“They’re re-entering.”
“Looks like it.”
“They shouldn’t do that.”
“No, they’re evidently in trouble.”
“Are they going to hit us?”
The offside hatch slammed back, and the Capuchin gunner stuck its furry face through. Clearly, it had heard her question.
“Bah!” the gunner snorted. “If the trail of ionized gases is not completely foreshortened from your point of view, then you’re several thousand meters from the impact point.”
“Will it hit the island?” Bertingas asked.
The Capuchin squinted a gunner’s eye at the falling warship. “No, southwest of us.”
“Then the operation is safe.”
“Everyone except our troops on Batavia.”
“What? How so?”
“If that thing hits at sea—and it will—it’s going to push a lot of water. A tidal wave. Right over the top of the island.”
“Quick!” Bertingas started to duck back inside, became wedged in the hatch opening against Mora’s chest. He got an arm out, placed his palm on the top of her head, and pushed her, gently but firmly, down into the ship. Then he ducked in and called to the pilot.
“Relay to the command network. ‘All personnel on Batavia to seek shelter in—’ ” He returned to the Capuchin. “How long?”
It shrugged. “Three minutes? Make it two.”
Back down to the pilot: “ ‘—in ninety seconds. Expect tidal wave.’ ”
The Cernian nodded and repeated the order.
Tad looked back up at the glittering light. It had grown brighter and wider. He could begin to see a dark, curving limb inside the flare of incandescent gases.
“Will that thing damage us? Shock wave? Radiation?” he shouted to the Capuchin.
“No data.” It shrugged.
Bertingas dropped inside the hull and pulled the hatch shut after him. A secondary clang told him the gunner had the same thought. Tad and Mora braced against the comm panel.
A deep sound like ripped canvas—the frayed mainsail of an ancient clipper coming apart under a bellying wind—jarred their airship. The fans raced as air was sucked sideways across their ducts. The dragon lurched.
In all the turbulence off the Broch’s flightpath, they never heard the splash.
The gunner went over to the keyboard shelved beside the strat tank and began pecking in numbers.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting an estimate of wave damage.”
“Good thinking.”
Distance, water depth, the Charlotten Broch’s tonnage (guessed from her navigational offset masses), and her impact velocity (guessed from a reasonable estimate of her orbital speed and braking capability). The tank’s AID came up with a wave twelve meters tall. It would damage the wharf area and drown out Batavia’s peripheral batteries. If the assault teams had all gotten the message and found shelter, then the drenching would do more to disorient and dislodge the defenders than any trick Bertingas and company had tried so far.
He studied the effects in the tank. “As soon as the wave passes,” he said to the pilot, “put us down on the spine of the island. Bring in the rest of the airbornes then, too. We go hand to hand.”
Two minutes later, Bertingas’ command dragon was grounded near the refit cradle bays. He took a repulsor rifle from the rack by the topside hatch and climbed out to join the operation’s fire teams. Mora Koskiusko was somewhere behind him, also with a weapon.
By this time, any aliens who worked on Batavia had surrendered to the advancing army of their compeers. Left to fight were the Human executives of the Haiken Maru, fanatics without hope.
Tad and Mora slid off the dragon’s forward airfoil and had just found their feet when the first shots bracketed them. One heavily weighted pellet blew a shallow crater in the syncrete beside Tad’s heel, the other punched a ragged hole in the dragon’s fiberglass outer skin four centimeters from Mora’s left hip.
He pulled her down and under cover—at least visual cover—of the airfoil.
“How long can we stay here?” Mora asked.
“Well, until—”
“From the angles, those shots had to come from the cab of that crane at two o’clock,” she said. “Give me a second ammo drum.”
“I don’t have a second—”
“Then give me the magazine from your weapon.”
Tad popped the drum out of his rifle’s breech.
“Now, when I step out,” she said, “you climb back inside and get four cassettes of ammunition and two chargepacks. And another weapon. And a handful of those grenades I saw.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Don’t look. Just go.”
