Six three-man teams of Marines slapped breaching rings on to the armorplast. Each of those rings was approximately three-meters in diameter. They adhered almost instantly, and the Marines stepped back and hit their detonators. Precisely shaped and directed jets of plasma sliced six perfect circles through the tough, refractory armorplast as easily if it had been no tougher than old-fashioned glass.
The consequences for the personnel inside the gallery, none of whom were in spacesuits, were as ghastly as they were predictable.
Thandi watched the hurricanes of atmosphere explode out of the breaches her teams had blasted. Computer chips, loose furniture, sheets of paper, and human beings came with them, sucked out by the hungry vacuum before interior blast doors and emergency hatches slammed shut, sealing off the air-gushing wounds.
"All Tango-Lima-Alpha units, this is Kaja. Phase One accomplished. Move to Phase Two."
The golden triangles on her display blinked fresh acknowledgment, and her assault teams began swarming through the openings as the space station's emergency procedures conveniently shut down the torrents of atmosphere pouring out of them.
Thandi, obedient to Berry's admonishment (and Lieutenant Colonel Huang's silent but pointed example), was in the third wave, not the first. But she was the first person to reach the control console at the center of the gallery. She studied the console for a dozen blazingly intense seconds, then grunted in satisfaction. Ruth and Colonel Huang had been correct during the planning sessions; it was a standard Solarian design. She looked back up, waiting impatiently as the last of her Audubon Ballroom personnel came through the breaches, then stabbed a button.
Alloy panels slid slowly downward, locking across the armorplast. The system was designed to protect against collision with minor debris, but it served a secondary function by sealing off the holes her Marines had blown. She waited, wishing she could tap her toe impatiently (not exactly practical for someone in battle armor), until the panels locked down. Then she punched another series of commands into the console and bared her teeth in truly wolfish delight as the gallery began to repressurize.
Homer Takashi wasn't cursing, but only because he didn't have the time.
He also didn't have any better idea what was happening than the late, unlamented Lassiter had had, but he did know that it wasn't what the entire galaxy had been led to expect. Whoever those people were, they weren't Templeton's Masadan terrorists. There were far too many of them, and they were moving with a trained precision and ferocity possible only for elite combat troops. Worse, before the interior visual pickups in the space dock gallery went out, they'd given him an excellent view of the attackers' equipment.
Which appeared to be first-line Solarian Marine issue.
"Who the fuck are these people?!" Jonathan Arnold's voice sounded on the brink of hysteria over Takashi's earbug.
"How the hell do I know?" Takashi shot back.
"Those are goddamned Solly Marine plasma and pulse rifles they're carrying!"
"Oh, really?" Takashi's response dripped vitriolic irony. He started to add something even more bitingly sarcastic, then made himself draw a deep breath, instead.
"Yes, they've got Marine-issue equipment," he said. "It doesn't make them Marines. Hell, you've got Marine pulse rifles and tribarrels! Besides, what would Solly Marines be doing attacking us?"
"What the hell is anyone else doing attacking us?" Arnold demanded. Which, Takashi admitted to himself, was a perfectly reasonable question. Unfortunately, it was one he had no answer for.
"Who they are doesn't matter," he said instead. "What matters is that you and your people get your asses in gear and stop whatever it is they think they're doing!"
Arnold grunted something which might have been an affirmative, and then Takashi heard him begin giving his first coherent orders to his own personnel. The security man's voice still didn't sound anything remotely like calm, but at least he sounded as if he was beginning to think, not simply dither, and that had to be an improvement.
Didn't it?
"Okay, Thandi," Ruth Winton's voice said in Thandi's ear. "Their military commander-his name's Arnold, if it matters-is starting to get his act together. Do you want a direct feed from his com link?"
Thandi managed not to roll her eyes. Anything less like proper military procedure than Ruth's idea of communications protocol would have been impossible to imagine. On the other hand, how often did a tactical commander have the opportunity to actually listen in on her opponent's instructions to her troops? Still…
"Not a raw feed," she decided. "I don't know enough about the station's internal layout to be able to interpret movement orders. It'd only confuse me if I tried. Captain Zilwicki?"
"Here, Lieutenant," a deep voice rumbled.
"Please monitor the op force communications. Don't worry about the details. Just keep me informed of anything you think I should know."
"Check," Zilwicki acknowledged, but then he continued. "Ruth's done a little better than you know, Lieutenant. She's not just into their communications net now. She's managed to tap into the visual pickups of their internal security systems." Thandi could almost hear the savage smile in his voice. "We can actually see their troops moving into position."
"Can we, now?" Thandi murmured, and she had no doubt at all what Zilwicki heard in her voice.
"Indeed we can," Zilwicki assured her. "In fact, Ruth is still pulling in information, and it looks like she's just found the master schematic for the entire station. We're integrating now against the visual input from their security cameras. Give us another couple of minutes, and we ought to be able to begin giving you the other side's positions and movements."
"Like fish in a barrel," Thandi heard Lieutenant Colonel Huang murmur over the command net, and she nodded, not that anyone could tell from outside her armor.
"Yeah," Zilwicki agreed. "Pity, isn't it?"
Major Arnold, unlike Thandi Palane, didn't believe in leading his troops from the front. To be fair, it wasn't out of any particular cowardice. He simply saw no reason to leave his own command post. All of the space station's security systems reported to him there, which meant it was the best place from which to monitor the battle. And it wasn't as if his troops were the sort to inspire a commanding officer with the kind of mutual loyalty which led to nonsense like commanding by example.
"-sorry ass up to Level Twelve," he said, glaring at the anxious face on his com screen. "I've got Maguire's team covering the lifts on Ten and Eleven. But so far, it looks like these bastards have a pretty damned good idea where they're going and how to get there. So if you don't get up there in time to block Axial Three, the sorry sons of bitches are going to march straight past you into Command Central. Now move, dammit!"
The woman on his screen gave a nod somewhere between curt and spastic, and Arnold punched for a fresh connection to another of his team commanders.
Captain Zenas Maguire decided he'd been an idiot to ever sign up with Manpower, however good the money had been. Of course, it was beginning to look as if it were a bit late for second thoughts, but still-
He took one last look at the schematic of his units' positions and nodded to himself. It was the best he could do, and at least his teams of plasma gunners were positioned to make it suicidal for the attackers to approach along any of the main passageways. He hadn't actually seen any of the imagery of the initial break-in into the dock gallery, but he hadn't had to see it to realize that whoever was coming after him was a hell of a lot better trained than his people were. But at least the defenders were intimately familiar with the vast, labyrinthine maze of the space station's confusing internal passageways.