Shadow of Freedom

Chapter Sixteen

“—want him to wonder why he’s being kicked out an airlock without a skinsuit.”

Anger smoked through Major John Pole like sea smoke as he listened to the playback of Kristoffersen’s conversation with the Manty lieutenant. Through an oversight (which Pole planned to correct as soon as this current business was resolved), he had no access to the surveillance systems outside Victor Seven when the Shona Station went to emergency com conditions, which meant he’d been unable to watch or listen to Kristoffersen’s conversation with the Manties until the captain had returned with his recording of the entire incident.

“Oversight’ my ass! Pole thought furiously now, remembering that bitch MacWilliams’ expression as she “apologized” so profusely for her “inability” to tap him into her systems. It was a purely technical problem, she’d assured him, and one Commander MacVey’s tech people would rectify the instant the current emergency let them stand down from their damage control duties.

Pole felt his teeth grate together in memory, yet there was nothing he could do about it at the moment. Besides, he had other things to be worrying about.

“She’s fucking crazy, Sir!” Kristoffersen said harshly. “She wanted me to go for my pulser and give that big son-of-a-bitch an excuse to blow me away!”

Pole’s grunt of agreement might have contained a modicum of sympathy for his subordinate’s frayed nerves, although, if pressed, he would have had to admit the universe would have survived quite handily if the Manties had taken Kristoffersen out. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean the captain’s estimate of this Hearns’ sanity was in error.

“Excuse me, Sir,” Captain Leonie Ascher, Charlie Company’s CO said respectfully, “but shouldn’t we consider the possibility that these people mean what they’re saying?”

“What? That they’ll come in here after us? Actually launch some kind of assault on a facility whose security is guaranteed by the Solarian Gendarmerie?”

Pole glared at her, and she shrugged ever so slightly.

“Sir, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we should simply roll over for the first neobarb to start throwing his or her weight around. But she had a point; this Zavala has already taken out four battlecruisers. It may be that he’s out of control, as well as out of his mind—that he’s way outside what his superiors expected when they gave him his orders. All that could be true. Hell, it probably is true! But he’s still committed an outright act of war already, and I think we have to seriously consider the possibility that he’ll keep right on going. Let’s face it, Sir—at this point he’s got to get his spacers back.”

“You’re saying he’s painted himself so far into a corner he doesn’t have any choice but to keep going? He’s got to get what he came for if he’s going to have a prayer of covering his ass when his superiors find out he’s created this kind of incident with the League?”

“Something like that, Sir.” Ascher nodded.

Pole considered what she’d said. With Captain Myers and Captain Truchinski off commanding detachments elsewhere, she and Kristoffersen were the only company commanders currently aboard Shona Station. Although Ascher was junior to Kristoffersen and two of her company’s platoons were off-station at the moment, she was far and away the more valuable asset. She’d always been smarter—a lot smarter, actually—than the other captain, which was why Pole had sent Kristoffersen out to meet the Manties. If they really were as out of control as the destruction of Dubroskaya’s warships suggested, and if something went wrong and he had to lose one of them, he’d preferred for it to be Kristoffersen. All of which suggested he really should consider the possibility that Ascher had a point…and probably a damned good one.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much he could do about it. Governor Dueñas had given him his orders in person in a com conversation he’d carefully recorded as part of the official record, and that left Pole very little wiggle room. If he surrendered the interned Manties, he’d be disobeying a direct order from his legal superior. The Gendarmerie would be furious enough with him for yielding to some neobarb navy’s threats, however hopeless his situation, given the disastrous precedent that would set. If he not only rolled over but did so in defiance of direct orders not to, he’d simply hand the inevitable board of inquiry—and the court-martial which would no doubt follow—an even bigger hammer with which to reduce him and his career to very tiny, well pulverized pieces. And he could be damned sure Dueñas would do his level best (and use every favor he was owed) to blame the disaster here in Saltash on anyone except himself.

