Revenge of the Damned (46 page)

Somewhere Hernandes had found an enormous rifle—nearly as long as he was—that single-fired a round the size of the cheroots he missed desperately. It was an ancient rifle fitted with a museum-quality optical sight.

But it was a very effective antique.

Hernandes held his sights on the target—a Tahn in the gunner's seat of a gravsled. He breathed in deeply. Then he let out half the breath and held. His finger pulled the forward trigger, then moved back to the set trigger. It touched the metal, and the rifle slammed him.

Kilgour had taken one look at Hernandes's weapon and dubbed it a "dinosaur gun."

"Because it'd kill a dinosaur," Sten straight-manned.

"Na, clot. Because it takit a dinosaur to fire the beast."

It damn near did. The rifle kicked—hard. Hernandes was pretty sure that his shoulder was if not broken at least cracked a lot.

But it was far worse on the arrival end.

The gunner in the gravsled had time enough to notice that he lacked a pelvis before he died.

Hernandes carefully scratched a mark on the stone next to him. That made twenty-seven.

He looked for another target.

Downslope, a Tahn sergeant spotted the movement, sighted, and touched a trigger.

The three-round burst blew Hernandes's abdomen apart.

The decimation went on.

Virunga reflexively ducked when the explosion went off, the blast echoing seemingly endlessly around the courtyard walls.

And then the screams started.

The first of the mortars had exploded. Thirty-one people were dead or maimed around the shattered metal. Medics scurried to help.

Virunga kept his expression untroubled. At least the blast walls had provided an unexpected side benefit and kept the damage moderate. But Virunga knew that the three remaining mortars would be shot on a duck-and-fire principle. Koldyeze, he estimated, could hold no more than another day, at best. And that night Wichman's forces mined the wall.

Wichman gave precise orders. Even though he was inexperienced at combat, he was learning rapidly.

I could have served better, he realized with resentment. I should have resigned my post for a combat command when this war began. Perhaps…

But he was not egotistic enough to think he could have changed things.

But this would be enough: a final revenge against the traitors and a final strike against the Imperials. Koldyeze was to be completely illuminated, both by flares and from six mobile searchlights that one of his aides had scrounged. Chainguns on the recon tracks were to sweep the walls. Any Imperial prisoner who stuck his head up would be slaughtered.

His plan worked.

When he was satisfied that all fire from the cathedral had been suppressed, he sent in the troops with demopacks. Nearly ten tons of high explosive was arranged at the foot of the wall. His next assault, which would occur an hour before dawn, was certain to succeed.

Unfortunately, Lord Wichman did not survive to see whether his tactics were successful.

Sten, outranking Sorensen, pulled the plug on the young man's commando operations. Virunga was right—they could not stand to lose him. Especially not now, with Virunga's cannon firing by calculation, calculation made possible only by Sorensen's mind functioning as a battle computer.

But those orders did not hold true for Sten.

After dusk, he and Alex went out looking for trouble. They went through the Tahn perimeter easily, all the old Mantis moves returning. Beyond the front lines, they split up and began their head-hunting.

Sten carried a miniwillygun with a single magazine of ammunition. If he was blown, he knew better than to imagine he would be able to shoot his way out. He carried four Mantis demolition packs with him, along with two grenades and a Gurkha kukri he had brought back to Heath.

The demopacks were the first to go. With a variable time set on the fuses, they were deposited, one on the deck of a recon track, one in the middle of four parked gravsleds, the third on one of the searchlight's generators, and the final one under what Sten thought was a com trailer.

Large cables led from that trailer into a well-guarded building. Sten found that interesting. He slipped into that building's neighbor and found an appropriate-length section of metal stair banister. On the roof, he positioned the banister across to the guarded building and hand-over-handed his way onto its roof, the rusty metal bending slightly as he went. He crept down the stairs, keeping low and close to the wall.

Lousy blackout, he thought, seeing a gleam of light from the curtained doorway of a room on the second floor. Then he saw the bulk next to it.

H'nrich might have been an excellent bodyguard against normal intruders.

