Insurrection s-4

by David Weber

  He swore viciously and hit his jump gear again-hard. It blasted him out of the fountain on a sharper trajectory than he'd really wanted, but being a moving target was more important than keeping as close to the ground as possible. He needed out of that bull's-eye before someone turned up with something heavier.

  More fire chewed up the tower's side plaza-spewing dust, this time, not mist-and something big, heavy, and high-velocity slammed into Stanislaus' left shoulder. It drove him forward and down, and he barely managed to tuck an armored shoulder under before he hit. The impact sent him skittering across the plaza pavement like a berserk bowling pin, and he grunted at the impact, even through the zoot's inertial damping systems, as he crashed into the tower's outer wall and came to an abrupt stop.

  He showed himself up into a sitting position, breathing hard, and triggered a quick diagnostic. The zoot's pauldron had survived the impact, whatever it had been. It was badly dished, and the zoot computer dropped a flashing red caret into the corner of his HUD to remind him not to expose the weakened area to any more fire than he could help, but he was effectively intact. Which was more than he could say for his rifle.

  He grimaced and drew his "sidearm." There'd been some raised eyebrows aboard Longbow at his nonstandard choice of backup weapons, but no one had chosen to object after they saw his range simulations scores with it. The sawed-off plasma carbine was a vast improvement over the old, original single-shot weapons, but only someone in a zoot could survive the back blast and thermal bloom of firing the thing. It was relatively short ranged, and had a maximum magazine capacity of only five rounds, but not even a zoot could survive a direct hit from it. Unfortunately, he'd never expected to use the thing indoors, and he made a fervent mental note to liberate something a bit less fractious from the first Rump Marine he encountered.

  He took a quick look at his HUD, and his mouth tightened. Three more green fireflies had turned amber, and one had turned red, but it looked like all the survivors were across the fire zone, and a couple of Marines from First Platoon's third squad turned up beside him. At least he had someone to watch his back now, he thought. And now that he did, all they had to do with their two understrength platoons was clear a two hundred-story building, about whose interior architecture they knew nothing at all, of a completely unknown number of opponents with equally unknown weapons capabilities.

  Nothing to it, he told himself, and slammed an armored, exoskeleton-powered foot through the glass doors in front of him.

  None of them had ever experienced anything like it.

  There weren't that many of the Rump holdouts in the tower, really. No more than two or three dozen of them, Stanislaus estimated. But every one of the bastards had a combat zoot, and they'd obviously raided the heavy weapons locker before they chose the position for their strongpoint, because the auto cannon on the west wall were the lightest of the weapons they'd dug into prepared firing positions around the tower's perimeter. But given their relatively low numbers, they didn't have enough people to keep all of them manned at once, and as they realized Stanislaus' people had broken into the tower, they were forced to pull off the perimeter weapons to deal with their attackers.

  That was undoubtedly a godsend to Major Urowski's people outside the tower, Stanislaus thought bitterly, but it didn't help his people one bit. And unlike Stanislaus, the defenders obviously did have a fairly good idea of the building's layout. They were waiting on stair landings, around corners, covering lift shaft doors, and Stanislaus' people had already used almost all of their sensor remotes before they ever got this far. Without remotes to toss around blind corners or lob up a stairwell, the quarters were so tight and the sensor interference so severe that at least half the time the only way Longbow's Marines discovered one of those waiting ambushes was when the ambushers opened fire.

  Stanislaus' hard-clenched jaw muscles ached as still more of his people went down. Most were "only" wounded, thanks to the protection of their zoots. But not even a zoot was much help when someone poked his helmet cautiously around a blind corner and someone else, in another zoot, blew that helmet off his shoulders with a plasma lance.

  It was insane. The defenders couldn't win, not in the end, whatever they did. They had to know that. But they didn't seem to care, and they'd stockpiled plasma lances, grenade launchers, and even rocket launchers to use inside the tower. The destruction was unbelievable. Modern towers like this one were almost unbelievably tough for civilian construction, and he had no doubt the basic structure was going to survive whatever he and the defenders might do. But its interior walls had never been designed to resist that sort of fire even momentarily. Even major structural girders disintegrated like shattered glass when they took hits from shoulder-launched rockets designed to destroy heavy armored vehicles. Stanislaus supposed he should be grateful the lunatics had at least not opted to use HVMs. Apparently, even they had no desire to set off the equivalent of a low-yield tactical nuke inside the same corridor as themselves.