Major Pole didn’t doubt the governor was already scheming to come up with an official explanation which would make the destruction of Vice Admiral Dubroskaya’s squadron entirely her fault. The idea was ridiculous, but in the competition between a dead Frontier Fleet admiral and a live Frontier Security governor, the one who was still breathing was almost certain to come out on top, regardless of any inconvenient little things like facts. Under the circumstances, the last thing Pole could afford would be to simultaneously disappoint Dueñas and give the governor an excuse to hang the League’s humiliating surrender on him. In the end, someone was going to be scapegoated for what had happened here, and whoever it was would be fortunate if all that happened was that his career came to an abrupt and ignominious end. More likely, the powers that were would decide an example had to be made, and John Pole had no intention of providing the example. The survival rate for ex-gendarmes who found themselves guests of the penal system was far too low for that.

The problem was that Ascher might well be right about whether or not Zavala was willing to push things. He truly might send in those boarders to reclaim the Manties by force. For that matter, he truly might be so crazy he really would treat Solarian gendarmes as common pirates if they fell into his hands!

“We can’t just play dead for him,” he said finally. “That’s completely unacceptable.”

Kristoffersen and Ascher glanced at each other, then back at him, and he bared his teeth.

“They may think it’s going to be easy to get into this module,” he said. “If they do, it’s up to us to demonstrate their error. We’ve probably got more troopers in here than they have boarders out there, there are only so many ways they can come at us, we know the station a hell of a lot better than they do, and we’ve also got the advantage of the defensive position. We’ve got a lot more heavy weapons than we saw in this, too.” He jabbed an angry finger at the recording they’d all just viewed. “If they try to fight their way in, we’ll massacre them!”

“And if they use their cruisers’ point defense to blow a way in from the outside, Sir?” Ascher asked.

“There’s no way even a maniac would do that.” Pole waved his hand dismissively. “You think they’re going to risk explosively depressurizing the entire module when they’re so anxious to get their people back unharmed?” He shook his head. “No, if they try to fight their way in here, they’re going to have to come to us on our terms. And when they do, we’ll bleed them.”

Ascher’s eyes looked doubtful, and the major glared at her.

“I’m not going to just hand over their spacers against direct orders without at least trying to hang onto them,” he said flatly. “And I think they may be more amenable to reason once they figure out how much trying to take them back by force is going to cost.”

Ascher still looked unconvinced, but Pole didn’t really care. He didn’t believe for a moment that he could hang onto the interned Manties indefinitely, but he was confident he could inflict heavy casualties on any Manty attempt to fight their way into Victor Seven, and when he did, they’d pull back to rethink. At that point, if he were this Zavala, he’d find a way to tighten the screws on Dueñas. There was no doubt in Pole’s mind that anyone with the only operable warships in a star system could find a way to convince that system’s governor to see reason sooner or later, especially when the governor in question was stuck out in the open where the Manties could get at him without killing the people they wanted to rescue themselves. And if Zavala convinced Dueñas to order Pole to hand the internees over, even it was obviously only under duress, the monkey was off the major’s back.

And if he can’t convince Dueñas to play ball, I’m no worse off than I was before, he thought. In fact, if I lose a couple of dozen gendarmes and then hand over the Manties “to prevent further bloodshed,” I may even be able to make a case for its being Dueñas’ fault for ordering me not to cough them up in the first place. If I phrase my report right, make it clear I was prepared to go all the way and only backed down to save Solarian lives from a homicidal neobarb once it became obvious my civilian superior had misread the situation disastrously, the Gendarmerie will be in a hell of a lot better position to hammer Frontier Security over this instead of our carrying the can.

* * *

“Well, time’s up, My Lady,” Gutierrez said.

“Indeed it is,” Abigail agreed. “So I suppose we should go ahead and get this ship off the field. If you’d be so good, Mateo?”

“Of course, My Lady.”

