Sarah James looked at the readings scrolling before her eyes, ignoring the occasional push of pseudogravity as the WACCI's engines fired course-correction bursts. The holohelmet was mostly readings. Graph bars, status lines, columns of figures; the icy splendor of the nameless gas giant's rings was lost behind them. She frowned in puzzlement.
"You won't believe this," she said to her controller on the Invincible, "but a lot of the ice chunks in this ring are made up almost entirely of deuterium and tritium inside a shell of water ice. It's like a heavy hydrogen slush. A fusion-fuel bonbon."
"I see what you mean," the comm answered. "I'm getting your readings now." There was a low whistle. "You don't see this very often."
"You don't see it anywhere," she said. "I can't imagine what sort of natural sorting process came up with this."
"Survey Service will get around to it someday," the voice on the Invincible said. The universe was full of puzzles, more puzzles than scientists with the time to study them. "Anything else?"
"I'm also getting neutrino signatures," Sarah said. And something about them makes me think they're not naturally occurring.
"Are they background?" the Invincible asked. "That protosun beside you has been known to burp on occasion."
Sarah was shaking her head as she listened. "Uh-uh," she said. "They look like power plant signatures to me." But they're weak. Shut down power plants, maybe?
"Give me the data."
A low chirp sounded as terabytes flowed through the comm link. "Commander, those don't fit any pattern of fusion plant we have on file. And this planet does spit 'em out. Anything on microray or deepscan?"
"Negative on that," Sarah answered. You expect me to find anything in that mass of junk? Not bloody likely. She turned her eyes back to her instruments, occasionally passing a comment to augment the information they were sending to the Invincible.
Suddenly . . .
"I'm getting a steep increase in neutrino output, asymptomatic curve," she said, her voice calm. Jesus! she thought, as fingers danced automatically over unseen controls, milking information out of the datastream.
"I'm definitely reading ship power plants. Powered down but activating. Coming online fast. High-yield drives." Sarah's forehead began to bead with sweat. "These are warship power plants," she told them. "Are you getting this, Invincible?" she asked as their silence grated on her nerves.
"Aye aye, Lieutenant Commander," the Invincible comtech stuttered. His voice was as stressed as hers, and much younger-sounding. "I was relaying your message."
"Hull signatures follow. They've gone to active sensors," Sarah said urgently, then frowned. "These are weirdly masked thermal signatures," she muttered.
Suddenly, almost beneath her bow, one of the enemy ships shook itself free of the ice that had cloaked it. It was close by astronomical standards; the detectors went foggy as ice fragments exploded outward and hydrogen slush sublimed into gas.
"Oh, my God," she murmured through stiff lips.
"Lieutenant Commander?"
"Shut up! I'm busy!"
The WACCI wrenched aside, then drifted in zero g as the pilot took evasive action and killed their emissions. A sidebar in Sarah's holohelmet blinked red; Yee was running a firing solution.
"Belay that, Yee," Sarah snapped.
Everyone in the reconnaissance craft was frightened, and they were reacting the way brave, well-trained, frightened people didconcentrating on their assigned tasks. Hers was to coordinate them. But their armament was popguns compared to what she was tracking.
"I don't think they can see us." At least not yet.
Three pairs of eyes went wide. The WACCI's artificial intelligence put together the hints from the ship's sensors and presented them with a visual of what was happening. Energies flared, and a ship moved across their sight. Parts of it strobed greenthe computer showing uncertaintybut the general outline was clear. It wasn't shaped at all like the double hammerhead of a Space Command vessel, and Mollie naval architecture followed the Commonwealth's closely. Instead it was a flattened swelling disk, like a Mechanist version of a tortoise shell, with two spiky structures curving forward as if it were an insect with mandibles. Eight heavy pods on farings ringed its stern, and the surface bristled with sensor arrays, launch tubes, focusing mirrors and beam guides for plasma weapons. Heavy missiles nestled against it.
