“Send it, Joyce,” he said, and Eileanóra Allenby’s niece nodded.
“Sending,” she said, and tapped a transmit key.
* * *
“Fifteen minutes, Jase! Signal just came in!”
“Then I reckon it’s ’bout time we got this here excursion underway,” Jason MacGruder replied.
At the moment, his air lorry was cruising idly through the MacIntyre Gap, coming up on Fort Golden Eagle, the central command post of the Swallow System Army. Since the Swallow System had a unified military, that meant Fort Golden Eagle was the central command nexus for all of Swallow’s armed forces. More to the point of MacGruder’s present perspective, however, was that it was also the SSA’s central equipment depot. At any given time, somewhere around eighty percent of Felicia Karaxis’ ground combat vehicles and more like eighty-five percent of her aircraft were neatly lined up at Fort Golden Eagle. The numbers were a bit lower than that at the moment, given the presence Karaxis had built up around the Cripple Mountains in response to the Cripple Mountain Movement, but that was fine with MacGruder. The CMM knew exactly where all those armed air cars, APCs, and light tanks were…and thanks to Eldbrand’s generosity, there was something they could do about it.
Just as MacGruder was about to do a little something about Fort Golden Eagle.
He touched the transmit key on his dashboard com.
“Gemma, you got those power cells for me?” he asked casually.
“Told you I did,” a voice came back. “Why? You running low?”
“Nah,” he said, feeding more power to the turbines and settling to a slightly lower altitude as he accelerated down the Gap towards Fort Golden Eagle. “Just checkin’. Know you can be a bit forgetful sometimes.”
“Ha!” The reply came back with fine disdain. “That’s rich, coming from you! But don’t worry. I’ll get ’em to you right on time,” Floyd Allenby’s sister told him.
“That’s a real comfort,” MacGruder replied, and smiled as the Fort Golden Eagle perimeter beacon came up on his HUD.
* * *
“What does that idiot think he’s doing?” Major Brinton Avery demanded as the civilian icon swept towards the outer perimeter. “Don’t tell me he doesn’t know this is restricted airspace!”
“Dunno about that, Sir,” the duty sergeant replied. “Got a lot of people taking the shortcut through the Gap. Some of ’em aren’t all that careful about their navigation, either.”
“Well, this one’s about to get his ass in a heap of trouble!” Avery said, and hit the guard frequency.
“Unidentified civilian traffic at three hundred meters, eighty-five kilometers, west-southwest, this is Golden Eagle Flight Ops. You are entering restricted airspace. Turn away immediately.”
Nothing happened for a moment, then—
“Golden Eagle Flight Ops, this is Tallulah-Sierra-Niner-Two,” a voice came back. “I know it’s restricted airspace. Check your clearance list.”
Avery frowned and snapped his fingers at the duty sergeant, then pointed at her terminal. He hadn’t seen anything about a Tallulah special flight when he came on duty!
“Nothing showing here, Sir,” the sergeant said after a moment while the air lorry swept steadily closer.
“Tallulah-Sierra-Niner-Two, Golden Eagle Flight Ops. I do not—repeat, do not—show you on the clearance list. Turn away now.”
“Look, laddie,” the voice came back, “if you want to explain to General Karaxis why the stuffed snow bear Ms. Hampton told me to deliver to her for Mr. Parkman isn’t in her office by sundown, that’s fine with me. But if you don’t want to explain that, then you’d better find me on your list!”
Oh, crap, Avery thought. The one thing that’ll get my ass canned in a heartbeat is to piss off the General. But, damn it, they aren’t on the list!
He punched in a command, swiveling the main camera head, and his frown deepened as the oncoming lorry sprang into sharp focus on his visual display. The vehicle was definitely painted in Tallulah’s livery, and its shiny, freshly polished look suited someone delivering a personal gift to Felicia Karaxis from Alton Parkman. It was a full-sized Torro-class heavy-lift lorry, not a mere van—way too big to be transporting a single snow bear. But, of course, that wasn’t necessarily the only thing it had aboard.
None of which solved his problem.
He frowned for another long moment’s thought, then drew a deep breath as the lorry crossed the inner perimeter.
