Duchess of Terra (Duchy of Terra Book 2)

by Glynn Stewart

  “It was worth a shot,” the Guard commander chuckled in turn. “How long do you need to get in position?”

  “We were moving twenty minutes after Alpha Three talked to Bond, but we don’t have interface-drive shuttles and suborbital flight paths. We’ll be in position in four hours.”

  “I’ll ping you at this contact then,” James promised. “If you’ll have eyes on the ground, you can feed us landing sites better than overhead and the schematics alone will.”

  “Agreed. I’d love to call in orbital fire on the bastards, but…”

  “We know where the Archive is in the base, but we don’t know where the hostages are.”

  “Exactly.” Alpha Commander paused. “What are your orders?”

  “Hostages first, data second, prisoners third,” James reeled off. “I don’t exactly need loose cells of rogue Weber operatives running around, but I want the hostages out alive—and so does my boss.”

  Nobody else needed to know the closest thing the boss had to a foster daughter was in the damned bunker.

  “I like her priorities. I’m not surprised by them—I knew Bond—but I like them anyway. We’ll see you in four hours, Major.”

  #

  Chapter 15

  The assault shuttles clustered in orbit, their strange and physics-defying engines gently humming to hold James Wellesley’s assault troops in a steady orbit above Colorado Springs.

  It had been bright noon in Pretoria when Bond had met with Mandela, and now, eighteen hours later, it was late evening in the Rocky Mountains as the Ducal Guard waited for their allies to check in.

  James once again slid the communicator open, checked it for a response to the message he’d sent five minutes ago, then closed it.

  “Didn’t anyone ever tell you a watched kettle never boils?” Sherman told him from her own seat. “Alpha Commander is one of ours, Triple-S. He’ll be in position—but take a look at the damned weather report, boss.

  “His people are moving in through torrential rain. It’ll be good for us, but it’s gotta suck for his boys and girls.”

  “Fair,” James acknowledged shortly. “I want Anderson’s head on a damn pike, Annabel,” he warned her. “My patience is running out.”

  At that moment, the device buzzed in his hands.

  “Wellesley.”

  “Alpha,” the commander of the Network force confirmed. “What a fucking mess we picked. Good call on the timing.”

  “I recall it being necessity, not a choice,” James replied. “Do you have landing sites for my shuttles?”

  “I’ve picked out all four entrances and scoped them,” Alpha confirmed. “Are you boys ready to kick in some doors?”

  “Locked and loaded with Imperial stunners,” James told him. “Watch your lines of fire, Alpha. My people will shoot first—because we can ask questions later.”

  “Do I get one of those if I sign up?”

  “And a plasma cannon,” James replied.

  “This whole surrendering bullshit is sounding nicer by the minute. Transmitting coordinates and a thermal map. See you on the other side of the big vault doors, Major.”

  The communicator pinged as the channel closed and a file downloaded.

  “McPhail,” he snapped, passing the device over to his pilot. “Get the data off this through as clean an interface as you can manage and confirm your drop sites.

  “I want to be on the ground in ninety seconds.”

  #

  Six A!Tol-built assault shuttles went from pretending to be holes in space to pretending to be homesick meteors forty seconds after he gave the order, screaming toward the surface of the planet at hundreds of kilometers a second.

  At those speeds, hitting atmosphere felt like running a car into a brick wall…and breaking through. Plasma coronas wrapped around the spacecraft as they broke through the air with pure brute force, hammering toward the surface at speeds that were literally insane in an atmosphere.

  McPhail, it appeared, had been training the new shuttle pilots in her own previously unique style of flying.

  The shuttles slammed to a dead halt six meters above the ground, the interface-drive-focused blast of superheated air searing the ground beneath them clean, exactly on the coordinates Alpha Commander had given them, twenty-five seconds ahead of James’s deadline.

  He wasn’t sure his stomach had caught up yet, but this wasn’t the time for hesitation.

  “Move!” he bellowed. “On the bounce, stunners first, but take no chances. I’d rather dead terrorists than dead hostages, clear?!”

  Unspoken was that he’d also rather dead Guard troopers than dead hostages. His people already knew that—they’d known that from the moment they’d put on the uniform.

  Una salus victus. For victory, never for safety.

  #

  Moments after James hit the ground, his suit informed him he was receiving a transmission on an old SSS tactical channel.

  “I’m assuming you brought doorknockers, Major, but I took the liberty of preparing for your arrival,” Alpha Commander told him when he accepted the communication. “Shall I knock?”

  “Go ahead.”

  His shuttles had already lit up the sky around the Weber Archive Facility with fire. Alpha Commander’s explosives did it again, shattering with precisely calculated blasts the massive metal doors that sealed the entrances James’s people were charging before.

  The power-armored Ducal Guards reached the doors first, but camouflage-clad SSS troopers materialized out of the night to join them before James reached his men.

  “The suits have thermal scanners; we’re checking for life forms,” he told the Network men. “Do you boys know the layout?”

  “Re-orged the teams to make sure each one had someone who’d been here before,” the team leader replied instantly. “What do you need?”