"Destroyer class, from the power plant," she muttered. "Two thousand tons. Estimated weapons classifications follow."
"Shall we call it a day, sir?" the pilot asked anxiously.
"We shall not," she answered. Not yet, anyway. "But I want you to signal the rest of the squad to head back to base."
She switched her attention back to her sensor array, blinking back dismay. "Invincible, we have three, four . . . six corvette to destroyer class warships. All of them were hiding in the ice. Emphasize, in it. So far only one has freed itself. Unknown configuration."
Sarah sucked in her breath in shock. Something else was hammering at an ice-asteroid further along the ring, hammering from the inside. Something in a very big iceball. She risked a burst of active scan; they were kicking up a lot of particles themselves, firing short controlled bursts from their own weapons to break free of their disguise-prison without reflecting damaging energies back on themselves.
"They are accompanying a very large ship, estimate fifty K-tons, data indicates . . ." She made a quick guesstimate. Neutrino signature gave her the power output; assuming roughly equivalent drive efficiencies, and that power-to-mass ratio would make it . . . "Battlecruiser. Repeat, they are accompanied by a battlecruiser. Unknown configuration. Computer has no match."
"Copy that, Lieutenant Commander. Have your people return to base."
"Copy that," she said. "Now we can call it a day," she said to the pilot. "Home, James."
"On our way, sir."
"Thank God!" the gunner murmured fervently.
The command bridge of the Invincible had a faint smell of old coffee. The liquid in the cup Knott clutched was as bitter and oily as exhaust-vent cleaning residue, but he sipped it anyway.
"How's it going, Major?" he asked the Marine down on the planet below, in the corridors of the Mollie base.
Hadji's voice came fast and hard, though his helmet camera showed no action in the corridor he was rapidly traversing. "It seems to be going as planned, sir. There's been some fierce resistance, but we've put most of it down. We've secured the Mollies' Speeds and," there was a sudden smile in his voice, "a small delegation of Fibians."
"Fibians!" Knott exclaimed.
"Yes, sir." Hadji turned and his camera trained on four gigantic . . . well, not really insects. They just looked that way to human eyes.
They were dull red, sparsely hairy, with a scaly, rough textured chitinous armor over their segmentations. The eight eyes situated in a diamond pattern on each of their faces, glimmered dully in the corridor's harsh lightlike scum-covered ponds. Their whiplike, acid-stinger tails had been secured to their narrow waists. The ends of the flexible tubes they used for speech were sphinctered shut.
I may be anthropomorphizing, Knott thought, but I don't think they look too happy. They also didn't look possible. It was one thing to know they existed, but quite another to actually see them. The flowing movement of their eight legs fascinated him. The back of his mind told him that they couldn't be real, that this was some very good special effect.
They would be a priceless Intelligence asset. Worth this entire raid in themselves.
"Get those prisoners to the Indefatigable at any cost, Major."
Sudden fire erupted from a side corridor and the Major's helmet camera was bobbing and weaving so rapidly that the images it transmitted were twisting blurs to the nervous watchers on the Invincible's bridge. Things calmed as they returned to the corridor they'd just left.
"We're almost at the mopping up stage, Captain," the major said, a slight gasp in his voice as he jogged along. "But there are some pockets of stiff resistance."
Or there's a suicide bomb somewhere under that base, Knott thought morbidly. Which one of those fanatics would be only too happy to set off. Or Major Hadji was being herded into an ambush. Though whether the Mollies were crazy enough to cut down a delegation of their allies remained to be seen.
Sensors worn by the Marines allowed the Invincible to trace their movements, mapping the corridors of the Mollie facility as the troops moved through it. At the moment, Hadji and his people were all alone and moving back and forth in a small, unmapped white space.
"Can you get back the way you came?" Knott asked urgently.
"It doesn't look good, sir. A fair number of Mollies have circled around behind us and any that are free on the station are in front of us."
"Lieutenant Slater," Knott barked. By speaking the lieutenant's name he automatically directed the computer to put him in touch with her.
