Path of the Fury

by David Weber

  Thermopylae was going to make things messy. Although Elysium had become an Incorporated World with direct Senate representation twelve years ago, its population was scarcely thirty million—too many for an all-out raid like Mathison’s World but too few to provide the industrial and financial districts which concentrated wealth for easy picking. Only one thing made Elysium a target: GeneCorp’s research facility. Every secret of the Empire’s leading biomedical consortium lay waiting in that facility’s data banks. That was Elysium’s true treasure: a cargo that could buy Howell’s entire squadron twice over yet be transported abroad a single ship.

  But GeneCorp’s HQ lay in the center of the planetary capital. It wasn’t a large city, little more than a million people, but built-up areas could exact painful casualties, and the defenders knew what his objective had to be. That was why Thermopylae called for them to center their defense on GeneCorp’s facility, where he couldn’t use heavy weapons to support his ground elements without destroying the very data he’d come to steal.

  It was going to be brutal, especially for the city’s civilians, but that, too, was part of his mission plan. Maximum frightfulness. A terror campaign against the Empire itself. There had been a time when James Howell would have died to stop anyone cold-blooded enough to mount such an operation.

  He bit his lip, cursing the way his mind savaged itself at moments like this. Past was past and done was done, and the final objective was worth—

  “Got it, by God!”

  Howell’s head jerked up at Rendlemann’s exultant cry, and wan humor glittered in his own eyes as he realized how successfully he’d distracted himself from the drone. But the blue dot had vanished, and he exhaled a tremendous sigh of relief.

  “Begin Phase Two,” he said softly.

  The governor stared at his tracking officer.

  “But . . . how? It was over fourteen light-minutes down-range!”

  “I don’t know. It was out of beam range, and none of their missiles could even catch it. Its like—“ The tracking officer broke off, her face sagging in sudden, bitter understanding and self-hate.

  “The destruct code!” She slammed a fist against the side of her own head. “Idiot! Idiot! I should’ve guessed from what happened to Hermes’ drone! How could I’ve been so stupid?!”

  “What are you talking about, Lieutenant?” the governor demanded, and she fought herself back under control.

  “I knew they’d taken out Hermes’ drone, but I assumed—assumed—they’d done it with their weapons. They didn’t. They used a Fleet self-destruct command and ordered it to suicide.”

  “But that’s impossible! There’s no way they could—“

  “Oh yes there is, Governor.” The lieutenant faced him squarely, her voice harsh. “Those aren’t just Fleet-built ships out there. I figured some son-of-a-bitch at the wreckers must’ve disposed of the hulls on the sly—God knows they’re worth more than reclamation, even stripped—but they’ve got complete Fleet data bases, as well, including the security files.”

  “Dear God,” the governor whispered. He sagged back into a chair, hands trembling as he realized the monumental treason that implied.

  “Exactly. And thanks to my stupidity—my stupidity!— we don’t have a drone left to tell anyone.”

  The assault boats sliced downward through Elysium’s night sky. The raiders’ carefully hoarded Bengals led the first wave, fleshed out by older but still deadly Leopards. A handful of local defense missiles rose to meet them, and a pair of unlucky shuttles vanished in direct hits.

  It was the defenders’ only luck. Imperial assault craft were designed to attack heavily armed ground bases; Elysium’s pitiful weaponry was less than nothing in comparison. Hyper-velocity weapons screamed down in reply, relying solely on the kinetic energy developed at ten percent of light-speed, and high kilotonne-range fireballs annihilated the missile sites.

  More HVW launched, targeted with cold calculation on the evacuation centers and the governor’s residence. Fresh flame shredded the darkness, and Major von Hamel cursed the minds and souls behind the weapons. This wasn’t an assault—it was a massacre. An intentional massacre of civilians by people who knew where the evacuation centers were. He and the governor hadn’t saved anyone; they’d simply gathered them in convenient targets for mass murder!

