by David Weber
Clancey and his team reached the landing and eased forward, boots skidding in what had once been their point men, backs pressed to the walls. They, too, had their sensors on-line, and they didn’t like what they were telling them. There were two Marines up there, and only one of them was where their grenades could get at him; the other was further back, sheltering in a cross-connecting corridor to cover his companion, and Clancey swore. God, what he wouldn’t give for hyper grenades! But at least the bastards didn’t seem to have any more grenades of their own.
He nodded to the two men against the opposite wall.
“Go!”
They spun into the doorway, launchers coughing on full auto. The closer Marine’s fire ripped both of them apart, but their grenades were already on the way, and a staccato blast rattled teeth as they detonated in sequence, killing him instantly.
Clancey cursed as an energy gun splattered his companions over him, but his implants told him the Marine who’d fired was dead. He went down in a crouch, hosing more grenades to keep the surviving Marine’s head down while more Security men charged the door. Explosions shattered walls and furnishings, and the building’s fire suppression systems howled to life as flames glared. More men charged up the stairs, white faces locked in death’s-head grins, and then Corporal Clancey discovered he’d been wrong about what the Marines had.
The grenade landed 1.3 meters behind him, and he had one instant to feel the terror before it exploded and killed six more men … including Corporal William Clancey, Earth Security.
* * *
Vlad Chernikov felt blind and maimed. For the first time in twenty-five years, every implant in his body had been shut down lest the Mark Ninety decide they were weapons, and the sudden reversion to the senses Nature had provided was a greater psychic shock than he’d anticipated.
He grimaced the thought aside and hoisted the charge Dahak had designed. The initiator charges of the obsolete warheads had been formed in hundreds of precisely shaped blocks, and Dahak had reassembled a hundred and fifty kilos of them into a single massive shaped-charge. That might be more than they needed, but Dahak believed in redundancy.
He slung the charge on his back—at least his muscular enhancement still worked, since it used no power and hence offered no emissions signature to offend the Mark Ninety’s sensibilities—and started down the hall to the gallery on the longest sixty-meter hike of his life.
* * *
The scream of alarms filled the stairwell as thermal sensors responded to the fires the explosions had set. Their shrill, atonal wail set Jourdain’s teeth on edge, but White Tower’s soundproofing was excellent, and his men at the switchboard had cut all lines to its top fifteen floors. None of which meant people wouldn’t notice if grenades started blowing out windows.
“Push ’em back!” he shouted, and started up the stairs. His point had stalled amid the carnage of shattered bodies, and he snarled at them. “Come on, you bastards! There’s only twelve of them!”
He flung himself through the doorway, landing flat on his belly in Clancey’s blood. More of his men crouched behind him or threw themselves prone, and at least a dozen energy guns snarled. Walls already torn and pocked by grenade fragments ripped apart under focused beams of gravitic disruption, and the Marine fired back desperately. Another of his men went down, then two more, a fourth, but there was only one Marine left. It was only a matter of time—and not much of it—until one of those energy guns found him.
* * *
There were five separate stairs. Captain Chin had placed two Marines to cover each, but Jourdain had elected to assault only three, and combat roared as his other assault teams ran into their own defenders. The Marines had the advantage of position; their attackers had both numbers and heavier weapons. It was an unequal equation, and it could have only one solution.
Jourdain’s number three assault team lost ten men in the first exchange, but its commander was a hard-bitten man, an ex-Marine himself, who knew what he was about. Once he’d pinpointed the defenders, he sent six men down one floor. They positioned themselves directly beneath the Marines, switched their energy guns to maximum power, aimed at the ceiling, and simply held the triggers back. The Marines never had time to realize what was happening, and assault team three charged forward over their mutilated bodies.
* * *
Captain Chin heard feet behind him and rolled up on one knee just as the leading “Security men” appeared in the hall. His energy gun howled, and three of them vanished in a gory spray. He flung himself back down, flat on his belly against the wall, and his single grenade killed three more attackers.
“Wire the doors and get your ass up here, Matthews!” he shouted to his teammate. Private Matthews didn’t waste time answering. She yanked the pin from her own grenade and wedged it against the stairwell door so that any effort to open it would release the safety handle. Then she grabbed her energy gun and headed for the captain’s position.
She arrived just in time to help beat off the next assault, and then Chin swore as the attackers fell back.
“They’re not coming up our stair at all,” he spat. “They’re going to leave someone to pin us down and get on with it.”
“Only if we let ’em, Cap,” Matthews grunted, and before Chin could stop her, the private lunged to her feet. She charged down the hall, energy gun on continuous fire, and Chin leapt to his feet and followed. Matthews killed six more men before answering fire blew her apart, and Chin vaulted her body. The captain landed less than a meter from the remaining three men holding the blocking position, and four energy guns snarled as one.
There were no survivors on either side.
* * *
Staff Sergeant Duncan Sellers, Earth Security, swore monotonously as he ran down the hall. He’d gotten separated from the rest of his team, and the entire floor had filled with smoke despite the fire suppression systems. His enhanced lungs handled the smoke easily, but he dreaded what could happen if he blundered into his friends and they mistook him for a Marine.
