by David Weber
“Round ’em up,” Roger said, and strode over to the command chair.
“Out,” he said over his armor’s external speakers.
“Like hell,” the mercenary in the chair said.
Roger raised a bead pistol, then shrugged inside his armor.
“I’d really like to kill you,” he said, “but it’s unnecessary.”
He reached out and picked the post commander up by his tunic. The burly mercenary might as well have been weightless, as far as Roger’s armor’s “muscles” were concerned, and the prince tossed him across the room contemptuously. The erstwhile commander slammed into the bunker’s armored wall with a chopped-off scream, then slithered bonelessly down it. Roger didn’t even glance at him. He was too busy punching a code on the command chair’s console.
“Identification: MacClintock, Roger,” he said. “Assuming control.”
“Voiceprint does not match authorized ID,” the computer responded. “MacClintock, Roger, listed as missing, presumed dead. All codes for MacClintock, Roger, deactivated. Authorization: MacClintock, Alexandra, Empress.”
“Okay, you stupid piece of electronics,” Roger snarled. “Identification: MacClintock, Miranda, override Alpha-One-Four-Niner-Beta-Uniform-Three-Seven-Uniform-Zulu-Five-Six-Papa-
Mike-One-Seven-Victor-Delta-Five. Our sword is yours.”
There was a long—all of three or four seconds—pause. Then—
“Override confirmed,” the computer chimed.
“Deactivate all automated defenses,” Roger said. “Lock out all overrides to my voice. Temporary identity: MacClintock, Roger . . . Heir Primus.”
The automatic bead guns on the Palace walls opened up. They took down the dozen civan immediately behind Rastar in a single burst and traversed for a second.
Then they stopped.
“Thank you, My Prince,” Rastar said under his breath. “Thank you for giving my people their lives, twice over.”
Civan ran with long, loping strides, heads down and flipping tails balancing them behind. Rastar lay forward over his own beast’s neck, all alone now and far out in front of the others. Only Patty had managed to keep pace with him, and the bead guns which had cut down his troopers had wounded her, as well. The big flar-ta was more enraged than hurt, however, and Rastar heard her thunderous bellows overtaking him from behind. He drew all four bead guns as they neared the gate, but the two guards at the gate, after a single burst of fire aimed at nothing in particular, turned around and hit the gate controls. The portal opened, and they darted through it.
The gate had opened just far enough to admit them, and it began closing immediately. Couldn’t have that.
“Eson!” Rastar bellowed to the mahout on Patty’s back.
Patty had had a very bad month.
First, the only rider with whom she’d ever had a decent sense of rapport had disappeared, replaced by someone who acted the same way, but just didn’t smell right. Then she’d been loaded on ships—horrible things—prodded, led around, carted to different planets, unloaded, loaded again, and generally not treated at all as she’d come to expect. And most of the time the food had been simply awful. Worst of all, she hadn’t even been able to let her frustration out. She hadn’t been permitted to kill anything at all since before even the last breeding season.
Now she saw her chance. She’d been pointed at those little targets, and they were getting away. Yes, she’d been pinpricked, but flar-ta were heavily armored on the front, lightly armored on the sides, and rather massive. The bleeding wounds lined across her left shoulder, any one of which would have killed a human, weren’t really slowing her down. And as the human guards tried to escape from her wrath, and the idiot on her back prodded at the soft spot on her neck, she sped into the unstoppable killing gallop of the flar-ta and lowered her head to ram the gate.
The twin leaves of Gate Three were marble sheathing over a solid core of ChromSten. If they’d been shut and locked, no animal in the galaxy could have budged them. But the integral, massive plasteel bolts had been disengaged to let the fleeing guards pass, and the only thing holding them at the moment was the hydraulic system which normally moved them. Those hydraulics were rather heavy—they had to be, to manage the weight of the ChromSten gate panels—but they weren’t nearly heavy enough for what was coming at them.
