Path of the Fury by David Weber
Arlen Monkoto poked his head cautiously around a corner, trying not to cough as acrid smoke assaulted his lungs. He’d fought his way to within two corridors of the computer center, but he’d lost Chief Pilaskov on the way in, and he was down to five men and three women, only two of them Maniacs.
The way ahead was clear, and he moved down the hall in the quietest run he could manage. “His” people followed him, and his mind raced. If they got into the computer center, took out the techs he knew were pillaging it—
An armored raider appeared before him, and thirty-millimeter rifle fire tore Captain Arlen Monkoto apart.
“Download complete!” someone called, and someone else was screaming to “Move it back to the shuttles now!” over the tactical net.
Raiders began to disengage, leapfrogging back towards the shuttle perimeter. Too few defenders remained to stop them, but the twenty shuttle loads who’d landed needed only twelve shuttles to lift them out again.
“Shuttles preparing to lift, sir.”
Howell grunted approval at the report, but inside he winced. Twenty percent casualties were too damned many so soon after Elysium, even if they had secured every one of their objectives this time. He didn’t care what Control said, he wasn’t sending teams in against targets this hard again.
“Sir, sensors report a Fasset drive coming in from the direction of El Greco,” an officer said suddenly, and Howell’s head snapped around.
“What is it?” he demanded.
“Can’t tell at this range, sir, but it’s not a Fleet drive. Looks like an El Grecan—probably a destroyer.”
The commodore relaxed. A destroyer had the speed to overhaul them, but not the firepower to fight them, and this time she was welcome to any sensor data she could get. Aside from the freighter’s transponder codes, nothing he’d done here had required the use of classified security data, and ex-Fleet heavy cruisers weren’t all that hard to come by.
He looked back into the display as the shuttles began to lift, and his mouth curled in an ugly smile. The fact that the “pirates” had one of Fleet’s cast-off CAs would spill no beans, but Intolerant’s weapons would more than suffice to destroy the El Grecan ship if she got close enough to be a problem. Besides, she’d be . . . distracted after Intolerant nuked Raphael, and—
“Sir! The shuttles!” someone shouted, and Howell’s face went white as the Stiletto teams opened fire. Nine of his thirty-one surviving shuttles became falling fireballs as he stared at the display.
Admiral Simon Monkoto stood on the bridge of the destroyer Ardent, staring at the view screen, and his carved-marble face was white as the silver at his temples. There had been no way for Ardent to know what was happening on Ringbolt until she dropped sublight, but the radiation counters were going mad. Whoever had nuked Raphael had used the dirtiest warhead Admiral Monkoto had ever seen on the city . . . and on Arlen.
Dark eyes, hot and hating in his frozen face, moved from the view screen to the gravitic plot. He could have overhauled the raiders. It would have been close, even with their freighters to slow them, for his destroyer had been on the wrong approach vector, but he could have caught them.
And it would have done no good at all against a heavy cruiser.
He’d almost done it anyway, but he hadn’t. He couldn’t throw away his crew’s lives—or his own. Even more than he wanted those ships, he wanted the people who’d sent them, and he couldn’t have them if he died.
His jaw clenched, and he turned away. Ardent’s last shuttle was waiting for him, waiting to take him down to the planet where his brother had died to do what he could. But he’d be back, and not with a single destroyer.
He promised himself that—promised Arlen—and his expression was as hellish as his heart.
Chapter Twenty
Ching-Hai lay barely 14.8 light-minutes from the F5 star Thierdahl, with an axial tilt of forty-one degrees. It was also dry—very dry—with an atmospheric pressure only three-quarters that of Old Earth, all of which conspired to produce something only the charitable could call a climate. Alicia couldn’t conceive of any rational reason to choose to live here, and not even Imperial Galactography knew why anyone had. The handbook’s best theory was that the original settlers were League War or HRW-I refugees who’d found in Ching-Hai a world so inhospitable neither the Empire nor the Rishatha would want it. As guesses went, that one was as good as any; certainly their descendants had no better one four hundred years later.
Which probably explained their attitude towards other people’s laws. They had to make a living somehow, and their planet wasn’t much help, she thought, crossing to the coffeemaker and watching with a corner of her brain while Megarea slipped them into orbit. They were a few hours early, and Alicia was just as glad. She’d recovered— mostly—from the experience Tisiphone had unleashed upon her, but she welcomed a little more time to settle down before she had to meet Yerensky’s local contact.
