EARLIER: TRINITY
The sound dived into the night of his mind, twisting deeper like a toothed whale hunting squid in the darkness a thousand fathoms down. It found him, gripped him, and tore him back to surface consciousness from the black gage coma in which he slept.
He didn’t know his name. He didn’t know where he was. But the whine of the base unit to which he’d plugged his commo helmet was the call of duty, and not even the half-dozen stim cones of the past evening could deny his duty.
He stabbed the speaker button, cueing the unit to continuous operation. “Go ahead,” he croaked.
He couldn’t see anything. Existence was a white throb shattered by jagged bands of darkness.
“Cap’n, it’s Filkerson,” a man said, his voice pitched high and staccato. “That load of local-manufacture pyrotechnics that arrived today, I can hear the crates, they’re chirping, and I don’t like it a bit!”
Shards of light spun. They reformed suddenly into present surroundings and the past life leading up to them:
He was Captain Sten Moden, Base Supply Officer serving the regimental field force of Frisian troops on Trinity. He was in semi-detached quarters, three rooms and a bath connected by a dogtrot to the Base Intelligence Officer’s suite.
The earthen berm surrounding Trinity Base’s ammo dump was 400 meters to the west of the officers’ lines. Filkerson was sergeant of the dump’s guard detachment tonight, which meant this was a real problem.
“Right,” Moden said. “Alert the emergency team. Start dousing the crates now, don’t take any chances. Are they in a bunker?”
Spasms wracked his muscles, but the aftereffects of the gage would pass shortly. It was like being dropped into ice water while soundly asleep. Why in hell did a crisis have to blow up the one night out of a hundred that he overdid it on stim cones?
“Blow up” wasn’t the most fortunate thought just now.
“No sir, there wasn’t time!” Filkerson said with an accusatory tone in his voice. “This is the batch that came in after hours, and you told us to accept it anyway!”
“I know what I did,” Moden said flatly. He’d donned his trousers and tunic while talking. Now he pulled on his boots and sealed their seams. He didn’t bother with the strap-and-buckle failsafe closure. “Handle your end, Sergeant. I’ll be with you as soon as I make a call. Out.”
He broke the contact by lifting his commo helmet from the base unit. He settled the helmet on his head with one hand as he switched the base to local and keyed a pre-set.
As he waited for the connection, Moden shook himself to rid his muscles of the last of the gage tremors. He was coldly furious, with Loie Leonard and more particularly with himself because of what he’d let Loie talk him into doing.
“Yes, what is it?” a woman said. She sounded irritated—as anybody would be, awakened two hours before dawn—but also guarded, because very few people had this number.
“Loie,” Moden said, “it’s Sten. I need you here at the base soonest with manufacturing records for everything in that load of flares and marking grenades you just sent us. There’s a problem, and part of it’s your problem.”
He squeezed the desk support hard so that the rage wouldn’t come out in his voice. Tendons rippled over the bones of his hands. Moden was a big man, so tall that almost anybody else would have claimed the finger’s breadth he lacked of two meters. He had difficulty finding boots to fit him, though now that he was in logistics, it was a lot easier than it had been with a line command.
“Sten, I’m at home in bed,” Loie said in irritation. “I don’t have any records here, and I don’t see what there is that couldn’t wait for dayli—”
“Soonest, Loie!” Moden said. “Soonest, and I mean it!”
He switched off the base unit so violently that the stand overset. He ignored the mess and started for the door.
Sten Moden had held his present position for thirteen standard months. Most of the field force’s munitions were shipped from Nieuw Friesland. The expense was considerable, but powergun ammunition and self-guided shells for the regiment’s rocket howitzers had to be manufactured to the closest tolerances if they were to function properly.
Supplies of other material were available cheaper and at satisfactory quality on Trinity. Because the local government had hired the Frisians at a monthly flat rate, cost cutting had a direct, one-to-one effect on President Hammer’s profit margin. Sten Moden was responsible for procuring food, bedding, soft-skinned vehicles, and hundreds of other items on the local economy.
Trip flares and smoke grenades were high usage items for the field force. Forges de Milhaud had underbid other suppliers on the past three contracts. In the course of his duties, Moden had gotten
to know Loie Leonard, the woman who owned the company.
Know her very well.
Moden didn’t have a vehicle at his quarters, and he didn’t want to waste time summoning one from the motor pool. He began to jog toward the munitions dump, letting his long arms flap instead of pumping them as he ran. The floodlights illuminating the fourmeter-high berm emphasized the yellow-green cast of the local soil.
This afternoon Forges de Milhaud had delivered a load of pyrotechnics after working hours. Indig labor crews had to be off-post at sundown, so deliveries couldn’t be properly sorted and inspected for quality.
According to standard operating procedure, Moden should have refused to accept the load until the next working day when it could be processed properly. This was an 8th Night, so delivery would take place after the weekend.
In normal circumstances, Moden might or might not have followed SOP. He didn’t like red tape, but it was a fact of life in any complex organization. The field force had a twelve-day supply of flares and grenades on hand, so there was no duty-related reason for the supply officer to cut corners.
But Loie called him, explaining that she needed acceptance now in order to meet her payroll. Moden had called Filkerson, telling him to let the drivers dump their cargo where it could be sorted in the morning of 1st Night.
And Moden had visited Loie at a hotel near the Forges offices. Later she went home to her family, and Captain Sten Moden, exalted by gage, returned to Trinity Base.
“Sir! Sir!” Filkerson screeched over the helmet earphones. “We’ve got a fire, a real fire, in the center of the pile. We can’t get to it with the hoses!”
