CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Captain of the Faithful Williams paced back and forth across the command room and gnawed his lower lip. He'd been picked for this post in no small part for his piety—now that very piety fanned his fury at the disaster wreaked by a woman. And violently though he tried to deny it, there was fear in his fury. Fear for himself and for God's Work. The Apostate admiral whoring for the Manticoran bitch had stopped demanding his surrender; that could only mean they were prepared to try something more direct.

But what? Williams didn't know, and ignorance shuddered in his blood like another layer of anger. That bitch! If she hadn't come back—back to a star system neither she nor her whore of a queen had any business in—Masada would have completed God's Work. But she had come back, she and her accursed ships, and smashed the entire remaining Navy except Virtue and Thunder in two short days. She'd set herself against God's Work and Will, just as women always had, and Williams cursed her with silent ferocity as he paced.

It wasn't supposed to happen like this. As Blackbird Base's CO, he'd known about Maccabeus, known all the military maneuvers were but window dressing for the real operation, and he'd wondered, deep inside, if perhaps the Elders weren't being just a bit too clever. Yet they'd spent decades creating the Maccabeans, and the Apostates' security had never suspected a thing. Surely that had been a sign God approved! And then the heathen Havenites had offered the final, crucial ingredient, the means to create the crisis Maccabeus needed. What better proof of the workings of God's Will could there be than the opportunity to use infidels against the Apostate?

Yet Williams had doubted, and in the nightmares which had haunted him since Jericho—and especially since the bitch's return—a fresh doubt had tormented him. Had his lack of Faith turned God's Heart from them? Had it been he who allowed Satan's bitch and her ships to thwart the Work?

Such thoughts could not be allowed, yet neither could he stop them. Even prayer and penance had failed him, but his sleepless nights had revealed another truth. Satan's servants must be punished, and so he had punished them, hoping to turn God's Wrath from the Faithful by proving his own Faith anew.

And he'd failed. God still turned His Heart against His Faithful. Why else had Thunder of God not returned to destroy the bitch? Why else had Blackbird's missiles failed to destroy even a single LAC? There could be no other answer, and as he paced and worried and fury knotted his belly, he prayed desperately for God to turn once more to His People and save them.

"Covington reports ready, Major."

"Thank you." Tomas Ramirez acknowledged the report and looked up. Sergeant Major Babcock stood beside him in the crowded pinnace troop bay, her gray eyes cool and very still in the open visor of her battle armor, and a pulser tri-barrel thrust up behind her right pauldron. "Are we ready, Gunny?"

"Aye, Sir. All weapons checked, and Cap'n Hibson's company and the HQ section are armored up. We had to downcheck one set of armor, but Apollo had a prepped spare. The Captain says she's ready to drop."

"Good, Gunny," Ramirez murmured, and silently thanked God that Susan Hibson's last assignment had been with one of the heavy assault battalions. She'd spent it practicing exactly the sort of thing her people faced today, which was why he'd made her Fearless's designated assault commander the day she came aboard.

"Give me a direct feed to Covington."

"Aye, Sir," the com tech replied, and a tone beeped as Ramirez's armor com dropped into the circuit.

"Covington, this is Ramrod. Do you copy?"

"Covington copies, Ramrod. Go ahead."

"Begin your drops, Covington. I say again, begin your drops."

"Covington copies," the voice in his earphones said. "Beginning drops now. May God go with you, Ramrod."

"Thank you, Covington. Ramrod clear." The major punched a chin switch to plug into the Manticoran net. "Ramrod to Decoy Flight. Commence your runs."

"Aye, Ramrod. Decoy Flight copies. Beginning our runs."

"Captain Williams!"

Williams whirled at the shout. His plotting officer pointed urgently at the master display, and the captain swallowed in sudden fear. Dozens of small craft were plummeting from the orbiting warships, and leading the way were two pinnaces with impossible energy signatures.

