by David Weber
“Still nothing, Altabani?” he asked his sensor tech.
“No,” she replied. “You think I wouldn’t’ve mentioned it if I’d seen anything? Shit, Norm! I know they’re on the other side of that corner, but—”
Something rattled and rolled on the far side of the hatch, caroming along the bulkheads.
“Grenade!” Altabani shouted as it spun its way up to the far side of the blast door and stopped abruptly when the Manticoran who’d thrown it activated the tiny tractor unit.
The Manticoran in question was nowhere near anything Mateo Gutierrez would have called adequately trained, but she did pretty well for a Navy puke. She’d watched the icon on her HUD as it bounded down the line of approach to the closed blast doors, then hit its anchoring tractor. She’d jumped the gun slightly, locking the grenade to the deck a dozen centimeters in front of the doors instead of to one of the actual panels, but that was close enough, and she hit the detonation key.
Dreyfus bounced back and sat down—hard—as the concussion came at him, transmitted through the sealed door. Altabani swore as the sensor she’d poked through one of the loopholes was destroyed, and another of Dreyfus’ troopers said something in a high, falsetto tone as blast came through his own loophole and blew him back the better part of a meter. His skinsuit and body armor were more than enough to deal with it; his cry was born of shock and surprise—and fear—more than injury.
But that was all that happened, and Dreyfus felt a surge of relief as he climbed back up onto one knee.
Altabani was already shoving another sensor into place, and Dreyfus bared his teeth at the rest of his squad.
“If that’s the best they’ve got, they’re screwed!” he announced.
* * *
“Very nice,” Gutierrez approved. “Let’s get the others in there now.”
A dozen Manticorans and Graysons sent grenades rolling around the corner, bouncing them off the bulkheads towards the blast doors.
* * *
The blast door rattled and banged and vibrated as grenades went off on the other side, but none of the new blasts were anywhere near as powerful as that first one had been, and all of them seemed to be going off at greater distances.
“Central, this is Dreyfus,” the sergeant announced over his com. “They’re making a lot of noise, but I don’t think they’re getting any further in than they are now.”
“Good!” Captain Kristoffersen replied. “Keep us informed and—”
Sergeant Norman Dreyfus’ world ended in fire and blast.
* * *
“Told you not to hurt Denny’s feelings,” MacFarlane told Gutierrez.
“I stand corrected,” Gutierrez replied, studying the wreckage with his sensor wand.
He really would have preferred a Bravo Charlie—one of the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps’ armored, counter-grav-equipped, robotic breaching charges. Of course, that would have constituted a pretty severe case of overkill against a mere civilian-grade blast door. And even though MacFarlane’s DNI-1 damage control remote hadn’t been designed for the task, it had attached its beehive shaped charge with neatness and precision under cover of the flashbangs and smoke grenades. It didn’t have the armored protection of a Bravo Charlie, but it was designed to operate in an environment which would very quickly have incinerated or demolished a standard robotic unit. If the gendarmes had noticed it coming and targeted it, they could undoubtedly have destroyed it, yet the covering flashbangs had been far too light to hurt it.
Now Gutierrez surveyed the wreckage of what had been a set of blast doors.
“Frank, Wilkie, let’s get up there and secure the doors,” he said, starting up the passageway himself. “Looks like it’s going to take a few minutes to clear the wreckage enough to move on.”
* * *
Major Pole swore as his tactical display updated itself.
The Manties weren’t actually moving all that rapidly, yet it was painfully obvious that wasn’t because his people were stopping them. He’d expected to start inflicting casualties quickly when they had to clear their way through strongpoints, but they weren’t cooperating. Instead, they were taking their time, and they appeared to have an inexhaustible supply of grenades and demolition charges. All he was really accomplishing with his “strongpoints” was to compel them to use up a few more explosives blowing their way through them.