He turned a corner and gasped in relief as he picked up the implants of his fellows ahead. He opened his mouth to shout his own name, then whirled as some sixth sense warned him. A shape bounded towards him, but his instant spurt of panic eased as he realized it was only one of the Empress’s dogs. Big as it was, no dog was a threat to an enhanced human, and he raised his energy gun almost negligently.
Gaheris was four meters away when he left the floor in a prodigious spring. Sergeant Sellers got off one shot—then screamed in terror as bio-enhanced jaws ripped his throat out like tissue.
* * *
Alex Jourdain advanced in a crouch, weapon ready, and disbelief filled him. There were only twelve of them, damn it!
Perhaps so, but by the time his three assault teams merged at the foot of the single stair leading to the next floor, he’d lost over seventy men. Over seventy! Worse, he’d added up the Marine body count from all three teams and come up with only eight. Two more were pinned down at the west stairwell, but the last pair of Marines was still unaccounted for—and ten of his own men were equally pinned down in the stairwell firefight. That left him with only nineteen under his own command, and he didn’t like the math. Eight Marines had killed seventy-six of their attackers. That worked out to almost ten each, and if Horus and the two remaining Marines did as well…
He shook his head. It was the stupid and incautious who died first, he told himself. The men he had left were survivors, or they wouldn’t have gotten this far. They could still do it—and they’d damned well better, because none of them could go home and pretend this hadn’t happened!
“Hose it!” he barked to his remaining grenadiers, and a hurricane of grenades lashed up the stairs and blew the doors at their head to bits.
“Go!” Jourdain shouted, and his men went forward in a rush.
* * *
Corporal Anna Zhirnovski cringed as another grenade exploded. The bastards had gotten Steve O’Hennesy with the last salvo, bu
t Zhirnovski was bellied down behind a right-angled bend in the corridor. They couldn’t get a direct shot at her, but they were trying to bounce the damned things around the corner, and they were getting closer. It was only a matter of time, and she rechecked her sensors. At least seven of them left, she thought, and despair stabbed through her. They wouldn’t waste this much time—or this many men—on killing one Marine unless they had enough other firepower to kill the Empress without their input, but there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it. She and Steve had been cut off from the central core, and even launching a kamikaze attack into them would achieve nothing but her own death.
Her muscles quivered with the need to do just that, for she was a Marine, handpicked to protect her Empress’ life, but she fought the urge down once more. She was going to die. She’d accepted that. And if she couldn’t kill the men attacking her (and she couldn’t), she could at least keep them occupied. And, she told herself grimly, she could make them pay cash when they came after her to finish off the witnesses.
Another string of grenades exploded, and she detected movement behind them. They were trying a rush under cover of the explosions, and she waited tensely. Now!
The grenadiers stopped firing to let their flankers go in, and Anna Zhirnovski rolled out into the corridor, under the smoke. Men shrieked as her snarling energy gun ripped their feet and legs apart, and Zhirnovski snap-rolled back into her protected position.
Two more, she thought, and then the grenades began to explode once more.
* * *
Oscar Sanders unwrapped another stick of gum, shoved it into his mouth, and chewed rhythmically without ever taking his eyes from the HD. Every news service was covering the chaos at the mat-trans facility across the Concourse from Sanders’ position in the White Tower lobby, and he shook his head. Virtually every member of White Tower’s usual security force was over there trying to sort out the confusion, and they were fighting a losing battle. Sanders had never seen so many people in one place in his life, and the threat that could produce it was enough to make anyone nervous. Evacuating an entire planet because of one bomb? What the hell sort of bomb could—
He looked up at a sudden slamming sound. It came again, then again, and he frowned and glanced at his console. Every light glowed a steady green, but the slamming sound echoed yet again, and he stood.
He walked around the end of the counter and followed the sound up the corridor. It was coming from the stairwell door, and he drew his grav gun and reached for the latch. He gripped it firmly and yanked the door open, then relaxed. It was only a dog, one of Empress Jiltanith’s.
But Oscar Sanders’s relief vanished suddenly, and his gun snapped back up as he realized the dog was covered with blood. He almost squeezed the trigger, but his brain caught up with his instincts first. The dog was not only covered with blood; one of its forelegs was a mangled stub, and the door was slick with blood where the injured animal had tried repeatedly to spring the crash bar latch with its remaining leg.
It took only a fraction of a second for Sanders’ stunned brain to put all that together—and then, with a sudden burst of horror, to remember whose dog this was. He jerked back, a thousand questions flaring through his mind, and that was when the strangest thing of all happened.
“Help!” Gaheris’s vocoder said just before he collapsed. “Men come to kill Jiltanith! Help her!”
* * *
Vlad Chernikov turned the last corner, and the magnificent statue stood before him. Even now he felt a stir of awe for its beauty, but he hadn’t come to admire it, and he advanced cautiously.
The shaped charge on his back seemed to take on weight with every stride. It was silly, of course. He was already well inside a Mark Ninety’s interdiction perimeter; if the thing was going to decide the charge was a weapon, it would already have blown up the planet.
