"Withdraw, Mister Chu," she said harshly. "There's nothing more we can do."
Longbow turned to limp brokenly away.
Han's shock frame broke as a massive concussion threw her from her chair. She turned in midair like a cat, landing in a perfect roll and bouncing back onto her feet in an instant. Lieutenant Chu was draped over his console-it took only a glance at his shattered helmet and grotesquely twisted spine to know she could do nothing for him. Lieutenant Kan heaved himself out of the ruin of his fire control panel, one hand slamming a patch over a hissing hole in his vac suit sleeve. Tsing was there, and five ratings. The rest of her bridge crew was dead.
She was still turning towards Tsing when the drive field died. There was no way to pass damage reports to what remained of her bridge, but she needed no reports now; the loss of the field meant the next warhead would vaporize her ship. There was no time for fear or pain or loss. Not now. Her chin thrust down on the helmet switch, and her voice reached every living ear remaining aboard her ship.
"Condition Omega! Abandon ship! Abandon ship!" she said, her voice almost as calm and dispassionate as when the action began. "Aban-"
Longbow's fractured hull screamed as another force beam ripped across her command section, shattering plating and flesh. The shock picked Han up and hurled her against a bulkhead, and darkness smashed her under.
An angry giant kicked Stanislaus Skjorning squarely in the spine as the assault shuttle hurtled out of the boatbay under full emergency power. Commodore Li's calm Code Omega was still sounding in his ears when the shuttle launched, and a deep spasm of grief went through him as he remembered how he'd envied Jai-shu's duty station in Point Defense Two.
Han's vision cleared. She felt hands on her arms and looked around dazedly. Tsing held her left arm, Kan her right, and the thunder of their suit packs came to her through their bodies as they fought for their lives and hers. She tried to reach her own pack controls, but she was weak, numb, washed out. They were risking their lives for her, and she wanted to order them to save themselves, but she had nothing left to give. She could only stare back at the gutted, shattered ruin of her splendid ship, her beautiful ship, her tremendous, vital, living Longbow, dying behind her. Point Defense Two was still in action, its Marine crew ignoring her bailout order as they fought to delay the moment of destruction-to give their fellows time to clear the lethal zone of the impending fireball, and tears clouded her eyes as she watched their hopeless battle. She should be with them. She should be there with her people. And how many of her other people lay dead within her beautiful, broken ship? How many of her family had she left behind?
The question was still driving through her as the missile struck. It took Longbow amidships-not that it mattered to the defenseless hulk. Han had a brief impression of fury and brilliance and light before her helmet polarized and cut off her vision. Then the fireball reached out to claim her, and there was only darkness.
STRONGPOINT
"Amber section! Heavy weapon at three o'clock! Three o'clock low! Thr-!"
Stanislaus killed his armor's jump gear instantly. He plummeted downward, slamming to the ground amid the rubble of what had once been a small specialty shop of some sort. The wreckage was too blasted and burned for him to estimate what wares it might have sold, but he had other things to worry about at the moment, anyway.
He stared at the moving icons on his heads-up display. The green and red fireflies of friendly and hostile units crawled across the HUD, but it was cluttered with the shadowy outlines and wire drawings (where available) of the surrounding residential and commercial towers. Details were almost impossible to make out, and the fact that so many of the extremely solidly built buildings contained their own power sources and masses of still-functioning machinery-air-conditioning, lift shafts, lighting, powered doors, computer nets-made it far worse. All of those background emissions provided enough electronic "noise" to hide even powered armor from enemy sensors if its wearer shut down his own active sensors and nonessential systems.
Stanislaus' mouth twisted in a bitter grimace as he located Corporal Tso Chiang's icon. The corporal's shouted warning had been in time for the rest of this section to hit dirt and find cover in the steadily spreading wreckage of the city of Selkirk's Landing. But there hadn't been time for Tso to follow suit. The quartet of heavy auto cannon on the third floor of the two hundred-floor tower one block to the east must have spotted him at the same instant he'd spotted them. A burst of superdense forty-millimeter penetrators took him almost center of mass, and not even a combat zoot could stand up to that. The icon strobed amber while Stanislaus' armor's knees were still flexing to absorb the shock of landing. By the time they'd straightened again, the icon had flashed the black-crosshatched scarlet of a dead man.
He shouldn't have sky-lined himself.
The thought flashed through Stanislaus' mind, but even as it did, he knew it was unfair. This nightmare of urban terrain was the worst imaginable arena for combat . . . especially when both sides knew there were still thousands of civilians huddling out in the middle of the insane carnage. All too often the only options were to go over an obstacle-which always threatened the consequences which had just claimed Tso's life-or try to bull right through the intervening structures when any hallway or stair could hide a Rump marine with a flechette gun or a plasma lance.
Or some terrified huddle of civilians trying frantically to stay out of both sides' way.
"Amber Three, Gold One," he said harshly over the platoon's tactical net. His zoot's CPU recognized the call sign and automatically routed the signal to Private O'Grady. "Amber Two is down. You're it. Acknowledge."
"Gold One, Amber Three," O'Grady's soprano came back almost instantly. "Confirmed, I've got Amber Section."
Stanislaus grunted in bleak satisfaction. Despite her unlikely name and painfully fair coloring, Estelle O'Grady was a third-generation citizen of Hangchow. Unlike Stanislaus, she spoke perfect Chinese as well as Standard English, and she'd been with the Longbow detachment for over two standard years. He hated to lose Tso for a lot of reasons-including the two sons back on Hangchow who would never see their father again-but O'Grady was solid. The section would be in good hands.
As long as it lasted, at least.
He punched up the most detailed schematic he could get of the tower which had killed Tso and tried not to think about how many people he'd already lost while he worked on deciding what to do next.
It was all so goddamned stupid. Admiral Pritzcowitski, the Rump system commander, had tried to do the smart thing. As soon as he'd realized Sky Watch had lost control of the space around the planet, he'd ordered the system's ground forces to lay down their weapons and surrender. Like the vast majority of humanity's planets, Cimmaron possessed no heavy planetary ground-to-space weapons or planetary defense centers. Defending inhabited worlds was the job of orbital weapons platforms. Without such weaponry or fortifications, there was no way the planet's defenders could hope to stand off the Republican Navy more than briefly, and if they refused to surrender, under the Federation's own rules of warfare, the Republic would be fully justified in employing orbit-launched kinetic weaponry or even old-fashioned tactical nukes against them.
But the garrison the Rump had dispatched to Cimmaron to keep a lid on its "rebellious" citizens had been carefully selected. It was overwhelmingly Corporate Worlder, and better than half of its officers had rejected the surrender order. Stanislaus had no idea what they thought they could accomplish. Probably, they figured-correctly-that no Republican admiral would resort to weapons of mass destruction on a heavily inhabited planet if they deliberately chose their positions in the midst of its civilian population. And maybe they were so stupid they actually thought they could hold out long enough for a Rump fleet to fight its way through and relieve them. Or maybe they just hoped to kill as many "rebels" as they could before they were killed themselves.