Throne of Stars (94 page)

Siminov stared at her, stunned by his abrupt encounter with his office wall and even more by the totally unanticipated carnage about him. He was still staring when she picked him up with one lower hand and threw him across the room. He made the violent acquaintance of yet another wall and oozed down it to the floor in a heap, moaning and clutching an arm which had acquired a sudden unnatural bend just below the elbow.

“He especially thought you might underestimate a pregnant one, even if she was a Mardukan,” Pedi went on genially. “And, I’ll admit, if you were dealing with one of those beaten-down Krath wusses, you might have been having a different conversation.”

She picked Despreaux up, heavy float chair and all, and used the sharpened side of her horns to cut the tape holding the human woman to the chair.

“But you’re not dealing with one of them,” she continued, walking over to where Siminov was trying to get to his feet. His eyes widened at the sight of the bloodsoaked Mardukan looming over him. “I am Pedi Dorson Acos Lefan Karuse, Daughter of the King of the Mudh Hemh Vale, called the Light of the Vales,” she ended softly, leaning down so that her face was barely two centimeters from his, “and
that,
my friend,
is a
civan
of a different color, indeed.”

“You seem like a nice guy,” Rastar said, lifting the inquisitive sergeant by his body armor in one true-hand as the earbud hidden under his cavalry helmet carried him Honal’s message. He flipped his right false-hand in a gesture of apology and ripped the bead pistol off the cop’s belt with his free true-hand. “I’m very sorry to do this.”

He turned with the sergeant in front of him and pointed the pistol at the other police in the squad which had been watching the Mardukans.

“Please don’t,” he continued in excellent Imperial as hands jerked reflexively towards holsters. “I’m really quite good with one of these. Just toss them on the ground.”

“Like hell,” Peterson’s second in command said, his hand on his pistol.

“Always the hard way,” Rastar sighed, and squeezed his trigger. The bead blew the holstered weapon right out from under the corporal’s hand, and the cop bellowed in shock—not unmingled with terror—and jerked his ferociously stinging fingers up to cradle them against his breastplate.

“No!” Rastar snapped as two of the other cops started to draw their own weapons. “He’s not injured. But you have a very small area at the top of your armor where you’re vulnerable. I can kill every one of you before you draw. Trust me on this.”

“And you won’t get a chance to, anyway,” one of the Diasprans said, lowering a razor-sharp pike until it rested on one of the cop’s shoulders. The small group of police looked around . . . into a solid wall of pikes.

Two more Diasprans stepped forward and began collecting weapons. They tossed them to Rastar, who caught the flying pistols neatly as the Diasprans secured the police.

“How many guns do you
need
?” Peterson demanded.

“I generally use four,” Rastar said, “but larger caliber. They’re on their way.” He mounted his
civan
and looked at the Palace, a kilometer away. “This isn’t going to be pretty, though.”

“Two-gun mojo can’t hit the broadside of a barn,” one of the cops said angrily.

“Two-gun mojo?” Rastar asked, turning the
civan
.

“Firing two guns at once, you idiot,” the sergeant said. “I cannot
believe
this is happening!”

“
Two
guns?”

Rastar turned to look at the police aircar, and his hands flashed. Four expropriated bead pistols materialized in his grip as if by magic and he emptied all four magazines. It sounded as if he were firing on full automatic, but when he was done, there were four holes, none of them much larger than a single bead, punched neatly through the aircar’s side panel.

“Two guns are for humans,” he said mockingly as he reloaded from one of the officers’ expropriated ammunition pouches. Then he turned towards the Palace and drew his sword as the first explosion detonated in the background.

“Charge!”

Jakrit Kiymet keyed her communicator as an explosion rumbled in the distance.

“Gate Three,” she said, frowning at the line of trucks setting up for the Festival.

“Military shuttles and stingships detected in Imperial City air space,” the command post said tautly. “Be ready for an attack.”

“Oh, great,” she muttered, looking around. She’d been pulled from guarding Adoula Industries warehouses and made a member of the Empress’ Own. That was usually a job for Marines, but she’d known better than to ask questions when she was told to “volunteer.” Still, it didn’t take a Marine to know that defending the Palace from stingships in her current position—standing in front of the gate, armed with a bead rifle—was going to be rather difficult.

“What am
I
supposed to do about stingships?” she demanded in biting tones.

“You can anticipate a ground assault, as well,” the sergeant in the distant, and heavily fortified, command post said sarcastically. “The Palace stingship squadron is powering up, and the response team is getting into armor. All you have to do is stand your post until relieved.”

