by David Weber
The tingle of active scanner systems reached out to them from the south, still faint but growing in intensity, as he checked his position for the thousandth time. Another twenty minutes for the tanks, he estimated, but they'd be picked up by those scanners within ten. He drew a deep breath, and his voice was crisp over the com link.
"Shuttle pilots - go!" he said, and the heavily armed and armored assault boats suddenly screamed ahead at nine times the speed of sound.
Alarms clangored aboard the sublight battleship Osir, and the man who had been Fleet Captain (Engineering) Anu shot upright in bed.
He blinked furiously, banishing the rags of sleep, and his face twisted in a snarl. Those gutless, sniveling bastards were daring to attack him! His neural feed dropped data into his brain with smooth efficiency, and he saw six assault shuttles shrieking towards his enclave. It was incredible! What did they think they were doing?! He'd blow them away like insects!
A command snapped out to the automated perimeter weapon emplacements, another ordered his distant fighters to abandon stealth and rally to the defense of the enclave, and a third woke every alarm within the shield.
"Here they come!" Colin muttered, wincing as missiles and energy beams suddenly shredded the darkness. This was the riskiest moment of the approach but it was also something assault shuttles were designed for, and those automated defenders were outside the main shield.
Decoys and jammers went to work, fighting the defensive computers, and Tamman's weapon systems sprang to life beside him. Colin felt him bending forward as if to urge his electronic minions to greater efforts, but he had little attention to spare. He was too busy wrenching the shuttle through every evasive maneuver he could devise, and the night was full of death.
He bit off a groan as one of the shuttles took a direct hit and blew apart in a ball of fire. Hanalat and Carhana, he thought sickly, and sixty Terra-born with them. A missile exploded dangerously close to a second shuttle, and his heart was in his throat as Jiltanith clawed away from the fireball. Energy guns snarled, and his own craft shuddered as something smashed a glancing blow against her armor.
But then Tamman had his own solution, and a salvo of mass missiles screamed away, too fast, too close, for defensive systems to stop. They were ballistic weapons, impervious to decoys, and they struck in a blast that wracked a continent and flooded the American Highland plateau with dreadful light. Other shuttles were firing, their missiles crossing and criss-crossing with the ones charging up to destroy them, and energy guns raved back at the ground. Explosions and smoke, pulverized stone and vaporized ice and killing beams of energy - that was all the world there was as Nergal's people thundered into the attack…
Anu crowed in triumph as the first assault shuttle exploded, then cursed savagely as the others struck back. He struggled into his uniform as the enclave trembled to the fury of the assault. Breaker! Breaker take them all! His defenses were designed to stop the all-out attack of an eighty-thousand ton battleship, not an assault landing, and fire stations were being blown into oblivion - not one-by-one, but in twos and threes and dozens! They'd gotten in by surprise, too close for his heavy anti-ship weapons, and his lightly-protected outer defenses crumbled and burned as he cursed.
It had been too long since he'd seen the Imperium wage war; he'd forgotten what it was like.
Ninhursag stumbled out of her shower, dragging wet hair frantically from her eyes, and shot down the apartment block transit shaft like a wet, naked otter. The sub-basement was built to withstand anything short of a direct hit with a nuke or a warp charge, and she had no business in what was about to happen out there. Not when she was as likely to be killed by a friend - or an accident - as by an enemy!
She was closing the reinforced blast door before it caught up with her. They were here! They'd done it!
"Shuttle Two, on my wing!" Colin snapped, and Jiltanith plummeted out of the flame-sick clouds. The two of them charged straight into the weakening defenses while their companions continued to savage Anu's weaponry. There! The access point beacon!
Colin MacIntrye drew a deep breath. At this speed, there would be no time to alter course if the shield stayed up, not even with a gravitonic drive. His implant triggered the code Ninhursag had stolen.
"NO!!"
Anu bellowed the protest in a burst of white-hot fury as he felt the shield open. How? HOW?! There was no way they could have the code! Ramman had died, and no other Imperial had left the enclave!
But they had it. The gates of his fortress yawned wide as two night-black shuttles screamed down the western tunnel, and its rock walls glowed with the compression heat of their passage.
"In!" Colin screamed to his passengers, and Tamman's exultation was a fire cloud beside him. The shuttles bucked and heaved, bare meters from destruction against the tunnel walls or one another, but neither Colin nor Jiltanith spared a thought for that. They hurtled onward, and their heavy, nose-mounted batteries of energy guns bellowed, destroying the very air in their path. Colin rode the thunder of his guns, blazing and invincible, and the inner portal of Imperial battle steel blew open like a gate of straw.
They crashed through into the enclave, drives howling in torment as they threw full power into deceleration. Even Imperial technology had its limits, and they were still moving at over a hundred kilometers per hour when they smashed through the trees in the central park and plowed into the apartment blocks. The hapless Terra-born traitors in their path had mere seconds to realize death had come as the buildings exploded outward and the shuttles slammed to a halt amid the wreckage, no more than thirty meters apart. Their passengers were battered and bruised, but assault shuttles were built for just such mistreatment. The hatches opened, and the waiting troops charged out.
