MacLean hugged her back for an instant longer, then nodded, grabbed her pulse rifle, and headed for the door. MacFadzean watched her go, then picked up the handset again and pressed the button that connected her to every other handset simultaneously.
“Blàr Chùil Lodair,” she said simply. “Let’s by some time for the tunnel rats.”
* * *
“No fucking around this time!” Colonel Nathan Mundy snarled over the battalion communications net. “And no excuses, either! Get in there, kick their asses, and bring me their fucking heads!”
Acknowledgments came back, and he smiled savagely as he settled deeper into his seat while his ground effect command vehicle slid around the final corner and his direct vision screens showed him the apartment building the rebels had taken over. It didn’t look any different from half a dozen other buildings they’d occupied across the capital, but this one was special. This was the one that was going to break the rebels once and for all, because this was their central command post. He’d thought for a while that MacPhee wasn’t going to break, but the UPS had a way of convincing even the most recalcitrant. Maybe MacPhee wouldn’t have broken if they’d had only him to work on, but when they brought in his daughter…
I suppose he still might’ve lied, the colonel thought harshly. Of course, if he did, he’ll think what we already did to the bitch was nothing.
“Get closer!” he barked at his driver.
“Sir, I—”
“Get me closer, goddamn it!”
“Yes, Sir.”
* * *
The tanks were Solarian surplus, at least two generations out of date, but some tank was always better than no tank, and their armor shed pulser fire with contemptuous ease. They moved forward steadily, pounding the apartment building and the two structures to either side with fire from their main guns—fifty-millimeter hyper-velocity weapons with the firepower of a pre-space hundred and fifty millimeter cannon. Gouts of dust and smoke erupted, spewing showers of splintered ceramacrete, and coaxially mounted tribarrels spat thousands of explosive darts at their targets. It was impossible for anything to survive under that pounding, and the tank crews knew it.
But the tank crews were wrong.
The first antitank missile struck like hell’s own viper. The superdense penetrator impacted on its target’s frontal armor at just over ten thousand meters per second, and that armor might as well have been made of paper. The tank erupted in a thunderous fireball, and an instant later there was a second fireball. And a third.
“Christ!” someone yelped over the command net. “Where the fuck did they get that?! Break right! Alfie, break ri—!”
The voice cut off abruptly.
* * *
Innis MacLay bellowed in wordless triumph as the first UPS tanks exploded. Then a pair of APCs encountered one of the improvised explosive devices the Provos had buried in the sewers under Brownhill Road. It wasn’t powerful enough to destroy them outright, but the blast was more than enough to cripple them, and he watched their vehicle crews bail out, the Uppies scattering like blue-uniformed maggots.
The grips of the tribarrel were comfortable in his hands as he peered through the holographic sight, and he squeezed the trigger stud.
* * *
Nathalan Mundy stared at his readouts in disbelief. That bastard MacPhee! He hadn’t said a single word about weapons that heavy! And the rebels hadn’t shown anything like that kind of firepower here in Elgin! How was he supposed to have realized—?
* * *
Another tank exploded, but this time one of its companions got a firm lock on the third-floor window from which it had come. A turret swiveled, a tank gun flashed, and half the floor behind that window disintegrated in a deafening explosion.
* * *
MacLay couldn’t feel the shock of the explosion from his lofty perch. Or, at least, he couldn’t feel it clearly enough to separate it from all the other shocks and vibrations whiplashing through the building. He saw the tank fire, though, and it wouldn’t have if it hadn’t had a target.
He wondered who’d just died, but it didn’t matter. They could hurt the bastards, but they couldn’t win, and he’d already heard the reports from the other side of the building. The Uppies had to know exactly where they were; they were closing in from every direction, and MacFadzean was right. Only those closest to one of the escape tunnels had any chance at all of getting out alive.
Assuming someone else kept the Uppies occupied, that was.
He selected another target, slamming his heavy caliber darts through the thinner top armor of one of the APCs. The twenty-five-man personnel carrier staggered to a stop, then exploded, and his bloodshot eyes glittered with satisfaction. It was only a matter of time before someone spotted his firing position, but at the moment they were more preoccupied with the missile teams than mere tribarrels, and he swung his weapon’s muzzle towards fresh prey.
* * *
“Fall back!” Colonel Mundy snapped at his driver. “Get us further back—now, damn it!”
The driver snarled something that could have been an acknowledgment, and the command vehicle curtsied on its ground effect cushion as he spun it around. The sensor cluster kept the apartment building centered in Mundy’s display even as the vehicle turned away, and a cursor flashed on the screen, highlighting a balcony on the sixtieth floor. An icon appeared beside it as the command vehicle’s computers identified the energy signature, Mundy’s eyes widened as he recognized the data code.
Tribarrel! a corner of his brain gobbled. That’s a tri—
* * *
The GEV erupted in a boiling cloud of red and black. It tore apart, incinerating its crew, and Innis MacLay howled in triumph. It was brief, that triumph, no more than seconds before one of the surviving UPS tanks put a round from its main armament right through the balcony’s French doors, but it was enough.
* * *
“This way, Megan!” Jamie Kirbishly said hoarsely. “We’re almost there.”
Megan MacLean nodded, wading through the ankle-deep water at her guide’s heels, trying not to think about what was happening behind her. There were perhaps twenty more people in the tunnel with her, stretched out in a long, grim-faced queue, most of them people who still had—or might still have—family somewhere on the other side of holocaust. People who knew their friends—friends who no longer had anyone waiting for them—had chosen to stay behind and cover their escape.
She put her hand into her pocket, feeling the hard edges of the chip folio, wondering who the man who had called himself “Partisan” really was. If he’d told MacFadzean the truth about his official status or if it had all been a lie. And if it hadn’t, what had he and the star nation who’d sent him really intended? Why had they offered to help the Liberation League? Whatever MacFadzean might have thought, it hadn’t been out of the bigness of their hearts. MacLean was certain of that, and God knew they had enough problems of their own at the moment. Had they simply been looking for a way to distract their enemies? That might well make sense, she supposed. But it was also possible it hadn’t all been cynical, pragmatic calculation on their part. They had a reputation for standing up for lost causes; maybe they even deserved it. And if they did, and if she really could get off-world and reach them somehow, maybe this nightmare slaughter wouldn’t have been entirely in vain after all. Maybe—
“Down!” Kirbishly screamed.
MacLean responded instantly, throwing herself down on her belly in the icy water even before she realized she’d moved. She landed with a splash, hearing shouts behind her, and raised her head just in time to see the heavily armored UPS troops plummeting down the ladder from the manhole above with their pulse rifles flaming in full automatic.