The impact sound was like a flat, hard explosion. Marble sheathing shattered, one of Patty’s horns snapped off . . . and the moving gates flew backward.
The mahout on Patty’s back went flying through the air, and Patty herself stopped dead in her tracks. She rocked backward heavily as her rear legs collapsed, then sat there, shaking her head muzzily and giving out a low bellow of distress.
Rastar reached the gate, still far ahead of any of the others, and he reined in his civan and leapt from the saddle before it had slid to a stop.
The flar-ta had prevented the gates from closing, but her huge bulk had the archway leading to the gate half-blocked. There was little room to get past her—barely room for two or three civan riders at a time—and even as he watched, the hydraulics recovered and the armored panels started to close again. He darted forward, drew one of his daggers, and slammed it into the narrow crack under the left-hand gate. The panel continued to move for a moment, but then the blade caught. The gate rode up it, grinding forward, scoring a deep gouge into the courtyard’s pavement. Then there was a crunching sound, and it stopped moving.
He repeated the maneuver with the right-hand gate, then drew his bead pistols as rounds begin to crack around his head. Humans in combat suits, which could stop rounds from bead pistols, were pouring into the courtyard from the Empress’ Own’s barracks. Most of them looked pretty confused, but the stalled flar-ta and the Mardukan were obvious targets.
More beads whipcracked past him, dozens of them. But if he allowed them to push him back, regain control of the gateway even momentarily, they would be able to unjam the gates and close them after all. In which case, the assault on the North Courtyard would fail . . . and Roger and everyone with him would die.
In the final analysis, human politics meant very little to Rastar. What mattered to him were fealty; his sworn word; the bonds of friendship, loyalty, and love; and his debt to the leader who had saved what remained of his people and destroyed the murderers of his city. And so, as the ever-thickening hail of fire shrieked around his ears and pocked and spalled the Palace’s wall’s marble cladding, he raised all four pistols and opened fire. He wasted none of his rounds on torso or body shots which would have been defeated by his foes’ combat suits. Instead, he searched out the lightly armored spot at the throat, the vulnerable chink, no larger than a human’s hand.
The combat-suited mercenaries recruited to replace the slaughtered Empress’ Own weren’t combat troops, whatever uniform they might wear. They were totally unprepared for anything like this, and those in the front ranks looked on in disbelief as bead after bead punched home, ripping through the one spot where their protective suits were too thin to stop pistol fire. No one could do what that towering scummy was doing.
Humans went down by twos and threes, but there were scores of them. Even as Rastar began dropping them, their companions poured fire back at him, and the calf of his left leg exploded as a rifle bead smashed it. Another bead found his lower right arm. His mail slowed the hypervelocity projectile, but couldn’t possibly stop it, and the arm dropped, useless. Another slammed through his breastplate, low on the left side, and he slumped back against the flar-ta, three pistols still firing, still killing. More beads cracked and screamed about him, but he kept firing as his civan brothers thundered across the final meters of the Park to reach him. He heard their war cries, the sounds of the trumpets sweeping up behind him, as he had upon so many battlefields before, and another bead smashed his left upper arm.
He had only two pistols now, and they were heavy, so heavy. He could barely hold them up and a strange haze blurred his vision. He knew he was finally missing his targets—somet
hing which had never happened before—but there were still beads in his magazines, and he sent them howling towards his foes.
Another bead hit him somewhere in the torso, and another hit his lower left arm, but there were fewer humans now, as well, and his civan brothers were here at last. He had held long enough, and the riders of Therdan poured past him, forcing their way through the gate, taking brutal casualties to close with the humans where their swords could come into play. Combat suits might stop high velocity projectiles, but not cold steel in the hands of the Riders of the North, and Prince Jackson’s mercenaries staggered back in panicky terror as the towering Mardukans and screaming civan rampaged through them and reaped a gory harvest.
And the Diasprans were there as well, climbing over the flar-ta, charging forward with level pikes while others picked up the weapons of fallen human guards. They were there. They were through the gate.
