Shadow of Freedom-eARC (30 page)

“One…two…three…four…”

He’d just reached “seven” when a burst of pulser darts from one of the loopholes destroyed the remote.

“Lord,” he muttered. “These clowns are as pathetic as those bas—I mean, as those jackasses on Tiberian, My Lady.”

He shook his head. Seven seconds to react at all, and then instead of a single shot the morons had fired an entire burst? The ricocheting pulser darts had taken out three of their own mines, and it wasn’t even as if the remote had been telling him anything he hadn’t already known in the first place!

“Don’t complain, Mateo,” Abigail said sternly.

“I’m not. It’s just—”

He shrugged irritably, a master craftsman frustrated by the slovenly workmanship of a would-be competitor, and glanced at Senior Chief Petty Officer Franklin Musgrave,
Tristram
’s boatswain.

“Ready, Frank?”

“Ready,” Musgrave confirmed.

“Then punch it.”

“Fire in the hole!”

Musgrave slid just the muzzle of his weapon around the edge of the corridor and squeezed the firing stud. It was an awkward angle, and despite the stabilizing pressor beam projected against one of the lift shafts from the launcher’s other end, the recoil was significant. Musgrave had expected that, however. He kept control of the bucking launcher without much difficulty, and the projectile’s flight path had been programmed to allow for the muzzle rise as it departed downrange. Because of the short range—the other end of the passage was actually inside the launcher’s danger zone—and the fact that no one in his right mind wanted to be within forty or fifty meters of a kinetic strike from a weapon that powerful, they’d had to step down its normal acceleration rate considerably and go with the chemical shaped-charge warhead, instead of its usual dart-like penetrator. Even that was bad enough, since it was designed to take out light armored vehicles, but at least the vast majority of the blast would expend itself on the other side of the blast doors.

Sergeant Clinton Abernathy had a single, fleeting instant to realize what the launcher was before it fired, but that was all the warning he had before he, the blast doors, and his entire squad ceased to exist.

* * *

“Jesus Christ!”

Surprise jerked the blasphemy out of Kristoffersen as Abernathy’s squad was wiped from existence.

“That was a
tank-killer!
” his company first sergeant blurted.

“No! You think?!” Kristoffersen snarled with a baleful glare that closed the first sergeant’s mouth with snap. “Tell Lieutenant Boudreaux to reinforce Axial One and Axial Three. And tell his people to keep their heads frigging down! These bastards’ve got heavier weapons than we thought.”

* * *

“
That
was noisy,” Gutierrez observed. He tossed another remote down the corridor and grimaced. “Messy, too.”

“They had their chance to do it the easy way, Mateo,” Abigail replied harshly. “Like you say, even those bastards on Tiberian were smarter than this! Let’s keep the pressure on them.”

“Aye, aye, My Lady.”

* * *

“Well, at least they’re not shy,” Major Pole growled, studying his tactical display. None of the Manties Kristoffersen had seen before he withdrew to deliver Lieutenant Hearns’ ultimatum had been armed with anything like that tank-killer. That was going to make things messier, but weapons that heavy were going to be less useful to the attackers as they moved into Victor Seven proper. They weren’t going to have any more firing lines as long as that first one, and without powered armor of their own, no one was going to want to be anywhere near the back blast from something like that when it was confined and channeled by one of the station’s passageways.

That was the good news. The bad news was that now that they’d blown their way past the late Sergeant Abernathy’s squad, their menu of approach routes got a lot broader. Pole’s people knew the internal geography of their habitat far better than the Manties possibly could, but covering all the possible approaches with enough forward-deployed firepower to stop people equipped with such heavy weapons was going to take a lot of manpower.

He considered offering to hand over the internees now that the Manties had demonstrated they were serious, but he couldn’t do that…yet. If he didn’t want to be the one who ended up carrying the can for this entire debacle, he had to be able to argue that he’d genuinely tried to obey the ridiculous, unreasonable orders he’d been given, and that meant he was going to have to accept heavier casualties before he recognized the inevitable and gave in. It was unfortunate, of course, but at least his command post was well back from the point of contact. He was pretty sure he’d have time to accrue sufficient casualties to cover his ass before the actual fighting got anywhere near him.

