He walked slowly to the office foyer. It was the only way into his personal quarters, and he upended his receptionist's desk and piled furniture about it. He built a sturdy barricade facing the entry, then stepped away from it to the wall beside the entry and settled his back into a corner.
"The explosives have arrived at the Palace, Colin," Dahak said as Colin entered the command deck of the computer's starship body.
"Good." Officers popped to their feet as their Emperor and Warlord strode across to the captain's couch, but he waved them back to their duties. Dahak had moved beyond the weapon's threat radius, and Colin felt a sick surge of guilt as he realized that, whatever happened, he personally was safe. It seemed a betrayal of all his subjects, and knowing Hector and Gerald were right to insist upon it only made his guilt worse.
He settled into the command couch. The display was centered on Birhat, not Dahak, and he watched sublight craft streaming from the planetary surface to the waiting planetoids. Like Dahak, all those starships were beyond threat range, and thousands more of his subjects were embarking aboard them as he watched, but it was taking time. Too much time they might not have. He drew a deep, deep breath and pressed himself back in his couch.
"Tell them to proceed, Dahak."
Brigadier Jourdain followed his men up the stairs. There were only twelve Marines, one tired old man, and a pregnant woman to stop them, while he had over a hundred men, all fully enhanced courtesy of Earth Security. It would be more than enough, he told himself yet again. Some were going to get killed, but not enough to stop them, and dead Security men would be convincing proof of how hard Brigadier Jourdain and his men had fought to protect their Empress.
He bared mirthless teeth at the thought as his point man approached the landing. They were one floor below Duke Horus's office and living quarters, and they hadn't seen a soul. Perhaps he'd worried too much. Surely if the Marines had figured anything out—
Something rattled. The lead Security man saw the small object skitter past his feet, and his eyes flared. No! His implant scanners hadn't picked up a thing, so how—
Eleven men died in a blast of fury, and the Marine who'd thrown the grenade grinned savagely as he and his partner reactivated their own implants and brought their energy guns to bear on the smoke-streaming door.
Captain Chin's head jerked up as the explosion rattled. Please, God, let someone else have heard it! he prayed, then settled back down in firing position.
Brigadier Jourdain's ears cringed as thunder filled the stairwell. The screams of the merely wounded were faint and tiny in the explosion's wake, and he swore viciously. So much for surprise!
"Clancey! Get up there!" he barked, and Corporal Clancey settled his automatic grenade launcher into firing position. He jerked his head at the other three members of his section, and the four of them pushed forward through the men above them on the stair.
The waiting Marines had their own implant sensors on-line now, but there was a limit to what the devices could tell them. They knew the stairs were full of men, but they couldn't tell what weapons they carried or precisely what they were doing. The second Marine held a grenade, ready to throw it, but the same suppressor that blocked their coms from hyper-space would smother any hyper grenade's small field, and they'd had only one HE grenade each. He couldn't afford to waste it, and so he gritted his teeth and waited.
Clancey and his team reached the landing and eased forward, boots skidding in what had once been their point men, backs pressed to the walls. They, too, had their sensors on-line, and they didn't like what they were telling them. There were two Marines up there, and only one of them was where their grenades could get at him; the other was further back, sheltering in a cross-connecting corridor to cover his companion, and Clancey swore. God, what he wouldn't give for hyper grenades! But at least the bastards didn't seem to have any more grenades of their own.
He nodded to the two men against the opposite wall.
"Go!"
They spun into the doorway, launchers coughing on full auto. The closer Marine's fire ripped both of them apart, but their grenades were already on the way, and a staccato blast rattled teeth as they detonated in sequence, killing him instantly.
Clancey cursed as an energy gun splattered his companions over him, but his implants told him the Marine who'd fired was dead. He went down in a crouch, hosing more grenades to keep the surviving Marine's head down while more Security men charged the door. Explosions shattered walls and furnishings, and the building's fire suppression systems howled to life as flames glared. More men charged up the stairs, white faces locked in death's-head grins, and then Corporal Clancey discovered he'd been wrong about what the Marines had.
The grenade landed 1.3 meters behind him, and he had one instant to feel the terror before it exploded and killed six more men... including Corporal William Clancey, Earth Security.
Vlad Chernikov felt blind and maimed. For the first time in twenty-five years, every implant in his body had been shut down lest the Mark Ninety decide they were weapons, and the sudden reversion to the senses Nature had provided was a greater psychic shock than he'd anticipated.
He grimaced the thought aside and hoisted the charge Dahak had designed. The initiator charges of the obsolete warheads had been formed in hundreds of precisely shaped blocks, and Dahak had reassembled a hundred and fifty kilos of them into a single massive shaped-charge. That might be more than they needed, but Dahak believed in redundancy.
He slung the charge on his back—at least his muscular enhancement still worked, since it used no power and hence offered no emissions signature to offend the Mark Ninety's sensibilities—and started down the hall to the gallery on the longest sixty-meter hike of his life.
The scream of alarms filled the stairwell as thermal sensors responded to the fires the explosions had set. Their shrill, atonal wail set Jourdain's teeth on edge, but White Tower's soundproofing was excellent, and his men at the switchboard had cut all lines to its top fifteen floors. None of which meant people wouldn't notice if grenades started blowing out windows.
"Push 'em back!" he shouted, and started up the stairs. His point had stalled amid the carnage of shattered bodies, and he snarled at them. "Come on, you bastards! There's only twelve of them!"
He flung himself through the doorway, landing flat on his belly in Clancey's blood. More of his men crouched behind him or threw themselves prone, and at least a dozen energy guns snarled. Walls already torn and pocked by grenade fragments ripped apart under focused beams of gravitic disruption, and the Marine fired back desperately. Another of his men went down, then two more, a fourth, but there was only one Marine left. It was only a matter of time—and not much of it—until one of those energy guns found him.
There were five separate stairs. Captain Chin had placed two Marines to cover each, but Jourdain had elected to assault only three, and combat roared as his other assault teams ran into their own defenders. The Marines had the advantage of position; their attackers had both numbers and heavier weapons. It was an unequal equation, and it could have only one solution.
Jourdain's number three assault team lost ten men in the first exchange, but its commander was a hard-bitten man, an ex-Marine himself, who knew what he was about. Once he'd pinpointed the defenders, he sent six men down one floor. They positioned themselves directly beneath the Marines, switched their energy guns to maximum power, aimed at the ceiling, and simply held the triggers back. The Marines never had time to realize what was happening, and assault team three charged forward over their mutilated bodies.