The Final Battle (39 page)

“You’re mad.”

Polk laughed. “Looks that way, doesn’t it?” he said. “But I’m not. After we’d dealt with the Federated Worlds, how much of a fight do you think the rest of humanspace would have put up? I’ll tell you: none. They’d be on their knees begging for mercy, which I, Emperor Jeremiah the First, would of course have been happy to grant.”

“Emperor Jeremiah the First,” Michael said; he shook his head. “You really are mad.”

“I’m the madman?” Polk said. He waved a dismissive hand. “I don’t think so. I’m not a Fed renegade sitting alone in the office of the Chief Councillor of the Hammer of Kraa Worlds. Oh, no; you’re the one’s who is mad. And for Kraa’s sake, stop pointing that rifle at me. Put it away! It’s no good to you.”

“I don’t think so.”

Polk’s eyes scanned the room. “Let me see … Yes, there are twelve lasers pointed at you right now, and they will kill you the instant your finger tightens on the trigger.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You should. My laser system is very good. It was a present from the Pascanicians. It’d take a battalion of marines to get past it.”

“Your lasers didn’t stop me from getting to you.”

“You idiot! That’s because I let you walk in. You are no threat to me. From the moment you walked up to the building, your life has been in my hands. Now I decide whether you live or die.”

Michael’s stomach knotted, his every instinct saying that Polk was telling the truth. “Okay, so you have lasers on me,” he said, tapping the butt of his rifle, “but I can still blow your damn head off before they get me.”

Polk shrugged. “I doubt it. The system has motion sensors, and it monitors heart rate, blood pressure, brain activity, pupil dilation, skin conductivity. And if you do fire at me, the lasers will destroy the bullet before it even gets close to me. I’ve seen them kill men who are better and faster than you’ll ever be. Trust me, Michael; it’s a very good system, and that’s because it’s all controlled by an AI.”

“Now I know you’re lying. AIs are proscribed by the Word of Kraa.”

“They are, but I’m chief councillor.” Polk shrugged. “If I want an AI, I’ll have an AI, and the religious primitives out there can go screw themselves,” he added, angry now, his forefinger stabbing out at Michael. Polk took a deep breath before continuing. “And the AI is very, very smart; I can see why you Feds are so fond of them. It knows when you are about to shoot me long before you do.”

“Bullshit!”

“You should also know that I only have to say a special code phrase and the lasers will kill you.’ Polk glanced at Michael, who stared back, stony-faced. “You still don’t believe me, do you?”

“No.”

Polk sighed. “There’s no trust anymore. Fine, have it your way. Watch this. Red Canal,” he said, and a microsecond later a laser pulse snapped from a recess in the ceiling and punched a small smoking hole in the carpet. Polk sat back, looking smug. “There you go,” he said. “That was a test pulse. The real thing is much more impressive, as you’d find out if you tried anything stupid.”

Michael nodded his defeat. He’d heard about these systems. They could be beaten, but that took months of training and a neuronics-linked needle gun. “Fine, I believe you now,” he said.

“Good, but we can’t just sit here swapping small talk. Come on; what’s your plan? You do have a plan, don’t you?”

Now, that is a very good question
, Michael thought.
What is my plan?
“I will kill you,” he decided after a moment’s consideration, “and if you kill me, that’s the price I have to pay.”

Frustrated, Polk threw up his hands. “Haven’t you been listening? You
cannot
kill me. No matter how hard you try, the lasers won’t let you. Anyway, you don’t want to die, and we both know it. You’re young, you have a good woman waiting for you, and I must say your Anna is such a lov—”

“You mention her again,” Michael shouted, “and I’ll blow your fucking head off. You hear me?”

“For Kraa’s sake, relax,” Polk said, putting a hand out as if to fend Michael off.

“I’ll relax when you’re dead, you asshole,” Michael barked. “You think I’ve forgotten what you and that scumbag Hartspring had planned for her?”

“Michael, please. That’s all in the past.”

“Not for me, it isn’t, as Hartspring just found out.”

Polk’s eyebrows lifted. “You killed him?”

“I did.”

“Ah, I was wondering why he hadn’t shown up. Look, Michael, much as I’m enjoying your company—and I am—time is against us, so we need to move along.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I have a proposal for you.”