He set down his last pistol, the pistol that had been light as a feather and now was heavy as a mountain, and lay back against the leg of the flar-ta which had carried his Prince, his friend, so far, so far.
And there, on an alien plain, in the gateway of the palace he had held for long enough, long enough, did Rastar Komas Ta’Norton, last Prince of fallen Therdan, die.
“What’s happening?”
“Looks like a dogfight in Imperial City, Sir,” Admiral Prokorouv’s intelligence officer said. “I don’t know who against who, yet. And we’ve got the communications lag, so—”
A priority message icon flashed on the admiral’s communicator console, and Prokourov tapped the accept key.
“Prok,” General Lawrence Gianetto said from the screen, five minutes after the message had been transmitted from his office on Old Earth. “Roger’s back. He’s trying to take the Palace. We’ve got stingships and powered armor on our backs. Get into orbit and prepare to give fire support to the Empress’ Own.”
“Right.” The admiral nodded unhappily. “I don’t suppose I could get that order direct from the Empress, could I?”
Larry Gianetto scowled at the wallpaper in the two quadrants of his com display dedicated to CarRon 14 and CarRon 12. That bastard Kjerulf had locked him out of the Moonbase communications system completely, and the general made a firm resolution to have the system architecture thoroughly overhauled after the current situation had been dealt with. And after he’d personally seen Kjerulf dangling in a wire noose.
At the same time, and even through his fury, he knew it wasn’t really the system’s fault. His office was in Terran Defense HQ, which was the administrative heart of the Imperial military, but Moonbase was the Sol System’s operational headquarters. That was why Greenberg had been on Luna instead of with one of his squadrons; because, in effect, Moonbase was the permanently designated, centrally placed flagship of Home Fleet. Every recon platform, system sensor, and dedicated command loop was routed through Moonbase, which was also the toughest, nastiest fortress ever designed by humans. Getting it back from Kjerulf, even after the attack on the Palace was dealt with, was going to be a gold-plated bitch, unless Gianetto had more loyalists in the garrison than he thought he did.
But for the moment, that meant that in a single blow, Kjerulf had blinded Gianetto’s eyes. He was getting the take from every sensor scattered around the system; Gianetto and his loyal squadron commanders had only what their own sensors could see. And it also meant Gianetto had to individually contact each squadron commander through alternate channels. Channels which he was not at all certain were going to be proof against Moonbase’s eavesdropping, despite their encryption software.
He drummed on his desk nervously. It was going to take five minutes for Prokorouv’s and Gajelis’ acknowledgments of his movement orders to reach him. And the signal-lag to his other squadrons was at least four times that long. He grimaced as he admitted that Greenberg had had a point after all when he’d pointed out that communications delay out to him. He’d brushed it aside at the time—after all, he’d known all about it for his entire professional career, hadn’t he? But it turned out that what he’d known intellectually about its implications for naval operations and what he’d really understood weren’t necessarily the same thing. He was a Marine. He’d always left the business of coordinating naval movements up to the Navy pukes, just as he’d left it to Greenberg. His own tactical communication loops had always been much shorter, with signal lag measured in no more than several seconds. He hadn’t really allowed for order-response cycles this tortoiselike, and he wasn’t emotionally suited to sitting here waiting for messages to pass back and forth with such glacial slowness.
He glowered at the other holographic displays floating in his superbly equipped office, and this time his scowl was a snarl. Light-speed transmission rates weren’t the only things that could contribute to uncertainty. Finding someone—anyone!—who knew what the hell was going on could do the same thing. And despite all of the sophisticated communications equipment at his disposal, he didn’t have a clue yet what was happening at the Palace. Except that it was bad.
Very bad.
“Plasma rifles!” Trey snarled, rolling back from the corridor as a blast cooked the far wall. “Nobody said they had plasma guns!”
“Plasma in the morning makes me happy!” Dave caroled in a high tenor. “Plasma in my eyyyyes can make me cryyyyyy!”