Sten was not normal.

H'nrich'e eye registered a flash in the dimness as the kukri came up from below. That was all.

Sten yanked the kukri out of H'nrich's neck—he had pulled the slash so he would not have to worry about a head bouncing around the hallway—caught the sagging, blood-spouting body, and eased it down. He sheathed the kukri, wiped stickiness from his face, and took three deep breaths.

The question was not what was going to happen next but what would happen
next
next. Specifically, would Sten have time to get out with his vital signs vital before the reaction.

Possibly.

He took the two grenades from his webbing and rolled the timer until the X was under his fingers. Ten seconds.

Come on, son. Don't get cowardly now.

His hand blurred the pistol from its holster, and Sten went through the blackout curtain.

There were seven beings in the room. One of them, Sten's mind registered, was wearing a dress uniform, and then he ID'd Lord Wichman as his finger pulled the trigger to its stop and the AM2 rounds spit around the room.

Four rounds tore Wichman's body apart. Sten's free hand lobbed the grenades at the com console, and then he was gone.

There were screams and shouts and somebody outside shooting at something.

Sten was back up the steps, three at a time, almost falling through a broken lift, then on the roof and across. Running. He hit the far edge, eyes telling him he could make the jump, mind saying you ain't no Kilgour, and then he was in the air.

He landed at least a meter on the other side of that third building's parapet. Getting cowardly, he thought once more, and then melted into the night toward Koldyeze.

Sten came back to awaiting catastrophe.

He had seen the searchlights blinding on the walls of Koldyeze, realized that he could not return the way he had come out, and went once more through the tunnel.

Virunga brought him quickly up to speed; they had heard, and seen, the demolition charges being planted. When the Tahn had pulled back, four brave men and women had tried to get to the charges. Their bodies lay only a few meters beyond the gate.

Not, Sten thought privately, that they could have accomplished much. He assumed that the demo charges were not only separately det-timed but booby-trapped as well. The romantic days of putting the fuse seconds before the bang banged were as ancient as Hernandes's rifle.

"Ordered," Virunga said, "all troops back from wall. If Koldyeze doesn't fall on our heads… will retake fighting positions after blast.

"Better suggestion?" he asked Sten hopefully.

Sten had none. Neither did Kilgour when he returned an hour later.

They looked for a big rock to hide behind.

Wichman might have been dead, but his troops soldiered on.

The blast went off—on schedule.

The shock wave blew down five entire rows of already-shattered tenements. The ground earthquake-shook, and in their still-separate battle two kilometers away, Imperial guardsmen ducked, sure that somebody had set off a nuke. The blast cloud rose more than three kilometers into the clouds despite the continuing drizzle.

The entire front wall of the cruciform-shaped cathedral crumbled, and slid down the hill.

But only six POWs died. Koldyeze had indeed been built to withstand almost anything.

The Tahn mounted what was to be the final attack—and ran instantly into trouble.

The ruins of that front wall made an excellent tank trap—far superior even to Sten's grease. Even the heavies could not grind through the building-high boulders.

Only the gravsleds could provide support for the infantry.

Somewhat surprised that they were still alive, the Imperial defenders boiled out of their holes and found fighting positions.

Gravsled pilots were hit, and the gravsleds orbited out of the battle. The first wave of the Tahn infantry was obliterated.

But the second wave found forward positions and laid down a base of fire.

The third wave attacked, and the gravsleds were able to move in.

The prisoners pulled back. Back and down.

Into the crypts.

"Clottin' convenient place to die," Kilgour observed, sourly looking around the cellar. "Thae'll be na need to dig a wee grave."

Virunga herded the last of the hostages down more stone steps deeper into the subbasements and limped back toward Sten.

Sten had hastily reorganized the surviving fighters into five-man squads and given each one a position to hold: a stairwell, a landing, a portion of the huge basement he himself was in. Anything bullet-resistant had been dragged up as a barricade.

He had not needed to tell his squads they were to hold till the last—none of the Imperial prisoners were stupid enough to believe the Tahn were interested in recapturing them.

