equipment, and there were no assurances they slept at night as humans did. Worst of all, and the final reason for deciding on high noon as H-Hour for the raid, they had to consider the fact that the Invaders ships were undoubtedly monitoring the planet from orbit.
They couldn’t be sure what kind of computer technology the enemy had, but Republic ships and satellites had the ability to automatically scan for thermal anomalies. At night, the Marine vehicles would have stood out from the cold, desert surface like a Christmas tree; in the day, with the scorching flame of white-hot Tau Ceti beating down, the thermal output from the turbine-driven tactical vehicles would be insignificant.
Yet, despite all the logic behind her decision, sitting out on the rocky outcropping, with the shelter’s dune buggy parked down the hill behind her and Nathan Tanaka by her side, she felt like somebody had drawn a bullseye on her back. Trying to shake that image, she raised her binoculars and focussed on the spaceport control center.
There was still some evidence on the building of the damage done in the invasion. Pockmarks from bullet impacts scarred the front face, a single crater from a grenade explosion had taken a chunk out of a corner at hip level, and the front door had been blown off its hinges. A pair of bodies, still in their grey Port Authority coveralls, had been left to decompose only meters from the entrance, and Shannon flinched as she saw a local scavenger gnawing at one of the corpses.
But the building was still in use: through the doorway, she could see shadowed figures milling around, working the instrument boards and monitoring the launch systems. For a bizarre moment, she thought the figures were human, but then one stepped into the light from the entrance and she saw that it was one of the blue-skinned Invaders,
Tracking away from the control center, she found the shining, metallic strip of the maglev rail and followed it around to the laser-launch platform, where several cars were waiting to be unloaded, their cargo of launch pods squatting in utilitarian ugliness on the flat-bed car. The powerful laser discharged even as she watched, the ionization of its beam making the hair on the back of her neck stand up from several kilometers away.
Shifting her view to the left, she brought the rotund shape of the Invader shuttle into her view—either they were still loading the same craft Vinnie and Captain Trang had observed, or this was yet another launch vehicle. Probably the former, she judged: the loading ramp was up, the cargo doors closed, and it seemed that they were clearing the area around the shuttle in preparation for take-off.
Swinging the binoculars around ninety degrees, she focussed on a narrow draw some three klicks from the control center. Her mind ticked off the seconds and, right on cue, a dull-grey teardrop shape burst out of the draw in a cloud of dust and a whine of turbines audible even from their far perch.
“There they go!” Shannon exclaimed, nearly breathless with tension—sounding, she thought, like a worried mother watching her son play football for the first time. Of her two years as a Fleet officer, nearly eighteen months had been spent as an intelligence analyst. Leading troops into battle—or worse,
Nathan Tanaka didn’t comment on her outburst, watching the events unfold through his own set of field glasses. The bodyguard looked ill at ease in the camo fatigues he’d borrowed for the operation, a Marine assault rifle slung from his shoulder. He’d nearly balked when Shannon had insisted he carry the weapon, but it had seemed more important to him to come along and guard her safety than to preserve a long habit. It seemed to Shannon that he had, in the absence of his charge Valerie O’Keefe, adopted safeguarding her as his primary duty.
Her temples throbbed with her pulsebeat as she watched the scout car race up the slope onto the plateau, still seemingly unnoticed. Trailing by nearly a kilometer, the APC rumbled out of the draw at a more sedate speed, curving around to take the plateau at a wide arc, keeping to the edge of the foothills on the east side. By the time the slower vehicle had taken the hill and mounted the flat table of the port highlands, the quicker scout car had finally managed to get the Invaders’ attention. One of the gangly Hoppers on patrol nearly a kilometer out stopped in mid-stride—like a grotesque, mechanical parody of a man doing a double-take—and swivelled the upper torso around to bring the main gun and missile pods to bear on the advancing Marines.
That was all the encouragement Jimmy Jimenez needed. A guided missile flared off the Marine vehicle’s launch rack and crossed the distance between the car and the anthropomorphic tank in less than a second. The warhead detonated against the Hopper’s left turbine, enveloping the machine in a halo of fire with a thunderclap that rolled across the mesa. Armored Invader troops immediately began to pour out of the control center, while the remaining Hoppers turned in their patrol paths and heavy-weapons crews picked up their guns and missile launchers to run out to the front and meet the threat.
As yet unseen, the APC curved around to the rear of the port complex and came to a halt on the far side of the landing pad, disgorging Gunny Lambert and five of his Marines. The troops fanned out into two-Marine teams, each team equipped with a shoulder-fired missile launcher, and took up positions behind what cover they could find at the inner perimeter of the landing pad.
Shannon could see the loosely-organized mass of Invaders streaming out of the control center begin to drop by twos and threes as the two Marine autogunners, in each of the outermost teams, opened up on them. A rifle grenade shot out from one of Lambert’s troopers, exploding in the midst of the armored Invaders and sending a half-dozen of them flying in a billowing cloud of smoke and dust. The withering fire drove the Invader troops even farther away from the operations building, drawing half of them toward the landing pad to face the attack from their flank.
“Now, Vinnie,” Shannon muttered to herself. “Do it now!”
More than a klick away from Shannon’s position, in a junction of rocky outcroppings overlooking the east side of the spaceport, Vincent Mahoney lowered his field glasses and twisted around on the seat of his borrowed motorcycle.
“Well, Cap,” he commented to Shao Tri Trang, seated behind him on the dirt bike, “I don’t think they’re gonna get any more diverted than that.” He turned to Jock Gregory and Tom Crossman, who shared the other bike. “Let’s move.”
Kickstarting the cycle, Vinnie twisted the accelerator and gunned it down the slope with a hum of electric motors, the other machine following close behind. The gap between the outcroppings was rutted and rocky, but both ex-Marines had been trained in handling nearly every land vehicle in existence and negotiated the path with practiced ease.
Vinnie concentrated on controlling the bike, confident in Captain Trang’s ability to look out for threats, but he couldn’t help the expectant stiffening in his spine as he heard the gunfire erupting all around. There was a bullet with his name on it out there, he had no doubt, and this was as good a chance of catching it as he’d ever had in his four years in the service. What kept him riding into the midst of the fray despite that knowledge was the realization that this was the culmination of his military experience: this was why he’d joined the Marines in the first place.
Without this assignment, the biggest contribution to the preservation of the Republic he could have hoped to make was putting down some petty rebellion that would inconvenience some corporate miner or landholder. Now, he was putting his life on the line to actually defend humanity against the most significant threat in history.
What a rush.
Both cycles were more than halfway across the plain before any of the enemy spotted them, but one of the few heavy weapons crews which had kept its position in a foxhole at the rear of the control center finally traversed its machine gun and brought the two bikes into the targeting reticle. A fraction of a second more was all it would have taken for the gunner to squeeze the weapon’s trigger and blow all four men out of existence, but their presence had not gone unnoticed by either Shao Trang or Tom Crossman.
Although his and Jock’s bike was slightly to the rear of Vinnie and Trang’s, Crossman actually spotted the emplacement first and brought up the grenade launcher he’d worn slung across his back. Seeing his motion, Trang unlimbered his own launcher and the two men fired almost simultaneously, each loosing a full-auto three-round burst. The mini-grenades described a high arc from the lightweight launchers and came in directly over the weapon emplacement and the pair of Invaders manning it.
Dust flew and machine-gun ammo cooked off with a flash of fireworks as the grenades scattered mingled pieces of machine gun and Invader in a half-circle around the foxhole. Before the smoke had cleared, Vinnie and