With that, the woman he loved, or was starting to love, walked out into the line of fire, planted her feet wide, raised the rifle to her hip, and shot the entire drum into the crane cab. Tad could hear the whap-whap-whap of 15.5 millimeters of glass beads going supersonic. Followed by the thud-thud-thud as they punched holes in the rolled steel and plex of the cab.
“Get your ass in gear!” she snarled at him. Then she ejected the original drum and shoved in his.
More whaps as Tad climbed back over the airfoil and into the dragon. There was no return fire from the crane. He scooped up the armaments she’d ordered, told the Capuchin gunner—too late—to cover them, and ordered the Cernian to get back in the air twenty seconds after he left.
“Relay this order to all units,” Tad said. “ ‘Preserve as many of the ships in cradle as possible.’ We may need them.”
The Cernian nodded and Tad climbed out through the hatch again. Outside, Mora was standing in cleared space, turning slowly on one heel, her repulsor still riding high on one hip, its muzzle seeking new targets. She was magnificent.
Bertingas landed beside her, slung a belt of drum ammunition and a chargepack around her waist, stuffed grenades in her pockets, and went back to back with her, to cover half of their exposed area.
“Now what?” she asked.
“They’re going to take the airship out of range, and we’re going to find the—”
Tad’s voice was drowned out by a hollow, splintering, crackling sound, like sheets of fiberglass and steel being crumpled and crushed at the bottom of a deep well. He instinctively turned his head toward the dragon, but it was unmoved and untouched. He looked up.
A lancet of purple-white light hung low in the sky.
Bertingas closed his eyes immediately. “Don’t look!” he shouted to Mora.
The colors were so intense, he was sure his retinas were damaged. Maybe permanently. Maybe only temporarily. If he sensed any fading of the image in—say, fifteen seconds or so—then he would feel better.
As he waited for his eyes to clear, Bertingas studied the afterimage. The colors had overridden all other visual impressions. How wide the plasma stream had been, how far away, he had no way of knowing. Unprotected as he and Mora were below it, their lives might depend on being outside the critical five-meter diameter of the plasma’s path through medium atmosphere.
“Are we dead?” Mora asked in a whisper.
The image across Tad’s eyes was beginning to fade. He looked up and around.
“That stream must have come from the Broch,” he said slowly. “Top batteries. Fairly elevated on the curve of her hull . . .”
“We’re pretty high on the island,” Mora observed.
“Right, but if we can find the target . . .”
“If it hit anything.”
“So, what’s changed on the skyline around us?”
“That tower over there.” She pointed to the north, the right direction for anything that was on the receiving end of the plasma stream Tad had seen. “Wasn’t it . . . taller? With some kind of antenna thing on top?”
Tad studied the tower. He vaguely remembered a horned antenna, a section of parabolic seen edge-on, atop it. The horns were still there to be seen, but lower, across a thicker part of the t
ower. Then what he was seeing came into focus. A perfectly circular bite had been taken out of the middle of the tower. Syncrete and structural steel had vaporized under the wavefront of plasma. Tad could detect no fallen wreckage, no hanging pieces. Clearly, as the top of the tower collapsed, it had sagged into the still-pumping plasma and had also been vaporized.
A sheathed stream of ionized helium, heated to one million degrees Celsius, would do that.
Yes, the cut in the tower looked to be at least ten meters up the side. Bertingas pointed this out to Mora.
“So we’re safe, as long as the Broch keeps picking her targets carefully,” she said. “You were saying something about where we were going . . . ?”
“The docking control center.”
“Why there?”
“I want to shut this whole area down.”
“Oh.”
“This way.”
Tad led her across the hardpan and under the bows of a stubby merchant vessel—or perhaps it was some kind of reaction tug—that was missing half of its hull plates. The loss was the work of welding arcs and wrenches, not military action. As Tad and Mora went, no one shot at them, no one ran from them. For the middle of a pitched battle, it was strangely quiet.