"Sir!" she snapped out.
"Major Hadji and his group are sixteen degrees north of your position. He's surrounded. I want you to take your people and relieve him. Major Hadji, you got that?"
"Yes, sir."
"If you need more help, call for it. Your prisoners have just become a priority. Understood?"
"Yes, sir."
Knott turned to his XO as she came to stand beside him. "Anything more from our WACCIs?" he asked. The absence of any raiders or blockade runners made him nervous.
"Lieutenant Commander James is reporting neutrino flux," Ju answered him, one slender finger touching her earpiece.
"Hrrrmp," Knott growled. "Could be that planet. It's almost a sun, and those storms"
"Captain," Ju interrupted, "the lieutenant commander is reporting . . ." her face stiffened and so did her posture. "Six corvette to destroyer class escorts . . . and a battlecruiser," she rapped out. "Unknown designation, the computer doesn't have a match for them."
"They have to be Fibian," Knott said tensely. "Unless the Mollies have found themselves another alien ally."
The sour acid of the ancient coffee twisted in his stomach. A fast carrier and two destroyers was plenty to assure space supremacy around a minor base with light defenses . . . but now he had an enemy battle group moving in on him.
With all of the Speeds and WACCIs out, Raeder and his people had nothing to do but to prepare for their return, and in Raeder's case, to observe what they were doing. He'd been paying particular attention to the adventures of Sarah James as she searched the tumbled rocks and ice of the gas giant's ring. He heard her smooth alto voice reporting the enemy ships.
Peter could feel the blood draining from his face.
My God, he thought, I can't even do anything. He ought to be in a Speed, accomplishing something. "God damn it," he whispered. He was tied to a chair in an office.
He was only slightly relieved when Sarah reported that the strangers' ships apparently couldn't see them.
Yet, his traitor mind supplied. This is bad, he thought, imagining the larger situation. There are only two choices: cut and run, or fight. They had only two destroyers to the enemy's six. And they have a battlecruiser. Which meant they were facing a ship twice the size, more heavily armed, and almost as fast as the Invincible. Not good, not good at all.
"I think they may have found us," Sarah's voice said calmly. "Vector . . ." she snapped. After a moment she said, "Yep. They've found us."
Run, Sarah! Raeder urged her mentally. Run! Don't let them get you. He was dimly surprised by the sense of outraged protectiveness that came over him. He wished, still more urgently, that he could strap on a Speed and go racing to her rescue.
"Have your people return to base," Knott was saying.
"Copy that," Sarah said crisply.
Her voice was suddenly cut off and a red light blinked on Raeder's console, accompanied by an urgent tone that indicated the captain was calling a meeting via comm.
Knott sat in his command chair, the screen before him divided into squares, one by one each of them was filled by the face of one of his senior officers.
"The choice is simple," he said. "We can abandon the troops and run for the Transit point, or we can fight." Knott's eyes were hooded, like those of a sleepy hawk. "The Marine command estimates it will take approximately two hours to get their people back on the Indefatigable. Suggestions," he said quietly.
"The Invincible is much smaller than a battlecruiser, sir," Truon Le, the tactical officer, said. "But we are considerably faster in both normal space and Transit, and we have Speed support. The Fibians have none, since the Marines have taken the Mollie craft."
"We're also more lightly armed," the quartermaster pointed out.
"The Speeds would mitigate that factor," the XO mused. Then she shook her head. "If it weren't for those six corvettes."
"Could any of the Marines fly the Mollie Speeds?" the astrogator, Ashly Lurhman, asked.
"They have yet to secure the base," Knott said. "I'd be reluctant to thin their ranks."
"But if we don't, sir, we may be forced to leave them behind," Truon Le said, his dark eyes pleading.
Peter's mind was still half on the fleeing WACCIs and Sarah. But there was something else niggling at the back of his mind. Something Sarah had said. Something . . .