Gutierrez nodded and glanced around to be sure all his people were where he’d told them to be before he stepped cautiously to the edge of the corridor down which Kristoffersen had departed in such high dudgeon. He extended a sensor wand into the corridor’s mouth, and the multi-spectrum pickup projected a detailed heads-up view of the passageway onto the inside of his skinsuit helmet. He cycled through the visible spectrum into infrared and then into ultraviolet and grunted in unsurprised satisfaction as he spotted the web of tripwire lasers covering the last third or so of the forty-meter corridor. The blast doors at the far end, where the spoke-like axial passage actually entered Victor Seven, were closed, but someone had cut what looked suspiciously like firing loopholes through the heavy-duty panels.

A little closer inspection showed that the tripwires he’d picked up were connected to anti-personnel mines which had been attached to the bulkheads and deckhead. The mines were covered with nanotech chameleon skin designed to blend into the alloy to which they’d been affixed, but the people who’d emplaced them were gendarmes, more skilled in thuggery than any sort of actual military training. They hadn’t even bothered to detach the laser sensors from the mines; they’d left them mounted on the mine housings, and with that for a starting point, it wasn’t hard for his sensor wand to locate the mines by their internal powerpacks.

“You know, My Lady,” he said absently, still cataloging threats, “if we were willing to get in line and march straight down the middle of the passageway here—and maybe go ahead and paint big bulls-eyes on our chests, too—they probably could get a lot of us.”

“I know how good you are, Mateo,” Abigail replied soothingly. “There’s no need to be nasty to them just because they aren’t. I’m sure they’re doing the very best they can.”

“The scary thing is you’re probably right about that.”

He studied his HUD for a few more moments, then nodded.

“’Bout what we expected, My Lady. Not much finesse, but let’s be fair. It’s a straight corridor into the first blast door. How much room for finesse is there?”

“I suppose that depends on a lot of factors,” she said with a crooked smile. “Go ahead and get their attention, Mateo.”

“Aye, aye, My Lady.”

* * *

The gendarmerie squad on the far side of those blast doors had failed to notice Gutierrez’ sensor wand, but Sergeant Clinton Abernathy, the squad’s leader, had grown increasingly nervous as the minutes ticked by. This wasn’t the kind of crap he’d signed up for, and the rumors about what this particular batch of neobarbs had already done only made bad a lot worse.

He didn’t like any part of this, and he failed to share Major Pole’s confidence that these people would back down in the face of a demonstration of manly determination. Perhaps that was because he and his squad had been chosen to do the initial demonstrating.

There were three access routes to Victor Seven from the rest of Shona Station. This one, following the main axial from the lift shafts, was the most direct and the broadest, which made it the logical path for a full-fledged assault. The second route ran through the materials-handling conduit, through which consumables and refuse were transported into and out of the habitat module. It hadn’t been planned for humans to use, however, and it would have been a cramped and tortuous way to get at the module’s garrison. At the moment, all of its blast doors had been closed and remote sensors had been set to alert the defenders if those doors were disturbed. It seemed unlikely anyone would try coming that way, but if they did, there’d be plenty of warning in time to get blocking forces into position.

The third possible way in was really designed as an emergency evacuation route, and it was less liberally supplied with blast doors, since it was supposed to stay open and accessible for people trying to get out of Victor Seven in the face of disaster. The good news was that it had a lot more bends and was rather narrower than the axial passageway, even if it was more accessible than the materials tube. They’d had to position more people to cover it, but they had good fields of fire and the Manties would have to come out in the open around the turns in the corridor wall to get at them.

But still—

“Movement!” Corporal Marjorie Pareja snapped suddenly.

“What? Where?!” Abernathy demanded, peering at the handheld display feeding from the fixed pickup on the far side of the blast doors.

“Zebra-Tango!” Pareja replied.

* * *

Gutierrez watched as the sensor remote he’d bounced up the passageway rolled to a stop just short of the first line of mines. He didn’t really need it, but seeing how quickly the other side reacted to it should be informative.

“One…two…three…four…”

He’d just reached “seven” when a burst of pulser darts from one of the loopholes destroyed the remote.

“Lord,” he muttered. “These clowns are as pathetic as those bas—I mean, as those jackasses on Tiberian, My Lady.”