  But that was about the only heavy weapon Stanislaus and his depleted fire teams failed to encounter as they fought their way savagely up, up, ever upward. Walls disappeared. Fire suppression systems tried-and failed-to extinguish the conflagration raging steadily upward with the combat. They were civilian systems, and their designers had never dreamed for an instant that they would be called upon to deal with bursts of plasma or the deliberate use of flamethrowers.

  The tower's central, loadbearing core survived more or less intact, but as more and more of the less essential interior partitions were shattered, the tower itself became a chimney. A blast furnace. Air roared in through the shattered façade, sucked into the maw of the fires raging like some huge, unchecked beast, and the combatants hunted one another through the vestibule of Hell. Even combat zoots found the temperature levels hard to handle, and as the furnace blazed hotter and hotter, the chance of anyone surviving even a tiny breach in his armor essentially disappeared.

  But ultimately, despite any advantages of position and their own undeniable, if totally misplaced, ferocity and determination, there simply weren't enough defenders for a building the tower's size, and as they took losses, their ability to cover multiple axes of approach crumbled. It didn't come easy, and it didn't come cheap, but Longbow's survivors found themselves flanking defensive strongpoints more and more rapidly as the defenders' numbers dwindled.

  In the end, the final handful of Rump holdouts were pinned down on the tower's hundred-and-eighty-first floor.

  "Good to see you, Skipper," Sergeant Huang said as he and Stanislaus finally met face-to-face on the hundred-and-eightieth floor.

  "The same to you," Stanislaus replied, and then his eyes widened in surprise as he checked the time. Surely they'd been fighting their way up this tower for days now, but according to his chrono, less than two hours had passed since Corporal Tso was killed. Two hours, in which a full twenty percent of his remaining Marines had been killed or wounded. At this rate, he'd be back down to the single platoon he was supposed to be commanding in another hour and a half.

  "What now, Skip?" Huang asked, gazing up the broad, triple stairwell to the next floor. The air was so thick with smoke that even their thermal imaging systems were half-blinded, but Huang could make out the bodies of three Marines-one Republican and two Rump-tangled together on the smoldering treads of the central stair.

  "We go up after them," Stanislaus said grimly. "And we don't take any fucking chances."

  Huang looked at him, and Stanislaus gestured at the body-laden stairs with the grenade launcher he'd found to replace his rifle.

  "I gave them the option of surrendering," he said harshly. "Those two said they wanted to accept. And when Hwang went up to collect their weapons, one of them shoved an armor-piercing grenade up against her chest and detonated it." His expression was grim, even harsher than his voice. "They don't get another chance to do that, Tse-lao."

  Huang looked at him for another moment, then nodded.

  "I can live wi
th that," he said almost conversationally.

  "Good." Stanislaus showed his teeth in a smile that belonged on something out of the Beaufort depths, then waved a hand at the lift shafts beside the stairwell.

  "I don't see an easy way to do this, Tse-lao," he said. "I can't get a good read through the floor and all the other interference, but I'm pretty sure there can't be more than four or five of them left, at most. Unfortunately, that's still enough for at least one of them to be covering the stairs and each of the lift shaft banks we've found. And I'm pretty sure we've found them all, because if we hadn't, they'd be beating feet out of here by now."

  Huang nodded again. The remaining handful of defenders had to know what was going to happen to them. Fanatic or no, if they had a way out, they would already have taken it-if only in hopes of linking up with others of their kind to continue their resistance.

