Chapter Seven
Shannon Stark was sleeping peacefully when something shook the building with enough force to throw her out of bed. She hit the floor catlike, on the balls of her feet and the heels of her hands, her head swivelling back and forth in startled shock as a crunching, rending crash reverberated through the walls.
An eerie silence trailed the cacophony for a long moment, and Shannon almost believed she’d merely awakened from some bad dream… until she heard a string of distinct but subdued bangs from somewhere down the hall, accompanied by a shriek of rending metal. She lunged back toward the nightstand, sweeping her sidearm off the table and rolling to the side of the bed opposite the door. Then, there was… nothing.
“Well, hell,” she muttered, starting to feel silly.
She was beginning to rise from behind the bed when her door slammed inward from the kick of a heavy boot, and a tall figure in head-to-toe armor stepped through behind a burst of full-auto rifle fire. A dozen slugs tore into her bed, kicking up a rain of foam stuffing before she aligned the red dot of her pistol’s pop-up sight on the invader’s center-mass and double-tapped it in the chest.
The 9mm caseless rounds her weapon fired were frangible ceramic surrounding a trio of tantalum flechettes travelling at well over 500 meters per second, so it was no surprise that the slugs penetrated the armor over the intruder’s chest, sending it staggering into the wall. What did surprise her was when the armored figure regained its footing and advanced on her unfazed, seemingly oblivious to the holes in its chest.
Before it had a chance to swing the barrel of its rifle around, Shannon retargeted her sights at the invader’s darkened faceplate and fired another two shots, punching through the visor without shattering the high-impact plastic. Blood sprayed from the two bulletholes as the armored intruder jerked backwards and crashed to the floor with a clatter of alloy plating.
Stark dropped her handgun and threw herself over the bed, grabbing the intruder’s fallen rifle and rolling into a crouch only a split-second before a second invader appeared in the doorway. She squeezed the rifle’s trigger—in a comfortingly familiar place on the weapon’s pistol grip—and felt it buck against her hip as it spat out a stream of surprisingly old-fashioned spent brass cases. The heavy slugs punched through the newcomer’s armor with ease, sending it reeling as she walked the long burst from its chest to its helm. The last two rounds pierced it through the forehead and it collapsed like a stringless marionette even as the bolt locked open on her last round out of the magazine. Once the ringing in her ears began to slowly fade, she suddenly became aware of the distant wailing of alarms somewhere outside the walls.
Seeing a shadow advancing down the hallway, she fumbled desperately at the rifle’s receiver to find the magazine release, cursing under her breath. She almost had the spent clip free when the shadow swelled into the imposing image of Jock Gregory, his broad, shirtless shoulders filling the doorway, his grenade launcher held at the ready.
“You all right, ma’am?” he asked, eyes dancing between her and the dead invaders. Seeing him there in only fatigue pants, she suddenly remembered that she’d been sleeping in nothing but her shorts. Oh, well, no time for modesty.
“What’s happening?” she asked him, feeding a fresh magazine from the dead intruder’s chest pack into the rifle and pulling back on the bolt handle to chamber a round.
“Something really big smashed through the roof down that way”—he motioned down the hall to the left—“and I guess it’s good bet that these blokes”—he angled his launcher’s muzzle at the dead attackers—“popped out of it. When me and Vinnie heard the shooting, I came to check on you and he went down to look in on Ms. O’Keefe.”
“Where’s Lieutenant McKay?” Shannon asked, pulling her boots out from under the bed and strapping them down while Gregory watched the door.
Jock shook his head. “Haven’t seen him.”
An eruption of gunfire from somewhere below them interrupted Shannon’s visual hunt for her shirt.
“That was outside,” she decided, yanking a bandoleer of magazines off of one of the invader corpses and slinging it over her shoulder. Before she could rise from the task, however, another burst of autoweapons chatter erupted much closer, reverberating off the corridor beyond her door.
“
The corridor was a smoke-filled, murky vision of hell, tinged red by the flames licking off the splintered walls around the intrusive pod. Shannon didn’t have the time to debate in her mind if the fire had begun from the thing’s ambient heat, left over from orbital friction, or from the invaders’ weapons; she and Jock were too busy thinking with their feet, racing toward the section of the guest wing that housed Valerie O’Keefe and her party.
As they reached the end of the corridor, where it split into a “T,” the chatter of gunfire was abruptly interrupted by the sharp, painful concussion of a trio of explosions in quick succession. The blasts shook the walls around them and nearly sent Jock, who was in the lead, tumbling head over heels. The sergeant managed to turn the potential spill into a controlled skid that put him into a crouch at the intersection of the hallways, and Shannon took up a position at the opposite corner, rifle trained down the corridor.
The scene before them was a canvas painted in blood. Shannon knew from a brief glance at the mansion’s floor plan prior to landing that the section of the mansion’s upper floor that O’Keefe and her party were staying in also housed several of the governor’s more highly-placed personal servants. She hadn’t met any of them, but she thought it was a safe bet that the handful of half-naked human bodies sprawled half-in and half-out of doorways all along the hallway belonged to those people.
The other four corpses visible, with large chunks of them blended with chunks of smoldering wall material, were obviously those of the armored troops which had emerged from the pod. The author of their fate was Vincent Mahoney, whom she immediately spotted at the opposite end of the hall, auto-grenade launcher cradled in his hands and pointed her way.
“Vinnie!” she called, not trusting him to recognize her and Jock with the eddies of smoke roiling in the half- demolished corridor. “It’s Lieutenant Stark! Don’t shoot.”
“Yeah, I see you, ma’am.” Vinnie let his weapon’s muzzle drop, his voice as neutral as the look on his face. “Come on ahead.”
Shannon and Jock advanced slowly through the bloody carnage, not wanting to look down but forced to against the chance that one of the invaders could still be alive. Shannon tried not to let her gaze dwell on the bullet-riddled corpses of the mansion staffers, with their open, lifeless eyes; she tried to avoid stepping in the slowly-spreading pools of blood, but both tasks were impossible. The blood was everywhere, and the dead eyes of the bodies seemed to draw her in.
She forced herself to concentrate on the invader corpses, instead. They were half blown apart, but the grenades had charred what flesh was visible beneath the armor beyond recognition, and what wasn’t black and burning was coated with blood. The armor, she noted, was laminated metal of some kind, not the advanced composites the Marines wore, and it covered them from head to toe. The camouflage pattern was a brown, black and green general woodland design singularly unsuitable for the Aphrodite Waste or even the planet’s more temperate regions.
And the weapons—they were a bullpup configuration like the issue Marine rifle, but that was where the resemblance ended. Marine weapons fired caseless ammo, with the projectile fixed on a cartridge made of molded hyperexplosives. Their ignition system was electronic, and they incorporated a sophisticated recoil-dampening mechanism to control muzzle climb. The carbine she had picked up used what looked like brass cartridges, technology that had been obsolete for over fifty years, and had kicked like a mule. She would have liked to have
