Shadow of Freedom

There were three access routes to Victor Seven from the rest of Shona Station. This one, following the main axial from the lift shafts, was the most direct and the broadest, which made it the logical path for a full-fledged assault. The second route ran through the materials-handling conduit, through which consumables and refuse were transported into and out of the habitat module. It hadn’t been planned for humans to use, however, and it would have been a cramped and tortuous way to get at the module’s garrison. At the moment, all of its blast doors had been closed and remote sensors had been set to alert the defenders if those doors were disturbed. It seemed unlikely anyone would try coming that way, but if they did, there’d be plenty of warning in time to get blocking forces into position.

The third possible way in was really designed as an emergency evacuation route, and it was less liberally supplied with blast doors, since it was supposed to stay open and accessible for people trying to get out of Victor Seven in the face of disaster. The good news was that it had a lot more bends and was rather narrower than the axial passageway, even if it was more accessible than the materials tube. They’d had to position more people to cover it, but they had good fields of fire and the Manties would have to come out in the open around the turns in the corridor wall to get at them.

But still—

“Movement!” Corporal Marjorie Pareja snapped suddenly.

“What? Where?!” Abernathy demanded, peering at the handheld display feeding from the fixed pickup on the far side of the blast doors.

“Zebra-Tango!” Pareja replied.

* * *

Gutierrez watched as the sensor remote he’d bounced up the passageway rolled to a stop just short of the first line of mines. He didn’t really need it, but seeing how quickly the other side reacted to it should be informative.

“One…two…three…four…”

He’d just reached “seven” when a burst of pulser darts from one of the loopholes destroyed the remote.

“Lord,” he muttered. “These clowns are as pathetic as those bas—I mean, as those jackasses on Tiberian, My Lady.”

He shook his head. Seven seconds to react at all, and then instead of a single shot the morons had fired an entire burst? The ricocheting pulser darts had taken out three of their own mines, and it wasn’t even as if the remote had been telling him anything he hadn’t already known in the first place!

“Don’t complain, Mateo,” Abigail said sternly.

“I’m not. It’s just—”

He shrugged irritably, a master craftsman frustrated by the slovenly workmanship of a would-be competitor, and glanced at Senior Chief Petty Officer Franklin Musgrave, Tristram’s boatswain.

“Ready, Frank?”

“Ready,” Musgrave confirmed.

“Then punch it.”

“Fire in the hole!”

Musgrave slid just the muzzle of his weapon around the edge of the corridor and squeezed the firing stud. It was an awkward angle, and despite the stabilizing pressor beam projected against one of the lift shafts from the launcher’s other end, the recoil was significant. Musgrave had expected that, however. He kept control of the bucking launcher without much difficulty, and the projectile’s flight path had been programmed to allow for the muzzle rise as it departed downrange. Because of the short range—the other end of the passage was actually inside the launcher’s danger zone—and the fact that no one in his right mind wanted to be within forty or fifty meters of a kinetic strike from a weapon that powerful, they’d had to step down its normal acceleration rate considerably and go with the chemical shaped-charge warhead, instead of its usual dart-like penetrator. Even that was bad enough, since it was designed to take out light armored vehicles, but at least the vast majority of the blast would expend itself on the other side of the blast doors.

Sergeant Clinton Abernathy had a single, fleeting instant to realize what the launcher was before it fired, but that was all the warning he had before he, the blast doors, and his entire squad ceased to exist.

* * *

“Jesus Christ!”

Surprise jerked the blasphemy out of Kristoffersen as Abernathy’s squad was wiped from existence.

“That was a tank-killer!” his company first sergeant blurted.

“No! You think?!” Kristoffersen snarled with a baleful glare that closed the first sergeant’s mouth with snap. “Tell Lieutenant Boudreaux to reinforce Axial One and Axial Three. And tell his people to keep their heads frigging down! These bastards’ve got heavier weapons than we thought.”

* * *

“That was noisy,” Gutierrez observed. He tossed another remote down the corridor and grimaced. “Messy, too.”

“They had their chance to do it the easy way, Mateo,” Abigail replied harshly. “Like you say, even those bastards on Tiberian were smarter than this! Let’s keep the pressure on them.”

“Aye, aye, My Lady.”

* * *