  "Since that's the way it is," Stanislaus continued grimly, "and since they obviously aren't interested in surrendering, the way I see it our only real option is to launch an attack straight up the stairs. They can't cover all three flights without spreading out, and the stair wells are wide enough that we can at least come at them more than one at a time each way. But I'm not real interested in paying the price an assault up the stairs is going to cost if we press it all the way. So what I'm figuring is that we push them hard enough to make them honor the threat. If they don't pull people off the lift shafts to hold us here, we'll bull through and take them out frontally. If they do pull people off the lift shafts-which I think they will-that's when you take what's left of Third Platoon up the shafts and hit them from behind."

  "Skipper, I think that I should-"

  "Then you think wrong," Stanislaus said flatly. "You're going up the shafts; I'm going up the stairs."

  Huang looked like a man who clearly wanted to argue harder, but he clamped his mouth shut and nodded curtly, instead.

  "Good," Stanislaus said again, softly, and smacked him on one armored shoulder. "Get your people in position. Let me know when you're ready."

  "Gold One, Gold Two. We're ready when you are, Skipper."

  "Gold Two, Gold One. All right, Tse-lao. On our way." Stanislaus looked around once more, then nodded to himself. "All right, people," he said. "Let's do it. Now."

  His Marines opened fire instantly. They'd expended a lot of ammunition on their way to this point, but they also had been liberating replacement rounds from dead Rump holdouts and their own wounded and dead, and a firestorm of destruction roared up the stairwell. Grenades sailed up through the storm front of flechettes and penetrators, and the grenadiers bounced them skillfully off the walls, sending them ricocheting around the bends in the stairwells.

  It seemed impossible for anything to survive in the face of that much firepower, but return grenades came rattling and bouncing down the stairs in reply. They exploded mostly harmlessly, although they ignited fresh fires all around Stanislaus' Marines, but they constituted a grim warning that there were still live defenders waiting up there.

  "First Team, move!" Stanislaus snapped, and a trio of armored Marines leapt for the center of the three stairs, moving as quickly as their jump gear allowed. They got as far as the first landing and wheeled to their left, firing up the narrow gut of the stairwell. More fire shrieked back down at them, and one of them went down, yet another firefly blinking from green to red on Stanislaus' HUD.

  "Second and Third Teams!" Stanislaus barked, and six more Marines charged the other two stairs.

  As Stanislaus had hoped, First Team had drawn the attention of at least some of the holdouts. The defensive fire down the flanking stairwells was much lighter, especially on the left-hand stair. In fact, Second Team got all the way to the second landing before there was any defensive fire on that side.

  "Fourth Team!" Stanislaus said harshly, and went forward himself, leading his fourth assault group up the center stair in First Team's wake.

  A grenade plunging from above bounced off his helmet and exploded behind him, sending yet another of his people down. Then he was on his belly beside First Team's two survivors, firing his own launcher steadily up the stairs. His people were taking a murderous weight of fire, but it was unaimed. They were throwing too much of their own fire up the stairs for the defenders to expose themselves to fire back accurately. They were still taking some losses, and they couldn't keep it up forever without shooting themselves dry, but it wasn't the massacre Stanislaus had been afraid he might be sending his people into.

  He started working his way up the next flight of stairs on his belly. Even as he did, he knew it was the wrong move. He was the Marines' commanding officer. It was his job to coordinate, to manage the battle and impose control on it, not to get his idiot self shot playing "Follow me!" But this was-had to be-the final strongpoint in this entire damnable tower. That made this the last of the endless assaults they'd made to reach this point, so there was no point worrying about what happened next. And Stanislaus Skjorning couldn't-not wouldn't; literally could not-send his people up that stair before him.

  Somebody at the head of the stairs decided to expose himself, and Stanislaus cringed as a burst of aimed fire slammed into the back of his armor. The armor held, but a shrill audio alarm sounded as the already weakened section behind his left shoulder took more damage. He could feel the heat of the furnace roaring about him seeping through the damaged section. It wasn't anything the zoot couldn't handle-yet-but if he took another hit there . . .

  And then, suddenly, the fire roaring down the stairwells abruptly ceased. There was still shooting going on-a lot of it-but it was no longer aimed at Stanislaus and his assault teams. His HUD was suddenly speckled with a dozen green fireflies on the floor above him, and he bounded to his feet.

