There! Another pass with his electronic skeleton key, and McCall had access to the storeroom.
The back stairs leading down to the cellars where the prisoners were kept should be just ahead....
* * *
"What's that? Up there!"
Alex froze in place, but it was too late. A group of militia troopers had emerged from a doorway on the parapet walkway thirty meters away, and one, at least, was wearing a helmet with IR scanners and a HUD visor as efficient as Alex's own. Though the Nighthawk suit cut down significantly on IR emissions, he'd been wearing the thing for hours now, had engaged in a tough, uphill climb over broken terrain, and capped the approach off with a burst from his jump jets. He was definitely no longer invisible to IR sensors.
"Halt!" a voice cried out. "You! Stop where you are!"
Alex vaulted from the parapet. It was a ten-meter drop to the ferrocrete pavement below, and he triggered his jump jets at the last instant, cushioning his landing. A burst of autofire crackled from the ramparts; bullets snapped past his head and one struck his chest, singing off his armor in a shrill ricochet.
Swinging about, Alex scanned the rampart above, his visor HUD picking out swiftly moving heat sources and bracketing them in flashing cursors. As he raised his laser rifle and aimed at the nearest of the IR targets, his suit electronics relayed targeting information to his HUD. Crosshairs intersected the cursor and flashed green.
He squeezed the trigger. There was a flash, and his external pickups caught the man's shriek as his clothing and kevlar armor caught fire. Alex shifted targets as the man tumbled backward off the wall; a second trooper running along the walkway took a pulse of coherent light squarely in the chest, and the explosion of vaporizing body fluids and tissue also pitched him backward and off the rampart.
Alex triggered another burst from his jets, vaulting to the cover of a line of parked vehicles and coming to ground again in a hissing shriek and a swirling cloud of dust. Just ahead, a pair of soldiers emerged from the doorway of a barracks, armed but carrying their weapons in relaxed, no-hurry poses. Alex chopped down the one on the right, but the other yelped and backpedaled into the open barracks door, screaming an alarm.
So much for maintaining a covert presence.
Well, it had been too much to hope that the two of them could actually penetrate the Citadel's defenses and remain undiscovered for long, not with so many soldiers and base personnel wandering around. An alarm was sounding somewhere in the depths of the Citadel's central keep, a rasping buzz that set the teeth on edge. Atop the gate tower, off to Alex's right, a quad-mount gun turret pivoted about with a mechanical whine, its twin pairs of autocannons dipping to bear on the invader. Alex triggered a shot from his laser, sending a blue-green pulse of light slashing through the night, searing off one of the gun barrels and boiling away a fist-sized crater in a burst of hot vapor.
Gunfire answered from the remaining weapons; explosions ripped across the pavement where Alex had been standing an instant before—but he'd already flexed his legs and taken flight once more, rocketing into the night as he sent a fresh salvo of laser bursts into the turret's target acquisition and tracking antenna array. Landing again, he ducked for cover, unclipping the Imperator-Delta autogrenade launcher strapped to his equipment harness. He chambered the first round, a high-explosive microgrenade, selected an aim point across the courtyard, and let fly. Explosions ripped through parked vehicles and stacks of equipment crates.
Suddenly, the courtyard had become a war zone wreathed in drifting smoke and torn by explosions. Armored soldiers appeared from every direction as the alarm continued to sound. In the keep itself, beneath the tallest of its spires, the main doors to the building's 'Mech bay, fifteen meters tall and cast in solid diacarb-tempered steel, were grinding slowly open on greased rails, revealing the pulse of a red warning light flashing on and off in the depths of the access tunnel beyond. Men in light combat armor or fatigues raced up the sloping ferrocrete ramp from inside the keep and into the open, only to crumble and die in the flash of multiple grenade explosions.
Alex tongued the control that gave him an active radio channel. "Gray Skull One, this is Gray Skull Two," he called. "It's starting to get hot out here. Do you copy? Over."
There was no answer, save for a burst of automatic rifle fire from the shadows on the far side of the courtyard. Alex tracked the heat signature of the gunman and returned fire, a burst of laser light that cut the running figure down.
"Gray Skull One! Gray Skull One! Do you copy?"