  “Stick with my people, team by team,” James ordered. “Get me someone who can lead me to the main residential section.”

  “That’ll be me,” the same man replied. “Shall we?”

  James followed the Network team as his armor’s sensors swept ahead and around for life signs. For a few precious moments, there was nothing, then…

  “Drop!” he snapped to their allies.

  They might not be entirely sure they trusted each other, but every man in the attack was Special Space Service. They had the same training, the same background—and James had the same trained command voice as their superiors.

  The Network team dropped, and the Guardsman fired their stunners over their heads as a squad of troopers in civvies charged around the corner with machine guns.

  The mutineers went down like tenpins without firing a shot.

  “What did you need us for?” the Network team leader asked, surveying the unconscious troops.

  “Hands,” James told him. “They can’t threaten my people, which means we need to get to the hostages before they work that out.”

  #

  “Ambush close! Cover the squishies!”

  It wasn’t the politest attachment to the warning James had ever heard, but it got the point across as a grenade came bouncing around the corner. The fragmentation weapon wasn’t a threat to his armor but was a threat to the Network SSS troops they had with them.

  One of his troopers handled it by the simple expedient of dropping onto the grenade, muffling its explosion with the chest plate of the power armor suit—the single most heavily armored part.

  Two more troopers charged around the corner, stunners blazing. Their helmet cameras showed only a single trooper. Unfortunately for the young woman, she’d had another grenade ready to throw when the stunners’ fields hit her and the live weapon fell to the ground with her.

  “Clear!” the closer SSS trooper shouted, diving forward and scooping the grenade up. Cradling it to his chestplate, he rolled to face the wall—protecting everyone, including the grenadier, from the blast.

  “Show-off,” James muttered as he led the rest of his strike force forwar
d.

  “Residential is just past this hallway,” their guide told them. “Probably not the only place with hostages, but…”

  “There’s probably some there,” James agreed. “And they’re probably defending it. Let’s go show off some more, shall we, Sergeant?”

  Somehow, the trooper managed to look sheepish in a two-meter-tall suit of battle armor, but he led the way regardless.

  The two point men didn’t even slow down when they hit the end of the corridor, charging through the doors to draw hostile fire. Machine gun fire echoed for a few moments, followed by the distinctive buzzing of Imperial stunners.

  Then the rest of James’s team followed through the wreckage of the doors, the Major leading the way. The schematics showed that this residential section was centered on a two-story gallery, one the mutineers were trying to use as a killing zone.

  So long as they were shooting at his people, they weren’t killing hostages—and ten stunners on wide beam made short work of the men guarding the gallery. There were no visible prisoners, however, and James was starting to get twitchy.

  “Move down the halls,” he ordered. “Teams of two, one armor, one Network. Eyes up.”

  Then he heard gunfire coming from the room and his plan collapsed as he charged to the sound. His suit sensors pinpointed it and then the servomotors allowed him to leap into the air, slamming to a landing on the second-floor balcony.

  More gunfire echoed out of the hallway and he busted through the door without slowing. Rounding the corner, he came across a mix between his worst nightmare and the last thing he’d expected to see.

  A young boy, maybe sixteen, was collapsed against the wall sobbing. He’d been shot in the shoulder and would need immediate medical attention, but was alive and applying pressure to his own wound.

  The men who’d shot him were not going to be so lucky. There were three of them, dressed in black unmarked fatigues and carrying silenced pistols, presumably intending to work their way through the hostages while causing as little panic as possible.

  Two were very definitely dead, shot in the back by one of Alpha Commander’s men. The third was dying—as was the Network trooper who’d shot them.

  The first aid kits included in suit armor provided a number of different options to save someone on the verge of death, but James only had enough time to save one of the two soldiers.

  It wasn’t a particularly difficult decision.

  #

  “East residential wing secured,” he reported over the radio several minutes later. “Troop Captains, report.”

  “North residential wing secured,” Sherman replied. “Estimated one hundred fifty hostages. Prisoners and hostages alike are being cooperative.

  “West residential wing secured, status much the same as North,” his other subordinate replied.

  “And we have two hundred here,” James concluded. “That should be them all.” He paused. “Has anyone located Morgan Casimir?”

  “Negative.”

  “That is not good.” He switched channels.

  “Alpha Commander, we believe there may be additional VIP hostages in the facility,” he told the Network man. “Where would they be held?”

  “Officers’ quarters,” the other man replied immediately. “Bottom floor, behind an entire other layer of security. There’s an evac tunnel, but we collapsed it earlier. Anyone down there is trapped.”

  “Well then, let’s go untrap them, shall we?” James suggested.

  “Wellesley…if they have anything that can crack your tin cans, they’ll be keeping it to protect the officers,” the Network officer warned him.

  “Then I suggest your people stay behind mine.”

  #

  The elevator down to the bottom floor was locked down, but that was hardly an obstacle to troops in power armor. James and his point team simply yanked the doors to the shaft open and stepped out.

  Dropping fifty meters wasn’t a pleasant process for them, but it wasn’t particularly dangerous.

