Frederick Lefarge felt the sweat trickle down from the rim of his helmet, itching under the armor and camouflage smock. He glanced at his watch: 2000 hours. The pickup squad was in a stand of tall pale-barked trees not far from what had been the perimeter wire of Chandragupta Base. A dozen of them, with nothing but their fieldcraft and two boxes of very sophisticated electronics to keep them out of the tightening Draka net. Two were wounded, and he didn’t think Smythe was going to make it, he’d been far too close to a radiation bomb yesterday, when the rest of them had been sheltered in the cellar. Vomiting blood was not a good sign, either.
“Sor.” Winters, the Englishman. Professional NCO in the Cumberland Borderers before transfer to the OSS special forces. Very reliable. “Sor, it’s past time.”
She isn’t going to make it, he thought. Either she’s dead or she should be. He fought down the hot flash of rage, let it mingle with fear until it became something cold and leaden in his gut. Something that would not interfere with the job at hand . . . He remembered a moment in Santa Fe, and the pistol in Marya’s hand unwavering upon him. We always knew the price, he thought. Go with God, ma soeur.
And her mission accomplished—the explosion in the base HQ proved that—but nothing beyond. He raised the visor of his helmet and bent to the eyepiece of the spyglass. There were pickups all over the operational area, where his men had left their optical-thread connectors. The fires were mostly out now. Those had been from the initial blitz, suborb missiles with precision-guided conventional explosives. Dibblers for the runways, earth piercers for the hardened weapons points, then a rolling surf of antipersonnel submunitions. The assault troops—1st Airborne Legion, Citizen Force elite—had come on the heels of those, but they had moved out once the area was secured, now there was a brigade of Janissaries doing clear-and-hold. And support personnel, Intelligence, transports, two squadrons of low-altitude VTOL gunboats, another of Falcons.
And now they think it’s secured, he thought grimly. Time to disabuse them.
“Hit it, Jock,” he said.
“And we—” Myfwany stopped. “What the fuck was that, Ali?”
They and the Janissaries were standing outside a dugout. The explosion was a kilometer away, across the base. A flash, and the muffled whump a second later, a ball of orange flame rising into the soft Indian night. The troopers went into an instinctive crouch, and Ali cursed, rolling back into the sandbagged slit and reaching for the groundline com.
“Suh?” he said. “Post Six, second tetrarchy—shit, it out!”
Another explosion, and another; a rippling line in an arc along the perimeter opposite them. Yolande and Myfwany exchanged a glance and pulled on their ground helmets, slipping down the visors and turning the night to a pale imitation of day. Each had a tiny dot of strobing red light at the lower left-hand corner; jamming. Then a real explosion. The two Draka threw themselves flat at the harsh white glare. Even reflected around the edges of their visors it was enough to dazzle, and the shockwave lifted them up and slammed them down again hard enough to stun and bruise on the unyielding pavement.
Yolande heard one of the Janissaries shouting. “Nuke? Dec, was that a nuke?” Her eyes darted down to the readout on the sleeve of her flight suit. No radiation above the nervous-making background already there, and a spear of blue-white flame was already rising from behind the broken hangars. Secondary explosions bellowed, like echoes of that world-numbing blast.
“No, it ain’t,” Ali was saying. “That the fuel store.”
Liquid hydrogen and methane, Yolande realized. High-energy fuels for high-performance craft, difficult to transport. One of the reasons the attack plan had made this base a priority target in the first place. And—
“The birds!” she shouted to Myfwany. Fatigue and worry vanished in the rush of adrenaline, at the thought of the turboram fighters caught helpless on the ground. The Falcons were two thousand meters distant, behind the parked assault transports.
Myfwany nodded. “Ali, you tasked with that?”
The burly Janissary was climbing back out of the revetment. He hesitated for a moment; he was, but having two Citizens along out of the regular chain of command was not a good idea . . . The two Draka women saw him shrug and nod, accepting what could not be changed.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Marcel, Ching, Mustafa, come with me. Brigitte, Nils, Vlachec, hold the position an’ report when the com comes back up.”
“Now!” Frederick Lefarge kept to one knee and watched the dozen OSS special-ops troopers scurry by. In toward the base that now swarmed like a kicked-open termite mound. Their only chance . . .
He rose to his feet and followed. There they were, ten Buffel tiltrotor assault transports, standing ready with their turbines warm. Nobody around them but unarmed ground crew. The Alliance soldiers could charge on board and take off in ten different directions; the Draka IFF would hesitate crucial seconds before overriding their own electronic identification . . . and the battle was still a chaos of Draka and Indian-held pockets from here to Burma. Just insane enough to have some chance of success. The Springfield-15 seemed light as a twig in his hands; his gaze hopped across the flat expanses of the airbase, watching for movement. There. Light armor, moving out of laager in the vehicle park, coasting toward them with air-cushion speed. His hand slapped a switch at his waist.
“Down!” Yolande shouted, when the lines of fire erupted upward out of the stand of trees to their right. She and Myfwany threw themselves apart and forward without breaking stride; she could hear the light impact of her lover’s body on the concrete, and seconds later the pounding slam of the Janissary heavy infantry hitting the pavement.
The weapon that had fired was some sort of rocket automortar; she watched the trajectories arch and then plunge back down. Down toward the trio of Cheetah hovertanks that had been approaching them; a hundred meters up, the self-forging warheads exploded in disks of fire, sending arrowheads of incandescent metal streaking for the thin deck armor of the Draka tanks. The impacts were flashes that would have been dazzling without the guard functions of her visor. The air-cushion vehicles bounced down as if slapped by the hand of an invisible giant, then exploded in gouts of fuel fire and ammunition glare. Hot warm air struck her like a pillow, and a pattering rain of cermet armor and body parts began to fall around the soldiers of the Domination.
“ ’Landa!” Myfwany called. “Look right, are those hostiles?” Yolande halted and went to ground conscious of the others following the pilot’s extended arm.
Frederick Lefarge threw himself to the ground and rolled to one side as the group running on an intercept vector with his opened fire. Muzzle flashes strobed before the silvery light-enhanced shapes of enemy soldiers. Shrapnel flicked at his exposed legs and arms, nothing serious, but he could feel the blood trickle behind the sharp sting. Can’t stop for a slugfest, went through him. His special-forces unit were only lightly armored, and there was no cover on this artificial concrete desert.
“Eat this!” the OSS trooper beside Lefarge cried, flipping up to his knees and firing a grenade from the launcher beneath the barrel of his SI7. It burst with an orange flash behind the enemy firing line; one of the rifles stopped, and there was a scream of pain. Then a chattering flash from directly ahead; machine pistol, not the louder growl of a T-7. The trooper who had fired pitched backward, torn open. Lefarge snapped off a burst toward the source and began crawling forward. Another sound came from near where he had fired, a scream that raised the tiny hairs along the back of his neck.