“Let me see if I can get some of the civilians out of here,” Commander Mulhoney said. He backed up, found a door that opened onto the east portico, and tried it. It stayed closed. He stood and fired at the lock. It flew open.
He stepped out on the portico. “Civilians,” he shouted, “follow me. Let’s get the hell out of this place.” That got the attention of the people cringing on the floor.
It also got the attention of people with guns who were already outside, covering the balcony. Two rounds spun him around.
“Blast it,” was his only response as he went down.
Then the emergency lights came on and Penny got a good look at just how bad hell could be.
Grant von Schrader slid to a halt behind a huge bronze vase. “Colonel, the situation is developing faster than we expected,” he said into his commlink. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“We no longer have contact with Security Central,” he reported.
“I told you that Longknife girl was not to be underestimated.”
The colonel did not defend himself or argue that there was no proof the loss of Security Central was the work of a Longknife. Instead, like a pro, he went on with their future.
“We are taking fire from the parking lot. I suspect we did not get all the Marine guards around the Wardhaven limo. I have detached a fire team to keep them busy.”
“Do not ignore our back door,” Grant snapped.
“I am not. I have detached two fire teams to cover the river. I’m sending a third up to see if the auto-guns can be operated locally.”
“Good. Tell them to look out for that Longknife hellion. The man who gets her will get millions.”
“Yes, sir. They are aware.”
“And now we must say good-bye, Colonel. Activate the jammer.”
“I was about to, sir. May I recommend that you fall back on my command post.”
“I will see you there in a moment. The slaughter here should be over very soon.”
Grant turned to the sergeant at his elbow. “Kill them all, then report to your colonel when your job here is done.”
The Greenfeld men pulled grenades from their belts as Grant low-crawled for the stairwell.
Bronc stared at his computer. It was totally jammed. A rock would tell him as much as his fine computer.
One of the sergeants picked up a gun that had fallen to the balcony’s floor. The young man who had held it stared blankly ahead. His forehead had a small hole in it.
Bronc had seen what the back of his head looked like. He never wanted to see that again.
“Your computer’s no good. Do some shooting,” he ordered.
Bronc put his computer aside and took the gun. He eyed it like some snake.
“Shoot, damn you, kid. Shoot or I’ll shoot you.” It didn’t sound like something Bronc could argue with.
Not when the sergeant punctuated it by shooting down a kid that was running for the far end of the balcony.
Bronc edged up to the balcony. Most of the kids still shooting were lying flat on the floor, shooting through the fancy marble poles that held up the banister. Bronc slipped his gun out, and aimed the barrel in the general direction of a statue of a half-nude woman.
He pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. The gun didn’t fire and the trigger didn’t move all that far back.
He squeezed harder on the trigger, but it just would not move.
“I think you have to do something with this lever,” the kid to his right said. He lay his rifle down, leaning it sideways so Bronc could see what he was pointing at.
He also made the mistake of getting higher up on his elbows than he’d been.
Something took the top off his head, spraying blood and stuff along the wall behind him.
Bronc felt like throwing up.
“Shoot, damn you.” That may or may not have been aimed at Bronc, but he got his head down, pushed the lever with his thumb, and shot.
The gun fired. It fired a long burst until Bronc remembered to ease back on the trigger.
“Don’t go automatic,” the kid on his left warned, staying low. “The sergeants don’t like that. Push the safety back a notch.”
Bronc did. The next time he pulled the trigger, it only fired one shot.
“And aim,” the kid said. “The sergeant hates it when you shoot but don’t aim.”
That kid was looking hard down the barrel of his own gun. Bronc did the same. He tried to line it up on that half-naked lady and pulled the trigger.
Some plaster above her head exploded. Was that him?
“I’m out of here,” a kid shouted, down the line from Bronc, as he jumped up and headed for the stairs.
“No you ain’t,” the sergeant snarled, and blew his head off.
“Enough of this,” the kid at the sergeant’s feet shouted, rolled over, raised his gun, and put three rounds into the sergeant’s belly, below the body armor that they had and the kids didn’t.
The other sergeant drilled that kid, but a girl, one of the few that got jobs as shooters, put two rounds into the back of that sergeant’s head.
But then she half got up and someone below put a bullet into her.
“Now what do we do?” the kid next to Bronc asked.
“I know a way out of here, I think,” Bronc said.
“I’m right behind you,” said several voices.
“They’re gonna kill us,” said one guy who was still shooting.
“You can stay here and get killed by those Marines. Me, I’m taking my chances with anyone else,” said Bronc and led a dozen or more in a low crouch off the balcony to the stairwell. He’d seen his sensor sergeant go up higher when he was peeled off to back up the firing line.
Bronc led the way up, rather than down the way they’d come.
A couple of guys headed down. But a second later there was fire from that direction, and the screams of dying youth.
The rest followed Bronc up.
“Sorry, ma’am, I must have tossed you a demolition grenade.” That sort of explained to Kris the mess she was looking at.