  But why? Von Hamel had read the reports on the other raids, but they were nothing compared to this, and it made no sense. A demand for surrender on pain of such an attack might have been reasonable. This wasn’t.

  More terrible shockwaves rippled through the ground, and he began barking orders. With the governor dead, he was on his own, and there was no point in a phased withdrawal now. The civilians he’d hoped to cover were already dead, and he sent his people charging back to their inner perimeter.

  Howell watched the gangrenous light boils bite off chunks of the holo-imaged city, and part of him shared von Hamel’s sickness. But the people in those centers would only have lived a few more hours whatever happened, and the panic of the strikes might hamper the defenders’ coordination. Anything that reduced his own casualties was worthwhile, he told himself . . . especially when it only meant killing people who simply hadn’t yet learned that they were dead.

  The first-wave shuttles grounded, and armored figures spilled from the ramps. Powered combat armor gleamed and glittered in the hellish light of the city’s fires as the assault teams formed up and swept into its heart.

  Major von Hamel watched his tactical display, and he was no longer afraid. Fury still crackled in his blood, but even that was suppressed, buried under an ice-cold concentration. He and his troops were Marines, products of a four-century tradition, and they were all that stood between a city and its murderers. They couldn’t stop it, and every one of them knew it . . . just as they knew they were going to die trying.

  The bastards were mounting a concentric assault, hoping to overpower his people in the first rush, and their assault routes were moving directly against his original prepared positions. The major watched them come and bared his teeth, unsurprised after the accuracy with which the evac centers had been taken out. They had to have detailed information on all of Elysium’s defense planning, but there was one thing they didn’t know: virtually every one of his original positions had been relocated in the wake of last week’s tactical exercise. He keyed the master tac link.

  “Hold your fire. I say again, all units hold fire for my command.”

  More shuttles streaked downward, probed by his tactical sensors as they planeted, and his face tightened. Those weren’t assault boats; they were heavy-lift cargo shuttles, and their presence this early could only mean the raiders were putting in heavy armored units.

  The assault teams converged on the defensive strong points with cautious confidence. Reports flowed back and forth as the first tanks disembarked from their shuttles and began to move forward. No one expected it to be easy—not against Imperial Marines—but knowing precisely where their enemies were turned it into something more like a live-fire exercise than a battle.

  Von Hamel watched his display. The raider spearheads were inside his perimeter in a dozen places, and if his people weren’t where the raiders thought they were, they weren’t far away, either. There were only a limited number of positions which could cover the same approach routes.

  One column of invaders moved towards his own CP, a tentacle of death reaching into the mangled city’s heart, and he gathered up his rifle. He had far too few people for him and his staff to stay out of the fire fight.

  He raised the heavy weapon—a thirty-millimeter “rifle” only a man with exoskeletal combat armor “muscles” could possibly have managed. It was loaded with discarding sabot tungsten penetrators four times heavier than those of the rifles unarmored infantry carried, and he slid it cautiously over the edge of the office building roof.

  “Engage!” he barked.

  The orderly advance exploded in chaos.

  Raiders screamed and died in a hu
rricane of high-velocity tungsten. Two hundred rifles—auto-cannon in all but name—blazed at point-blank range, and not even combat armor could stop fire like that. Fifteen-millimeter penetrators hurled them aside like shattered dolls, support squads’ launchers spat plasma grenades and HE, and Captain Alexsov’s careful briefing had become a death trap. The raiders knew where the defenders were, and their point men and flankers had succumbed to overconfidence.

  Even taken by surprise, they had the firepower to deal with their enemies. What they no longer had was the will. They didn’t even try to return fire; they simply broke and ran, scourged by that deadly hail of fire until they managed to get out of range.

  “Regroup! Assume Position Gamma. I say again, Position Gamma.”