"Captain," John Larkin said. "With all respect, sir, for our people's abilities. We have two corvettes, a virtually unarmed troop carrier and ourselves. Despite the Speeds," he said, rushing over the protesting sounds made by the others, "we must be realistic. We are no match for a battlecruiser and six corvettes or destroyers, even though they lack Speed support. I think we should withdraw."
"And what about our Marines?" the captain asked, his voice betraying nothing, neither agreement nor disapproval.
"Sir, the Marines and their transport are effectively lost already," Larkin said solemnly. "How can we possibly mount a rescue when we can't even defend ourselves?"
Knott's face sharpened somehow, eyes hooded like an eagle's. "If we run, the light carrier concept will be discredited. Those who say that we're too light to do anything useful and that our speed is only good for bugging out will be vindicated. Not to mention an unforgivable number of casualties. Come on, people, you can do better than this!"
Peter loathed the idea of leaving anyone behind to test the Mollie concept of mercy. Judging by the faces looking back at him from the screen, so did the others, including Larkin, who had suggested it.
"We must not be intimidated into ignoring the tactical advantages that we do have," Truon Le was saying.
"Sir!" Raeder interrupted. "Our main difficulty is the battlecruiser, and according to Lieutenant Commander James it's embedded in ice from the planet's rings. Correct?"
"What's your point, Commander?" Knott said coolly, but his eyes were interested.
"That ice is mostly deuterium, sir. Let the Speeds attack while the Fibians are still trapped in it. If they use their particle beam weapons in coordinated strikes against the ice, they may be able to compress the deuterium enough to start a fusion reaction."
"For God's sake, Raeder. Do you think the Fibs are just going to sit there and let our Speeds do that? You're out of your mind," Larkin exclaimed. "Sir," he said to the captain. "I appeal to you. I know it's a very hard thing to leave twenty-two hundred people behind. But you have over sixty-six hundred lives that you can save. Don't throw those lives away on an insane gamble like this. There are too many ifs and maybes in this plan."
"They'll be able to get closer than usual," Peter insisted, "because the Fibians' weapons will be masked by the ice. Their captain will probably figure that the ice will protect them from any damage the Speeds can do. But we'll be striking at the ice!" He stopped speaking, but his eyes spoke for him as he looked at the captain from out of the screen. Please, they said, let us try.
"It's doable," Augie Skinner said in his inimitably matter-of-fact manner.
Knott considered the chief engineer's solemn face. "You think so?" he asked.
"Yes, sir," Augie said firmly.
"And what are those six corvettes going to be doing while all this is going on?" Larkin demanded.
"They're going to be struggling out of the ice," Ju, the XO, snapped. Her delicate face wore a severe expression, as though, at the moment, she didn't very much like the quartermaster.
"If Raeder's plan takes out the battlecruiser," Knott said slowly, "then the corvettes won't be as much of a problem." The captain sat for a moment, pulling on his upper lip. "We'll do it. Thank you for your input, people. Squadron Leader . . ."
The faces vanished from Raeder's screen, and he called up the schematic that would show the movements of the Speeds as they flowed toward the enemy battlecruiser. Sutton's voice discussed possible strike points with his second as they made their approach.
Raeder suggested one or two, and Sutton said, "Ah, so you're in on this, too, are you, Commander?"
"Absolutely, Squadron Leader. It was my idea."
"I rather like it," Sutton said cheerfully. "Wish you could be with us."
"So do I," Raeder said wistfully. "Don't get too close," he cautioned. "That's liable to be one hell of an explosion."
"Teach your granny to tat," Sutton snarled.
Raeder laughed. What the hell does tat mean? he wondered.
Now he'd have something to do. The squadrons were going to be very busy, and they'd need all the backup he could provide.
Then another time of waiting, once they were launched. He kept to the flight deck this time, behind one of the larger consolesone large enough to support a full thirty-eight splitscreens, a monitor for every one of the carrier's craft. He licked his lips, not just seeing through Sutton's monitor but somehow feeling what he was doing. . . .