Jack’s flashlight showed a grizzly scene. The counter and its glass enclosure had held, as had the windows. That left nothing for the explosives to work on but four human bodies and the electronic gear still smoldering in the room.
The walls were covered in soot and blood and bones and body parts. The armored glass wept red onto the counter.
The sergeant used his last bit of C-8 to blow the lock on the door and let them into what they had done.
“You see any switch that might turn the lights back on?” Kris asked.
“Looks like the grenade blew up on that work station,” Jack said, aiming his light at one particular sparse bit of wreckage. Cables led into to it, and away from it, but there was no telling what they might have done in between.
“Do we have the auto-guns out of commission?” Kris asked.
That got only a shrug from Jack. On a well-designed ship, any station could be brought up as any station. Even if they had demolished the primary work center for the guns, was there a backup security center in the basement?
No way to tell.
“Nelly, order the Marines to attack.”
“I can’t, Kris. That jamming just started.”
Kris said a very unprincesslike word.
“Jack, can you signal the captain?”
“Let’s see how good my Morse code is.”
Jack wiped the gore from a small section of the window and started flashing a message toward the river. “Let’s hope this is good enough.”
“Stop or I’ll shot” came from the sergeant guarding their back door. He followed that up with a shot.
“Don’t shoot. Please don’t shoot” came in a voice that sounded familiar to Kris.
Captain DeVar knew things were changing in the Gallery when he spotted the explosion behind several windows on the roof.
“Let’s get ready to ride, troops,” he ordered, wondering if h
e was ordering them into a slaughter.
Then the lights went out.
“That sure looks like showtime to me,” he said, ordering the first squad forward.
They splashed from the river and slid down on the riverbank, rifles at the ready. Nothing happened.
Then a light started flashing from the window that had been lit up a moment ago by that explosion.
It took Captain DeVar a second to realize that the light’s flashes had meaning.
“FROM THE HALLS OF MON” said enough for one Marine.
“Charge,” Captain DeVar ordered for the first time in his life.
“Move it, move it, move it,” sergeants echoed to his right and left.
“Last one to the big house does KP next month” came from somewhere along the line.
And a hundred sharp troopers raced across the manicured lawn of the Gallery as fast as full-battle rattle would allow.
And ahead of him, on the roof, the captain spotted movement. More movement down on the west portico.
Muzzles flashed there. Dirt exploded here. A Marine went down.
“First squads, hit the deck,” DeVar ordered. “Provide covering fire. Second squads, advance with me.”
Nobody joined the Marines for an easy berth.
It didn’t look to this Marine captain like his crew would be seeing one anytime soon.
52
Penny ordered the sergeant to reorient his axis of attack.
The balcony was silent, all the shooters up there either dead or fled. If she wasn’t mistaken, Bronc had been the one that led the final flight from up there but it was hard to tell in the faint light from the emergency lamps.
She hoped he lived. They owed the kid for his warning.
Then a grenade sailed in from the rotunda, and another. And another. The general slaughter had begun.
The first grenade landed among a clump of civilians. They stared at it…and died as it exploded. The second landed in a group that had a Marine. He fell on it and died…but the others lived. Another fell among the group of Marines. One of them tossed it back to explode above the head of the raiders.
It was nice hearing screams from them.
More grenades flew. More examples of folly and denial leading to death. Or bravery and courage leading to a single death or death to the enemy.
Long forgotten virtues quickly were remembered on Eden.
The grenade toss became a full participation sport.
“Don’t we have a few of those ourselves?” a Marine asked. So Penny and a security type ended up pealing grenades of their own out of their petticoats and tossing them to Marines in the front who tossed them into the midst of the shooters and throwers around the bronze figures holding pride of place there.
A lot of art shattered. A lot burned.
But then, so did a lot of people.
A security type saying, “I was a pitcher for the Dodgers,” asked for a grenade. He stood in the doorway to the west portico and tossed it toward the main entrance. There were screams. From Mulhoney came the first sign of life. Only a weak thumbs-up, but it was a sign.
But somehow, the portico force was reinforced. The sounds of a major firefight out there aimed at the car park and the one exit from the great hall told Penny safety didn’t lie in that direction.
More grenades flew in. More grenades were tossed out. People died cringing in on themselves. People died fighting. But here or there, Marines shouted for more grenades or a fresh magazine. Penny found herself promoted from pack mule to supply sergeant.
How long could this keep up?
Kris watched the Marines charge from the river, hope rising in her belly. Then she turned for the door. “Don’t shoot, sergeant. Is that you, Bronc?”
“Yes, ma’am, Your Highness. And I’ve got a dozen scared kids with me. Please don’t shoot us.”
And somebody fired.
Kris reached the corridor just in time to see the kids hugging the tiled floor and her Marine firing at something down the hall where Kris had lurked only a few minutes ago.
She pulled out two whizbangs and sent them flying down the passageway in company with the sergeant’s darts.
The whizbangs went bang…and a door slammed.
“I think we got trouble on the roof. They might be trying to come around behind us,” the corporal said.