  Von Hamel’s people responded instantly, withdrawing from the positions their attack had marked for the raiders, and this time the smoke and confusion and terror helped them. There was no way the other side could track them through the chaos as they dashed for their new stations.

  They’d done well, von Hamel thought. Barely half a dozen Marine beacons had gone out, and the raiders had been brutally mauled.

  But they wouldn’t get another chance like that. The other side might not know his troops’ exact positions, but they knew his general battle plan. They wouldn’t come in fat and stupid a second time, and they had that damned armor to back them, not to mention the assault boats.

  Howell watched Alexsov’s face as the reports came in. Another man might have sworn. At the very least he would have said something. Alexsov only tightened his lips and started sorting out the chaos.

  The commodore looked away, grateful for Alexsov’s calm yet constitutionally incapable of understanding it. His eyes swept his command deck, and he frowned. Commander Watanabe sat stiffly in the assistant gunnery officer’s chair, sweat beading his brow, and his face was pale as he stared at the fires spalling the darkened city.

  Howell turned his head, looking for Rachel Shu, and found her. She, too, was watching Watanabe, and her eyes were narrow.

  A smoke-choked dawn, smutted with cinders and the stench of burning, painted the sky at last.

  Major von Hamel hadn’t expected to see the sun rise, and now he wanted to, more than he had ever wanted anything before, for he knew he would never see it set. But it was grim, vengeful satisfaction that pulsed within him, not fear. He and what remained of his battalion, little more than a company, had withdrawn to their final positions, and the streets behind them were thick with the dead. Too many were his own, and far, far too many were civilians, but there were over six hundred raiders and nine gutted tanks among them. His air-defense platoon had even added a trio of Bengals to the carnage, for the enemy dared not use HVW this close to GeneCorp’s HQ. They had to strafe if they wanted his Marines, and that brought them into his people’s reach.

  Yet the end was coming. Only the tight tactical control he’d managed to maintain had staved it off this long, but ammunition was running low, and his last reserve had been committed. He was spread too thin to hold against another determined push, and once the final perimeter broke, his control would vanish into a room-to-room insanity that could end only one way.

  He knew that. But he’d also realized something else during the nightmare night. These weren’t pirates. He didn’t know what they were, but no pirate commander would have continued such a furious assault or accepted such casualties, and if he’d tried, his men would have mutinied. These people were something else, and the carnage they’d wreaked on the evac centers filled him with a dreadful certainty.

  They were going to destroy this city. They were going to wipe it from the face of Elysium, whether they gained their prize or not. It was part of their pattern, and there was something more than brute sadism to it. He was too exhausted to think clearly, but it was almost as if they needed to eliminate all witnesses to protect some secret.

  He had no idea what that secret might be, and it didn’t matter. None of his people were going to be surrendered to the butchers who had raped and tortured Mawli and Brigadoon and Mathison’s World, and there was no longer any reason to preserve GeneCorp’s data base as a bargaining chip.

  He lay on a balcony, watching the smoky sky, and waited.

  “All right.” Even Alexsov sounded drained, and Howell could scarcely believe their losses. The chief of staff locked eyes with the ground commander’s screen image, and the commodore saw the terrible fatigue in the ground man’s face. Howell was desperately tempted to give it up—simply replacing the losses to his ground component was going to take months—but they’d come too far. And, he reminded himself tiredly, whatever happened, they’d attained their primary objective. News of what had happened to Elysium would rock the Empire to its foundations.

  “One more push, and you’re in. Check?” Alexsov said.

  “Check,” his subordinate said wearily, and the chief of staff nodded.

  “Then get it moving, Colonel.”

  Von Hamel heard the sudden crescendo of fire as the tanks moved in. His troopers fired back desperately, but they were almost out of anti-tank weapons and they were too thin, too heart-breakingly thin. Beacons vanished from his display with dreadful speed, and he switched it off with a sigh.

