The hatch rotated closed. The edge mated solidly with the coaming despite the fact that a Spook’s arm lay across it.
Abbado jumped. There’d been nearly a hundred Spooks in the hangar when the heavily-armed strikers entered. Now, seconds later, the only Kalendru still visible and moving were those who thrashed in their death throes.
Some Spooks hid beyond the corvette or behind pieces of equipment, but they weren’t an immediate concern. The ones still alive aboard the vessel were a real threat.
The corvette’s armory probably held enough small arms to outgun all the strikers in C41, but even that was a secondary danger. If the crew got the ship’s main battery in operation, it was Katy bar the door for the whole operation.
“Fire control!” Abbado said. The code phrase keyed his words to Lieutenant Whichard of Heavy Weapons Platoon. “Give me a rocket soonest, mark!”
He focused his eyes on the ship’s closed airlock and blinked twice. That highlighted the image his helmet was transmitting to Whichard and—Abbado prayed—to the sergeant of one of the rocket batteries. “Break, Three-three personnel take cover! Out.”
By this time all six heavy rockets might have been launched or destroyed by Spook counterfire. If there was a round left, Abbado couldn’t be sure it would bear on the target. At such short range the rockets didn’t have much room to maneuver between launch and impact.
The one certain thing was that 3-3 would get the support if it was possible. There wasn’t a more important target on the base. Nobody’d dreamed there was going to be a warship in the hangar. The planners might have scrubbed the whole operation if they’d known.
Abbado threw himself on the hangar floor and tugged a personal rocket from his bandolier. He twisted the base cap to extend it and arm the rocket. A 4-pound rocket was unlikely to do serious harm to a starship’s hull, but unless Whichard came through they were the best 3-3 had to go on.
A striker threw an electrical grenade into the cab of the travelling hoist above her. The sharp blast flung the operator out in a shower of glass. Both electrical and fuel-air grenades had specific advantages. Electricals offered fragmentation and higher peak impulse, but fuel-air provided incendiary effect and greater total impulse.
Abbado had heard arguments on the subject go on for hours, but the truth of it was that the choice was personal whim. Combat troops like to claim that their decisions are in some objective sense “right,” but they know in their hearts of hearts that they’ll probably die for no better reason than that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Three-three,” the squad channel warned in a voice that wasn’t Whichard’s. “Shot!”
The eight strikers within the huge hangar crouched in the best shelter they could find. Over the general chaos, Abbado heard the crack of a rocket igniting.
The hangar’s central door burst inward from the supersonic shockwave and the missile that detonated against the corvette’s airlock. The hangar roof billowed up from the joists. Sheared rivets rained onto the floor.
The rocketeers had set the fuzing circuit for point focus because the warship’s hull was too thick to be pierced by an omnidirectional blast. The pulse ruptured a cone of wire, forming the electrical equivalent of a chemical shaped charge. The shockwave forged a thin disk of uranium into a molten spear that struck like an asteroid.
The corvette rocked on its landing struts. The heavy-metal spike blew a hole big enough to pass a fully-equipped striker through the center of the hatch. The blast skidded Abbado three feet backward on the smooth floor, and his ears rang despite the cancellation pulse his helmet produced to save his hearing. He scrambled to his feet and ran for the opening, clasping the rocket in his left hand and the stinger in his right with the buttplate against his biceps.
It didn’t occur to Guilio Abbado to order his strikers to follow him. It wouldn’t have occurred to them to do anything else. If they hadn’t been that sort of people, they wouldn’t have been in C41.
Two strikers fired rockets through the opening before they charged. Glasebrook threw in a fuel-air grenade. That was useful for the purpose of clearing defenders from the corridors nearest the hatch, but the airlock focused the thumping explosion and knocked Abbado flat on his ass. By the time he got up, Horgen was into the ship ahead of him.