She carried her cup back to the view port. Ochre and yellow land masses moved far below her, splashed with an occasional large lake or small sea. It all looked depressingly flat, and there were very few visible light blurs on the nightside. The one official spaceport was well into the dayside at the moment, but whoever was in charge hadn’t even bothered to assign her a parking orbit, much less mounted any sort of customs inspection.
“No, but this is so . . . so—“
“Something like that. Not that I’m complaining. I don’t know how Yerensky got those medical supplies out of the Empire and onto Maguire without any customs stamps, but I’d hate to try explaining it to someone else.”
Alicia didn’t reply. She suspected herself of sulking, and she didn’t really care. The reminder of all the unresolved hate and violence still locked away within her had frightened her. Not that she hadn’t known it was there, but knowing and feeling were two different things, and—
“So soon?” Alicia’s eyebrows rose.
“I don’t like it. Yerensky didn’t say anything about night landings.”
“On this planet?” Alicia frowned. “I wouldn’t’ve thought there was any reason to hide medical supplies. They’re valuable, sure, especially on some of the lower-tech Rogue Worlds, but I can’t see needing to hide them.”
She hesitated a moment longer, then shrugged.
“Put on your Ruth face and ask for the countersign, Megarea.”
“Damn. Well, I guess we don’t have much choice.” Alicia sighed. “Load up the shuttle with the first pallets.”
“You may indeed,” Alicia murmured, and felt Megarea’s total agreement.
The cargo shuttle slid downward through the hot Ching-Hai night, cargo bay packed with counter-grav pallets, and Alicia lifted the combat rifle into her lap and slipped in a m
Megarea and Tisiphone had both wanted her in combat armor, if for slightly different reasons. The AI worried about her safety, but the Fury wanted to see the armor in action, for its destructive capabilities fascinated her. Of the two, Alicia had found Megarea’s argument more telling, yet she’d decided against it. No free trader could have gotten her hands on Cadre armor—Cadre Intelligence would have chased her to the ends of the galaxy to get it back if she’d tried—and someone might conceivably recognize it.
Besides, if some ill-intentioned soul was waiting for her, he faced certain practical constraints. His only objective could be her cargo, which meant he couldn’t use anything big and nasty enough to take out the shuttle. She, on the other hand, had no compunctions about what she might do to him.
“On the contrary.” Alicia jacked a nine-millimeter discarding sabot round into the chamber and set the safety. “I won’t do a thing to them unless they intend to do something to me.”
“Indeed. But if they do have something planned, I intend to do unto them first.”
“Never said there weren’t.” Alicia shifted to her contact with Megarea.
Alicia turned back to the shuttle controls, wiggling to settle her unpowered body armor. It, too, was Cadre-issue, better than anything on the open market but not visibly different enough to call attention to itself. They were less than two minutes out now, and she let the first trickle of tick seep into her bloodstream and smiled wolfishly as the universe slowed.
The ground party watched the shuttle slide down the last few meters of sky and deploy its landing legs. Flat pads reached for the ground, dust devils danced in the turbine wash, and one of the air lorries moved away from the dust in a curve that just happened to point the rear of its cargo bed at the shuttle. The tarp which closed it flapped in the jetwash, and something long and ominous was briefly visible behind the canvas.
“They’re down,” a man muttered into his helmet com. “Ready?”
“Light on the pads,” a voice replied in his earphones.
“Good. I hope we won’t need you, but stay loose.”
“Yo,” his phones said laconically, and he turned his full attention back to the shuttle. He’d expected a standard shuttle, and avarice flickered as he realized this one was almost twice that size. It must contain an even bigger chunk of Yerensky’s cargo than he’d anticipated.
The shuttle’s after hatch whined open and extruded a ramp, and he changed com channels, murmuring to his lorry pilot. The lorry’s powerful lamps came on, bathing the shuttle in light, and he walked forward into the glare with a bright smile and a welcoming wave.
“Try and take the pilot alive,” he reminded his gunners. He’d settle for one shuttle load—especially one this size—but if he could get his hands on the pilot and “convince” him to take his own boys back upstairs. . . .
His nerves crackled as subsiding dust billowed around the ramp. Any minute, he thought, still grinning and waving while he braced for the gunfire.
But the dust settled, and no one emerged. His waving hand slowed, his grin faded, and he suddenly felt exposed and stupid in the light.