  He sat up, craning his neck at the eastern sky, and tears trickled down his face as he listened to the thunder. Not for himself, but for his people. For all they’d done and given that no one would ever know a thing about.

  His southern perimeter broke at last. It didn’t crumble and yield; it simply died with the men and women who held it, and the attackers thundered through the gap as a blazing arm of the sun rose above the shattered skyline. Von Hamel stared at it, drinking in its beauty, and pressed the button.

  Commodore James Howell stared in shock at the expanding globe of fire in the center of the city. It swelled and towered as he watched, wiping away GeneCorp and all he had come to steal and devouring half his remaining ground troops like some dragon out of Terran myth.

  “Damn.” It was Alexsov, his voice flat and almost disinterested, and Howell wanted to scream at him. But he didn’t. There was no point.

  “Recover the assault force,” he told Rendlemann.

  “Yes, sir. Shall I move on the secondary objectives, sir?”

  “No.” Howell watched the fireball begin to fade. Amazing how little of the remaining city had gone with it. Whoever planted those charges had known what he was doing. “No, I don’t think so. We’ve lost enough people for one night, and there’s still that damned militia. We’ll cut our losses.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Howell leaned back and rubbed his eyes. That suicide charge had never been part of Thermopylae. Had someone down there realized the truth?

  “Move to Phase Four,” he said quietly.

  The shuttles departed with barely a third of the personnel they’d landed. Their mother ships recovered them, and the ground force’s survivors stumbled back aboard, stunned by the blood and chaos of their “walkover.” It was the first time they’d failed, and Howell tried to hide his own fear of the consequences. Not for himself. Control should have no complaints about the effect of the operation, and ground equipment and the cannon fodder to man it had always been far easier to come by than starships.

  No, it was the effect on his men he feared. How would their morale react to this? He already knew Control was going to have to settle for more lightly defended targets in the immediate future. He’d have too many new personnel, and the vets would need easy operations to rebuild confidence.

  He folded his hands in his lap, brooding down on Elysium’s holo image. It was past time to be done here, and he turned to the gunnery officer.

  “Are we prepared to execute Phase Four, Commander Rahman?”

  “Yes, sir. Missile targets are laid in and locked.”

  “Good.” Howell studied the man’s expression. It wasn’t exactly calm, but it was composed and ready. Commander Watanabe, on the other hand . . .

  The commodore tu
rned to the commander. Watanabe was pasty pale and sweating hard, and Howell sighed internally. He’d been afraid of this ever since Alexsov voiced his own concern over Watanabe’s reliability.

  “Commander Watanabe,” his voice was very quiet, “execute Phase Four.”

  Watanabe jerked, and his face worked. He stared at his commanding officer, then down at the console. Down at the target codes for every one of Elysium’s cities.

  “I . . .”

  “I gave you an order, Commander,” Howell said, and his eyes flicked over Watanabe’s shoulder to Rachel Shu.

  “Please, sir,” Watanabe whispered. “I . . . I don’t . . .”

  “You don’t want to execute it?” The commander’s eyes darted back up at the almost compassionate note in Howell’s voice. “That’s understandable, Commander, but you are one of my officers. As such, you have neither room for second thoughts nor the luxury of deciding which orders you will obey. Do you understand me, Commander Watanabe?”

  Silence hovered on the command deck, and the commander closed his eyes. Then he stood and jerked the synth link headset from his temples.

  “I’m sorry, sir.” His voice was hoarse. “I can’t. I just can’t.”

  “I see. I’m sorry to hear that,” Howell said softly, and nodded to Rachel Shu.

  The emerald beam buzzed across the bridge. It struck precisely on the base of Watanabe’s skull, and his body arched in spastic agony. But it was a dead man’s reaction—a muscular response and no more.

  The corpse slithered to the deck. Someone coughed on the stench of singed hair, but no one moved. No one was even surprised, and plastic and alloy whispered on leather as Shu holstered her nerve disrupter with an expression of mild distaste.