Ballistic (The Palladium Wars), стр. 66
“The chemical analysis is not complete yet,” Dahl said next to her as they walked along the central corridor of the building, causing Gretian officers to swerve out of their way or duck into nearby offices to avoid them. “But all indicators point toward a binary explosive, possibly artillery propellant from Gretian military stocks.”
“Surprise,” Idina said. “That’s how they got my squad out in the field three months ago. A rail gun to draw our attention, make us bunch up and get us all in the same spot. And then boom. I bet you my kukri that these were the same people.”
“I would not take that bet,” Dahl said. “The odds would be heavily in your favor. And even if they were not, I would never try to claim the win.”
“It’s a brigade expression,” Idina said. “You use it when you are absolutely sure of something. No brigade trooper would ever give up their kukri willingly.”
“The residue and explosive strength indicated the presence of at least two hundred liters of binary artillery propellant in the basement prior to the detonation. This is not something you carry into a building in a backpack on short notice. They set that trap for us well in advance.”
“Which means Fuldas was part of it. The question remains whether he was in on the whole thing. Or if they decided to shut him up for certain before he could get off the planet.”
“It just so happens that we have someone in custody who may know,” Dahl said.
“Let’s go ask him. And I hope for his sake that he isn’t into playing games today. Because I am all out of patience for those.”
Haimo was seated at a steel table in the middle of one of the small interrogation rooms. He was wearing restraints around his wrist, which had been tethered to an eye hook on the floor, leaving very little slack for movement. He looked up when they walked into the room, and his expression wasn’t unsure or fearful anymore. Instead, he looked calm and composed. He gave Idina a pleased little smirk that told her he knew about the bombing. For all their reputation as a hard-nosed law-and-order society, the Gretians were surprisingly lenient with their detainees once they were in state custody. She had been surprised to learn that they were even allowed limited Mnemosyne usage because the state considered access to information a human right.
Some police state, she thought as she returned Haimo’s gaze without expression. On Pallas, you would be in a windowless cell right now, with a hole in the ground for a toilet you’d be shitting blood into after each interrogation.
Dahl did not offer a greeting. She walked over to the table and put a translator earbud down in front of Haimo.
“The sergeant and I have a few questions for you,” Dahl said. “If you would.”
Haimo looked at the earbud as if he had never seen one before in his life. Then he raised his hands to the tabletop, which was the maximum range of movement the tether allowed. He picked up the earbud and threw it across the room, where it bounced off the wall and clattered on the floor.
“I will talk to you, maybe,” he said to Dahl. “I do not want to hear anything out of that one.”
He nodded his head at Idina with distaste.
Idina looked at him, and he held her gaze, the smug little smile still in the corners of his mouth. It was like looking at a different person. This wasn’t the kid they had scared shitless just a few days ago, the one who had been upset about losing his job. Idina was in full battle gear and armed to the teeth, and he was demonstratively unconcerned about it.
I wonder if the scared kid was an act, or if this cocky one is, she thought. Pallas and Gretia had no history of conflict, no major cultural friction points before the last war. She had no idea why this kid and the people like him hated her so much. Maybe it was the fact that of all the other planets, Pallas’s population looked the most obviously non-Gretian. Or maybe this kid knew that Palladians had killed more Gretian soldiers on the ground than all other Alliance planets combined. They had given the Gretian veterans a legacy of generational nightmares about sharp blades in dark places. She hoped he hated her for the Palladian battle skills and not for her color, because that sort of rage seemed tiresome and stupid to expend on someone due to the melanin content of their skin.
So much rage, she thought. It will get you killed before you have a chance to get old enough for knowledge. You’ll never even know that you’ve wasted your life, or why.
And that would be fine with her right now, except that he wouldn’t be the only one who ended up dead. There were eight body bags in the morgue at Joint Base Sandvik right now, and most of them didn’t contain anything except a few scraps of tissue. All those young men and women were dead, their histories and ambitions wiped out in a few nanoseconds, every one of them leaving long-lived ripples of grief in their circles of friends and families with the heavy impact of their senseless deaths. And this little shit was happy about it.
“Captain Dahl,” she said without taking her eyes