“Down!'” Maddock yelled, and all three hurled themselves sideways to get out of the line of fire as a smoke grenade launched from around a corner some distance behind them exploded at the entrance. Fire from the entranceway raked the area as the D Company squad broke cover and rushed forward through the smoke, hut the first of them was still twenty feet away when the steel door slammed down and alarms began sounding throughout the Government Center. –
Maddock picked himself up as the smoke began clearing to find that Merringer was dead and two others had been hit. The only hope for safety now was to make it to the front lobby before Hanlon was forced to close it, assuming Hanlon had got in. “Go first with four men,”
he shouted at Harding. “Fire at any SD’s who get in the way. They know we’re here now.” He turned to the others. “Grab those two and stick with me. You two, stay with Crosby and cover the rear. Okay, let’s get the hell out.”
But SD’s were already pouring out of the guardroom behind the main doors of the Government Center and racing along the corridor toward the communications facility while civilians flattened themselves against the walls to get out of the way, and others who had been working late peered from their offices to see what was happening. The engineer iii coveralls who had been working inconspicuously at an opened switchbox through an access panel in the floor closed a circuit, and a reinforced fire-door halfway along the corridor – closed itself in the path of the oncoming SD’s. The SD major leading the detachment stared numbly at it for a few seconds while his men came to a confused halt around him. “Back to the front stairs,” he shouted. “Go up to Level Three, and come down on the other side.”
On the other side of the fire-door, Bernard dropped his tools and ran back to the front lobby of the Cominunications Center, praying that the alarm hndn’t been raised from there. Hanlon and Stanislau were waiting outside the entrance with a handful of the others. Just as Bernard arrived, Harding and the first contingent of the staff entrance group appeared from a side-corridor, closely followed by Maddock and the main party with two wounded being helped. Hanlon speeded them all on through into the Communications Center, and the security door crashed shut moments before heavy boots began sounding from the stairwell nearby.
Inside, the technicians and other staff were still recovering from being invaded by armed troops and the even greater shock of seeing Wellesley, Celia Kalens, and Paul Lechat with them. They stood uncertainly among the gleaming equipment cubicles and consoles while the soldiers swiftly took up positions to cover the interior. Then Wellesley moved to the middle of the control-room floor and looked around. “Who is in charge here?” he demanded. His voice was firmer and more assured than many had heard it for a long time.
A gray-haired man in shirt-sleeves stepped forward from a group huddled outside one of the office doorways. “I am,” he said, “McPherson-Communications and Datacenter Manager.” After a short. pause he added, “At your disposal.”
Wellesley acknowledged with a nod and gestured toward
Lechat. “Speed is essential,” Lechat said without preamble…–‘~ “We require access to all channels on the civil, service, military, and emergency networks immediately.
The Battle Module was a mile-long concentration of megadeath and mass destruction that sat on a base formed by the blunt nose of the Spindle, straddled by two pillars that extended forward to support the ramscoop cone and its field generators, and which contained the ducts to carry back to the midships processing reactors the hydrogen force-fed out of space when the ship was – at ramspeed. Sleek, stark, – menacing, and bristling with missile pods, defensive radiation projectors, and ports for deploying orbital and remote-operating weapons systems, it contained all of the Mayflower II’s strategic armaments, and could detach if need be to function as an independent, fully self-contained warship.
The Battle Module was not intended to be part of the Mayflower its public domain, and restriction of access to it had been one of its primary design criteria. Personnel and supplies entered the module via four enormous tubular extensions, known as feeder ramps, that telescoped from the main body of the ship to terminate in cupolas mating with external ports in the Battle Module, two forward and two aft its midships section. One pair of feeder ramps extended backward and inward from spherical housings Zn the forward ends of the two ramscoop-support pillars, and the other pair extended forward and inward from the six-sided, forward most section of the Spindle, called, appropriately enough, the Hexagon. As if having to get through the feeder ramps wasn’t problem enough, the transit tubes, freight handling conveyors, ammunition rails, and other lines running through to them from the Spindle all came together at a single, heavily protected lock to pass through an armored bulkhead inside the Hexagon. Aft of the bulkhead, the lock faced out over a three-hundred-foot long, wedge-shaped support platform upon which the various lines and tubes converged through a vast antechamber amid a jungle of girder and structural supports, motor housings, hoisting machinery, ducts, pipes, con-