He shook his head. Seven seconds to react at all, and then instead of a single shot the morons had fired an entire burst? The ricocheting pulser darts had taken out three of their own mines, and it wasn’t even as if the remote had been telling him anything he hadn’t already known in the first place!

“Don’t complain, Mateo,” Abigail said sternly.

“I’m not. It’s just—”

He shrugged irritably, a master craftsman frustrated by the slovenly workmanship of a would-be competitor, and glanced at Senior Chief Petty Officer Franklin Musgrave, Tristram’s boatswain.

“Ready, Frank?”

“Ready,” Musgrave confirmed.

“Then punch it.”

“Fire in the hole!”

Musgrave slid just the muzzle of his weapon around the edge of the corridor and squeezed the firing stud. It was an awkward angle, and despite the stabilizing pressor beam projected against one of the lift shafts from the launcher’s other end, the recoil was significant. Musgrave had expected that, however. He kept control of the bucking launcher without much difficulty, and the projectile’s flight path had been programmed to allow for the muzzle rise as it departed downrange. Because of the short range—the other end of the passage was actually inside the launcher’s danger zone—and the fact that no one in his right mind wanted to be within forty or fifty meters of a kinetic strike from a weapon that powerful, they’d had to step down its normal acceleration rate considerably and go with the chemical shaped-charge warhead, instead of its usual dart-like penetrator. Even that was bad enough, since it was designed to take out light armored vehicles, but at least the vast majority of the blast would expend itself on the other side of the blast doors.

Sergeant Clinton Abernathy had a single, fleeting instant to realize what the launcher was before it fired, but that was all the warning he had before he, the blast doors, and his entire squad ceased to exist.

* * *

“Jesus Christ!”

Surprise jerked the blasphemy out of Kristoffersen as Abernathy’s squad was wiped from existence.

“That was a tank-killer!” his company first sergeant blurted.

“No! You think?!” Kristoffersen snarled with a baleful glare that closed the first sergeant’s mouth with snap. “Tell Lieutenant Boudreaux to reinforce Axial One and Axial Three. And tell his people to keep their heads frigging down! These bastards’ve got heavier weapons than we thought.”

* * *

“That was noisy,” Gutierrez observed. He tossed another remote down the corridor and grimaced. “Messy, too.”

“They had their chance to do it the easy way, Mateo,” Abigail replied harshly. “Like you say, even those bastards on Tiberian were smarter than this! Let’s keep the pressure on them.”

“Aye, aye, My Lady.”

* * *

“Well, at least they’re not shy,” Major Pole growled, studying his tactical display. None of the Manties Kristoffersen had seen before he withdrew to deliver Lieutenant Hearns’ ultimatum had been armed with anything like that tank-killer. That was going to make things messier, but weapons that heavy were going to be less useful to the attackers as they moved into Victor Seven proper. They weren’t going to have any more firing lines as long as that first one, and without powered armor of their own, no one was going to want to be anywhere near the back blast from something like that when it was confined and channeled by one of the station’s passageways.

That was the good news. The bad news was that now that they’d blown their way past the late Sergeant Abernathy’s squad, their menu of approach routes got a lot broader. Pole’s people knew the internal geography of their habitat far better than the Manties possibly could, but covering all the possible approaches with enough forward-deployed firepower to stop people equipped with such heavy weapons was going to take a lot of manpower.

He considered offering to hand over the internees now that the Manties had demonstrated they were serious, but he couldn’t do that…yet. If he didn’t want to be the one who ended up carrying the can for this entire debacle, he had to be able to argue that he’d genuinely tried to obey the ridiculous, unreasonable orders he’d been given, and that meant he was going to have to accept heavier casualties before he recognized the inevitable and gave in. It was unfortunate, of course, but at least his command post was well back from the point of contact. He was pretty sure he’d have time to accrue sufficient casualties to cover his ass before the actual fighting got anywhere near him.

* * *

“Okay, things are about to get tricky, My Lady,” Gutierrez said.

