by David Weber
Marine Raiders plummeted like lethal, ungainly hawks, and the totally surprised defenses of PDC Saint-Just roused to meet them. Stunned crews flung themselves at their targeting scopes as close-range missile launchers and cannon muzzles slewed crazily, but there wasn't enough time. Not enough to sort out target signatures as small as single repulsor fields. Not enough to track and lock. A few defensive emplacements got lucky, and almost a thousand Marines died before they grounded, but they came in fast and dirty. Getting down quickly was more important than a precise landing pattern, and they overrode their automatics ruthlessly, screaming down at velocities which would have seen any one of them busted back to doolie if they'd tried it in training.
Another few hundred died or broke limbs, despite their zoots, at the speed they hit, but three Raider divisions were down, and their total casualties were barely five percent of what a conventional assault into those defenses would have cost them.
Sharon Manning slammed into the ground, cursing as two bones broke in her right foot, but her zoot was in one piece and she hit her rally signal even as she reached for her own heavy flechette launcher.
This ain't no place for a general, she told herself as a totally astonished Shellhead sentry emptied his magazine at her and she blew him into bloody rags, but it beats hell out of being dead!
* * *
"Get them back—now!" Aram Shahinian snapped, and Second Fleet's capital ships hurled themselves towards the limits of capital missile range.
* * *
First Marshal Sekah cursed horribly, despite the Prophet's presence, as the infidel fleet retreated. It was all a trick—and he'd fallen for it!
More and more surface defense positions went into action, but the infidel assault shuttles had already made their drops. Heavy weapons and ammunition canisters still plummeted behind the Raiders, but the shuttles were streaking away, hugging the sea to stay below his heavy weapons, and he snarled in frustration at their speed. The cursed things were too fast for his aircraft to catch—and they were armed. One squadron of high performance jets managed to cut the angle and intercept, but it took everything they had in full afterburner, and they got one shuttle—one!—before the rest of the infidel formation blotted them from the heavens.
But those shuttles were still dead if Saint-Just held. They might run rings around atmospheric craft, but they couldn't get out of atmosphere without braving his defensive umbrella. Yet if they did manage to take Saint-Just, they'd have a gap. A narrow one, but wide enough for more assaults to break through and nibble away at his ground bases. . . .
But why? Why run the insane risk of coming in on the ground? They could have opened the same hole from space without putting thousands of people on the planet, cut off with no retreat if their assault failed! It made no sense, unless . . .
The Prophet! They knew where he was, and they were after the Prophet himself!
He crossed quickly to the Prophet's side, bending close to murmur into his ear.
"Your Holiness, I believe the infidels know you're here. They hope to capture or kill you with this insane assault! I urge you to evacuate immediately. Allow us to deal with them before you return."
"Evacuate?!" The Prophet stared at him. "Don't be preposterous, First Marshal! This is the strongest fortress on Thebes. They'll never take it with a few thousand infantry!"
Sekah stared at him, longing to argue, but the Prophet had spoken—and this was, indeed, Thebes' strongest fortress. But was it strong enough? If the infidels had known exactly where to strike, might the Satan-Khan also have told them how to strike?
His spine stiffened, and he returned to his staff with a grim expression. Satan-Khan or no, the infidels would get to the Prophet only over his own dead body.
* * *
A Theban bunker vaporized as the HVM struck, and Sharon Manning popped her jump gear, hurling herself into the glowing crater. Her staff—what of it had managed to join her—tumbled into it about her, zoots ignoring the fiery heat. A heavy weapons section materialized out of the chaos, setting up to cover the hole, and Manning grunted. It wasn't much of a CP, but it didn't look like anyone could range on them—except for that damned mortar pit. She barked an order, and three Raiders swarmed out to deal with it.
They did, but only one of them came back.
* * *
Lantu grunted in anguish as they hit the ground and MacRory's unyielding armor bruised him viciously through his armored vac suit. But he was intact, more or less, and Angus set him instantly on his feet. More Raiders filtered out of the forest about them, zoots slimed with tree sap and broken greenery, but not a single weapon fired on them. They were over two hundred kilometers from the inferno raging atop Saint-Just, and Lantu swayed dizzily as he found his bearings. Major M'boto came bounding up in the effortless leaps of his jump gear, carrying Fraymak like a child.
