We Few

by David Weber

  "Like hell," Peterson's second in command said, his hand on his pistol.

  "Always the hard way," Rastar sighed, and squeezed his trigger. The bead blew the holstered weapon right out from under the corporal's hand, and the cop bellowed in shock—not unmingled with terror—and jerked his ferociously stinging fingers up to cradle them against his breastplate.

  "No!" Rastar snapped as two of the other cops started to draw their own weapons. "He's not injured. But you have a very small area at the top of your armor where you're vulnerable. I can kill every one of you before you draw. Trust me on this."

  "And you won't get a chance to, anyway," one of the Diasprans said, lowering a razor-sharp pike until it rested on one of the cop's shoulders. The small group of police looked around... into a solid wall of pikes.

  Two more Diasprans stepped forward and began collecting weapons. They tossed them to Rastar, who caught the flying pistols neatly as the Diasprans secured the police.

  "How many guns do you need?" Peterson demanded.

  "I generally use four," Rastar said, "but larger caliber. They're on their way." He mounted his civan and looked at the Palace, a kilometer away. "This isn't going to be pretty, though."

  "Two-gun mojo can't hit the broadside of a barn," one of the cops said angrily.

  "Two-gun mojo?" Rastar asked, turning the civan.

  "Firing two guns at once, you idiot," the sergeant said. "I cannot believe this is happening!"

  "Two guns?"

  Rastar turned to look at the police aircar, and his hands flashed. Four expropriated bead pistols materialized in his grip as if by magic and he emptied all four magazines. It sounded as if he were firing on full automatic, but when he was done, there were four holes, none of them much larger than a single bead, punched neatly through the aircar's side panel.

  "Two guns are for humans," he said mockingly as he reloaded from one of the officers' expropriated ammunition pouches. Then he turned towards the Palace and drew his sword as the first explosion detonated in the background.

  "Charge!"

  Jakrit Kiymet keyed her communicator as an explosion rumbled in the distance.

  "Gate Three," she said, frowning at the line of trucks setting up for the Festival.

  "Military shuttles and stingships detected in Imperial City air space," the command post said tautly. "Be ready for an attack."

  "Oh, great," she muttered, looking around. She'd been pulled from guarding Adoula Industries warehouses and made a member of the Empress' Own. That was usually a job for Marines, but she'd known better than to ask questions when she was told to "volunteer." Still, it didn't take a Marine to know that defending the Palace from stingships in her current position—standing in front of the gate, armed with a bead rifle—was going to be rather difficult.

  "What am I supposed to do about stingships?" she demanded in biting tones.

  "You can anticipate a ground assault, as well," the sergeant in the distant, and heavily fortified, command post said sarcastically. "The Palace stingship squadron is powering up, and the response team is getting into armor. All you have to do is stand your post until relieved."

  "Great," she repeated, and looked over at Diem Merrill. "Stand our post until relieved."

  "Isn't that what we do anyway?" the other guard replied with a chuckle. Then he stopped chuckling and stared. "What the... ?"

  A line of riders mounted on—dinosaurs?—was thundering across the open ground of the Park. They appeared to be waving swords, and they were followed by a line of infantry with the biggest spears either of the guards had ever seen. And...

  "What in the hell is that thing?" Kiymet shouted.

  "I don't know," Merrill replied. "But I think you ought to tell them to go active!"

  "Command Post, this is Gate Three!"

  * * *

  "And... time."

  Bill swung the airvan out of traffic and dropped it like a hawk at the back door of the "neighborhood association."

  Dave had opened the side door as they dropped, and Trey put two beads into each of the guards as Clovis rolled out of the vehicle under his line of fire. The entry specialist hit the ground before the airvan was all the way down, and crossed the alley at a run. He put the muzzle of his short, heavy-caliber bead gun against the lock of the door and squeezed the trigger. Metal cladding shrieked and sprayed splinters in a fan pattern as the twelve-millimeter bead punched effortlessly through it. One bead for the deadbolt, one for the handle, and then Dave kicked the door open as he hurtled past Clovis and charged through it.

