by David Drake
Rocks and debris pattered from the sky on Stephen and his fellows. He saw the gate clearing from the turbulence. The morning sun backlit the firing slits. One of the horizontal bars darkened. Stephen fired without needing to give a conscious order to his trigger finger.
The laser bolt struck just below the slit. It flash-heated the nickel steel in a yellow patch the size of a soup plate with a blazing white heart. The surface facing Stephen blistered outward, while the back of the plate exploded in ragged flakes. The slit brightened as the Fed who'd stood behind it fell.
Stephen reloaded as he ran forward. He paused at the gate to snatch at the cutting bar clipped to the right hip of his suit. Dole beside him already had his bar ready. The bosun cut down in a single powerful stroke. The blade's hornet whine became momentarily deeper where it sheared frame as well as plating. To the left, soldiers were mounting the steep berm. Pairs of armored men knelt to form a stirrup of their hands for a third who vaulted to the top.
A sailor fired both barrels of his shotgun down through the slotted opening of the guard kiosk. That probably wasn't necessary, because the Fed guard hadn't worn a hard suit. It was barely possible that the fellow on duty this morning had survived the Wrath's exhaust, but he certainly wasn't in shape to resist. Better to make sure, though. Always better to kill.
Dole's bar cut to the ground in a last spray of burning steel. Stephen and a dozen sailors hit the gate with their armored shoulders, ramming it backward faster than a Fed crew had ever opened it. The body of a Molt lay where Stephen's bolt had spalled supersonic fragments of steel from the plate to disembowel her.
The hatch of the farther gunhouse was closed. The hatch of the nearer gunhouse was closing. Stephen fired into the crack, blowing a divot of metal from the jamb and perhaps reflecting some of the laser's energy into the gunhouse.
The hatch slammed shut anyway. A dozen Fed crewmen, humans and Molts, were trapped in the pit but closed out of the gunhouses. The humans screamed, raising their hands or dodging to shelter on the other side of the armored houses.
A Molt fired his rifle. The bullet hit Stephen in the center of the chest, knocking him back a pace. Scores of bullets and shotgun charges ripped the trapped Feds, killing all of them.
Stephen strode down the ramp. His chest tingled. He didn't think the bullet had penetrated his hard suit, but he couldn't worry about that now. The gun crew wasn't prepared to fight men in full armor, though they'd reacted pretty well to what must have been a complete surprise.
The nearer barbette began to rotate to face the eastern sky. The gunners were preparing for a target to approach from orbit.
Stephen dropped flat on his belly with his head cocked to the side so that he could see from that position despite the limited width of his faceshield. The gunhouse shaded the barbette's gear train, but he could see the quiver of motion. He aimed the flashgun and fired.
The flash of coherent light ignited an explosive secondary glare as metal burned white. The welded gear bound. The barbette stopped with a squeal.
Soldiers with flashguns knelt or sprawled to fire into the workings of the other barbette. Bubbles of vaporized metal spurted explosively from beneath the gunhouse. A man stepped past Stephen and held his flashgun almost in contact with the nearer gunhouse's hatch.
"Don't!" Stephen bellowed though his hard suit's external speakers.
The soldier didn't hear or didn't care. His bolt blasted a fist-sized divot of steel from the heavy door, making the gunhouse ring but doing no harm whatever to the Feds within. The vaporized metal blew outward, knocking the shooter across the pit. The shock wave staggered Stephen even though he'd braced himself on all fours when he saw what the foolish whoreson was about to do.
Stephen had lowered his face to the ground. If he'd been turned in the direction of the blast, metal would have redeposited on his visor in an opaque coating.
"Throw something in those gun muzzles!" Stephen ordered as he got up. He tossed his discharged flashgun battery toward the nearer plasma cannon, several meters above him. The battery, a 20-by-6-by-4-centimeter prism, bounced back from the stellite tube.
Other men tried their luck with pebbles and debris; a sailor succeeded in lobbing the broken buttstock of a shotgun up and into the gun tube. Major Cardiff was climbing a ladder welded to the side of the farther gunhouse with a Fed's white jacket in his hand to drape over the muzzle.
