Piet brought them down out of the east, just above the risen sun. The guardship hadn't flashed the port a warning, so the ground staff wasn't afraid of hostile forces, but the Wrath's display was thunderous and colorful. It was sure to draw eyes in a port where excitement generally meant that a ship had lost control during her landing approach.
"Bet they're waking the crash crews right now, boys," Stephen shouted over the roaring descent. Sailors laughed and catcalled; soldiers relaxed minusculely in their shells of ceramic or metal.
By choice, Stephen would have been silent before action, but this time he had the responsibilities of command. Few if any of the soldiers had experienced a combat descent. Most of them thought the Wrath really was about to crash. Hearing the sailors laugh at the thought was the best tonic Colonel Gregg could offer.
Stephen checked the Fed defenses as their images grew. The gun tower batteries were lowered into their cradles. The guns in the pit were vertical in their equivalent rest position. The tubes were dim blurs at the display's modest resolution because they projected only two meters above the gunhouses, but the long shadows the sun threw from them were clear to a trained eye.
The port's scarred gray surface filled the screen. The Wrath sailed at a steep angle past a pair of vessels undergoing maintenance on the ground.
"Get a good grip, boys," Dole bellowed. "Captain Ricimer's the best there is, but inertia's still inertia!"
All sixteen thrusters cut in at full output, slowing the big vessel to the speed of a dropping feather in the last two hundred meters before she touched down. Despite the warning and the stanchions planted thickly in a hold designed for combat, not cargo operations, half the landsmen crashed to the deck under the braking thrust.
Dole had wanted to use only sailors for the operation; but the soldiers had more experience in ground operations, and half a dozen of the landsmen were reasonably expert with the heavy, dangerous flashguns that few sailors cared to use. Life is a trade-off. .
Touchdown was so delicate that Stephen noticed not the contact but the cessation of the thrusters' roaring vibration. The hold was configured for rapid assaults: instead of a single hatch across the entire frontage, worked by a screw jack, the hold had six paired clamshell doors that sprang open under the action of powerful hydraulic rams.
Ideally they sprang open. This time the lower trio worked properly, but the center door of the upper tier jammed half raised to hang like the sole tooth in a gaffer's mouth. Men in the middle of the assault force lurched right or left, fouling their fellows as they charged into the seething hell beyond.
The last of the Wrath's exhaust lifted in a superheated doughnut as the hatches opened. A blast of incoming cooler air ripped trash and pebbles from the ground. It slammed the troops and staggered them, even the sailors who knew more or less what to expect. The flashgun tugged in Stephen's grasp, though he was barely conscious of the fact.
If Stephen Gregg had an article of faith, it was that his weapon would point where he wanted it to point and would fire when it bore on a target, no matter what the universe did to obstruct him. Other men had warmer, brighter gods; but as the veil of plasma lifted and the enemy's gunpit came in sight-this faith would serve. This would serve very well.
Stephen took three paces forward, breathing bottled air in his sealed hard suit. He couldn't see anything until the roiling air settled, but he knew from the display in the boarding hold and a decade of working with Piet that the Wrath had set down where planned, twenty meters or so from the gate to the gunpit. There were men to Stephen's immediate right and left. Major Cardiff in armor yellow-striped for identification pressed forward on the left flank of the assault force.
Rocks and debris pattered from the sky on Stephen and his fellows. He saw the gate clearing from the turbulence. The morning sun backlit the firing slits. One of the horizontal bars darkened. Stephen fired without needing to give a conscious order to his trigger finger.
The laser bolt struck just below the slit. It flash-heated the nickel steel in a yellow patch the size of a soup plate with a blazing white heart. The surface facing Stephen blistered outward, while the back of the plate exploded in ragged flakes. The slit brightened as the Fed who'd stood behind it fell.
Stephen reloaded as he ran forward. He paused at the gate to snatch at the cutting bar clipped to the right hip of his suit. Dole beside him already had his bar ready. The bosun cut down in a single powerful stroke. The blade's hornet whine became momentarily deeper where it sheared frame as well as plating. To the left, soldiers were mounting the steep berm. Pairs of armored men knelt to form a stirrup of their hands for a third who vaulted to the top.
A sailor fired both barrels of his shotgun down through the slotted opening of the guard kiosk. That probably wasn't necessary, because the Fed guard hadn't worn a hard suit. It was barely possible that the fellow on duty this morning had survived the Wrath's exhaust, but he certainly wasn't in shape to resist. Better to make sure, though. Always better to kill.
Dole's bar cut to the ground in a last spray of burning steel. Stephen and a dozen sailors hit the gate with their armored shoulders, ramming it backward faster than a Fed crew had ever opened it. The body of a Molt lay where Stephen's bolt had spalled supersonic fragments of steel from the plate to disembowel her.
The hatch of the farther gunhouse was closed. The hatch of the nearer gunhouse was closing. Stephen fired into the crack, blowing a divot of metal from the jamb and perhaps reflecting some of the laser's energy into the gunhouse.
The hatch slammed shut anyway. A dozen Fed crewmen, humans and Molts, were trapped in the pit but closed out of the gunhouses. The humans screamed, raising their hands or dodging to shelter on the other side of the armored houses.
A Molt fired his rifle. The bullet hit Stephen in the center of the chest, knocking him back a pace. Scores of bullets and shotgun charges ripped the trapped Feds, killing all of them.
Stephen strode down the ramp. His chest tingled. He didn't think the bullet had penetrated his hard suit, but he couldn't worry about that now. The gun crew wasn't prepared to fight men in full armor, though they'd reacted pretty well to what must have been a complete surprise.
The nearer barbette began to rotate to face the eastern sky. The gunners were preparing for a target to approach from orbit.
Stephen dropped flat on his belly with his head cocked to the side so that he could see from that position despite the limited width of his faceshield. The gunhouse shaded the barbette's gear train, but he could see the quiver of motion. He aimed the flashgun and fired.
The flash of coherent light ignited an explosive secondary glare as metal burned white. The welded gear bound. The barbette stopped with a squeal.
Soldiers with flashguns knelt or sprawled to fire into the workings of the other barbette. Bubbles of vaporized metal spurted explosively from beneath the gunhouse. A man stepped past Stephen and held his flashgun almost in contact with the nearer gunhouse's hatch.
"Don't!" Stephen bellowed though his hard suit's external speakers.
The soldier didn't hear or didn't care. His bolt blasted a fist-sized divot of steel from the heavy door, making the gunhouse ring but doing no harm whatever to the Feds within. The vaporized metal blew outward, knocking the shooter across the pit. The shock wave staggered Stephen even though he'd braced himself on all fours when he saw what the foolish whoreson was about to do.