“I’m not interested,” Michael muttered, frustrated, consumed by impotent rage. He knew he sounded like a spoiled child.

“You should be, because it’s the only way you’ll escape from here alive. You are a fool: a fool for coming here, a fool for thinking you could kill me, and a fool for even imagining you can just walk away. You’ve let emotion tell you what to do. Unless you start using your brain, you’ll end up dead, and why would you want that?”

Michael knew Polk was right. He had let emotion take over, and he did not want to die. It was galling, but he would have to hear Polk’s proposal.

“What do you want, Polk?”

“To leave, both of us.”

“You could have left with all the rest of your loyal subjects.”

“That’s what everyone thinks I did, but me taking to the streets of McNair?” Polk shook his head. “Way too risky,” he went on. “The mob wants my blood, and they if they didn’t get me, the
NRA
would, so I stayed put. You see, with everything that’s going on out there, this is the safest place for me to be. Hiding in plain view it’s called. The
NRA
will think I went with my chief of staff and the rest of my people. This is the last place they’ll come looking.”

“So what’s the deal?” Michael said.

“An orbital shuttle is coming to pick me up … let me see … yes, in less than ten minutes. Thanks to friends of mine inside
ENCOMM
’s air tasking group and an obscene amount of money, I plan to be onboard a Kallian fast courier when it breaks orbit less than an hour from now. You see, Michael, I never expected it to come to this, but I always knew it might. So I made plans just in case. Oh, yes, I intend to have a very long and very comfortable retirement.”

“Why do you need me? Sounds like you have all the bases covered.”

“For heaven’s sake,” Polk said with an irritated frown. “Are you always this slow? Why do you think you’re still alive?”

“What, I’m a hostage now?”

“Of course you are. The
NRA
will never shoot down a shuttle that has you onboard.”

Michael shook his head. “You are delusional, Polk,” he said. “Have a look out the window. It’s a bloodbath out there. No shuttle will get within ten klicks of here.”

“An
NRA
shuttle will, a shuttle under orders to check that Kallian courier to make sure I’m not onboard. Those orders have come from
ENCOMM
, Michael. Why would anybody question them?”

“It won’t work, Polk, not when the shuttle has to drop in here to pick you up. Bit of a giveaway, don’t you think?”

“That’s why I’m so pleased to see you, Michael,” Polk said. A huge grin of self-satisfaction animated his face, a grin Michael wanted badly to wipe away with the butt of his rifle. “Now, instead of putting down to deal with battle damage, it’ll respond to a comm from you, a comm to say you’ve been wounded—nothing too serious, of course—and need to be casevaced. And you, Michael, are the best insurance I could ask for.”

Michael could only stare. Polk had him by the balls. All he could do was hope that fate would give him the chance he needed to kill Polk without being killed in the process. “Fine,” he said eventually. “If I agree to go with you, then you’ll let me go?” Even to his ears, he sounded pitifully weak, but what choice did he have? He needed time for something to turn up, and if he had to beg to get it, he would.

“Once I’m onboard that Kallian courier, yes. You have my word on it.”

“Your word? That’s fine, then. What are we waiting for?”

“Don’t be sarcastic. The crew will be coming with me; the shuttle’s AI will fly you back. All of this is finished—” Polk waved a hand around the office. “—so what do I care? What you did, it’s history now and I’m over it. Now we need to go. Either come with me or I’ll give the word and the lasers will kill you. Last chance. Coming or not?”

“I’m coming.”

Polk got to his feet and made for the door to his private rooms, Michael close behind. “We’ll take the elevator to the roof,” Polk said over his shoulder. “Once the shuttle appears, we need to be quick or it will leave without us. And in case you’re tempted, don’t try anything. There are lasers everywhere, even covering the pad. Those Pascanicians are very thorough. It’s the only thing I like about them.”

“I just want to get this over with,” Michael replied.

The elevator opened into a small reception room. Polk checked a wall-mounted holovid screen showing the rooftop landing pad. “Good,” he said, tapping a small data window superimposed on the image. “Our shuttle has received the message about you and is inbound.”

The holocam tracked the shuttle in. Its nose reared up for landing. Belly-mounted thrusters blasted jets of incandescent gas into the pad. It slowed into a hover and started to drop to ground.