The night was filled with flame and noise, but no response from Davis McCall.
15
Citadel Keep
Caledonia, Skye March
Federated Commonwealth
2308 hours, 1 April 3057
Davis McCall had heard nothing over his radio communications channel, but he was deep enough underground now that the powerful little transceivers built into his headgear wouldn't be able to penetrate. He hadn't heard any gunfire, either, but he had heard the alarm when it went off, the raucous buzz grating through every level of the Citadel.
He dodged one group of soldiers when he heard them at a door in the passageway just ahead. Springing straight up, he grabbed hold of some bundled power cables and conduits attached to the stone ceiling four meters above the floor, hooked his legs above a cluster of water pipes, and hung on motionless as the door slid open and soldiers came charging through, their helmeted heads just a man's height beneath McCall's shoulders.
In that position he couldn't see them, of course, but he could track each trooper by the noises he was making— pounding boots and clanking gear, nervous chatter between mates, and labored breathing. When the last sound had died away, McCall released his grip and dropped lightly back to the floor, his power suit camouflage already losing the surreal pattern of wires and pipes and shadows that it had shown a moment before. Congratulating himself on avoiding a nasty encounter, he unslung his laser rifle, palmed open the door and nearly collided with a pair of surprised-looking soldiers who were coming through after the rest of their comrades.
Instinctively, McCall raised his rifle one-handed, triggering a dazzling flash of blue-green light that exploded the head of the first soldier in a messy splatter of blood, bone, and gray matter.
The second man snatched his weapon—a viciously snub-nosed submachine gun—to the ready, clamping down hard on the trigger and sending a long burst rattling into McCall's chest at point-blank range. The impact staggered McCall, punching him back a step as bullets shrieked and whined off his breastplate. He shifted his aim but didn't fire, for the subgunner was twisting and jumping like a puppet on a madly jerking string, riddled by a dozen or so of his own bullets as they ricocheted back off McCall's armor. Finger still holding down the trigger, the gunman toppled over, his last few rounds chewing their way across the ceiling before the magazine ran dry.
McCall stepped across the two bloody bodies and into a large, round, low-ceilinged room with many doors. In the center of the room was a doughnut-shaped control console occupied by yet another soldier, a Bloodspiller officer, who was rising to his feet and groping for his sidearm.
"Don't!" McCall ordered, bringing his laser to bear squarely on the officer's chest. A slight pressure from his finger triggered the laser at a very low wattage, painting a bright blue-green dot on the man's sternum. "All I have to do is close my fist, lad, an' you're dead!"
The officer gaped down at his chest, eyes goggling, then slowly raised his hands above bis head. "Don't shoot!" he cried. "Please!"
Keeping the targeting laser on the man, McCall moved closer, glancing at the console. Dozens of small monitors were there, each showing scenes of men and women sitting in stone-walled cells, alone or in small, disheveled groups. "Open 'em up," McCall ordered. "Let 'em go!"
The man complied, touching a master release. With a hiss, the doors around the room's perimeter slid open as one. With a sudden movement, the officer dropped his hand to the laser pistol
holstered on his hip, but McCall fired first.
The man screamed once, a sharp, short yelp, and his body fell, smoking, to the floor.
"Come on oot!" McCall boomed over his external speaker when no one immediately ventured out. "You're all free!"
One woman poked her head out the door of her cell. A moment later, a couple of men stepped uncertainly through the door of theirs, followed closely by three more.
"Who are you?" one of the men demanded.
"Never mind tha'," McCall said. "Listen to me vurra closely, people. I'm here for Angus McCall! Is he here?"
"I'm here," came a voice, and McCall turned, tracking the sound. His brother was scarcely recognizable, a dirty scarecrow of a man in tattered white rags and an unkempt beard. "D-Davis? Is tha' you in that thing?"
"Aye, Angus. An' what hae y' done t' get y'sel' in trouble noo?"
"I don't ... I don't believe it!"
"Maimer sent me t' get ye, Angus," McCall said with a tight grin. "She says it's aye time t' be gettin' home!"
"I'll agree wi' y' there, Davis." Somewhere far overhead, thunder rolled.