“Tallulah-Sierra-Niner-Two, Golden Eagle Ops,” he said. “You are not—repeat, not—cleared to the primary field. Divert to Bravo Three. You’ll be met by a security team and—”
* * *
“…a security team and—”
“Reckon it’s about time.” Jason MacGruder’s tone was relaxed, almost casual, but sweat beaded his forehead as the glanced at the young man seated beside him. “Jessop?”
“Go for it,” Jessop Allenby replied tautly.
MacGruder slammed the throttle through the gate and the turbines, borrowed from one of Cripple Mountain Search and Rescue Command’s high-speed, heavy-lift rescue ships, howled.
* * *
“Good seal,” the docking bay controller announced as Truman Rodriguez’s shuttle settled into the buffers and the personnel tube mated with its hatch.
“Thank you,” Rodriguez acknowledged pleasantly, then smiled as Vincent Frugoni and ninety heavily armed men and women stormed through that tube and into Donald Ulysses and Rosa Aileen Shuman Space Station.
Fortunately for the bay controller, he was a very fast-thinking man. He got his hands up in less than 2.5 seconds.
* * *
“What the—?!” the duty sergeant began, and Brinton Avery’s stomach turned to ice as he realized he’d waited too long to divert the Tallulah air lorry.
It sprang forward at at least twice its listed maximum velocity, and a corner of his brain wondered exactly what had been done to its engines. It was only a very tiny corner, though. All the rest of it was focused on the deadly stream of cluster munitions spilling from its belly hatch. The programmable weapons’ stubby wings popped out, they banked sharply away from the lorry, and Avery watched in something that longed desperately to be disbelief as they blanketed Fort Golden Eagle’s primary ground armor park in a red-and-white surf of chemical explosives.
His hand darted out without any conscious decision on his part and his thumb jammed down on the emergency alert button. Alarms began to warble all over the base, duty sections raced to man their weapons, but no one had expected anything like this! As he watched, the improvised bomber changed course. It swept across the parked air cav mounts and atmospheric sting ships with that seemingly inexhaustible store of cluster bombs still tumbling from its belly hatch, and the bright blue flare of exploding hydrogen reservoirs ripped through them in its wake. It didn’t get all of them, of course, but it got most of them. And as it dropped down on the deck, screaming across the military reservation at just under Mach 1, false panels on its exterior blew free and a quartet of Rattlesnake Ground Attack Missiles blasted from their concealment.
One of the pre-programmed, precision guided weapons took out the three ready-duty sting ships on the parking apron. The second impacted directly on the base’s central air-defense station; and the third and fourth blew the transmitting masts atop Felicia Karaxis’ HQ building into blazing wreckage.
* * *
The man in the Tallulah Security Enterprises uniform looked up in astonishment as the door to TSE’s on-station com center opened abruptly and half a dozen heavily armed men and women swept into the compartment.
“Don’t!” the tall, brown-haired woman at their head said sharply, but instinct had already betrayed him. His hand scrabbled at the pulser holstered at his side, and a single shot from the ugly flechette gun in her hands cut him almost in half.
“Damn,” Master Sergeant Alexandra Mikhailov (retired) said almost mildly. “Wish he’d been smarter.”
* * *
Major Avery stared sickly at the flame, smoke, and debris rising in the air lorry’s wake, trying to understand how a single vehicle could have wreaked such havoc. Flames vomited from the HQ block, the Rattlesnake hit on Air Defense Central sent an evil, anvil-headed cloud heavenward, and he saw men and women bursting out into the open, staring up in shock and confusion. The lorry squatted low to the ground, screaming directly west across the thousand-square kilometer area set aside for training maneuvers at barely fifty meters. No one on the ground was remotely capable of effective action as it swung further north, streaking back up MacIntyre Gap at that same, preposterous speed.
And as it sped north, drawing every eye to its passage, over a dozen more heavily modified civilian vehicles—lorries, vans, and at least one search-and-rescue skimmer—came slicing up from the south.