All right. They were clearly concentrating their efforts along Axial Three, and if they kept coming through another couple of sets of blast doors, that was going to lead them into one of the commons areas Victor Seven’s designers had laid out for the habitat’s anticipated VIP inhabitants: a spacious, landscaped compartment sixty meters, across fitted with picnic tables, scattered conversational groups of chairs, and a small ornamental pool with a fountain.
His eyes narrowed. He’d wanted short, restricted firing lines on the theory that they would favor the defender over the attacker, but this Lieutenant Hearns was obviously more experienced in boarding combat than any of his people. She was making those restricted fields of fire work for her, not the defenders, so maybe what he needed was a more extended firing range.
He considered his options. Virtually all of Kristofferson’s troopers were already parceled out across the approaches, and he didn’t dare thin out his forward defenses. The last thing he needed was to open up a second invasion route! That left him only the two platoons of Captain Ascher’s understrength company. He needed to maintain at least some reserve, but if he pulled up one of her platoons to reinforce the squad Kristofferson already had covering the compartment, then ordered the other squad which was covering the blast doors between it and the Manties to fall back…
* * *
“If this brainstorm of yours is actually working, My Lady, we’re probably getting close,” Gutierrez said over his private link to Abigail. “If I were in charge on the other side, this is where I’d be stacking my fire. Nice extended sightlines, and plenty of opportunity for converging fire on the only door the other guys could come through.”
“It does look like the best opportunity for them, doesn’t it?” Abigail agreed, studying the detailed imagery from the damage control guide. “I guess the only question’s whether or not this Major Pole’s going to pull enough strength from his reserve.”
“Only one way to find out about that,” Gutierrez said philosophically.
“I know.” Abigail smiled fleetingly. “That doesn’t mean I have to like it, though. I really don’t want to be wrong about this one, Mateo.”
“Course you don’t,” he replied in a gentler tone. “But when you come down to it, you’ve got to drop the penny. I don’t know if it’ll work, either, but I think it’s our best shot.”
Abigail nodded. Her greatest fear, really, had been that the gendarmes would drag one of their Manticoran prisoners into the middle of the firefight and threaten to kill him if she and her boarders refused to back off. Given the gendarmerie’s normal disregard for civilian life—if it belonged to “neobarbs,” at least—she’d anticipated from the beginning that the Sollies would eventually call her bluff, find out if she truly was willing to continue attacking in the face of a direct threat to the prisoners. What she hadn’t been able to estimate with any confidence was how soon they might do that. It seemed unlikely they’d risk that sort of escalation until they were convinced they wouldn’t be able to stop her any other way, however, which was the entire basis of the strategy she’d adopted.
Hopefully, Major Pole was bright enough to recognize the defensive possibilities Gutierrez had just described. If he was, and if he’d committed enough of his reserve…
“All right, everybody,” she announced over the tactical net. “It’s just about time to dance. Report readiness.”
A chorus of responses came back to her, and she nodded.
“Mateo, start the music. Nicasio, let’s be about it.”
* * *
“Get ready!” Captain Ascher snapped as “Denny” blew another set of blas
t doors into wreckage.
* * *
“Now!” Lieutenant Nicasio Xamar said crisply, and the Royal Manticoran Navy personnel standing on the surface of habitat module Victor Seven moved forward.
Just finding the emergency personnel locks should have been a nontrivial challenge, and even after the Manties had found them, they should have had to burn or blast their way inside. They certainly shouldn’t have been able to override the entry codes and cycle their personnel through them without anyone noticing! But that, of course, assumed they didn’t have access to Shona Station’s classified damage control files.
* * *
“They’re behind us! They’re behind us!”
“What the hell?!”
John Pole’s head flew up as his tactical display changed abruptly. Half a dozen of his single reserve platoon’s icons went crimson in the same instant, and three more blinked from green to amber—or red—even as he watched. That couldn’t be right! The Manties couldn’t—!
“Central, they’re hitting us from—!”
