The bio bod did as he was told, and the demolition charge attached to Snyder’s chest exploded. It destroyed the Trooper II and blew a large hole through the loader’s torso. Gontho swore as his controls went dead, the machine staggered, and tried to right itself. The Ramanthian hit his hatch release, but nothing happened, as Ichiyama called on the gunner’s mates to trigger his charge. That produced a fl?ash of light, but no sound to go with it, as the space elevator fell through the hole and into space. The signifi?cance of that registered on Gontho’s brain just as the technician felt the badly damaged loader topple forward. He screamed, “No!” but there was no one to hear as both the operator and his machine fell through the hatch and entered space. However, rather than follow the cable down as the tech feared he would, the War Gontho soon found himself in orbit. He screamed over a radio that no longer worked, watched his air supply continue to dwindle, and cursed his rotten luck. Gontho had an excellent view of Jericho, however, even if he couldn’t fi?nd the serenity to enjoy it, and was soon consumed by the surrounding darkness.
The space elevator didn’t fall at fi?rst because roughly half of it was still weightless. But without the dreadnaught to serve as a counterweight, it wasn’t long before the bottom half of the twenty-three-thousand-mile- long cable began to pull the top half down. And once that process began, the rest was inevitable.
The fi?rst hint that something was wrong came when the free-falling superstrong cable began to tug at its anchor point. Which, unbeknownst to the Ramanthians stationed around it, had been systematically weakened during the installation process. Metal clanged on metal, and the cable jerked spasmodically, thereby alerting the ground crew to the fact that something was wrong. However, it wasn’t until an upper-level jet stream took hold of the errant space elevator, and pulled the free end toward the east, that the Ramanthians realized the full extent of the danger they were in. But it was too late by then, as the cable plucked the anchor assembly out of the pyramid it had been secured to and converted the heavy-duty hardware into a massive fl?ail!
A variety of competing forces caused the superstrong cable to whip back and forth across the adjoining airstrip. It leveled the terminal building with a single blow, made a loud cracking sound as it cleared fi?fty acres of jungle, and erased what remained of Camp Enterprise. Then, as Jericho’s gravity continued to pull more of the line down, the ground shook as if in response to an earthquake. The cable was falling in fi?ve-and ten-mile-wide coils by that time. Each loop scoured portions of the planet clean as it was pulled sideways and sent clouds of dust thousands of feet up into the air. And it all happened so quickly that Vice Admiral Tutha had no more than felt a tremor and looked up to see hundreds of fl?yers burst out of the Hu-Hu tree in front of his headquarters building than the free end of the cable destroyed 80 percent of his command. Including the prefab structure he was standing in. But by some stroke of luck, Tutha emerged from the debris almost entirely unscathed, to wander aimlessly through the wreckage of what had been the largest military base on Jericho. Later, after all of the damage assessments were completed, it would turn out that 7,621
Ramanthians had been killed by the collapsing space elevator.
Of course that wasn’t the worst of it. Somewhere, out in the jungle, tens of thousands of nymphs were about to emerge from the wilding stage. Which was the moment when teams of specially trained civilians were supposed to gather the youngsters in and begin the process of socializing them. Except that wouldn’t happen now. Which meant thousands of the Queen’s offspring were going to die, or worse yet, live like savages in the primordial jungle. The horror of that was too much to bear, and the offi?cer was busy searching the debris for a weapon with which to take his own life, when the energy stored inside a coil of cable located three miles to the north was suddenly released. The whiplike space elevator lashed out, erased a major river, and sent a tidal wave of soil fl?owing over the spot where Tutha had been standing. Meanwhile, many miles above the devastation, the Imperator fl?oated free.
19
Where law ends, tyranny begins.
ABOARD THE RAMANTHIAN DREADNAUGHT
The Imperator’s spacious control room was located deep within the ship’s hull, where it was safe from missiles, torpedoes, and cannon fi?re. Everything except the least likely threat of all: a single alien armed with two pistols. But there Maximillian Tragg was, with a blood-splattered offi?cer lying dead at his feet, and a gun clutched in each fi?st. Ten Ramanthians of various ranks and specialties stood arrayed before him. Some were frightened, but most were angry, and ready to attack the human if given the chance. Also witness to the tableau, but invisible in the glare produced by the overhead lights, was a tiny sphere. It bobbed slightly as air from a nearby ventilation duct fl? owed around the device.
“Okay,” Tragg said levelly. “Now that I have your attention, listen up. In case you haven’t heard, a group of POWs murdered Commandant Mutuu, stole two of your shuttles, and landed one of them on this ship. Now, having cut the space elevator loose, they’re going to come here in hopes of taking control. A plan which, if successful, will land you in a Confederacy POW camp. Or,” the renegade continued, “you can take me where I want to go and return home safely. The choice is yours.”
None of the Ramanthians found either option to be very appealing as the ensuing silence made clear. “Let’s try it again,” Tragg insisted, as he shot a junior offi?cer in the head. “Either you will do what I say, or you will die!”
“All right,” one of the offi?cers said, as the reverberations from the gunshot died away. “We’ll do as you say.”
Batkin had been “watching” the scene unfold via the tiny marble-sized remote, which had threaded its way through the ship’s ventilation system and into the control room. “He just murdered another member of the bridge crew,” the cyborg said, as he swiveled his globe-shaped body toward Santana. “And the bugs are beginning to cooperate. That will allow Tragg to take the ship wherever he wants.”
The two of them, along with a combined force of legionnaires and ex-POWs, had arrived outside the control room, only to fi?nd that the access hatch was locked from within. Not by the Ramanthians, as they initially supposed, but by Tragg. Who, having been refused passage aboard a Thraki ship, had taken refuge on the Imperator.
“We have to get in there,” Santana said grimly. “Can your remote open the hatch?”
“Maybe,” the cyborg allowed doubtfully. “I could take a run at the door switch. But the remote is so small, it might not pack enough mass to close the circuit. And Tragg isn’t likely to give me any second chances.”
