The Armageddon Inheritance

prayerfully grateful that it had brought him Tsien Tao-ling.

The cutter dropped toward the dust-spewing wound which had once been a mountain top, and Hatcher checked his breathing mask. He hated using it, but the dust alone would make it welcome, and the fact that PDC Huan-Ti was located at an altitude of almost seventy-five hundred meters made it necessary. He felt a bit better when he saw Tsien reaching for his own mask … and suppressed a spurt of envy as Major Allen Germaine ignored his. It must be nice, he thought sourly as he regarded his bioenhanced aide.

They grounded, and thin, cold air, bitter with dust, swirled through the hatch. Hatcher hastily clipped on his mask, and his uniform’s collar was a suddenly minor consideration as the Imperial fabric adjusted to maintain a comfortable body temperature and he led the way out into the ear-splitting, dust-spouting, eye-bewildering bedlam of yet another of Geb’s mighty projects.

Tsien followed Hatcher, hiding his impatience. He hated inspection tours, and only the fact that Hatcher hated them just as badly let him face this time-consuming parade with a semblance of inner peace. That and the fact that, time-consuming or no, it also played its part. Morale, the motivation of their human material, was all important, and nothing better convinced people of the importance of their tasks than to see their commanders inspecting their work.

Yet despite his impatience, Tsien was deeply impressed. Enough Imperial equipment was becoming available to strain the enhancement centers’ ability to provide operators, and the result was amazing for someone who had grown up with purely Terran technology. The main excavation was almost finished—indeed, the central control rooms were structurally complete, awaiting installation of the computer core—and the shield generators were already being built. Incredible.

He bent to listen to an engineer, and movement caught the corner of his eye as a breath-masked officer disappeared behind a heap of building material, waving one hand as he spoke to another officer at his side. There was something familiar about the small figure, but the engineer was still talking, and Tsien returned his attention to him.

“I’m impressed, Geban,” Hatcher said, and Huan-Ti’s chief engineer grinned. The burly ex-mutineer was barely a hundred and fifty centimeters tall, but he looked as if he could have picked up a hover jeep one-handed— before enhancement.

“Really impressed,” Hatcher repeated as the control room door closed off the cacophony beyond. “You’re—what, four weeks ahead of schedule?”

“Almost five, General,” Geban replied with simple pride. “With just a little luck, I’m going to bring this job in at least two months early.”

“Outstanding!” Hatcher slapped Geban’s shoulder, and Tsien hid a smile. He would never understand how Hatcher’s informality with subordinates could work so well, yet it did. Not simply with Westerners who might be accustomed to such things, either. Tsien had seen exactly the same broad smile on the faces of Chinese and Thai peasants.

“In that case,” Hatcher said, turning to the marshal, “I think we—”

A thunderous concussion drowned his words and threw him from his feet.

Diego McMurphy was a Mexican-Irish explosives genius from Texas. Off-shore oil rigs and dams, vertol terminals and apartment complexes—he’d seen them all, but this was the most damnable, bone-breaking, challenging, wonderful project he’d ever been involved with, and the fact that he was buying his right to a full set of biotechnic implants was only icing on the cake. Which is why he was happy as he waved his crew forward to set the charges on the unfinished western face of Magazine Twelve.

He died a happy man, and six hundred and eighty-six other men and women died with him. They died because one of McMurphy’s men activated his rock drill, and that man didn’t know someone had wired his controls to eleven hundred kilos of Imperial blasting compound.

The explosion rivaled a three-kiloton nuclear bomb.

Gerald Hatcher bounced off Tsien Tao-ling, but the marshal’s powerful arm caught him before he could fall. Alarms whooped, sirens screamed, and Geban went paper-white. The door barely had time to open before he reached it; if it hadn’t, he would have torn it loose with his bare hands.

Hatcher shook his head, trying to understand what had happened as he followed Tsien to the open door. A huge mushroom cloud filled the western horizon, and even as he watched, a five-man gravitonic conveyer with a full load of structural steel turned turtle in mid-air. It had been caught by the fringes of the explosion, and the pilot had almost pulled it out. Almost, but not quite. Its standard commercial drive had never been designed for such abuse, and it impacted nose-first at six hundred kilometers per hour.

A fresh fireball spewed up, and the death toll was suddenly six hundred and ninety-one.

“My God!” Hatcher murmured.

Tsien nodded in silent, shocked agreement. Whatever the cause, this was disaster, and he despised himself for thinking of lost time first and lost lives second. He turned toward the control block ramps in the vanished Geban’s wake, then stopped as a knot of men headed towards him. They were armed, and there was something familiar about the small officer at their head—

“Quang!” he bellowed.

The fury in Tsien’s voice jerked Hatcher’s eyes away from the smoke. He started to speak, then gasped as the marshal whirled around and hit him in a diving tackle. The two of them crashed back into the control room, hard enough to crack ribs, as the first burst of automatic fire raked the open doorway.

“Forward!” General Quang Do Chinh screamed. “Kill them! Kill them now!”

His troopers advanced at the run, closing on the unfinished control block, and Quang’s heart flamed with triumph. Yes, kill the traitors! And especially the arch-traitor who had tried to shunt him aside! What a triumph to begin their war against the invaders!

As he and his men sprinted forward, construction workers raced to drag dead and wounded away from the explosion site, and six other carefully infiltrated assault teams produced automatic weapons and grenades. They concentrated on picking out Imperials, but any target would do.

“What the hell is happening?!” Gerald Hatcher’s voice was muffled by his breath mask, but it would have been hoarse anyway—a hundred kilos of charging Chinese field marshal had seen to that. He shoved up onto his knees, reaching instinctively for his holstered automatic.

“I do not know,” Tsien replied tersely, checking his own weapon’s magazine. “But the Vietnamese leading his men this way is named Quang. He was one of those most opposed to joining our forces to yours.”

Another burst of fire raked the open doorway, ricochets whining nastily, and Hatcher rose higher on his knees to hit the door button. The hatch slammed instantly, but it was only lightweight Terran steel; the next burst punched right through it.

“Shit!” Hatcher scurried across the control room on hands and knees. Major Germaine already stood with his back to the wall on the left side of the door, and his grav gun had materialized in his right hand like magic.

“What the fuck do they think they’re going to accomplish?!”

“I do not know, Gerald. This is pointless. It simply invites reprisals. But their ultimate objective is immaterial—to us, at least.”

“True.” Hatcher flattened himself against the wall as another row of holes appeared in the door. “Al?”

“I already put out the word, sir.” Unlike his boss, Germaine had a built-in communicator. “But I don’t know how much good it’s going to do. More of the bastards are shooting up the rescue crews. Geban’s down—hurt bad —and he’s not the only Imperial.”

“Goddamn them!” Hatcher hissed, and fought to think as the half-forgotten terror and adrenalin-rush of combat flooded him. Continuous firing raked the panel now, and he gritted his teeth as bullets and bits of door whined about his ears. This room was a deathtrap. He tried to estimate where their