“Let’s go,” Polk said the instant the machine settled onto its undercarriage. He pushed through armored doors and walked briskly across the pad to where the shuttle waited, its ramp down. Michael struggled to keep up; belatedly he worked out why. The cocktail of stimulants he had injected into his body was wearing off. By the time he reached the ramp, it took a huge effort just to keep moving. His body was beginning to collapse with frightening speed. He staggered up the ramp and into the shuttle. A crewman—the only one Michael could see in the cargo bay—waved him into a seat, his pistol trained on Michael’s chest, as it had been from the moment he had appeared at the foot of the ramp.

“I’ll have the gun,” the man said. Pistol in one hand, he reached forward to take Michael’s rifle. But, as he did, the pilot fed power to the thrusters for liftoff and the artgrav twitched, forcing the crew member off balance for an instant.

Michael had his opportunity, and he took it. Purely on instinct, he pushed himself out of his seat and whipped his rifle up, driving the butt into the crewman’s stomach with sickening force. The impact doubled the man over, and he half fell, half stumbled back. It gave Michael enough room to bring his rifle to bear, and he shot the man full in the chest, the noise of the gun shockingly loud even over the roar of the shuttle’s main engines.

Shock had frozen Polk into immobility. Before the crewman even reached the deck, Michael was bringing his rifle up. Polk saw death coming for him. He threw his body to one side as Michael fired. The burst plucked at Polk’s sleeve and smashed into the bulkhead, spalling metal and plastic into the air. Michael tried to get the gun to follow Polk around, but he was too slow.

Polk ducked under the rifle barrel and launched himself into a desperate leap that threw Michael onto his back, the rifle ripped out of his hands as he cannoned into the deck.

Now Polk was on top of Michael. One hand was around Michael’s throat; the other arced down in a glitter of quicksilver. Michael only had time to bring his left arm up to deflect the attack but not fast enough to stop the knife from slicing through his DocSec-issue coverall. In a searing blaze of pain that shocked Michael into a frantic, scrabbling fight to win the knife, it opened a gash across the corded muscle between neck and shoulder.

With an awful clarity, Michael knew that this was a fight he could never win. His adrenaline-fueled energy was fast running out, and Polk was attacking with a manic ferocity that was truly terrifying, his left hand battering punches into Michael’s face while the knife in his right slashed and cut and stabbed past Michael’s flailing hands, a desperate struggle that left both men drenched in Michael’s blood.

Michael rolled the dice for the last time.

Calling on the last of his reserves, he arched his back, a violent movement that brought his right leg up hard and gave him the space he needed to twist his upper body away from Polk’s fist. He lunged for the knife with both hands, forcing it down, the sudden move throwing Polk off and onto his back. Polk fought to regain the initiative, but Michael’s right fist was free now. A punch exploded upward into Polk’s jaw. The blow hit home with a sickening crunch of broken bone that drove Polk backward, screaming in agony.

Kicking to get clear of him, Michael broke free. He scrabbled across the deck to grab his rifle. He leveled the gun at Polk. “It’s over,” he shouted.

Polk wasn’t finished. His right arm whipped across his body. The knife was a blur that moved so fast that Michael had no time to react. It buried itself in Michael’s right shoulder. Overwhelmed by pain and shock, Michael staggered back across the cargo bay. He hit the bulkhead and collapsed into a seat, the gun still in his hand across his lap. He glanced in disbelief at the knife lodged in his shoulder.

Polk struggled back to his feet. Terrified, Michael watched the man come toward him across the deck, a bloody-jawed horror with death in his eyes. Polk scrabbled into a pocket and pulled out a pistol. “Yes, Michael,” he mumbled; scarlet froth dribbled from his mouth as he raised the gun, his hand shaking. “It is over, but it’s not—”

Michael needed to move the gun only a fraction. He fired. The shot hit Polk below the heart. Polk staggered backward. The second shot hit him in the center of his chest, and he slumped to the deck, arms out wide and legs twisted beneath his body. But his eyes stayed locked on Michael’s.

Michael stared back. “Where are your Pascanicians and their lasers now?” he mocked. “I know we had a deal, but I decided not to honor it. You should have killed me when you had the chance.”

“You’ll … never make it … Helfort,” Polk said, the effort it took to force the words out twisting his face into a grotesque mask. “The pilot will know … so you’re … dead too.”