They gathered speed even as he stared at them, slicing down into Blackbird's wispy hydrogen atmosphere, and crimson projections showed their targets.

"They're going for the vehicle entrances!" Williams snapped. "Alert the ready teams and get Colonel Harris' men moving!"

The Manticoran flight crews were tense faced, nerves clenched against the ground fire they all expected. But there was none, and the pilots pulled out of their steep approaches, kicking the counter-grav to a hundred twenty percent and riding their thrusters to convert momentum into howling dives straight for their targets.

"Coming up on IP. Arm, arm, arm," the master weapons officer aboard Fearless chanted into his com. Amber standby lights blinked to red aboard each pinnace, and the gunners' hands curled about the triggers on their joysticks.

"Launch your birds! Launch your birds!" the weapons officer sang out, and two waiting fingers squeezed.

Quad-mounted fifty-centimeter rockets ripple-fired like brief-lived, flame-tailed meteors. Twelve of them blasted ahead of each pinnace—twenty-four one-thousand-kilo warheads with a yield man once could have gotten only from atomic weapons—and the pinnaces charged onward down their wakes.

Captain Williams went white as a rumbling fist of thunder smashed through Blackbird Base. The entire facility shuddered, lighting flickered, and eyes jerked anxiously up as overhead rock groaned. Dust sifted down over the command room equipment, and the first bellow of destruction was followed by another. And another. And another!

The final rockets smashed home, and the pinnaces' bow-mounted pulsers opened fire. Thirty thousand thirty-millimeter shells per second ripped into the smoke and dust billowing in Blackbird's thin atmosphere, and then they flashed directly over their targeting points and the plasma bombs dropped.

Most of the men guarding those portals were already dead; the rest died instantly as the heart of a sun consumed them.

"God the Merciful, be with us now!" Williams whispered in horror. He'd lost all of his pickups in the immediate lock areas, but remote cameras showed the smoke and dust—and the thick plumes of atmosphere howling up through it—and his eyes whipped to the base schematic. They'd blown their way over a hundred meters into the base! Emergency blast doors slammed, and the captain licked his lips in terror as troop shuttles grounded two kilometers from the breaches and began disgorging hundreds of suited figures.

"Tell Harris to hurry!" he shouted hoarsely.

"Well," Ramirez murmured, "that was impressive, wasn't it, Gunny?"

"As the Major says," Sergeant Major Babcock's smile was predatory. "Think they took the hint, Skipper?"

"Oh, I'd say it was probable," Ramirez said judiciously. "At least we knocked on the door hard enough to get their attention." He glanced at the chrono and keyed his mike. "Ferret Leader, this is Ramrod. Stand by for run-in in one-zero minutes."

Decoy Flight screamed upward, then pushed over and came in again. The remaining Masadan surface arrays saw them coming, but even as Colonel Harris screamed a warning to his troops, the anti-radiation missiles blasted off the racks. Six seconds later, they put out Blackbird Base's eyes, and then the pinnaces rolled back onto their original attack headings and bored straight in.

The Masadan defenders went flat, rolling off into side passages wherever possible, and then the entire base leapt and convulsed again. This time each pinnace fired only a single missile, but those missiles' onboard radar took them straight into the airlocks their predecessors had blown open and down the passages inside them at eight thousand MPS. They carried no explosives, but their super-dense "warheads" struck the first sets of internal blast doors with the force of twenty-three and a half tons of old-style TNT apiece, and another two hundred odd Masadans died as the doors disintegrated in white-hot gas and murderous shrapnel.

More troop shuttles landed, and Colonel Harris cursed his survivors to their feet and sent them stumbling through the rock dust and the howl of escaping atmosphere to find firing positions even as the core base's main blast doors slammed shut behind them.

"Ramrod, the Ferret is rolling. I say again, the Ferret is rolling."

"Roger, Ferret. Ramrod copies." Ramirez looked up at his own pilot. "Follow them in, Max."