What looked like a game was nothing of the sort. A plasma cannon's shell was a spherical array of miniature lasers that, when tripped, compressed a bead of tritium from all points but the one in line with the bore. Plasma propagated from the resulting thermonuclear explosion at light speed, but the ions were themselves of slight mass. The least obstruction within the gun tube would disrupt the stream and reflect enough of the enormous energy backward to destroy the weapon itself.
"Vanderdrekkan!" Stephen called, looking around for his aide with the laser communicator. "Van—"
The European lieutenant was at Stephen's elbow. Their suits clashed together as Stephen turned quickly. "Oh! Get up the ramp—"
Major Cardiff stood on the roof of the gunhouse and tossed the wadded jacket into the 20-centimeter hole.
"—and tell Piet that these guns are—"
The Wrath's main battery let loose in a rippling string. Ten bolts, her port broadside—tearing the sky, shocking the assault force as much by the intensity of light as the crashing thunder of air filling each track superheated to near vacuum by the plasma.
A moment later the starboard guns fired. This time the Wrath's hull muffled the havoc somewhat. The targets, hidden from the assault force by the gunpit and berm, fountained in white coruscance a kilometer high.
Piet had landed the Wrath so that Hatch 3 was adjacent to the gunpit gate, and so that the vessel's guns (trained as far forward as the ports allowed) bore on the towers of the military port. The gun towers were of sturdy construction with sloped concrete copings to shield the guns at the rest position. It would have required several broadsides to hammer through their protection.
Instead of that, Piet had waited till the Feds raised the guns to engage the invaders who had landed in the civil port. As soon as the Fed weapons appeared over the coping, the Wrath's waiting gunners blew them to shimmering plasma.
The Feds didn't get off a shot. Their own ammunition added to the towers' scintillating destruction.
Stephen cleared his throat. The port-side guns had fired directly over the gunpit. "Tell Piet—" he repeated.
The world went white. Every sensory impression vanished.
Stephen Gregg was lying halfway up the gunpit ramp. He was on his belly, his head pointed toward where the gate had been.
The gate was gone. Stephen didn't have his flashgun, and the two satchels of batteries he'd worn over his shoulders on crossed straps were missing also. The cutting bar was still clipped to his left hip.
Stephen levered himself upright and looked back into the pit. The base of the farther gunhouse was stamped down as if drop-forged over the gearing below. The structure's armor had been 15 centimeters thick on the sides, 20 on the front and probably the top. The lower meter or so of the walls was now splayed out from the base. Everything above that height—the height of the plasma cannon's breech when the weapon fired—had been eroded into the iridescent cloud towering from the blast site into a dumbbell thousands of meters high.
The Feds in the gunhouse had fired their cannon. Either they didn't know the bore was plugged or they'd preferred to die in a blaze of glory rather than surrender to pirates from Venus. Major Cardiff had been on top of the thermonuclear explosion. He no longer existed. Several of his nearer men had been blown to fragments despite their sturdy hard suits. The nearer gunhouse had shielded Stephen, but if he hadn't moved slightly to give an order it could have—
It could have meant that he'd have gone to whatever eternity God keeps for men like Stephen Gregg.
The hatch of the nearer gunhouse unsealed. A Fed officer, waving his wh
ite jacket on a pry bar, babbled, "Don't blow us up! Don't blow us up! We surrender!"
Several Molts crouched behind him, fear in their carriage though their exoskeletal faces were impassive. The Feds thought Stephen's men had vaporized the other gunhouse.
"Vanderdrekkan?" Stephen croaked. His aide was one of the armored men picking themselves up nearby, but he'd lost his laser communicator just as Stephen had lost the flashgun in the shock wave.
Stephen had been close to death before, many times before; but generally he'd known the danger was present. This time—
The fighting wasn't over, not by hours or maybe days, but the initial assault was complete. Stephen's troops had carried their objective without casualties and almost without fighting.
And then the blast that Major Lucas Cardiff hadn't felt, and Colonel Stephen Gregg wouldn't have felt either if he'd been standing one pace to his right. God's will, Stephen supposed; and therefore unfathomable by human beings, Piet would add. But . . .
