Yet all four of them stood their ground, pouring their futile fire back down the passageway, and then one of the armored attackers raised a grenade launcher. The launcher steadied, and the last thing Citizen Chairman Rob Pierre ever saw was the way the StateSec citizen sergeant flew backwards as the grenade impacted directly on his chest before it detonated.

The shrill sound of the alarm took Tsakakis completely by surprise.

For a moment, he didn’t even recognize which one it was, but then he saw the flashing light on his com panel, and his heart seemed to stop. Sheer disbelief held him paralyzed for perhaps two breaths, and then the heel of his hand slammed down on the outside line’s acceptance button.

“They’re coming right over us! We never saw them on the way in, and—”

Explosions and the sound of weapons fire formed a hideous backdrop for the desperate voice, and then a final, louder explosion chopped it off with dreadful finality, and Mikis Tsakakis went white. He hadn’t recognized the frantic voice, but he was certain he’d known the speaker. He knew every member of the Citizen Chairman’s personal security detail.

His brain seemed to be frozen by the sheer impossibility of what must have happened. Thought was momentarily beyond him, but training substituted for it. His left hand hit his own alarm key as if it belonged to someone else, and his right hand had already drawn his pulser before he was even fully out of his chair.

The strident howl of the alarms was almost enough to drown out the thunderous roar of chemical explosives as the passengers from the unmarked civilian van triggered their breaching charges.

Major Gricou led the way through the shattered security door. Properly, she knew, she should have let Sergeant Jackson take point, but that was a lesson she’d always had just a little bit of difficulty learning. Besides, in this situation out in front was where she needed to be, so Jackson could just keep himself busy watching her back.

The sudden clangor of alarms had taken her by surprise, but only for a moment, and she congratulated herself on her timing. She knew what had to have alerted whoever had sounded them. It couldn’t have been the detection of her own team, because not even StateSec was stupid enough to warn a hostile assault force by setting off alarms all over the frigging building before their response teams were in position to strike. Which meant something else must have caused it, and she knew what that something else had to be. But although the news that someone had attacked Pierre was bound to throw SS HQ into a tizzy and send their security personnel to a higher state of alert, there wouldn’t be enough time for it to do them any good. In fact, the confusion which rumor and counter-rumor must inevitably engender would actually help her.

She couldn’t expect that confusion to last for long. Whatever she might think of StateSec’s morals, its personnel were too well trained for that. But for at least the next few minutes, all the training in the world wouldn’t be enough to offset the sheer stunning surprise of the discovery that a coup attempt was underway. And while the surprise lasted…

She stepped through the breach, turned to her left, and sent a screaming pattern of death howling down the corridor from her flechette gun. The SS file clerk who’d stood gawking at the night-black troll emerging from the cloud of dust and rubble didn’t even have time to scream.

Tsakakis’ team members reacted almost as quickly as he had. They were already opening the special wall lockers for the heavy weapons stored in them and assembling in the secretary’s outer office by the time he made it out of the surveillance room. But just like him, their reaction was one of trained reflex and guard dog instinct which scarcely consulted their forebrains at all. They had no idea at all what was happening.

“Someone just attacked Citizen Chairman Pierre!” he barked, and saw his own shock in their expressions. “I don’t know what’s happening at that end,” he went on tersely, “but it didn’t sound good. And if this is some kind of coup attempt, the Citizen Secretary has to be on the same list, so—”

The office door flew open, and half a dozen weapons swung towards it. The uniformed citizen sergeant who’d opened it flung out his hands to show they were empty just in time, but he scarcely seemed to notice that he had just come within a few grams of trigger pressure of dying.

“They’re coming up from the garage!” he gasped. “Don’t know how many. They blew their way in. At least a dozen of them—in battle armor! Not more than one level away!”

The door to Saint-Just’s inner office opened, and the citizen secretary stood in the opening, a long-barreled military style pulser in his right hand, but Tsakakis barely glanced at him.

“John! You and Hannah are right here on the Citizen Secretary. Al, you, Steve, and Mariano take the lift shafts. I want Isabela and Janos on the emergency stairs. Nobody gets through without my personal authorization—is that clear?”

Heads nodded, and taut-faced bodyguards dashed for their assigned positions.

“What about me, Sir?” the citizen sergeant demanded.

“If they’re in battle armor, you need a bigger gun, Sarge,” Tsakakis told him with a grim smile, and reached back into the locker for a plasma carbine. “You checked out on this thing?”

“Not in the last nine or ten months, Sir. But I guess it’ll come back to me in a hurry, won’t it?”

“It better, Sarge. It damned well better.”

* * *

Gricou forged ahead down the hallway. Somehow, Jackson had managed to get in front of her anyway, and her armor audio pickups brought her the whining thunder of the sergeant’s flechette gun as he spun to fire a short, professional burst down a cross corridor.

A thin haze of smoke eddied down the hall, and she heard the sound of small arms fire from behind, as well. So far there was nothing dangerous behind her, but she didn’t begin to have enough people to hold open a line of retreat to the parking garage, so she wasn’t trying to. Her rearguard’s job was just to keep the lightly armed regular security types off her back until she got her hands on Saint-Just. Once they had him, they’d have the only door key they needed. But if they didn’t get him…

She checked her HUD schematic again, and grunted in satisfaction. Less than three minutes since they’d detonated the breaching charges, and they were only one floor below their objective.

Ahead of her, Jackson charged the lift doors. A stream of pulser darts cascaded off his battle armor, but he turned straight into them and triggered his flechette gun. Someone shrieked in agony, and the pulser fire chopped off abruptly. The sergeant started to punch the lift button, but Gricou’s sharply barked command stopped him.

“We’re taking the direct route!” she told him, and beckoned for Corporal Taylor and her demolition charges.

Tsakakis checked the charge on his plasma rifle again, and then scrubbed sweat from his forehead. Was he making the right call? Or was his decision to fort up the worst one he could have made? It had been automatic, made without any true consideration at the conscious level, but that didn’t necessarily make it wrong.

One set of instincts screamed at him to get the citizen secretary the hell out of here. No one seemed to have a clue about what was truly happening, and the earbug of his personal com brought him only confusion and panic while State Security’s duty personnel tried frantically to somehow bring order out of chaos. The only things he knew for certain were that someone had attacked the head of state and that other attackers were actually here, inside the building. That should have made putting distance between them and his charge his number one priority. But he didn’t know where else there might be attackers, and he did know that there was nowhere else on the planet where there were more StateSec reinforcements than right here in this building. All he had to do was keep Oscar Saint-Just alive until those reinforcements could arrive.