"Aye, Sir. All weapons checked, and Cap'n Hibson's company and the HQ section are armored up. We had to downcheck one set of armor, but Apollo had a prepped spare. The Captain says she's ready to drop."
"Good, Gunny," Ramirez murmured, and silently thanked God that Susan Hibson's last assignment had been with one of the heavy assault battalions. She'd spent it practicing exactly the sort of thing her people faced today, which was why he'd made her Fearless's designated assault commander the day she came aboard.
"Give me a direct feed to Covington."
"Aye, Sir," the com tech replied, and a tone beeped as Ramirez's armor com dropped into the circuit.
"Covington, this is Ramrod. Do you copy?"
"Covington copies, Ramrod. Go ahead."
"Begin your drops, Covington. I say again, begin your drops."
"Covington copies," the voice in his earphones said. "Beginning drops now. May God go with you, Ramrod."
"Thank you, Covington. Ramrod clear." The major punched a chin switch to plug into the Manticoran net. "Ramrod to Decoy Flight. Commence your runs."
"Aye, Ramrod. Decoy Flight copies. Beginning our runs."
"Captain Williams!"
Williams whirled at the shout. His plotting officer pointed urgently at the master display, and the captain swallowed in sudden fear. Dozens of small craft were plummeting from the orbiting warships, and leading the way were two pinnaces with impossible energy signatures.
They gathered speed even as he stared at them, slicing down into Blackbird's wispy hydrogen atmosphere, and crimson projections showed their targets.
"They're going for the vehicle entrances!" Williams snapped. "Alert the ready teams and get Colonel Harris' men moving!"
The Manticoran flight crews were tense faced, nerves clenched against the ground fire they all expected. But there was none, and the pilots pulled out of their steep approaches, kicking the counter-grav to a hundred twenty percent and riding their thrusters to convert momentum into howling dives straight for their targets.
"Coming up on IP. Arm, arm, arm," the master weapons officer aboard Fearless chanted into his com. Amber standby lights blinked to red aboard each pinnace, and the gunners' hands curled about the triggers on their joysticks.
"Launch your birds! Launch your birds!" the weapons officer sang out, and two waiting fingers squeezed.
Quad-mounted fifty-centimeter rockets ripple-fired like brief-lived, flame-tailed meteors. Twelve of them blasted ahead of each pinnace—twenty-four one-thousand-kilo warheads with a yield man once could have gotten only from atomic weapons—and the pinnaces charged onward down their wakes.
Captain Williams went white as a rumbling fist of thunder smashed through Blackbird Base. The entire facility shuddered, lighting flickered, and eyes jerked anxiously up as overhead rock groaned. Dust sifted down over the command room equipment, and the first bellow of destruction was followed by another. And another. And another!
The final rockets smashed home, and the pinnaces' bow-mounted pulsers opened fire. Thirty thousand thirty-millimeter shells per second ripped into the smoke and dust billowing in Blackbird's thin atmosphere, and then they flashed directly over their targeting points and the plasma bombs dropped.
Most of the men guarding those portals were already dead; the rest died instantly as the heart of a sun consumed them.
"God the Merciful, be with us now!" Williams whispered in horror. He'd lost all of his pickups in the immediate lock areas, but remote cameras showed the smoke and dust—and the thick plumes of atmosphere howling up through it—and his eyes whipped to the base schematic. They'd blown their way over a hundred meters into the base! Emergency blast doors slammed, and the captain licked his lips in terror as troop shuttles grounded two kilometers from the breaches and began disgorging hundreds of suited figures.
"Tell Harris to hurry!" he shouted hoarsely.
"Well," Ramirez murmured, "that was impressive, wasn't it, Gunny?"
"As the Major says," Sergeant Major Babcock's smile was predatory. "Think they took the hint, Skipper?"
"Oh, I'd say it was probable," Ramirez said judiciously. "At least we knocked on the door hard enough to get their attention." He glanced at the chrono and keyed his mike. "Ferret Leader, this is Ramrod. Stand by for run-in in one-zero minutes."
Decoy Flight screamed upward, then pushed over and came in again. The remaining Masadan surface arrays saw them coming, but even as Colonel Harris screamed a warning to his troops, the anti-radiation missiles blasted off the racks. Six seconds later, they put out Blackbird Base's eyes, and then the pinnaces rolled back onto their original attack headings and bored straight in.
The Masadan defenders went flat, rolling off into side passages wherever possible, and then the entire base leapt and convulsed again. This time each pinnace fired only a single missile, but those missiles' onboard radar took them straight into the airlocks their predecessors had blown open and down the passages inside them at eight thousand MPS. They carried no explosives, but their super-dense "warheads" struck the first sets of internal blast doors with the force of twenty-three and a half tons of old-style TNT apiece, and another two hundred odd Masadans died as the doors disintegrated in white-hot gas and murderous shrapnel.
More troop shuttles landed, and Colonel Harris cursed his survivors to their feet and sent them stumbling through the rock dust and the howl of escaping atmosphere to find firing positions even as the core base's main blast doors slammed shut behind them.
"Ramrod, the Ferret is rolling. I say again, the Ferret is rolling."
"Roger, Ferret. Ramrod copies." Ramirez looked up at his own pilot. "Follow them in, Max."
Captain Williams tried not to twitch in impatience while his damaged sensors strove to sort out what was happening. Most of Harris' men seemed to have survived, and he heard snatches of chatter as their officers harried them into some sort of defensive positions amid the rubble, but his surface arrays were gone. He couldn't tell where the attackers were, how soon they would hit Harris, or what they were armed with.
Nor could he see the fresh flight of small craft streaking towards the hangars on the far side of Blackbird Base.
"Launch your birds!"
Fresh rockets streaked downward, but these were much lighter than the ones which had ripped the vehicle entrances apart. Their warheads massed barely three hundred kilos each, and hangar doors blew open and surface domes peeled back like broken bone. A hundred and twenty battle-armored men and women fell from pinnace belly hatches like lethal snow, riding their counter-grav down into the gaping holes, and four hundred more Royal Manticoran Marines debarked from cutters and shuttles to follow in their wake.
Fresh alarms screamed, and Captain Williams' head twisted around as new swatches of crimson blazed on the base schematic.
Speed was everything, and the handful of suited Masadan service techs who got in the point teams' way died before anyone found out whether they were trying to fight or surrender. Then the Marines came up against the closed blast doors, and engineers slapped shaped charges against the massive panels even as other engineers sealed in the portable plastic airlocks behind them.