  They crashed through the roof of the elevator cab, then his point team smashed through the doors and into the teeth of hostile fire.

  The Network clearly hadn’t been sure just what it would take to kill his suits. Anti-armor rockets, a portable battle laser, and dozens of armor-piercing bullets walked over the lead two suits, physically hurling one of them back into the elevator.

  Stunners buzzed repeatedly and fire slackened, allowing James and two more troopers to rip the doors the rest of the way off and break into the open killing zone the Network mutineers had set up.

  A high-velocity anti-armor rocket slammed into James’s shoulder, knocking him backward and triggering warning signs across his suit. He backtracked the shot and lay down a wave of stunner fire.

  The battle laser pulsed again, and they’d clearly turned it up all the way. The weapon probably wouldn’t get more than a handful of shots at that level—but one of James’s point team went down and stayed down, his vitals flashing critically on the Major’s heads-up display.

  More stunners flared and the team manning the laser went down, the last real threat in the room suppressed.

  James had enough time to sigh in relief before he realized that hodgepodge of weapons had been a test—one his determination to use stunners and take prisoners had enabled. The doors at the back of the elevator lobby swung open and six suits of power armor emerged.

  They didn’t have plasma weapons, as the only armor suits delivered to Earth so far were police units with built-in stunners and no lethal weaponry.

  So they’d improvised. Presumably, they’d had racks of each type of weapon the front team had tried, and all six came out lugging the same battle laser, normally a tripod- or vehicle-mounted weapon for pre-conquest Earth militaries.

  Police armor or not, stunners weren’t going to put these guys down.

  “Go plasma,” he barked. “Take them hard!”

  His Guardsman’s suits were more heavily armored. More heavily armed—and also faster and with better computer support. The Network mutineers had built-in stunners and were carrying battle lasers.

  His people had been carrying external stunners because their suits had built-in plasma guns.

  There was a moment to recalibrate, to drop the nonlethal mindset along with the stunners. That moment cost James three people, crumpling backward as overpowered battle lasers ripped into their suits and triggering critical life-sign warnings on his displays.

  Then his computer tagged the targets, informed him the plasma guns were online, and he walked fire across the hall. The computer controlled when the guns fired to prevent collateral damage, and the distinct hiss-crack echoed repeatedly in the confined space as James’s last handful of Guardsman ripped apart Anderson’s futile last hope.

  Silence reigned at last.

  “Cover me; I’m sweeping forward,” he ordered as he picked up his stunner again. The doors were already open and he pushed through, sweeping around for thermal signatures.

  Now he stood in a more decorative central plaza than above, with a small fountain and plants around the gallery.

  “I’m with the Duchess,” he announced loudly. “Anyone who lays down their weapons and surrenders will not be harmed. We’re here to rescue the hostages.”

  He heard shuffling and a whispered argument, one he couldn’t quite make out, then a small girl’s voice piped up despite another, older woman, trying to shush her.

  “How do I know you’re not a bad man too?”

  “Cover me,” he repeated to his people, then reached up and removed his helmet, facing up toward where the voice had come from.

  “My name is James Arthur Valerian Wellesley, husband to Captain Patrick Kurzman, third in line for the Duchy of Wellington and sworn liegeman to Duchess Annette Bond,” he said formally. “You have my word as an officer and a gentlemen that I am here to help you.”

  “You’re from Auntie Annette?” the voice said, and a tiny blond head popped over the railing to look dow
n at him. “You look silly in that armor, just a teeny head.”

  Morgan Casimir giggled, and James breathed a sigh of relief and smiled at her.

  “That I do, little one,” he agreed. “That I do.”

  #

  Chapter 16

  “This is not a good idea,” Sergeant Wei Lin noted, somewhat redundantly in Annette’s opinion, as the shuttle coasted to a gentle landing outside the Weber Archive Facility.

  The tall Taiwanese woman had said the same thing in four or five different ways already. Tellaki had been blunter, if more immediately obedient to Annette’s commands than the human NCO.

  Annette’s patience had run out when they’d found Morgan. She could understand why she shouldn’t be supervising the assault—it would have been inappropriate when she was a starship commander, let alone Duchess of Terra—but this whole mess was important.

  In a lot of ways.

  “I have to be here,” she told Lin. “Are you really going to argue that?”

  “No.” The Guardswoman sighed. “We’ll sweep the area before you exit the shuttle,” she insisted. “This is still an active combat zone.”

  Annette had won her actual fight in Hong Kong half an hour before. Being sensible now was a concession she could easily afford.

  Her four human bodyguards moved out, checking the area around the shuttle and leading to the entrance as their Duchess waited impatiently aboard the shuttle with two Rekiki protectors.

  Finally, Lin waved Annette out—just as Major Wellesley emerged from the bunker. His helmet was under one arm and a familiar-looking blonde cherub was sitting on his armored shoulder, looking on top of the world.

  It was a good thing Lin had called the zone as clear, because at that point, no force in the Imperium would have stopped Annette charging out of the shuttle and over to her chief bodyguard.

  “Morgan,” she greeted the child. “Are you all right?”