"They weren't expecting us to react this quickly," Sutton said. "Execute Alpha."
Acceleration slammed at him, wrenching. The Fibian destroyers were breaking free of their sheaths, two of them coming up from the gas giant's ring in a blazing flare of drive energies. Spectacular, but then a destroyer always was. A wing peeled off toward them, vector cones overlapping in the displays of his holohelmet. Behind him the squadrons spread out in a blunt convex shape, and behind that the two Space Command destroyers bore in.
"Let's eat them head-first, the way a boar hog does a snake," Sutton clipped.
Spots of light crawled among the displays. Heavy missiles leaving the Fibian destroyers, little automated ships in their own right. The markers for his Speeds blinked in his holohelmet as they fired, lasers and light rapid-fire plasma cannon. Then white light shone through the holohelmet, dimmed to merely eye-hurting brightness. He read off the emission signature from the status bars and whistled silently. The missile the Speeds had destroyed had used an antihydrogen warheadthat light came from the total annihilation of matter, not from a conventional fusion explosion. These bugs take things seriously, by damn, he thought.
Ranges closed with frightening speed. From a convex plate the Speeds turned into a cup reaching to enfold the Fibian destroyers. Plasma bursts sparkled and flared against shielding fields. The AI drew missile vectors across the stars, and lights blinked silently where warheads detonated.
"Too aggressive by half," he said, grimly satisfied. Bad tactics; they should have refused engagement until all their comrades were free to join them. "Get 'em!"
The cup became a globe. It shrank inward. Speeds peeled out of it, jinking and twisting in complex high-speed vectors that brought them within firing range.
"Eat your heart out, Raeder," Sutton muttered to himself as his turn came.
His fingers moved in the cups, the only part of him that could move in these circumstances. Acceleration kicked him, pressing down like the soft hugely strong hand of an impalpable giant. Random vector changes tugged, switching the directions his inner ear translated as up, down, sidewaysall at random intervals. He ignored it, watching instead the swelling schematic of the alien destroyer growing in the holohelmet's display. Closing in, now; he could probably have seen it as a bright dot trailing drive plasma if he'd had time to look with the naked eye, which he didn't.
"Launch!" he rasped.
A spray of parasite bombs kicked loose from the Speed's upper deck, spreading out and hurtling toward the destroyer as they followed his vehicle's trajectory. Sutton flipped the Speed end-over-end and opened the drive past redline as plasma bolts and flickering lasers probed for him, looping out and away. The parasite bombs were too close for the Fibian's defensive systems to stop. They exploded, each one slamming a spike of bomb-pumped X-ray laser fire into the guts of the alien warship.
On Invincible hard plastic crumbled under Raeder's hand. He could see the results in his mind's eye: unstoppable bolts of energy burning through ablative panels and into the hull frame, searing through conduits and corridors and crew, into the sensitive electronic heart of the destroyer.
"Bingo," he whispered. "Containment field failure."
The Fibian destroyer's fusion drive fields had ruptured, faster than the fail-safes could shut down the reaction. The Speed's AIs let him see the consequences: the flattened disk of the Fibian ship flipping as it tumbled dead through space, bits and pieces glittering as they spun away.
The other Fibian warship had broken away, turning toward the gas giant in hopes of disappearing against the background clutter until the other ships of its flotilla could join it. The Commonwealth destroyers Aubry and Maturin had been waiting for that. They weren't nearly as agile as the Speeds, but they were extremely fast. They closed in, bracketing the Fibian ship, lashing out with their heavy antiship missiles. The Fibian killed more velocity, skimming closer to the gas giant . . .
"Too close," Raeder muttered.
The alien struck the outer fringes of the planet's atmosphere at a speed that made it a glowing meteor, plunging down into storms so vast and wild that the flare of its destruction was barely noticeable.
Sutton's voice crackled through the comnet, overriding the cries of "Hoo-ah!" and "Gotcha, bug!"
