The Wolf Worlds (24 page)

None of them was armed.

It did not matter to Mathias or to his Companions.

The patients died as they squirmed for shelter under their beds.

From overhead, as the Bhor strafing ships dipped and swooped, firing at anything resembling a black uniform, the port of Urich was in chaos. Here smoke or flame flared; there a building mushroomed outward. Troops scuttled from shelter to shelter.

The raid was progressing very well.

"Pretty." Kurshayne said.

They were. Sten/Alex/Kurshayne's own target was the Jann design center, specifically the complex design computers in the building's basement.

But the booths for the designers were hung with sketches and models. Some of them, Sten knew, must have been made by people who loved the clean, swept beauty of interstellar ships.

So? Sten pulled the toggle on the twenty-second timer, and electricity pulsed through the portuguese-man-of-war-swirl that the det blocks and wiring made across the building's floor.

Kurshayne was still staring, fascinated, at one ship model.

Sten grabbed the model and shoved it deep into the man's nearly empty backpack. "Move, man, if you don't want to go into orbit."

As the three men doubled-timed out of the building, the charges rumbled and then went off and the center fell into its own basement.

No, Ffillips decided. No man, even a Jann, should die like that.

She and three commando teams were crouched behind a ruined building. Across the square from them was a skirmish line of Jann. And, above them, a huge tank of chem fuel.

Between the two forces one of Ffillips' men lay wounded in the center of the square.

"Recovery!" one of Ffillips' men shouted, and she sprinted out into the open. A Jann calmly broke cover, aimed, and put a shell through the would-be rescuer. Then switched his aim and gut-shot the wounded man.

Which effectively made up Ffillips' mind, and she sprayed rounds into the chem tank above the Jann. Liquid fire turned the black-uniformed killers into dancing puppets of death.

"All first-wave units committed. General," the Jann said.

"Thank you, Sigfehr," Khorea returned, and eyed his battle screen. Very well, very well. My first wave has held the mercenaries in place. Now my second wave will break their lines and the third wave will wipe them out.

He was curious as to what possible intentions the mercenary captain had—he still could see no rationale for the suicide raid.

The charges on the
Atherston
were quadruple-fused, just to make sure nothing could go wrong. Even so, two of them had been smashed out-of-circuit in the landing.

But two more ticked away their small, molecular-decay timers.

Brave men of the Jann reinfiltrated back to their AA positions, and slowly the weapons pits returned to life. Suddenly it was worth a Bhor's life for him to lift his lighter higher than the port's buildings.

The commando team edged forward, out of the shadows toward their target. As they moved into the open, a Jann missile lost its intended target—a Bhor lighter—in ground-clutter and impacted into a building.

All those commandos might have heard was the explosion of the missile and then the crumble as the ten-story structure poured down on them.

Their target would not be destroyed, and, for years afterward, some of their friends would wonder, over narcobeers, just what had happened.

The second wave of Jann, Khorea observed, was moving most efficiently. They did seem to be making inroads against the raiders' perimeter.

The third wave, now that the Bhor tac/air ships had to keep their distance, was drawn up in attack formation on the landing field, close to that ruined freighter.

Very well, Khorea thought. Now the Jann will show their courage.

Sten sighted carefully through his projectile weapon's sights and touched the trigger. Eight hundred meters away a Jann Sigfehr convulsed, threw his weapon high into the air, and collapsed.

Sten slid back into the nest of rubble he, Otho, Kurshayne, and Alex were occupying.

Kurshayne had dug out the model Sten had given him and was evidently staring at it in fascination. Sten started to snap something about children, toys, and their proper places when he noticed the small blue hole just above one of Kurshayne's eyes.

Alex crawled up beside Sten, and they looked at Kurshayne's corpse, then at each other. Wordlessly they clambered back up to the top of the rubble heap.

Contrary to the livies, even good men died at the least dramatic time.

A dusty and battered Egan checked his watch, peered out at the wreckage of the
Atherston
, then decided to see how far under the nearest boulder he could crawl.

"Men of the Jann." Khorea's voice rang through the PA.

"You have the enemy before you. I need not tell you what to do. Sigfehrs! Take charge of your echelons and move them to the attack!"

As that third wave of Jann doubled forward—more than three thousand elite soldiers—past the wreck of the
Atherston
, a decay switch ran out of molecules.

For the first time in Sten's experience, Alex had been doubtful about what would happen when charges went up."Ah ken i' th'

door's gone, we'll hae ae wee fireball inside yon plant. But wha'll happit whae yon fireball hits yon
back
door ae th' plant, ah lad.

Ah dinna ken. Ah dinna ken—"

What did happen was quite spectacular: As intended, the shaped charges on the
Atherston
blew straight out the open-nosed bow of the ship into the engine-hull mating plant, creating a quite impressive fireball—almost half a kilometer high. It rolled forward, at something more than l,000kps, toward the back door.