Kilgour, three-gee muscles straining, had lifted a stone altar into position for his and Sten's personal last stand. He spread out his remaining grenades and ammunition in front of him.

Sten followed suit.

"Y' know, wee Sten," Kilgour observed. "If thae clottin' Tahn hae brain one, thae'll just filter gas down the steps an' be done wi' us. Thae's nae a filtermask't' be had."

At least, Sten thought, that would be relatively painless.

"Or p'raps," Kilgour went on relentlessly, "thae'll just seal us up alive. Thae'll be no bones f'r m' mum't' mourn over. An me a claustrophobe, too."

Sten showed his teeth in what he realized probably did not much resemble a smile and settled down to wait for death.

It was, surprisingly, a fairly long wait.

They dimly heard the sound of firing from above. Sten wondered. Had the Tahn found some other way down to them? The firing suddenly rose to a dull storm and died away. There was the crack of single shots then.

Sten looked at Kilgour.

"Na," Alex suggested. "Thae's too convenient."

But both of them replaced their grenades and ammo into their harnesses and moved slowly up the steps toward the courtyard. A burst of fire shattered down at them, and they ducked behind the turn in the stairwell.

"Clot," Alex swore. "Ah was right. Too convenient."

Sten waited for the requisite grenade to roll down on them. But instead there came a shout in very bad Tahn.

"Surrender. Weapons no. Hands air in."

Sten and Alex grinned. And Sten shouted back in Imperial.

"Friends. Imperial. Kiss to be kissed."

"One up," came the shout, in Imperial but still suspicious.

Sten shucked his combat harness and, moving very slowly, hands in plain sight, climbed the steps until he saw two battered guardsmen, their red, exhausted eyes glaring through filthy faces. And he kissed them both.

Out of common courtesy, the one with the beard got the first one.

They were rescued.

The relief force was commanded by a one-star general. Imperial forces had mounted a massive armor assault and driven a wedge through the Tahn lines.

They had not stopped to widen that perimeter but had kept on moving, their tracks slamming at full speed through the city of Heath. Gravsleds hovered above them. Gunners opened fire on any movement without checking to see whether the target was a scared civilian or a Tahn soldier. They had hit the remnants of Wichman's forces in the rear and scattered them.

Sten and Alex stood in the courtyard, listening to the general. He was very proud of himself and his men.

Why not? Sten thought in stupid fatigue. After I sleep for about six months, I'll buy him a beer, too. Come to think, I'll buy anybody in this unit as much alk as they can pour down. Or whatever else they take, he amended. He was turning to Kilgour to suggest they find somewhere to collapse—and suddenly the Scotsman's rifle was snapping to his shoulder.

Senior Captain Lo Prek was aiming very carefully. He had followed the assault wave into Koldyeze, and no one had bothered asking who the hell he was.

He had found a position inside Koldyeze itself and waited. Perhaps Sten was outside the walls, or perhaps inside. But he knew that he would have his chance.

He ignored the destruction of Wichman's soldiers and the victorious Imperials. That was not a part of his war.

And at that point he was rewarded, seeing below him the man who had murdered his brother.

As his sights found Sten, his heart thundered and he aimed, knowing he would get only a single shot.

Sten and the Guards general went down as Kilgour fired a long, chattered
snap-burst
that blew apart the cathedral window above them.

Kilgour lowered the rifle.

"What was—" Sten managed, and Alex waved the barrel.

A body slumped forward out of the window and hung, motionless.

"Clottin' sniper," Kilgour said.

Sten picked himself up. That was it. For him, the war was over.

The body of Senior Captain Lo Prek was eventually picked up by a press gang of Tahn civilians under the direction of an Imperial sanitation expert, loaded onto a gravsled, and taken outside the city. It was cremated, along with several thousand other, equally nameless bodies.

And the war was over.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

T
he surrender document was a small off-white sheet of parchment. There were very few words penned on the document itself, because there were
no
terms. The surrender was unconditional.