That, unfortunately, made him feel no less naked and vulnerable, and he missed his implants’ ability to manipulate his adrenaline level as he stepped around the inert scanner remote still lying where it had fallen when Dahak hastily deactivated it.
He moved to within two meters of the sculpture and studied it carefully. The problem was that his weapon was insufficient to reduce the entire statue to gravel, so he had to be certain that whatever bit he chose to blow up contained the bomb. And since neither he nor Dahak could scan the thing, he could only try to estimate where the bomb was.
It would help, he thought irritably, if they knew its dimensions. It was tempting to assume they’d used Tsien’s blueprints without alteration, but if that assumption proved inaccurate, the consequences would be extreme.
Well, there were certain constraints Mister X’s bomb-makers couldn’t avoid. The primary emitter, for example, had to be at least two meters long and twenty centimeters in diameter, and the focusing coils would each add another thirty centimeters to the emitter’s length. That gave him a minimum length of two hundred sixty centimeters, which meant the bomb couldn’t be inside the human half of the statue. It would have had to be in his torso, and while the Marine was more than life-sized, he wasn’t that much larger, so the bomb itself had to be inside the Narhani. Unfortunately, the Narhani was big enough that the thing could be oriented at any of several angles, and he couldn’t afford to miss. Of course, the power source for the bomb was a fair-sized target all on its own, and the designers had had to squeeze in the Mark 90, too. They’d undoubtedly put at least part of the hardware inside the Marine, but which part?
They’d counted on the bomb’s never being detected, Vlad thought, so they probably hadn’t considered the need to design it to sustain damage and still function, which might mean the power source was inside the Marine and the rest of the hardware was inside the Narhani. That was a seductively attractive supposition, but again, he couldn’t afford to guess wrong.
He stepped even closer to the statue, considering the angle of the Narhani’s body as it reared against its chains. All right, the bomb wasn’t inside the human and it was the next best thing to three meters long. It couldn’t be placed vertically in the Narhani’s torso, either, because there wasn’t enough length. It could be partly inside the torso and angled down into the body’s barrel, though. The arch of the Narhani’s spine would make that placement tricky, but it was feasible.
He rocked back on his heels and wiped sweat from his forehead as the unhappy conclusion forced itself upon him. The possible bomb dimensions simply left too many possibilities. To be certain, he had to split the statue cleanly in two, and to be sure the break came within the critical length, he’d have to come up from below.
He sighed, wishing he dared activate his com implant to consult with Dahak, then shrugged. He couldn’t, and even if he could have, he already knew what Dahak would say.
He wiped his forehead one more time, took the bomb from his back, and bent cautiously to edge it under the marble Narhani’s belly.
* * *
The last exchange of fire faded into silence, and Brigadier Jourdain’s mouth was a bitter, angry line. Ten more of his men lay dead around the head of the ruined stairs. Two more were down, one so badly mangled only his implants kept him alive, and they wouldn’t do that much longer, but at least they’d accounted for the last two Marines.
He glared at the closed door to the foyer of Horus’s office and cranked his implant sensors to maximum power. Damn it, he knew the Governor was in there somewhere, but the cunning old bastard must have shut his implants down, like the Marines covering that first stairwell. As long as he stayed put without moving, Jourdain couldn’t pick him up without implant emissions.
Well, there were drawbacks to that sort of game, the brigadier told himself grimly. If Horus had his implants down, he couldn’t see Jourdain or his men, either. He was limited to his natural senses. That ought to make him a bit slower off the mark when he opened fire, and even if he’d found an ambush position to let him get the first few men through the door, he’d reveal his position to the others the instant he fired
.
“All right,” the brigadier said to his seven remaining men. “Here’s how we’re going to do this.”
* * *
Franklin Detmore ripped off another burst of grenades and grimaced. Whoever that Marine up there was, he was too damned good for Detmore’s taste. The ten men assigned to mop him up had been reduced to five, and Detmore was delighted to be the only remaining grenadier. He vastly preferred laying down covering fire to being the next poor son-of-a-bitch to rush the bastard.
He fed a fresh belt into his launcher and looked up. Luis Esteben was the senior man, and he looked profoundly unhappy. Their orders were to leave no witnesses; sooner or later, someone was going to have to go in after the last survivor, and Esteben had a sinking suspicion who Brigadier Jourdain was going to pick for the job if he hadn’t gotten it done by the time the Brigadier got here.
“All right,” he said finally. “We’re not going to take this bastard out with a frontal assault.” His fellows nodded, and he bared his teeth at their relieved expressions. “What we need to do is get in behind him.”
“We can’t. That’s a blind corridor,” someone pointed out.
“Yeah, but it’s got walls, and we’ve got energy guns,” Esteben pointed out. “Frank, you keep him busy, and the rest of us’ll go back and circle around to get into the conference room next door. We can blow through the wall from there and flank him out.”
“Suits me,” Detmore agreed, “but—” He broke off and his eyes widened. “What the hell is that?” he demanded, staring back up the corridor.