  "Come on!" he bellowed, and hit his jump gear one last time.

  The prodigious bound send him up the final flight of stairs like an old-fashioned rocket. It was, he realized, an incredibly stupid stunt which should have made him a sitting duck for any defender. But Huang's sudden thrust up the lift shafts had worked. The Rump fanatics had more immediate things to worry about as deadly accurate fire ripped into them from the rear, and they wheeled to face the shocking, unanticipated attack from behind them . . . just as Stanislaus erupted from the stairwell, already firing.

  It was a gymnasium, a corner of his mind noted. A big, open space, almost as badly on fire as the floor below, with the charred carcasses of exercise equipment looming up amid the bodies and the cases of ammunition the holdouts had stockpiled here. But only a fragment of his attention applied itself to the architecture. All the rest of it was focused on killing his enemies before they killed any more of his Marines, and he got off three grenades while he was still in midair, then touched down, still firing.

  After two hours of murderous combat which had reduced the entire tower to a seething volcano of internal fires, it was all over in less than seven seconds from the time he hit his jump gear.

  There were no Rump survivors.

  "All right, people." Stanislaus managed to keep most of his own exhaustion out of his voice as he looked around the survivors of Longbow's company. It had entered Cimmaron with two hundred and six officers and enlisted personnel; the fifty-seven survivors, less Amber Section, fitted into the fire-gutted gymnasium around him easily.

  "We've got the tower," he went on, "such as it is and what's left of it. But there's still the rest of the city out there. Let's get this area policed up. Tse-lao, make sure we've found all the wounded-theirs, if any, as well as ours. Fuchien, you're in charge of sorting through all this ordnance. We burned a hell of a lot of ammo on the way in, so let's reammo from what we've got here, as much as we can. Shu, your squad has perimeter security. Let's move, people."

  As Huang and the other two noncoms set about executing his orders, Stanislaus walked across the burning gymnasium to the tower's outer wall, looking for a clear transmission path for his com. He found a three and a half-meter breach in the wall and stepped into it.
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  "Snaphaunce One, Longbow One," he said wearily.

  "Longbow One, Snaphaunce One. What's your situation?"

  "We have the objective. I'm down to roughly sixty effectives, and low on ammo, but we've captured a good bit of ordnance. I'll need a little time to reorganize before I c-"

  "Skipper."

  Stanislaus' sentence chopped off in mid-syllable at the single word from behind him. It came over his priority dedicated link to Huang Tse-lao, but that wasn't what jerked him back around from the hole in the wall. No. What jerked him back like a garrotte about his throat was the raw, bleeding anguish in the sergeant's tone.

  "What?" he asked quickly. Huang was bent forward, as if his zoot's "muscles" had somehow failed, and he carried something in his arms. Stanislaus couldn't see see the small bundle clearly, but the sergeant was hunched over it.

  "Longbow One, Snaphaunce One," Major Urowski's voice said over his com. "Longbow One, your transmission was interrupted. Say again all after 'reorganize.' "

  Stanislaus heard him, but it was only noise, without meaning as he tried to understand what had happened to his sergeant.

  "Skipper," Huang half-sobbed. "Skipper . . . it was-Oh, sweet Jesus! This was a school, Skipper."

  Stanislaus Skjorning's heart seemed to stop. He looked around the gymnasium almost automatically, and for the first time noticed how small most of the equipment was. Realized the stature of the people it was sized to fit.

  He stepped forward, and Huang raised his helmeted head, staring at him through his battle-scarred visor while tears ran down his face. The sergeant held out his arms, and a saw-edged blade of agony went through Stanislaus as he recognized Huang's "bundle" at last as the small, horribly burned body of a little girl.

  "Dozens of them, Skip," the sergeant said hoarsely. "My God, my God-there are dozens of them, all huddled together in a classroom back there, all dead!"

  Stanislaus' soul cringed at the thought. They must have been up here, on the top floor, when those fucking lunatics decided to turn their building into a fort, he thought. Did the bastards even know they were here? Did they care? And what does it matter? My God, what they must have gone through before we killed them all in the end.