One or two fell, but only a spattering of fire met them. It was no trap, Colin thought exultantly. No trap!
He activated his jump gear, vaulting over a heap of smoking rubble, his own energy gun snarling. Only a handful of armed security men confronted him, and he bared his teeth as he blew the first unarmored enemy apart.
A tremendous boom of displaced air burst out of the tunnel as the next pair of shuttles shot into the enclave, and then the true madness began.
Anu dashed onto Osir's command deck, cursing his henchmen for the unreliability that had spawned his distrust and made him order the other warships deactivated. Not even Osir's crew was permitted to live on board, but she was his command post, and he skidded to a halt beside the captain's console, activating his automatic defensive systems. They were intended to deal with an uprising among his own, not a full-scale invasion, but maybe they could buy his minions time to get into action.
Concealed weapons roused to life throughout the enclave. There was no time to give them precise directions even had Anu wanted to; they opened fire on anything that moved.
Ganhar tumbled from his bed as the alarms shrieked, and his eyes lit. Doubt, fear, and anguished uncertainty vanished in a blaze of triumph, and he laughed wildly. There, maniac! Let's see you deal with these people!
He dragged out his own combat armor. He was going to die, he thought calmly, and unless there truly was an afterlife, he would never know why he'd permitted this to happen, but it no longer mattered. He'd done it, and it wasn't in him to leave any task half-done.
The last surviving shuttle crashed into the wreckage and disgorged its troops, and Nergal's people began to die. Energy beams raked the park, attracted by movement, and the Terra-born could detect neither the targeting systems nor the weapons that killed them. But their Imperials' armor scanners could find both, and they moved to engage them.
Colin wanted to weep as Rohantha vaulted onto a wreckage-bared structural beam, exposing herself recklessly, energy gun ripping two heavy weapons from the cavern wall before they could rake her team of Terra-born. She almost made it back into cover herself, and Nikan, her cabin mate and lover, blew the gun that killed her to rubble.
Colin spun on his own toes, dodging as an energy bol
t whipped past him and tore a twenty-centimeter hole through an Israeli paratrooper. His own weapon silenced the Israeli's automated executioner, and he dashed on, racing for the battleships while a corner of his mind tried to remember the dead man's name.
Three of Anu's stealthed fighters abandoned concealment, screaming through the heavens under maximum power as they stooped upon the clumsy gaggle of cutters and pinnaces and tanks still streaming towards the enclave. Their tracking systems found targets, but the lead pair vanished in cataclysmic balls of flame before they could fire. The third flight crew had a moment to gape at one another in horror as their instruments told them what had happened. Hyper missiles - shipboard missiles! - which could only have been launched from vacuum!
They died before they could warn their commander that Dahak was not dead.
Anu grimaced in hate and triumph. Even the computers could give him only a confused impression of what was happening, but he felt armory lockers being wrenched open aboard the transports while his weapons spewed death outside them.
Yet his triumphant snarl faded as the intensity of the fighting grew and grew. The attackers weren't human! They were demons out of Breaker's darkest hell, and they soaked up his fire and kept right on coming!
A surge of Nergal's raiders swept up the boarding ramp of the transport Bislaht, and a trio of French Marines set up a fifty-caliber machine-gun in the lock. Their teammates rushed past them behind Nikan, racing for the armory before Bislaht's mutineers could find their weapons.
They almost won their race. Barely half a dozen defenders were in armor when they crashed out of the transit shaft. Nikan roared in fury as he cut two of them down and charged the others, his energy gun on full automatic, filling the air with death. A third armored mutineer went down, then a fourth, but the fifth got his weapon up in time. Nikan exploded in a fountain of blood and a crackling corona of ruptured energy packs, and the SAS commando behind him hosed his killer with a grav gun.
Smoke and the stink of blood filled the armory, and the Terra-born commandos, now with no Imperial to lead them, crouched for cover just inside the hatch and killed anything that moved.
Ganhar stepped out of the transit shaft inside Security Central aboard the transport Cardoh. Security men shoved past or bounced off his armor as they funneled towards the transit shaft, heading for the armory below, and he waded through them like a Titan. Jantu's outer office was deserted, and he felt a momentary surge of disappointment. But then the inner hatch licked open, and Jantu stood in the opening, an energy pistol clutched in his hand.
Ganhar smiled through his armored visor, savoring the wildness of Jantu's eyes. It was worth it, he thought coldly. It was all worth it, if only for this moment.
He lifted his grav gun slightly, and Jantu's crazed eyes narrowed with sudden comprehension as his implants recognized Ganhar's. The Operations head saw it all in that fleeting instant, saw the recognition and understanding, the sudden, intuitive grasp of what had really happened when Ramman came to him.
"You lose," he said softly, and his gun hissed.
Colin went flat on his face as an armored form tackled him from behind, and he rolled over, snatching out his sidearm before he recognized Jiltanith. The reason she'd hit him became instantly clear as an energy bolt whipped above him, and he raised himself on one elbow, sighting back along its path. The unarmored security man was lining up for a second shot when Colin's grav gun ripped him to shreds.