* * *
Alex needed to find a way to buy himself and McCall a few precious moments of complete confusion among the Citadel's defenders, and he was pretty sure he'd found just that. A number of vehicles—groundcars and lightly armored hovercraft—were parked in ranks just behind the vertical thrust of the gate tower. Among them was the silvery form of a small tanker truck. Alex couldn't tell what the vehicle was carrying, or even whether or not it was full, but there was plenty of water on Caledon, so whatever the tank's contents were, they were likely to be nasty. Even if the tank was empty, trapped fumes from jet fuel or volatile petroleum products could turn it into a very large bomb under the right conditions.
He decided to create the right conditions. Reaching down with his left hand, Alex plucked a timed scatter toss from his suit's carry harness. A twist set the timer, one minute. His throw, amplified by the suit's electronic musculature, sent the silver-gray cylinder flying eighty meters before striking a back wall and clattering off the cab roof of a hover transport and onto the pavement, ten meters away from the tanker.
Before the tosser stopped rolling, Alex had stepped backward into the pitch-black shadow of the Citadel's walls, crouched slightly to take advantage of the cover afforded by a rusty, paint-chipped Pegasus hover tank and a stack of plastic supply crates. As he froze motionless in place, his suit's chameleon circuitry shifted his armor's color into patterns of black and dark gray.
Seconds later, a team of laser-armed soldiers raced past, pounding across the compound in search of the reported intruders. The immediate noise of battle had died away for the moment, but the night was a confusion of shouting men and of boots scuffing and thudding across the pavement. The alarm buzzer continued to sound, and the throbbing warning light from the open doorway to the keep cast a surreally shifting alternation of red and black across the Citadel's walled enclosure.
"Where are they?" one voice yelled from the vicinity of a fuel truck parked near a shed. "Which way did they go?"
"I don't think they're inside, Rodriguez," another voice answered. "Th' Cap'n said they was just lobbin' missiles into the compound."
"Who was?"
"The rebel bastards, of course! Who else? Tryin' t' get even with us for yesterday."
A soldier in combat fatigues and lugging a heavy assault rifle stepped into the space between the Pegasus and the supply crates, peering carefully into the darkness. Alex found himself staring straight into the man's fear-widened eyes, close enough to see the beads of sweat trickling down his face. The temptation to move, to defend himself, to shoot was almost overpowering, but Alex forced himself to remain absolutely motionless ... and the soldier's eyes slid past him, up the stack of crates to the left, and then the man had turned away and gone.
"Johnny said he saw one over this way," a voice called from nearby.
"Aw, Johnny couldn't see a BattleMech if it stepped on his—"
Across the courtyard, the tosser went off, a rippling chatter of detonating submunitions hurling tiny bomblets across that half of the compound. Explosions banged and muttered like crackling fireworks or shrieked through the air on fiery streaks; a sheet of flame went up among the parked vehicles, and, an instant later, the tanker exploded in a blinding, deafening blast.
Orange flame mushroomed into the night, its glare obliterating the illumination from spotlights and lamps, its roar as loud as bellowing thunder. Pieces of parked vehicle rained across the compound, trailing smoke; a screaming soldier ran wildly into the open, his jacket furiously burning. Another vehicle exploded ... and then another, a chain reaction that jolted Alex's feet through the pavement each time a blast went off. Several of the high-intensity lamps ringing the enclosure went out as blast effects shattered their lenses. The compound was in utter, flaming confusion now as explosions continued to detonate in every direction.
Alex crouched lower as the night in the courtyard turned to searing day.
* * *
"The rest of you, noo," McCall said, addressing the others who were moving into the room in increasing numbers. There must have been eighty or ninety men and women there, all together. "You're all aye free, but I cannae promise you a safe trip oot a' the Citadel! It sounds like there's gunplay ootside, an' it's likely t' be dangerous."
"No more dangerous than staying in here!" one dirty-faced, raggedly dressed woman shouted back. "Tha' bastard Wilmarth's promised t' kill most of us here!"
"Aye," another woman said, "An' the blessed hope a' tha' was all tha' was keepin' some of us goin'!"