Air Defense Central’s destruction fatally compromised Fort Golden Eagle’s aerial defenses, and those vehicles spread out across the base. Heavy tribarrels, delivered courtesy of Harvey Eldbrand and fitted to most of those “civilian vehicles,” spat rivers of explosive darts. They went through the surviving air cavalry mounts and the armored ground vehicles like chainsaws of fire, leaving broken, blazing wreckage in their trail, and two of them swooped down on the already blazing HQ block and put a dozen smaller missiles—mixed high explosive and incendiary—into the SSA’s central command nexus.
* * *
Leroy Yelland looked up from his cards as the ready room door slammed open.
“What the f—?!” he began, then froze and sat very, very still as Master Sergeant Mikhailov showed him the muzzle of her flechette gun.
Abiola Wilhelmsen, the other ready-duty sting ship pilot, and Ramiro Maxwell, one of the squadron’s maintenance techs, sat just as still. Wilhelmsen laid his cards face down on the table and carefully raised both hands. Maxwell simply sat paralyzed, his eyes huge.
“Nice to see some sanity this time,” Mikhailov said with a thin, cold smile. “Now if the lot of you will come this way, please?”
Her twitched flechette gun summoned all three TSE employees out of their chairs like a magic wand. Two of the armed civilians with her took charge of them, ushering them roughly, though not brutally, out of the ready room and into the lounge area next door.
As they entered the lounge, Yelland saw another forty or fifty TSE and Tallulah Corporation personnel seated at the food court’s tables. One of his own keepers used her military-grade pulse rifle to point at an unoccupied table.
“Why don’t you fellas have a sit-down?” Her genial tone fooled none of them. “You just keep your hands on the table top or the top of your heads, whichever you prefer, and you’ll do just fine. Let those hands go wanderin’, though, and—”
She shrugged, but one glance at the pair of flechette gun-armed men positioned to cover the entire room without intruding into one another’s lines of fire completed the sentence quite adequately in Leroy Yelland’s opinion.
He sat with his back to the rest of the lounge and his mind raced in at least a dozen directions at once, like an entire cage of crazed hamsters, while it tried to figure out what the hell was happening. Then his eyes widened as a quartet of men and women in flight suits jogged past the lounge’s open door.
* * *
“Good morning, people,” Vincent Frugoni said as the lift car’s doors opened and he and the fifteen CMM fighters with him stepped out onto Dumber Ass’ central control room. Another thirty of his people had peeled off on the way here—moving with the smooth precision of the Solarian Marines, thanks to Alexandra Mikhailov’s training—and secured the route from the shuttle bay to the space station’s electronic brain.
The control room personnel whirled at the sound of his voice, and he heard someone swear in surprise as the CMM’s numbers—and armament—registered.
“This space station is now under the control of the Cripple Mountain Movement,” he continued, mostly accurately. “As of this moment, all communications are down unless I tell you differently. That includes you, Ms. MacDerry!” he said sharply as one com tech’s hand twitched towards her panel.
She snatched her hand back into her lap and stared at him goggle-eyed, more surprised by the fact that he knew her name than that he’d seen her hand move. He smiled and twitched the muzzle of the pulser in his hand.
“In fact, just to keep any of your colleagues from doing anything foolish, why don’t all of you move over here by Commander Hewitt.” He nodded almost companionably to the station’s administrator, standing rigid and still frozen in shock. “That way we can keep an eye on all of you without getting cricks in our necks,” he told MacDerry. None of them moved for an instant, and his face hardened. “Now, people,” he said in a quiet tone more terrifying than any bellow, and feet scrambled suddenly to obey him.
“Better,” he said.
* * *
“Yo.” Floyd Allenby answered his com laconically and listened for a moment, then nodded. “Thanks,” he said, equally briefly. He cut the connection and punched in another combination, looking down through the icy, crystal Cripple Mountains’ morning at the Swallow System Army’s Camp Justice, well over two thousand meters below him.
He could think of very few less appropriate names for the sprawl of temporary barracks, the vehicle park, and the air cav mounts parked on its small airfield. Although, he reflected, there was a certain amount of “justice” in what was about to happen to it.
The com chimed at him, announcing the establishment of the programmed conference call.
“Sandra’s coming,” he said quietly.