He was two blast doors deeper into Victor Seven, and Abigail had downloaded the damage control guide’s memory to his skinsuit as well as her own. More copies had been uploaded to Nicasio Xamar, Tristram’s assistant tactical officer, as well as to Senior Chief Musgrave and all the other senior noncoms attached to the boarding party. Now Abigail and Gutierrez studied the imagery together, even though they were the better part of fifty meters apart.

“We could cut through this engineering crawlway,” Gutierrez pointed out, highlighting the crawlway in question on both HUDs. “That’d get us around behind them right here.”

He highlighted the closed, loopholed blast doors just ahead of his current position, where the gendarmes had set up another strongpoint.

“If we were actually trying to fight our way through them, that would probably be a good idea,” Abigail replied. “Since we’re not…?”

“Since we’re not, I guess we need to knock on the door again,” Gutierrez replied.

He sat back, thinking for a moment. As he’d said, things were about to get tricky. To get at the strongpoint, the Manticorans would have to make their way around a relatively sharp bend in the passageway. The problem was that they’d be exposed to fire from the gendarmes the instant they poked their heads around the turn. There wasn’t room for them to use Musgrave’s launcher here, either. With a Marine fire team in proper powered armor, a heavy tri-barrel, and a plasma rifle, it would have been a straightforward tactical problem. Without any of those, he was just going to have to adapt, improvise, and overcome.

“MacFarlane!”

“Yes, LT?” PO 1/c William MacFarlane replied.

“Bring your little friend up here.”

“On my way, LT.”

MacFarlane, one of Tristram’s damage control specialists, crawled up behind Gutierrez less than a minute later. The Marine-turned-armsman slithered back a little so that he and MacFarlane could both look at a hand display.

“We need to make that door go away,” Gutierrez said, tapping the display. “Think your pet’s up to it?”

“Oh, yeah,” MacFarlane replied. “Course, the people on the other side’re going to be trying to stop him.”

“I think we can probably do a little something about that,” Gutierrez told him. “Mind you, it would work better with a Bravo Charlie, but I guess we’ll just have to make do.”

“Don’t you be hurting Denny’s feelings, LT!” MacFarlane retorted with a grin. “He’ll do just fine.”

“So let me get the cheering section organized and then you can show me.”

* * *

Sergeant Norman Dreyfus wished his skinsuit allowed for old-fashioned brow wiping. It wouldn’t have changed anything, but at least he might have felt better.

He also wished to hell he knew exactly what the advancing Manties were up to at the moment. Unfortunately, they’d been systematically taking out the sensors the gendarmes had emplaced. In fact, they’d been swatting sensors with ridiculous ease as they advanced—obviously the people responsible for planting those sensors hadn’t concealed them anywhere nearly as well as they’d thought—which meant the best he could do was guess about what they were doing. That didn’t make him happy…and the fact that their current location appeared to be just on the other side of his current location didn’t make him any happier.

The intruders were working their way inward along two separate routes, moving with a certain degree of caution but without any particular effort to disguise their intentions. Not that there would have been much point in subtlety, since there weren’t all that many possible approaches.

“Still nothing, Altabani?” he asked his sensor tech.

“No,” she replied. “You think I wouldn’t’ve mentioned it if I’d seen anything? Shit, Norm! I know they’re on the other side of that corner, but—”

Something rattled and rolled on the far side of the hatch, caroming along the bulkheads.

“Grenade!” Altabani shouted as it spun its way up to the far side of the blast door and stopped abruptly when the Manticoran who’d thrown it activated the tiny tractor unit.

The Manticoran in question was nowhere near anything Mateo Gutierrez would have called adequately trained, but she did pretty well for a Navy puke. She’d watched the icon on her HUD as it bounded down the line of approach to the closed blast doors, then hit its anchoring tractor. She’d jumped the gun slightly, locking the grenade to the deck a dozen centimeters in front of the doors instead of to one of the actual panels, but that was close enough, and she hit the detonation key.

