Shadow of Freedom

He also wished to hell he knew exactly what the advancing Manties were up to at the moment. Unfortunately, they’d been systematically taking out the sensors the gendarmes had emplaced. In fact, they’d been swatting sensors with ridiculous ease as they advanced—obviously the people responsible for planting those sensors hadn’t concealed them anywhere nearly as well as they’d thought—which meant the best he could do was guess about what they were doing. That didn’t make him happy…and the fact that their current location appeared to be just on the other side of his current location didn’t make him any happier.

The intruders were working their way inward along two separate routes, moving with a certain degree of caution but without any particular effort to disguise their intentions. Not that there would have been much point in subtlety, since there weren’t all that many possible approaches.

“Still nothing, Altabani?” he asked his sensor tech.

“No,” she replied. “You think I wouldn’t’ve mentioned it if I’d seen anything? Shit, Norm! I know they’re on the other side of that corner, but—”

Something rattled and rolled on the far side of the hatch, caroming along the bulkheads.

“Grenade!” Altabani shouted as it spun its way up to the far side of the blast door and stopped abruptly when the Manticoran who’d thrown it activated the tiny tractor unit.

The Manticoran in question was nowhere near anything Mateo Gutierrez would have called adequately trained, but she did pretty well for a Navy puke. She’d watched the icon on her HUD as it bounded down the line of approach to the closed blast doors, then hit its anchoring tractor. She’d jumped the gun slightly, locking the grenade to the deck a dozen centimeters in front of the doors instead of to one of the actual panels, but that was close enough, and she hit the detonation key.

Dreyfus bounced back and sat down—hard—as the concussion came at him, transmitted through the sealed door. Altabani swore as the sensor she’d poked through one of the loopholes was destroyed, and another of Dreyfus’ troopers said something in a high, falsetto tone as blast came through his own loophole and blew him back the better part of a meter. His skinsuit and body armor were more than enough to deal with it; his cry was born of shock and surprise—and fear—more than injury.

But that was all that happened, and Dreyfus felt a surge of relief as he climbed back up onto one knee.

Altabani was already shoving another sensor into place, and Dreyfus bared his teeth at the rest of his squad.

“If that’s the best they’ve got, they’re screwed!” he announced.

* * *

“Very nice,” Gutierrez approved. “Let’s get the others in there now.”

A dozen Manticorans and Graysons sent grenades rolling around the corner, bouncing them off the bulkheads towards the blast doors.

* * *

The blast door rattled and banged and vibrated as grenades went off on the other side, but none of the new blasts were anywhere near as powerful as that first one had been, and all of them seemed to be going off at greater distances.

“Central, this is Dreyfus,” the sergeant announced over his com. “They’re making a lot of noise, but I don’t think they’re getting any further in than they are now.”

“Good!” Captain Kristoffersen replied. “Keep us informed and—”

Sergeant Norman Dreyfus’ world ended in fire and blast.

* * *

“Told you not to hurt Denny’s feelings,” MacFarlane told Gutierrez.

“I stand corrected,” Gutierrez replied, studying the wreckage with his sensor wand.

He really would have preferred a Bravo Charlie—one of the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps’ armored, counter-grav-equipped, robotic breaching charges. Of course, that would have constituted a pretty severe case of overkill against a mere civilian-grade blast door. And even though MacFarlane’s DNI-1 damage control remote hadn’t been designed for the task, it had attached its beehive shaped charge with neatness and precision under cover of the flashbangs and smoke grenades. It didn’t have the armored protection of a Bravo Charlie, but it was designed to operate in an environment which would very quickly have incinerated or demolished a standard robotic unit. If the gendarmes had noticed it coming and targeted it, they could undoubtedly have destroyed it, yet the covering flashbangs had been far too light to hurt it.

Now Gutierrez surveyed the wreckage of what had been a set of blast doors.

“Frank, Wilkie, let’s get up there and secure the doors,” he said, starting up the passageway himself. “Looks like it’s going to take a few minutes to clear the wreckage enough to move on.”

* * *

Major Pole swore as his tactical display updated itself.