The air was tight and oxygen-depleted, but much of the smoke from the wrecked cutter was being vented up through the wide landing shaft. Not the best conditions in which to fight a battle, but who ever got to fight a battle in ideal conditions?

And Valerian was willing to risk some respiratory difficulty to actually see the men he was going to have to kill.

He wiped a hand over his face, trying to keep his breaths shallow, and blinked regularly to keep his eyes moist. He could just about make out the echoing sound of gunshots and wandered where they were coming from. Had his grandfather and Charles managed to get his mother to safety while his father's marines fought back? Or was he hearing echoes of shots being fired execution style, like those that had ended the life of his father's parents and sister?

The thought that his mother was in real danger almost sent him running back along the corridor, but he forced himself to remain where he was. Allowing emotion to rule his actions would only get him killed and that would do no one any good, least of all himself.

He glanced up toward the cutter. What was taking so long?

Was the comm unit broken? Was his father even now trying to repair it?

How long had passed anyway?

Valerian found he couldn't even begin to guess how long it had been since the attack began. It felt as though several hours had elapsed, but he suspected that it was one at best. The elasticity of time in a combat situation was something he'd read about, but had never expected to experience firsthand.

He felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise and looked over to where Master Miyamoto crouched. His farmer tutor was staring at him, jabbing a finger down the corridor, and Valerian fell his mouth go dry as he heard the clatter of boots and the bark of shouted orders.

This was it. The enemy he'd run from all his life was finally here. But this time Valerian Mengsk wasn't running. This time he was fighting.

He shouldered his gauss rifle and licked his lips as he saw shadows moving through the ruptured aperture of the blast door. Risking a quick glance back at the cutter, he silently willed his father to get a damn move on.

A pair of Confederate marines ducked around the edge of the torn doorway. Master Miyamoto rose from cover and opened fire, a meter-long tongue of fire blasting from the muzzle of his weapon. The first marine dropped, Master Miyamoto's expertly aimed fire punching unerringly through his visor and filling the inside of his helmet with iron spikes.

Valerian pulled the trigger, working his fire over the second marine. The recoil of the gauss rifle was fearsome, designed to be absorbed by a powered combat suit, which Valerian conspicuously wasn't wearing. The roar of the weapon was deafening, but Valerian kept the rifle on target, knowing that his target's armor would defeat all but the most concentrated clusters of impacts.

The man fell as the three soldiers opened up as well, the additional weight of their firepower tearing through the marine's armor and spraying the wall behind him with blood. Valerian ducked back into cover as return fire sawed through the doorway. Impaler shots rattled from the metal around him and he flinched as a ricochet sliced across his arm.

He heard shouts and rose once more, sending a blast of fire toward the doorway.

Shots filled the air, smacking from the debris and rock walls as the enemy marines laid down a curtain of suppressive tire. Valerian heard something skitter across the ground and his heart leapt into his mouth as he saw a gently wobbling oval disc come to rest no more than a few feet from him.

Without thinking, he dropped to one knee and scooped up the grenade, lobbing it back the way it had come. It exploded an instant later, the noise agonizingly loud and the wave of overpressure swatting him onto his back. He scrambled to his knees, coughing and trying to force the air to return to his lungs.

Valerian heard screams and cries for medics, sounding tinny and impossibly distant. He felt warm wetness in his ears and reached up, his fingers coming away bloody. A greasy fog bank of acrid smoke swirled upward from the grenade's detonation. Valerian felt around for his rifle, only now realizing it had been snatched from his grip by the blast.

More blasts of gunfire sounded, but he couldn't tell who was shooting.

He found his rifle and swept it up. The top portion of the barricade he'd been sheltering behind had been torn away by the explosive force of the detonation. Valerian realized if he'd stood to throw the grenade back, his upper body would have been vaporized.

Perhaps seven marines were lying screaming on the ground, ripped open and their guts spilled out over the floor. Fragments of armor and ruptured body parts littered the ground, but it was impossible to tell exactly how many men had died. Shouting marines tried to drag their wounded comrades to safety, but Valerian and Miyamoto gave them no respite, cutting them down in a deadly crossfire.

Valerian experienced a surge of exhilaration and fell the urge to laugh well up within him with almost uncontrollable force. Amid all this killing and death, the sensation was ludicrous, and he suddenly realized how ridiculous this notion of battle was. Men who had never met were trying to kill one another.

Valerian knew why he was fighting: to protect his loved ones and save his own life.

But these marines? What were thеу fighting for?

A fallen regime that had lied to them and probably erased the truth of their own lives with invasive brain surgery.

That was no reason to die, yet here they were, fighting a battle to the death.

As he was contemplating such weighty thoughts, a trio of grenades arced into the chamber. Valerian saw them coming and dropped, cursing at his stupidity. The middle of battle was no place to meditate on the absurdity of war, yet it had seemed the most natural thing in the world at the lime.

Strange what the mind will do in times of stress, he thought.

Clearly the marines had learned their lesson and the grenades exploded almost as soon as they landed. Grenades explode up and out, so Valerian pressed his face to the floor as the enormous force of the blast roared over him.

Two of his father's soldiers vanished in a seething orange fireball and the gun culler lurched dangerously as the blast's shock wave dislodged the rubble holding it in place. More choking clouds of smoke billowed upward, and Valerian knew their defiance was at an end.

He heard the sound of charging marines and the ripping-cloth sound of sustained gauss fire. Impaler spikes zinged from sheet metal and neosteel armor plates and the last of his father's soldiers cried out in pain as he was brought down.

Valerian coughed and rolled to his feet. He'd hung on to his rifle this time and, though he knew it was futile, aimed it toward the marines assaulting their position.

A continuous roaring howl, like the thunder of the mightiest storm front, filled the enclosed landing platform chamber. Valerian dropped to his knees with his hands pressed against his ears at the overwhelming, unbelievable volume.

The marines in front of Valerian disintegrated in a storm of blazing light, chewed up by hypervelocity slugs and exploding like wet, red sacks of meat. He looked up to see the dorsal-mounted cannon turret of the gun cutter spewing shells from its quad-barreled weapon mount. Armor and bone and flesh vaporized under the holocaust of cannon fire. The sheer killing power of the guns at such close range was utterly terrifying.

Valerian could just make out his father sitting behind the weapon, working its fire over their attackers in merciless arcs. Even as he watched, sparks and ricochets hammered the upper fuselage of the cutter, and Valerian looked up to see half a dozen marines firing down into the landing platform's shaft from above.