Strike Force companies were prefixed B, C, or D depending on their size. C-class units had a nominal strength of one hundred personnel. C41 had received eight replacements since the last operation, but Farrell decided not to bring them along on a mission as rough as Active Cloak looked like being. The replacements were good people or they wouldn’t have passed Strike Force screening after they volunteered, but they hadn’t worked with C41 before. There was no margin here for somebody who misunderstood an order or reacted in an unexpected way.
The Spooks had a civilian colony of five hundred thousand on Maxus 377 in addition to the logistics bases that served their military on fourteen worlds. There was no margin at all when C41 seized the planet’s main port ahead of the full-scale Unity invasion.
The tripod landing legs touched the ground in sequence. The freighter rang in three descending notes. “Go!” Farrell shouted, unheard over the clangs of the bolts shearing. He and a dozen other strikers shoved at the toppling bulkhead.
They’d landed just before local noon. Sunlight quivered through heat waves from the port’s white concrete surface. Anti-emitter missiles launched in snarling cacophony from the freighter’s upper cargo deck, homing on every operating radio-frequency antenna within their ten-mile range.
Major Arthur Farrell hit the ground running, headed for the port administration building with his headquarters group and two squads of Third Platoon. C41 had begun the invasion.
The rest of the Unity armed forces better follow soon.
The pair of Spooks in the cab of the maintenance vehicle goggled to see the recently-landed freighter fall apart as they drove past. Sergeant Guilio Abbado killed them both with a single burst from his stinger before he jumped to the ground.
“Three-three to the truck!” Abbado shouted. Most of his squad was already running toward the eight-wheeled vehicle. It slowed but still coasted forward after the driver died in a spray of coppery blood. Horgen and Glasebrook leaped aboard, flinging the dead Spooks out of the way. Horgen managed to turn the vehicle before it plunged into an open sump, but she couldn’t seem to find the brakes.
One of the Spooks hung out the open door. Abbado kicked the body the rest of the way to the ground as he climbed into the cab beside Flea Glasebrook. The other five strikers of Third Squad, Third Platoon clambered onto the back of the vehicle, shooting at any visible Spook to keep the enemy’s panic boiling.
Horgen goosed the throttle. She steered east and accelerated without needing orders.
The truck was a godsend if you believed in God, which Abbado more or less did. The navy flight crew had landed the captured freighter on the magnetic mass nearest the port’s northwest corner according to plan. Abbado could see the sense of that, since the port garrison’s compound and the administration building were immediately north of the site and the transient military barracks were adjacent on the west.
The trouble was 3-3’s objective, the huge maintenance hangar along the east edge of the field, was almost four hundred yards from the ship. That was a hell of a long way to run across bare concrete with a combat load. By the time the exhausted strikers got to the hangar, the Spooks would have had time to wake up.
They were waking up already. A hundred-foot-wide segment of hangar door had been open when C41 appeared. It was closing now, rolling down from the building roof. “Don’t stop!” Abbado said, not that there was any likelihood Horgen had planned to.
Abbado hooked his left arm around the frame of the shattered windshield and sprayed a crackling burst from his stinger across the shadowed figures moving within the hangar. Two of them flopped to the ground; one sprang up again and limped out of sight behind his fellows.
The stinger’s coils accelerated 15-grain projectiles to 10,000 feet per second. The pellet wasn’t effective beyond 500 yards, but the strikers carried rockets to handle the occasional distant target. Stingers had the impact of a grenade on a target at short range. With thousand-round ammo packs containing both pellets and a fresh power supply, they were the weapon of choice for the sudden assaults in which C41 specialized.