The gardener bolted up, reached back to seize hold of Anderssen's jacket collar and staggered off down the tilted passageway.
Sixty kilos of cutting gel ignited in the container. Ravening flame burst upwards, incinerating the wounded technician and engulfing the wooden scaffolding. Marble groaned, tormented by raging heat. The air in the vault rushed inwards, fueling the flames roaring outwards. The kalpataru was wrapped in liquid fire, though the ancient metal remained unmoved and untouched. All three fuel-cell packs blew apart, adding yet more heat to the incandescent explosion. Stone ribs flexed, expanding violently, and then the roof of the dome splintered, raining debris down on the huge room below.
A shockwave of white-hot flame, smoke and dust boomed out through the adjoining corridors, overcoming more Jehanan soldiers rushing towards the fane. The entire structure, buried deep within the body of the House, buckled, crashing down, burying the divine tree in thousands of tons of limestone and marble.
The Captain's Launch
In Orbit Over Jagan,
Approaching the Tepoztecatl
An indicator on Hadeishi's navigation plot spun downwards, showing the launch closing rapidly with the freighter. Asale began her braking maneuver, swinging the launch below the main axis of the ship as the most suitable boat bay faced the planet. The Chu-sa was listening intently to reports being relayed to him from the bridge of the Cornuelle. The burgeoning revolt on the planet looked to require Fleet intervention.
"Can you patch me through to Yacatolli?" Hadeishi reached out and touched the pilot's shoulder while he waited for the communications duty officer on the Cornuelle to respond. Asale looked over questioningly, dark face composed and attentive. He signed for her to hold position.
"Groundside comm is shot to hell, kyo," a very sleepy Three-Jaguar replied. Both the first and second watch communications officers had taken his advice to get some sack time – and then had been jarred awake by the combat stations alert only an hour later. "Smith-tzin is trying to reestablish comm to the Legation, to Sobipurй and to the Army cantonment, but the main relay station at the landing field is off the air and some kind of general jamming is flooding the whole area."
"Where did the request for atmospheric suppression come from?" Hadeishi caught Asale's eye, made a circling motion with his z-suited finger and pointed towards the Cornuelle. The light cruiser had completed its initial maneuvering burn and was now sliding into a lower orbit, one almost directly over Parus. The pilot nodded, twisting her control yoke, and the launch shuddered, dumping the last of its velocity.
"We're picking up fragmentary fire-control requests from elements of the 416th in Takshila in the north and near Fehrupurй in the south. They're being engaged by atmospheric attack craft – old-style supersonic jet airplanes – with a variety of munitions. The jamming storm is interfering with their vehicle-mounted fire-control radar. They want us to establish air superiority from orbit."
Hadeishi coughed in polite amusement. "Well, it is a welcome change to be appreciated. What does Hayes think – one moment…"
The quiescent channel to the freighter flickered to life and the face of Captain Chimalpahin appeared. His choleric expression had been replaced by a pale sheen of sweat and worried eyes. A claxon was ringing in the background.
"Chu-sa Hadeishi! The situation on the planet has deteriorated. A number of our surveillance networks have been destroyed and we've lost touch with the Legation and Regimental command. We need your ship to take over master relay from lower orbit, allowing us to reestablish comm."
"We're already working on that," Hadeishi said in a dry voice. "Our first priority is to resynch the combat comm net with the Regiment and any dispersed elements. Then we will work on contacting the Legation and the consulates. After that…we'll see about your surveillance networks."
"Chu-sa!" Chimalpahin's face turned dark red. "Fleet is not the command authority here! Our precedence is well established -"
"I am not concerned about your little war of flowers and padded swords." Hadeishi let a little of his anger flare, shocking the man into silence. "You've put thousands of citizens in harm's way – once we've seen to their safety, then we will help you restore your comm network. Do you -"
An enormously bright light flared off to Hadeishi's right and above his shoulder. For an instant, he saw everything in the cockpit of the launch cast in sharp, unadulterated shadow. The view ports polarized a microsecond later and an alarm blared in his ear.
"Evasive!" he shouted, pressing himself reflexively into the shockchair. "Full power!"
Asale had already thrown the launch into a break to the left, engines howling, the entire frame of the little ship groaning with rapidly mounting g-stress. Hadeishi felt his chest compress, then the z-suit kicked in and the shockwebbing took the brunt of the acceleration. His fingers darted across his command board, bringing up a situational plot and tasking the two realtime cameras on the launch to track the Tepoztecatl and the Cornuelle.
A tiny fragment of his mind heard the two Marines shouting in alarm and Sho-i Asale hissing through clenched teeth as the launch tumbled into a random series of spins and hops, hoping to avoid whatever enemy had crept up out of the dark.
His eyes focused on the video-feed of the freighter. In the seconds since the blast – another part of his mind had already correlated the flare of light with the detonation of some kind of anti-ship mine – a third of the Tepoztecatl had been smashed into ruin. Sections of the freighter's hull were glowing white-hot, while atmosphere boiled out in white clouds of ice crystals. The fans of comm relays on the outer hull were twisted wreckage. A secondary explosion ripped through the engine spaces as he watched, spewing a cloud of debris and short-lived flame. The fore part of the ship still seemed to be intact, but all of the habitat rings had stopped violently, their guide-rails torn and mangled. Inside, he knew from cruel experience, every compartment would be in chaos, filled with mangled bodies, crushed equipment and a cloud of paper, unsecured objects, fire-suppression foam, droplets of blood from the wounded and the stink of burning electrical circuitry.
"Situation report," Hadeishi rasped, wrenching his attention back to the plot. He hadn't served as weapons officer for nearly a decade, but an eternity of cadet drill did not die easily. "Comp shows twelve orbital detonations. Dirty anti-matter signatures are coming in…bomb-pumped x-ray lasers…" He snarled in disgust. The flash plot on the tiny board matched up perfectly with traffic control's last update showing the Development Board's planetary communications network satellite array. "Max acceleration, pilot, match orbit with -"
Hadeishi stopped, heart in his throat, a chill feeling of horror flooding his z-suit. Six of the mines had erupted in a nearly perfect flower-box formation around his ship. Even at this distance, the v-feed of the Cornuelle showed massive ruptures in her hull, atmosphere venting in an ever-expanding cloud, the intermittent flare of secondary explosions, and worst – one maneuvering drive still firing in an orbital correction burn while the other five were silent. The light cruiser slid sick-eningly towards the upper atmosphere of Jagan, spewing bodies, debris and radiation.
"Jaguar-tzin!" Hadeishi's face froze. "Hadeishi to the Cornuelle, come in. Hadeishi to the Cornuelle, come in!"
Static roared across the standard comm bands, popping in and out as the launch's little comp attempted to restore communications with the ship. Hadeishi flinched as the display flared again. Two thirds of the way around the planet, the free merchantman Beowulf – struck by only one of the mines – suffered catastrophic reactor failure and vanished in a sun-bright burst of hard radiation. The flare rippled across the launch – now racing to catch the wounded Cornuelle – only seconds later, and Hadeishi watched grimly as his display sparked, shuddered and went dark. The launch's shipskin groaned, toasted by the wave-front. The lights flickered and went out.