* * *

“Okay, things are about to get tricky, My Lady,” Gutierrez said.

He was two blast doors deeper into Victor Seven, and Abigail had downloaded the damage control guide’s memory to his skinsuit as well as her own. More copies had been uploaded to Nicasio Xamar,
Tristram
’s assistant tactical officer, as well as to Senior Chief Musgrave and all the other senior noncoms attached to the boarding party. Now Abigail and Gutierrez studied the imagery together, even though they were the better part of fifty meters apart.

“We could cut through this engineering crawlway,” Gutierrez pointed out, highlighting the crawlway in question on both HUDs. “That’d get us around behind them right here.”

He highlighted the closed, loopholed blast doors just ahead of his current position, where the gendarmes had set up another strongpoint.

“If we were actually trying to fight our way through them, that would probably be a good idea,” Abigail replied. “Since we’re not…?”

“Since we’re not, I guess we need to knock on the door again,” Gutierrez replied.

He sat back, thinking for a moment. As he’d said, things were about to get tricky. To get at the strongpoint, the Manticorans would have to make their way around a relatively sharp bend in the passageway. The problem was that they’d be exposed to fire from the gendarmes the instant they poked their heads around the turn. There wasn’t room for them to use Musgrave’s launcher here, either. With a Marine fire team in proper powered armor, a heavy tri-barrel, and a plasma rifle, it would have been a straightforward tactical problem. Without any of those, he was just going to have to adapt, improvise, and overcome.

“MacFarlane!”

“Yes, LT?” PO 1/c William MacFarlane replied.

“Bring your little friend up here.”

“On my way, LT.”

MacFarlane, one of
Tristram
’s damage control specialists, crawled up behind Gutierrez less than a minute later. The Marine-turned-armsman slithered back a little so that he and MacFarlane could both look at a hand display.

“We need to make that door go away,” Gutierrez said, tapping the display. “Think your pet’s up to it?”

“Oh, yeah,” MacFarlane replied. “Course, the people on the other side’re going to be trying to stop him.”

“I think we can probably do a little something about that,” Gutierrez told him. “Mind you, it would work better with a Bravo Charlie, but I guess we’ll just have to make do.”

“Don’t you be hurting Denny’s feelings, LT!” MacFarlane retorted with a grin. “He’ll do just fine.”

“So let me get the cheering section organized and then you can show me.”

* * *

Sergeant Norman Dreyfus wished his skinsuit allowed for old-fashioned brow wiping. It wouldn’t have changed anything, but at least he might have
felt
better.

He also wished to hell he knew exactly what the advancing Manties were up to at the moment. Unfortunately, they’d been systematically taking out the sensors the gendarmes had emplaced. In fact, they’d been swatting sensors with ridiculous ease as they advanced—obviously the people responsible for planting those sensors hadn’t concealed them anywhere nearly as well as they’d thought—which meant the best he could do was guess about what they were doing. That didn’t make him happy…and the fact that their current location appeared to be just on the other side of
his
current location didn’t make him any happier.

The intruders were working their way inward along two separate routes, moving with a certain degree of caution but without any particular effort to disguise their intentions. Not that there would have been much point in subtlety, since there weren’t all that many possible approaches.

“Still nothing, Altabani?” he asked his sensor tech.

“No,” she replied. “You think I wouldn’t’ve
mentioned
it if I’d seen anything? Shit, Norm! I know they’re on the other side of that corner, but—”

Something rattled and rolled on the far side of the hatch, caroming along the bulkheads.

“Grenade!” Altabani shouted as it spun its way up to the far side of the blast door and stopped abruptly when the Manticoran who’d thrown it activated the tiny tractor unit.

The Manticoran in question was nowhere near anything Mateo Gutierrez would have called adequately trained, but she did pretty well for a Navy puke. She’d watched the icon on her HUD as it bounded down the line of approach to the closed blast doors, then hit its anchoring tractor. She’d jumped the gun slightly, locking the grenade to the deck a dozen centimeters in front of the doors instead of to one of the actual panels, but that was close enough, and she hit the detonation key.