  Three guards spilled out of the room just inside the entryway. Their response time was excellent, but not excellent enough, and Clovis dropped to one knee, taking down all three of them as Dave went past.

  "Corridor one, clear," he said.

  * * *

  Roger keyed the last of a long series of boxes and lifted the plasma cannon. He and his team were ninety seconds behind schedule.

  "Show time," he muttered as the door slid backwards, and then up.

  The power-armored guard outside the Palace command post door whirled in astonishment as the solid wall of the deeply buried corridor abruptly gaped wide. His reflexes, however, were excellent, and he was already lifting his own heavy bead gun when Roger fired. The plasma blast took off the guard's legs and sent him flipping through the air, and Roger's second shot took out the other guard while the first was still in midair.

  That left the CP door itself. The portal was heavily armored with ChromSten, but Roger had dealt with that sort of problem before. He keyed the plasma gun to bypass the safety protocols and pointed it at the door, sending out a continuous blast of plasma. The abuse risked overheating the firing chamber and blowing the gun, and probably its user, to hell. It also made the weapon useless for further firing, even if it survived. But this time, the gun held up, and the compressed metal door ended up with a body-sized hole through its center, while the corridor looked like a rainy day on the Amazon—or a normal Mardukan afternoon—as the Palace sprinkler system came to life.

  Roger dropped the now useless cannon and let Kaaper take the entry while he followed at the four position. It felt odd to follow someone else in, but Catrone had been right. Roger was the only person they literally could not afford to lose if some idiot decided to play hero. But there were no lunatics inside the command post. None of them were armored, and although they had bead pistols, they knew better than to try them against armor.

  "Round 'em up," Roger said, and strode over to the command chair.

  "Out," he said over his armor's external speakers.

  "Like hell," the mercenary in the chair said.

  Roger raised a bead pistol, then shrugged inside his armor.

  "I'd really like to kill you," he said, "but it's unnecessary."

  He reached out and picked the post commander up by his tunic. The burly mercenary might as well have been weightless, as far as Roger's armor's "muscles" were concerned, and the prince tossed him across the room contemptuously. The erstwhile commander slammed into the bunker's armored wall with a chopped-off scream, then slithered bonelessly down it. Roger didn't even glance at him. He was too busy punching a code on the command chair's console.

  "Identification: MacClintock, Roger," he said. "Assuming control."

  "Voiceprint does not match authorized ID," the computer responded. "MacClintock, Roger, listed as missing, presumed dead. All codes for MacClintock, Roger, deactivated. Authorization: MacClintock, Alexandra, Empress."

  "Okay, you stupid piece of electronics," Roger snarled. "Identification: MacClintock, Miranda, override Alpha-One-Four-Niner-Beta-Uniform-Three-Seven-Uniform-Zulu-Five-Six-Papa-Mike-One-Seven-Victor-Delta-Five. Our sword is yours."

  There was a long—all of three or four seconds—pause. Then—

  "Override confirmed," the computer chimed.

  "Deactivate all automated defenses," Roger said. "Lock out all overrides to my voice. Temporary identity: MacClintock, Roger... Heir Primus."

/>   * * *

  The automatic bead guns on the Palace walls opened up. They took down the dozen civan immediately behind Rastar in a single burst and traversed for a second.

  Then they stopped.

  "Thank you, My Prince," Rastar said under his breath. "Thank you for giving my people their lives, twice over."

  Civan ran with long, loping strides, heads down and flipping tails balancing them behind. Rastar lay forward over his own beast's neck, all alone now and far out in front of the others. Only Patty had managed to keep pace with him, and the bead guns which had cut down his troopers had wounded her, as well. The big flar-ta was more enraged than hurt, however, and Rastar heard her thunderous bellows overtaking him from behind. He drew all four bead guns as they neared the gate, but the two guards at the gate, after a single burst of fire aimed at nothing in particular, turned around and hit the gate controls. The portal opened, and they darted through it.