They moved quickly along a high wall, part of the revetment separating the docking bay they were in from the next one over. As they neared the end of it, Tad heard footsteps—at first thinking they were an echo of his and Mora’s—before anything else.
From the other side of the wall: running feet, the clatter of bootsoles on syncrete; then voices, high and whooping; then the click, snap, and ping of weapons brought to the ready.
Bertingas took out a sonic grenade, tore off the restraint tab, flicked the spoon, and hiked the pear-shaped canister high over the wall.
Two seconds later, even Tad and Mora were slightly stunned. The sound came in four parts: a bass element, like the kettledrums in a marching band; a treble, like crunching metal and breaking crystal; a sibilance, like steel cables sliding across each other; and a ringing like all the bells of creation. It came in four parts all jammed together into a single blat of noise that their bruised ears would take a minute or more to sort out.
Tad didn’t wait for his head to clear but ran around the end of the wall and began firing, low at first and then raising his aim.
Four men, already reeling and holding their heads, danced with his beads until they flopped down. They wore the same green uniforms as the soldiers Bertingas had overcome at the hyperwave station after his long walk in the woods. He checked to make sure all were dead, and put a single mercy shot through the head of a man whose legs were gone into twitching tassels of blood, bone, and tendons.
Mora came up behind him.
“How did you know,” she asked, “from the other side of the wall, that these weren’t our own soldiers?”
“I—uh—didn’t. Actually.” Tad was embarrassed. “That’s why I threw a sonic stunner, instead of a concussion or fragging grenade. But I guessed right.”
“You’re dangerous! Even in a war.” Her voice showed exasperation and pride, mixed. “Now what?”
“Up that ladder over there.”
“I’ll go first—”
“What? Why?”
“You get off to the side and cover me. If we both go up at once, we’re both helpless.”
Bertingas nodded. He put himself in firing position against the smooth syncrete wall. Mora slung her weapon and began to climb. When she reached the top, a pair of hands came down and lifted her bodily, legs kicking, off the ladder.
Tad ran out and took aim, but Mora was gone.
He had no alternative but to climb up himself.
Bertingas went up cautiously, hand over hand, listening and peering upward. The hands came over the top at him. He shifted his rifle and took clumsy aim against his left forearm. Then a face followed the hands—the square face of Patty Firkin. Tad let his rifle slide loose on its strap.
“What are you doing up there?”
“What are you doing down there?” she answered. “All the action was topside.”
“Not all of it.”
“Yeah. Halan and I got to watch you at work. You’re dangerous.”
“That’s what everyone says . . . What’s left to do?”
“We’ve pulled the plug on this area. That shut down all the doors and drop tubes. Now we have teams going from level to level taking surrenders—or making more permanent arrangements.”
“So we’ve won.”
“Looks like it.”
“Where’s Halan? For that matter, where’s Mora?”
“I sent her up to the control center. Where he is.”
“Which way?”
“Over here.” Firkin started off, her boots ringing on the dense syncrete.
“What’s the damages?”
“On which side?”
“Ours first.”
“Of 15,000 troops landed,” she said, “we have 7,000 responding to the roll and another 3,000 under medical care. On a closed field like this, an island, with its defense force fragmented and gone to the cellars, we have to presume the remainder of our effectives to be dead rather than deserted or captured.”
“I see. That’s bad.”
The colonel shrugged. “They won. First-time troops. Against a hardened objective. How they won is, ah, secondary.”
“Go on. What’s the condition of facilities here? Specifically, those merchant ships in cradle.”
“Still evaluating. I sent a team of Capuchins in to scope out the equipment the H.M. were putting aboard. They’re jerry-built, for sure, but they still did some damage in that battle at Gemini. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Find out how many of those ships are operable,” Bertingas said. “And have the Capuchins work over these cradles. We’ll see if Gemini’s damaged destroyers—maybe their cruisers, too—can retrofit here.”
“They can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because Gemini Base is under blockade. Nothing moves. We got word of that ten minutes ago.”
“Ouch!”
