rising from her seat abruptly.
“I’d better get some sleep.” She hit the control to shut off the screen, and the lack of its light plunged the room into darkness, only the faint glow of the ghostlights on the baseboards allowing them to see at all. Curiously, though the bodyguard hadn’t moved, he seemed closer somehow in the darkness. “I’ll brief everyone in the morning,” she promised, moving away from him, back toward the hallway to the sleeping quarters. Halfway there, she hesitated and eyed him curiously. “How did you know I’d be in here?”
“It is where I would have been,” he answered simply. A smile stretched across her face, and she tried to fight back a blush.
“Good night, Mr. Tanaka,” she said. “And thanks.”
She moved down the hallway without waiting for a reply, quickly out of sight around the corner. Tanaka’s eyes followed her, staring at the empty corridor long after she’d gone. Then, tentatively and carefully, his lip twitched upward into a smile. He allowed himself to savor the unfamiliar expression, and the unfamiliar emotion that accompanied it, for a moment before shaking away the feeling and stepping purposefully out of the room.
“Who knows laser-launch systems?” Shannon Stark asked, scanning the faces of the group collected around the frozen monitor image of the spaceport.
“What about them?” Gunny Lambert interjected from his perch on the arm of the couch. “I mean, I guess I know the newsholo spiel: the laser heats the air in the capsule’s ignition chamber and propels it into orbit.”
“Actually,” Tom Crossman corrected him, surprising Shannon, “the air that the launch capsule sucks in only gets it to the upper atmosphere; it has to carry a small fuel supply to reach orbit.”
“I’m talking about operations,” Stark clarified. “We need to find a way to shut it down, permanently, and hopefully destroy the other port facilities in the process. Any ideas on what we should target?”
“We could hit a launch capsule at take-off,” Vinnie offered. “Knock out the ignition chamber and the debris might smash the laser’s optics.”
Tom shook his head. “They’re fail-safed: all the fragile shit’s underground.”
Shannon cocked an eyebrow at Crossman. “You seem to be the resident expert. Tell us what you know.”
“Well,” the technician said, “my dad was an engineer—he helped build the system on Mars colony. I’m no expert, but I still remember a lot of the stuff he told me.” He levered himself off the couch and went up to the monitor screen and poked a finger at the image of the launch platform. “Like I said, all the laser’s focussing equipment’s down below, protected by a good ten meters of dirt and rock. Power feed’s down there, too, probably.”
“Couldn’t we pop a missile down the emitter?” PFC Bobby Comstock, the APC driver, wanted to know. “That’d take out the mirrors and power, wouldn’t it?”
Crossman rolled his eyes. “Earth to Jarhead—didn’t we just track that target? All that shit is shielded. Only thing a missile down the spout would hit is half-meter thick transplas ocular, and that’s all they’d have to replace to get it running again.”
“Well, if you’re so Goddamned smart,” Bobby drawled irritably, “then how th’ hell do we knock it out?”
“There’s maintenance tunnels running from the control center.” Crossman bonked the screen with his knuckle over the blockish building at the center of the port. “We’re gonna have to go through them to get access to the laser’s guts: maybe a shoulder-fired missile or some kind of bomb we could rig up. That’s the only way to take the thing out bad enough that they can’t fix it.”
“And that’s what we’ll have to do,” Shannon said, “if we want to prevent them from looting this colony and using that laser to knock out any rescue ships that might come.”
“That’s an awful lot of open space,” Lambert commented, wagging a finger at the port. “They’ve gotta have motion detectors and thermal scanners set up.”
“You’ll need a diversion of some kind,” Trang noted. “Something to draw their forces away.”
“We could take the scout,” PFC Jimmy Jimenez, the thin, shaven-headed scout car driver suggested, “and go after that big rocket.” He pointed at the onion-shaped heavy-lift launch vehicle over at the landing pad. “That’d get their attention, damn straight.”
“You might not
“The Private is correct.” Tanaka spoke for the first time since the meeting had begun. “The scout can be only one part of the attack. Besides the penetration team, you will need a dismounted element utilizing shoulder-fired missiles to support the diversion.”
“Oh, goody,” Corporal Camellia Tinker muttered, chuckling humorlessly, “fun for everyone.”
“So we’ll need four groups,” Shannon Stark mused, rubbing her chin. “Penetration, mounted diversion, dismounted support and an overwatch element to coordinate.”
“Well, we know who’s in the scout group,” Comstock declared. “Who gets to go inside?”
“That’s what we were trained for,” Vinnie reminded Shannon.
“Vinnie’s right,” she said. “The four of us will take the laser.”
“All due respect, ma’am,” Lambert said, shaking his head, “you going in wouldn’t be a good idea.”
“He is correct,” Tanaka agreed, his tone gently reproving. “You are the only officer: you must stay with the overwatch element and direct the other teams.”
“All right, damn it.” Shannon let out a sigh. “This commanding officer crap is getting old. If not me, then who? Three probably won’t be enough—you’ll need two to hold the control center and at least two to set the charges.”
“How about you, Captain Trang?” Vinnie asked the mercenary officer. “You handled yourself pretty good out there.” He extended the man a hand. “Wanna come along for the ride?”
“You patriotic types will get me killed yet,” Trang moaned. But he took the hand. “I’m in,” he told Shannon.
“We’ll hang with you, Captain,” one of the other two security people, a tall, lanky European whose name escaped Shannon declared. The other merc, a broad-shouldered Asian, nodded his agreement.
Trang shook his head. “I thank you for your loyalty, but your place is here, to ensure the safety of the governor.” He glanced at Sigurdsen, who sat off to the side, a potted plant for most of the conversation. Actually, Shannon couldn’t recall the big man having said more than two words since the night of their arrival, but the reference to him seemed to stir him from his self-imposed silence.
“Lieutenant,” he spoke hesitantly, “are you certain this is the right thing to do? What if your ship is still out there? Shouldn’t we wait till we’re sure there’s no other way?”
“They didn’t reply to our transmission, Your Honor,” she reminded him. “Even if they’re out there, they couldn’t approach till we took out the laser—otherwise, the Invaders could use it to knock out any attempt at a counterstrike.”
The Governor nodded slowly and reluctantly, still seemingly not quite convinced.
“All right.” Shannon took a deep breath before continuing. “Gunny, I’ll leave it to you to separate your people into three teams: the scout car assault group, an APC crew and a support team to dismount from the carrier and back up the diversion. Vinnie, you coordinate with the Gunny on coming up with the charges and timers.”
“We can rig something up from rifle grenades,” Mahoney stated, rising from his seat as the others began to drift away from the meeting.
“Lieutenant.” Governor Sigurdsen motioned for her to remain by the couch as the others moved away to prepare for the mission.
“Yes, Your Honor?” Shannon cocked an eyebrow.
“What should I… should we do if none of you come back?”
Stark regarded him silently, sorely tempted to reply: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” But a sidelong glance at the two merc guards and the young servant girl squashed that impulse.
“Pray.” She shrugged, turning away from him. “God might be merciful, but I doubt the Invaders will be.”
The midday sun beat down on Shannon’s back, leaving her with an inescapable feeling of exposure and helplessness. It seemed odd, even now, to launch a commando raid in broad daylight, but the benefits of a night attack would have been illusory at best. The Invaders surely had infrared night vision and thermal imaging
