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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 gu
The entire operation had taken sixteen seconds by her chrono.
Harris started his men cycling through the perso
"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 tu
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 from the control room."
"Ferret One, Ramrod. Good work, Captain. Send them in—but remind them we want the place intact."
"Aye, Sir. We'll take it in one piece if we can. Ferret One clear."
Captain Williams heard the thunder coming closer and slammed his hand down on the button that closed the control room hatch. He stared at it with wide eyes, then whirled and cursed his technicians as they began to scramble for the still open hatch on the far side of the chamber. They ignored him, and he snatched out his sidearm.
"Get back to your posts!" he screamed.
A terrified lieutenant turned to run, and Williams shot him in the back. The man went down, and his shriek of agony galvanized the others. They darted through the hatch, and Williams howled curses after them, firing until his magazine was empty. Then he turned back to the control room, and his eyes were mad as he calmly replaced the empty magazine and switched the selector to full auto. The sobbing lieutenant dragged himself towards the hatch, his blood a thick, crimson smear on the floor, and Williams stepped over beside him.
He emptied the entire magazine into the dying man.
Private Montgomery slapped her beehive on the sealed panel, stepped back, and hit the button. The hatch blew apart, and Sergeant Henry went through it in a swooping leap.
A single Masadan officer's pistol spat fire at less than ten meters' range, and steel-jacketed slugs whined uselessly from the Sergeant's armor. He felt them bouncing away and started to bring up his pulser, then remembered his orders to take the place intact. He grimaced and waded through the fire, and an armor-augmented fist clubbed the Masadan to the floor.
A corridor blast door slammed shut with no warning at all, crushing the man in front of Colonel Harris in an explosion of gore, and the colonel slithered to a halt in shock. Someone screamed over his suit com, and the colonel whirled to see another man shrieking and twisting as the door at the far end of the corridor segment ground his leg to paste. But then, through the screams, he heard something even more terrifying.
"Attention. Attention, all Masadan perso
"This is Captain Susan Hibson of the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps," the cold, flat voice said. "We are now in possession of your central control room. We now control your blast doors, sensors, and life support. Lay down your arms immediately or face the consequences."