The voice chopped off in mid-sentence, and Pole’s face went white as even more icons went down. Others were falling back desperately, abandoning their positions, and he heard heavy firing and explosions over the open circuit. But that wasn’t possible. There was no way the Manties could have—
“Sir, the Manties want to talk to you,” a pale-faced communications tech said. Pole stared at him, and the tech pointed at a display. Somehow the Manties had patched into the station’s “secure” communications net.
Pole stood for a moment, frozen while his brain tried to process the information coming at him. None of this could be happening, but—
“Sir?” the com tech said almost plaintively, and the major shook himself viciously back to life and turned to the indicated display.
“What?” he got out. His voice sounded strangled, even to himself, and the young woman on the display smiled coldly.
“I’m in contact with my people who have just taken control of your brig, Major,” she said flatly. “I understand at least twenty-five of your gendarmes have surrendered to them. At the moment, your people are being locked into the cells and my people are evacuating the way they came. I very much doubt you have anyone in a position to intervene…and if you do, I’d strongly recommend you don’t try it. So far, whether you believe it or not, I’ve been trying to avoid killing any more of your people than I have to. I’m perfectly prepared to abandon that approach if you insist, however.”
Her smile was icy, but her eyes were colder still, and something inside Major John Pole shriveled under their weight.
“So tell me, Major,” she invited, “which way would you like me to handle it?”
May 1922 Post Diaspora
“Oh, you ain’t seen bad yet, but don’t you go away, now. It’ll be along in a minute.”
—attributed to Simon Allenby
of the Cripple Mountain Allenbys, Swallow System.
Chapter Seventeen
“Look out!”
The screamed warning came a lifetime too late as the first obsolescent but still deadly Solarian-built Scorpion light armored fighting vehicle rounded the corner of the pastel-colored ceramacrete tower. It moved down the center of the broad boulevard, and two more AFVs followed it. Still others were visible beyond the initial trio, all wearing the presidential seal and crossed thunderbolts of the Presidential Guard.
Any doubt as to the Scorpions’ purpose was dispelled quickly, clearly, and not with anything so potentially ambiguous as words.
The Scorpion’s main weapon—a 35-millimeter grav gun—didn’t fire, but its secondary, turret-mounted tribarrel spewed out thousands of rounds of solid five-millimeter darts per minute. They struck like some terrible, solid tornado of destruction, and the front of the crowd of demonstrators disintegrated in a hideous spray of crimson and shredded flesh. Pieces of bodies flew or flopped to the pavement, and shrieks of terror replaced the furious, chanted slogans of moments before.
The stink of blood and riven human bodies buried the warm summer scent of flowers from the capital’s green belts, and the huge demonstration began to shed a torrent of panicked fugitives.
None of those fleeing people were armed. They’d come to express their opposition to President Lombroso’s régime, not to engage in pitched warfare with the black-uniformed Presidential Guard, the most feared of the Mobius System’s many security services. The current demonstration had been a long time brewing, and over half of its members belonged to Lombroso’s own System Unity and Progress Party. That didn’t mean as much as it might have, since the SUPP was the only legal political party in the entire Mobius System and party membership was a requirement for anybody who ever hoped for anything better than purely menial employment, but it probably said something that so many of System Unity’s rank and file had been willing to come out in protest of their own founder’s policies. Yet while there’d been no lack of anger in their chants’ furious denunciations of Lombroso’s tyranny and corruption, very few of those running for their lives had ever imagined a response like this one!
Not all the demonstrators were fleeing, however. Nor had all of them come unarmed. Less idealistic (or naïve, perhaps) than their fellows, those others had anticipated the Guard’s appearance and come prepared. Or they’d thought they had, anyway; the appearance of AFVs in the heart of the planetary capital when there’d been zero violence from the demonstrators surprised even them.
