IronStar (69 page)

Her camera continued rolling at the
twin displays on Kirrah’s panel. On the left-side screen, the group of soldiers
at O’dakai’s eastern gate had dragged the cart’s occupants out and were
systematically beating and kicking them. Two of the soldiers were rummaging
through the cart’s contents, occasionally pulling out some article or other. On
the right-side display, the clock was down to [0 / 122]. As it rolled over to
[0 / 120], Admiral Dunning’s face appeared behind it.

“Yes, Kirrah Warmaster, I too would
like to hear your answer to that question. Even though nothing is showing on
Argosy’s
high-res Doppler scans yet, I believe you have placed some object on a
cee-fractional bombardment trajectory.”

“Yes, ma’am, I have,” Kirrah
replied to both women. “We accelerated toward the planet to seventy percent of
lightspeed and released a one point two gram object which, if we’ve done our
navigation right, will shortly strike the Kruss base with the force of a ten
kiloton explosion. We hope, because of the vertical impact angle, that most of
the energy will be released underground. Our objective is the Kruss base hidden
beneath the O’dai palace.”

“You understand this will result in
Civilium sanctions.”

“Yes, Ma’am. I mean, I don’t think
so, Ma’am. As I understood Dr. Pennington’s explanation, local forces can only
petition the Civilium for wrongs against them, if they have actually joined the
Civilium. It would only be justice, therefore, if we were not bound by Civilium
law
until
we joined.” As she spoke, Kirrah continued to ease the
shuttle’s nose up toward the horizon. At Margaret’s cue, she deployed the first
notch of airbrakes. Air screamed thinly at their touch, and the feeling of
weight reasserted itself in earnest. Skin temperature eight sixty Celsius,
climbing, but slowly.

“Kirrah,” the Admiral replied, “You
cannot claim the protection of Civilium law to prosecute the Kruss Empire for
crimes they committed days ago, and then turn around and break that law
yourself, today. Your case against the Kruss is now mutually exclusive with
your own violation of anti-bombardment laws.”

“I understand, ma’am. It was the
only solution I could find. In another… ninety-five seconds, there aren’t going
to
be
any Kruss on my planet. Not a trace. Talam is prepared to forget
the whole thing, apply for Civilium membership claiming Regnum sponsorship,
dated as of tomorrow.”

“And what of the remaining Kruss
with your hostages? No Regnum weapons against it, I cannot compromise on that.”

“Understood, ma’am. That was the
plan from the start. I will capture or kill it on my own.” Under Kirrah’s hand,
the shuttle’s nose was now pulled up to near-level flight, streaking north
toward her rendezvous on the river Geera. Speed, Mach two point nine; altitude
twenty-four thousand meters; skin temperature eight forty; all falling.

“Lieutenant Roehl, I believe you
will. Tell me one thing. What did you choose for your projectile?”

Doris had resumed realtime control
of the spyfly, which was now hovering twenty meters off the eastern parapet of
the palace building. On the left-hand screen, a thin, black-robed old man was
peering over a balcony railing at the tiny aircraft. He raised his cane and
shook it. The clock read [0 / 55].

Kirrah replied, “It’s one of the
Kruss smartshots, ma’am. We’re expecting about forty terajoules on the ground.”

“Huh. Nice touch, ‘Warmaster’.”

“May I infer, Admiral, from the
fact that we are still alive, that I have not completely disappointed you?”

Mach two point eight, altitude
twenty-three thousand meters, eight thirty Celsius on the leading edges of the
wings. More of the high thin wind-scream penetrated the shuttle’s frame as they
plunged deeper into the atmosphere. The controls shook lightly in the buffeting
of high-level winds.

On the left-hand viewscreen, a
taller man joined Parsh’ap on the balcony. The face under his ornate headdress
bore a strong familial resemblance to Paedako, the murdered prince. The man
glared at the spyfly, reached under his robe, withdrew a thin metal tube,
raised it, pointed it at the spyfly.

Lucinda Dunning replied, “You have
dealt each of us an interesting hand, both on the ground and before the
Civilium courts. I believe I’ll play mine as dealt.”

“Thank you, Admiral Dunning. Thank
you
very
much.” On the corner of the right-hand screen, superimposed
over the Admiral’s image, the clock reached [0 / 0]. On the left-hand screen,
the signal feed from the spyfly went dead.