* * *
Colonel Brenda Johnson sipped orange juice, then set the glass back down and reached for her fork once more. Johnson was a member of the System Security Force, and the SSF was the component of the system’s military which corresponded most closely to an actual police force. As such, she sometimes wondered how she’d wound up in command of Camp Justice. She was a Lowland girl, and these mountains were cold enough to freeze the ass off a statue. The people who lived in them were no great prize, either. But at least the food was good, and—
The first shoulder-fired missile came shrieking down the morning sky from the high ridge to the east. It slammed directly into the tank farm for Camp Justice’s ground vehicles and air cav, and a huge fireball of exploding hydrogen soared into the heavens. The next half dozen missiles—with blast-fragmentation and incendiary warheads—landed a heartbeat later, ripping into the camp’s crowded barracks and mess halls.
Men and women screamed in agony as they were blown apart, scourged by blast and shrapnel, or set afire. Some of the wounded rolled on the ground, beating at their flaming clothing. Others simply ran in panic, and the wind of their passage fanned the flames higher.
The launchers along the ridgeline reloaded, and a second wave of explosions ripped through the camp’s vehicle park. Armored units exploded and air cav mounts tumbled end for end as the shockwaves clawed at them.
Then the mortars to the north opened fire, adding their heavier, even more destructive hate to the holocaust, and the three heavy tribarrels concealed on the slope eight hundred meters below Allenby’s position opened up, pouring their devastating fire into the sea of smoke and flame.
Colonel Johnson, her XO, and his immediate subordinate were all dead before the first tribarrel dart arrived on its target. And at exactly the same moment, at six other locations covering the approach to the Cripples, six other base commanders’ breakfasts suffered the same fiery interruption.
* * *
“Now you two just remember the plan,” Rachel Lamprecht said in a calm, matter-of-fact tone as she and Staff Sergeant Laszlo Hiratasuka (also retired) led the way into the launch bay. “The important thing is for both of you to take your time getting the feel of the controls, right?”
Joyce Allenby nodded, hoping she didn’t look as nervous as she probably did, and glanced at Orrin MacGruder. She and Orrin were highly skilled pilots. In fact, both of them carried Unlimited Licenses, a
nd Orrin had taken the Swallow Trans-Atmospheric Racing Association’s Donald Ulysses Shuman Memorial Cup in the last season before Sandra Allenby’s death. Neither of them, however, had ever piloted a sting ship in their lives.
Fortunately, that was exactly what Lamprecht and Hiratasuka had spent the last twenty or thirty T-years doing. And they’d rigged simulators aboard a pair of Sky Shark-class racing ships when they arrived as “tourists” on one of Vincent Frugoni’s charters from Wonder six T-months ago. It wasn’t the same as actual sting ship cockpit time, but it was a hell of a lot better than nothing!
“Remember,” Lamprecht continued as they crossed the bay to the two ready-duty ships, “TSE uses Lanza Corporation’s Relámpago-class ships, and the Relámpagos actually aren’t quite as hot as the Sky Shark. They’re more maneuverable out of atmosphere because they’ve got heavier grav plates that let you pull higher gees, but their top acceleration rate’s a good ten gees lower.”
The shaven-headed Hiratasuka was punching commands into the bay’s central console, and green standby lights flickered to amber above the docking hatches of a second pair of sting ships while the automated systems began loading missiles onto the external racks.
“They’ve got a lot more endurance, too, of course,” Lamprecht went on. “What matters most at the moment, though, is that with those Frontier Fleet bastards gone, we’ve just taken control of the only exo-atmo armed ships in the entire frigging star system.” Her smile was fiercely predatory, and her brown eyes glittered. “I don’t think Shuman and Parkman are going to like that one little bit!”
Chapter Forty-Seven
“Ms. Terekhov is here, Sir,” the midshipman escort said, and Admiral Augustus Khumalo walked around his desk with his hand held out as the elegantly dressed red-haired woman stepped into his day cabin.
“Ms. Terekhov!” he said as her slender hand disappeared into his far more massive one. “I can’t tell you how pleased I am to meet you.”
His tone, Sinead noted, was sincere. But it carried an edge which suggested his pleasure at seeing her might not be completely un-flawed.