Designated Targets

He hadn’t counted on this. He’d hoped he could stall them on the cam feed, perhaps even fob them off altogether. But of course, Le Roux would be able to operate that subsystem. He worked with it all the time on the Tigers.

Danton cursed himself as the ship quaked with the second launch. Le Roux was boasting that this salvo would destroy all the major army air bases on the island. But Danton wasn’t so sure of that. He’d got to at least half those missiles. He hadn’t had enough time to render them completely safe, though. They were going to land somewhere, and do a huge amount of damage. But at least it wouldn’t be where the fascists wanted them.

Not all of them, anyway.

As he struggled to his feet in the deepening swell, he found that he was no longer scared. He had made his decision, and knew he was going to die in the next couple of minutes. There was no changing that now. All that mattered was how he went out.

He hadn’t been able to hide proof of his interference. When the Lavals began to drop into clear sea and empty fields, they would know what he had done. There was nothing for it. He would have to try destroying the missiles in flight.

The third and final launch roared away as he calmly took in the scene. A couple of Indonesians were watching the cam footage rather than tending to the met station. Hidaka looked as if he might be about to levitate, he was so excited. The Germans were babbling. And Le Roux was bullshitting to anyone who would listen.

It would be only a few minutes until he was discovered. So he made the sign of the cross and said one Hail Mary—apologizing to God for having to whisper—for the lives he could not save, for those he was about to take, and most of all for a steady hand and a good aim. If he wanted to destroy those missiles, he would have to kill everyone in this room first.

“. . . Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and in the hour of our death. Amen.”

“What’s that boy? What the—”

Danton smiled at Le Roux over the sight of a Metal Storm VLe 24 he’d smuggled in. Operating on exactly the same principle as the Close-In Weapons System that protected the Dessaix from missile swarms, the pistol had no moving parts. The ceramic rounds were stacked in-line in three barrels, hence the three muzzles into which Le Roux’s horrified eyes now stared. An electronically fired propellant separated each bullet. The gun could discharge the entire load in one simultaneous burst. Or it could be set to fire single shots. Or three round volleys, as it was now.

“—hell?” said the chief petty officer, beginning to drop to his knees, to beg for his life.

Danton squeezed the trigger.

Le Roux’s descent meant that the burst took off the top half of his head, rather than all of it. But the end result was the same. The multiple shots sounded like a single discharge. The impact of three ceramic bullets on the traitor’s skull was dramatic. It popped open like a rotten piece fruit, the kinetic energy knocking the pig off his feet with enough power to spin the bloated body through the air. Blood, bone chips, and brain frappé splashed across the ceiling.

He flicked the selector to single-shot and began to work the room. Kruger took a round just below the ear. The compressed nanoshards unfurled inside his brainpan and blew out the other side of his head. Danton hadn’t minded Kruger, and wanted to spare him any sense of violation and betrayal.

The others were just Nazis, and he calmly put a round into each as they scrambled for their own weapons. The bullets were advertised as one-shot/one-kill, and they worked mostly as advertised. A German lieutenant lost an arm at the shoulder, but the shock wave traveled into his body and killed him a few seconds later. The flat, hollow, painfully loud report of the 24 boomed out again and again.

Danton thought of nothing as he went about his killing. At night, in his cabin, he had always imagined that if it had come to this, he would think of himself as an avenging angel, meting out justice on behalf of his crewmates back in Lyon. Especially on behalf of his best friend, Dominic, who had been caught erasing files and was strangled to death in front of them all.

But now that the moment had arrived, he felt nothing. The carnage around him slowed down, as though he had thumbed the half-speed function on a video stick. His head was light and strange. Everything appeared slightly flat to him.

Someone was firing back at him. A monitor exploded by the side of this head, but it might just as well have been a mile away. A German rushed at him with a chair raised like an unwieldy shield, though he seemed less real than a character in a V3D game like Halo VII.