In Elizabeth Einarson’s camera, the
sky to the southwest split vertically as though cloven by a white axe. In the
thousandth part of a second, the relativistic smartshot slammed into the upper
atmosphere and began to explode.

The tiny fireball, spreading at
fifteen kilometers per second, had just enough time to expand to a twelve-meter
ring of tortured atomic fragments before it penetrated the planet’s atmosphere
at over two hundred thousand kilometers per second, and impacted just inside
the north wall of the O’dai palace. The still-relativistic gram of matter,
along with a dense shower of subatomic debris swept along its pass through the
atmosphere, plunged through the building’s stone and masonry like so much
tissue paper. In another microsecond, the entire moving mass deposited its
colossal kinetic energy into a column of soil and stone fifteen meters wide and
two hundred meters deep under the palace’s foundations. Two thousand tonnes of
bedrock converted instantly into incandescence, some of it as plasma hotter
than the core of a sun. The fire surged horizontally outward, met deep rock,
forced its way into the stone. The stone yielded, shattered, flowed. At the top
of the column, however, the incandescent fury met the least resistance. The
palace and everything within seventy meters of it blew into the sky in a cloud
of debris like the cork from a champagne bottle, followed by a brief roman
candle of searing white-hot vaporized basalt and olivine.

On the highest-speed vid playbacks,
in one frame the palace was standing, in the next frame, it was replaced by a
blinding column of white light, with a thread-thin incoming tail standing
straight up to the top of the atmosphere like a preternaturally straight bolt of
white lightning.

To human eyes viewing from the
three hundred kilometer distance of the descending shuttle, the impact looked
instantaneous. An intense white flare one hundred fifty meters across vomited
up from under the palace, shooting two kilometers or more into the air. Far
above, a second huge, diffuse aurora of light flared high in the dawn sky as
some of the now-diffuse exhaust gases from the shuttle’s maneuvering thrusters
impacted the upper atmosphere at point seven cee. Half a heartbeat later the
shock wave in the surrounding stone found its way to the surface, and another
larger and slower blast lifted earth, stone and debris in a dust cloud almost
half a kilometer across. As it climbed, the original white flare faded to
orange, then cooled to a light brown dust.

The tremendous heat from the
initial flare incinerated anything organic within two hundred meters around the
palace and started fires for a kilometer in all directions. Twin shock waves
swept across the city in geometrically precise rings of destruction: first the
ground shock flattening adjacent buildings and shaking great chunks out of
structures up to eight hundred meters farther away. Then the slower-moving air
blast tore roofing tiles and shattered windows for another two or three kilometers.
Sailing ships rocked and swayed in the harbor as the water surged and heaved in
the grip of the shuddering earth.

Ten kilometers out on the plains,
the lucky ones, some eighty percent of O’dakai’s population, started and cried
out at the sight. Hundreds fell to the ground a few seconds later as the
earthborne shock waves made the earth dance and tremble under their feet.

Thirty seconds later the first
sound reached them, a huge
SNAP!
sounding like the crack of doom, then the roar of outraged earth. In a
hundred-kilometer high column above ground zero, air fell back into the vacuum
created by the passage of the descending fireball, and an enormous clap of
thunder pealed on and on, diminishing only after a full three minutes of
reverberating boom.

Chunks of bricks, stone and various
cooling fragments massing one to several hundred kilograms began to rain down
on the city and surrounding area. The hail of debris continued for five or six
minutes, raising splashes in the river and making small craters where the
heavier ones landed on the
not-grass
or in a city street. A wind began
blowing toward the ruined palace grounds from all directions, feeding the
rising pillar of smoke and dust. Under the cloud, the well of lava where the
palace had stood slumped into a steep funnel-shaped depression almost two
hundred meters across and fifty deep. The center of the pit would glow
white-hot for an hour, orange-red for a day.

Not bad
, Kirrah felt the
voice of her darkness say.
Not bad at all
. The corners of her mouth rose
and her teeth bared, in an expression no sane person would have mistaken for a
smile.

So much for the scary part. Now
for the
hard
part
.

“An eye for an eye makes the
world go blind.” - Mahatma Gandhi - 20
^th
century A.D.
philosopher-peacemaker; India, Terra.

