Lysander stood. “I don’t suppose I can be much help with that. Cornet Talkins, please go to St. Thomas’s. It won’t be any picnic. I’m afraid the hospital is going to end up as part of the defense system.”
* * *
“The next push with their armor may get through,” Lysander said bluntly, to the officers grouped around them. “We’re sopping up their infantry, us and the Citizens, but we’ve got to get more antitank teams out there—”
It had been only five hours since the attack began. Five hours. God. He could hear his own words as he briefed his men, but somewhere beneath it was running a stream of memory, smashed buildings and men gaping in death around burning iron. Only five hours and we’re already back to Government House Square. The St. Thomas Hospital had been the only building suitable for a redoubt.
“Sir, rebels, they’re in the main ventilation shafts on level four!”
Lysander jerked his head up from the map. “Bloody hell! Come on—not you, just the riflemen.”
The machine gunner at the window nodded, tapping off another expert short burst at the shadowy figures darting between the burning cars in the lot below. God Damn. The CoDo Marines were not cooperating with the Helots deliberately, but the effect could be the same.
Lysander led the way out of the orderly room they had taken over as tactical HQ at a pounding run. Wounded men and the sick evacuated from the lower levels looked up at him as he passed, slalomed off the wall at the axial corridor with the rifle squad at his heels. This was level four; his redoubt. And Melissa’s room was quite close to where the main airshaft branched off from the service core.
“There!” he shouted.
There was movement behind the grillwork screen, across from her door. He fired from the hip as he ran, walking the bullets up the wall and into the meter-square grille. More movement, a jerk. A flash of white light, and suddenly he was lying against the door and the door was open, and Melissa was looking at him. Smiling. Then horrified, and beginning to struggle out of bed. She had a pistol in one hand, and a book in the other. Some distant part of him recognized it; the Church of Sparta Book of Hours.
“No, stay there, darling, please.”
“Bastards,” he wheezed, levering himself over so that he faced the corridor. The door swung shut behind him. Thin, no protection.
Pain stabbed into his ribs, making him cough. That was a mistake, because white light ran behind his eyelids and the world rocked, and vomiting would really be a mistake if his ribs were in the state he thought they were. Already in hospital, nothing I can do.
“Bastards,” he gritted again, and used the rifle to climb to his knees. “Bastards!” The men who had followed him here were down, moving or still but down. An arm dangled out of the black hole up near the roof where the screen had been, shredded and dripping, a head and shoulders and too many teeth showing where blast had ripped the skin and muscle off a skull like a glove off a hand. The body jerked and trembled. Not alive. Moving. More of them in the shaft.
Lysander slumped against the wall, ignoring the gratings under his chest. The armor would hold it for a while. He clamped the rifle between his side and his arm, brought up the wavering muzzle.
“Bastards!”
Bang and ptank as a bullet slammed through the thin lath and thinner metal behind it, the aluminum airshaft itself. Hollow booming as something big thrashed around in that strait space, and the hole began to leak red down the gray-white plaster of the hospital wall.
“Bastards!”
Another shot, another, recoil hammering into his side, spacing them down the length of the corridor, the length of the hidden shaft. Someone came up behind him, another rifleman, firing with him, slow and deliberate. Then a thunderclap; fire shot out around the body stuck in the hole like a cork in a bottle, and plaster showered down as the metal ballooned. Harv came trotting down the corridor reloading his grenade launcher, calling over his shoulder for stretcher-bearers.
Lysander looked to see who his companion was. “Well, Cornet Talkins. I think you’ve earned another favor. Now do me one. Stay with Melissa.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Harv brought the medics up. “Lady, I sure thank you,” he said. “It was supposed to be me with the Prince, and—” He gestured to the medics.
“I can stand,” Lysander gritted. “I can’t sprint but I can command. Get me up. Back to the war room. Now.”
* * *
Centrifugal force kept the outer rim of the space station at .9 gee, which was comfortable compared to Sparta. Everyone knew that high gravity was much better for your health, people in high gravity planets lived longer due to the increased exercise, but .9 gee was still a relief. Sergeant Wallace and the 77th Captain whose name Boris Karantov couldn’t remember had remarked on it. They’d talked about many things in an attempt to be pleasant, and to take Karantov’s mind off the fact that he was a prisoner in his own office.
After a while they turned on the television screens. They showed the battles in Sparta City from the view of the Marines of the 77th. The battle wasn’t going smoothly. In five hours they’d made a wreck of part of the city but they hadn’t stopped the city resistance at all. And now there were other scenes, of rebels attacking the citizens although they carefully avoided fighting any units of the 77th.
Boris Karantov watched the battle with horror. He maintained a chilly silence until the Marine lieutenant had left the room. Then he spoke to the polite Line Marine sergeant. “Sergeant Wallace, good men are being killed down there. Your comrades, Legionnaires, Spartans. And you are illegally detaining legitimate CoDominium authorities who could end this madness.”
The Line Marine sergeant didn’t like his situation at all. “Sir, the Captain told me—”
“Sergeant, do you deny that I am senior CoDominium Marine officer in this system?”
“No, sir.”
“Then forget your captain. I am giving you orders: assist me in regaining control of this station.”
“Colonel, I can’t do that—”
“Sergeant, you will do that. Or shoot me now. If you disobey this order and I am alive when this is over, Sergeant Wallace, I will have you hanged in low gravity, and the last thing you will see will be recordings of that.” He pointed at the screens. “Or do you tell me you join military services to accomplish that?”
“Jesus, Colonel, all I know is they tell me—” He lowered his voice. “Colonel, the story is you’re all Lermontov people, and Lermontov is out. Arrested. Admiral Townsend is in charge now.”
“And you believe Fleet will go over to Townsend, which is to say, Bronson?”
“God damn, Colonel, we don’t know jack shit about politics, I know I got my orders.”
“Which are rescinded,” a voice said from behind him. “Sergeant, if you reach for that weapon I will cheerfully cut your throat. Colonel, if you’ll relieve him of that sidearm—there. Thank you.”
“Thank you. Now who are you?” Karantov demanded.
“Master Sergeant Hiram Laramie, SAS, Falkenberg’s Legion, at your service, Colonel. When we couldn’t raise communications, Colonel Owensford sent us up to have a look.”
“How the fuck did you get here?” Sergeant Wallace demanded.
“I confess curiosity myself,” Karantov said.
“Navy helped,” Laramie said. “They was getting worried they couldn’t reach Captain Newell or any of their own officers, sir, so they was glad to help us come take a look. Lieutenant Deighton’s looking to help Captain Newell, sir.”
“What have you done with the others of the 77th?”
“Got ’em handcuffed outside,” Laramie said. “Sergeant Wallace, if you’ll put your hands behind you—careful, now, and nobody gets hurt. Thank you. Colonel, General Owensford would like mightily to speak with you. Shall I get him for you?”
“Yes, please, Sergeant. And please to find out status of Fleet Captain Newell, if you will . . .”
* * *
Marine Captain Saunders Laubenthal slid up behind the windowsill and looked out onto the street outside. The dead from the last Spartan counterattack littered it; many were down below, where his men had had to clear them out with grenades.
We took the street, he thought bitterly. And now there’s another bloody street to take.
“Irony,” he muttered to himself.
“Sir?” Sandeli said.
The black was the senior sergeant now, and second-in-command of the company since Lieutenant Cernkov had been carried back to the enclave and the regeneration stimulators. The unit had taken twenty percent casualties in the night’s fighting.
“I was planning to retire here,” Laubenthal said absently. “Gods, if these are militia we’re fighting, I’d hate to see their best. They just don’t give up.”