The position wasn't perfect, but it was the best Martin could expect to find, and it wasn't as if they had to worry about target identification. The harlot was Harrington's Steadholder, all other traffic in and out of HSF had been shut down for fifteen minutes on either side of her arrival as a security measure, and they knew the bearing from which her pinnace would approach.

The ex-sergeant went down on one knee in the dense, black shadow of the parked air lorry, pistol in hand, and scanned the field nervously while Taylor unpacked the missile and attached the sighting unit to the launcher.

Senior Corporal Anthony Whitehead, HSG, was in a hurry. All the scurrying about to prepare for the Steadholder's arrival had delayed him, and he was over fifteen minutes late for the gate change. He had no doubt Armsman Sully wondered where the hell he was, and he couldn't blame the kid.

He half-jogged around the last bend, the better to show Sully that even NCOs were aware of their obligations, then slowed to a halt, and his sympathy disappeared into instant anger. Damn it to hell, where was he? Just because a man's relief was a little late was no reason to go dashing off and leave his post unguarded! When he got his hands on that young twerp, he'd...

His mental tirade broke off as his cognitive processes caught up with his instant anger. Frederick Sully was no "twerp." Young, yes, but well trained and sharp. He'd made Afc in record time, and Whitehead and his platoon sergeant had their eyes on him for further promotion. There was no way Sully would just wander off with the entire facility on a heightened alert level. Feelings were running high, and the Steadholder's armsmen had no intention of taking chances with her life.

But if he hadn't wandered, then...

The corporal snatched out his com.

"Security alert! This is Corporal Whitehead at Gate Five! I've just arrived on-site, and there's no sign of the sentry!" Something poked at his mind, and he scowled, then swore as something he'd seen without seeing it flashed through his brain. "Central, Whitehead. There's an HSG air car parked out here on the hangar apron, Bay Seven-Niner-Three. Was that cleared?"

His answer was the sudden, strident howl of security alarms throughout the facility.

"Sweet Tester!" Taylor gasped as sirens began to scream, and Martin bit back a matching expletive as he remembered what the dead guard had said. It was lonely, "but my re..." His relief, of course!

"W-What do we d-do, Ed?" Taylor stuttered, and the ex-sergeant gave him a steady look.

"We do God's work," he said quietly through the alarms' howl, "and if it's His will that we escape alive, we do that, too. Arm your launcher."

Master Chief Coxswain Gilbert Troubridge was Navy, not a member of the Harrington Guard, but the GSN did not encourage its pilots to take chances with the safety of flag officers. More to the point, Troubridge was as aware as anyone of the high state of tension on the planet, and his com was tied into both the HSF and HSG nets.

"Security alert?" He turned in his seat to glare at the com tech. "What kind of security alert, damn it?"

"I don't know, Gil," the rating replied tautly. "Some HSG corporal just came up on the air. Something about an unguarded gate."

"Shit!" The pinnace was already on final. If he had to abort, his counter-grav could take him up like a homesick meteor, but with no more information than he had, he couldn't know if that was necessary. Or, for that matter, a good idea.

Master Chief Troubridge made a decision. A Fleet pinnace's active tactical sensors would play hell with HSF's navigation and control systems, but he had an admiral who also happened to be a steadholder onboard.

His finger stabbed a button on his flight console.

"Seeking... seeking ... seeking..." Taylor's singsong chant sawed at Martin's nerves, but he forced himself not to shout at the younger man to be silent. Neither of them was likely to live another ten minutes, and he would not go to God having cursed a man seeking to do His will.

"Acquisition!" Taylor cried suddenly, and squeezed the stud.

"Missile launch, zero-zero-ten!" Troubridge's copilot shouted, and the master chiefs belly turned to frozen lead. Impeller drive. Had to be from the acceleration. Coming up at over forty degrees.

The data snapped into his brain, and he knew there was no way he could climb out of its path. In fact, there was only one thing he could do.

He killed the counter-grav and dove straight for the ground.

"Sweet Tester!" the senior controller in HSF Flight Ops gasped. There was no exhaust flare from an impeller-drive missile, and his instrumentation was too badly hashed by the pinnace's sensor emissions for him to tell precisely where it had come from, but he knew what it was, and he stabbed a button that dropped his mike into the HSF security net as well as its link to Lady Harrington's pinnace.

"SAM launch, somewhere on the west approach apron!"

"My God, at the Steadholder?" someone else shouted from behind him, but the controller didn't even look up. His horrified eyes were locked to the pinnace's plunging radar return.

Honor's head flew up as the pinnace suddenly lurched, then fell heavily off to port and dove vertically. For a moment she thought the pilot had lost it, but then she heard the scream of air-breathing turbines rammed to full power and realized the pinnace was still veering sharply left. It was an intentional maneuver, but why...?

Nimitz reared up in her lap, and she locked her arms about him, then bent her body across his in instant, protective reaction. She freed one arm from the cat to reach out and jerk Reverend Hanks' head down, and that was absolutely all she could do.

In technical terms, what Master Chief Troubridge was trying to do was generate a miss. In layman's terms, he was deliberately crashing his own pinnace in a desperation bid to drop out of the SAM's acquisition envelope... and praying he could recover in the instant before he hit the ground and killed everyone on board himself. It was a virtually impossible maneuver, but Gil Troubridge was very, very good, and he almost managed it.

Almost.

He had to pull up, and he hauled the nose desperately back, riding his abused, howling turbines and air foils and simultaneously throwing in the counter-grav, but he was perhaps one meter low, and the pinnace's tail slammed into the ground. The impact snapped the sleek craft almost straight upright, but it didn't quite go over. For an instant it hung there, and Troubridge felt a moment of terrible relief. His copilot had gotten the emergency landing skids deployed. When the bird came down on them, it would be all...

That was when the SAM executed its terminal attack run.

The small, high-tech kamikaze had lost its target when Troubridge dove for the deck, but its seekers had reacquired lock, and it came slashing in at over ten kilometers per second. Even so, the pilot had almost denied it a hit, and its impeller wedges leading edge caught the pinnaces rearing nose one bare meter aft of the radome.

A guillotine of gravitic energy slammed through the fuselage like an axe through butter, and the raw kinetic energy of the impact tore the first ten meters of the pinnace apart. Troubridge, his copilot, and his com tech died instantly, and the impact energy completed what the tail strike had begun. The dying pinnace twisted impossibly, snapping all the way up and over, then slammed into the ground like a dolphin arcing backwards into the water. But it was no dolphin, and the spaceport approaches were paved with forty centimeters of ceramacrete that was much, much harder than water.