The only redeeming factor was that Angelica would probably be dead even before him.
“Tango Flight, execute!” Tango One Lead barked.
“Here they come, Ma’am.”
Esther McQueen’s raised hand interrupted the latest report from Lieutenant Caminetti, and she turned quickly to the huge main plot at Captain Rubin’s announcement.
Normally, that plot was used to display the locations and status of every unit of the vast web of fortifications and fleet units stationed to protect the Haven System from any foreign attack. Now it showed something which very few of the people in the War Room had ever seen on it, even in drills: a detailed holographic map of the City of Nouveau Paris and a hundred-kilometer radius around it. The map was scabrous with the red blotches of identified threats and a thinner scattering of green friendly units, and she felt a familiar stab of tight-mouthed tension as a deadly cluster of tiny crimson arrowheads appeared upon it.
Her trained gaze identified each of the plot’s icons as readily as someone else might have read a newsfax, and her eyes narrowed.
“Those poor bastards.”
She glanced to her right at the soft regretful murmur, and Ivan Bukato shook his head as her eyes met his.
“We have lock,” someone announced, and McQueen turned her attention back to the plot as sighting circles reached out to entrap the arrowheads.
“They must know they don’t have a prayer,” Bukato said quietly, and she shrugged.
“Of course they don’t,” she agreed absently. “And whoever ordered them in knows it, too. But she might be wrong, so she’s spending them to find out for sure whether or not we managed to secure the grid before some StateSec loyalist could disable it. Or possibly in an effort to distract us from something else.”
Bukato’s eyes flicked once from the plot to the unyielding, almost serene profile of the diminutive woman beside him, and then he returned them to the display with a tiny shiver.
An angry war god smashed his palms together, and the mangled wreckage of a pinnace spewed itself across the smoke-tinged blue skies of Nouveau Paris.
It was not alone. The battle steel hatches of massively armored ground emplacements flicked open like striking serpents, and mass-drivers hurled anti-air missiles out of them at four times the speed of sound. The missiles’ impeller wedges flashed to life as soon as they cleared their launchers, and they howled in on their targets like vengeful demons. The pinnaces leading Oscar Saint-Just’s airstrike never had a chance, and then it was the sting ships’ turn.
The transatmospheric craft had come in high, but the pure air-breathers lacked both their ceiling and their speed. The best that they could manage was little more than mach three, but they compensated by coming in in terrain-riding mode. They shrieked in barely two hundred meters above the ground, weaving their ways between the ceramacrete mesas of the People’s Republic’s capital city’s administrative and residential towers, and fresh missiles streaked to meet them.
Not impeller wedge missiles this time, because hardwired software imperatives made it impossible for the defense grid to fire such weapons at any targets at less than five hundred meters’ altitude. A hit by one of those weapons on any tower would inflict catastrophic damage, and so, as if in some bizarre effort to level the playing field, the slower and lower sting ships could be engaged only with less capable old-fashioned reaction drive missiles.
But if the field had been leveled slightly, it remained uncompromisingly tilted in the defense grid’s favor. The system’s designers might have denied the grid the use of impeller wedge missiles, but it had scores of launch stations, and at least ten missiles targeted each of the incoming attackers.
It wasn’t a battle. It wasn’t even a massacre. Not one of the attackers survived to reach its own launch range of the Octagon, and fireballs and explosions rocked the heart of Nouveau Paris as bits and pieces of men and women and once sleek attack craft thundered down from the heavens.
“My God,” someone blurted. “Assault shuttles?”
McQueen didn’t even turn her head to see to it was. It didn’t matter, and even if it had, she could not have taken her eyes from the plot as a fresh wave of icons appeared. There were dozens of them, each a StateSec assault shuttle with up to two hundred fifty men and women aboard, and they streaked straight towards the Octagon as if their pilots actually believed that the sacrifice of the sting ships might have somehow distracted the tracking systems from their own approach. She watched them come, and an ancient phrase out of the history of Old Earth whispered in the back of her brain.
“C’est magnifque, mais ce n’est pas la guerre,” she said very softly.
“Dear God in Heaven.”
Oscar Saint-Just didn’t even turn his head, and his stonelike expression never wavered. He felt certain that the staffer didn’t realize that he’d whispered his half-prayer aloud. But even if the man had, and even if he’d been foolish enough to mean it as a criticism of Saint-Just as the man who had ordered the mission, the citizen secretary would have chosen, just this once, to ignore it.
His eyes never flickered as he watched the icons of the troop-laden second-wave assault shuttles streak into the teeth of the Octagon’s defensive fire. They came in at just over mach three, but they had come in higher than the sting ships had, and the impeller wedge missiles slashed into them with lethal efficiency. They had better ECM than the sting ships, but nowhere near enough of it to make any real difference, and the missiles ripped them apart effortlessly. Only two of them got close enough for the energy weapons on the Octagon’s roof to engage them directly.
The last assault shuttle went down, taking its embarked company of StateSec ground force troopers with it, and the silence in Saint-Just’s office could have been chipped with a knife. The SS commander watched the displays tally the horrendous casualty numbers with an unyielding basilisk gaze, then gave a tiny shrug.
I had to try. Badly as it turned out, my other options were even worse. And now, bad as they are, they’re all I have left.
He inhaled, and turned away from the displays to seat himself once more behind his desk.
“And now Citizen Secretary Saint-Just knows for certain who controls the grid,” Esther McQueen murmured softly, turning from the main plot to survey the direct view screens. Fires and secondary explosions filled them, and for all the serenity of her tone, her eyes were cold. “I do hope that whoever passed on the order for this attack survives to be captured,” she went on in a nearly conversational voice.
“I’d like to… discuss his choice of tactics with him myself, Ma’am,” Bukato agreed.
“I agree that they never had a chance of breaking through, Ma’am,” Captain Rubin said respectfully, “but as you yourself pointed out, I don’t see that they had any real choice but to try.”
“I realize that, Captain,” McQueen said after a moment. “But it was a forlorn hope from the beginning, and whoever actually ordered those shuttles in should have realized that the instant we mowed down the sting ships. And if she did, and if she’d had an ounce of moral courage, she would have told Saint-Just that sending those shuttles into the same defenses was nothing but an act of murder. It never had any real chance of succeeding as a serious attack, and if it was only a probe, he’d already drawn the response that should have told him everything he needed to know with just the sting ships. There was absolutely no point in taking the additional casualties.”