Кристофер Банч - The Return of the Emperor

A flotilla of tacships were the first to scream down and across Soward's launch grounds. Other flotillas provided Tac Air over the rest of Prime's ports.

The lead tacship's exec/weapons officer reported three ships, drives active.

"All elements… Fairmile Flight… Targets as indicated and illuminated… Goblin launch… Fire !"

Non-nuclear medium-range missiles spat out of the tacships' tubes, homing on the Kraas' three ships. Three blasts became a single fireball belching up thousands of feet.

And Mahoney ordered in the fleets.

Sten, as per orders, was the first to bring his in. Destroyers and cruisers hung over Soward and Fowler. He brought his own battleship and its two fellows down onto Prime—flashthought: A bit different than when I skulked out of here last—and behind them the assault transports landed, and armor and troops spilled out.

Kilgour tossed Sten his combat harness, and Sten buckled on the webbing that held the heavy Gurkha kukris and a miniwillygun.

He would command the assault on the council's bunker himself. The Eternal Emperor had given him explicit orders: he wanted the Kraas, Malperin, and Lovett—alive if at all possible. He did not want to see, he added, the work of Sten's Tribunal wasted.

"Admiral." A screen was indicated.

Five armored gravsleds pulled onto the field about three kilometers away. Four were standard squad combat types; the fifth was a command unit.

"Ah think w' flushed some ae them," Kilgour said, mentally plotting their intended destination, that fireball that had been the ready-to-lift ships.

Before Sten could issue orders, a tacship bulleted across the field, scattering area-denial cratering bomblets. The blast flipped two of the sleds out of control, and a third lost power and slammed, nose first, into the smoking, newly dug ditch.

Two were left. Their pilots spun them through 180 degrees, back the way they had come.

But Sten saw that their exit had been sealed, not by Imperial forces or bombing, but by a screaming, boiling mob. Armed and unarmed. Human and alien.

The gravsleds fired into the mob. Beings fell and were shattered. More replaced them.

The squad gravsled was disabled and grounded. Someone, somewhere, had found, stolen, or seized an anti-armor weapon and fired. The blast disintegrated the gravsled—and sent its attackers spinning.

The command sled changed course once more, this time toward the grounded Imperial ships.

It never made it.

Sten saw the flash as a homemade incendiary landed on its top deck and fire poured down into the McLean intakes. The sled shuddered to a halt. Sten saw the rear ramp drop and then—

He thought he saw two beings come out: one enormously fat, the other looking like a skeleton wearing a tent. Their hands were upraised, and they were shouting something.

And then the mob poured over them.

Sten turned away from the screen.

"Ah hae i' recorded," Kilgour said. "We'll need ae frame-b'-frame f'r an' ID an' confirm't thae wa' th' Kraas. Thae'll be nae enow lef f'r th' autopsy."

Sten nodded, still not looking at the screen. "Let's go, Mr. Kilgour. I want the courts to have somebody to bring to trial."

The assigned Imperial troops were no better or worse than the rest of the Empire's units Sten had faced lately. It did not matter—Sten had already assumed inexperience and formed his spearhead from the mercenaries.

He assumed they would have to fight their way through the streets of Fowler to the privy council's headquarters—but they did not. The riots and the revenge had already swept through the streets they took: overturned gravcars and -sleds, some burnt-out; improvised barricades; bodies, some uniformed, some not.

Burning and burnt businesses and buildings.

Three times bodies dangling from street lamps.

But nothing they had to stand against.

Surprisingly, there was order, of sorts. Civilians directed traffic as best they could—what little traffic there was. More civilians patrolled the walkways.

The sergeant commanding the combat squad in Sten's assault gravsled stuck his head out of the hatch, shouted a question to one of the civilians, and received an answer.

"Cult a' the Emp, sir. Helpin' pave the way, sir."

Sten thought the cult practiced nonviolence. Perhaps the bruised man he saw being frog-marched by three large women had tripped and fallen downstairs. Or maybe there would be a confession to make later.

He heard the sound of firing as his assault force closed on the council's headquarters.

There were bodies in the mottled brown of the Imperial Guard and riddled gravsleds in front of it. Sten dismounted and was greeted by a sick- and worried-looking captain, a young woman who could not decide whether to cry or swear. It had been the first time she had led a unit into combat—and the first time the unit she had so carefully knitted together took casualties.

She neither cried nor swore—but professionally made a sitrep. The council had guards inside the building—there. Four antitrack launchers sandbagged there and over there. Snipers and rapid-fire weapons upstairs in the building itself. All orders to surrender had been ignored.

Sten thanked her and issued orders. She was to pull her company back. Make sure the area was sealed—nobody out but, more importantly, nobody in. Especially not another lynch mob.

The captain watched in awe as Sten and Kilgour issued a string of orders to their mercenaries and Bhor troops.

You get good, Sten thought, when you're doing it for the fortieth or four hundredth time around and you're armored against seeing your people get killed.

He brought up a company of heavy tracks and used them to bulldoze barricades and smash through the buildings around the headquarters to provide firing positions. Heavy weapons were readied, and fire was opened against the snipers and crew-served guns.

"Th' wee antitrack launchers," Kilgour said. "Ah hae their medicine ready."

He did.

Kilgour had ordered snipers—the best an' y' ken who y'be, dinnae be tryin' t' t' smoke me—into flanking positions.

As Sten ordered a gravsled to move forward, he sensed Cind moving in close to him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her scanning the confusion for hidden danger—danger against him.

The antitrack crews aimed—and were sniped down. More of the council's—soldiers? secret cops? private goons?—ran to replace them.

Willyguns cracked, and the new gunners never made it. A third try… and volunteers suddenly got scarce.

"Mister Kilgour?"

Alex shouted orders, and Sten's hand-picked squad doubled into the lowered troop ramp of a heavy track.

"Y' dinnae hae't' be knockin't," Alex ordered the track commander. "An' gie y'self a bit ae coverin't fire. Go!"

The track ground forward, turrets flaming. Its tracks clawed over one of the abandoned antitrack launchers, and then the multiton monster exploded through the entrance of the council's building, into the huge atrium.

The ramp banged down, and Sten and his "arresting officers" came out. He noticed the green-encrusted fountains and what must have been some kind of tall dead tree in the atrium's center. The tank had felled the tree as it slid to a halt before the troops dismounted.

Sten glanced at the small map case he held. "Bunker entrance is… over there. Move slow, dammit! Don't end up makin' history by bein' the last one dead."

Good advice, Sten thought. Listen to it. A dead admiral being the last casualty of this… war? Revolt? Insurrection? Whatever might rate more than a footnote.

They went down and down, into the bowels below what had been the privy council's proudest construction. Cind and Alex kept close to Sten as they moved from cover to cover like cautious snakes.