Alicia killed the flight deck lights, popped an emergency hatch, and dropped to the ground on the far side from the illuminating lorry. That had been outstandingly stupid, she thought as she floated to earth on the wings of the tick. Anyone looking into that light would be blind as a bat, not to mention all the nice shadows it made on this side. She melted into the darker shadow of a landing leg and juggled her sensory boosters with practiced ease. She had to wind them way down when she looked into the light, then pump them high when her gaze tracked across the dark, but that was a problem she was used to, and she grunted with satisfaction as she completed her count.
Eighteen, nine of them bunched up around the air lorry with the heavy machine gun and not a one of them in even light armor. Well, at least it proved their mastermind was no military type. Unless his name was Custer.
the AI replied, watching through Alicia’s eyes as easily as Alicia might scan space through her sensors. Tisiphone was silent in the back of her brain, wise enough not to distract her at a time like this.
Damn it, something was wrong! His waving hand fell to his side as suspicion became certainty and he realized how exposed he was in that vortex of light. He started to turn and order the lamps doused when something sailed past his head to thump and rattle metallically across a lorry freight bed.
The air lorry gunship vanished in superheated fury as the plasma grenade exploded, but Alicia wasn’t watching. She’d turned like a cat while the grenade hung dreamily in midair, and the combat rifle was an extension of her body. She didn’t even see the sight picture, not consciously. She simply looked at her target, and the gunman’s chest exploded.
The glare of the lorry couldn’t quite hide her muzzle-flash, but she’d already found the two men who could see it. One of them died before he realized he had; the second while he was still raising his weapon.
The gun crew inside the lorry never knew they were dead, but screams of agony and terror rose from the men clustered about it. A human torch shrieked its way into the darkness as if the night could somehow quench its flames, and two more rolled on the ground, fighting to extinguish themselves. Three unwounded hijackers ran for their lives from the inferno, and the leader threw himself under his own vehicle and switched channels frantically.
“Get over here!” he screamed, and two heavily-armed aircraft leapt into the night in reply.
Alicia slid easily through the gap she’d blown in the ring around the shuttle. Three of the six on this side of the ambush remained, but they didn’t realize they were alone. They’d made the mistake of staring into the flames, stunned by the carnage, and Alicia looked at their backs in disgust. Idiots. Did they think simply carrying a gun made someone dangerous?
It really wasn’t fair. These people were pathetic, so completely out of their class they didn’t even know it. But life wasn’t fair, and anyone who lent himself to ambush and murder for gain had no kick coming. She found the position she wanted and fired three more short, neat bursts.
The stutter of automatic fire hammered his ears, and he stared out from under the lorry as a white eye flickered beyond the shuttle. Beyond the shuttle! Someone was on the ground out there! It had to be the shuttle pilot, but how? And where were the men he’d posted back there?!
How became immaterial as a lithe, slender shape slid across the very edge of the light with a cobra’s speed and blew another of his men apart. It vanished back into the darkness, graceful as a dream, but another deadly burst and a bubbling shriek told him where his men were. Drive turbines began to whine above him as his lorry pilot prepared to pull out, and panic filled him at the thought of being left exposed and naked. He wanted to run, but his body refused to move, and he pounded the dry earth with his fists and prayed for his sting ships to get here in time.
Two heavily-armed aircraft sliced throug
A night-black piece of sky swooped upon him from above. He had one stunned moment to register it, to begin to realize what it was, and then the Bengal-class assault shuttle tore him into very, very tiny pieces.
His head jerked up in horror, slamming into the bottom of the lorry, as the fireball blossomed. Flaming streamers arced from its heart like some enormous fireworks display, and then there was a second fireball.
He stared at them, watching them fade and fall, then cowered down as a vicious burst of fire lashed the vehicle above him. A chopped-off cry of agony and the sudden stillness of the waking turbines told him his pilot was dead, and he buried his face against the ground and sobbed in terror.
There were no more screams, no more shooting. Only the crackle of flames and the stench of burning bodies, and he whimpered and tried to dig into the baked soil beneath him as feet whispered through short, tough grass.
He raised his head weakly, and saw two polished boots, gleaming in the firelight. His eyes rose higher and froze on the muzzle of a combat rifle eight centimeters from his nose.
“I think you’d better come out of there,” a contralto voice, colder than the stars, said softly.