Dreyfus bounced back and sat down—hard—as the concussion came at him, transmitted through the sealed door. Altabani swore as the sensor she’d poked through one of the loopholes was destroyed, and another of Dreyfus’ troopers said something in a high, falsetto tone as blast came through his own loophole and blew him back the better part of a meter. His skinsuit and body armor were more than enough to deal with it; his cry was born of shock and surprise—and fear—more than injury.

But that was all that happened, and Dreyfus felt a surge of relief as he climbed back up onto one knee.

Altabani was already shoving another sensor into place, and Dreyfus bared his teeth at the rest of his squad.

“If that’s the best they’ve got, they’re screwed!” he announced.

* * *

“Very nice,” Gutierrez approved. “Let’s get the others in there now.”

A dozen Manticorans and Graysons sent grenades rolling around the corner, bouncing them off the bulkheads towards the blast doors.

* * *

The blast door rattled and banged and vibrated as grenades went off on the other side, but none of the new blasts were anywhere near as powerful as that first one had been, and all of them seemed to be going off at greater distances.

“Central, this is Dreyfus,” the sergeant announced over his com. “They’re making a lot of noise, but I don’t think they’re getting any further in than they are now.”

“Good!” Captain Kristoffersen replied. “Keep us informed and—”

Sergeant Norman Dreyfus’ world ended in fire and blast.

* * *

“Told you not to hurt Denny’s feelings,” MacFarlane told Gutierrez.

“I stand corrected,” Gutierrez replied, studying the wreckage with his sensor wand.

He really would have preferred a Bravo Charlie—one of the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps’ armored, counter-grav-equipped, robotic breaching charges. Of course, that would have constituted a pretty severe case of overkill against a mere civilian-grade blast door. And even though MacFarlane’s DNI-1 damage control remote hadn’t been designed for the task, it had attached its beehive shaped charge with neatness and precision under cover of the flashbangs and smoke grenades. It didn’t have the armored protection of a Bravo Charlie, but it was designed to operate in an environment which would very quickly have incinerated or demolished a standard robotic unit. If the gendarmes had noticed it coming and targeted it, they could undoubtedly have destroyed it, yet the covering flashbangs had been far too light to hurt it.

Now Gutierrez surveyed the wreckage of what had been a set of blast doors.

“Frank, Wilkie, let’s get up there and secure the doors,” he said, starting up the passageway himself. “Looks like it’s going to take a few minutes to clear the wreckage enough to move on.”

* * *

Major Pole swore as his tactical display updated itself.

The Manties weren’t actually moving all that rapidly, yet it was painfully obvious that wasn’t because his people were stopping them. He’d expected to start inflicting casualties quickly when they had to clear their way through strongpoints, but they weren’t cooperating. Instead, they were taking their time, and they appeared to have an inexhaustible supply of grenades and demolition charges. All he was really accomplishing with his “strongpoints” was to compel them to use up a few more explosives blowing their way through them.

All right. They were clearly concentrating their efforts along Axial Three, and if they kept coming through another couple of sets of blast doors, that was going to lead them into one of the commons areas Victor Seven’s designers had laid out for the habitat’s anticipated VIP inhabitants: a spacious, landscaped compartment sixty meters, across fitted with picnic tables, scattered conversational groups of chairs, and a small ornamental pool with a fountain.

His eyes narrowed. He’d wanted short, restricted firing lines on the theory that they would favor the defender over the attacker, but this Lieutenant Hearns was obviously more experienced in boarding combat than any of his people. She was making those restricted fields of fire work for her, not the defenders, so maybe what he needed was a more extended firing range.

He considered his options. Virtually all of Kristofferson’s troopers were already parceled out across the approaches, and he didn’t dare thin out his forward defenses. The last thing he needed was to open up a second invasion route! That left him only the two platoons of Captain Ascher’s understrength company. He needed to maintain at least some reserve, but if he pulled up one of her platoons to reinforce the squad Kristofferson already had covering the compartment, then ordered the other squad which was covering the blast doors between it and the Manties to fall back…

* * *

“If this brainstorm of yours is actually working, My Lady, we’re probably getting close,” Gutierrez said over his private link to Abigail. “If I were in charge on the other side, this is where I’d be stacking my fire. Nice extended sightlines, and plenty of opportunity for converging fire on the only door the other guys could come through.”

