Hatcher shook his head, trying to understand what had happened as he followed Tsien to the open door. A huge mushroom cloud filled the western horizon, and even as he watched, a five-man gravitonic conveyer with a full load of structural steel turned turtle in mid-air. It had been caught by the fringes of the explosion, and the pilot had almost pulled it out. Almost, but not quite. Its standard commercial drive had never been designed for such abuse, and it impacted nose-first at six hundred kilometers per hour.

A fresh fireball spewed up, and the death toll was suddenly six hundred and ninety-one.

“My God!” Hatcher murmured.

Tsien nodded in silent, shocked agreement. Whatever the cause, this was disaster, and he despised himself for thinking of lost time first and lost lives second. He turned toward the control block ramps in the vanished Geban’s wake, then stopped as a knot of men headed towards him. They were armed, and there was something familiar about the small officer at their head—

“Quang!” he bellowed.

The fury in Tsien’s voice jerked Hatcher’s eyes away from the smoke. He started to speak, then gasped as the marshal whirled around and hit him in a diving tackle. The two of them crashed back into the control room, hard enough to crack ribs, as the first burst of automatic fire raked the open doorway.

“Forward!” General Quang Do Chinh screamed. “Kill them! Kill them now!”

His troopers advanced at the run, closing on the unfinished control block, and Quang’s heart flamed with triumph. Yes, kill the traitors! And especially the arch-traitor who had tried to shunt him aside! What a triumph to begin their war against the invaders!

As he and his men sprinted forward, construction workers raced to drag dead and wounded away from the explosion site, and six other carefully infiltrated assault teams produced automatic weapons and grenades. They concentrated on picking out Imperials, but any target would do.

“What the hell is happening?!” Gerald Hatcher’s voice was muffled by his breath mask, but it would have been hoarse anyway—a hundred kilos of charging Chinese field marshal had seen to that. He shoved up onto his knees, reaching instinctively for his holstered automatic.

“I do not know,” Tsien replied tersely, checking his own weapon’s magazine. “But the Vietnamese leading his men this way is named Quang. He was one of those most opposed to joining our forces to yours.”

Another burst of fire raked the open doorway, ricochets whining nastily, and Hatcher rose higher on his knees to hit the door button. The hatch slammed instantly, but it was only lightweight Terran steel; the next burst punched right through it.

“Shit!” Hatcher scurried across the control room on hands and knees. Major Germaine already stood with his back to the wall on the left side of the door, and his grav gun had materialized in his right hand like magic.

“What the fuck do they think they’re going to accomplish?!”

“I do not know, Gerald. This is pointless. It simply invites reprisals. But their ultimate objective is immaterial—to us, at least.”

“True.” Hatcher flattened himself against the wall as another row of holes appeared in the door. “Al?”

“I already put out the word, sir.” Unlike his boss, Germaine had a built-in communicator. “But I don’t know how much good it’s going to do. More of the bastards are shooting up the rescue crews. Geban’s down—hurt bad—and he’s not the only Imperial.”

“Goddamn them!” Hatcher hissed, and fought to think as the half-forgotten terror and adrenalin-rush of combat flooded him. Continuous firing raked the panel now, and he gritted his teeth as bullets and bits of door whined about his ears. This room was a deathtrap. He tried to estimate where their attackers had been when Tao-ling tackled him. On the ground to the south. That meant they had to climb at least three ramps. So whoever was firing at the door was covering them until they could get here … probably with a demolition charge that would turn them all to hamburger.

“We’ve got to get ourselves a field of fire,” he grated. His automatic was a toy compared to what was coming at them, but it was better than nothing. And anything was better than dying without fighting back.

“I agree,” Tsien said flatly.

“All right. Tao-ling, you pop the hatch. Al, I think they’re coming up from the south. You can cover the head of the ramp from where you are. Tao-ling, you get over here with me. We’ll try to slow ’em down if they come the other way, but Al’s got our only real firepower.”

“Yes, sir,” Germaine said, and Tsien nodded agreement.

“Then do it—now!”

Tsien hit the button and rolled across the floor, coming up on his knees beside Hatcher. They both flattened against the wall as yet another burst screamed into the room, and Hatcher cursed as a ricochet creased his cheek.

“Can you get that sniper without getting yourself killed, Al?”

“A pleasure, sir,” Germaine said coldly. His eyes were unfocused as his implants sought the source of the fire, then he crouched and took one step to the side. He moved with the blinding speed of his biotechnics, and the grav gun hissed out a brief burst, spitting three-millimeter explosive darts at fifty-two hundred meters per second.

Quang swore as his covering fire died. So, they had at least one of the cursed grav guns. That was bad, but he still had twenty-five men, and they were all heavily armed.

He had no idea how the rest of the attack was going, but Tsien’s reactions had been only too revealing, and the only man who could identify him must die.

His men pounded up the ramp ahead of him.

Her name was Litanil, and, disregarding time spent in stasis, she was thirty-six. It took her precious moments to realize what was happening, and a few more to believe it when she had, but then cold fury filled her.

Litanil hadn’t thought very deeply when Anu’s people recruited her, for she’d been both young and bored. Now she knew she’d also been criminally stupid, and, like her fellows, she’d labored with the Breaker’s own demons on her heels in an effort to atone. Along the way, she’d come to like and admire the Terra-born she worked with, and now hundreds of them lay dead, butchered by the animals responsible for this carnage. She didn’t worry about why. She didn’t even consider the monstrous treason to her race the attack implied. She thought only of dead friends, and something snarled inside her.

She turned her power bore towards the fighting, and her neural feeds sought out the safety interlocks. It was supposed to be impossible for any accident to get around them—but Litanil was no accident.

Allen Germaine went down on one knee, bracing his grav gun over his left forearm, as the first three raiders hurled themselves over the lip of the topmost ramp, assault rifles on full automatic.

They got off one long burst each before their bodies blew apart in a hurricane of explosive darts.

Litanil goosed her power bore to max, snarling across the stony plain at almost two hundred kilometers per hour. Not even a gravitonic drive could hold the massive bore steady at that speed, but she rode it like a bucking horse, her implant scanners reaching out, and her face was a mask of fury as she raised the cutting head chest-high.

Private Pak Chung of the Army of Korea heard nothing, but some instinct made him turn his head. His eyes widened in horror as he saw the huge machine screaming towards him. Rock dust and smoke billowed behind it like a curdled wake, and the … the thing at its front was aimed straight at him!