Captain Williams tried not to twitch in impatience while his damaged sensors strove to sort out what was happening. Most of Harris' men seemed to have survived, and he heard snatches of chatter as their officers harried them into some sort of defensive positions amid the rubble, but his surface arrays were gone. He couldn't tell where the attackers were, how soon they would hit Harris, or what they were armed with.

Nor could he see the fresh flight of small craft streaking towards the hangars on the far side of Blackbird Base.

"Launch your birds!"

Fresh rockets streaked downward, but these were much lighter than the ones which had ripped the vehicle entrances apart. Their warheads massed barely three hundred kilos each, and hangar doors blew open and surface domes peeled back like broken bone. A hundred and twenty battle-armored men and women fell from pinnace belly hatches like lethal snow, riding their counter-grav down into the gaping holes, and four hundred more Royal Manticoran Marines debarked from cutters and shuttles to follow in their wake.

Fresh alarms screamed, and Captain Williams' head twisted around as new swatches of crimson blazed on the base schematic.

Speed was everything, and the handful of suited Masadan service techs who got in the point teams' way died before anyone found out whether they were trying to fight or surrender. Then the Marines came up against the closed blast doors, and engineers slapped shaped charges against the massive panels even as other engineers sealed in the portable plastic airlocks behind them.

Battle armor wasn't built to let someone tap an impatient toe, so Captain Hibson was reduced to snapping her chewing gum as her people worked. Not that she could fault their speed and precision. It was just that it took time, however good they were.

"Sealed!" Lieutenant Hughes' voice crackled in her earphone.

"Do it," she grunted back.

"Fire in the hole!" Hughes called, and armored shapes turned away from the locks just in case.

There was an instant of taut silence, and then Blackbird's rock transmitted the smothered ka-CHUNK! to them. One lock failed as back-blast leaked around the face of a charge and split a plastic wall, but the engineers were on it before more than a few cubic meters of air escaped, and even as they worked, a dozen more locks were passing Marines into the base six at a time.

Colonel Harris looked around wildly. Smoke and dust settled about his knees with dreamy slowness in Blackbird's low gravity and tenuous atmosphere, but there was no sign of the ground attack. There should have been. The attackers should be following up their initial breaching strike as closely as they dared, not letting his men get set to receive them. So where were they?

"The hangars!" a voice shouted in his earphones. "They're coming in through the hangars, too!"

Too? Harris looked around once more, then punched the side of his helmet. They weren't coming against his positions at all! It had all been a feint—and all his men were on the wrong side of the base's sealed blast doors!

Captain Hibson's people went down the passage with the speed only battle armor allowed. There wasn't room to use thrusters, and their exoskeletal "muscles" were real energy hogs, but in this gravity they let them advance in gliding, thirty-meter jumps, and terror went before them like pestilence.

Here and there a firearm barked and metal slugs whined off a Marine's armor, but Hibson's troopers carried tri-barrels and plasma rifles, and they moved with the smooth precision she'd drilled into them for months.

She watched a squad team move down the passage before her. They came to an intersection, and a plasma gunner turned each way. White light flashed off their armor as they hosed the perpendicular corridors, and the next squad leapfrogged past them while their demolition numbers slapped beehives onto the seared tunnel roofs. They pulled back, the charges thundered, the intersecting passages collapsed for over ten meters, and the squad was moving again.

The entire operation had taken sixteen seconds by her chrono.

Harris started his men cycling through the personnel locks in the core blast doors, but each lock would admit only three men at a time, and the only sitrep he could get from Captain Williams was a half-hysterical babble about demons and devils.

"Ramrod, this is Ferret One," Captain Hibson's voice said in Ramirez's earphone. "Ferret One has penetrated two kilometers. I've got corridor markings indicating the route to the control room and to the power section. Which should I follow?"

"Ferret One, Ramrod," Ramirez replied without hesitation. "Go for the control room. I repeat, go for the control room."

"Ramrod, Ferret One copies. Go for the control room."