Dahak felt almost cheerful, despite a gnawing anxiety over Colin. His scanners showed that the northerners had breached the enclave. One way or the other, that shield would soon fall.
In the meantime, he busied himself locating all of Anu's deployed fighters as they abandoned stealth mode to streak back south. He tracked each of them precisely, allocated his hyper missiles with care, and fired a single salvo.
Twenty-nine more Imperial fighters died in a span of approximately two-point-seven-five Terran seconds.
The huge cavern was hideous with smoke and flame as more southerners found weapons and armor, emerging as isolated knots of warring figures that sought to link with one another amid the nightmare that had burst upon them. They were badly outnumbered, but they were all Imperials. Even without combat armor, they were more than a match for any Terra-born opponent. Or would have been, had they understood what was happening.
Most of Anu's automatics were silent now, for both sides were equally at risk from them, and both had been taking them out from the start. But they'd blunted the first rush while more of his people got themselves armed. It was helping, but they'd yielded a dangerous amount of ground. So far he'd lost touch completely only with Bislaht, but fighting raged aboard three other transports, and six more were surrounded, their hatches under intense fire.
Breaker! Who would have thought degenerates could fight like this? There were only a handful of old, worn out Imperials among them, but they were like madmen!
He winced as his scanners watched a quintet of Terra-born suddenly pop up out of a tangle of wreckage. They formed a gantlet, with three of his own Imperials between them. Two of the degenerates went down, but the others swept his armored henchmen with an unbelievable mix of Imperial and Terran weapons. Grav gun darts exploded inside armored bodies, a flamethrower hosed them with liquid fire, and a Terran anti-tank rocket blew the last survivor six meters backward. The surviving degenerates ducked back down under cover and went scuttling off in search of fresh prey.
This couldn't be happening - he saw it with his own eyes, and he still couldn't believe it!
But then came the report he'd hoped for. Transhar's people had finally gotten some of their vehicles powered up, and he grinned again as the first light tank floated towards the hatch on its gravitonics.
Andrew Asnani slid to a halt, sucking in air as he scrubbed sweat from his face. He'd become separated from the rest of his team, and the deafening bellow and crash of battle pounded him like a fist, but for all its horror, it was the sweetest sound he'd ever heard. It proved he hadn't led the colonel and his people into a trap, and he'd been able to shuck off his demolition charge.
He drew another breath and took a firmer grip on his assault rifle as he eased around the rubble of a broken wall. He was in the section that had housed Anu's terrorists, and he still wasn't certain how he'd gotten here. Habit, perhaps. Or possibly something else…
He dropped suddenly as shapes loomed in the dust-heavy smoke. Terra-born, not Imperials, for his goggles saw no signature implants. But neither were they his people, he thought grimly, hunkering deeper into the shadow of his broken wall. There were at least twenty of them, all armed, though he had no idea how they'd gotten their hands on weapons. It didn't matter. The odds sucked, and with a little luck, he'd just let them slip…
But he had no luck. They were coming straight towards him, and the copper taste of fear filled his mouth. Unfair! To have come so far, risked so much, and blunder into contact with -
His mind froze, panic suddenly a thing of the past, and he stopped trying to ease further back out of sight. Abgram! The man leading that group was Abgram, and that changed everything, for it had been Abgram whose operation had planted a truck bomb in New Jersey five years before.
For eleven months, Asnani had known who had killed his family, yet he could do nothing without blowing his own cover and Colonel MacMahan's op. But the thunder and screams were in his ears, and his own life was no longer essential to success.
He ejected his partially used magazine, replacing it with a fresh one, checking his safety, gathering his legs under him. The terrorists were coming closer, dodging in and out of shadows even as he had. He couldn't leave his cover without being seen, but they'd see him anyway in another twenty seconds. Ten meters. He'd let them come another ten meters…
Sergeant Andrew Asnani, United States Army, exploded from concealment with his weapon on full auto.
Six men died almost instantly, and the man called Abgram went down, screaming, even as his fellows poured fire
into the apparition that had erupted in their midst. He stared up in agony, watching bullets hammer body armor and flesh, seeing blood burst from the man who had shot him.
It was the last thing Abgram ever saw, for only one purpose remained to Andrew Asnani, and his last, short burst blew Abgram's head apart.
"Shit!"
Colin killed his jump gear and slithered to a halt in a tangle of smashed greenery as the light tank let fly. A solid rod of energy ripped through two of Anu's madly fleeting Terran allies and what had once been a fountain before it struck an armored figure. Rihani, he thought, one of Nergal's engineers, but there was too little left to ever know. He watched the tank settle onto its treads for added stability as grenades and rockets exploded about it. Its thick armor and invisible shield shrugged off the destruction as the turret swiveled, seeking fresh prey. The long energy cannon snouted in his direction, and he grabbed Jiltanith's ankle and hauled her down beside him, not that -