But the back door to the hangar did not drop, contrary to everyone's expectations. Instead, the fireball back-blasted, back up through the plant and back out, over the
Atherston
and onto the landing field itself.

From overhead the explosion might have resembled a sideways nuclear mushroom cloud as the now unrestricted blast-wave bloomed across the enormous landing ground.

Directly over the charging Jann troops.

About the best that could be said is that it was a very, very quick way to die, mostly from the pressure wave, oxygen deprivation, or by being crushed by debris hurled from the hangar. Only the unlucky few on the blast's edges became human torches.

But in less than two seconds, three thousand Jann ceased to exist. As did the engine-hull mating plant. Nothing less than a high-KT nuke blast could have actually obliterated that huge building. But Sten's demo charges lifted the building straight up—and then dropped it back down on itself.

Some of Sten's men, in spite of specific orders, were too close to the blast area. They died. Others would never hear again without extensive surgery.

Sten's raid was more than satisfactory.

A side benefit—one which would ultimately save Sten's life—was that the Jann command bunker's com net was cut and Khorea, together with what little Jann command staff still lived, would be buried for at least three days.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

PARRAL LEANED CLOSER to the vidscreen, watching the action from Urich with a great deal of interest. Sten's plan had more than succeeded.

But Sten had done much too well. As far as Parral was concerned, the war was over. Only one final blow was needed, and that Parral would take care of himself.

He switched circuits and keyed the command mike to his transports hanging in space off Urich. "This is Parral. All ships will break orbit. I say again: All ships will break orbit.

Navigators, plot a course for home. That is all."

None of Parral's skippers, of course, protested. They were all too well trained. And, as the ships turned on Parral's vidscreen, the merchant prince was mildly sorry he didn't have a pickup down on the planet's surface, to watch Sten's final moments.

He was sure they would be terribly heroic.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

STEN SHOVED A chunk of melted plas off his legs and staggered to his feet. Across the crater, Otho stared in befuddlement as Alex grinned at him.

"Dinna tha' go, lad?" Alex said proudly. "Dinna tha' be't tha most classic-like blast Ah hae e'er set?"

Sten groggily nodded, then turned as Egan stumbled into the crater, his eyes wide in panic. "Colonel," the boy shouted.

"They've abandoned us!"

Sten gaped at him.

"We're stuck here! They've abandoned us!"

Then Alex was beside Egan, shaking him and not gently.

"Tha be't nae way to report, so'jer," he reproved. "Dinna y'ken hae t'be't ae so'jer?"

Egan brought himself back under control. "Colonel Sten," he said formally, but his voice was still shaking. "My com section reports a loss of contact with Parrel's freighters. Plotting also shows all the pickup ships have disappeared from their orbits."

And then Egan lost it again. "They're leaving us here to die!"

BOOK FOUR

RIPOSTE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

"WHAT DO YOU think?" Tanz Sullamora asked proudly.

Clot polite, the Emperor thought. "Slok," he said, quite clearly.

Sullamora's face began falling in stages.

The painting, like the others, was what the Eternal Emperor could have called Russian-heroic. It showed a tall, muscular young man. with dark hair and blazing blue eyes. Good muscle tone. The young man was armed with what the Emperor believed to be an early-model willygun and was using it to hold off a mixed horde of crazed alien- and humanoid-type fanatics.

The gallery itself was stupendous, almost a full kilometer long, and hung with what Sullamora had assured the Emperor was the largest and most valuable collection of New Art in the Empire.

The paintings were all massive in canvas and theme, all painted in the superrealistic style that was the current rage. The medium was a high-viscosity paint whose colors shifted with the light as the viewer moved. Always the same color, but slightly different in tone. The "paintbrush" itself was a laser.

Each of the paintings that the Emperor had stared and then scowled at showed another heroic moment in the History of the Empire.

And each one was so realistic, a cynic like the Emperor wondered, why bother with a paintbrush when a computer-photoreconstruction would do just fine?

Sullamora was still in shock, so the Emperor decided to elaborate. "It's abysmal. A vidcomic, like everything else in this gallery. Whatever happened to the good old days of abstract art?"

Sullamora headed one of the largest entities operating under Imperial Pleasure, a conglomerate that was, basically, a vertical mining discovery-development-exploration subempire. He was very successful, very rich, and very pro-Empire.

Privately his tastes ran to the horrible art the Emperor was looking at and prenubile girls taken in tandem. Which was why he had invited the Emperor to the gallery opening, and which was also why he now slightly resembled a Saint Bernard who'd discovered his brandy barrel was empty.

Sullamora managed to cover his first reaction of pure horror and his second, which was to tell the Eternal Emperor he was a fuddy-duddy with no appreciation for modern art.