“Kirrah Warmaster, calling
Pssittagk.” A kilometer up the river, Kirrah could see the two tiny rafts
lashed together, drifting closer in the current. In the powerful optical sight
of Adrianne’s sniper rifle, the bodies of Akaray and Tash’ta were clearly
discernible, still bound wrist and ankle atop the piles of oil-soaked brush on
each raft. Somewhere between the children, invisible from her position, was an
armored Kruss. Almost invisible high overhead, the
Attila’s
shuttle kept
close watch.

Adrianne crouched among some reeds
beside Kirrah, unshackled by mutual consent when the shuttle landed near the
river. The raft they had carried in the shuttle’s aft bay, with its cargo of
meat, now lay tethered mid-river at the point of a long vee of rope slung
across the current and tied at each shore about twenty meters upstream from
where they stood. Rash’koi and Prax’soua stood by the bank a few meters from
Kirrah. Between them lay a 20x25 centimeter gray cylinder. Lieutenant Warden
and the others waited in the shuttle, ninety meters back from the riverbank.
Kirrah put her lips to the wristcomp’s pickup once more.

“C’mon, Pssittagk. Talk to me.” Her
wristcomp remained silent. The raft drifted along in the current, slowly
drawing closer. Except for a few puffy white clouds and a darker tan-colored
stain peeping just above the southwest horizon, the sky was a glorious clear
cerulean blue, with a slightly green-blue tinge low in the west. The Geera was
chuckling to itself as it ran west toward the Sea of the Sun. A few birdcalls
were audible in the distance. It looked like it was going to be a beautiful
day.

On the north shore a kilometer
away, two Marines in a Tango were still pacing the raft. Three kilometers up
river, Captain Crathpae’s four steamships were on station, following as Kirrah
had ordered.

“Doris, give me a spyfly thirty
meters out,” Kirrah called. The small aircraft popped out of a port in the side
of the shuttle’s tail, rose on spinning rotors, tilted toward the river. On her
wristcomp screen, the view from the spyfly lurched and swung, turned over the
river, then steadied on the rafts. Two children, piles of brush, no Kruss
apparent anywhere.
Damn! What was the lizard up to?

“Kirrah,” came Marcus’ voice over
the shuttle’s comm. “My people on the other shore in the Tango report the last
time they saw the Kruss was a few minutes after your balloon went up. They
could see the flash over the palace clearly from here. They report seeing the
Kruss stand a moment, then lie back down between the kids. The rafts swung
around in the current, they lost sight of the Kruss for a few seconds. When the
raft turned farther, the lizard wasn’t where it had been. No sighting since.”

“I smell a rat, ma’am,” said
Adrianne. “It was wearing one of their Hostile Environment suits. Air for up to
sixty hours. It could be clinging to the bottom of the raft. It probably has
remote detonation capability - I certainly would. Don’t assume it’s clear.”

“No assumptions, Corporal Gilman.
And thank you for volunteering to help. You don’t owe me anything, after what
we did to you and Marcus.”

“No hard feelings, ma’am. You aced
us with appropriate guile and treachery. I hafta admire that.” The woman’s
attractive face split in a rare grin, showing perfect white teeth. “Besides, it
was in a good cause. And I’m the best shot with the P-6R. But it’s still
‘Adrianne’, ma’am.”

“Ok, then it’s still ‘Kirrah’.”

In another ten minutes the rafts
were half the distance closer. Still no sign of her enemy. At least the
children were alive, Akaray twisting and struggling against his bonds at the
sight of the small aircraft hovering nearby.
Nothing to do but wait
.
Kirrah found her hands aching for want of an arm to grab and hold.
Irshe’s
arm
.

Finally the drifting fire rafts
bobbed up against the tether rope, ten meters away from their tethered raft.
The current slid and spun the two fire rafts along the slanted rope, until they
came up against the tethered raft bearing the sha’pluuth carcass. They stalled
there, hung in the current. Nothing happened. The three log platforms bobbed
together in mid-river.

After another three minutes of
excruciating suspense, Kirrah made a decision. She pressed a key on her
wristcomp twice, then once more. Out on the tethered raft, the fabric under the
sha’pluuth flew back and Elagai surged up from a void cunningly carved between
two logs. Swiftly she stepped onto the raft with Akaray. He flinched and cried
out as the Wrth’s dark blade flashed. One hand grabbed the box strapped around
his neck, the other guided the blade between the strap and his throat. In half
a second, the strap parted and Elagai flung the released device far out into
the river. Akaray blinked, shook his head.