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Ida rolled out the door, finger locked on the trigger, then through the entrance to the labs. Bet slid after
her. The two women turned, and sprayed down the corridor, then dashed toward the main lab.
Alex sang softly to himself as he unspooled the backup firing-circuit wire back toward the center of the
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lab.
"Ye'll set on his white hause-bane,
An I'll pike out his bonny blue een;
Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair.
We'll theek our nest when it goes bare . . ."
Clipped the wire and fed it into the det box. Ran his firing circuitry through his mind, and glanced at Sten.
Sten high-signed him, and Alex closed the det key.
"Ye ken we best be on our way. An hour an* yon labs'll be a mite loud for comfort."
Then Ida and Bet doubled into the room. Ida crouched next to the door and sprayed down the corridor.
"The patrol," Bet shouted. Slugs spattered through the lab doors, and the team members went flat,
scuttling for cover. Ida emptied her magazine and scrambled toward the ship.
The team formed a semicircle perimeter just before the freighter. Sten ducked behind a large machine
resembling a drill press as the first of Thoresen's troops burst into the lab.
"Can you stop the charges?" Sten shouted.
Alex cut down the patrolmen inside the lab, then said calmly, without turning his head, "Ah may've
outsmarted mesel' on this one, lad. Each an' every one a' those charges I fitted a antidefuse device to."
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"Sixty minutes?"
"We hae" Alex checked bis watch "nae more'n fifty-one now."
Tacships, darting in front of the Guard's assault transport, hammered through the drifting security
satellites off Vulcan, not knowing that Bet's massacre of the Creche workers meant most of them were
unmanned.
Monitors moved straight for Vulcan. Over the past months, Thoresen had acquired some moderately
forbidden antimissile devices and installed them in blisters on Vulcan's outer skin. The combination of the
Guard's sudden attack and the half-trained status of their crews, however, meant only a few went into
action before the monitors' own missiles wiped the positions out.
Obviously the normal canister-dispersing assault transports couldn't be used. Conventional freighters had
been laboriously modified for clamshell-nose loading and unloading. Proximity detectors clacked, braking
rockets shuddered the transports down to a few kilometers per hour, then still slower as the pilots dived
out of the control positions, sealing locks behind them as the transports crashed through Vulcan's outer
skin, half burying themselves into the world.
The noses dumped away, and suited guardsmen spilled out. There was little resistance. None of the
patrolmen inside had realized what could happen in time to suit up.
The Guard smoothly broke down into small, self-contained attack squads and moved out. Behind them
moved their semiportable maser support units and, around the ships, combat engineers went into action,
closing off the vents in the outer skin.
Resistance, compared to the Guard's usual opposition, was light. The Sociopatrolmen may have thought
themselves elite thugs, but, as they discovered, there was a monstrous difference between larruping
unarmed workers or crudely armed resistance fighters and facing skilled, combat-experienced
guardsmen.
Mercenaries make rotten heroes, Thoresen decided as he watched the Sociopatrol officer wave his
squad forward. About half of them huddled even closer behind the improvised barricades Thoresen had
ordered set up just inside the lab's entrance. The other half reluctantly came to their feet and moved
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forward.
The Mantis troopers across the room opened fire. The fastest-moving patrolman made it three meters
before legs exploded and he sprawled on the bodies of previous waves. The accountant part of
Thoresen's brain shuddered at the tab. They have five men Thoresen hadn't seen Frick and Frack,
sheltered high above him on a beam we came in with almost seventy. They've taken no casualties, and
we've lost thirty patrolmen?
The com at his belt buzzed. Thoresen lifted it. He listened, then hastily muted the speaker. Slowly going
white as anger washed over him. Mostly at himself. He had assumed the Emperor wouldn't move in
without some pretext, but the panicked communications center Tech had notified him that the guardsmen
were already in. Including the rebels' sectors, almost a third of Vulcan was taken.
Thoresen slithered backward to the patrol officer. "We'll need more men," he said. "I'll coordinate them
from the security office." The wall above his head exploded as he snaked his way out of the lab into the
corridor.
He got up and ran down the corridor toward the end. Stopped and took the tiny red control unit from
his pocket, touched the fingerprint-keyed lock, and opened the unit. He tapped 15 onto the screen and
closed the circuit, then forced himself to calmness as he walked away from the Bravo Project labs. A
gravsled waited for him. "The Eye," he ordered, and the sled lifted.
Behind him, under the floor of the lab's main controls, the timer started on Thoresen's own Doomsday
Device a limited-yield single megaton atomic device that would obliterate the entire project lab and give
Thoresen his only chance at remaining alive.
Ida raked fire across the patrolmen's barricades and grunted.
"Alex. You realize that if we stay pinned down and your charges go off, I'll never take you drinking
again."
Alex wasn't paying attention. His eyes were locked on one of the instruments from his demopack. "Sten.
We hae worse problems tha' the charges Ah set. Ah hae signs a' some nuclear device's running."
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Sten blinked. "But where? Who set it?"
"Ah dinnae. But best we find it. Mah name's Kilgour, nae Ground Zero." He set the detector to
directional, and swept its pickup around the room. "Ah, tha's so fine. Yon bomb's right across there." He
waved across fifty meters of open space toward the central controls.
"Gie us some interestin' thoughts," he said. "Firs', we manage t'gae 'crost that open space wi'out gettin' [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]