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Combat raged across the once-beautiful campus—ugly, swirling knots of blood and fire and hate amid smoldering wreckage and the litter of bodies. A small team of Maniacs got in among the grounded shuttles and destroyed five before they could be killed. A police SWAT commander's jury-rigged team of civilians and a handful of police fought its way into the admin/library complex, and Arlen Monkoto led a personal assault on the bio-research center.
The raiders' casualties mounted, but they still had the edge in numbers. They fought off the shock of surprise and went back onto the offensive, and Commodore Howell relaxed as his people began to regain the ground they'd lost while the data continued to pour upward.
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Arlen Monkoto poked his head cautiously around a corner, trying not to cough as acrid smoke assaulted his lungs. He'd fought his way to within two corridors of the computer center, but he'd lost Chief Pilaskov on the way in, and he was down to five men and three women, only two of them Maniacs.
The way ahead was clear, and he moved down the hall in the quietest run he could manage. "His" people followed him, and his mind raced. If they got into the computer center, took out the techs he knew were pillaging it—
An armored raider appeared before him, and thirty-millimeter rifle fire tore Captain Arlen Monkoto apart.
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"Download complete!" someone called, and someone else was screaming to "Move it back to the shuttles now!" over the tactical net.
Raiders began to disengage, leapfrogging back towards the shuttle perimeter. Too few defenders remained to stop them, but the twenty shuttle loads who'd landed needed only twelve shuttles to lift them out again.
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"Shuttles preparing to lift, sir."
Howell grunted approval at the report, but inside he winced. Twenty percent casualties were too damned many so soon after Elysium, even if they had secured every one of their objectives this time. He didn't care what Control said, he wasn't sending teams in against targets this hard again.
"Sir, sensors report a Fasset drive coming in from the direction of El Greco," an officer said suddenly, and Howell's head snapped around.
"What is it?" he demanded.
"Can't tell at this range, sir, but it's not a Fleet drive. Looks like an El Grecan—probably a destroyer."
The commodore relaxed. A destroyer had the speed to overhaul them, but not the firepower to fight them, and this time she was welcome to any sensor data she could get. Aside from the freighter's transponder codes, nothing he'd done here had required the use of classified security data, and ex-Fleet heavy cruisers weren't all that hard to come by.
He looked back into the display as the shuttles began to lift, and his mouth curled in an ugly smile. The fact that the "pirates" had one of Fleet's cast-off CAs would spill no beans, but Intolerant's weapons would more than suffice to destroy the El Grecan ship if she got close enough to be a problem. Besides, she'd be ... distracted after Intolerant nuked Raphael, and—
"Sir! The shuttles!" someone shouted, and Howell's face went white as the Stiletto teams opened fire. Nine of his thirty-one surviving shuttles became falling fireballs as he stared at the display.
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Admiral Simon Monkoto stood on the bridge of the destroyer Ardent, staring at the view screen, and his carved-marble face was white as the silver at his temples. There had been no way for Ardent to know what was happening on Ringbolt until she dropped sublight, but the radiation counters were going mad. Whoever had nuked Raphael had used the dirtiest warhead Admiral Monkoto had ever seen on the city ... and on Arlen.
Dark eyes, hot and hating in his frozen face, moved from the view screen to the gravitic plot. He could have overhauled the raiders. It would have been close, even with their freighters to slow them, for his destroyer had been on the wrong approach vector, but he could have caught them.
And it would have done no good at all against a heavy cruiser.
He'd almost done it anyway, but he hadn't. He couldn't throw away his crew's lives—or his own. Even more than he wanted those ships, he wanted the people who'd sent them, and he couldn't have them if he died.
His jaw clenched, and he turned away. Ardent's last shuttle was waiting for him, waiting to take him down to the planet where his brother had died to do what he could. But he'd be back, and not with a single destroyer.
He promised himself that—promised Arlen—and his expression was as hellish as his heart.