"That way." Lantu raised an arm and pointed. "We're still about ten kilometers east of—ullpppp!"
He cut off in chagrin as Angus snatched him up again and the entire battalion went streaking off along the mountainside.
* * *
Ivan Antonov watched his display, clamping his jaw and wishing his scan sections could show him what was happening. But the range was simply too great. He could only watch the relayed data from Mangus Coloradas and pray.
He looked up as someone stopped beside his chair.
"Well, Kthaara," he said quietly, "your little trick worked."
"Indeed," the Orion replied softly, flexing his claws as he, too, stared at the display. One hand touched the empty spot where his defargo had hung, and he seemed to relax slightly.
* * *
Sekah sat before his console, taking personal command of Saint-Just's defense, and sweat rimmed his cranial carapace. Those weren't mortals—they were demons! He'd never dreamed of infantry weapons like the ones they were using against him, and that powered armor—! No wonder the Fleet's boarding attacks had been so persistently thwarted after the first few months!
But demons or not, his interlacing fields of fire were killing them. Not in hundreds as they should have, but still in dozens and scores.
His orders rolled out, diverting troops from unthreatened sectors to back up his fixed positions as the infidels blew them apart. They were coming in from the west, carving a wedge-shaped salient into Saint-Just's defenses, and they were through the outer ring and into the second in far too many places. But the deeper they came, the more they exposed their flanks.
A battalion commander led his men scuttling through the personnel tunnels and launched them into the rear of an infidel company advancing up a deep ravine.
* * *
"Your six! Watch your s—!" Major Oels' voice died suddenly, and Lieutenant Escalante spun to the rear. A screaming wave of Shellhead infantry rolled over Delta Company like a tsunami, rocket and grenade launchers flaming. A dozen Raiders went down in an instant, and then the rest of the company was on them. A tornado of flechettes and plasma bolts piled the attackers in heaps, but eight more Delta troopers went with them.
Escalante panted, turning in circles, flechette launcher ready, but there were no live Shellheads left. Then someone touched his arm, and he damned near screamed. He whirled to face Sergeant Major Abbot, and the sergeant's grim expression crushed his scathing rebuke stillborn.
"Skipper just bought it, Lieutenant," Abbot said harshly, and Escalante noticed the blood splashed all over his zoot. "Captain Sigourny, too."
Escalante stared at him in horror. Third Battalion had been spread all over the island in the drop. Murphy only knew where the other three companies were, and Delta had already lost Lieutenant Gardener and Lieutenant Matuchek. Dear God, that meant . . .
The big sergeant nodded grimly.
"Looks like you're it, sir."
* * *
Lantu hung onto his breakfast grimly as branches lashed at his armored body. The drunken swoops wouldn't have been so bad if he, like MacRory, had known when they were coming. The colonel's jump gear was a marvel
, but it was like being trapped in a demented, sideways elevator, and just clutching his inertial guidance unit was—
"Stop!" he shouted, and five hundred Terran Marines slammed to a halt as one. He was too preoccupied to be impressed. "Put me down, Colonel!"
Angus deposited him gently on the forested mountainside, and the admiral peered about, wishing it hadn't been winter the one time he'd seen this spot with his own eyes. All these damned leaves and branches. . . .
"There." He pointed, and the Terrans craned their necks at the creeper-grown hillock. It didn't look like a heavy weapons emplacement—until they checked their zoot scan systems.
" 'Twould seem yer on yer ain, Admiral," Angus said, but Lantu was already scrambling up the slope.
* * *
General Manning nodded thanks without even looking up from her portable map display as Sergeant Young slapped a fresh power cell into her zoot. This was her third CP, if such it could be called, since landing, and she was amazed they'd gotten this far. The tangled mountainsides made beacon fixes hellishly difficult, but it looked like they were into the fourth defensive ring. She grinned humorlessly. Only four more to go, and then they'd hit the hard stuff.