"Vectors, following," he snapped. "Let's get the job done."
"Slater!" Hadji snapped. "Where the hell are you?"
"On our way, sir, but running into heavy resistance. These people seem determined to stop us at any cost." Her blue eyes flinched away from the piled bodies in the corridor before her. The Mollies were using them as a barrier, crouching behind them and then popping up to fire on the Marines.
She'd ordered her people to stop firing with lasers because she disliked seeing the damage they did to the helpless dead. Not that she was all that fond of what the projectile weapons were doing, either, but at least they didn't set the bodies on fire.
Slater shook her head in exasperation. "This is useless," she muttered. "Get a coil-gun up here," she said to her second. "That ought to simplify things."
Major Hadji knew his options were growing more limited by the second. His group had been harried into an untenable position. They were exposed in a corridor with the enemy closing in from both ends. There were doors everywhere, but no means of opening them. They resisted laser fire, remaining cool to the touch even after a sustained blast. Projectiles ricocheted off and kicks just hurt your foot. Obviously alien technology.
Hadji turned to the Fibians. "Open this," he said to one of them.
The alien lifted the trunk that dangled between its sets of eyes and Marines raised their weapons in automatic response to a potential threat. It hesitated, then said: "Why should we help you, human?" Its voice was completely understandable, though high and flat and it vibrated weirdly. "Our allies will come shortly and kill you. Then we shall be free."
The major drew his sidearm and aimed it between its eyes, almost, but not quite touching its dull red head. "When they come, I guarantee you that you will be dead. Now open that door."
"You will not kill me," the Fibian insisted. "I heard your commander tell you to preserve us at all costs."
"Unfortunately for you, he's not here," Hadji told it. "But I am." He pressed the weapon right up against the creature's chitinous head. "And if you won't open that door, maybe one of your buddies will after I've shot you. Three's almost as good as four, and two is almost as good as three, and if worst comes to worst, we only really need one of you."
"This is pointless," the Fibian argued. "You will be conquered. Surrender and we will speak for you. Our word is important to them."
"You don't know your allies very well if you believe that, buddy. Understand one thing: if we go down, you go down with us. I kinda like the idea of us all dying together." Hadji cocked his head with a fleeting smile. "It's kind of romantic. So the better we can defend ourselves, the longer you get to live. Do you understand me?" the major asked.
"Yes," it said, and turned to the door. Four times it pressed its strange three-fingered hand against the door's inner edge. When it finished the door slid aside.
The Marines and their prisoners hustled inside.
"Close it," Hadji ordered, and the Fibian did.
The major looked around the room. There were no other doors. It was obviously a lab of some sort. There was even a ventilator for sucking up fumes. He went over to it and looked up under the hood. There was a good-sized pipe leading up from it. Too small for him, of course.
"Where does this pipe go?" he asked one of the Fibians. The major couldn't tell if this was the one he'd threatened in the corridor.
"To the air-conditioning plant, I would assume," it answered. "It is not something we contributed to."
Hadji could have sworn he heard a touch of pique in the trembling voice. "Benger," he barked. "Front and center."
"Yes, sir!" a light young voice snapped.
"Think you can fit up there?" Hadji asked.
"Yes, sir," she said, her answer freighted with unasked questions.
"We're going to boost you up there. If the air duct is big enough, I want you to crawl through it, find Slater and her people, and lead them to us."
"Sir," Benger objected, "I can't just leave like this!"
"No," Hadji said, "you can stay here and die. Go out there and get me some help, Sergeant. Bear in mind that our lives and our pride are far less important than getting these prisoners to Intelligence. Do you copy, Benger?"
"Yes, sir!" she said sharply, and put her booted foot into Corporal Davies' cupped hands.
The corporal slung her upwards as if she were weightless, and she pulled herself into the air duct with a muffled grunt.
"I can do it, sir," she said, her voice both muffled and echoed. "It's tight, but I can move."
