“Zebra-Tango!” Pareja replied.
* * *
Gutierrez watched as the sensor remote he’d bounced up the passageway rolled to a stop just short of the first line of mines. He didn’t really need it, but seeing how quickly the other side reacted to it should be informative.
“One…two…three…four…”
He’d just reached “seven” when a burst of pulser darts from one of the loopholes destroyed the remote.
“Lord,” he muttered. “These clowns are as pathetic as those bas—I mean, as those jackasses on Tiberian, My Lady.”
He shook his head. Seven seconds to react at all, and then instead of a single shot the morons had fired an entire burst? The ricocheting pulser darts had taken out three of their own mines, and it wasn’t even as if the remote had been telling him anything he hadn’t already known in the first place!
“Don’t complain, Mateo,” Abigail said sternly.
“I’m not. It’s just—”
He shrugged irritably, a master craftsman frustrated by the slovenly workmanship of a would-be competitor, and glanced at Senior Chief Petty Officer Franklin Musgrave, Tristram’s boatswain.
“Ready, Frank?”
“Ready,” Musgrave confirmed.
“Then punch it.”
“Fire in the hole!”
Musgrave slid just the muzzle of his weapon around the edge of the corridor and squeezed the firing stud. It was an awkward angle, and despite the stabilizing pressor beam projected against one of the lift shafts from the launcher’s other end, the recoil was significant. Musgrave had expected that, however. He kept control of the bucking launcher without much difficulty, and the projectile’s flight path had been programmed to allow for the muzzle rise as it departed downrange. Because of the short range—the other end of the passage was actually inside the launcher’s danger zone—and the fact that no one in his right mind wanted to be within forty or fifty meters of a kinetic strike from a weapon that powerful, they’d had to step down its normal acceleration rate considerably and go with the chemical shaped-charge warhead, instead of its usual dart-like penetrator. Even that was bad enough, since it was designed to take out light armored vehicles, but at least the vast majority of the blast would expend itself on the other side of the blast doors.
Sergeant Clinton Abernathy had a single, fleeting instant to realize what the launcher was before it fired, but that was all the warning he had before he, the blast doors, and his entire squad ceased to exist.
* * *
“Jesus Christ!”
Surprise jerked the blasphemy out of Kristoffersen as Abernathy’s squad was wiped from existence.
“That was a tank-killer!” his company first sergeant blurted.
“No! You think?!” Kristoffersen snarled with a baleful glare that closed the first sergeant’s mouth with snap. “Tell Lieutenant Boudreaux to reinforce Axial One and Axial Three. And tell his people to keep their heads frigging down! These bastards’ve got heavier weapons than we thought.”
* * *
“That was noisy,” Gutierrez observed. He tossed another remote down the corridor and grimaced. “Messy, too.”
“They had their chance to do it the easy way, Mateo,” Abigail replied harshly. “Like you say, even those bastards on Tiberian were smarter than this! Let’s keep the pressure on them.”
“Aye, aye, My Lady.”
* * *
“Well, at least they’re not shy,” Major Pole growled, studying his tactical display. None of the Manties Kristoffersen had seen before he withdrew to deliver Lieutenant Hearns’ ultimatum had been armed with anything like that tank-killer. That was going to make things messier, but weapons that heavy were going to be less useful to the attackers as they moved into Victor Seven proper. They weren’t going to have any more firing lines as long as that first one, and without powered armor of their own, no one was going to want to be anywhere near the back blast from something like that when it was confined and channeled by one of the station’s passageways.
That was the good news. The bad news was that now that they’d blown their way past the late Sergeant Abernathy’s squad, their menu of approach routes got a lot broader. Pole’s people knew the internal geography of their habitat far better than the Manties possibly could, but covering all the possible approaches with enough forward-deployed firepower to stop people equipped with such heavy weapons was going to take a lot of manpower.
He considered offering to hand over the internees now that the Manties had demonstrated they were serious, but he couldn’t do that…yet. If he didn’t want to be the one who ended up carrying the can for this entire debacle, he had to be able to argue that he’d genuinely tried to obey the ridiculous, unreasonable orders he’d been given, and that meant he was going to have to accept heavier casualties before he recognized the inevitable and gave in. It was unfortunate, of course, but at least his command post was well back from the point of contact. He was pretty sure he’d have time to accrue sufficient casualties to cover his ass before the actual fighting got anywhere near him.
* * *
“Okay, things are about to get tricky, My Lady,” Gutierrez said.
He was two blast doors deeper into Victor Seven, and Abigail had downloaded the damage control guide’s memory to his skinsuit as well as her own. More copies had been uploaded to Nicasio Xamar, Tristram’s assistant tactical officer, as well as to Senior Chief Musgrave and all the other senior noncoms attached to the boarding party. Now Abigail and Gutierrez studied the imagery together, even though they were the better part of fifty meters apart.
“We could cut through this engineering crawlway,” Gutierrez pointed out, highlighting the crawlway in question on both HUDs. “That’d get us around behind them right here.”
He highlighted the closed, loopholed blast doors just ahead of his current position, where the gendarmes had set up another strongpoint.
“If we were actually trying to fight our way through them, that would probably be a good idea,” Abigail replied. “Since we’re not…?”
“Since we’re not, I guess we need to knock on the door again,” Gutierrez replied.
He sat back, thinking for a moment. As he’d said, things were about to get tricky. To get at the strongpoint, the Manticorans would have to make their way around a relatively sharp bend in the passageway. The problem was that they’d be exposed to fire from the gendarmes the instant they poked their heads around the turn. There wasn’t room for them to use Musgrave’s launcher here, either. With a Marine fire team in proper powered armor, a heavy tri-barrel, and a plasma rifle, it would have been a straightforward tactical problem. Without any of those, he was just going to have to adapt, improvise, and overcome.
“MacFarlane!”
“Yes, LT?” PO 1/c William MacFarlane replied.
“Bring your little friend up here.”
“On my way, LT.”
MacFarlane, one of Tristram’s damage control specialists, crawled up behind Gutierrez less than a minute later. The Marine-turned-armsman slithered back a little so that he and MacFarlane could both look at a hand display.
“We need to make that door go away,” Gutierrez said, tapping the display. “Think your pet’s up to it?”
“Oh, yeah,” MacFarlane replied. “Course, the people on the other side’re going to be trying to stop him.”
“I think we can probably do a little something about that,” Gutierrez told him. “Mind you, it would work better with a Bravo Charlie, but I guess we’ll just have to make do.”
“Don’t you be hurting Denny’s feelings, LT!” MacFarlane retorted with a grin. “He’ll do just fine.”
“So let me get the cheering section organized and then you can show me.”