* * *
Amleto Escalante couldn't believe it. Here the Shellheads went and bored these nice, big tunnels so they could shuttle infantry back and forth, and they didn't even bother to cover them with sensors!
Not that he had any intention of complaining.
His lead squad was a hundred meters ahead of him, probing cautiously. He could have wished for more spacious quarters—in fact, his skin crawled at the thought of wallowing around in here like a bunch of troglodytes—but if there wasn't enough room to use jump gear there was still enough for them to move two abreast. He only had sixty troopers left, but he had a sneaking suspicion Delta Company was deeper into the defenses than anyone else. Now if he only knew what he was doing. . . .
"Two branches, Lieutenant," Abbot reported. "One east, one west."
Escalante flipped a mental coin.
"We go east,' he muttered back.
* * *
Lantu's heart hammered as he approached the entrance. He carried only captured Theban equipment, and the Terrans had stopped beyond the scanner zone, but if they'd guessed wrong about his retinal prints . . .
He drew a deep breath as no automated weapon system tore him apart. As long as nothing fired, no alarm had been tripped—now it was up to him to keep it that way, and he removed his helmet with clumsy fingers.
A push of a button opened an armored panel, and he leaned forward, presenting his eyes and wincing as brilliant light flashed into them. He held his breath, staring into the light, then exhaled convulsively as the blinding illumination turned to muted green. He cleared his throat.
"Alpha-Zulu-Delta-Four-Niner-One," he recited carefully, and then his mouth twisted. "Great is the Prophet."
Something grated, and a vast portal yawned. He stepped through quickly, reaching for a blinking panel of lights on the tunnel wall, stabbing buttons viciously. There was a moment of hesitation, and then he grinned savagely as the entire panel went blank.
* * *
First Marshal Sekah muttered to himself as reports flooded in. The infidels were cutting still deeper, but their rate of advance was slowing. He cursed himself for not having seeded the outer rings with nuclear mines. The infidels were bunching up, and sacrificing a few thousand of his own troops would have been a paltry price for taking them out. He'd already tried air strikes, but their damned kinetic missile launchers had an impossible range. None of the nuclear strike aircraft from his other bases had lived to get close enough, and Saint-Just's own air fields were closed by heavy fire.
But even without nuclear weapons, he was grinding them down. It was only a matter of time, he thought, and tried not to think about the Satan-Khan's malign influence.
* * *
The first twenty Raiders crowded into the lead monorail car as Lantu clambered into its control chair. He'd been more than half afraid to summon the vehicles lest he trigger someone's suspicions, but they needed the speed. And the system was fully automated. With so much else to worry about, he doubted anyone had the spare attention to monitor it.
"Ready?" He looked back at MacRory, and Angus nodded sharply. The first admiral breathed a silent prayer to Whoever might really be listening, and five hundred Terran Marines—and two traitorous Thebans—went streaking into the heart of PDC Saint-Just at two hundred kilometers per hour.
* * *
"Oh, shit!"
Escalante hugged the wall in reflex action as the sudden roar of combat rolled down the tunnel. He punched an armored fist into the stone, then jerked back up and bounded forward. Sergeant Major Abbot grabbed for him, missed, and went streaking after him, cursing all wet-nosed officers who didn't have the sense Mithra gave a Rigelian.
* * *
"Sweet Terra!"
Sekah jerked as fresh alarms shrieked, and his eyes turned in horror to the illuminated schematic of Saint-Just's personnel tunnels. A crimson light glared—and it was inside the final defensive perimeter!
* * *
Escalante rounded a bend into a huge, brilliantly lit cavern just as his point finished off the last astonished Shellhead missile tech. He looked around him in disbelief, staring at the sequoia-sized trunks of capital missile launchers. Sweet Jesus—they were inside the main base!
"Sar'major Abbot!"
"Aye, sir!" Abbot appeared almost as if he'd been chasing him, and Escalante pointed across the cavern.
"Cover that tunnel! Mine it and drop it. Then I want blastpacks on that hatch over there—move it, Sar'major!"
"Aye, aye, sir!" Abbot barked. Mithra! Maybe this idiot knew what he was doing after all!