"Then move," Hadji barked. A quiet slithering sound answered him.
He looked at the aliens. What is it that they know that I don't? he wondered. Or maybe I'm imagining things. How could you read something that looked like a spider's idea of the DTs? Still, he could have sworn that the Fibians thought they had some ace in the hole. The way they held their mandibles looked . . . smug, somehow.
"Marcy's hit!" someone shouted.
"Eject, eject!"
Raeder winced as the green beacon strobed red. Another Speed goneblown to ionized gas, or tumbling with systems dead through the wreckage. Aubrey and a Fibian destroyer were spiraling off toward the northern pole of the gas giant, orbiting each other in a vicious corkscrew path and hammering with energy weapons, missiles long gone. Maturin hovered closer to the still-trapped Fibian battlewagon, fighting off the three surviving Fibian escorts; she was leaking air and the status bars showed a third of her compartments sealed. From the readings the Fibian ships were in even worse shape, one of them barely maneuverable, but they kept boring in and trying to bring their weapons to bear against the Speeds.
And the Speeds were easier targets, their trajectories regular and precise, keeping their energy cannons firing at the same spots, building up heat and compression faster than it could radiate back into space. The schematic of the Fibian capital ship showed it surrounded by plasma that was literally sun-hot.
Just a little longer, just a little
Marine Sergeant Rubin Cohen hoisted the slender coil-gun to his shoulder and waited for the computer to pick its optimum target. There was a high-toned cheep as it proclaimed its readiness, and Cohen pressed the firing stud.
"Eat this, you zealots," he muttered.
With a soft phoot! the tiny missile burst from the muzzle and the end of the corridor exploded in fire and blood and smoke.
They waited a moment to see what the enemy would do. Then as the air-scrubbers absorbed the smoke and still there'd been no response, Slater said, "Let's move." She stepped out cautiously. With a gesture she sent her second, Sergeant Baird, up on point.
Baird adjusted her helmet camera to full magnification and set it to scan the corridor ahead. The computer in her helmet began interpreting the camera's input, looking for anomalies, or specific objects, such as a wire camera peeking out from one of the side corridors. The legend "passage is clear" came up in orange letters in the upper left quadrant of her visor. The sergeant unreeled her own wire camera, coiled in a retractable spool just under her main camera and slaved to its receiver, and carefully fed the thin wire out into the corridor's end. Its special lens showed views of the passageway to the right and left.
"Nothing but bodies," Baird said into her comm.
Lieutenant Slater moved up to stand beside her. Looking over the bodies she saw that there were no living wounded among them.
"Mollies," she muttered bitterly. There were times when words like "stupid" were superfluous, and even "dumber than doggie-doo" wouldn't quite cut it. But "Mollies" said it all.
She looked to the right, down the corridor they would have to travel, and saw a body lying before a closed door. Slater went to it and stood looking down at him for a moment. From what could be seen of his shredded clothing, this was no Mollie. There was thinfilm body armor under the clothes, also shreddedthe sort of thing policemen wore, useless in a combat situation where real weapons were being used. She nudged the body over with her foot.
The front of the suit was unmarred, sleek and expensively tailored. A heavy gold chain encircled one wrist and there was a solid, jeweled ring on the middle finger of each hand. A tiny needler was still clutched in one well-manicured hand.
Slater's people moved past her down the corridor. Baird stopped beside the lieutenant.
"What's an overdressed bully boy like that doing on a Mollie base?" the sergeant asked.
"I don't know," Slater answered slowly, looking at the closed door the dead man had apparently been guarding. "But whatever is in there, I think I want a piece of it."
Reaching out, Slater snagged the arm of one of her men. She whispered something that could only be heard by him. The man stepped forward and pounded on the closed door.
"Sir," he said respectfully. "We have to move out of here."
The door opened and Slater stuffed her weapon up under the chin of the man who stood behind it. Man, or perhaps bear, she thought. He was dressed much like the man on the floor, and he was huge. Not soft, either. She increased the pressure on the pistol grip of her barker.
