It also gave him a chance to deny them at least part of what they were after.
Dom called down to the computer core. The control center for GA&A, its heart and brains, was buried in a concrete bunker two klicks under the surface. Even a direct hit by a micronuke would leave GA&A’s assets and records unharmed. If he’d had some warning of the attack, he could be down there and control most of the aspects of the complex, including defense.
By the time he had stopped talking to Zanzibar, the cold reptilian part of his mind had decided that there was a traitor, who he was, and where he had to be.
Cy Helmsman, his Vice President of Operations, was one of the more powerful cogs in the GA&A machine. Dom had built GA&A, but much of it had been on the foundation of Helmsman’s expertise. In many senses, Helmsman was Dom’s sword arm. Helmsman fought GA&A’s secret battles, and had brought many of GA&A’s competitors to their knees. Helmsman had come out of the same background that Dom had—war, espionage, the TEC.
Which all meant that Dom had never fully trusted him.
Helmsman was the man who answered the holo call down to the core. The core was the only place where it was possible to override the defense screens without Dom himself being present.
“I’ve been expecting you,” Helmsman said.
Helmsman was middle-aged, white-haired, a slow, plodding, methodical man used to deception and double-think. Dom had felt he could keep Helmsman’s ambition in check by using Helmsman’s incredible cowardice. Dom had miscalculated.
Very slowly, Dom asked him, “How much did they offer?”
“Ownership of the company.”
Helmsman had abandoned the TEC to save his own precious skin. Apparently he had returned to the fold because he thought he deserved a bigger slice of the pie.
Helmsman was a fool.
“Don’t try to come down here,” Helmsman went on. “I’ve planned this for quite a while. The blast-doors are all down and locked. I’ve reprogrammed all the access codes—”
Dom shook his head. Helmsman had thought everything through. He had made sure that he would pass through the battle unscathed, safe in the armored bunker at the core. Helmsman had made the assumption that he knew everything about GA&A’s security setup.
“Good-bye, Cy.”
“What?”
“Code Gehenna Hellfire.”
The holo cut out and the power to GA&A died. There was an earthquake rumble as glass blew out from the office complex. The walls to Dom’s office became temporarily opaque. It took the emergency generators three seconds to kick in.
Dom had activated a very small program buried in the communications software of GA&A. If Dom said those three words through any communications channel on the GA&A web during a full alert, the program switched a mechanical relay. Anyone who looked at the program wouldn’t even know what it did unless he dug into the heart of the mainframe and traced the wires. Something Helmsman couldn’t have done and maintain his little secret.
The relay activated a GA&A half-kiloton tactical warhead that was located about twenty meters away from Cy Helmsman, deep in the core. Helmsman and the GA&A mainframe, with its assets and sensitive information, had just become an integral part of the bedrock two kilometers beneath the complex.
It was a desperation move, to prevent a good deal of sensitive information from falling into unauthorized hands. It would also make life hell for the people taking over a complex operation that suddenly had no records, no brain. It would save many people, clients and employees, a lot of grief.
It was also the equivalent of shooting a decade of his blood in the head and leaving it to die.
Dom wanted to feel something.
The only thing there was a deep, aching chill in his metallic bones that he really shouldn’t be able to feel.
When the power came back, Dom looked behind him. The walls went transparent on the scene of the troopship hovering just outside the perimeter. Landing craft were putting down inside the complex. The landing parties looked like marines, though all he could make out from this height in the dark were the battlesuits in striped urban camouflage.
Time to get the hell out of here.
The marines were at the base of the residence tower. He stood up and walked to the curve of wall that faced the ship. Dom saw the details on the ship now.
The hundred-meter long monster was a Paralian-designed drop-ship, a Barracuda-class troop-carrier. Hovering, it blotted out most of the western sky—a dead-black rectangle with a drooping nose and stub wings. The drive section to the rear was half again the size of the rest of the ship. Missiles clamped to hard-points in the ranks across the skin of its midsection. Ten landing craft had clung to parasitic blisters under the wing like suckling young. Each could handle ten marines in full battle dress, and all had dropped. A five-barrel Galling pulse cannon stuck out of the troopship’s nose. The cannon could waste the whole GA&A complex with a single strafing run. Dom didn’t look at the ship long enough to determine if it had a full bombload.
Once he was close to the wall, he could make out where the door was. He found the switch and placed his hand against it. He could have had his onboard computer open it, but he wasn’t going to risk a transmission.
The invisible door whooshed aside and let in the smell of smoke. Dom ran out onto the roof of the residence tower. Behind him, from the outside, his office was a matte-black hemisphere. As soon as he emerged, a high-freq laser lanced out from somewhere in the sky, to score on the dome. Don smelled kilos’ worth of electronics crisping in the walls behind him.
Sounds drifted from below. Explosions and screams.
Without a wall between him and it, the Paralian ship seemed bigger than ever. It nearly blocked his view of Godwin. He ran, paralleling its profile, hoping another laser wouldn’t target him.
Dom raced to the edge of the roof, where one corner was paved for a small landing area. In the center of the area was a canvas tarpaulin. Dom threw it aside to reveal a Hegira personal luxury transport. It wasn’t armored and it wasn’t armed. Dom had only used it to get around the GA&A complex—
There was a very ancient proverb about beggars and choices.
The canopy slid up slowly over the drive section and Dom jumped into the leather bucket seat. He started the power sequence wishing for wings, a hypersonic drive capability, life support capable of low orbit, a tach-drive—
A pulse laser strafed the roof in front of the car, leaving a blackened groove. Dom looked up and saw a marine landing craft heading for the roof.
The Hegira’s vectored jets hadn’t reached full pressure yet. Dom didn’t wait for them. He hit the main drive units on full and rolled off the edge of the roof. The car was designed for vertical takeoff. It needed those vector jets to maneuver. It fell.
Dom had a great view of a platoon of marines below him. They saw the descending craft and—probably a smart move—broke formation and ran. Behind him, the main drive blew out windows down the side of the residence complex.
He wasn’t in free fall. The drive accelerated him faster than gravity wanted him to. Dom watched the pressure of the vector thrust build. Slow, too damn slow. The ground was too damn close.
He opened the vector jets prematurely and hoped it would be enough to maneuver the craft.
The Hegira shot away from the wall, and Dom desperately tried to get the nose up. The front end drifted upward, giving him a view of scattering marines, landing craft, and the blown perimeter defenses.