First the missiles would sequentially impact on the target area, resulting in chaos, flames, and screams. Sten and his team would arrow into that chaos with "Rescue" in their shouts and murder in their hearts. They would terminate any surviving council members, then withdraw, break contact, and head for the pickup point.
The tone-corn would also signal Kilgour to bring the tacship to the surface and low-fly upriver to a preset RP.
Then they could all go home and get drunk.
Stop hesitating. Go, lad.
Sten touched the button.
One...
The first missile was launched and nap-of-the-earth guided into the estate's main building.
Three seconds...
Faye Archuler pitched a sausage charge over the wire and pulled the fuse cord.
Six...
The first missile "crept" forward, at little more than 200 kph.
Eight...
The charge exploded, slicing the fence open like a gate.
Ten...
The second missile launched.
Eleven...
Sten shouted, "Grenades!" The team thumbed timers and hurled grenades into the compound.
Thirteen...
Sten was the first on his feet and charging through the hole in the wire. It may have saved his life.
Fifteen...
The grenades exploded, huge flares broadcasting confusion through visible-invisible spectrums.
Eighteen seconds...
Imperial Security sprang the trap.
Two armored gravsleds floated into sight, their multiple chainguns yammering. A missile launcher snapped up from its silo, tracking.
Twenty-one...
Sten's first missile was just four seconds from impact. The gravsled chainguns' sensors found the incoming missile. Solid collapsed-uranium slugs sheeted through the air—and the missile shattered!
Twenty-four...
The missile launcher acquired its target. Twenty counterbattery missiles spat into the night.
Twenty-eight seconds...
The missiles impacted on Sten's launch site. The two N'Ran disappeared in a howl of explosions.
The second missile, no longer under command, soared vertically.
Twenty-nine seconds...
Akashi's boot heel slammed down on a mine sowed less than an hour before. The charge took his legs off at the groin, and shrapnel scythed through Montoya.
The nearby blast caught Sten, flipping him up and back into the wire. He hung, limply.
Montoya's vital-signs pack blew, purple in the night.
Thirty-one...
High overhead, Sten's second missile exploded harmlessly.
Thirty-six...
The guns on the gravsleds tracked down... ammunition drums clanged as the loads automatically changed and the guns yammered on.
Larry and Faye Archuler were cut nearly in half.
Thirty-nine...
A sniper found the running Havell in his sights... lost him in a grenade blast... then touched the trigger. The AM2 round blew Havell's chest away.
Forty-two...
Corum and Valdiva zagging... rolling... firing... The chainguns found and smashed them.
Sten found himself flat. Stunned. Disoriented. He started to his feet—and the Mantis reflexes took over. He rolled, over and over, somehow keeping hold of his broken-stocked scattergun. Explosive rounds stitched centimeters over his head, and he was back in the hollow. Safety. Stay here, his mind said. They won't see you. They won't find you.
His body disobeyed. He ripped out of his combat harness, thumbed the switch on a grenade, and threw the vest back, into the wire.
The first grenade detonated—and the others went off in sympathetic explosions.
Sten was up, stumbling. Away. You're blown. Move! The others! Clot the others—they're dead! Follow the damned orders I'm issuing!
A five-man patrol came out of the smoke. Gun up, trigger held back—and red spray instead of men, AM2 bullets exploding the razor fence behind them and its sensors.
Through, skin ripping.
Water-sound. Run, damn you. It doesn't hurt.
A bank. Flat-dive over—fearing rocks, hoping water. Neither. Smash into the cushion... the ripping cushion of rusted high-piled concertina wire.
The knife out of your arm, man.
Slashing.
Nothing to slash. Somehow the knife was in its "sheath," and Sten was crashing forward, into the water and through the shallows.
Someone behind him was firing.
Bullet-splashes.
Deeper. Dive. Go under. Hold your clottin' breath. You don't need oxygen.
Now. Surface. One gasp-go under. Swim if you can. Let the current carry you. Away. Down the river.
One hand moved inside his uniform, found a tiny box, slid the cover back on the box, and pressed a stud.
Swim. You can.
Safety.
Downriver. Alex. The pickup.
Sten knew he would never make it.
Kilgour paced the control room of the tacship, waiting. It was not much of a pace-no more than four steps at the maximum before he would slam into something.
The ship was grounded on the river beach chosen for the pickup point. Alex had the hatch open. His orders were clear and exact: remain in place until one hour before daybreak or if discovered. If no one is at the pickup point, return to the ocean. Try to remain near mouth of the river. The team would try, if the pickup was blown, to E&E to the ruins of Reedsport. If no contact was made, he was to head offplanet and report.
In the not-very-distance, Alex could hear the sounds of hell. He hoped it was being given, not gotten. Once more he cursed Sten, then broke off in midobscenity as an ululation began from a com speaker.
One screen showed a projection of the target area. Just outside it, a tiny red light blinked-from the river. Mid-river, the map told him.
"Clot!" The obscenity was heartfelt. The light-and signal-came from a standard search-and-rescue transmitter. Each member of the team had carried one, with orders to activate it only if they missed pickup. Certainly not anywhere close to the target zone.
An SAR light. One.
Kilgour zoomed the projection back, to see if there were others. Nothing.
His fingers found a mike. "This is pickup. Go."
Nothing but dead air. The light continued to blink.
Kilgour took about a nanosecond to decide that those clear and exact orders could get stuffed. Seconds later, he lifted the tacship, banged the drive selection into Yukawa power—and be damned who could see the torch—and drove forward, upriver.
A screen flashed at him. Six gravsleds.
Alex took one hand from the controls and slapped a switch. The tacship's chainguns blasted. The tacship yawed, ripping through the top of a redwood grove, and almost went in before Alex had control again. He shot through the falling debris of the gravsleds and a voice from a speaker smashed at him:
"Unidentified tacship! Ground, or we fire!"
Alex was forced to lift out of the gorge. He banked the ship into a tight spiral, took three steps away from the control board, and hit all launch on the long-activated weapons panel. Eight Goblin XIX's salvoed upward. He found time to hope the medium-range antiship missiles' brains were awake, and there he was back at the controls, diving down into the gorge; the cliffs dropped away, and Kilgour was almost overflying the blinking light—and into the alerted target zone.
He spun ship, still under power, his stabilizing and nav-gyros screaming, killed power, and went to McLean power.
Far overhead, a nuclear fire blossomed.
Kilgour splashed down and was at the hatch. Just upstream, a body floated down toward him, motionless. Then an arm lifted, trying to swim.