“Great,” she repeated, and looked over at Diem Merrill. “Stand our post until relieved.”

“Isn’t that what we do anyway?” the other guard replied with a chuckle. Then he stopped chuckling and stared. “What the . . . ?”

A line of riders mounted on—dinosaurs?—was thundering across the open ground of the Park. They appeared to be waving swords, and they were followed by a line of infantry with the biggest spears either of the guards had ever seen. And . . .

“What in the hell
is
that thing?” Kiymet shouted.

“I don’t know,” Merrill replied. “But I think you ought to tell them to go active!”

“Command Post, this is Gate Three!”

“And . . . time.”

Bill swung the airvan out of traffic and dropped it like a hawk at the back door of the “neighborhood association.”

Dave had opened the side door as they dropped, and Trey put two beads into each of the guards as Clovis rolled out of the vehicle under his line of fire. The entry specialist hit the ground before the airvan was all the way down, and crossed the alley at a run. He put the muzzle of his short, heavy-caliber bead gun against the lock of the door and squeezed the trigger. Metal cladding shrieked and sprayed splinters in a fan pattern as the twelve-millimeter bead punched effortlessly through it. One bead for the deadbolt, one for the handle, and then Dave kicked the door open as he hurtled past Clovis and charged through it.

Three guards spilled out of the room just inside the entryway. Their response time was excellent, but not excellent enough, and Clovis dropped to one knee, taking down all three of them as Dave went past.

“Corridor one, clear,” he said.

Roger keyed the last of a long series of boxes and lifted the plasma cannon. He and his team were ninety seconds behind schedule.

“Show time,” he muttered as the door slid backwards, and then up.

The power-armored guard outside the Palace command post door whirled in astonishment as the solid wall of the deeply buried corridor abruptly gaped wide. His reflexes, however, were excellent, and he was already lifting his own heavy bead gun when Roger fired. The plasma blast took off the guard’s legs and sent him flipping through the air, and Roger’s second shot took out the other guard while the first was still in midair.

That left the CP door itself. The portal was heavily armored with ChromSten, but Roger had dealt with that sort of problem before. He keyed the plasma gun to bypass the safety protocols and pointed it at the door, sending out a continuous blast of plasma. The abuse risked overheating the firing chamber and blowing the gun, and probably its user, to hell. It also made the weapon useless for further firing, even if it survived. But this time, the gun held up, and the compressed metal door ended up with a body-sized hole through its center, while the corridor looked like a rainy day on the Amazon—or a normal Mardukan afternoon—as the Palace sprinkler system came to life.

Roger dropped the now useless cannon and let Kaaper take the entry while he followed at the four position. It felt odd to follow someone else in, but Catrone had been right. Roger was the only person they literally could not afford to lose if some idiot decided to play hero. But there were no lunatics inside the command post. None of them were armored, and although they had bead pistols, they knew better than to try them against armor.

“Round ’em up,” Roger said, and strode over to the command chair.

“Out,” he said over his armor’s external speakers.

“Like hell,” the mercenary in the chair said.

Roger raised a bead pistol, then shrugged inside his armor.

“I’d really like to kill you,” he said, “but it’s unnecessary.”

He reached out and picked the post commander up by his tunic. The burly mercenary might as well have been weightless, as far as Roger’s armor’s “muscles” were concerned, and the prince tossed him across the room contemptuously. The erstwhile commander slammed into the bunker’s armored wall with a chopped-off scream, then slithered bonelessly down it. Roger didn’t even glance at him. He was too busy punching a code on the command chair’s console.

“Identification: MacClintock, Roger,” he said. “Assuming control.”

“Voiceprint does not match authorized ID,” the computer responded. “MacClintock, Roger, listed as missing, presumed dead. All codes for MacClintock, Roger, deactivated. Authorization: MacClintock, Alexandra, Empress.”

“Okay, you stupid piece of electronics,” Roger snarled. “Identification: MacClintock, Miranda, override Alpha-One-Four-Niner-Beta-Uniform-Three-Seven-Uniform-Zulu-Five-Six-Papa-
Mike-One-Seven-Victor-Delta-Five. Our sword is yours.”

There was a long—all of three or four seconds—pause. Then—

“Override confirmed,” the computer chimed.

“Deactivate all automated defenses,” Roger said. “Lock out all overrides to my voice. Temporary identity: MacClintock, Roger . . . Heir Primus.”