Some of the others laughed, and McCall grinned to himself. Wilmarth and Bloodspillers and dungeons hadn't broken the spirit of this lot, not by ten light years! "Any of you who want t' stay an' take your chances wi' Wilmarth, you can do so," he said. "If you're not missin' from your cells, he cannae accuse you of takin' part in a jailbreak.
"If you want to go, though, you'll hae t' take your chances wi' Wilmarth's troops ootside. If you can get past the walls and th' front gate, there are Reivers in the woods, ready to take care of you. But gettin' to them is liable t' be a wee bit tricky...."
"Better tha' than Wilmarth's damned interrogators!" a man snapped. He took a step forward and spat on the officer's body. "I say, let's tell Wilmarth wha' we think of his filthy hospitality!"
A resounding cheer answered ... punctuated by a deep, rumbling boom from somewhere overhead. The light in the room dimmed ominously, and a fine mist of dust drifted down from the ceiling.
"Who kens how t' use this?" McCall asked, holding up the officer's laser pistol. Dozens of hands, men's and women's, thrust up or reached out. "Aye," McCall said, handing the weapon butt-first to a bearded man with a vividly fluorescent tattoo on his right deltoid—a BattleMech holding a giant hammer aloft. Recognizing the insignia as one popular with some enlisted MechWarriors, McCall guessed that the man had seen military service. "You a vet?"
"Twelve years pilotin' steel with the Fifth Crucis Lancers," the man growled. "That vet enough for you?"
The Fifth Crucis was one of the best. "Good enough. Name?"
"Ross."
"Okay, Ross. You bring up the rear an' make sure everyone who wants t' get out does. Don't stop to play. Anyone who stops gets left behind! I'll lead from the front."
"Right." Ross took the laser and stripped back the charge lever, checking the power coil with an obviously experienced eye.
"Angus! Where are you?"
"Here, Davis." His brother still looked dazed, as though unable to fully comprehend what was happening. "Is ... is it really you?"
"Aye, lad. It really is."
"You came for me...."
"I've done a lot of aye stupid things in m' time. Stay close to me noo. I would nae want t' lose ye after all this trouble!"
Thunder barked again overhead, louder and more insistent this time, and the lights dimmed again. "Wha' is it? Did y' bring your mercenary
BattleMech friends wi' ye, then?"
"Just the one," McCall replied. "But he's more than a match for what Wee Willie can throw at him. Come on, people! Line up! We're movin' oot!"
The crowd surged toward the doorway leading out.
* * *
Alex crouched in the cover provided by the Pegasus hover tank and a portion of the keep's outer wall as explosions continued to boom and rumble across the compound. Most of the parked vehicles on the far side of the compound were flaming piles of wreckage now. There were perhaps a half dozen vehicles on the near side, though, including the old Pegasus. It would be nice to take them out too before the raiders left. Wilmarth would be a long time rebuilding his military infrastructure after tonight!
Next on his scheduled list was the barbican and the gate leading out of the Citadel's walls. He could see the entrance from here ... standing open on the courtyard side, though the outer gate was closed. Snapping a fresh clip of ten microgrenades into the receiver of his autolauncher, he chambered the first round, raised the weapon to his shoulder, and squeezed off a long, chattering burst directly at the open inner gate.
The inside of the barbican lit up brighter than day with a popping, rippling chain of flashes. Windows blew out, and a larger, more massive secondary explosion blasted out a portion of the gate tower wall as some vehicle or ammo store inside detonated. Dust and smoke boiled from the gaping scar in the tower's face, but no return fire came from the walls or the upper windows. Just to be certain, Alex reloaded again, then fired carefully aimed, deliberately placed microgrenades through individual windows and firing ports. Flames were licking from one open window at the parapet level, but still there was no sign of life from the barbican defenses.
Raising up higher behind his patch of shelter, Alex surveyed the rampart walls to either side of the gate tower. Both autocannon turrets appeared to be out of action, their fire control circuits fried or damaged, their gun barrels cocked at odd and useless angles. In the courtyard itself, bodies lay everywhere, mingled with wrecked equipment and scattered rubble. A few of the bodies were those of Wilmarth's victims, his courtyard trophies, but those few were far outnumbered by the carnage Alex had wrought in just the past few minutes.
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