Moden broke into a full run. He switched his helmet to override the carriers of all his subordinates. “Supply Six to all personnel in the dump area. Get outside the berm now! Run for it! There’s nothing inside the berm that’s worth your life!”
He wasn’t sure whether the emergency team was on the same channel or not. He hoped so, or at least that they’d have sense enough to follow the dump staff when the latter started running for the entrance.
Still running, Moden keyed his helmet to a general Trinity Base push. “Supply Six to Base Operations!” he said. He was gasping with fear and exertion. “General alarm! We have an emergency situation at the ammo dump. If it blows, debris may injure personnel anywhere in the compound and start fires! Over!”
Moden was twenty meters from the separate outwork shielding the entrance to the dump. A burp of orange flame flashed momentarily above the berm. The ground shuddered, and Filkerson screamed over the unit channel.
A firetruck on a hovercraft chassis howled through the dump entrance, slid up on the outwork as it made the necessary ninety-degree turn, and accelerated down the branch through which Moden was entering the dump.
Moden leaped sideways to save himself. The panicked driver hadn’t noticed him. Four firefighters with airpacks and flame-resistant garments, and three of Moden’s khaki-clad guard detachment, clung to side-rails of the speeding vehicle.
The siren on the headquarters building began to wail. The floodlights around the dump flickered.
There was another explosion, much brighter and louder than the first. Shells and rocket motors emerged in sparkling parabolas from the fireball, screaming like banshees. The ground shock staggered Moden, though the berm protected him from whizzing fragments like those that sprayed overhead.
The entrance gate, cyclone fencing on a tubular framework, was torn askew. Two khaki figures ran out as Moden entered. The troopers clung to one another, though neither man appeared to be injured.
Moden grabbed them both in his huge arms. “Where’s Sergeant Filkerson?” he demanded.
“Via, he’s back there!” one of the troopers screamed. “The shack came down on him and we couldn’t get him out!”
Moden flung the pair out toward safety. He’d thought of ordering them to help him, but they didn’t look to be in shape to do that or anything else just now.
The guard shack had been to the immediate right of the dump entrance. It was constructed of dirt, stabilized with a plasticizer and compacted.
The locally made pyrotechnics had been off-loaded adjacent to the shack, as good a place as any since they couldn’t be processed at the moment. When the pile exploded, the shock wave shattered the near wall of the building and collapsed the rest onto Filkerson, inside using the radio. It was hard to believe that anybody beneath the heavy slabs could be alive, but Filkerson’s voice still moaned through the commo helmet. The sergeant had been—in a manner of speaking—lucky.
The floodlights went out. The dump glowed red in a dozen locations, bunkers where further material had been ignited by the previous blasts. Moden thumbed his helmet visor to light-amplification mode and began shifting the ruin of the guard shack, chunk by chunk.
The choice was speed or caution, and under the present conditions speed won going away. Moving the mass of shattered walls was much like playing pick-up sticks. There was always a chance that when Moden’s huge muscles bunched to hurl a block clear, the remaining slabs would shift and crush Filkerson like a caterpillar on the highway; but if Moden waited for specialized rescue equipment, blast shocks were going to make the pile settle anyway.
Besides, there was nothing else Sten Moden could do except watch helplessly the destruction caused by his failure to do his duty.
The edges of the crumbled guard shack were jagged rather than sharp. Moden should have been wearing gloves for the job. The pain didn’t bother him, but the film of blood was slippery until it dried to tackiness.
Moden grasped a shard, found it set firmly, and stepped to the side to take instead the 80-kilo block that held the previous one in place. He lifted and threw the block aside. Filkerson’s head and torso were beneath. The man moaned softly.
A bunker on the other side of the dump erupted in orange flame. The initial open-air blast had shifted the armored doors of some bunkers. With the volume of sparks and larger chunks of burning debris, it was inevitable that the fire would spread.
The Lord only knew how it had started. Perhaps a fuze had been defective, perhaps a ruptured membrane had brought two reactive compounds in contact. Perhaps there’d been no manufacturing flaw whatever, but one of the crates had been crushed with disastrous results when the load was dumped unceremoniously.
If lightning had struck the pyrotechnics, it would still have been Sten Moden’s fault. The only reason the load was in the dump this night was that he had accepted it improperly.
Moden gripped the slab lying on Filkerson’s legs, so that the whole weight wouldn’t shear down on flesh like the blade of a roller mill. “It’s okay, Sergeant,” he murmured.
Only when Moden spoke did he realize how loud the background rumble was. The ground trembled at a low frequency that tried to loosen his bowels.
Filkerson’s eyes opened. “Via, Cap’n,” he said. “Get me out of here, right?”
He was still speaking on the unit push. Despite the radio augmentation, Moden understood the words only because he watched Filkerson’s lips form them.
Another bunker blew up, belching the roof of steel planks and tonnes of dirt overburden. Moden staggered forward. He turned and lifted Filkerson onto his back. His left hand cushioned the man’s buttocks while his right gripped Filkerson’s arms, flopped over Moden’s shoulders and across his chest.
Moden stepped carefully through the tumble of slabs and started for the nearby gate at a trot.
A bunker in the center of the dump detonated. The shock wave set off three more bunkers simultaneously. The cataclysmic blast hurled the two men over the four-meter-high outwork protecting the entrance.
The sleet of debris riding the wave front chewed off Sten Moden’s left arm, but Filkerson’s body saved the captain’s torso.