"What the devil? Captain, you'd better come and ..." The pilot's voice boomed puzzlement before he realized his external speakers were still on. He cut them off. Grayson moved his head slightly. With one eye tightly closed, he risked a look toward the spotlit men.

Sergeant Burns, Sergeant Clay, and MechWarrior Mccall stood side by side, blinking into the light. They were unarmed, were not even wearing knives, but they had on the slightly baggy fatigues common to technical personnel in the military forces of all the Successor States. They were the very image of a trio of astechs who had gone out to share a bottle and then wandered back to camp, roaring drunk and barely able to stand.

The door at the back of the van opened, spilling light onto the gravel once more. Two men stepped down onto the ramp, the light silhouetting them against the brilliance.

Grayson came to his feet, his TK assault rifle held high, his booted feet pounding against the gravel. Lori, Lieutenant Khaled, Mech Warrior Bear, Alard King, and the others in the assault group followed close behind, flying toward the open door.

The two men in the light turned at the sound of running feet. One groped for a holstered weapon. The other gasped and jumped back into the van. The sentries on either side of the door brought their weapons down, but the man drawing his pistol on the ramp partly blocked their fire.

Grayson's TK thuttered as silenced, 3 mm caseless slivers spat from the heavy barrel. One sentry's face vanished in a trio of tiny, searing explosions as soft metal and high explosives impacted in flesh and bone. The man with the pistol shrieked and kicked back as explosive rounds chopped across his chest and arm. The second sentry plunged off the ramp, his submachine gun firing wildly into the night.

Lori's SMG stammered in her hands, picking up the second sentry and spinning him back against the trailer hull. In the same moment, the Thunderboltswung ponderously around to face this new disturbance. A fractional instant later, a small, furiously burning projectile arced from the woods, exploding the air ten meters short of the Thunderbolt.The explosion grew, unfolding in liquid flame that washed across the Thunderbolt'supper hull, Inferno rounds are designed to explode halfway to their target, spraying it with a concentrated fuel mixture that burns at a temperature sufficient to melt alloyed steel. The "drunken technicians—" Clay, McCall, and Burns-had unlocked arms and ran for cover the instant the inferno round shrieked over their heads.

The night on the north side of the trailer also lit up as a second inferno round bathed the Archerin living flame.

Between twin fountains of radiance, Grayson and the others raced up the ramp.

The door at the end of the van was closing; once closed, there would be no way to open it without heavy cutting tools or a 'Mech's laser, neither of which they had at the moment. More even than the Marik officers inside the headquarters van, time was their enemy now. Grayson ran faster. The door, swinging shut, fouled on one of the bodies at the top of the ramp, giving Grayson the instant he needed to plunge through into the lighted interior.

A sergeant rose from a communications console, a pistol already in his hand. Two communications technicians sat behind him, their faces frozen in fear. At the far end of the narrow, instrument-crowded room, a Marik officer was heading for the massive steel door that led to the forward chamber of the van.

Grayson's TK bucked and hissed again, spraying the room with death and destruction. The sergeant pitched back into a console, smoke and blood boiling from the pulsing hole in his chest. Grayson was past him before he fell, was past the technicians before they could even react. The Marik officer at the far end of the van was opening the steel-armored hatch there. If he got through and sealed it, the raiders would be isolated in this rear portion of the trailer. Yet, if there was a chance to capture the van's inner sanctum, this was it.

The Marik officer stepped through, the door closing behind him. Still running, Grayson swung his TK over his head and hurled it spinning end for end down the length of the room. It clattered across the low sill between the two chambers, and the heavy door smashed down on it. Plastic splintered and the massive sound suppressor barrel bent, but the door jammed open. An instant later, he was at the door, hauling back on it with his bare hands. King was beside him, adding his strength to the effort. The door cleared the smashed rifle, then swung open.

Gunfire barked from the inner chamber. Lori's submachine gun fired past King and Grayson, shell casings from her weapon ringing against consoles and across the waffle-molded steel deck. Then Bear pushed past her, his own submachine gun looking like a toy in one of his massive hands.

"Gray!" Grayson had not heard such shock and surprise in Lori's voice before. He squeezed past the half-open door and joined Lori and Bear inside the inner room.

It was a smaller room than the rear part of the headquarters, with fewer instruments. A planning and conference table dominated one end. On three bulkheads, there were wall-sized, fully-color, satellite-projection computer displays showing the entire area from north of the Aragayan Mountains to the Vermillion Plains beyond the Nagayan Mountains in the south, and from the Gro-don Sea to the west to the Dead Sea Flats to the east. Computer terminals glowed, their screens crowded with words. A Marik Lieutenant lay sprawled on the floor, cut down by Lori's gunfire.

Lori stood there above the body now, her gun leveled on a second officer cowering against the far wall of the room. Grayson knew from the uniform that this was the man he had first seen outside, and whom he had chased back through the trailer. His eyes widened in shocked recognition.

"Graff!"

"Don't . . . kill me! Carlyle! Don't kill me! I'm valuable to you!"

Bear reached one massive first forward and easily plucked Graff from the deck as though he were a bundle of rags.

"Don't hurt him," Grayson said. "Bring him!"

King and Khaled were in the outer room with a half-dozen of Ramage's Special Ops people. Grayson recognized Janice Taylor under layers of camouflage paint. Lieutenant DeVillar and a Legion infantry-man came through the door, each lugging three canvas satchels. Each satchel held ten kilos of plastic explosives and a set of fulminate of mercury detonators.

Grayson gestured at the two technicians who still sat in their chairs, their fingers carefully interlaced on the tops of their heads. "You Techs," Grayson said. "Out!

If you stop running any time in the next five minutes, you're dead!" The two squeezed past the Legion troops, their hands still above their heads. Grayson heard their booted feet break into a run as soon as they touched the metal ramp outside.

"O.K. Everybody out except the explosives people! Bear! You take Graff! Mind the 'Mechs outside!"

DeVillar was already placing each satchel of explosives where it would do the most good, and running long wires clipped to the fuses from bag to bag. The man had been a mining engineer long before becoming the commander of the Gray Death's B Company, and professed to know something about explosives. This, Grayson had told him, was his chance to prove it.

A long burst of machine gun fire sounded distantly from outside, followed by the keening hiss of 'Mech laser fire. The inferno rounds fired at the two 'Mechs would not be enough to disable them. The hope was that the clinging, liquid fire would distract the pilots for the few moments that Grayson's raiders needed to complete their mission. Precious seconds had been lost already, chasing and catching Graff. But if they could get himback to camp, it would be worth it!