The Honor of the Qween

base leapt and convulsed again. This time each pinnace fired only a single missile, but those missiles' onboard radar took them straight into the airlocks their predecessors had blown open and down the passages inside them at eight thousand MPS. They carried no explosives, but their super-dense 'warheads' struck the first sets of internal blast doors with the force of twenty-three and a half tons of old-style TNT apiece, and another two hundred odd Masadans died as the doors disintegrated in white-hot gas and murderous shrapnel.

More troop shuttles landed, and Colonel Harris cursed his survivors to their feet and sent them stumbling through the rock dust and the howl of escaping atmosphere to find firing positions even as the core base's main blast doors slammed shut behind them.

* * *

'Ramrod, the Ferret is rolling. I say again, the Ferret is rolling.'

'Roger, Ferret. Ramrod copies.' Ramirez looked up at his own pilot. 'Follow them in, Max.'

* * *

Captain Williams tried not to twitch in impatience while his damaged sensors strove to sort out what was happening. Most of Harris' men seemed to have survived, and he heard snatches of chatter as their officers harried them into some sort of defensive positions amid the rubble, but his surface arrays were gone. He couldn't tell where the attackers were, how soon they would hit Harris, or what they were armed with.

Nor could he see the fresh flight of small craft streaking towards the hangars on the far side of Blackbird Base.

* * *

'Launch your birds!'

Fresh rockets streaked downward, but these were much lighter than the ones which had ripped the vehicle entrances apart. Their warheads massed barely three hundred kilos each, and hangar doors blew open and surface domes peeled back like broken bone. A hundred and twenty battle-armored men and women fell from pinnace belly hatches like lethal snow, riding their counter-grav down into the gaping holes, and four hundred more Royal Manticoran Marines debarked from cutters and shuttles to follow in their wake.

* * *

Fresh alarms screamed, and Captain Williams' head twisted around as new swatches of crimson blazed on the base schematic.

* * *

Speed was everything, and the handful of suited Masadan service techs who got in the point teams' way died before anyone found out whether they were trying to fight or surrender. Then the Marines came up against the closed blast doors, and engineers slapped shaped charges against the massive panels even as other engineers sealed in the portable plastic airlocks behind them.

Battle armor wasn't built to let someone tap an impatient toe, so Captain Hibson was reduced to snapping her chewing gum as her people worked. Not that she could fault their speed and precision. It was just that it took time, however good they were.

'Sealed!' Lieutenant Hughes' voice crackled in her earphone.

'Do it,' she grunted back.

'Fire in the hole!' Hughes called, and armored shapes turned away from the locks just in case.

There was an instant of taut silence, and then Blackbird's rock transmitted the smothered ka- CHUNK! to them. One lock failed as back-blast leaked around the face of a charge and split a plastic wall, but the engineers were on it before more than a few cubic meters of air escaped, and even as they worked, a dozen more locks were passing Marines into the base six at a time.

* * *

Colonel Harris looked around wildly. Smoke and dust settled about his knees with dreamy slowness in Blackbird's low gravity and tenuous atmosphere, but there was no sign of the ground attack. There should have been. The attackers should be following up their initial breaching strike as closely as they dared, not letting his men get set to receive them. So where were they?

'The hangars!' a voice shouted in his earphones. 'They're coming in through the hangars, too!'

Too? Harris looked around once more, then punched the side of his helmet. They weren't coming against his positions at all! It had all been a feint—and all his men were on the wrong side of the base's sealed blast doors!

* * *

Captain Hibson's people went down the passage with the speed only battle armor allowed. There wasn't room to use thrusters, and their exoskeletal 'muscles' were real energy hogs, but in this gravity they let them advance in gliding, thirty-meter jumps, and terror went before them like pestilence.

Here and there a firearm barked and metal slugs whined off a Marine's armor, but Hibson's troopers carried tri-barrels and plasma rifles, and they moved with the smooth precision she'd drilled into them for months.

She watched a squad team move down the passage before her. They came to an intersection, and a plasma gunner turned each way. White light flashed off their armor as they hosed the perpendicular corridors, and the next squad leapfrogged past them while their demolition numbers slapped beehives onto the seared tunnel roofs. They pulled back, the charges thundered, the intersecting passages collapsed for over ten meters, and the squad was moving again.

The entire operation had taken sixteen seconds by her chrono.

* * *

Harris started his men cycling through the personnel locks in the core blast doors, but each lock would admit only three men at a time, and the only sitrep he could get from Captain Williams was a half-hysterical babble about demons and devils.

* * *

'Ramrod, this is Ferret One,' Captain Hibson's voice said in Ramirez's earphone. 'Ferret One has penetrated two kilometers. I've got corridor markings indicating the route to the control room and to the power section. Which should I follow?'

'Ferret One, Ramrod,' Ramirez replied without hesitation. 'Go for the control room. I repeat, go for the control room.'

'Ramrod, Ferret One copies. Go for the control room.'

* * *

Colonel Harris' central reserve was small, with none of the Havenite weapons issued to his primary maneuver units, but it was stationed deep inside Blackbird Base to move to any threatened sector. The colonel had a very clear idea what would happen to those men if he committed them against the juggernaut rolling towards them, yet he had no choice, and they went racing down the tunnels to meet the intruders.

Some of them came up against sealed passages choked with fallen rubble and stalled. Others were less fortunate; they found the enemy.

The Marines' belt-fed tri-barrels pumped out a hundred four-millimeter explosive darts per second, with a muzzle velocity of two thousand MPS. That kind of firepower could chew through armored bulkheads like a hyper- velocity band saw; what it did to unarmored vac suits was indescribable.

* * *

'Ramrod, Ferret One. We have contact with organized resistance—such as it is. No problems so far.'

'Ferret One, Ramrod copies. Keep it moving, Captain.'

'Aye, Sir. Ferret One copies.'

* * *

Colonel Harris shoved through a blast door airlock and ran down the passage at the head of everyone he'd gotten back inside. Captain Williams' voice had gone beyond mere hysteria in his headphones. The base CO was babbling prayers and promises to punish Satan's whores, and the colonel's mouth twisted in distaste. He'd never liked Williams, and what he and others like him had been doing for the last two days sickened Harris. But it was his job to defend the base or die trying, and he exhorted his men to ever greater efforts even while the premonition of failure settled in his bones.

* * *

'Ramrod, Ferret One. My point is one passage from the control room. Repeat, my point is one passage