An armor-clad Marine streaked past Shamir with a puff of compressed gas from his zero-gee maneuvering jets, slicing across the Russians with a burst of flechettes from a CAWS supershotgun. A haze of bright-red blood globules floated across Shamir’s vision, and when the view cleared a half-dozen Marines had spread out in a hemisphere around the opening.
“We’re in, sir,” Shamir reported.
“Head for the bridge, Ari,” McKay ordered. “We’ll meet you there.”
A weight pressed the occupants of the courier forward as Vinnie hit braking thrusters, bringing them from docking speed to a dead stop just short of the forward wall of the bay.
“Take small children by the hand and check your seats for personal possessions, ladies and gentlemen,” Vinnie announced, securing the yokes of his battle helmet. “And thank you for flying Protectorate spaceliners.”
The four men moved quickly and with practiced ease as they pulled weapons from ready-mounts on the hull and moved to the ship’s emergency airlock. McKay hit the control to open the outer door to the hard vacuum of the bay, then turned to his team.
“You boys ready?”
“You only live once,” Tom grunted, racking a round into the chamber of his CAWS. “Might as well get it over with.”
McKay chuckled, then punched the pressure plate to open the inner door.
The atmosphere in the courier’s cabin shot them out the door like they’d been launched from a mass driver, straight into the midst of a squad of Protectorate biomechs. Jock squeezed the maneuver control in his left fist and turned himself in a lazy arc, at the same time pressing down on the butterfly trigger of his assault gun. Modified for zero-g, the gun vented its exhaust gasses from rear-angled ports to counter the recoil as he fired, pumping alternating penetrators and frag rounds into the biological robots.
It was a surreal scene, the armored biomechs falling apart under the impact of a hail of slugs in the dead silence of the vacuum. All Jason heard was his own breath rasping inside his helmet as he, Vinnie and Tom joined Jock in pouring fire into the squad of Protectorate troopers, but the effect of the barrage was real enough. Within seconds there was nothing left of the half-dozen biomechs but careening chunks of flesh and metal and baseball- sized globules of floating blood.
A half-dozen spacesuited human workers scurried for cover, but McKay ignored both them and the primary debarkation collar that was extending automatically toward the courier, and moved instead to the maintenance airlock. While Vinnie, Jock and Tom surrounded him in a defensive cordon, Jason pulled a computer module from his belt and affixed it to the airlock control panel. The module read and decoded the door’s security system in less than a second and sent the outer door sliding silently open.
Jason pulled the device free and the four of them moved into the lock, shutting the outer door behind them. Through their pressurized helmets, the men could hear the gentle hiss of inrushing air as the lock equalized pressure with the ship. Once the indicator lights went green, Jason attached the lockpick module to the inner door and then moved quickly back from it, bringing up his rifle.
The inner lock slid aside with a rumble of antique motors, moving with painful slowness, and before it was halfway open they were squeezing out through the gap and setting up a perimeter in the corridor. Jason had half- expected a squad of biomechs to be waiting for them, but there was not so much as a cockroach to be seen in the antiseptic-white hallway—just a Cyrillic-lettered sign on one wall with a pictographic symbol for an airlock and the universal symbol for danger.
“The Marines must have ’em distracted,” Jock opined hopefully, looking around nervously at the lack of opposition.
“Yeah,” McKay grunted, unconvinced. “Well, let’s not wait around for them to find out we’re here.”
With a gust of compressed gas, he led them down the corridor, heading for the bridge.
“What in the hell is going on?” Antonov roared, turning on Lieutenant Dubronov, the violence of his outburst sending the officer floating gradually backwards till he caught himself against a safety rail.
“Sir…” the man stuttered, “I think we are under attack!”
“You think!” Antonov repeated, glaring at the man. “What in the hell do you mean, ‘You think?’ Dubronov?” He pointed at the image frozen on one of the ship’s security scanners, the bodies of a squad of biomechs floating in a sea of blood and metal fragments. “Do you see that, Lieutenant? You damn well better
“General,” he said hastily, “we have received scattered reports of gunfire throughout the ship, and a maintenance crew in the docking bay has radioed that several armored men came out of Colonel Podbyrin’s ship and killed the security detail.”
“Podbyrin! That goat-fucking moron!” Antonov’s fists clenched and he wished for gravity so that he could smash something. “He let himself be captured!” He turned back to Dubronov with unbridled rage in his visage. “You. I want you to take a security team and find these invaders. Do not try to engage them directly, just get behind them and herd them.”
“Herd them where, General?” Dubronov asked, shaking his head.
“Why, exactly where they wish to go, Lieutenant.” The General’s eyes narrowed and Dubranov could see the foxlike cunning that had brought Antonov from a minor division commander to leader of half the world. “Right here. I want you to bring them to me.”
Johnny Lee shook away the darkness and tried once more to claw his way free of the wreckage of the overturned ATV. Lee wasn’t sure what had hit them, but the last thing he remembered was a flash of light and the taste of metal and dirt, and then he’d woke upside-down beneath the roll-cage of the little machine. The front end of the ATV was a twisted mass of smoldering metal, and he didn’t know where Raj was.
His helmet kept getting twisted around and bumping against the roll cage, so he impatiently yanked it off and suddenly felt as if he were about to faint. A warm trickle of blood flowed down his forehead and dripped off his nose, and he cursed under his breath—if his brains were leaking out he wouldn’t be walking very far.
“Goddammit, Raj,” he hissed, pushing at the dirt beneath him. “Where the hell are you when I need you?”
“Just give me a second, you ungrateful asshole,” came the unexpected reply.
Lee twisted around and saw Rajiv Vingh leaning into the frame of the wrecked ATV, trying to push it off his friend.
“Just hold still so I don’t crush your silly ass,” he grunted. “That’d be real funny—you live through an enemy rocket hitting us and then get your neck broke while I’m trying to get you out.”
As Lee watched him, he noticed that Vingh’s right leg was covered with blood, his fatigue pant ripped at the thigh, but it didn’t seem to slow the man down as he strained against the vehicle. The ATV frame began slowly rocking in rhythm, and finally Vingh rammed into it with his shoulder and the little rover toppled over with a high- pitched metallic creak. Lee pulled his legs into a fetal position and let the ATV’s roll cage pass over him, the vehicle coming to a rest on its side with a rattling crash.
“Thanks, Raj,” Lee moaned, rolling gingerly to his feet. He felt a little dizzy and his head throbbed with every heartbeat, but at least he was alive. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll live,” Vingh told him—and as he did, Lee finally noticed how quiet it was.
No rattle of gunfire, no explosions, not even the rumble of engine turbines. He looked across the field and saw to his surprise that they were alone. The burning hulks of the hodgepodge of vehicles the strike force had assembled littered the plain like little roadmarks leading to the control center. At their head, toppled apocalyptically, was the remains of one of the Protectorate Hoppers, one of its legs a twisted ruin, its biomech driver hanging limply from the shattered cockpit.
The control center itself loomed only a hundred meters in front of them, the transmission antennae it guarded now scorched wreckage from multiple missile hits, and around its walls were scattered lumps that could have been bodies. But there was not another living soul to be seen on the field of battle.
“Where is everybody?” Lee blurted, taking a tentative step toward the control center.
“Far as I can tell, ” Vingh declared wearily, “they’re all dead. Nothing’s moved since I came to.”
“They can’t all be dead,” Johnny said, shaking his head. He waved at the entrance to the base. “If anyone made it, they’d be inside.”
