic was a veteran of a hundred firefights and fired thousands of bead rounds every week just to keep in practice. No hacked assassination program, however well-designed, could beat that experience. Her own bead pistol tracked onto the young ensign's throat, and she triggered a single round.

The five-millimeter bead was accelerated to four kilometers per second in its twenty-centimeter flight up the barrel. When it struck the ensign's neck, one centimeter to the left of her trachea, it shattered, converting all of its kinetic energy to explosive hydrostatic shock in a fraction of a second.

The ensign's head exploded off her body and was thrown backwards as the severed carotids jetted blood all over the unarmed bomb at her feet.

Before the decapitated body had hit the floor, Kosutic was up and ru

All of the bombs were behind Eva Kosutic, and she intended to ensure that they stayed as far away as possible. She keyed her communicator. "Fire in the hole! Shut all blast-doors!" she shouted as she leapt over the sprayed blood and past the ensign's head, still accelerating.

Captain Pahner had just opened his mouth to repeat the sergeant major's order when there were a whole series of thumps, and the world went sideways.