David Weber - We Few

Jorgensen blanched as the thing sniffed at his hair. It could take off his head with one bite from its big beak, but it only sniffed, then burbled unhappily. It spun around, far more lightly than anything that large should move, and bellowed. Loudly. It did not sound happy.

Finally, one of the big riders in armor gave it a piece of cloth that looked as if it might have been ripped from a combat suit. The beast sniffed at it, and snuffled on it, then settled down, still looking around, but mollified.

It was a good thing the crowds were still so sparse, Jorgensen thought. Maybe that was why the parade marshal had swapped these guys around to the head of the parade from somewhere near the tail? To get them and their critters through and out before the presence and noise of bigger crowds turned the cranky beasts even crankier?

Nah, it couldn't be anything that reasonable, he thought. Not with all the other crap going on this year.

But at least it was going to be an interesting Festival.

"Here he comes," Macek said, glancing up from the panel he'd pulled apart and sliding the multitool back into its holster on his maintenance tech's belt.

Macek and Bebi had both been stationed with the Moonbase Marine contingent in an earlier tour, which was why they'd been picked for this job. They didn't like it, but they were professionals, and they'd followed Roger through too many bloodsoaked battlefields to care about one bought-and-paid-for admiral.

"What about the aide?" Bebi asked.

"Leave her," Macek said, glancing at the attractive brunette lieutenant and pushing down his goggles. "Stunner."

Bebi nodded, withdrew the bead pistol from the opened maintenance panel, and turned. Greenberg had just enough time to identify the weapon in his assassin's hand before the stream of hypervelocity beads turned his head into gory spray. The lieutenant beside him opened her mouth as her admiral's brains and blood were deposited across her in a red-and-gray mist, but Macek raised his stunner before she could do anything more.

"Sorry about that, Ma'am," he said, and fired.

Both men dropped their weapons and put their hands on their heads as Marine guards pounded suddenly down the corridor, bead pistols drawn and very angry looks on their faces.

"Hello," Macek said.

"You mother-fu—!"

"Fatted Calf," Bebi interrupted conversationally, lowering his hands. "Mean anything to you?"

"Inner doors opening," Rosenberg said. "Initiate."

The Shadow Wolves swept forward, bursting from their hiding place in the very heart of Imperial City. As soon as he'd cleared the inner doors and had full communications capability, Honal keyed the circuit for all squadrons.

"Arise civan brothers!" he cried. "Fell deeds await! Now for wrath, now for ruin, and a red dawn!"

Roger had taught him that. He didn't know where the prince had picked it up—probably some ancient human history—but it was a great line, and deserved to be repeated.

"Oh, shit," Phelps said.

"What now?" Gunnar inquired with a yawn.

"Multiple signatures!" Phelps snapped. "Military grade. Three loca—four... five locations, two in the Western Ranges! Three of them are inside the city!"

" What? " Gunnar jerked upright in her station chair, keying up a repeater on her console. "Oh, my God! Not again."

"Where in the hell did they come from?" Phelps demanded.

"No idea," Gunnar replied. "But five gets you ten where they're headed ." She started tapping in a set of commands, only to stop as her connection light blinked out. A fraction of an instant later, there was a rumble from the bulding's subbasement.

"Primary communications link down," Corporal Ludjevit said tersely. "Secondary down, too. Sergeant, we're cut off."

"Find out why!" Gunnar said. "Shit, can't we communicate at all ?"

"Only if you want to use a phone," Ludjevit told her.

"Then use the fucking phone !"

"Luddite."

"Say what you will about all these human devices," Krindi Fain observed, blowing out the match, "there's a certain thrill to gunpowder."

The main communications node for the Imperial City Police Department had just encountered two kilos of the aforementioned gunpowder. The gunpowder had won.

"Humans taught us that, too," Erkum said, scratching at the base of one horn. "Right?"

"Oh, be a spoilsport," Krindi replied. "Time to get out of here."

"Right this way," Tebic said. "Getting in was easy." It had been, thanks to IBI-provided clearance for the "technicians." "Getting out, we have to take the sewers."

Imperial City was the best defended spot in the galaxy. Everyone knew that. What most were unaware of, however, was that it was defended primarily against space attack. Defensive emplacements ringed the city, and some were located in its very heart, for that matter. But they were designed to engage incoming hostile weapons at near orbital levels.

There were far fewer defenses near the ground.

The stingships used that chink in the capital's armor for all it was worth. Aircars had been grounded automatically, as soon as the city police network went down. That meant the traffic which would normally have been in their way was parked on the ground, drivers cursing at systems that simply wouldn't work. That didn't mean the air was free, just less cluttered by moving crap.

Honal banked the stingship around one of the city's innumerable skyscrapers and triggered a smart round. The round went upwards, then back, and impacted on Prince Jackson's office as Honal dove under a grav-tube and made another bank down 47th Street.

A police car at the intersection of 47th and Troelsen Avenue sent a stream of beads his way, but they bounced off the stingship's ChromSten armor like raindrops. Honal didn't even respond. The police, whether they knew it or not, were effectively neutrals in this battle, and he saved his ammo for more important things.

Such as the defensive emplacements at the edge of Imperial Park.

His sensors peaked as one of those emplacements locked onto him, and he triggered two HARM missiles at the radar. They screamed off the Shadow Wolf's wing racks, and he banked again—hard—to put another skyscraper between him and the defenses. The HARM missiles flew straight and true, riding the radar emissions into the defensive missile pods, and rolling fireballs blew the pods into scrap.

But one of the pods had already fired, and an anti-air missile locked onto his stingship and made the turn down 41st Street, howling after him.

A threat warning blazed in Honal's head-up display as the pursuing missile's homing systems went active. He glanced at the HUD's icons, then dropped the ship down to barely a hundred meters and kicked his afterburners to full thrust. The Shadow Wolf's turbines screamed as the stingship went hurtling down the broad avenue at the heart of the capital city of the Empire of Man, but the missile was lighter, faster, and much more modern. It closed quickly, arrowing in for the kill, and Honal waited carefully. He needed it close behind him, close enough that it couldn't—

He hauled up, riding his afterburners through a climbing loop on a pillar of thunder. His stingship's belly almost scraped the side of yet another skyscraper, and the semismart missile followed its target. It cut the corner to destroy the stingship, slicing across the chord of the Shadow Wolf's flight path... and vanished in a sudden blossom of flame as it ran straight into the grav-tube Honal had looped inside of.

"Yes!" Honal rolled the ship and headed for Montorsi Avenue and the next target on his list. "I am Honal C'Thon Radas, Heir to the Barony of—!"

"Red Six," Rosenberg said dryly over the com. "You've got another seeker on your tail. Might want to pay a little attention to that."