Stephen had lowered his face to the ground. If he'd been turned in the direction of the blast, metal would have redeposited on his visor in an opaque coating.
"Throw something in those gun muzzles!" Stephen ordered as he got up. He tossed his discharged flashgun battery toward the nearer plasma cannon, several meters above him. The battery, a 20-by-6-by-4-centimeter prism, bounced back from the stellite tube.
Other men tried their luck with pebbles and debris; a sailor succeeded in lobbing the broken buttstock of a shotgun up and into the gun tube. Major Cardiff was climbing a ladder welded to the side of the farther gunhouse with a Fed's white jacket in his hand to drape over the muzzle.
What looked like a game was nothing of the sort. A plasma cannon's shell was a spherical array of miniature lasers that, when tripped, compressed a bead of tritium from all points but the one in line with the bore. Plasma propagated from the resulting thermonuclear explosion at light speed, but the ions were themselves of slight mass. The least obstruction within the gun tube would disrupt the stream and reflect enough of the enormous energy backward to destroy the weapon itself.
"Vanderdrekkan!" Stephen called, looking around for his aide with the laser communicator. "Van-"
The European lieutenant was at Stephen's elbow. Their suits clashed together as Stephen turned quickly. "Oh! Get up the ramp-"
Major Cardiff stood on the roof of the gunhouse and tossed the wadded jacket into the 20-centimeter hole.
"— and tell Piet that these guns are-"
The Wrath's main battery let loose in a rippling string. Ten bolts, her port broadside-tearing the sky, shocking the assault force as much by the intensity of light as the crashing thunder of air filling each track superheated to near vacuum by the plasma.
A moment later the starboard guns fired. This time the Wrath's hull muffled the havoc somewhat. The targets, hidden from the assault force by the gunpit and berm, fountained in white coruscance a kilometer high.
Piet had landed the Wrath so that Hatch 3 was adjacent to the gunpit gate, and so that the vessel's guns (trained as far forward as the ports allowed) bore on the towers of the military port. The gun towers were of sturdy construction with sloped concrete copings to shield the guns at the rest position. It would have required several broadsides to hammer through their protection.
Instead of that, Piet had waited till the Feds raised the guns to engage the invaders who had landed in the civil port. As soon as the Fed weapons appeared over the coping, the Wrath's waiting gunners blew them to shimmering plasma.
The Feds didn't get off a shot. Their own ammunition added to the towers' scintillating destruction.
Stephen cleared his throat. The port-side guns had fired directly over the gunpit. "Tell Piet-" he repeated.
The world went white. Every sensory impression vanished.
Stephen Gregg was lying halfway up the gunpit ramp. He was on his belly, his head pointed toward where the gate had been.
The gate was gone. Stephen didn't have his flashgun, and the two satchels of batteries he'd worn over his shoulders on crossed straps were missing also. The cutting bar was still clipped to his left hip.
Stephen levered himself upright and looked back into the pit. The base of the farther gunhouse was stamped down as if drop-forged over the gearing below. The structure's armor had been 15 centimeters thick on the sides, 20 on the front and probably the top. The lower meter or so of the walls was now splayed out from the base. Everything above that height-the height of the plasma cannon's breech when the weapon fired-had been eroded into the iridescent cloud towering from the blast site into a dumbbell thousands of meters high.
The Feds in the gunhouse had fired their cannon. Either they didn't know the bore was plugged or they'd preferred to die in a blaze of glory rather than surrender to pirates from Venus. Major Cardiff had been on top of the thermonuclear explosion. He no longer existed. Several of his nearer men had been blown to fragments despite their sturdy hard suits. The nearer gunhouse had shielded Stephen, but if he hadn't moved slightly to give an order it could have-
It could have meant that he'd have gone to whatever eternity God keeps for men like Stephen Gregg.
The hatch of the nearer gunhouse unsealed. A Fed officer, waving his white jacket on a pry bar, babbled, "Don't blow us up! Don't blow us up! We surrender!"
Several Molts crouched behind him, fear in their carriage though their exoskeletal faces were impassive. The Feds thought Stephen's men had vaporized the other gunhouse.
"Vanderdrekkan?" Stephen croaked. His aide was one of the armored men picking themselves up nearby, but he'd lost his laser communicator just as Stephen had lost the flashgun in the shock wave.
Stephen had been close to death before, many times before; but generally he'd known the danger was present. This time-
The fighting wasn't over, not by hours or maybe days, but the initial assault was complete. Stephen's troops had carried their objective without casualties and almost without fighting.
And then the blast that Major Lucas Cardiff hadn't felt, and Colonel Stephen Gregg wouldn't have felt either if he'd been standing one pace to his right. God's will, Stephen supposed; and therefore unfathomable by human beings, Piet would add. But. .
Why Cardiff and not me? Why so many others over so many years, and not me?
Stephen started up the ramp to carry the message of success since he couldn't send it to the Wrath. Piet Ricimer in gilded half armor, carrying a shotgun and a laser communicator, stepped though the opening from which the gate and gateposts had both been blown by the explosion.
"Bring the squadron in, Guillermo," Piet ordered into the communicator's mouthpiece. "The guns have been eliminated."
Stephen flipped up his faceshield. Piet's eyes flicked from the Fed gun position to the man climbing toward him in a hard suit blurred by the frosty gray of recondensed metal vapor. "Stephen? Stephen, are you all right?"
"For God's sake, Piet," Stephen Gregg whispered as he embraced his friend. "For God's sake."
All Stephen could think of in that moment was that if Piet had leaped from the Wrath's cockpit hatch a few seconds sooner, the general commander in his half armor would have been ripped to atoms as surely as the gate itself.
And Stephen Gregg would still have been alive with the memory.
WINNIPEG SPACEPORT, EARTH
April 16, Year 27
0257 hours, Venus time
Steam, smoke, or sometimes flame flared from every opening of the 400-tonne Federation freighter across the field from the Gallant Sallie. While Sal was still in orbit, she'd watched the destruction on a signal from the Wrath.
The Fed crew had run out eight of their moderate-sized plasma cannon as Captain Casson brought the Freedom down. The Feds fired three bolts at the Freedom. They hit twice but didn't penetrate the big armed merchantman's hull. Before the other Fed guns could fire, the Wrath and the Freedom together put a dozen rounds of 17-, 20-, and 25-cm cannonfire into the metal-built vessel, turning it into a blazing white inferno.
"I'm going to open the hatches now," Sal said.
"We ought to give the ground another minute-" Tom Harrigan said.
Brantling stepped past the mate and threw the controls for the cockpit hatch. Harrigan grimaced but didn't object. Air, throbbing with the heat of the ground and scores of fires across the spaceport, entered the cabin.