  The gate had opened just far enough to admit them, and it began closing immediately. Couldn't have that.

  "Eson!" Rastar bellowed to the mahout on Patty's back.

  Patty had had a very bad month.

  First, the only rider with whom she'd ever had a decent sense of rapport had disappeared, replaced by someone who acted the same way, but just didn't smell right. Then she'd been loaded on ships—horrible things—prodded, led around, carted to different planets, unloaded, loaded again, and generally not treated at all as she'd come to expect. And most of the time the food had been simply awful. Worst of all, she hadn't even been able to let her frustration out. She hadn't been permitted to kill anything at all since before even the last breeding season.

  Now she saw her chance. She'd been pointed at those little targets, and they were getting away. Yes, she'd been pinpricked, but flar-ta were heavily armored on the front, lightly armored on the sides, and rather massive. The bleeding wounds lined across her left shoulder, any one of which would have killed a human, weren't really slowing her down. And as the human guards tried to escape from her wrath, and the idiot on her back prodded at the soft spot on her neck, she sped into the unstoppable killing gallop of the flar-ta and lowered her head to ram the gate.

  The twin leaves of Gate Three were marble sheathing over a solid core of ChromSten. If they'd been shut and locked, no animal in the galaxy could have budged them. But the integral, massive plasteel bolts had been disengaged to let the fleeing guards pass, and the only thing holding them at the moment was the hydraulic system which normally moved them. Those hydraulics were rather heavy—they had to be, to manage the weight of the ChromSten gate panels—but they weren't nearly heavy enough for what was coming at them.

  The impact sound was like a flat, hard explosion. Marble sheathing shattered, one of Patty's horns snapped off... and the moving gates flew backward.

  The mahout on Patty's back went flying through the air, and Patty herself stopped dead in her tracks. She rocked backward heavily as her rear legs collapsed, then sat there, shaking her head muzzily and giving out a low bellow of distress.

  * * *

  Rastarreached the gate, still far ahead of any of the others, and he reined in his civan and leapt from the saddle before it had slid to a stop.

  The flar-ta had prevented the gates from closing, but her huge bulk had the archway leading to the gate half-blocked. There was little room to get past her—barely room for two or three civan riders at a time—and even as he watched, the hydraulics recovered and the armored panels started to close again. He darted forward, drew one of his daggers, and slammed it into the narrow crack under the left-hand gate. The panel continued to move for a moment, but then the blade caught. The gate rode up it, grinding forward, scoring a deep gouge into the courtyard's pavement. Then there was a crunching sound, and it stopped moving.

  He repeated the maneuver with the right-hand gate, then drew his bead pistols as rounds begin to crack around his head. Humans in combat suits, which could stop rounds from bead pistols, were pouring into the courtyard from the Empress' Own's barracks. Most of them looked pretty confused, but the stalled flar-ta and the Mardukan were obvious targets.

  More beads whipcracked past him, dozens of them. But if he allowed them to push him back, regain control of the gateway even momentarily, they would be able to unjam the gates and close them after all. In which case, the assault on the North Courtyard would fail... and Roger and everyone with him would die.

  In the final analysis, human politics meant very little to Rastar. What mattered to him were fealty; his sworn word; the bonds of friendship, loyalty, and love; and his debt to the leader who had saved what remained of his people and destroyed the murderers of his city. And so, as the ever-thickening hail of fire shrieked around his ears and pocked and spalled the Palace's wall's marble cladding, he raised all four pistols and opened fire. He wasted none of his rounds on torso or body shots which would have been defeated by his foes' combat suits. Instead, he searched out the lightly armored spot at the throat, the vulnerable chink, no larger than a human's hand.

  The combat-suited mercenaries recruited to replace the slaughtered Empress' Own weren't combat troops, whatever uniform they might wear. They were totally unprepared for anything like this, and those in the front ranks looked on in disbelief as bead after bead punched home, ripping through the one spot where their protective suits were too thin to stop pistol fire. No one could do what that towering scummy was doing.