Despite that, weapons began to fire back from here and there in the screaming crowd. Pulsers were few and far between, since (as Lombroso and his OFS-trained Presidential Guard had explained when confiscating all modern weapons over twenty T-years earlier) the security of Mobius’ citizens was the responsibility of their government. There’s no room for vigilantism on Mobius, Citizens, thank you very much! Now move along. Nothing to see here!
Less sophisticated firearms had tended to evade the government ban on personal weapons, however, and if they were less “advanced” than pulsers, they were no less deadly if they managed to hit their targets.
The Guard infantry following the Scorpions with their body armor, shields, and high-voltage stun batons found that out the hard way. Their riot gear had served them well in confrontations with outraged college students, fired more by intellectual outrage than organized hatred. It had served well enough breaking heads to discourage the occasional general strike, or moving “squatters” out of housing they happened to own but which had been condemned under eminent domain for transfer to Lombroso’s corporate patrons. And the swaggering, self-proclaimed “elite” troopers who wore it were backed by heavier infantry and armored vehicles, even sting ships. They’d been confident no one could possibly be stupid enough to offer them actual armed resistance with all that firepower on tap to support them.
Unfortunately, this time they were wrong, and the riot gear which had always stopped improvised truncheons or thrown rocks turned out to be far less effective against bullets.
The Guard’s ranks shuddered as the return fire slammed into it. For a second or two, the troopers simply froze, unable to believe such a thing could possibly happen to them, and over forty were killed or wounded in that handful of moments. For the first time in its history, the Guard heard its own members screaming in agony as their bodies were broken and rent, as their blood soaked the pavement. Then, as if it were a single organism, the “elite” infantry turned and fled in howling panic.
The Scorpion crews were just as astonished by the ferocity of the response. Like their infantry compatriots, they’d grown accustomed to being the ones who did the killing and maiming. The notion that someone could offer them organized violence in return had never crossed their minds, and they snarled in fury as their anticipated afternoon’s amusement of slaughtering enemies of the state turned into something else.
Yet there were still plenty of those “enemies of the state” out there, and the Scorpions still had their weapons…and their armor. They swept forwar
d on their counter-grav, tribarrels raving. Dozens of demonstrators—most of whom hadn’t had a thing to do with the fire coming back at the Guard—were killed for every security trooper who’d gone down. Bodies (or parts of them, at least) piled in rows as hyper-velocity darts tore them apart, and scores of other people were trampled, many to death, in frantic efforts to escape the Scorpions’ wrath.
Unfortunately for the Guard, however, President Lombroso’s security forces hadn’t managed to confiscate all of his citizens’ modern weapons after all, and the antitank launcher on the thirtieth floor of the O’Sullivan Tower was a very modern weapon, indeed. Its kinetic projectile weighed over five kilos, despite its slender dimensions. Accelerated to thirty KPS by the man-portable gravitic launcher, it was effectively an energy weapon. The super-dense projectile struck with the equivalent energy of well over half a ton of pre-space high explosive, concentrated into a penetrator barely one and a half centimeters in diameter, and the lead Scorpion erupted in a blue-white blaze of burning hydrogen as its fuel tanks ruptured.
A second launcher took out another light tank in equally spectacular fashion, and the Scorpion crews turned their attention from the diversion of butchering demonstrators to the desperate business of self-preservation. Their weapons tracked around, trailing swaths of destruction, hammering the faces of the towers from which the fire was coming. Display windows and businesses exploded. Flames gushed through shattered ceramacrete walls. Fire alarms wailed, smoke streamed up in dense, choking columns, and another Scorpion exploded.
The others redoubled their efforts, and main gun fire joined the tornado of tribarrel darts. The 35-millimeter projectiles were substantially heavier than, and at least as fast as, the antitank penetrators, and explosions pocked the towers, blasting deep into their internal structure.
* * *
“Intolerable! Unacceptable!” President Svein Lombroso shouted, pounding on his desk blotter. “Did you see that? Do you see that?”
