"An tha's screekit an' scrawkit' an' than, bumpit, bumpit, bumpit, doon tha' hill comit th' heads ae th' squad.
"An' th' Brit gin'ral lookit up tha' hill, an' on th' crest still standit thae giant.
"An' he skreekit, 'Ah'm Red Rory ae th' Glen! Send up y'r best comp'ny!'
"An" th' Brit gin'ral turnit a wee shade more purple, an' he say, 'Adj'tant!'
"An' th' adj'tant sae, 'San!'
"An' th' Brit gin'ral sae, 'Adj'tant, send up y'r best comp'ny! Ah wan' that man's head'!
"The adj'tant sae 'Sah!'
"An' he sendit oop th' hill th' reg'mint's best comp'ny!"
And the timeclick went to zero and Otho touched the button. Alex cut his story off as the Bhor captain got busy.
"By Sarla, Laraz, and...and all the other gods," Otho muttered, then swiveled his shaggy head to eye Sten.
"You know what's going to happen, Colonel. Those chub-butts who brought us here will probably skite for safety the minute we enter Urich's atmosphere."
"I doubt it."
"Why not?"
"Because I haven't paid them and because Parral will have them thin-sliced if they do."
"But what happens if they do do?" Otho heard what he'd just said and grunted. "You see, Colonel, you try to make me a soldier and then I lose everything. Pretty soon I'll be grunting primordial Bhor."
"Which is ae differen' frae th' way y' talkit noo," Alex asked interestedly. Otho just sneered.
Otho, three Bhor crewmen, Alex, Sten, Mathias, Egan with two com specialists, and the ever-present Kurshayne overfilled the control room of the Atherston. Packed safely away in shock-mounted compartments were the first wave, two companies of Mathias' troops and Vosberh's men.
Hanging in space around them were the fifty Bhor lighters, filled with Ffillips' commandos and the remainder of Mathias' force.
Otho stared at Sten, as if waiting for him to say something noble. Sten had a mouth too dry for hero speeches; he just waved, and Otho ratcheted the drive to full power and targeted the ship toward Urich's surface.
The Jann picket ships were quickly destroyed by low-speed interdiction missiles that the Bhor lighters had launched two hours before. They had no chance to warn the planet below.
The first clue the main base had was when five one-kiloton nukes flared, just out of the atmosphere. No fallout, no shock, no blastwave, but a near-continuous electromagnetic pulse that, momentarily, put all the Jann sensors on burble.
By the time the secondary circuits had cut in, the Atherston and the Bhor assault lighters were in-atmosphere, coming in on a straight, no-braking-pattern approach.
As the attack alarm blatted, Jann gunners ran for their posts. One Jann, faster or better trained or more alert, reached his S/A launch station and, on manual, punched five missiles up into the sky.
Above him, a Bhor tac/air ship banked, turned through ninety degrees, and, at full power, blasted toward the field. Its pilot had only time enough to unmask his multicannon before the first Jann missile went off, spinning the lighter sideways.
The gee-force went over 40. Too much even for the massive Bhor. The pilot and copilot blacked out. A millisecond later, the second and third Jann missiles impacted directly on the lighter.
A ball of flame flowered in the morning sky as other ships dove in to the attack.
"Your mother had no beard and your father had no buttocks," a Bhor tac pilot grunted as he brought his control stick back into his gut, and the lighter flattened out, barely a meter above the landing field. The pilot locked a knee around his stick and both hands flashed across the duck-foot cannon mounted in the lighter's nose.
Fifty mm shells exploded from the duck-foot's six barrels, then the weapon recoiled, dropping the first set of barrels down into load position and bringing the second set up.
The antipersonnel shells from the cannon, warheads lovingly filled with meta-phosphorus and canister, ricocheted off the thick landing ground's concrete and exploded, shrapneling through the Jann running for their combat stations.
The pilot lifted at the end of his run, keeping the stick all the way back, and the inverted lighter came back for another pass, the pilot's laughter roaring louder than the slam of the cannon firing.
"We should be receiving fire by now," Otho said cheerily and dumped the ship atmosphere. Sten swallowed hard as his ears tried to balloon—they were still some six thousand meters off the deck.
There was a dull crash from somewhere in the stern, and indicator lights turned red. The internal monitor terminal scrolled figures that everyone ignored.
A radar belched and flames began curling out.
Sten keyed the ship's PA mike. "All troops. We are taking hits. Minus thirty seconds."
In the troop compartments the soldiers tucked themselves more tightly into their shock capsules, tried to keep their minds blank and their eyes off the man next to them, who probably looked as scared as they were.
Below them, on the field, most Jann AA stations were manned and coming into action, in spite of the intense suppressive fire from the strafing Bhor ships.
Missiles swung on their launchers, sniffing, and then smoked off into the air. Multibarreled projectile weapons nosed for a target.
There was only one good one:
The chunky, rusty mass of the Atherston, now only four thousand meters above the field, drive still billowing heatwaves into the air, crashing toward them.
"Station three... we have a compartment hit. All units inside counted casualties," a Bhor officer said.
"Whose?" Vosberh asked. Before he heard the reply, a missile penetrated the control bubble and exploded. A meter-long splinter of steel split his spine just above the waist.
Sten pushed the body out of the way and checked Otho. The Bhor's beard was bloody and one eye seemed to be having trouble. But his growl was loud and the grin was wide as he reversed drive on the two Yukawa drive units that had been added for braking force.
"Two hundred meters—"
And Sten dove for his shock capsule.
As it drove downward, the Atherston looked as if it were held aloft on a multicolored fountain of fire, and every weapon on the field swung and held on the unmissable target. Quickly the Athenian's compartments and passageways were sieved; Bhor and men died bloody.
Otho's second in command dropped, blood gouting from a throat wound as he slumped over the controls. Kurshayne was out of his capsule, staggering against the gee-force and at the panel. He ripped the dead Bhor away from the controls, then flattened himself on the deck just as one Yukawa braking unit, still under drive, was shot away from the ship and skyrocketed upward.
Most of the Jann guns and missiles diverted onto the drive tube as it arced up into the sky.
And then there was nothing in Sten's eyes but the massiveness of that huge hangar as the ship closed and the doors rose up toward him and became the center of his world and his universe and:
The Atherston smashed through the hangar's monstrous doors as it they were wet paper. The ship hung, impaled in the concrete, and then, as if in slow motion, the doors to the engine-hull mating plant broke away and tumbled the ship down into a ground-shuddering impact on the field itself.
"Come on! Come on!" Sten was screaming as he heard the det charges blowing the crumpled nose cone away and then the dry grinding of broken-toothed gears as they tried to lower the landing ramps.
Alex had Otho over one shoulder and was pushing a limping Kurshayne ahead of him as they dropped out of the control room, into the swirling mass of Mathias' and Vosberh's soldiers as the latter ran out onto the landing field.