Dreyfus bounced back and sat down—hard—as the concussion came at him, transmitted through the sealed door. Altabani swore as the sensor she’d poked through one of the loopholes was destroyed, and another of Dreyfus’ troopers said something in a high, falsetto tone as blast came through his own loophole and blew him back the better part of a meter. His skinsuit and body armor were more than enough to deal with it; his cry was born of shock and surprise—and fear—more than injury.

But that was all that happened, and Dreyfus felt a surge of relief as he climbed back up onto one knee.

Altabani was already shoving another sensor into place, and Dreyfus bared his teeth at the rest of his squad.

“If that’s the best they’ve got, they’re screwed!” he announced.

* * *

“Very nice,” Gutierrez approved. “Let’s get the others in there now.”

A dozen Manticorans and Graysons sent grenades rolling around the corner, bouncing them off the bulkheads towards the blast doors.

* * *

The blast door rattled and banged and vibrated as grenades went off on the other side, but none of the new blasts were anywhere near as powerful as that first one had been, and all of them seemed to be going off at greater distances.

“Central, this is Dreyfus,” the sergeant announced over his com. “They’re making a lot of noise, but I don’t think they’re getting any further in than they are now.”

“Good!” Captain Kristoffersen replied. “Keep us informed and—”

Sergeant Norman Dreyfus’ world ended in fire and blast.

* * *

“
Told
you not to hurt Denny’s feelings,” MacFarlane told Gutierrez.

“I stand corrected,” Gutierrez replied, studying the wreckage with his sensor wand.

He really would have preferred a Bravo Charlie—one of the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps’ armored, counter-grav-equipped, robotic breaching charges. Of course, that would have constituted a pretty severe case of overkill against a mere civilian-grade blast door. And even though MacFarlane’s DNI-1 damage control remote hadn’t been designed for the task, it had attached its beehive shaped charge with neatness and precision under cover of the flashbangs and smoke grenades. It didn’t have the armored protection of a Bravo Charlie, but it was designed to operate in an environment which would very quickly have incinerated or demolished a standard robotic unit. If the gendarmes had noticed it coming and targeted it, they could undoubtedly have destroyed it, yet the covering flashbangs had been far too light to hurt it.

Now Gutierrez surveyed the wreckage of what had been a set of blast doors.

“Frank, Wilkie, let’s get up there and secure the doors,” he said, starting up the passageway himself. “Looks like it’s going to take a few minutes to clear the wreckage enough to move on.”

* * *

Major Pole swore as his tactical display updated itself.

The Manties weren’t actually moving all that rapidly, yet it was painfully obvious that wasn’t because his people were stopping them. He’d expected to start inflicting casualties quickly when they had to clear their way through strongpoints, but they weren’t cooperating. Instead, they were taking their time, and they appeared to have an inexhaustible supply of grenades and demolition charges. All he was really accomplishing with his “strongpoints” was to compel them to use up a few more explosives blowing their way through them.

All right. They were clearly concentrating their efforts along Axial Three, and if they kept coming through another couple of sets of blast doors, that was going to lead them into one of the commons areas Victor Seven’s designers had laid out for the habitat’s anticipated VIP inhabitants: a spacious, landscaped compartment sixty meters, across fitted with picnic tables, scattered conversational groups of chairs, and a small ornamental pool with a fountain.

His eyes narrowed. He’d wanted short, restricted firing lines on the theory that they would favor the defender over the attacker, but this Lieutenant Hearns was obviously more experienced in boarding combat than any of his people. She was making those restricted fields of fire work for
her
, not the defenders, so maybe what he needed was a more
extended
firing range.

He considered his options. Virtually all of Kristofferson’s troopers were already parceled out across the approaches, and he didn’t dare thin out his forward defenses. The last thing he needed was to open up a second invasion route! That left him only the two platoons of Captain Ascher’s understrength company. He needed to maintain at least some reserve, but if he pulled up one of her platoons to reinforce the squad Kristofferson already had covering the compartment, then ordered the other squad which was covering the blast doors between it and the Manties to fall back…