S. Stirling - Conquistador

Tully, she thought, after a moment when her brain simply spun in place. Roy Tully, you little gargoyle, you are worthy of Sandy, and I hope you both live through this. And Henry Villers, and Jim Simmons, and Kolo too.

She looked down at Tom; the square rugged face was relaxed in unconsciousness, looking younger than his years for a change. You could see what he’d been as a fresh-faced farm boy just out of high school and waiting for the bus that would take him to boot camp.

“And I order you not to die,” she whispered.

The fighting seemed to be mostly out from the Gate complex, a U of combat noises and muzzle flashes ringing the buildings. That meant that the Collettas and Batyushkovs in the GSF had some sort of control of the Gate itself, or there would be more shooting from inside the building. Their men and the reinforcements were trying to hold a perimeter, staving off the growing weight of the Commission forces loyal to the Rolfes. Which meant…

“They expect help through the Gate,” she muttered, unable to frame the thought without speaking it. “Oh joy, oh bliss, oh rapture. They could still pull this off. I’ll have to set the self-destruct mechanism going.”

Let them get a firm control on the Gate and the area around it, and let the other Families and their Settlers realize that their contacts with FirstSide now depended on the Collettas, and support for the Rolfes might yet evaporate. At the very least, the Collettas and Batyushkovs might escape unpunished, the weight of opinion in the committee forcing amnesty to get the Gate back intact.

She still had her pistol; she drew it and moved out cautiously through the parking lot, moving from one car to another. A dead Gate Security Force trooper lay beyond that, where the glass sliding doors she’d passed through so often lay shattered in a sparkle of fragments. Adrienne stooped beside him, closed the staring eyes and took up the G36. It had a C-mag in it, and a glance at the transparent rear face of the magazine showed it was full—a hundred rounds. She slid the sling over her head, in the assault position that put the muzzle forward and left the pistol grip by her right hand. It also made things easier on her injured left.

Adrienne strode forward through the waiting rooms and into the final corridor that led to the personnel check-through station. A man looked up at her as she walked by; he was kneeling by a row of wounded. Then he did a double take and rose, opening his mouth.

She turned and loosed a three-round burst at point-blank range. The medic toppled backward, and the wounded man he fell on moaned weakly. Apart from that everything was vacant until she turned into the Gate chamber itself.

Someone had used an earthmoving machine to sweep a broad lane clear to the rippling silvery surface; a sense of wrongness caught at her, this chaos in the place she’d helped keep so orderly. And men were stepping out of the surface, moving in squads—not uniformed, beyond a rough practicality, but all armed. Something stuck its snout through, the muzzle of a vehicle-mounted cannon. Whatever the plot on FirstSide had been, it had worked—probably a lot better than the Commonwealth half.

Everyone in the room was looking at the Gate; there weren’t more than a dozen or so men in the whole huge room, which was a sign of how desperately the conspirators’ forces were trying to hold their perimeter until this help arrived.

Tsk, tsk, Giovanni—still operating on a shoestring and not leaving a margin for failure! Of course, the odds of her crashing inside the area the enemy were holding and surviving in shape to walk were pretty astronomical….

Terminals were spotted all around the interior of the Gate chamber. She stepped over to one and punched her thumb down on the pad. The small screen lit, and she felt a wave of relief that almost overrode the pain in her head and hand. They had had to leave the local system up, or the Gate complex’s internal power and light wouldn’t be functioning.

“Identify,” she said, and looked into the retina scanner. Her voice might be off enough not to match the files, but eye and thumb together were enough.

“Identified: Rolfe, Adrienne.”

“Code—” She rattled off a string of letters and numbers; ones known only to the two elder male Rolfes, until a scant few weeks ago.

“Acknowledged. Query: Authority?”

“Milady. Cardinal. State.”

“Acknowledged. Query: Sequence?”

“Hey, you there! What are you doing?”

“Override B-1!” Adrienne said, as the man turned toward her. “Override B- 1! Override B-1, Oasis!”

That had been her idea—a personal link into the self-destruct sequence that would blow the charges in the floor—and send a wall of high-velocity concrete back through to the FirstSide end of the Gate, smashing her grandfather’s original short-wave set beyond hope of repair.

She turned, finger clenching the trigger, two fingers and a thumb of her left hand on the forestock to keep the assault rifle from riding up. Cartridges fountained out of it, and the whole hundred rounds spat out in less than ten seconds.

“Self-destruct sequence initiated,” the computer said in its flat idiot-savant voice. “Five minutes to detonation.”

Then she threw the weapon aside and ran, down the corridor, dodging as bullets chipped tile out of the floor, hurdling a fallen row of waiting-room chairs, out into the night—

Fire, and then peace.

“Cigarette?” Lieutenant Mordechai Pearlmutter said. He was a slender beak-nosed swarthy young man of medium height. “Blindfold?”

“Get it over with!” Dimitri Batyushkov said; the only other sound beyond the gulls and the distant sea was the muttered prayers of the black-bearded, black-robed priest off near the entrance.

The adobe courtyard was plain whitewash, but the wall behind him had a row of pockmarks across it at chest height, all new, and some splashes. The Prime drew himself up as the row of Pearlmutter militiamen filed in with their rifles sloped; he had asked only one thing, that he not be bound to the post.

The officer—Batyushkov wearily thought a curse at the unseen sardonic face of the old man who had picked a damned Yid for this!—drew his .45 as he walked back to where the squad would stand; he would administer the coup with the pistol, one final shot behind the ear, if it was necessary. A noncom walked down the row of young men, most of them pale-faced and grim, one or two nervously excited. He took each rifle and loaded it with one cartridge, his back turned to the soldier so that none could see which held the one blank.

“Ready!” the young Pearlmutter collateral said. The weapons came up to the present.

“Aim!” And they went level, all but one or two steady. It would probably be quick.

The air was sweet; he was not afraid, but it was a hard thing to leave a world so beautiful. Why was I not content with it? he asked himself. There was no answer.

“Fire!”

Giovanni Colletta sat behind his desk, looking at the surveillance screens. The soldiers outside on this bright cool fall day had many shoulder flashes: the Rolfe lion, the Pearlmutter Seal of Solomon, even the Von Traupiz eagle. None wore his… and he suspected it would be a long time before the tommy gun appeared on an armed man’s shoulder flash.