He spun back the way he'd come, waving Honor past him to enter the command code, and he and Marcia McGinley crouched on either side of the passage down which they'd come, pouring fire back up it. Heavier weapons were snarling back, now, and as Honor hammered the lift button, she heard the distinctive, ear-splitting devastation of a tribarrel slicing bulkheads like a bandsaw.
The doors opened and she leapt through them, stabbing at the panel. Lights flickered on the display, then burned steadily, confirming that Harkness' control of the lift still held, and she turned back towards her friends.
"Come on!" she shouted. "Come on!"
McGinley heard her and wheeled, teeth bared in a huge smile of triumph as she ran for the lift... and then she seemed to trip in midair, and her torso exploded as the tribarrel sawed through the bulkhead, and Honor screamed in useless denial.
"Go, My Lady!" LaFollet shouted, slamming his final magazine into the flechette gun. "Go now!"
He went down on one knee, firing desperately—firing like Jamie had, like Robert and Venizelos and Marcia—and Honor couldn't leave him. She couldn't!
"Come on, Andrew!" she screamed, but he ignored her, and then a grenade skittered around the bend and he hurled away his weapon and flung himself on it. Somehow he reached it before it exploded, and his frantic heave sent it back the way it had come, but not quite soon enough, for the blast picked him up and bounced him off the bulkhead like a rag doll. He slammed to the deck, motionless, and Honor's heart died within her.
She had to go. She knew she had to go. That this was what her armsmen—her friends—had died for. That only her escape would give their deaths meaning, and that it was her duty—her responsibility—to go.
And she couldn't. It was too much, more than she had in her to give, and she dropped her own weapon and hurled herself from the lift. The grenade explosion seemed to have stunned the attackers—any who were still alive—and not a shot was fired as she flung herself down beside Andrew. She was weak and wasted, running on adrenaline and desperation alone, and it didn't matter. She snatched him up as if he were a child and flung him over her shoulders even as she turned back towards the lift.
And that was when the Peeps seemed to snap back awake. Pulser darts whined and shrieked, ricocheting from the bulkheads. More grenades exploded. The tribarrel opened fire once more, flaying the bulkheads, and the entire universe was a seething, screaming tide of metal and hate ripping about her ears.
She staggered as a flechette chewed into the outside of her right thigh, but she kept her feet and hurled herself into the lift. She spun on her toes, blood scalding her leg as the wound pumped, and somehow she hit the release button without dropping LaFollet.
The car began to move, and relief rose in her, warring with her grief, but she was going to make it. She and Andrew were going to make—
And that was when the tribarrel tore the lift doors apart.
"The lift! Someone's coming down the lift!"
McKeon whirled at the shout, and his heart leapt. If Harkness' lockout had held, that could only be the people who'd gone after Honor, and if it wasn't—
He beckoned, and Sanko and Halburton turned their plasma rifle back to the undamaged lift while Anson Lethridge dashed across the deck towards it with a grenade launcher. But then the lift stopped, the doors opened, and Lethridge froze. He stared into it, ugly face blanching, and then he hurled away his launcher and charged into it. McKeon followed on his heels, and the captain gasped in horror at what he saw.
The upper third of the lift car had been torn to bits, not so much shattered as sliced by what could only have been a heavy-caliber tribarrel, and bits and pieces of knife-edged alloy—some small as a fingernail paring, others the size of a man's hand—had been spewed out of the lift wall like bullets. He knew they had, for Honor Harrington and Andrew LaFollet lay entangled on the lift floor, and the entire bottom of the car was coated in blood.
Lethridge was already there, lifting LaFollet off his Steadholder and passing the limp armsman to McKeon. The captain took him and passed him out to other, ready hands, but his eyes never left Honor as Lethridge went to his knees in her blood.
It was her arm. Her left arm was shattered just above the elbow, and Lethridge's hands moved with desperate speed as he whipped his own belt around her upper arm, right at the armpit, and yanked the crude tourniquet tight. And then he and McKeon between them picked her horribly limp, blood-soaked body up and ran for the pinnace.
"Bug Out One, this is Bug Two. Say status."
Geraldine Metcalf started to sigh in relief as Captain McKeon's voice sounded in her earbug, but then his tone registered. It was harsh and jagged, with a fury—or a despair—Metcalf had never heard from him, and she turned to look at DuChene.
"Status green," she said into her com after a moment. "I say again, status green."
"Very well," McKeon's voice came back. "Stand by for Falling Leaf."
Two stolen StateSec assault shuttles moved towards one another, hiding in Tepes' radar shadow as they used the lobotomized battlecruiser for cover. Some of the ship's systems were coming back on-line under manual control, but not many, and she was still blind, unaware of the two tiny motes gliding rapidly towards her stern on thrusters alone. Nor did any of Tepes' crew suspect that Horace Harkness' final—and most deadly—computer programs weren't in the main system at all. They were in the single assault shuttle and pinnace still in Boat Bay Four.
Scotty Tremaine was at Bug Out Two's controls, with McKeon in the copilot's seat, and he watched the digital timer on the instrument panel count down and prayed that Harkness had gotten it right. It felt disloyal to doubt the senior chief, but surely it was too much to expect him to get everything right! And if he hadn't—
The third shuttle came screaming out of Boat Bay Four under maximum reaction power. Its carefully programmed flight path brought it whipping up past Tepes' armored flank, then steadied down on a course away from Hades with Tepes directly between it and the planet. Its impeller wedge came up as soon as it was clear of the ship, and its acceleration leapt instantly to four hundred gravities.
"Impeller signature!" Shannon Foraker barked.
Count Tilly had killed her velocity relative to Hades and started back the way she'd come, but she remained far beyond any range at which she could have intervened in what was happening in Hades orbit. The drone she'd launched was still too far out for good detail resolution, but it was close enough to see the brilliant gravitic beacon of a pinnace streaking for the stars. For that matter, her shipboard sensors easily picked up its impeller wedge, and Foraker clenched her jaw as the small vessel raced for freedom.
"Do they have it from Camp Charon?" Tourville asked urgently.
"They must, Sir," she said grimly, and looked up to meet her admiral's eyes. Then she looked back at her display, already knowing what she would see.
Most of the defenses around Hades were designed to kill starships, not something as small and agile as a shuttle. None of the energy platforms or hunter-killer missiles could target something that tiny—not efficiently—and Camp Charon was in no mood to try. Nor did it need to, for that was why the old-fashioned area-effect mines had been emplaced. And so the ground base waited calmly until the small craft passed almost directly between two hundred-megaton mines, then pressed a button.