They had arrived at the glassed-in control center—now missing a lot of its windows. The equipment looked mostly undamaged, except for crystals of tempered glass scattered over everything like big diamonds.
Mora was there, with Follard. They both looked grim.
“Who is it that has Gemini?” Bertingas asked. “Spile?”
“Has to be,” Mora answered.
“Then this was just a diversion . . . ”
“No, we’ve choked off one source of easy weapons,” Follard said. “We’ve also broken the powers of his best ally, at least here in Aurora Cluster.”
“Not to mention,” Firkin began, “making a political breach that will—” She stopped when the traffic board lit up.
The young Capuchin that had taken it over and dusted off the glass fragments called out: “Incoming party of five airships. Transponder on one says it’s the governor. Others make noises like the Cluster Command. Do you want to believe them?”
Follard looked suddenly tired. “Yeah. We’d better,” he replied. Then, to Bertingas: “Now’s the time to explain your little trick with the Freevid.”
“If I can . . . It would help if we had someone important here, like Valence Elidor, this station’s manager, or even the head of ship repairs—whoever’s surrendered to us—to formally turn Batavia over to Governor Sallee.”
Follard looked at Firkin. “See if you can find someone with gold braid and a contrite look. Meet us on the field. And—um—explain to this person, carefully, that if he—or she—begins to lodge a protest with the governor, he won’t outlive the interview. Make it convincing.”
“Sure, Boss.” The square-set woman went off.
“Still going to be your party, Tad,” Halan said.
Bertingas nodded.
“Then let’s go down.”
The traffic board brought the governor’s line of aircraft do
wn on the open blastway to the north of the docking center. Upon debarkation, Deirdre Sallee was surrounded—and a military eye would have said shielded, too—by ranking uniforms of the Cluster Command and the heads of department from throughout her government. The brains of Aurora Cluster, or at least the figureheads, were gathered in this one spot, vulnerable to a single concussion grenade. Bertingas looked quickly up and down the strip, at the blown-out windows and open doorways of hangars and outbuildings. One surviving Haiken Maru office boy with a repulsor could change history here.
As Halan, Tad, and their subordinates approached, one of the shielding group broke away and came toward them. Bertingas recognized the sleek head of Selwin Praise.
“You are under arrest!” Praise shouted. He turned to one of the Cluster Command brass. “Colonel, take that man prisoner!”
The officer, whose attention had been on the governor and what she was saying, looked over in surprise.
Praise advanced on the assault team.
“You’ve precipitated an unprecedented attack on a sovereign conglomerate, Bertingas. And why? Why? If any of the Haiken Maru’s ships had been used in the raid on Gemini, it was under a lawful sale of merchandise to the Arachnids. Not a military act, certainly. But you’ve given them cause now. When they are through dealing with the Central Fleet base, those ships will come here, to Palaccio and reduce it to slag. There’s not a hope in Hell that Governor Spile will ignore this cluster now. He’ll wipe us up with the bloody rags of Gemini Base. Unless we throw ourselves immediately on his mercy. You’ve reduced our options to that and that only. You’ve given us noth—are you listening to me, sirra?”
Bertingas shook his head. “Isn’t that for the governor to decide?” he asked quietly. “We’ve given her back the Cluster, or at least the military advantage in this part of it. If she wants to hang me for that, then she will. If she wants to turn me over to Aaron Spile and his Haiken Maru henchmen as a peace offering, then that’s her prerogative, too.”
Bertingas tried to walk around the man.
“You can’t evade your responsibility for this,” Praise shouted. Tad suddenly understood that he was speaking a set piece, for other ears.
“Oh, yes!” the D.ofC. declaimed. “We know it was you. We took your accomplice, the alien Rinaldi. She admitted to creating that utterly false and treasonable transmission at your direction. It put Her Excellency the Governor in a terrible position. We have Rinaldi’s working notes, also in your handwriting. There’s proof that—”
An Honorable Defense Book 1 Crisis of Empire Page 24
