'Keep them moving,' Stephen said with a curt nod to his aide. He took the flashgun and jogged forward, trying to pull his skirmishers back into a straight line. Because the ambush had occurred in the center of the lead company, the ends had drawn forward like horns pointing toward St. Mary's Port. The second and third companies started to move out from the brush where they'd assembled.
With a roar that drowned the crash of occasional plasma bolts from the spaceport, a medium-sized starship rose into sight from the valley of the St. Mary's River. The ship moved with glacial slowness, a single maneuver at a time. Not until the vessel had reached its intended altitude of about fifty meters did its captain swing the bow to starboard so that his port broadside bore on the troops a kilometer away.
The ship seemed to float on a cloud of rainbow exhaust. The morning was quiet, poised between the land breeze of night and the wind that the river would funnel from the relatively cool ocean toward the city in a few hours.
Stephen lowered his visor. At this range, he couldn't punch a flashgun bolt through the exhaust to shatter a thruster nozzle. The trick was possible-Stephen had done so more than once-but only if the pilot cooperated by bringing the vessel close enough or high enough to give the flashgunner an opportunity.
Stephen aimed at a gunport, a minuscule target and one where even a hit wouldn't change the course of battle. Still, a target.
He squeezed off. A flashgun bolt, not his, lit a stern panel. Vaporized metal combined with atmospheric oxygen in a harmless secondary flare. Many of the soldiers were firing, riflemen as well as flashgunners; even one desperate sod with a shotgun whose pellets couldn't
Stephen reloaded with his visor down and his head lowered. The starship fired six plasma cannon together.
The guns ranged from under 10-cm bore to 15-cm at least. They weren't especially well laid, but a single charge incinerated six soldiers as it gouged a long furrow across the field. Carbon in the soil and foliage burned red. A bolt that dug to bedrock blasted quicklime in white splendor.
Recoil from the simultaneous thermonuclear explosions rotated the vessel 20° upward on her axis, bringing the port thrusters into slightly better view. Stephen aimed again, seeing the blaze of the tungsten nozzles as a line of dashes through his darkened faceshield. Before he could fire, Stampfer's plasma cannon hit the forward quartet of thrusters squarely.
The thunder of the starship's guns was still echoing from the buildings of St. Mary's Port when the vessel nosed over and her stern motors drove her into the ground. She was nearly perpendicular when she hit. The bow stabbed meters through the soft limestone before strakes fractured and the rest of the ship crumpled like a melon in a drop forge.
Stephen knelt and covered the back of his neck with his hands. The groundshock threw him forward in a somersault fractionally before the sky-filling crash reached him through the air.
The sound went on for several seconds, punctuated by green flashes and the sharp cracking failure of the four stern thrusters. Normally the nozzles were cooled by reaction mass before it was converted to plasma. When the tanks ruptured, the coolant passages emptied and the thrusters exploded.
The ship excavated a crater fifty meters across and nearly half that in depth. Fragments of hull and shattered bedrock flew in parabolas from the impact. The scattered pieces knocked down buildings that the groundshock had spared, crushing Feds and attackers alike.
Stephen got to his feet. 'Let's go!' he croaked. He couldn't see. It was a second or two before he remembered to raise his visor, smeared with dirt even though the filtering tint had started to clear.
Plumes of steam and dense black smoke twisted in a single rope from the crash site. Fires had broken out at a dozen places in the city. Despite the wreckage, a Molt fired from the rubble of a fallen wall. Stephen squinted and squeezed his trigger, flinging the alien back dead despite smoke and airborne debris that attenuated the laser's effect. He reloaded as he moved on.
A hundred meters of waste ground lay between the field and the nearest buildings. Plowed-up rocks were piled at the edge of the cultivated area. A few Fed marksmen had fired from rough stone hangars here. One of them was dead beneath a starship hatch that had tumbled like a flipped coin before pinning her to the ground; the rest had fled. Stephen strode past the body.
Lewis and Vanderdrekkan were still with him. Beverly wasn't. Stephen could see only a dozen other members of the lead company, but the casualties couldn't really be that high. Skirmishers who'd been thrown down or even stunned would get to their feet momentarily; the main body of the attack would follow in a matter of minutes or less, splitting the Fed defenses open from the lodgment Stephen and his handfuls tore in the immediate chaos.
'Rifle!' Stephen shouted, wondering if Lewis could hear him. He carried a cutting bar, but it wasn't his weapon. Even in a hand-to-hand fight at a barricade Stephen preferred a gun butt or the muzzle jabbing like a blunt spear to a bar's twitching edge.
For a moment he thought that the roar he heard was blood racing in his ears. Pearly radiance blazed across the buildings, and he turned his head to the left.
Risen from the riverbed but barely brushing the surface of the ground, a second Federation starship parted the pall marking the destruction of its consort. The vessel was swinging to rake its broadside across the Venerian attack. Stephen snatched back the flashgun from his loader. He aimed, because he had nothing better to do.
BERRYHILL
January 18, Year 27
2138 hours, Venus time
Ditches the transports' exhaust had dug across the St. Mary's delta had filled with water and looked natural, but the amount of litter the ground force had left behind surprised Sal. Pallets, flexible sheeting, empty boxes, and containers of all kinds; clothing, pieces of body armor, scattered cartridges; even a rifle broken at the small of the stock.
A wrench pinged on the head of a bolt, rang from the gun mount, and dropped into a cutter's cabin to clang loudly on the deck. Tom Harrigan caught the wrench in the air as it started another bounce, this time toward the attitude-control panel. He blinked at the tool in pleased surprise.
'Sorry, sailor,' muttered Godden, a gunner's mate from the
It had taken fifteen minutes to mount the six-tube laser at the front edge of Cutter 725's dorsal hatch. The weapon and the 5-cm plasma cannon being fitted to Piet's Cutter 551 had to be carried within the little vessels during reentry. Though a cutter could fly at moderate speed through an atmosphere with the two-meter-by-one- meter hatch open, it couldn't survive braking from orbital velocity; neither could a weapon stuck out in the turbulent airstream.
'725 to 551,' Sal said into her communications handset. The modulated laser was directed at the pickup antenna of the cutter eighty meters away, but she had to hope 551's console speaker was at full volume. Piet and his four subordinates were all visible on the hull or half out the cutter's hatchway, wrestling with a mounting that obviously wasn't going as planned. 'We're ready to lift. Over.'
725's optics were good for a cutter but not
'Captain says go on without him, ma'am,' Godden relayed. 'Says there's no time to lose.'
'Understood,' Sal said. 'Prepare to lift.' She lit 725's thruster, lifted to balance a moment on a three-meter pillar of flame, and roared north up the channel of the river at 50 kph. It would have been nice to fill the water tank, but the small crew couldn't do that and mount the laser at the same time.
The St. Mary's River drained through what had been a fault in a limestone plate. Friction and acids from rotting vegetation carried by the current had widened the crack to half a kilometer, leaving bluffs a hundred meters high on either side of the channel. Sal didn't have time to be impressed, but she heard Godden mutter, 'Holy Jesus!' forgetting the intercom was keyed.
She kept the cutter low, fighting the shockwaves reflected from the surface of the water. The plume of steam