The automatic bead guns on the Palace walls opened up. They took down the dozen
civan
immediately behind Rastar in a single burst and traversed for a second.

Then they stopped.

“Thank you, My Prince,” Rastar said under his breath. “Thank you for giving my people their lives, twice over.”

Civan
ran with long, loping strides, heads down and flipping tails balancing them behind. Rastar lay forward over his own beast’s neck, all alone now and far out in front of the others. Only Patty had managed to keep pace with him, and the bead guns which had cut down his troopers had wounded her, as well. The big
flar-ta
was more enraged than hurt, however, and Rastar heard her thunderous bellows overtaking him from behind. He drew all four bead guns as they neared the gate, but the two guards at the gate, after a single burst of fire aimed at nothing in particular, turned around and hit the gate controls. The portal opened, and they darted through it.

The gate had opened just far enough to admit them, and it began closing immediately. Couldn’t have that.

“
Eson!
” Rastar bellowed to the mahout on Patty’s back.

Patty had had a very bad month.

First, the only rider with whom she’d ever had a decent sense of rapport had disappeared, replaced by someone who acted the same way, but just didn’t
smell
right. Then she’d been loaded on ships—horrible things—prodded, led around, carted to different planets, unloaded, loaded again, and generally not treated at all as she’d come to expect. And most of the time the food had been simply
awful
. Worst of all, she hadn’t even been able to let her frustration out. She hadn’t been permitted to kill anything at all since before even the last breeding season.

Now she saw her chance. She’d been pointed at those little targets, and they were getting away. Yes, she’d been pinpricked, but
flar-ta
were heavily armored on the front, lightly armored on the sides, and rather massive. The bleeding wounds lined across her left shoulder, any one of which would have killed a human, weren’t really slowing her down. And as the human guards tried to escape from her wrath, and the idiot on her back prodded at the soft spot on her neck, she sped into the unstoppable killing gallop of the
flar-ta
and lowered her head to ram the gate.

The twin leaves of Gate Three were marble sheathing over a solid core of ChromSten. If they’d been shut and locked, no animal in the galaxy could have budged them. But the integral, massive plasteel bolts had been disengaged to let the fleeing guards pass, and the only thing holding them at the moment was the hydraulic system which normally moved them. Those hydraulics were rather heavy—they had to be, to manage the weight of the ChromSten gate panels—but they weren’t nearly heavy enough for what was coming at them.

The impact sound was like a flat, hard explosion. Marble sheathing shattered, one of Patty’s horns snapped off . . . and the moving gates flew backward.

The mahout on Patty’s back went flying through the air, and Patty herself stopped dead in her tracks. She rocked backward heavily as her rear legs collapsed, then sat there, shaking her head muzzily and giving out a low bellow of distress.

Rastar
reached the gate
,
still far ahead of any of the others, and he reined in his
civan
and leapt from the saddle before it had slid to a stop.

The
flar-ta
had prevented the gates from closing, but her huge bulk had the archway
leading
to the gate half-blocked. There was little room to get past her—barely room for two or three
civan
riders at a time—and even as he watched, the hydraulics recovered and the armored panels started to close again. He darted forward, drew one of his daggers, and slammed it into the narrow crack under the left-hand gate. The panel continued to move for a moment, but then the blade caught. The gate rode up it, grinding forward, scoring a deep gouge into the courtyard’s pavement. Then there was a crunching sound, and it stopped moving.

He repeated the maneuver with the right-hand gate, then drew his bead pistols as rounds begin to crack around his head. Humans in combat suits, which could stop rounds from bead pistols, were pouring into the courtyard from the Empress’ Own’s barracks. Most of them looked pretty confused, but the stalled
flar-ta
and the Mardukan were obvious targets.

More beads whipcracked past him, dozens of them. But if he allowed them to push him back, regain control of the gateway even momentarily, they would be able to unjam the gates and close them after all. In which case, the assault on the North Courtyard would fail . . . and Roger and everyone with him would die.

In the final analysis, human politics meant very little to Rastar. What mattered to him were fealty; his sworn word; the bonds of friendship, loyalty, and love; and his debt to the leader who had saved what remained of his people and destroyed the murderers of his city. And so, as the ever-thickening hail of fire shrieked around his ears and pocked and spalled the Palace’s wall’s marble cladding, he raised all four pistols and opened fire. He wasted none of his rounds on torso or body shots which would have been defeated by his foes’ combat suits. Instead, he searched out the lightly armored spot at the throat, the vulnerable chink, no larger than a human’s hand.