“Or see if they can get the auto-guns shooting,” Kris growled. “Cover me.”
And Kris was out, tiptoeing through young men, who huddled as low as the floor would let them. Most had rifles, but few clutched them. Kris stooped to pick up one, pulled a bandolier off another.
She reached the door to the stairwell about the time the other stairwell creaked open again and the sergeant behind Kris took it under fire.
The next set of whizbangs brought Jack in behind Kris, along with a couple of kids who didn’t take to lying on the floor while bullets whizzed by a few inches above their heads.
Even a teenager could figure that sooner or later, someone was going to lower their aim.
One of the kids was Bronc.
“The Marines from the river are taking fire,” Jack whispered. “DeVar’s slowed. Half providing overwatch to the half still moving.”
“Can these auto-guns be fired on manual and locally?”
“Your guess about what they do on Eden is as good as mine,” Jack said.
Kris flipped open the door to the roof.
And watched as it was quickly punched full of holes.
“This ain’t gonna be easy,” Jack said.
Kris felt around her bottom. “Whizbangs, sleepy gas, don’t look all that good just now.”
“I have some smoke and two frags,” Jack offered.
Kris pulled out two whizbangs and two sleepy gas throwers. She distributed them among the willing kids. “Jack will toss the smoke first. Keep it close in. You kids throw the sleeping gas as far as you can. It’s open air and the gas won’t do so well, but even a yawn helps.” That got a dry chuckle.
Kris would toss the whizbangs. Farther than the smoke, shorter than the gas.
“Ready? Jack tosses on three, the gas on two. I’ll throw the bangs on one. Jack, you add a frag to the mix. Don’t run out there until I tell you the smoke has thickened up. Hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am” came back just like you’d expect from a bunch of teenagers.
And so they did it. Smoke, gas, then bangs, and lastly boom. Kris waited, one hand on Bronc’s heaving chest. His heart was pounding like it might punch its way out past his ribs.
Kris waited for the smoke to thicken.
“Stay low. Run now.”
And Kris and Jack led the kids out, firing their automatics into the smoke, into the flashing lights.
Somewhere a man screamed. Another man cursed and hollered for a medic.
Kris ran low, then dropped to roll up behind the concrete base of some antenna. Jack picked the next one for his own.
A boy went down, sprawling from a hit. Another found a cinder-block wall to take cover behind.
There were six of them out on the roof before the smoke dissolved and a wall of automatic fire replaced it.
And somewhere down the roof, an auto-gun cut loose a long wicked burst at the ground below.
Kris didn’t need to see, she could feel the Marines going down before it.
“Snipers, get those bastards on the roof,” Gunny Brown called.
And got a fusillade of small-arms fire for his effort. Since this big, armored dinosaur hardly budged as it took the hits, it was no skin off Gunny’s nose.
But clearly, something was happening up on that roof. From the looks of it, he’d say Marines held down the right wing up there. Probably that lieutenant and the princess.
And it looked like they could use all the help he could send their way.
Then an auto-gun opened up, thankfully, not on Gunny’s side of the roof.
But it had to be shooting at something, and the old man and his platoons were the only worthw
hile targets beside Gunny’s fire teams.
Marines needed help and the only help Gunny could give was to the roof.
One sniper took down someone with a gun trying to work his way down behind the right wing.
Good.
Another dude up there stopped at what looked like an auto-gun and started to raise a shield or maybe it was just the top of the control box. A sniper put an end to that noise.
Now other Marines opened up, sweeping the front of the roof clean of dark figures. Those that didn’t crouch low and beat a hasty retreat only stayed in place to die.
But applying pressure on the roof lighted up the pressure they’d been keeping on the front porch of that stone monster.
Clearly, a major fight was going on there.
Gunny drew up a good sight picture and dropped a guy leaning out a door to toss a grenade.
He went down. A moment later, his grenade did horrible things to the fellows around him.
Gunny grinned and swept the area, looking for another grenade thrower. He hated those things. Didn’t those dudes up there know that Mr. Grenade was not your friend.
Gunny checked his fire teams. Between the half dozen around him and the two sniper crews on his flank, he could hold this car park against most any force coming at him from the front.
He spared a glance behind him. Tanks and trucks still burned fitfully. Why hadn’t any of those shooters worked their way up to reinforce him? What was going on out there?
Gunny shook his head. Officers were supposed to do that kind of worrying. If he wasn’t careful, someone would order him off to OCS.
Gunny sighted in on movement at a window. He blew another grenade thrower back to where he’d come from. A moment later, there was a delightful explosion.
It was nice being an enlisted swine.
Captain DeVar knew the auto-gun was aimed at him. Of course, every man up and following him felt the same way. But when the auto-gun finished its first burst, it was DeVar’s legs that would no longer hold him up.
The captain skidded to a halt, the armor taking up most of the shock. His legs weren’t hurting. Yet.
He put the time to good use.
“Rockets, get that gun,” he ordered.
Kris Longknife Audacious Page 30
