"What d' you think's going on?"
Maguire turned to look at Lieutenant Annette Kawana, his second-in-command. Kawana had once been a Solarian Marine sergeant, herself, although she hadn't exactly left the Corps on the best of terms.
"I think Manpower is about to get buggered," he said flatly. "And unfortunately, it looks like we're going to get the same, only harder."
"What the fuck do they want?" Kawana demanded, and Maguire managed not to throttle her by telling himself that the question was obviously rhetorical.
"I don't know," he told her with massive restraint. "On the other hand, I think it might be good idea for someone to ask them that question. Don't you?"
"All right, Lieutenant. They're in position and settling down." Anton Zilwicki's voice was a rumbling murmur, almost as if he were afraid the Manpower security goons might overhear him, Thandi thought with a flicker of amusement.
Of course, he's busy listening to them, so maybe it isn't quite as silly as it seems. Not that keeping his voice down is going to make any difference!
"Acknowledged," she said, keeping any trace of humor out of her reply. "Wait one."
She checked her tactical display. Colonel Huang had been right about the fish and the barrel, she thought. Of course, it helped that the other side obviously couldn't have poured piss out of a boot without printed instructions on the heel. Thandi's Marines had been systematically knocking out the security scanners as they advanced, but by now it should have occurred to at least one of the Manpower morons that certain of her people had been dropping steadily out of sight.
Ruth Winton's penetration of the space station's surveillance net allowed her to do more than simply spy on the enemy. She'd also managed to compare the master schematic for the station to the surveillance coverage, and she'd discovered that the central ventilation system wasn't monitored at all. The access points were, but once the cameras in any given section of corridor had been knocked out, there was no way for anyone on the other side to know who-or what-might be slipping quietly into the ventilation shafts.
Seems like I end up crawling around the guts of every space station I go aboard, she thought sardonically. Maybe my lunatic ancestors included a little rodent DNA in the mix? She snorted. Not that I'm about to complain.
"Decoy One," she said.
"Yes, Kaja?" It was Donald, in charge of the Ballroom gunmenwho continued ostentatiously, if slowly, advancing down the direct route towards the Manpower blocking position. She'd left a half dozen Marines to keep an eye on things, but it was Donald's command.
"We're just about ready," she told him, "but Lara's team is about four minutes behind, and you're only two hatches from contact. Slow down just a bit. We want them looking your way, not spooked, and she needs to catch up."
"Understood, Kaja."
"Kaja, clear."
Surely by now someone on the other side should have noticed that over three-quarters of her battle-armored personnel had disappeared. She certainly would have. But maybe she was being a bit harder on them than was fair. They were getting only glimpses of the front of Donald's column before their visual sensors were knocked out, after all.
She watched her display, suppressing any sign of impatience, while she waited for Decoy Two to get into position. It wasn't Lara's fault that her group had fallen a bit behind the others, and the ex-Scrag was working hard to make up the differential.
There!
"All Tango-Lima-Alpha units, this is Kaja. Standby to execute on my command."
She waited two more heartbeats, then-
"All units, execute!"
Zenas Maguire settled deeper into his selected position. There wasn't any such thing as a good position from which to direct the defense of such a complicated tangle of passageways and corridors, so he'd had to select the best one he could find. At least it was more or less centrally located in his area of responsibility.
Unfortunately, it appeared that the attackers were headed directly for the same position, almost as if they knew that it lay at the center of his dispositions. Which was impossible, of course.
He watched the imagery from the cameras covering the last hatch between his people and them, and his belly was a hollow, singing void. He'd never expected to face serious combat as one of Manpower's hired guns. That was one reason he'd taken the job. He was tired of getting shot at for the miserly pay of a Silesian Army lieutenant, and making sure that a bunch of slaves didn't get uppity had seemed a beguiling change of pace. Not to mention how much better the money was.
Well, I guess what goes around, comes around. Whoever these people are, they obviously don't much like Manpower, which means they aren't going to like anyone who works for it, either. So the only way to save my ass is to save Arnold's and Takashi's. The sorry bastards. If they'd done their jobs properly in the first place, none of us would-
Something clanged behind him. Metal on metal, his mind reported, but what kind of metal? He started to turn towards the sound, and a blur of motion caught at the corner of his eye.
His attention flicked towards it, and both eyes began to widen in disbelief as he saw the deck-to-ceiling ventilation grate lying on the deck and the Solarian Marine, battle armor in heavy-assault configuration, striding out of the opening.
Zenas Maguire's eyes never finished widening all the way, and his brain never quite completed the identification of what he saw, because the trigger finger of Corporal Jane Borkai, Company Bravo, Second Battalion, 877th Solarian Marines, closed the circuit on her plasma rifle first. That "rifle" was a cannon in all but name-the sort of weapon only someone in battle armor could carry-and the ravening packet of plasma it sent screaming across the compartment wiped out Maguire, Kawana, six more of Maguire's personnel, eight bulkheads, two blast doors, three main power conduits, a sanitation main, two fire suppression control points… and all trace of central command among the defenders.
Five other ventilation grates were kicked open almost simultaneously, and five other Marines-two of them armed "only" with heavy tribarrels-bounded through the sudden openings and opened fire. They appeared in the midst of Maguire's carefully chosen defensive positions, like demon djinn conjured out of nothingness, and their fire was devastatingly accurate. Maguire's troopers outnumbered their attackers by at least three-to-one, and it didn't matter at all. Not when Ruth had been able to steer Thandi and her Marines into positions of such crushing advantage. Almost half the defenders were killed in the first four seconds of Thandi's attack, and the sudden, totally unexpected savagery was too much for the traumatized survivors. Their stomach for combat died with their commanders, and weapons thudded to the deck amid frantic offers of surrender.
Homer Takashi watched in gray-faced shock as the green icons of friendly units vanished from his display with sudden and terrifying finality. How? How could anyone do that? It was impossible! Unless-?
The ventilation system! That was the only possible avenue, the only way people in something as bulky as battle armor could have avoided the main corridors. But that was still impossible! For it to work, the attackers would have to have known the internal layout of the space station better than people who'd lived and worked aboard it literally for T-years!
Not that it mattered. However they'd managed it, they'd also timed it perfectly. Arnold had divided his available strength into four well chosen blocking positions… and the attackers had maneuvered into position to take all four of them out simultaneously. In the space of less than ten minutes, effectively every defender, aside from the single platoon Arnold had held out as a tactical reserve, had been eliminated. And even as Takashi watched the illuminated schematic of the station, whole sectors were turning from green to bloody crimson as the invaders fanned out towards the fusion rooms, life-support, the com section… and Central Command.