Empire from the Ashes

by David Weber

  "Go, 'Tanni!" Horus said urgently.

  "I go, Father," she said softly, yet she paused just long enough to throw one arm about him and kiss him before she wheeled away. He watched her go, Gwynevere trotting ahead of her like a scout, and turned to survey his office one more time. He'd accomplished a lot from this place. Commanded the Siege of Earth, directed the reconstruction in its wake, coordinated the introduction of an entire planet to Imperial technology... . He'd never expected to fight for his daughter's life from it, but if he had to do that too, then, by the Maker, he would.

  He walked slowly to the office foyer. It was the only way into his personal quarters, and he upended his receptionist's desk and piled furniture about it. He built a sturdy barricade facing the entry, then stepped away from it to the wall beside the entry and settled his back into a corner.

  * * *

  "The explosives have arrived at the Palace, Colin," Dahak said as Colin entered the command deck of the computer's starship body.

  "Good." Officers popped to their feet as their Emperor and Warlord strode across to the captain's couch, but he waved them back to their duties. Dahak had moved beyond the weapon's threat radius, and Colin felt a sick surge of guilt as he realized that, whatever happened, he personally was safe. It seemed a betrayal of all his subjects, and knowing Hector and Gerald were right to insist upon it only made his guilt worse.

  He settled into the command couch. The display was centered on Birhat, not Dahak, and he watched sublight craft streaming from the planetary surface to the waiting planetoids. Like Dahak, all those starships were beyond threat range, and thousands more of his subjects were embarking aboard them as he watched, but it was taking time. Too much time they might not have. He drew a deep, deep breath and pressed himself back in his couch.

  "Tell them to proceed, Dahak."

  * * *

  Brigadier Jourdain followed his men up the stairs. There were only twelve Marines, one tired old man, and a pregnant woman to stop them, while he had over a hundred men, all fully enhanced courtesy of Earth Security. It would be more than enough, he told himself yet again. Some were going to get killed, but not enough to stop them, and dead Security men would be convincing proof of how hard Brigadier Jourdain and his men had fought to protect their Empress.

  He bared mirthless teeth at the thought as his point man approached the landing. They were one floor below Duke Horus's office and living quarters, and they hadn't seen a soul. Perhaps he'd worried too much. Surely if the Marines had figured anything out—

  Something rattled. The lead Security man saw the small object skitter past his feet, and his eyes flared. No! His implant scanners hadn't picked up a thing, so how—

  Eleven men died in a blast of fury, and the Marine who'd thrown the grenade grinned savagely as he and his partner reactivated their own implants and brought their energy guns to bear on the smoke-streaming door.

  * * *

  Captain Chin's head jerked up as the explosion rattled. Please, God, let someone else have heard it! he prayed, then settled back down in firing position.

  * * *

  Brigadier Jourdain's ears cringed as thunder filled the stairwell. The screams of the merely wounded were faint and tiny in the explosion's wake, and he swore viciously. So much for surprise!

  "Clancey! Get up there!" he barked, and Corporal Clancey settled his automatic grenade launcher into firing position. He jerked his head at the other three members of his section, and the four of them pushed forward through the men above them on the stair.

  The waiting Marines had their own implant sensors on-line now, but there was a limit to what the devices could tell them. They knew the stairs were full of men, but they couldn't tell what weapons they carried or precisely what they were doing. The second Marine held a grenade, ready to throw it, but the same suppressor that blocked their coms from hyper-space would smother any hyper grenade's small field, and they'd had only one HE grenade each. He couldn't afford to waste it, and so he gritted his teeth and waited.

  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, but 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.