David Weber - Path of the Fury

He sat up, craning his neck at the eastern sky, and tears trickled down his face as he listened to the thunder. Not for himself, but for his people. For all they'd done and given that no one would ever know a thing about.

His southern perimeter broke at last. It didn't crumble and yield; it simply died with the men and women who held it, and the attackers thundered through the gap as a blazing arm of the sun rose above the shattered skyline. Von Hamel stared at it, drinking in its beauty, and pressed the button.

Commodore James Howell stared in shock at the expanding globe of fire in the center of the city. It swelled and towered as he watched, wiping away GeneCorp and all he had come to steal and devouring half his remaining ground troops like some dragon out of Terran myth.

"Damn." It was Alexsov, his voice flat and almost disinterested, and Howell wanted to scream at him. But he didn't. There was no point.

"Recover the assault force," he told Rendlemann.

"Yes, sir. Shall I move on the secondary objectives, sir?"

"No." Howell watched the fireball begin to fade. Amazing how little of the remaining city had gone with it. Whoever planted those charges had known what he was doing. "No, I don't think so. We've lost enough people for one night, and there's still that damned militia. We'll cut our losses."

"Yes, sir."

Howell leaned back and rubbed his eyes. That suicide charge had never been part of Thermopylae. Had someone down there realized the truth?

"Move to Phase Four," he said quietly.

The shuttles departed with barely a third of the personnel they'd landed. Their mother ships recovered them, and the ground force's survivors stumbled back aboard, stunned by the blood and chaos of their "walkover." It was the first time they'd failed, and Howell tried to hide his own fear of the consequences. Not for himself. Control should have no complaints about the effect of the operation, and ground equipment and the cannon fodder to man it had always been far easier to come by than starships.

No, it was the effect on his men he feared. How would their morale react to this? He already knew Control was going to have to settle for more lightly defended targets in the immediate future. He'd have too many new personnel, and the vets would need easy operations to rebuild confidence.

He folded his hands in his lap, brooding down on Elysium's holo image. It was past time to be done here, and he turned to the gunnery officer.

"Are we prepared to execute Phase Four, Commander Rahman?" "Yes, sir. Missile targets are laid in and locked."

"Good." Howell studied the man's expression. It wasn't exactly calm, but it was composed and ready. Commander Watanabe, on the other hand …

The commodore turned to the commander. Watanabe was pasty pale and sweating hard, and Howell sighed internally. He'd been afraid of this ever since Alexsov voiced his own concern over Watanabe's reliability.

"Commander Watanabe," his voice was very quiet, "execute Phase Four."

Watanabe jerked, and his face worked. He stared at his commanding officer, then down at the console. Down at the target codes for every one of Elysium's cities.

"I …"

"I gave you an order, Commander," Howell said, and his eyes flicked over Watanabe's shoulder to Rachel Shu.

"Please, sir," Watanabe whispered. "I … I don't …"

"You don't want to execute it?" The commander's eyes darted back up at the almost compassionate note in Howell's voice. "That's understandable, Commander, but you are one of my officers. As such, you have neither room for second thoughts nor the luxury of deciding which orders you will obey. Do you understand me, Commander Watanabe?"

Silence hovered on the command deck, and the commander closed his eyes. Then he stood and jerked the synth link headset from his temples.

"I'm sorry, sir." His voice was hoarse. "I can't. I just can't."

"I see. I'm sorry to hear that," Howell said softly, and nodded to Rachel Shu.

The emerald beam buzzed across the bridge. It struck precisely on the base of Watanabe's skull, and his body arched in spastic agony. But it was a dead man's reaction-a muscular response and no more.

The corpse slithered to the deck. Someone coughed on the stench of singed hair, but no one moved. No one was even surprised, and plastic and alloy whispered on leather as Shu holstered her nerve disrupter with an expression of mild distaste.

"Commander Rahman," Howell said, and the senior gunnery officer straightened in his chair.

"Yes, sir?"

"Execute Phase Four, Commander."

Alicia lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and chewing her lip while she tried not to stew. It was becoming steadily more difficult.

In one sense, things weren't actually that bad. Tannis's diagnostics were reporting exactly what they ought to, now that Tisiphone knew what results they were supposed to get, and Alicia wasn't worried about revealing anything she chose to conceal. Tannis had tried direct neural queries, chemical therapy, even hypnotic regression, but Tisiphone was an old hand at controlling human thoughts and responses. She might not be able to do it to anyone else these days, but Alicia's brain and body were her own front yard, and she allowed no trespassers, so that side was secure enough.

Unfortunately, that didn't help against her boredom. Tisiphone might enjoy fooling the medics or roaming Soissons's planetary computer net, but Alicia was going mad. The thought woke a sour smile, but it had stopped being funny when she realized what was really happening to her grief and hatred.

They were still there. She couldn't feel them through Tisiphone's shields, but she sensed them, and she hadn't dealt with them. She couldn't deal with them, because she couldn't touch them, and that left an odd, dangerously unresolved vacuum at her core. Worse, she thought she knew what Tisiphone was doing with all that raw, oozing emotion. The Fury had no interest in dissipating it, for she knew only one catharsis. At first Alicia had suspected she was absorbing it like some sort of strange sustenance, but a worse suspicion had occurred to her, and the Fury had refused to deny it

She was storing it. Distilling it into the pure essence of hatred, reserving it against some future need, and Alicia was afraid. Drop commandos had few self-delusions- they couldn't afford them-and she knew about her own dark side. She'd demonstrated it, without a trace of regret, on Wadislaw Watts, and there had been times in the field when her killer self had threatened to break free, as well. It had never happened, but it had been a near thing more than once, and a woman stayed clearheaded in combat or she died-probably taking other people with her when she went.

Thoughts of what the sudden release of all that pent-up rage might do to her judgment terrified her, but Tisiphone refused even to discuss it despite requests which had come all too close to pleading before pride drove Alicia to drop them. She was helpless in the face of the Fury's refusal … and Tisiphone had reminded her-not cruelly, but almost kindly-that she had agreed to pay "anything" for her vengeance. That was nothing less than the truth, and the fact that she'd thought she was mad had no bearing. She'd given her word, and like Uncle Arthur, that was the end of it.

And now a fresh disturbing element had been added, for Tisiphone was clearly up to something. There was a pleased note to her mental voice which made very little sense, given their total lack of achievement. Alicia was astonished that the fiery, driven Fury hadn't insisted on making their break long ago. To be sure, she'd gleaned a tremendous amount of information- including everything Colonel McIlheny and even Ben Belkassem knew about the pirates-but there had to be something else… .