Why Cardiff and not me? Why so many others over so many years, and not me?
Stephen started up the ramp to carry the message of success since he couldn't send it to the Wrath. Piet Ricimer in gilded half armor, carrying a shotgun and a laser communicator, stepped though the opening from which the gate and gateposts had both been blown by the explosion.
"Bring the squadron in, Guillermo," Piet ordered into the communicator's mouthpiece. "The guns have been eliminated."
Stephen flipped up his faceshield. Piet's eyes flicked from the Fed gun position to the man climbing toward him in a hard suit blurred by the frosty gray of recondensed metal vapor. "Stephen? Stephen, are you all right?"
"For God's sake, Piet," Stephen Gregg whispered as he embraced his friend. "For God's sake."
All Stephen could think of in that moment was that if Piet had leaped from the Wrath's cockpit hatch a few seconds sooner, the general commander in his half armor would have been ripped to atoms as surely as the gate itself.
And Stephen Gregg would still have been alive with the memory.
WINNIPEG SPACEPORT, EARTH
April 16, Year 27
0257 hours, Venus time
Steam, smoke, or sometimes flame flared from every opening of the 400-tonne Federation freighter across the field from the Gallant Sallie. While Sal was still in orbit, she'd watched the destruction on a signal from the Wrath.
The Fed crew had run out eight of their moderate-sized plasma cannon as Captain Casson brought the Freedom down. The Feds fired three bolts at the Freedom. They hit twice but didn't penetrate the big armed merchantman's hull. Before the other Fed guns could fire, the Wrath and the Freedom together put a dozen rounds of 17-, 20-, and 25-cm cannonfire into the metal-built vessel, turning it into a blazing white inferno.
"I'm going to open the hatches now," Sal said.
"We ought to give the ground another minute—" Tom Harrigan said.
Brantling stepped past the mate and threw the controls for the cockpit hatch. Harrigan grimaced but didn't object. Air, throbbing with the heat of the ground and scores of fires across the spaceport, entered the cabin.
Sal stood up and adjusted her pistol holster to the side now that the navigation console's bucket seat no longer squeezed her hips. She thought of taking a respirator from the locker near the hatch, but she didn't bother. She'd breathed hotter, fiercer air every time she crossed to or from a starship in a transfer dock on Venus. She could take this.
A Venerian 6x6 with fiberglass wheels drove toward the Gallant Sallie. The vehicle was moving as fast as the load, two heavy plasma cannon, allowed.
Only one Fed ship had attempted to resist the Venerian assault on Winnipeg. The crews—mostly just anchor watches—of the others abandoned their vessels on foot, trudging toward the edge of the reservation. The risk of another ship landing close by in a crown of lethal exhaust seemed less serious than that of being used for target practice by the invaders.
Sal stood a meter back from the hatch so that the angle through the airlock chamber would trap heat radiating from the ground. There was a good deal of activity around the warehouses and administrative buildings on the port's southern edge. The fighting seemed to be over, though Sal couldn't be sure from a klick away.
She wondered where Stephen was.
"Ma'am?" Godden called. "Captain Blythe, sir?"
Sal turned. "Ma'am?" the gunner repeated. "Can I fire into that freighter that's burning? I'd like to see—"
"Christ's blood, man!" Harrigan shouted. "What d'ye want to be wasting ammunition for? Aren't there fireworks enough for you?"
Godden stiffened. "I'd like to see how a gun handles before I use it for serious, sir," he said. Godden was a rated specialist, not a common sailor, and he'd been posted to the Gallant Sallie from the general commander's own ship. "And as for blasphemy—your soul's in your own keeping, Mister Harrigan, but I don't care to be party to terms such as you just used."
The remainder of the crew watched the gunner and their officers. Their faces were in general studiously blank, but Brantling wore a broad grin.
"Tom, see what the truck's doing here," Sal ordered crisply. "Godden, one round, and make damned sure that you don't hit somebody driving past!"
She stepped to the hatch to join Harrigan. She'd extricated the mate from a situation he shouldn't have gotten involved with in the first place. Tom wasn't the Gallant Sallie's captain; but everyone aboard was tense and uncertain right now, in a chaotic, dangerous place and out of communication with the other Venerian ships.