* * *
"Brigadier Ho is pinned down, sir."
Sharon Manning grimaced and tried to think. Ho's brigade was her point now, and he'd been shot to hell. She stared at her map display, scrolling through the terrain and thanking God Commander Trevayne had managed to get them such detailed maps. Now where—?
It had to be coming from that bunker complex. And that meant . . .
"Hook Fourth Brigade around to the north." A burst of rifle fire battered her zoot, and she curled around, automatically protecting the display board without even looking up. The cough of a flechette launcher from behind her silenced the fire, but she hardly noticed. "While the Fourth moves up," she went on without a break, "get Second Battalion of the Nineteenth out on their flank. Tell them to watch out for rocket fire from—"
She went on snapping orders, and tried not to think of how many of her people were already dead.
* * *
A company of Theban infantry pounded down the tunnel to Missile Bay Sixty-Four, unable to believe their orders. There was no way—no way—infidels could be inside Saint-Just! It had to be a mistake!
The captain at their head raced around a turn and sighed in relief as he saw the closed hatch. False alarm, he thought, waving for his troops to slow their headlong pace. If it weren't, that hatch—
Fifty kilos of high explosive turned the hatch into shrieking shrapnel and killed him where he stood.
* * *
Escalante started to wave his troopers forward, then stopped dead. Fuck! Maybe Sergeant Grogan had been right about what lieutenants used for brains! Here he was deep inside the enemy position, and he hadn't even bothered to tell anyone about it! But none of their coms would punch through this much rock, so . . .
His eye lit on Private Lutwell. Something big and nasty had wrecked the exoskeleton of her zoot's right arm, and the useless limb was clipped to her side while she managed her flechette launcher with an awkward left hand.
"Lutwell!"
"Sir?"
"Shag ass back down that tunnel. Tell 'em we're inside and that I'm advancing, sealing branch corridors with demo charges to cover my flanks."
"But, sir, I—"
"Don't fucking argue!" Escalante snarled "Do
it, Trooper, or I'll have your guts for breakfast!"
Lutwell popped into the tunnel like a scalded rabbit, and Escalante swung back to his front. He paused for just an instant as he saw the grin on Abbot's face, and then his people were moving forward once more.
* * *
The monorail braked in a dimly-lit tunnel, and the battalion spilled out, looming like chlorophyll-daubed trolls in the semi-dark. Lantu scuttled out behind Angus as Fraymak pelted up with M'boto.
"That shaft, Fraymak." Lantu pointed. "Remember the security point just before Tunnel Fourteen." Fraymak nodded. He could handle the standard security systems on the way, but his retinal patterns couldn't access the classified security point; he and M'boto would have to blow their way through.
"Remember," Lantu said, "give us ten minutes—at least ten minutes—before you blow it."
"Yes, sir." Fraymak saluted, then held out his hand. Lantu took it. "Good luck, sir."
"And to you." The admiral squeezed the armored gauntlet and stepped back. "This way, Colonel MacRory," he said. Angus scooped him up once more, and the battalion vanished into the darkness down two different shafts.
* * *
"Your Holiness," Sekah's face was pale, "the infidels are inside our inner ring."
The Prophet inhaled sharply and raised one hand to grip the sphere of Holy Terra hanging on his chest. Sekah swallowed and cursed himself viciously. He didn't know how they'd gotten so deep, but he should have stopped them. It was his job to stop them—and he'd failed.
"I don't know how big a force it is," he continued flatly. "It may be only a patrol—but it may be the lead elements of an entire regiment. I've diverted reinforcements, but it will take them fifteen minutes to get there." He drew a ragged breath. "Your Holiness, I implore you to evacuate. You can escape to safety in one of the nearby towns until we've dealt with the threat or . . . or—" He broke off, and the Prophet's eyes narrowed. But then he smoothed his expression and touched Sekah's shoulder carapace gently.
"As you say, my son. Doubtless you will fight better without us to worry over, anyway." He raised his hand and signed Holy Terra's circle. "The blessings of Holy Terra be upon you, First Marshal. She will give you victory, and I shall return to see your triumph."