Colonel Harris' central reserve was small, with none of the Havenite weapons issued to his primary maneuver units, but it was stationed deep inside Blackbird Base to move to any threatened sector. The colonel had a very clear idea what would happen to those men if he committed them against the juggernaut rolling towards them, yet he had no choice, and they went racing down the tunnels to meet the intruders.

Some of them came up against sealed passages choked with fallen rubble and stalled. Others were less fortunate; they found the enemy.

The Marines' belt-fed tri-barrels pumped out a hundred four-millimeter explosive darts per second, with a muzzle velocity of two thousand MPS. That kind of firepower could chew through armored bulkheads like a hyper-velocity band saw; what it did to unarmored vac suits was indescribable.

"Ramrod, Ferret One. We have contact with organized resistance—such as it is. No problems so far."

"Ferret One, Ramrod copies. Keep it moving, Captain."

"Aye, Sir. Ferret One copies."

Colonel Harris shoved through a blast door airlock and ran down the passage at the head of everyone he'd gotten back inside. Captain Williams' voice had gone beyond mere hysteria in his headphones. The base CO was babbling prayers and promises to punish Satan's whores, and the colonel's mouth twisted in distaste. He'd never liked Williams, and what he and others like him had been doing for the last two days sickened Harris. But it was his job to defend the base or die trying, and he exhorted his men to ever greater efforts even while the premonition of failure settled in his bones.

"Ramrod, Ferret One. My point is one passage from the control room. Repeat, my point is one passage from the control room."

"Ferret One, Ramrod. Good work, Captain. Send them in—but remind them we want the place intact."

"Aye, Sir. We'll take it in one piece if we can. Ferret One clear."

Captain Williams heard the thunder coming closer and slammed his hand down on the button that closed the control room hatch. He stared at it with wide eyes, then whirled and cursed his technicians as they began to scramble for the still open hatch on the far side of the chamber. They ignored him, and he snatched out his sidearm.

"Get back to your posts!" he screamed.

A terrified lieutenant turned to run, and Williams shot him in the back. The man went down, and his shriek of agony galvanized the others. They darted through the hatch, and Williams howled curses after them, firing until his magazine was empty. Then he turned back to the control room, and his eyes were mad as he calmly replaced the empty magazine and switched the selector to full auto. The sobbing lieutenant dragged himself towards the hatch, his blood a thick, crimson smear on the floor, and Williams stepped over beside him.

He emptied the entire magazine into the dying man.

Private Montgomery slapped her beehive on the sealed panel, stepped back, and hit the button. The hatch blew apart, and Sergeant Henry went through it in a swooping leap.

A single Masadan officer's pistol spat fire at less than ten meters' range, and steel-jacketed slugs whined uselessly from the Sergeant's armor. He felt them bouncing away and started to bring up his pulser, then remembered his orders to take the place intact. He grimaced and waded through the fire, and an armor-augmented fist clubbed the Masadan to the floor.

A corridor blast door slammed shut with no warning at all, crushing the man in front of Colonel Harris in an explosion of gore, and the colonel slithered to a halt in shock. Someone screamed over his suit com, and the colonel whirled to see another man shrieking and twisting as the door at the far end of the corridor segment ground his leg to paste. But then, through the screams, he heard something even more terrifying.

"Attention. Attention, all Masadan personnel!" His face went white, for the voice in his earphones spoke with an accent he'd never heard before . . . and it was female.

"This is Captain Susan Hibson of the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps," the cold, flat voice said. "We are now in possession of your central control room. We now control your blast doors, sensors, and life support. Lay down your arms immediately or face the consequences."

"Oh, God," someone whimpered, and Harris swallowed hard.

"W-what do we do, Sir?" His exec was trapped on the far side of the blast door behind the colonel. Harris could almost feel the man's struggle to suppress his own terror, and he sighed.

"There's only one thing we can do," he said heavily. "Lay down your weapons, boys. It's over."