When the truck stopped, the driver in the open cab was only two meters from the airlock hatch. The man wore a full hard suit. He'd thrown open his faceshield, but Sal didn't recognize him.
"Gallant Sallie?" the driver called. He jerked an armored thumb toward the two 15-cm plasma cannon in the truck bed. "Captain Ricimer said to bring you these to load soonest, then for me to get back. There's more where these come from, if they can just get them out before the whole warehouse burns."
Sal jumped to the truck bed. "Tom, unlimber the winch and get these aboard!" To the driver she added, "You! Pull around to the main hatch."
The truck's torque converter built to a peevish whine as inertia fought the diesel's rattling surge. The vehicle eased forward to halt again by the hatch as it lowered.
Sal rubbed her hands together. Her throat was dry. She should have grabbed a water bottle.
"Is Mister Gregg with the general commander, then?" she asked the driver. She wished she knew the man's name. She'd seen him aboard the Wrath, she was sure.
"Oh, yeah," the driver said cheerfully. He gave Sal a slight smile as he eyed her. "The Feds tried to start something at the arms warehouse, so he was there to sort them out."
"He's all right, though?" Sal asked, her heart as parched as her mouth.
"You needn't worry about him, ma'am," the driver said. "Our Mister Gregg—he's the Angel of Death, he is."
The Gallant Sallie's crane squealed as Brantling ran the hook out the beam positioned over a gun tube. Four crewmen were lifting the fiberglass sashes tied around the heavy weapon.
"Harrigan!" Sal called. "When we've got these guns loaded, take charge of the ship. I'm going back on the truck to—to see what's going on."
WINNIPEG SPACEPORT, EARTH
April 16, Year 27
0345 hours, Venus time
The casters clacked like gunshots at every irregularity in the warehouse floor. The manual dolly tracked straight enough, but as the entrance neared Stephen saw that they weren't going to clear the door, which had jammed only three-quarters open.
Piet, across the dolly from Stephen, leaned hard against the muzzle of the 15-cm gun tube. The dolly continued along an unchanged line. The concrete was sloped, slightly but enough to give the tonnes of plasma cannon a will of its own.
"I'm changing sides," Stephen shouted. The fire at the rear of the big warehouse was bursting containers—clangs, not explosions, but they reverberated loudly within the structur
e.
The hot, smoky air made Stephen's eyes water and his lungs burn. He'd raised his faceshield because he wanted to save the remaining contents of his air bottle for a real emergency, but he was beginning to think he'd need it before they got out of this damned building.
The hard suit chafed Stephen's neck, his hipbone, and his knees. Maybe he should have taken the suit off, but when they entered the warehouse they hadn't been sure how quickly the fire would spread. The armor would have been their only chance of survival if the roof had collapsed . . .
"We'll be all right," Piet gasped. The rhythm of the casters slowed slightly. The four men with Piet and Stephen slacked their efforts as they saw the problem ahead.
Stephen let the dolly rumble past, then walked behind it and around to take his position directly in back of Piet. He'd thought of trotting in front of the gun—and thought of slipping on the concrete, exhausted, and having the dolly upset its load onto him. His hard suit might or might not withstand the shock, but they'd certainly lose the gun tube.
"Easy, now," Piet warned. Stephen settled his weight against the weapon, then put a little more of his strength into the side thrust with every pace. The dolly hesitated, then slanted 15° to the right; enough to miss the door wedged open by a corpse that had fallen into the track. Stephen stepped back, made sure the dolly would hold its new line, and trekked around to the right side again.
The sunlight beyond was a beckoning dazzle. Smoke rising from the fires in the rear of the building filtered the overhead lights into ruddy glows. The ventilation fans in the roof peaks prevented the haze from filling the warehouse, but they also stirred the flames to greater enthusiasm. The Feds hadn't stored fuel or munitions here, but the packing materials themselves were combustible.
"Watch the lip!" Piet warned. The metal threshold plate was a half-centimeter higher than the concrete to which it was bolted. The front casters hit the plate at a skew angle. The dolly rocked, then righted, and rolled out onto the stabilized earth of the spaceport proper.