"The Montreal doesn't mount heavy guns," Stephen said. "They won't be able to do us serious damage in the time they'll have before we land."
His face was quietly composed, and his eyes still looked human. There was nothing to do until the ramp opened, so Stephen's mind hadn't yet reentered the place that it went when he killed.
The man beside us bobbed his face forward to look through his open faceshield. It was Dole. There were twelve of us in the front rank this time, packed so tight that the bosun couldn't turn to face us he normally would while suited up. "Bastards did good to hit us the once," he shouted. "Don't worry about them getting home again, sir."
"Don't discount the Fed gunners," Stephen said calmly. "They may have somebody as good as Stampfer. It only takes one if they have director control."
"I'm not worried," I said. I stood in the body of a man about to charge through a haze of sun-hot plasma toward a ship weighing hundreds of tonnes and crewed by anything up to a thousand enemy personnel. I wasn't a part of that suicidal mission, I was just observing.
The siren sounded, warning that we were about to touch down. Stephen and I linked arms and braced one boot each against the ramp. I felt a sailor in the second rank clasp my shoulder. There were no individual gripping points within the hold, but if we locked ourselves together, I figured the whole assault party would be able to stay upright.
Our rate of descent was much higher than Piet's normal gentle landings because we had to remain parallel with Our Lady of Montreal. She was dropping like a brick, either from panic, general incompetence, or as a calculated attempt by the Fed captain to get an angle from which he could send a bolt into the thruster nozzles on our underside.
Braked momentum slammed down on me at 6 g's. I thought we'd hit the surface, but Piet had instead opened the throttles at the last instant. The ground effect of our rebounding exhaust rocked the Oriflamme violently from side to side. Then our extended skids hit the surface.
Everybody in the hold fell down like pieces of a matchstick house. I was under at least two men. Somebody's gauntlet was across my visor. I supposed I should be thankful that he'd forced the visor shut instead of ramming his armored fingers directly into my eyes.
I'd thought we could remain standing no matter how hard we hit. Man proposes, God disposes. .
The men on top of me got up. One of them was Stephen, identifiable because he carried both his flashgun and a rifle. Somebody else tried to step across my body. I pushed him back as I lurched to a squat. I found my cutting bar beside me and stood up with it. I clipped the weapon to an equipment stud again. I should have left it there until it was time to use the blade.
The hatch unsealed. Air charged by our exhaust swirled around the edges of the ramp in a radiant veil. As the lip lowered, I saw Our Lady of Montreal looming like a vast curved wall before us. She was at least fifty meters tall through her vertical axis, and no farther than that from us. The hatches that could open out from the great sphere's base were closed, but I saw unshuttered gun ports on the lower curve.
A 15-cm plasma cannon fired directly overhead. Its brilliance was so dazzling that it rocked me back against the men behind. My faceshield reacted instantly, saving my vision by filtering black everything except the ionized track itself. Even combed by the filter, the bolt was bright enough to turn the massive shock wave five milliseconds later into anticlimax.
A fireball shrouded Our Lady of Montreal. Her own vaporized hull metal had exploded into white flame.
The bubble of light lifted away on the gases expanding it. Our bolt had punched a hole a meter in diameter in the Montreal's lower quarter. The edges of the gap glowed for a moment; then the Oriflamme's second gun blew a similar blazing hole beside the first.
Stampfer was firing our battery with a two-second pause between bolts-time to dissipate the ionized haze which would lessen the effect of an instantly following round. The Oriflamme rocked at each discharge. The recoil of a few grams of ions accelerated to light speed was enough to shake even a starship's hundred tonnes.
The Long Tom fired. Its discharge was heavier than the midships guns' by an order of magnitude. The Oriflamme's bow shifted a centimeter on the landing outriggers.
The lower quarter of the Federation vessel was a fiery cavity. The hatch had been blown completely away, but the mist of burning metal beyond was as palpable as marble.
The end of our ramp was still a meter and a half in the air. The blast of the main guns had deafened me. I couldn't even hear my own voice shouting, "God and Venus!" as I leaped to the ground.
I crashed down on my face. The plasma cannon firing from the Montreal hit the sailor behind me instead and blew him to vapor. Bits of his ceramic armor scattered like grenade fragments.
I got to my feet. Stephen aimed his flashgun up at a 45° angle. His laser bolt, so bright under most conditions, was lost in the greater brilliance of the plasma weapons moments before.
I stumbled toward the cavity Stampfer's guns had blasted for our entry. It roiled with ionized residues of the cannonfire and the ordinary conflagrations which the bolts had ignited in the compartments beyond. With my visor down, I was breathing from the suit's oxygen bottle.
An explosion above us almost knocked me down again. Stephen's bolt had punched into the cannon's 5-cm bore, damaging the nearly spherical array of lasers within the chambered round. The lasers were meant to implode a deuterium pellet at the shell's heart and direct the resulting plasma down a pinhole pathway aligned with the axis of the gun barrel.
Instead, the cannon's breech ruptured. The blast was more violent than the one which killed the man behind me, and I doubted whether Federation armor was as good as our Venerian ceramic.
The rocky soil beneath the Montreal was glazed by exhaust and our heavy cannon. The hatch had been wrenched away, but the lintel was square and a meter and a half above ground level. Stalactites of nickel-steel plating hung from the lower edge of the wound.
The white glare of the vessel's interior had dulled to a deep red. Fluid dribbling from the ruptured hydraulic lines burned with dark, smoky flames.
I gripped the lower lip of the opening and kicked myself upward. To my amazement, I wobbled into the hold despite thirty kilos of hard suit and weakness from the days we'd spent in free fall.
The vessel's cylindrical core held tanks of reaction mass and liquefied air behind plating as thick as that of the external hull. Shock waves had started a few of the seams, but the structure in general was still solid. Dual companionways to the higher decks were built into the core structure.
The horizontal deck was 1-cm steel. Blasts generated by our plasma bolts had hammered the surface downward as much as twenty centimeters between frames. The hold's internal bulkheads were flattened, and the hatches that should have closed the companionways had been blown askew.
Five Federation crewmen in the lower hold were in metal hard suits when our first 15-cm bolt penetrated the hull. The suits remained, crushed and disarticulated. From the top of a thigh guard stuck the remains of a femur burned to charcoal. That bone was the only sign of the people who'd been wearing the suits.
I looked behind me. Several men in armor were trying to clamber up with one hand hampered by weapons. I clasped the nearest man under the right shoulder and heaved. His face was down, so I don't know who he was. He skidded aboard, got to his feet, and clumped toward a companionway.