For some reason it struck a chord. There was an audible murmuring in the crowd.
On the matter of the legislature it went 892 to 272 and passed. On the matter of the name being Home it read 1311 to 71. Even Tibbet was surprised at the vote and later shocked to find he had secured a place in history as firm as John Hancock.
This first constitutional assembly of Home might well have lasted through the night. However just then Frank called Jon and informed him the problem with the Cincinnati was not over as he thought. There was an agitated maintenance worker, a fellow working in the North hub, who reported a group of armed men in space armor had swept in, from the same airlock Art had used to jump to the USNA shuttle a couple weeks ago. He was grabbed out of the corridor where he was washing the wall and performing maintenance on lights and such and stuffed with cuffs on into a maintenance closet and the door jammed shut behind him.
The men had taken his pad and smashed it out in the hall, but apparently the concept of a janitor's closet having a com and data access, was not the norm on Earth. All he knew was they were headed South and seemed in a hurry. Jon immediately asked his people to ambush them from the side corridors and hurried to intercept. April, Heather and several others suspected immediately what their objective might be and sent a short message to Neil. "Holiday Inn." "I know," Neil replied with a semi cryptic, "I'll check them in." Perhaps it was simply his droll humor.
Chapter 31
Neil walked around the counter and checked the Holiday Inn logo which decorated the front of the checkin desk. Last night before setting a watch for Harris, he'd reinforced the desk on which it was mounted. A thick aluminum plate inside, behind the plastic logo strengthened it now. The counter was fastened to the deck with generous large bolts and he had satisfied himself on their sturdiness. Behind the aluminum plate, he had filled the desk with boxes of supplies from the storage rooms. Soup and powdered drinks, toiletries and pamphlets. As much mass as he could find to pile in the cabinet.
The logo hid a master study in improvised munitions. They had no more claymore mines, but he had pulled the flimsy plastic front off the sign and filled the rear with a sheet of plastique. He carefully spread all of the C4 compound from two demolition charges, building each quadrant of the sheet into a mound with a knot of DET cord buried in each. The cords all met in the middle on a main line with four double lark's heads pulled snug around it. The main ran to an electric blasting cap, where it was doubled against the copper tube and tied off.
An assortment of odd nuts and bolts Housekeeping swept up and a large number of used button batteries that were awaiting recycling, were pressed in the surface of the explosive like chocolate chips studded on cookie dough. They would become missiles every bit as lethal as the special balls or pyramids a commercial Claymore used. With the flimsy plastic front cover clipped back on the front, he checked the firing circuits and got a green light. He removed the tester, kept the familiar clacker in his hand and relaxed awaiting company.
* * *
April and Easy set an ambush at the second ring, where the corridors were close together and they could shoot from one intersection to the next. She and Easy took opposite sides of the next intersection spin wise, about fifty meters away. She laid her captured pistol from the Chinese fellow right in the middle of the intersection they were ambushing. They figured nobody could resist stopping to pick it up and look at it. They had their portable shields deployed behind the corners on each side and were holding their lasers around the corner watching the pistol with spex.
She had set her suit exterior to a gray and black, to match the corridor walls. An older man and a younger one ran up behind them and hunkered down. She looked over her shoulder at them and they were obviously father and son. Both carried equipment, the father with something that had wheels and both had old fashioned soft body armor which closed with Velcro straps.
"How close are the Earthies? Do you know?" demanded the father.
"Pretty close. They should be here any second." April assured him. "Please don't distract me when I have to shoot," she asked, concentrating to talk and watch at the same time.
"What are you guys shooting?" he asked.
"High powered lasers."
"Hot damn! Let me get just one shot in please and my boy will probe them now. I'll take the risk to cross," he scrambled to the other side and lay on the floor by Easy. His weapon was big and visibly heavy, with two small rubber wheels on the back so you could push it like a hand cart. He had a two footed tripod at the front and April could see two massive concentric coil springs within a square frame of some sort of metal tubes. She heard an electric motor whining at full speed, but the springs very slowly pulled back in compression. It took at least a full minute to take the springs all the way back, before there was a sharp latching sound and the motor shut off. April glanced at the boy still on her side.
"What the hell is the contraption he's lugging around?"
"My dad's a machinist and fabricated his weapon over the last two days, figuring the Earthies were coming. It's sort of a crossbow without the bow"
April watched him push a gray missile about a hundred-fifty millimeters long and maybe twenty in diameter in the front. It had little shiny tail fins at the back, on the cone of a flared skirt, which was perhaps twice the diameter of the long body. It rather looked like pictures she had seen online, of the tank killing dart a discarding sabot carried from an antiarmor canon.
"Solid tungsten rod, with a tungsten carbide point and a half carat diamond tip sintered in," he informed her. "No explosives," he lamented, "But it masses pretty good and dad said if you can scratch it you can crack it. We figure it will toss it at about three hundred to three-fifty hundred meters a second. It should penetrate and then when the cone on the rear gets to the surface, if it doesn't pull through it should be a jolly jolt in any case. We just didn't know how strong their armor is."