“It does look like the best opportunity for them, doesn’t it?” Abigail agreed, studying the detailed imagery from the damage control guide. “I guess the only question’s whether or not this Major Pole’s going to pull enough strength from his reserve.”

“Only one way to find out about that,” Gutierrez said philosophically.

“I know.” Abigail smiled fleetingly. “That doesn’t mean I have to like it, though. I really don’t want to be wrong about this one, Mateo.”

“Course you don’t,” he replied in a gentler tone. “But when you come down to it, you’ve got to drop the penny. I don’t know if it’ll work, either, but I think it’s our best shot.”

Abigail nodded. Her greatest fear, really, had been that the gendarmes would drag one of their Manticoran prisoners into the middle of the firefight and threaten to kill him if she and her boarders refused to back off. Given the gendarmerie’s normal disregard for civilian life—if it belonged to “neobarbs,” at least—she’d anticipated from the beginning that the Sollies would eventually call her bluff, find out if she truly was willing to continue attacking in the face of a direct threat to the prisoners. What she hadn’t been able to estimate with any confidence was how soon they might do that. It seemed unlikely they’d risk that sort of escalation until they were convinced they wouldn’t be able to stop her any other way, however, which was the entire basis of the strategy she’d adopted.

Hopefully, Major Pole was bright enough to recognize the defensive possibilities Gutierrez had just described. If he was, and if he’d committed enough of his reserve…

“All right, everybody,” she announced over the tactical net. “It’s just about time to dance. Report readiness.”

A chorus of responses came back to her, and she nodded.

“Mateo, start the music. Nicasio, let’s be about it.”

* * *

“Get ready!” Captain Ascher snapped as “Denny” blew another set of blast doors into wreckage.

* * *

“Now!” Lieutenant Nicasio Xamar said crisply, and the Royal Manticoran Navy personnel standing on the surface of habitat module Victor Seven moved forward.

Just finding the emergency personnel locks should have been a nontrivial challenge, and even after the Manties had found them, they should have had to burn or blast their way inside. They certainly shouldn’t have been able to override the entry codes and cycle their personnel through them without anyone noticing! But that, of course, assumed they didn’t have access to Shona Station’s classified damage control files.

* * *

“They’re behind us! They’re behind us!”

“What the hell?!”

John Pole’s head flew up as his tactical display changed abruptly. Half a dozen of his single reserve platoon’s icons went crimson in the same instant, and three more blinked from green to amber—or red—even as he watched. That couldn’t be right! The Manties couldn’t—!

“Central, they’re hitting us from—!”

The voice chopped off in mid-sentence, and Pole’s face went white as even more icons went down. Others were falling back desperately, abandoning their positions, and he heard heavy firing and explosions over the open circuit. But that wasn’t possible. There was no way the Manties could have—

“Sir, the Manties want to talk to you,” a pale-faced communications tech said. Pole stared at him, and the tech pointed at a display. Somehow the Manties had patched into the station’s “secure” communications net.

Pole stood for a moment, frozen while his brain tried to process the information coming at him. None of this could be happening, but—

“Sir?” the com tech said almost plaintively, and the major shook himself viciously back to life and turned to the indicated display.

“What?” he got out. His voice sounded strangled, even to himself, and the young woman on the display smiled coldly.

“I’m in contact with my people who have just taken control of your brig, Major,” she said flatly. “I understand at least twenty-five of your gendarmes have surrendered to them. At the moment, your people are being locked into the cells and my people are evacuating the way they came. I very much doubt you have anyone in a position to intervene…and if you do, I’d strongly recommend you don’t try it. So far, whether you believe it or not, I’ve been trying to avoid killing any more of your people than I have to. I’m perfectly prepared to abandon that approach if you insist, however.”

Her smile was icy, but her eyes were colder still, and something inside Major John Pole shriveled under their weight.

“So tell me, Major,” she invited, “which way would you like me to handle it?”