Wichman gave precise orders. Even though he was inexperienced at combat, he was learning rapidly.
I could have served better, he realized with resentment. I should have resigned my post for a combat command when this war began. Perhaps...
But he was not egotistic enough to think he could have changed things.
But this would be enough: a final revenge against the traitors and a final strike against the Imperials. Koldyeze was to be completely illuminated, both by flares and from six mobile searchlights that one of his aides had scrounged. Chainguns on the recon tracks were to sweep the walls. Any Imperial prisoner who stuck his head up would be slaughtered.
His plan worked.
When he was satisfied that all fire from the cathedral had been suppressed, he sent in the troops with demopacks. Nearly ten tons of high explosive was arranged at the foot of the wall. His next assault, which would occur an hour before dawn, was certain to succeed.
Unfortunately, Lord Wichman did not survive to see whether his tactics were successful.
Sten, outranking Sorensen, pulled the plug on the young man's commando operations. Virunga was right—they could not stand to lose him. Especially not now, with Virunga's cannon firing by calculation, calculation made possible only by Sorensen's mind functioning as a battle computer.
But those orders did not hold true for Sten.
After dusk, he and Alex went out looking for trouble. They went through the Tahn perimeter easily, all the old Mantis moves returning. Beyond the front lines, they split up and began their head-hunting.
Sten carried a miniwillygun with a single magazine of ammunition. If he was blown, he knew better than to imagine he would be able to shoot his way out. He carried four Mantis demolition packs with him, along with two grenades and a Gurkha kukri he had brought back to Heath.
The demopacks were the first to go. With a variable time set on the fuses, they were deposited, one on the deck of a recon track, one in the middle of four parked gravsleds, the third on one of the searchlight's generators, and the final one under what Sten thought was a com trailer.
Large cables led from that trailer into a well-guarded building. Sten found that interesting. He slipped into that building's neighbor and found an appropriate-length section of metal stair banister. On the roof, he positioned the banister across to the guarded building and hand-over-handed his way onto its roof, the rusty metal bending slightly as he went. He crept down the stairs, keeping low and close to the wall.
Lousy blackout, he thought, seeing a gleam of light from the curtained doorway of a room on the second floor. Then he saw the bulk next to it.
H'nrich might have been an excellent bodyguard against normal intruders.
Sten was not normal.
H'nrich'e eye registered a flash in the dimness as the kukri came up from below. That was all.
Sten yanked the kukri out of H'nrich's neck—he had pulled the slash so he would not have to worry about a head bouncing around the hallway—caught the sagging, blood-spouting body, and eased it down. He sheathed the kukri, wiped stickiness from his face, and took three deep breaths.
The question was not what was going to happen next but what would happen next next. Specifically, would Sten have time to get out with his vital signs vital before the reaction.
Possibly.
He took the two grenades from his webbing and rolled the timer until the X was under his fingers. Ten seconds.
Come on, son. Don't get cowardly now.
His hand blurred the pistol from its holster, and Sten went through the blackout curtain.
There were seven beings in the room. One of them, Sten's mind registered, was wearing a dress uniform, and then he ID'd Lord Wichman as his finger pulled the trigger to its stop and the AM2 rounds spit around the room.
Four rounds tore Wichman's body apart. Sten's free hand lobbed the grenades at the com console, and then he was gone.
There were screams and shouts and somebody outside shooting at something.
Sten was back up the steps, three at a time, almost falling through a broken lift, then on the roof and across. Running. He hit the far edge, eyes telling him he could make the jump, mind saying you ain't no Kilgour, and then he was in the air.
He landed at least a meter on the other side of that third building's parapet. Getting cowardly, he thought once more, and then melted into the night toward Koldyeze.
Sten came back to awaiting catastrophe.
He had seen the searchlights blinding on the walls of Koldyeze, realized that he could not return the way he had come out, and went once more through the tunnel.
Virunga brought him quickly up to speed; they had heard, and seen, the demolition charges being planted. When the Tahn had pulled back, four brave men and women had tried to get to the charges. Their bodies lay only a few meters beyond the gate.
Not, Sten thought privately, that they could have accomplished much. He assumed that the demo charges were not only separately det-timed but booby-trapped as well. The romantic days of putting the fuse seconds before the bang banged were as ancient as Hernandes's rifle.
"Ordered," Virunga said, "all troops back from wall. If Koldyeze doesn't fall on our heads... will retake fighting positions after blast.
"Better suggestion?" he asked Sten hopefully.
Sten had none. Neither did Kilgour when he returned an hour later.
They looked for a big rock to hide behind.
Wichman might have been dead, but his troops soldiered on.
The blast went off—on schedule.
The shock wave blew down five entire rows of already-shattered tenements. The ground earthquake-shook, and in their still-separate battle two kilometers away, Imperial guardsmen ducked, sure that somebody had set off a nuke. The blast cloud rose more than three kilometers into the clouds despite the continuing drizzle.
The entire front wall of the cruciform-shaped cathedral crumbled, and slid down the hill.
But only six POWs died. Koldyeze had indeed been built to withstand almost anything.
The Tahn mounted what was to be the final attack—and ran instantly into trouble.
The ruins of that front wall made an excellent tank trap—far superior even to Sten's grease. Even the heavies could not grind through the building-high boulders.
Only the gravsleds could provide support for the infantry.
Somewhat surprised that they were still alive, the Imperial defenders boiled out of their holes and found fighting positions.
Gravsled pilots were hit, and the gravsleds orbited out of the battle. The first wave of the Tahn infantry was obliterated.
But the second wave found forward positions and laid down a base of fire.
The third wave attacked, and the gravsleds were able to move in.
The prisoners pulled back. Back and down.
Into the crypts.
"Clottin' convenient place to die," Kilgour observed, sourly looking around the cellar. "Thae'll be na need to dig a wee grave."
Virunga herded the last of the hostages down more stone steps deeper into the subbasements and limped back toward Sten.
Sten had hastily reorganized the surviving fighters into five-man squads and given each one a position to hold: a stairwell, a landing, a portion of the huge basement he himself was in. Anything bullet-resistant had been dragged up as a barricade.
He had not needed to tell his squads they were to hold till the last—none of the Imperial prisoners were stupid enough to believe the Tahn were interested in recapturing them.