"Hands up," she commanded, "no sudden moves."
Baird patted him down and began removing deadly weapons, tossing them to the Marine who'd rapped on the door, and then fastened his hands behind his back with a coil of memory wire.
"I'm sorry, sir," their prisoner said over his shoulder. "They got the drop on me."
"They got the drop on you 'cause you're stupid!" a furious male voice answered him. "I ain't goin' nowhere with these people."
"That's your prerogative, sir," Slater said politely. "But you should know that we plan to blow this base up once we've raped the computers. It's your choice, but I'd recommend that you come with us."
"Who is that?" the voice demanded. He swept his huge bodyguard aside like a curtain and glared up at Slater. The man was short and paunchy, with a small neat nose that didn't go with the rest of his bone structure. "Let me tell you something, girlie," he shouted pointing at her aggressively, "I've got influence! I've got friends! Don't you mess wit me!"
Slater blinked, somewhat taken abackthis one was so completely un-Mollie.
"Uh . . . just who are you, sir?" she asked.
"I'm Mike Fleet, you dumb jarhead!"
A slow smile spread over the lieutenant's features as she remembered where she'd heard that name before. He was very big in organized crime. Very big. And his relationship with the raiders was said to be both close and warm.
"Oh," she said, her voice sweet, "we have a room all prepared for you, sir. I'm sure you'll feel right at home. Would you come with us, please?" And she took his arm and started down the corridor.
"Lieutenant!" a voice said from overhead, and they flattened themselves against the walls with their weapons directed upward. Slater shoved the prisoner behind her, putting her body and cermet armor between him and the voice. This was a very valuable prisoner.
Fleet pushed feebly against her. "You're crushing me, you butch bitch," he whined.
"Shut up, sir," the lieutenant ordered.
Through the grid in the air duct they could dimly see a face. "Major Hadji sent me," the voice said quickly. "He told me to guide you to him. The squad's trapped in a room not far from here. Stand back and I'll burn my way out of here."
Slater turned her prisoner over to Baird and motioned her to follow the others. Then she and the other Marine moved back, still watching the duct carefully.
Their faceplates darkened as they watched the laser cut through the thin metal of the duct, then a pair of small, gloved hands gripped the edge and swung down.
"Private Benger, sir," the miniature Marine said, and saluted. "Major Hadji asked me to lead you to him," she repeated.
"Why did he shut down his beacon?" Slater asked, motioning Benger to lead the way.
"He thought the Mollies were using it to trace us, sir. We have four Fibian prisoners and the Mollies seem determined to stop us from getting away with them." Benger picked up to a trot. "This way," she said, directing them down a side corridor.
Slater had to call her people back to follow the young Marine. They made another unexpected jig and suddenly began to come across bodies, both Mollie and Marine. Benger held up her hand and the whole column came to an abrupt halt.
"This is the corridor," Benger said. She frowned. "But it's so quiet."
As if on cue there was a blast from down the hallway, followed by the unmistakable flash of laser weapons, the explosive hiss of subliming metal exploding into vapor . . .
Slater keyed her communicator. "Semper fi, and duck." She looked over her shoulder. "Do it."
A short, stubby weapon coughed. Ctaaang. It was quite safe at this distance; the crystal-fragment shrapnel lost velocity quickly . . . although at close range it was like ten thousand miniature buzzsaws. Slater and her Marines poured into the corridor, their hand weapons chuddering, catching the Mollie attackers in a devastating cross fire as the Marines trapped in the breached room fired, too.
"Throw down your weapons," Hadji's voice bellowed. "Surrender!"
Nobody really expected them to give up. The last one raised his hands as if to yield . . .
"Watch it!" Slater barked, hitting the deck.
Her squad followed with drilled reflex. Fragments and pieces of the Mollie spattered over the corridor walls. Something went ting off the backplate of her cermet armor, driving a hard grunt from her lungs.