Chapter Seven
The planet Marha, seventeen light-minutes from Bia and smaller than Mars, had never been much of a planet, and it had become less of one when the Fourth Imperium made it a weapons testing site. For two thousand years, until antimatter and gravitonic warheads made planetary tests superfluous, fission, fusion, and kinetic weapons had gouged and ripped its near-airless surface into a tortured waste whose features defied all logical prediction.
Which was precisely why the Imperial Marines loved Marha. It was a wonderful place to teach infantry the finer points of killing other people, and Generals Tsien and MacMahan were delighted to share it with Admiral Robbins' midshipmen. Naval officers might not face infantry combat often, but they couldn't always avoid it, either, and not knowing what they were doing was a good way to get people (especially their Marine-type people) killed.
At the moment, Admiral Robbins rode the command deck of the transport Tanngjost,sipping coffee, and her brown eyes gleamed as her scanners watched her third-year class deploy against the graduating class. That Sean was a sneaky devil, she thought proudly. He'd made an absolute ass of himself at his first parade, but he'd survived it, and he stood first in the Tactics curriculum by a clear five points. He was a bit audacious for her taste, but that wasn't too surprising, and his parents would have just loved this one.
Mid/3 MacIntyre hand-signaled a stop, and his company of raiders slumped in the knife-sharp shadow of the tortured ring wall. He slumped with them, panting hard, and tried to remember he was being brilliant. If he managed to pull this off, he might even find two or three people to agree with him; if he screwed up, everybody would be waiting to tell him what a jackass he'd been.
He glanced at Sandy, more worried than he cared to admit as he noted how wearily she sat. This was her company, and she'd loved the idea when he sketched it out, but her small size was working against her.
An enhanced person could move in powered-down combat armor, if its servos were unlocked. It wasn't easy (especially for someone Sandy's size), but the sheer grunt work could be worth it under the right circumstances. Unpowered armor had no energy signature, and it even hid any emissions from its wearer's implants, which meant his raiders were virtually invisible.
The only real threat was optical detection, and he'd noticed that while his peers gave lip service to the importance of optical systems, they relied on more sophisticated sensors. He'd started to mention that during the critique of the last field exercise, but then he'd remembered he would be leading this one... and that the Academy didn't give out prizes for losing.
He slithered up the ring wall, unhooked the passive scanner from his harness, poked it over the crest, and grinned at its display. Onishi and his staff were exactly where The Book said they ought to be, safely tucked away at the heart of the sensor net guarding their HQ site. But The Book hadn't envisioned having a company of raiders barely half a klick away, well inside the sensor perimeter which should have protected Onishi's tactical HQ and ready to decapitate his entire command structure before Tamman (who'd always wanted to be a Marine anyway, for some strange reason) led in the main force.
He slid back down beside Sandy and pressed his helmet to hers. The face behind her visor was sweat-streaked and weary, but her brown eyes were bright, and he grinned and slapped her armored shoulder.
"We got 'em, Sandy!" Their helmets conducted his voice to her without the betraying pulse of a fold-space com. "Get the troops saddled up."
She nodded and began waving hand signals, and her support squad set up with gratifying speed, even without their armor's "muscles." He left them to it and reclimbed the slope to double-check the target coordinates. A standard saturation pattern would work just fine, he thought gleefully.
He glanced up. Sandy's heavy weapons types were set, and her other people were creeping up beside him, "energy guns" ready. It was just like laser tag, he thought, prepping his implants to activate his armor. And then he energized his com for the first time in almost six hours.
"Now!" he snapped.
Mid/4 Onishi Shidehara frowned as he stepped out of his HQ van to stretch. Crown Prince or no, MacIntyre was a hot dog, and the cautious sparring being reported by the outposts wasn't like him. It was only skirmishing, and along the most logical line of advance, at that. Mid/4 Onishi expected to kick His Imperial Highness's ass most satisfyingly, but so far he'd seen barely ten percent of the opposition, which suggested MacIntyre meant to try something fancy. For Onishi's money all that razzle-dazzle might look good to the instructors, but only MacIntyre's luck had let him get away with it so long. This time he was going to have to do things the hard way, and—
Something kicked dust in front of him. In fact, dozens of somethings were falling all over his position! He just had time to feel alarm before they erupted in the brilliant flashes of "nukes" and "warp grenades," and he went down in an astonished cloud of dust as the flash-bangs' override pulses locked his armor and blanked out his com implant to simulate a casualty.
He whipped his head around, trapped in his inert armor, and saw his entire HQ staff falling about him. A second wave of flash-bangs deluged his position, catching most of the handful who'd escaped the first, and then a horde of armored figures came down off the ring wall shooting.
It was over in less than thirty seconds, and Mid/4 Onishi gritted his teeth as one armored figure loped over to squat beside him with a toothy grin.
"Zap!" Sean MacIntyre said insufferably.
It had taken Horus months to learn to smile again after Isis' death, but today his grin was enormous as he entered Lawrence Jefferson's office.
"What's so funny?" the Lieutenant Governor asked.
"I just got back from Birhat," Horus said, still grinning, "and you should've heard Colin and 'Tanni describing Dahak's latest brainstorm!"
"Oh?" Unlike most people, Jefferson preferred an old-fashioned swivel chair, and it creaked as he leaned back. "What 'brainstorm'?"
"Oh, it was a beaut! You know how protective he is of the kids?" Jefferson nodded; Dahak's devotion to the imperial family was legendary. "Well, their middy cruise's coming up in a few months, and he had the brilliant idea that they should make it aboard him." The old man laughed, and Jefferson frowned.
"Why not? They couldn't possibly be in safer hands, after all!"
"That was his point," Horus agreed, "but Colin and 'Tanni won't hear of it, and I don't blame them." Jefferson still looked puzzled, and Horus shook his head and hitched a hip onto the Lieutenant Governor's desk.
"Look, Dahak's the flagship of the Imperial Guard, right? Not even a unit of Battle Fleet at all."
Jefferson nodded again. Colin MacIntyre had lost ninety-four percent of the Fourth Empire's resurrected Imperial Guard Flotilla in the Zeta Trianguli Campaign. Only five ships remained, and repairing them had taken years, but they were back in service now. They were also fundamentally different from the rest of the Fifth Imperium's planetoids, for their computers lacked the Alpha imperatives which compelled the rest of Battle Fleet to obey Mother, not the Emperor directly. Herdan the Great, the Fourth Empire's founder, had set Battle Fleet up that way as an intentional safeguard, since Mother wouldn't obey an emperor who'd been constitutionally removed by the Assembly of Nobles or whose actions violated the Great Charter stored in her memory. That neatly cut the legs out from under a monarch with tyranny on his mind, but the Guard was the Emperor's personal command, and its units weren't hardwired to obey Mother.