"It's just an armored suit, not a frigging battle tank," April told him unbelieving, realizing she was in the presence of truly over the edge weirdness with these two. The missile had to weigh several kilograms. It would hit like having a ground car dropped on you. April suspected it would go through a shuttle lengthwise like a wet paper sack, much less a suit.
"Oh, good. You must think it's enough then," he smiled, taking it for approval.
The boy pulled the object he was carrying out from under his arm and April realized it was a remote control model air car. He punched a command in his pad and held the toy out at arm's length where it spun its rotors up and went into a hover. It hung there to gave him time to pick the pad up and then took off surprisingly fast for the target area. When it reached the other corridor, it banked around the corner at a steep angle and disappeared. April looked down at his screen which showed the on board camera and realized he was flying it inches from the ceiling. There was an indistinct clump of darkness far down the corridor and it grew quickly into a cluster of combat space suits jogging along.
"Hey, you spotted them," April congratulated him. "Don't you think you better pull it back before they shoot it down?"
He ignored her, with a faraway look on his face and the scene telescoped into close-up in seconds. The lead figure did raise a weapon and the whole view tilted at a crazy angle then full inverted as the toy swooped down the wall, faster than the bright flashing muzzle of the weapon could follow it.
It transversed the floor as it corkscrewed and swooped around the lead figure, who spun sideways trying to track it, as the model twisted in the air of the corridor. There was just an instant of zoomed image of the second suit before impact, just a fleeting impression of a couple eyeballs wide with surprise through the faceplate, before the screen went dark. The floor transmitted a little thump, like someone stomping their foot and there was a brief orange flash from the North corridor.
"Just an itty-bitty little shaped charge, they use to punch rivet holes in girders," the teenager said. "About the size of a AA cell," he said, holding up his finge
rs to illustrate, "but it can't be very good to have go off right on your helmet face plate."
April went back to her spex shaken by the image. She didn't want to be seeing those eyes in dreams like she knew Easy had. She had burned a ship knowing there were men inside, but after she hadn't been near as cheerful as this kid. It bothered her. Neither did she realize she had labeled him a child in her mind and he was probably two years her elder. She forced her attention back to watch the spex image in her heads up and see the father across by Easy just fine also.
The first trooper came sliding into the intersection and looked at the Chinese pistol. He was cautious enough to prod it with the muzzle of his weapon before reaching for it. As he bent over April laid her cross hairs on his torso, but a second running suited figure bumped into his hip and knocked him to his hands and knees, going down himself but sliding past the first. There was a ringing metallic -THRUMP!- from the father's homemade weapon and he slid back a good half meter or more on the floor, from the recoil. He left the weapon there and rolled to cover back behind Easy with a moan.
The dart caught the suited man down on his hands and knees, right behind the arm pit. It picked him up, heavy suit and all and rolled him end over end in the air at least three times that April saw, limbs spun out from the impact. He was actually carried out of the intersection into the side corridor. The dart passed through both layers of space armor and soft filling, cone punching a 40mm hole straight through everything without changing trajectory very much. It continued down the hall leaving a dark splash trickling down the corridor wall near the junction and had the good fortune to catch on a door frame instead of ricochet.
It then sliced a groove through eight meters of sheet metal wall before impacting on the next door frame on the hall, creasing a deep groove across the heavy hatch, lodging in the opposite side of the steel door frame of an equipment room. It was sheer luck it didn't keep going until it exited the hull somewhere venting pressure or otherwise killing some innocent resident.
April recovered from the visual shock of that overkill and fired at the legs of the fellow still hanging into the intersection from the South side. There was a buzzing spray of sparks off the ablative coating as she nipped the edge of him, but he was gone too fast. His arm came back around the corner and lobbed a smoke grenade toward them. She snapped a shot at it, but just burned wall in a wailing loud spray of molten metal droplets. Easy nailed the grenade while it was still rolling, vaporizing it with very little smoke. Another hand came around the corner from the North and rolled another smoke bomb toward them, already spewing white. April fired at the corner and switched to infrared. The smoke was opaque in it too. She fired blindly into the haze and the Earthies sprayed an brief and equally blind stream of bullets down towards them, which drummed loudly on the walls.
Easy and she stood to fire around the corner, with a continuous beam. Just hosing the area hoping to catch something, but they were probably past. The green beam was impressive as could be, the pulsing beam which Jeff had designed to shake a target apart, also shook it like a speaker cone. The wail of it as it played across surfaces was bone rattling, but she didn't know if she was hitting anything, or if it carried enough punch through the fog to do damage. It was frustrating to realize the father and son team had two kills for sure with their strange homemade equipment, but Easy and she had no idea if they hit anything.
She stopped shooting when Easy rushed forward into the smoke and she looked back at the boy. He was looking where one of the bullets had snipped his thumb off with a sickly fascination. He had hunkered behind her shield with her but let his hand out too far to brace himself and caught a bullet. "I've got a minor wound," he called to his dad. "Have to get a new thumb grown. You OK? Or did you take any hits?"
