Heirs of Empire

“On it,” Tamman agreed, and started shouting fresh orders.

“Holiness! The heretics!”

Vroxhan looked up at Farnah’s shout, and then the first crackling musket fire rolled back from ahead. A bend in the street blocked his view, but he saw clouds of powder smoke and heard the screams of the wounded. Almost half his guard were musketeers, and they scattered into doorways and shop fronts, diving for cover to return fire while the pikemen jerked back around the corner to get out of range.

“Keep moving!” he snapped, but Farnah shook his head sharply.

“We can’t, Holiness. They’re inside the Sanctum’s wall, and there must be three or four hundred of them with their damned rifles. We can’t advance across the square against their fire. It’s suicide.”

“What do our lives matter compared to our souls?” Vroxhan raged.

“Holiness, if we advance, we die, and if we die, we can accomplish nothing to save the Sanctum,” Farnah grated in a voice of iron.

“Damn you!” Vroxhan’s hand slashed across the captain’s face. “Damn you! Don’t you dare tell me—”

He cocked his arm to swing again, but then he paused. He froze, oblivious to the naked fury on Farnah’s reddened, swelling face, then grabbed the captain’s arm.

“Wait! Let them hold the walls!”

“What do you mean?” Farnah half-snarled, but Vroxhan was already turning away.

“Bring half your men and follow me!”

Sean looked back as the rifles began to crack. He hated himself for leaving those men to hold that wall without him, yet he had no choice. They could hold it as well without him as with him, but only he, Sandy, or Tamman could access the computer.

They had only thirty men with them, the survivors of B and C Companies’ original two hundred, as they clattered into the Sanctum. The original command bunker had been encircled, over the centuries, with chapels and secondary cathedrals, libraries and art galleries. It was a crazed rabbit warren of gorgeous tapestries and priceless artwork, and bloody boots thudded on rich carpet and floors of patterned marble as they pounded through it.

“Left, left, left,” Sean muttered to himself as he felt the energy flows of the ancient command complex through his implants. “It has to be to the left, damn it, but where—”

“Got it, Sean!” Tamman shouted. “This way!”

Tamman swung sharply left down a stairway, and Sean caught Sandy’s hand and half-dragged her after their friend, eyes gleaming as walls of marble and paneled wood gave way to bare ceramacrete. The command center was buried beneath the bunker, and boots and combat gear clattered in the deep well of the stairs. Here and there a man lost his footing and fell, but someone always dragged him back up, and the gasping urgency of their mission drove them on.

“Hatch!” Tamman yelled, and the men behind him suddenly slowed as they beheld the great, gleaming portal of Imperial battle steel. The Sanctum’s guardians had ordered the computer to close the hatch, and for just an instant, religious dread held the Malagorans, but Tamman was oblivious to it as his implants sought the access software, and he grunted in triumph.

“No ID code,” he muttered in English as Sean and Sandy pushed up beside him. “Guess the guys who set up this crazy religion figured the priesthood might forget it. Let me—ahh!”

His neural feed found the interface, and the Malagorans sighed as the huge hatch slid silently aside. They stared into the holiest of Pardalian holies, and their eyes were awed as they gazed at the man who’d opened the way.

“Come on!” Sean drew two pistols and shouldered past Tamman.

“Blasphemer!” someone screamed, and a sledgehammer punched into his breastplate as a musket roared, but the tough Imperial composites held. One of his pistols cracked viciously, and High Inquisitor Surmal’s head exploded. His corpse tumbled back into the depths of the main display, blood pooling under the glitter of holographic stars, and Sean looked around quickly. None of the equipment was proper military design, and the Pardalians hadn’t helped by covering the walls with Mother Church’s trophies. Ba

“There, Sean!” Sandy pointed, and Sean swallowed a curse as he saw the console. The bastards hadn’t just switched the neural interfacing off; they’d physically disco

“Tam, you’re our best techie. Go! Get that thing back on-line!”

“Gotcha!” Tamman dashed across the command center, and Sean turned back to the men crowding through the hatch behind him. “In the meantime, let’s get some security set up here. We need to—”

“Sean!” Sandy screamed, and he whirled just as a tapestry on the opposite wall was ripped aside and a musket flashed fire through the sudden opening. The ball whizzed past his head by no more than a centimeter, and he saw more men filling a five-meter-wide arch.

A tu

Even as the thought flashed through his mind, he had time to wonder whether the original architect had installed it, or if it had been added by the Church’s founders … and to realize it didn’t really matter.

“Take ’em!” he bellowed. “Keep them off Tamman’s back!”

His men answered with a snarl, and rifles barked like the hammer of God. Choking smoke filled the command center’s vaulted chamber as muskets blazed back, yet for the first few seconds it all went the Malagorans’ way, despite the surprise of their enemies’ sudden arrival. They were spread out, able to pour more rounds into the arch than the Guardsmen could fire back, but three hundred men crowded the tu

“Hit ’em! Bottle ’em up!” Sean roared, and charged as the first Guardsmen broke out into the open.

His Malagorans charged at his heels, but the Guardsmen were charging, too. They’d left their pikes behind, unable to get through the tu

“Malagor and Lord Sean!” someone howled.

“Holy God and no quarter!” the Guard bellowed back, and the two forces slammed together in a smoke-choked nightmare of hand-to-hand combat.

Sean rampaged at the head of his men, and his slender sword carved an arc of death before him. No unenhanced human could enter its reach and live, and he hacked his way towards the arch. If he could reach it, bottle them up inside it … But his men weren’t enhanced. They couldn’t match his strength and speed, and too many Guardsmen had gotten into the control center. They swirled about him, and he grunted in anguish as something slammed into his thigh from behind. His enhanced muscle and bone held, but blood oozed down his leg, and unenhanced or not, if they swarmed him under—

He fell back, cursing, strangling an enemy with his left hand even as he cut down two more with his sword, and someone swung a mace two-handed. It clanged into his breastplate and rebounded, staggering him despite his enhancement, but once more the Imperial composite held. Steel clashed and grated all about him, men screamed and died, and a Guardsman loomed suddenly before him, sword thrusting for his throat, and there was no time to dodge.

He saw the point coming, and then a battle-ax split his killer from crown to navel. Blood fountained over him, and he gasped in surprise as Sandy bounded past him. The ax she’d snatched from the trophies on the wall was as tall as she was, and she shrieked like a Valkyrie as she swung. She’d lost her helmet, and her brown eyes flashed fire as she cut a second man cleanly in half, and another voice screamed in horror.