"Sir, I alerted my ready duty platoon as soon as Bateman reported the conveyors. They'll enter atmosphere in approximately—" she paused to consult her internal chronometer "—seventy-eight seconds."
"Good work, Brigadier. Very good work!" The shaft deposited them outside the planetoid's bridge, and Tattiaglia rubbed his mental hands in glee as he raced for the command hatch.
"Thank you, Sir."
Captain Tattiaglia arrived on his bridge just as Hofstader's assault shuttle entered atmosphere at eleven times the speed of sound. A corner of the command deck display altered silently, showing them what the shuttle pilot was seeing, and the captain dropped into his command couch with hungry eyes.
"Listen up, people," Lieutenant Prescott said as his shuttle hurtled downward. "We don't know these're terrorists, so we ground, watch 'em, and get ready to move if they are, but nobody does squat unless I say so. Got it?" A chorus of assents came back. "Good. Now, if they are bad guys, ONI wants prisoners. We take some of 'em alive if we can—everybody got that?"
The fresh affirmatives were a bit disappointed, but he had other things to worry about as the shuttle grounded to disgorge his Marines, then swooshed back into the heavens in stealth to give air support if it was needed. Prescott didn't even watch it go; he was already maneuvering his troops into the hastily chosen positions he'd selected on the way in.
Three big conveyors ghosted to a landing in a patch of woods, and forty heavily armed people filed out with military precision. The raiders moved quietly towards the floodlit grounds of the Shenandoah Valley Power Receptor, then split, diverging towards two different security gates.
The commander of one attack party studied a passive scanner as he neared the perimeter fence, hunting security systems their briefing might have missed, then stiffened. He whirled, and his jaw dropped as his eyes confirmed his instrument's findings.
Well, they sure as hell aren't picnickers, Prescott thought as his armor scanners confirmed the intruders' heavy load of weapons, and— Oh shit! So much for surprise!
"Take 'em!"
The terrorist leader saw the armored shapes and tried to scream a warning, but a burst of fire splattered him across his troops halfway through the first syllable.
His followers gaped at the Marines, but they had weapons of their own and two of them were fully enhanced, and a Marine blew apart as the night exploded in a vicious firefight. An energy gun killed a second trooper, the whiplash of grav gun darts crackled everywhere, and a third Marine went down—wounded, not dead—but the Marines had combat armor, and the terrorists didn't.
Forty-one seconds after the first shot, three Marines were dead and five were wounded; none of the four terrorist survivors was unhurt.
Prescott waved his medics towards the casualties, then turned as the parked conveyors screamed upwards. They were still climbing frantically when Lancelot's assault shuttle blew them apart from stealth.
Funny, I could've sworn I told Owens to challenge 'em before she shot. Prescott ran back over his conversation with his pilot. Oops, guess not.
"Friend," Fleet Lieutenant Esther Steinberg said, "I don't really care whether you talk to me or not. We've got three of your buddies, too, and one of you is going to tell me what I want to know."
"Never!" The young man cuffed to the chair under the lie detector looked far less defiant than he tried to sound. "None of us have anything to say to servants of the Anti-Christ!"
You're talking too much, friend. Got a little case of nerves here, do we? Good. Sweat, you bastard!
"Think not?" She crossed her arms. "Let me explain something. We caught you in the act, and you killed three Fleet Marines. Know what that means?" Her prisoner stared at her, sullen eyes frightened, and she smiled. "That means there's not gonna be any fooling around. You're gonna be tried and convicted so fast your head swims." The young man swallowed audibly. "I don't imagine your mama and papa'll be real pleased to see their itty-bitty son shot—and they will, 'cause every data channel's gonna carry it live. I'd guess you've seen one or two people catch it with grav guns, haven't you? Kinda messy, isn't it? I figure a half second burst ought to just about saw you in two, friend. Think your folks'll like that?"
"You bitch!" the prisoner screamed, and she smiled again—coldly.
"Sticks and stones, friend. Sticks and stones. I'll make sure I've got some spare time to watch, too."
"You—you—!" The prisoner writhed against his restraints, wounds forgotten, eyes mad, and Steinberg's laugh was a douche of ice-water.
"You seem a mite upset, friend. Too bad." She turned towards the hatch, then paused, listening to his incoherent, terrified rage and gauging his mood. This boy's just about ripe.
"Just one thing." He froze, glaring at her. "Talk to me, and ONI'll recommend leniency. You still won't like what happens, but you'll be alive." She smiled like a shark. "Only catch is, we only make the deal with one of you—and you've got ten seconds to decide if you're the lucky one."
"That," Fleet Captain Reynaud observed, "is one nasty lieutenant."
"She is, indeed," Tattiaglia murmured, watching the holo of the "interview" with his exec as the terrorist began to spill his guts, then glanced up at the captain from ONI. "I'm not going to shed any tears for the prisoners, but will any of this stand up in court?"
"Not in a civilian court, but it won't have to. His Majesty's invoked the Defense of the Imperium Act, and that gives military courts jurisdiction over prisoners captured by the military. Besides," the captain's grin was as sharklike as his lieutenant's, "we don't need any of it. Your boys and girls caught these jokers with enough physical evidence to shoot them all."
"Then what's the point?"
"The point, Captain Tattiaglia," the ONI officer said, switching off the holo and turning to Lancelot's CO, "is that I've got another little job for you. Among the other tidbits our gallant fanatic let slip is the location of his own cell's HQ—and Esther set a new personal record breaking that little prick. If we get a move on, we can hit them before they figure out their raiders aren't coming back."
"You mean—?"
"I mean, Captain, that twenty more terrorists are just sitting there waiting for you to drop a few Marines down their chimney."
"Oh boy," Tattiaglia whispered. "Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! Now I know there's a God."
Fleet Admiral MacMahan's smile was wolfish as she studied the report. That Lieutenant Steinberg is one sharp cookie. Have to do something nice for her in the next promotion list. And Tattiaglia's people deserve one hell of a pat on the back, too.
She finished the report with a sigh of satisfaction. Nice. Very nice. Jefferson's people swat an assassination attempt Tuesday, and we pick off an entire cell Thursday. Not a good week for the Sword of God.
Of course, it hadn't gotten them any closer to Mister X, but she wasn't complaining. She punched up the holo record of the terrorist hideout and studied it. Steinberg had accompanied the Marines in and gotten every bit of the raid and its aftermath for her report, and Ninhursag whistled at the size of the terrorists' arsenal. There was a lot of Imperial weaponry in it, and she made a mental note to ask about the serial numbers. They hadn't had a lot of luck in that regard from Jefferson's occasional successes, but they had a lot more hardware this time, and all they really needed was one hard lead.