He had been carefully winnowing through the personnel roster of his retained spookshop, and hiring away the absolutely loyal, and those who were qualified in certain irregular areas. The truehearts he used for personal and estate security. The others made up a very specialized hunter-killer team. They went looking for whoever had hired the hijackers. And they found them—the woman and her son who headed SpaceWays/Galiot. Somehow a commercial gravlighter went out of control and crashed into a mansion on a tiny, private Aegean island. Without any surviving heirs, SpaceWays went into receivership until the situation could be sorted out Just to make sure that the robber barons and their thugs got the message, Kea hired more security people. These had a new task—to baby-sit, unobtrusively, his spacemen. Anyone interfering with one of his crew members, whether it was pumping for info in a barroom or trying a back-alley snatch for interrogation, was intercepted and "handled roughly."
Kea bought more shipyards and commissioned more ships, and they went out to the stars. For deployment around the worlds of man, he had a different class of ship built. These were AM2 warships, missile/rocket/laser/chaingun-armed partrol craft, which escorted the liners and freighters safely away from the dangerous—i.e., inhabited—worlds. Governments may have been banned from building warships, but no one had mentioned private enterprise, for the simple reason that before AM2 drive, a spaceship/starship built for combat was absurdly wasteful. Kea was spending a fair amount of his time thinking about weaponry. One of his technicians, a Robert
Willy, had pointed out that there was no particular reason a tiny particle of AM2 could not be given a shroud of Imperium X and made into an explosive bullet, if the shielding was cast with a deliberate, high-impact-sensitive fault. He also believed that, if this "bullet" was made small enough, and the latest generation of hyperpowerful portable lasers was used, that the AM2 bullet could not be ‘Tired" by laser. Kea Richards, thinking grimly of Alfred Nobel, his invention that was intended for the benefit of all mankind, and the effective if terribly dangerous "dynamite guns" that were produced, gave Willy his own research team and access to Anti-Matter Two.
The vids and the livies, reflecting public perceptions and feelings as the media have always done instead of creating it as too many fools believe, were beginning to banner Kea as a liberator. Greater than Edison, greater than Ford, greater than McLean, even. Kea knew they weren't even close, although the thought sounded like it came from a megalomaniac. They still didn't understand, any more than someone in the middle of massive change ever does, the total revolution that was going on. But they would.
Everything was running at full drive. Kea was worried, because he knew what would come next and wasn't sure that he would be able to block the next attempt to deny man the stars.
Perhaps the assault team had forgotten about Jupiter light and thought they would have complete night for their cover. Or perhaps they didn't care. But it was no more than three-quarters dark when they attacked, Jove hanging overhead like the largest color-streaked party light ever built. They were well-trained commandos and must have practiced on full-scale models or at the least livie-simulations of Richards's estate.
Alarms screamed, and Kea rolled out of the bed he had slumped into, exhausted, less than an hour before. Not awake, he stumbled to a closet and pulled on a dark coverall. Hanging nearby was an LBE harness with a pistol and ammo belt. A machine carbine dangled next to it. Wishing that he'd had more time, and Willy'd been able to perfect his AM2 weapon, he jacked a round into the carbine's chamber, tugged on zip-closure boots, and headed down the hall. The ground roiled beneath him, and Kea tumbled down. He didn't find out until later that was a small picketboat, under robot control, that had been sent smashing into one of his compound's perimeter labs as a diver-sion to attract emergency crews. Kea came up, ran on. Into one of the mansion's lobbies.
"Mr. Richards! The bunker!" Security's watch commander was waving at him. Then a crash, and supposedly impactproof plas and reinforcing alloy fell into the chamber. The officer spun, shouted, died, as two black-dressed men dropped into the room, weapons firing. One of them saw Richards, gun came up, recognized their target, the gun was knocked away, and they dove toward him. Kea held the trigger full back and three rounds on full auto/control shattered the pair. So they were under explicit orders, he thought. I'm not to be killed. That'll slow ‘em down a little.
Richards's security men swarmed into the lobby. One of them flipped a blast grenade up, through where the skylight had been blown away. Another explosion, and screams. The hell with the bunker, Richards thought If the bastards know enough about mis mansion to hit close to my bedroom, they've probably got that targeted as well. Gunfire chattered from outside the main entrance and lasers flashed seen/never-seen red eye-memory. Shouts.
"Let's go," he yelled, and ran toward the main door. Absurd, absurd, he thought. Are you leading from the front, or are you playing Roland? You are an engineer and maybe a back-alley brawler. You've never been a combat soldier, nor been much interested in being one, or even watching the livies that glorify their slaughter.
The mansion's mam anteroom was a haze of smoke and gunfire. Kea watched his "soldiers"—and most of them had been trained in one or another of the various armed forces of the Solar System—fire, cover, and maneuver forward. Amazing, he thought. Just like the vids. Just like the livies. Another thought came: Did the livies reflect reality, or are all of us aping what we've seen done by actors? Come on, man! You don't have time for this slok! There were four attackers left, crouched behind the solid planters, containing now-bullet-shattered ferns. More grenades rained—never liked the ferns anyway, and there'll sure be a redecorating bill after this, amazing how the mind can spin all these stupid things out—and the first wave was obliterated.
Kea's security may have been surprised by the first assault— but now their training and constant practice took over. Great doors that appeared to be part of the three-story walls slid open, and wheeled autocannons were rolled out. They were set up—as intended—behind those planters that had been designed to double as a firing point, and ammo drums slammed home.
Outside, on the vast reaches of the grounds, Kea counted three, no four, small ships. This was not a small-time operation, he realized. The second wave rose from cover and charged. The front of Kea's near-palace had been laid out with graceful, flowing, low, close-barred railings that swept the viewer's eye toward the splendor of the house itself. It was considered part of the magnificence that had made the house a prizewinner in architectural circles. In fact, the flowing walls had been drawn up by Kea himself, working with his head security man, and were intended to channel not the viewer's eye, but an attacker's charge.
The railings were just high enough to be hard to hurdle, and the bars were far enough apart so they offered neither cover nor concealment. Now, they worked as intended, channeling the attackers directly toward the main entrance. Directly into the killing zone of the autocannon.
Guns yammered again, and blasts fragmented the night, and men and women shouted and died. A wounded, bloodied man stumbled through the smoke, gun hanging down, and was shot down. He was the last. Without a pause, the autocannon were pushed out into the open, and opened up on the four spacecraft. Two of the ships blew apart, the other smoked menacingly, and the last gouted flames.