John Ringo: Choosers of the Slain

“How is it there?” Vanner asked. “Oleg looks like he’s getting pounded.”

“Other than that, all good,” Mike admitted just as there was a shot downstairs. “Check that. Gunfire. Out here.”

Boris waited quietly in the safety room, cursing the bastards who had wrecked his club.

As soon as the explosions started upstairs, he had raced for the secure room in the basement. But even before he reached the stairs, he could hear gunfire from the side door and knew that they were under heavy attack. Probably too heavy for even his bloated guard force.

On reaching the basement, he’d ordered the guards to hold out as long as possible and then secreted himself in the “panic room.” The room was concealed behind a set of shelves that contained some of the documents related to the wideflung network of whorehouses and street whores.

The room had been ransacked, but nobody, fortunately, noticed the carefully hidden door. After a few minutes frantic activity, the ransackers, mostly women, curiously, had left carrying almost every document and computer hard drive in the room. The exception was the woman working on the safe, and one bodyguard.

Boris would very much prefer it if whoever was attacking did not get the contents of the safe. Even if everything else was gone, he could rebuild from just what was in there, in money, drugs and especially his collection of DVDs. He wasn’t sure, but he thought most of the attackers had gone upstairs. The rest of the gangs had to be attacking them from the outside. If he could just kill these two he might be able to make it out alive.

The problem was that the little whore of a safecracker was looking right at him. She’d started up the drill while the other women were in the room, then left it to drill as she chatted with the guard. All he needed was for her to turn around for a few seconds…

Creata was bored.

The first part of the mission had been exciting and scary. Three Keldara had been injured or killed trying to get to the basement office and she felt bad about that. But waiting to enter the corridor had been the most exciting thing she had ever done, except maybe fast-roping down to the alleyway.

Then running down the corridor and setting up had been exciting. She had had to carefully, but quickly, find the precise spot to start drilling. If she was off by half a millimeter, the entry wouldn’t work. She’d carefully measured and then started the drill. After that, though, it got boring. Boring, boring, boring.

There had been two choices of drill, a mechanical or a laser. The laser drill was slightly heavier, but it had two advantages. It could detect when there had been a burn-through, and with the fine machinery on the far side of the outer plate Creata didn’t want anything touching it but her, and it didn’t have the problem of bits breaking or binding. It was a tad less reliable otherwise, but she had been careful to pad it for the entry and it started up without problem. Now all she had to do was wait for it to bore through to the tumbler assembly.

Bore.

Now she knew why the words were the same in English. They’d talked about this part in the briefing, and the Kildar had said that she’d get bored and then laughed. So she did, chuckling at the thought.

“What?” Ivan asked, frowning.

“I just figured out why the Kildar laughed when we were talking about this part,” Creata said. She’d propped her back on the safe, waiting for the bore to finish. Looking at it wasn’t going to make it go any faster. “Any word on what’s going on upstairs?”

“All four teams are pinned down,” Ivan said, shrugging. “They’ve taken a few casualties. The only ones killed, so far, were Dimant back there on the stairs, Arkady opening the front door and Stanislav when the helicopter crashed. Oh, and the copilot of the helicopter. Bunch of wounded, though.”

“I’m going as fast as I can,” Creata said, shrugging.

“We know,” Ivan replied, then grinned. “Although I have overheard some comments from upstairs. But they all know the timing. They’re going to be okay.”

“I hope they can extract okay,” the girl said, biting her lip.

“The Kildar thinks…” Ivan said, just as the drill went into overrev.

“Through,” Creata shouted, turning off the drill. “Quiet, now.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ivan replied, grinning. But he keyed his mike and spoke into it softly.

Creata pulled the drill out of the casing carefully, rolling it to the side, then slid a doubled optical wire into the hole. One was for vision and the other one had a light. The interior was precisely as she’d been told it would be and she looked at the tumblers for a second.

“I can see the first number…” she muttered to herself, ignoring a faint click behind her.

The guard didn’t seem to hear the faint click as the shelves unlatched from the wall and Boris held his breath as he slowly swung the door open. But, still, the guard, who was speaking softly into his radio, didn’t seem to notice anything.

The guard was wearing heavy body armor so Boris slowly raised his pistol up to the level of his eye, took a two-handed grip and shot the guard just below the base of his helmet.

Creata turned around in shock as the whole area around her was covered in bloodspatter, only to find an unknown man, one of the Albanians from his looks, standing over the body of Ivan with a smoking pistol.

“Come away from there, girl,” the man said, waving for her gently. “Come away and you won’t get hurt.”

“No,” Creata said, scurrying behind the bulk of the laser drill. “They’ll come for you, soon.”

“But you’re their safecracker,” the man said, moving around to the side to get a clear shot. “Without you, they can’t get in, can they?”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Creata replied, keeping the drill between herself and the man. She had a very small body and could crouch behind it almost totally under cover. “Just go away.”

“Ah, but I very much enjoy hurting little girls like you,” the man said, stepping forward.

“You probably do,” Creata replied and turned the laser on.

The fifteen megawatt chemical laser was designed to bore through one centimeter of 440 steel per second. Human flesh had about the resistance to it that butter had to a hot knife. It was nearly out of charge, but Creata only had to play it across the man’s abdomen, 23 millimeters below his navel. The precise height that the laser had to be aligned to enter the safe.

Boris didn’t even feel the pain at first: his legs simply collapsed under him as he felt something slither down them. He hit the floor on his face but retained his grip on his pistol and tried to raise it, only to find a small and shapely boot on his wrist.

“I really didn’t want to hurt you,” Creata said, pointing her own pistol at his face. “I simply wanted to kill you. Of course, I think that the disemboweling you just got is probably starting to hurt. Let me be nicer than you and make the pain go away…”

Mike could see Ivan’s body on the floor before he even got to the door of the basement office, but the shot that rang out was a surprise.

He skidded through the door, SPR up and pointed, just as Creata was putting her pistol away. There was a body on the floor besides Ivan’s, an unknown Albanian with his legs tangled in intestines. His identity would probably forever be unknown, since he also had a bullet hole in the back of his head and his face was blown out.

“Oh, hello, Kildar,” Creata said, turning back to the safe. “Do you think you could watch my back while I finish?”