Crown of Slaves

* * *

'Arnold wants to know what you want him to do,' Takashi said over Lassiter's private com channel.

'I already told him what to do!' the general manager snapped back, never taking his eyes from the mobile mountain of alloy as it eased to a stop relative to his space station. He'd come down to the dock gallery from his command center. Not because he wanted to, but because he already knew that whatever happened here, and however little choice he'd had but to agree to it, his career was about to take a major hit. Under the circumstances, it was imperative that he be able to present himself as having been hands-on at every stage of the disaster. It might not do much good, but it would certainly look better than cowering safely in Command Central.

'I'm only telling you what he said,' Takashi replied.

'Goddamned idiot,' Lassiter growled in a deliberately ambiguous tone which might equally well have applied to his senior assistant or to the commander of Verdant Vista's security force. Then he drew a deep breath.

'Tell him,' he said in a dangerously patient voice, 'that he will do nothing-repeat, nothing- except stand by in the positions he and I already discussed unless and until I tell him differently. This situation is fucked up enough already without him deciding to play goddamned Preston of the Spaceways on his own!'

'I'll tell him,' Takashi acknowledged, and Lassiter half-growled and half-snorted in satisfaction. Or as close to satisfaction as he could reasonably expect to feel at a moment like this. He'd allowed Arnold to issue weapons and put his heavy combat teams into their battle armor, but not without some severe misgivings. Major Jonathan Arnold was basically competent, if not particularly imaginative. Not all of his personnel were, however. In fact, in Lassiter's considered opinion, at least half of them would have been incapable of organizing a bottle party in a brewery without direction. They were a blunt instrument in Manpower's hands-adequate when it came to keeping an iron boot planted on the necks of Congo's slave laborers, but not much more than that. Indeed, Manpower hadn't wanted them to be much more, and that was why the current situation was far enough beyond the parameters of their capabilities to give Lassiter nightmares every time he thought about the potentially dire consequences of a single itchy trigger finger.

Unfortunately, it was a case of damned if he did, and damned if he didn't. If one of his security people screwed the pooch, he'd be blamed. But if he ordered Arnold to stand his people down and something went wrong anyway, someone on the Council was absolutely certain to suggest that it was all Lassiter's fault for not having made proper use of his resources. As if anything he did at this point-

That was odd. Why were they opening the-?

* * *

The docking tube had just touched Felicia's main personnel hatch when the huge doors of her specially designed 'cargo bays' snapped open. Kamal Lassiter's eyes widened, but consternation turned almost instantly into panic as human beings began to spill through the gaping openings. Not the unprotected bodies of slaves, but armed and armored figures shooting across the gap between them and the gallery with bulletlike speed.

Surprise was total. Despite all the tension and anxious precautions Felicia's arrival had engendered, no one aboard the space station had even contemplated the possibility of an actual attack. Not after the way Victor Cachat's strategy had misdirected everyone's attention to the 'terrorist Templeton's' demands. Lassiter's brain was still fumbling with the new data, trying to force it into some sort of coherency, when the first Marine breaching teams hit the gallery's armorplast.

The operations manager stumbled back a step or two as the Marines touched down on tractor-soled boots. They landed and clung as naturally as so many houseflies, and Kamal Lassiter's face went paper-white as he finally realized what he was seeing. He spun away from the sight, dashing madly for the gallery lifts, but it was far too late for that.

Six three-man teams of Marines slapped breaching rings on to the armorplast. Each of those rings was approximately three-meters in diameter. They adhered almost instantly, and the Marines stepped back and hit their detonators. Precisely shaped and directed jets of plasma sliced six perfect circles through the tough, refractory armorplast as easily if it had been no tougher than old-fashioned glass.

The consequences for the personnel inside the gallery, none of whom were in spacesuits, were as ghastly as they were predictable.

* * *

Thandi watched the hurricanes of atmosphere explode out of the breaches her teams had blasted. Computer chips, loose furniture, sheets of paper, and human beings came with them, sucked out by the hungry vacuum before interior blast doors and emergency hatches slammed shut, sealing off the air-gushing wounds.

'All Tango-Lima-Alpha units, this is Kaja. Phase One accomplished. Move to Phase Two.'

The golden triangles on her display blinked fresh acknowledgment, and her assault teams began swarming through the openings as the space station's emergency procedures conveniently shut down the torrents of atmosphere pouring out of them.

Thandi, obedient to Berry's admonishment (and Lieutenant Colonel Huang's silent but pointed example), was in the third wave, not the first. But she was the first person to reach the control console at the center of the gallery. She studied the console for a dozen blazingly intense seconds, then grunted in satisfaction. Ruth and Colonel Huang had been correct during the planning sessions; it was a standard Solarian design. She looked back up, waiting impatiently as the last of her Audubon Ballroom personnel came through the breaches, then stabbed a button.

Alloy panels slid slowly downward, locking across the armorplast. The system was designed to protect against collision with minor debris, but it served a secondary function by sealing off the holes her Marines had blown. She waited, wishing she could tap her toe impatiently (not exactly practical for someone in battle armor), until the panels locked down. Then she punched another series of commands into the console and bared her teeth in truly wolfish delight as the gallery began to repressurize.

* * *

Homer Takashi wasn't cursing, but only because he didn't have the time.

He also didn't have any better idea what was happening than the late, unlamented Lassiter had had, but he did know that it wasn't what the entire galaxy had been led to expect. Whoever those people were, they weren't Templeton's Masadan terrorists. There were far too many of them, and they were moving with a trained precision and ferocity possible only for elite combat troops. Worse, before the interior visual pickups in the space dock gallery went out, they'd given him an excellent view of the attackers' equipment.

Which appeared to be first-line Solarian Marine issue.

'Who the fuck are these people?!' Jonathan Arnold's voice sounded on the brink of hysteria over Takashi's earbug.

'How the hell do I know?' Takashi shot back.

'Those are goddamned Solly Marine plasma and pulse rifles they're carrying!'

'Oh, really?' Takashi's response dripped vitriolic irony. He started to add something even more bitingly sarcastic, then made himself draw a deep breath, instead.

'Yes, they've got Marine-issue equipment,' he said. 'It doesn't make them Marines. Hell, you've got Marine pulse rifles and tribarrels! Besides, what would Solly Marines be doing attacking us?'

'What the hell is anyone else doing attacking us?' Arnold demanded. Which, Takashi admitted to himself, was a perfectly reasonable question. Unfortunately, it was one he had no answer for.

'Who they are doesn't matter,' he said instead. 'What matters is that you and your people get your asses in gear and stop whatever it is they think they're doing!'

Arnold grunted something which might have been an affirmative, and then Takashi heard him begin giving his