“One thing,” Bruchinsky said, fumbling in another of his pouches. “This I get from the farmer today. Does it spend? It’s broke, but it’s real gold by Jesus!”
He held it out for the others to see. It was a sovereign, snapped in half and mounted for an ear stud. The legend and lower portion of the bust of George III were worn to shadows.
Janni began to laugh. The sound started normally but rose into hysterical peals.
Bruchinsky, the only man in the room who didn’t get the joke, looked in growing puzzlement at his Draka companions.
COMING UP AGAINST IT
The Grantholder’s Palace was five hundred meters ahead of Milligan when the artillery prep landed, just as planned. The first rounds were high-capacity shells detonated by zero-delay nose fuzes, so that the blasts blew chunks from the exterior walls instead of going off inside the six-story building. The shockwaves rocked Milligan about a second after the orange flashes.
The shells were to provide entry for the assault squad, not to kill the occupants. The squad would do the killing.
The city’s power grid went out at the same time, though occasional vehicle headlights marked the streets Milligan skimmed over. The AI of Milligan’s suit sharpened the amplified-light view of the palace with mapped images from the data bank. So far as the squad was concerned, this mission was a scramble with no time for practice, but the intelligence base was remarkably complete. Somebody’d known what was coming.
The windmilling figure in powered battle armor flung skyward by the ground-floor shellburst wasn’t part of anybody’s plan. The cyborg who was supposed to go in low on the south face while Milligan hit the top floor had hot-dogged. He got to the target just as the entry salvo did, and the shockwave flung him out of control.
The cyborg had a name, all four of them did, but the humans of the squad’s Fire Team One used letter calls in the rare instances they had anything to say to members of the other fire team. This cyborg was Gamma. He was at roof height, flailing in smoke and the debris of terra-cotta cladding, when the remainder of the artillery prep arrived: cargo shells delivering anti-armor sub-munitions to clear the palace-roof defenses.
The Grantholder had a small particle-beam weapon and a pair of powerful lasers, all in separate turrets. The sub-munitions chose specific targets and punched self-forging fragments through them, destroying the weapons and killing the crews.
The blast-formed uranium projectiles riddled Gamma’s powered battle armor with similar ease. The scuttling charge sucked the suit in with a white flash and a blast more powerful than those of the artillery rounds.
“My shell was a dud!” shouted Porter. “Cap’n, shall I cut my own?”
A shell that didn’t burst would only knock a head-sized hole in the light brick that covered the building’s load-bearing concrete frame. Porter could blow an entrance in the wall herself, but she’d have to hover on her jets while she did so. That would make her an easy target for everybody in the Gendarmery camp adjoining the palace to the north and east.
“Hit the ground floor south, Porter!” Milligan called. He paused before the smoke-streaming hole, a rectangle three meters wide framed by concrete beams, revectored his jets, and jumped for his own entrance five stories up.
“Roger that, Porter!” Wittvogel agreed. Porter was already correcting her curved approach to bring her around to the south of the building.
Porter had been supposed to go in on the east side of the fifth story. Captain Wittvogel had the roof and Platt—who was new, plenty of simulator time but no combat missions—would take the fourth story, believed to be servants quarters.
The cyborgs had the three lower stories and the basements, as much as anything to keep them out of the way of the humans of Fire Team One. The cyborgs weren’t really squad members any more than they were really human. They didn’t take orders well, and they didn’t worry about damage to friendlies so long as their own kill rate stayed high. Putting Porter in with Fire Team Two was dangerous, but not as dangerous as wobbling fifteen meters in the air like a shooting-range pop-up.