  Humans went down by twos and threes, but there were scores of them. Even as Rastar began dropping them, their companions poured fire back at him, and the calf of his left leg exploded as a rifle bead smashed it. Another bead found his lower right arm. His mail slowed the hypervelocity projectile, but couldn't possibly stop it, and the arm dropped, useless. Another slammed through his breastplate, low on the left side, and he slumped back against the flar-ta, three pistols still firing, still killing. More beads cracked and screamed about him, but he kept firing as his civan brothers thundered across the final meters of the Park to reach him. He heard their war cries, the sounds of the trumpets sweeping up behind him, as he had upon so many battlefields before, and another bead smashed his left upper arm.

  He had only two pistols now, and they were heavy, so heavy. He could barely hold them up and a strange haze blurred his vision. He knew he was finally missing his targets—something which had never happened before—but there were still beads in his magazines, and he sent them howling towards his foes.

  Another bead hit him somewhere in the torso, and another hit his lower left arm, but there were fewer humans now, as well, and his civan brothers were here at last. He had held long enough, and the riders of Therdan poured past him, forcing their way through the gate, taking brutal casualties to close with the humans where their swords could come into play. Combat suits might stop high velocity projectiles, but not cold steel in the hands of the Riders of the North, and Prince Jackson's mercenaries staggered back in panicky terror as the towering Mardukans and screaming civan rampaged through them and reaped a gory harvest.

  And the Diasprans were there as well, climbing over the flar-ta, charging forward with level pikes while others picked up the weapons of fallen human guards. They were there. They were through the gate.

  He set down his last pistol, the pistol that had been light as a feather and now was heavy as a mountain, and lay back against the leg of the flar-ta which had carried his Prince, his friend, so far, so far.

  And there, on an alien plain, in the gateway of the palace he had held for long enough, long enough, did Rastar Komas Ta'Norton, last Prince of fallen Therdan, die.

  "What's happening?"

  "Looks like a dogfight in Imperial City, Sir," Admiral Prokourov's intelligence officer said. "I don't know who against who, yet. And we've got the communications lag, so—"

  A priority message icon flashed on the admiral's communicator console, and Prokourov tapped the accept key.

  "Prok," General Lawrence Gianetto said from the screen, five minutes after
the message had been transmitted from his office on Old Earth. "Roger's back. He's trying to take the Palace. We've got stingships and powered armor on our backs. Get into orbit and prepare to give fire support to the Empress' Own."

  "Right." The admiral nodded unhappily. "I don't suppose I could get that order direct from the Empress, could I?"

  Larry Gianetto scowled at the wallpaper in the two quadrants of his com display dedicated to CarRon 14 and CarRon 12. That bastard Kjerulf had locked him out of the Moonbase communications system completely, and the general made a firm resolution to have the system architecture thoroughly overhauled after the current situation had been dealt with. And after he'd personally seen Kjerulf dangling in a wire noose.

  At the same time, and even through his fury, he knew it wasn't really the system's fault. His office was in Terran Defense HQ, which was the administrative heart of the Imperial military, but Moonbase was the Sol System's operational headquarters. That was why Greenberg had been on Luna instead of with one of his squadrons; because, in effect, Moonbase was the permanently designated, centrally placed flagship of Home Fleet. Every recon platform, system sensor, and dedicated command loop was routed through Moonbase, which was also the toughest, nastiest fortress ever designed by humans. Getting it back from Kjerulf, even after the attack on the Palace was dealt with, was going to be a gold-plated bitch, unless Gianetto had more loyalists in the garrison than he thought he did.

  But for the moment, that meant that in a single blow, Kjerulf had blinded Gianetto's eyes. He was getting the take from every sensor scattered around the system; Gianetto and his loyal squadron commanders had only what their own sensors could see. And it also meant Gianetto had to individually contact each squadron commander through alternate channels. Channels which he was not at all certain were going to be proof against Moonbase's eavesdropping, despite their encryption software.