Sten sighted carefully through his projectile weapon's sights and touched the trigger. Eight hundred meters away a Jann Sigfehr convulsed, threw his weapon high into the air, and collapsed.
Sten slid back into the nest of rubble he, Otho, Kurshayne, and Alex were occupying.
Kurshayne had dug out the model Sten had given him and was evidently staring at it in fascination. Sten started to snap something about children, toys, and their proper places when he noticed the small blue hole just above one of Kurshayne's eyes.
Alex crawled up beside Sten, and they looked at Kurshayne's corpse, then at each other. Wordlessly they clambered back up to the top of the rubble heap.
Contrary to the livies, even good men died at the least dramatic time.
A dusty and battered Egan checked his watch, peered out at the wreckage of the Atherston, then decided to see how far under the nearest boulder he could crawl.
"Men of the Jann." Khorea's voice rang through the PA.
"You have the enemy before you. I need not tell you what to do. Sigfehrs! Take charge of your echelons and move them to the attack!"
As that third wave of Jann doubled forward—more than three thousand elite soldiers—past the wreck of the Atherston, a decay switch ran out of molecules.
For the first time in Sten's experience, Alex had been doubtful about what would happen when charges went up."Ah ken i' th' door's gone, we'll hae ae wee fireball inside yon plant. But wha'll happit whae yon fireball hits yon back door ae th' plant, ah lad. Ah dinna ken. Ah dinna ken—"
What did happen was quite spectacular: As intended, the shaped charges on the Atherston blew straight out the open-nosed bow of the ship into the engine-hull mating plant, creating a quite impressive fireball—almost half a kilometer high. It rolled forward, at something more than l,000kps, toward the back door.
But the back door to the hangar did not drop, contrary to everyone's expectations. Instead, the fireball back-blasted, back up through the plant and back out, over the Atherston and onto the landing field itself.
From overhead the explosion might have resembled a sideways nuclear mushroom cloud as the now unrestricted blast-wave bloomed across the enormous landing ground. Directly over the charging Jann troops.
About the best that could be said is that it was a very, very quick way to die, mostly from the pressure wave, oxygen deprivation, or by being crushed by debris hurled from the hangar. Only the unlucky few on the blast's edges became human torches.
But in less than two seconds, three thousand Jann ceased to exist. As did the engine-hull mating plant. Nothing less than a high-KT nuke blast could have actually obliterated that huge building. But Sten's demo charges lifted the building straight up—and then dropped it back down on itself.
Some of Sten's men, in spite of specific orders, were too close to the blast area. They died. Others would never hear again without extensive surgery.
Sten's raid was more than satisfactory.
A side benefit—one which would ultimately save Sten's life—was that the Jann command bunker's com net was cut and Khorea, together with what little Jann command staff still lived, would be buried for at least three days.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
PARRAL LEANED CLOSER to the vidscreen, watching the action from Urich with a great deal of interest. Sten's plan had more than succeeded.
But Sten had done much too well. As far as Parral was concerned, the war was over. Only one final blow was needed, and that Parral would take care of himself.
He switched circuits and keyed the command mike to his transports hanging in space off Urich. "This is Parral. All ships will break orbit. I say again: All ships will break orbit. Navigators, plot a course for home. That is all."
None of Parral's skippers, of course, protested. They were all too well trained. And, as the ships turned on Parral's vidscreen, the merchant prince was mildly sorry he didn't have a pickup down on the planet's surface, to watch Sten's final moments.
He was sure they would be terribly heroic.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
STEN SHOVED A chunk of melted plas off his legs and staggered to his feet. Across the crater, Otho stared in befuddlement as Alex grinned at him.
"Dinna tha' go, lad?" Alex said proudly. "Dinna tha' be't tha most classic-like blast Ah hae e'er set?"
Sten groggily nodded, then turned as Egan stumbled into the crater, his eyes wide in panic. "Colonel," the boy shouted. "They've abandoned us!"
Sten gaped at him.
"We're stuck here! They've abandoned us!"
Then Alex was beside Egan, shaking him and not gently.
"Tha be't nae way to report, so'jer," he reproved. "Dinna y'ken hae t'be't ae so'jer?"
Egan brought himself back under control. "Colonel Sten," he said formally, but his voice was still shaking. "My com section reports a loss of contact with Parrel's freighters. Plotting also shows all the pickup ships have disappeared from their orbits."
And then Egan lost it again. "They're leaving us here to die!"
BOOK FOUR
RIPOSTE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
"WHAT DO YOU think?" Tanz Sullamora asked proudly.
Clot polite, the Emperor thought. "Slok," he said, quite clearly.
Sullamora's face began falling in stages.
The painting, like the others, was what the Eternal Emperor could have called Russian-heroic. It showed a tall, muscular young man. with dark hair and blazing blue eyes. Good muscle tone. The young man was armed with what the Emperor believed to be an early-model willygun and was using it to hold off a mixed horde of crazed alien- and humanoid-type fanatics.
The gallery itself was stupendous, almost a full kilometer long, and hung with what Sullamora had assured the Emperor was the largest and most valuable collection of New Art in the Empire.
The paintings were all massive in canvas and theme, all painted in the superrealistic style that was the current rage. The medium was a high-viscosity paint whose colors shifted with the light as the viewer moved. Always the same color, but slightly different in tone. The "paintbrush" itself was a laser.
Each of the paintings that the Emperor had stared and then scowled at showed another heroic moment in the History of the Empire.
And each one was so realistic, a cynic like the Emperor wondered, why bother with a paintbrush when a computer-photoreconstruction would do just fine?
Sullamora was still in shock, so the Emperor decided to elaborate. "It's abysmal. A vidcomic, like everything else in this gallery. Whatever happened to the good old days of abstract art?"
Sullamora headed one of the largest entities operating under Imperial Pleasure, a conglomerate that was, basically, a vertical mining discovery-development-exploration subempire. He was very successful, very rich, and very pro-Empire.
Privately his tastes ran to the horrible art the Emperor was looking at and prenubile girls taken in tandem. Which was why he had invited the Emperor to the gallery opening, and which was also why he now slightly resembled a Saint Bernard who'd discovered his brandy barrel was empty.
Sullamora managed to cover his first reaction of pure horror and his second, which was to tell the Eternal Emperor he was a fuddy-duddy with no appreciation for modern art.
Instead, looking at the muscular, mid-thirties-appearing man who was the ruler of stars beyond memory, he backed down. Which was his first mistake. He whined, which was his second. The Eternal Emperor liked nothing better than a good argument, and he loathed nothing more than a toady.