“Bill?” Catrone said.
“They just started popping up,” the technician replied over Catrone’s helmet com. “Seven sources. They must have had them shielded in the basement someplace. Three closing. Two in Alpha Quadrant, moving right.”
“Then they’ve got the stairs,” Catrone said. They’d made it to the second floor, but now they were getting pinned down and surrounded by heavier firepower.
“I’m down to twenty rounds,” Clovis said, thumbing in another magazine. “Starting to see what your friend meant about combat troops. Which is the only reason I’m not killing Dave right now!”
“Yeah, we need some serious firepower,” Catrone agreed tightly. “But—”
“Tomcat,” Bill said. “Stand by. Help’s on the way.”
“Did you know they had plasma guns?” Despreaux asked as she triggered another burst at the left side of the doorway.
“No,” Pedi said, aiming carefully at a leg which had exposed itself on the right side of the door. She missed . . . again. “Did you?”
“No,” Despreaux said tightly.
“It’s not like you could have told us, or anything,” Pedi said, deciding to just spray and pray. Most of the rounds hit the wall, which they had discovered was armored plasteel. “So, if you did know, you can admit it. Just to me. Between friends.”
“I didn’t,” Despreaux said angrily. “Okay?”
“All right, all right,” Pedi said pacifically. “How do you reload one of these things, again?”
“Look, just . . . stay down and let me do the shooting,” Despreaux said. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Pedi replied with a pout. “I wish I had my swords.”
“I wish I had my Roger,” Despreaux said unhappily.
“Look, Erkum,” Krindi said gently, eyeing the weapon his friend was carrying. “Let me do the shooting, all right? You just watch my back.”
He looked up at the towering noncom one last time, while a small, still voice in the back of his brain asked him if this was really a good idea. Erkum was the only person, even among the Mardukans, who could have carried one of the light tank cannon the Alphanes had supplied—and its power pack—without benefit of powered armor. The sheer intimidation factor of seeing that coming at them should be enough to convince Siminov’s goons to be elsewhere. Of course, there were possible downsides to the proposition. . . .
“Watch my back,” he repeated firmly.
“Okay, Krindi,” Erkum said, then kicked in the front door of the Neighborhood Association and stepped through it, tank cannon held mid-shoulder-high and leveled. The sudden intrusion froze the group of guards at the other end of the corridor f
or a moment as they turned, and their eyes widened in horror as they caught sight of him. Then he pulled the trigger.
The round came nowhere near the humans. Instead, it blew out the corridor’s entire left wall, opening up half a dozen rooms on that side, then impacted on a structural girder and exploded in a ball of plasma.
Pol’s finger, unfortunately, had clamped down on the trigger, and two more plasma bolts shrieked from his muzzle, blowing out a thirty-meter hole that engulfed the ceiling and most of the right wall, as well. The building was instantly aflame, but at least between them, the follow-up bolts had managed to take out most of the guards who’d been his nominal targets.
“Water damn it, Erkum!” Krindi dropped to one knee and expertly double-tapped the only human still standing with his bead rifle. “I told you not to fire!”
“Sorry,” Erkum said. “I’m just getting used to this thing. I’ll do better.”
“Don’t try!” Krindi yelled.
“Ooooo! There’s one!” Erkum said as a guard skittered to a halt, looking at them through the flames of several eviscerated rooms on the right side of the mangled passageway. The human raised his weapon, thought better of it, and tried to run.
Erkum aimed carefully, and the round—following more or less the damage path to the left of their position—went through the room and hit a stove in the kitchen on the back wall, blowing a hole out the back of the building and into the one on the other side of the service alley, which promptly began spouting flames of its own. If the running guard had even noticed the shot, it wasn’t evident.
Erkum tried again . . . and opened up a new hole in the ceiling. Then his finger hit the firing button to no avail as the cannon’s internal protocols locked it down long enough to cool to safe operating levels.