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"Hold your fire. I say again, all units hold fire for my command."
More shuttles streaked downward, probed by his tactical sensors as they planeted, and his face tightened. Those weren't assault boats; they were heavy-lift cargo shuttles, and their presence this early could only mean the raiders were putting in heavy armored units.
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The assault teams converged on the defensive strong points with cautious confidence. Reports flowed back and forth as the first tanks disembarked from their shuttles and began to move forward. No one expected it to be easy—not against Imperial Marines—but knowing precisely where their enemies were turned it into something more like a live-fire exercise than a battle.
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Von Hamel watched his display. The raider spearheads were inside his perimeter in a dozen places, and if his people weren't where the raiders thought they were, they weren't far away, either. There were only a limited number of positions which could cover the same approach routes.
One column of invaders moved towards his own CP, a tentacle of death reaching into the mangled city's heart, and he gathered up his rifle. He had far too few people for him and his staff to stay out of the fire fight.
He raised the heavy weapon—a thirty-millimeter "rifle" only a man with exoskeletal combat armor "muscles" could possibly have managed. It was loaded with discarding sabot tungsten penetrators four times heavier than those of the rifles unarmored infantry carried, and he slid it cautiously over the edge of the office building roof.
"Engage!" he barked.
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The orderly advance exploded in chaos.
Raiders screamed and died in a hurricane of high-velocity tungsten. Two hundred rifles— auto-ca
Even taken by surprise, they had the firepower to deal with their enemies. What they no longer had was the will. They didn't even try to return fire; they simply broke and ran, scourged by that deadly hail of fire until they managed to get out of range.
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"Regroup! Assume Position Gamma. I say again, Position Gamma."
Von Hamel's people responded instantly, withdrawing from the positions their attack had marked for the raiders, and this time the smoke and confusion and terror helped them. There was no way the other side could track them through the chaos as they dashed for their new stations.
They'd done well, von Hamel thought. Barely half a dozen Marine beacons had gone out, and the raiders had been brutally mauled.
But they wouldn't get another chance like that. The other side might not know his troops' exact positions, but they knew his general battle plan. They wouldn't come in fat and stupid a second time, and they had that damned armor to back them, not to mention the assault boats.
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Howell watched Alexsov's face as the reports came in. Another man might have sworn. At the very least he would have said something. Alexsov only tightened his lips and started sorting out the chaos.
The commodore looked away, grateful for Alexsov's calm yet constitutionally incapable of understanding it. His eyes swept his command deck, and he frowned. Commander Watanabe sat stiffly in the assistant gu
Howell turned his head, looking for Rachel Shu, and found her. She, too, was watching Watanabe, and her eyes were narrow.
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A smoke-choked dawn, smutted with cinders and the stench of burning, painted the sky at last.
Major von Hamel hadn't expected to see the sun rise, and now he wanted to, more than he had ever wanted anything before, for he knew he would never see it set. But it was grim, vengeful satisfaction that pulsed within him, not fear. He and what remained of his battalion, little more than a company, had withdrawn to their final positions, and the streets behind them were thick with the dead. Too many were his own, and far, far too many were civilians, but there were over six hundred raiders and nine gutted tanks among them. His air-defense platoon had even added a trio of Bengals to the carnage, for the enemy dared not use HVW this close to GeneCorp's HQ. They had to strafe if they wanted his Marines, and that brought them into his people's reach.
Yet the end was coming. Only the tight tactical control he'd managed to maintain had staved it off this long, but ammunition was ru
He knew that. But he'd also realized something else during the nightmare night. These weren't pirates. He didn't know what they were, but no pirate commander would have continued such a furious assault or accepted such casualties, and if he'd tried, his men would have mutinied. These people were something else, and the carnage they'd wreaked on the evac centers filled him with a dreadful certainty.
They were going to destroy this city. They were going to wipe it from the face of Elysium, whether they gained their prize or not. It was part of their pattern, and there was something more than brute sadism to it. He was too exhausted to think clearly, but it was almost as if they needed to eliminate all witnesses to protect some secret.
He had no idea what that secret might be, and it didn't matter. None of his people were going to be surrendered to the butchers who had raped and tortured Mawli and Brigadoon and Mathison's World, and there was no longer any reason to preserve GeneCorp's data base as a bargaining chip.
He lay on a balcony, watching the smoky sky, and waited.
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"All right." Even Alexsov sounded drained, and Howell could scarcely believe their losses. The chief of staff locked eyes with the ground commander's screen image, and the commodore saw the terrible fatigue in the ground man's face. Howell was desperately tempted to give it up— simply replacing the losses to his ground component was going to take months—but they'd come too far. And, he reminded himself tiredly, whatever happened, they'd attained their primary objective. News of what had happened to Elysium would rock the Empire to its foundations.
"One more push, and you're in. Check?" Alexsov said.
"Check," his subordinate said wearily, and the chief of staff nodded.
"Then get it moving, Colonel."
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Von Hamel heard the sudden crescendo of fire as the tanks moved in. His troopers fired back desperately, but they were almost out of anti-tank weapons and they were too thin, too heartbreakingly thin. Beacons vanished from his display with dreadful speed, and he switched it off with a sigh.
He sat up, craning his neck at the eastern sky, and tears trickled down his face as he listened to the thunder. Not for himself, but for his people. For all they'd done and given that no one would ever know a thing about.
His southern perimeter broke at last. It didn't crumble and yield; it simply died with the men and women who held it, and the attackers thundered through the gap as a blazing arm of the sun rose above the shattered skyline. Von Hamel stared at it, drinking in its beauty, and pressed the button.
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Commodore James Howell stared in shock at the expanding globe of fire in the center of the city. It swelled and towered as he watched, wiping away GeneCorp and all he had come to steal and devouring half his remaining ground troops like some dragon out of Terran myth.
"Damn." It was Alexsov, his voice flat and almost disinterested, and Howell wanted to scream at him. But he didn't. There was no point.
"Recover the assault force," he told Rendlema
"Yes, sir. Shall I move on the secondary objectives, sir?"
"No." Howell watched the fireball begin to fade. Amazing how little of the remaining city had gone with it. Whoever planted those charges had known what he was doing. "No, I don't think so. We've lost enough people for one night, and there's still that damned militia. We'll cut our losses."
"Yes, sir."
Howell leaned back and rubbed his eyes. That suicide charge had never been part of Thermopylae. Had someone down there realized the truth?
"Move to Phase Four," he said quietly.
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The shuttles departed with barely a third of the perso
No, it was the effect on his men he feared. How would their morale react to this? He already knew Control was going to have to settle for more lightly defended targets in the immediate future. He'd have too many new perso
He folded his hands in his lap, brooding down on Elysium's holo image. It was past time to be done here, and he turned to the gu
"Are we prepared to execute Phase Four, Commander Rahman?" "Yes, sir. Missile targets are laid in and locked."
"Good." Howell studied the man's expression. It wasn't exactly calm, but it was composed and ready. Commander Watanabe, on the other hand ...
The commodore turned to the commander. Watanabe was pasty pale and sweating hard, and Howell sighed internally. He'd been afraid of this ever since Alexsov voiced his own concern over Watanabe's reliability.