"They didn't hit me," he called back. "but the damn machine broke my shoulder real bad. We seriously underestimated the recoil. I think we could take the smaller spring out altogether and add some more weights," he concluded in a huge understatement.
April could see the hazy outline of Easy in the clearing smoke. He had sprinted to the next intersection and let loose a long blast down the way they were running, braced on the corner with his laser. He waited a bit and come back towards her slowly, with her Chinese pistol he had retrieved in his left hand. The ventilation had sensed the smoke and cranked up, clearing it pretty fast, but the smoke alarm was still wailing, needing reset.
* * *
Further South, Jon had earlier met Frank just North of the third ring, setting up their ambush about the same time as April. It was the same corridor as Heather's family lived on, but still North of them. He was talking on his pad to Dave's guys at the Happy Lewis and Happy himself, who was rushing to get to the ship. The tug over at the Cincinnati was talking to them. They reported some casualties and two crewmen asking to surrender. The flight crew were not combative or armed at all.
They were moving to find where the ambulance docked and make sure even if the troops were not stopped inside, they would have no scooter to escape. Where they thought they could go in it he didn't know, as it did not have the range to reach another station in any reasonable time. Especially with the load of eight or nine troopers in armor the janitor reported.
Frank joined him, carrying a clear rod carefully in both hands, index and thumbs pressed together on both ends. He looked scared to death.
"You got what I think there?" Jon asked looking at it warily.
"Yup. Our Friend Mister Bucky Braid. Rolled up on an old sapphire laser core. You take the diamond from my right hand and I will keep the left one and we will move slowly apart wiggling them in a counterclockwise motion and the rod will drop out. Reach in my pocket first and get an adhesive gun I have, to position your diamond on the wall. Then come over and do a drop for me." They moved apart and moved slower and slower until Jon definitely felt a resistance to his pulling the diamond further. He looked at Frank.
"I'll swing to the wall in an arc. Waist high OK with you?" They were positioning it on a diagonal as it was longer than the corridor was wide and just before a cross corridor.
"Super. Just no sudden tugs. I'd have to just leave it and get long tongs to retrieve it later. I won't take a chance of getting caught in a loop of it. Be a hell of a note to get caught here holding it when they come down the corridor. Huh?
"I got mine." Jon said he touched the wall with the applicator and slid the little metal clip onto the drop. He stopped and visualized the braid and carefully withdrew his two fingers from the diamond along the wall, then stepped back.
He laid down and looked to see Frank still had it between his fingers and quickly rolled low under the line past Frank to retrieve the rod on the deck and came back with the applicator. He reached in past Frank slowly. Frank slid it slowly along the wall until he could rock the disk a hair away from the wall. Straining to keep his hand flat on the wall Jon put the tip of the applicator behind the disk and pulled the trigger for a single drop. Frank pressed against the drop and just like Jon made a slow and exaggerated withdrawal from the grip.
"Hah!" he said and showed Jon a tiny shiny oval shaved off the finger tip, where there was no longer a print. They heard the rip of an automatic weapon to the North and a low pop, but Frank still paused a moment to pull a manual pump bottle from his belt and point it at the overhead across the Braid and squeeze off a few streams of some clear fluid. The fluid arced as far as Frank could reach with it, wetting the floor to maybe two meters away on the other side. There were more bursts of automatic fire - closer and a shuddering metallic scream like he had never heard. Then the steady wail of a distant smoke alarm.
"Silicone lubricant," he explained, as he finished spraying. "It doesn't look very wet but it's as slick as can be." Then they rushed around the corner and went down to the second door on the North side, where Jon used his master key and let them in. The light came on automatically and he could not see a switch anywhere so he pulled his Taser and fried the light, which went out with a purple fl
ash.
The room was storage of some sort. He could see the intersection if he leaned on the door jamb. Frank leaned out above him, but decided his weapon was too light for armor anyway and stepped back. "I'll just man the door," he offered. "You take one good shot if you get one and roll back in as far as you can go and I'll shut the door.
Jon watched and heard rumbling footsteps of the heavy suits coming. Suddenly he heard an extra loud thump and saw a torso slide through the intersection, followed by a pair of legs still connected at the top. They went past faster than he could have reacted to shoot, leaving a scarlet streak on the deck. But the next thump was followed by a suited figure missing only a foot and it slid at an angle, so it smashed headlong into the corner of their side hall and flailed around trying to get up. Another figure stopped and grabbed the fallen figure by the equipment rack on the front. Jon fed a Taser bolt into the head of the fallen figure and another into the standing one, then back to the bottom one.
The standing powered suit appeared to have its grip locked on the front of the downed one which had gone still. The Taser had fried something in its controls.
A green shimmer flashed and a flare of melting metal walked down the wall and found the head of the one laying on the deck with lethal results.
Crap, I should have put the two shots in the standing one, Jon thought. His Taser showed an amber light behind the sight, meaning a delay to shoot again while the capacitor charged up.
April Page 51
