Starfist: Lazarus Rising (41 page)

Just a few more minutes.

"Just ahead," the colonel's voice crackled in Devi's headset.

"All right, men! You know what to do! You men in those Gabriels, hold on, we're going cross-country and it'll be a rocky ride!"

The column of vehicles turned off the main highway, down a steep embankment, and across a farmer's field, bouncing over irrigation ditches, crashing through fences and scattering livestock. A huge cloud of dust rose into the air behind them. If they didn't know we were coming before, Devi thought, they'll sure know it now. They smashed across a secondary road, the Gabriels and APCs leaping a meter or more into the air, sailing over the road and crashing down on the other side. Devi was firmly strapped into his seat but still felt the jar in the fillings in his teeth.

They came to another road, which ran at a right angle to their column of march.

This was it! To the left, no more than five hundred meters down the road, loomed Wayvelsberg Castle. Devi marveled at how Bass had understood it all after just a glimpse at the map.

"Good hunting!" the battalion commander said, saluting the element that peeled off and headed toward the barracks. "Form a firing line!" the commander ordered, and his Gabriels pulled up on each flank of the command car. The vehicles roared into line behind them. Everything was proceeding perfectly.

"Range, 457 meters," a gunner announced laconically.

"Fire one round on my command and then advance in line of battle," the commander ordered.

Major Devi peered through his optics at the main entrance of Wayvelsberg Castle.

He could clearly see the look of astonishment on the faces of Special Group troops running for cover. One of the Gabriels fired. He counted 1001, 1002—bright flashes temporarily obscured the main gate, followed by the
thud-thud-thud
of the high-explosive projectiles impacting on and around the front of the building.

Sections of the masonry were crumbling but clouds of greasy black smoke hid most of the damage.

"Forward!" the battalion commander ordered. "Fire when ready!"

The Special Group commander at the barracks had alerted his men at the first word of the approaching column, and as a result, they were deploying along the road to Wayvelsberg when the armored column appeared on their flank. The two lead Gabriels burst into flames almost immediately from the antiarmor rounds fired at them by the SG. The driver of the foremost vehicle, knowing he was a dead man as the flames roared all around him, made no attempt to get out, but drove on. Just before the fire seared his lungs, he rammed straight into a truckload of SG men; both vehicles exploded in a fireball, blocking the road and cutting the reinforcement column in half.

The last Gabriel in line, seeing what was happening on the road ahead, dismounted its infantry and drove around the barracks complex and onto the airfield, where its rapid-fire pulse gun wreaked havoc with the parked Hoppers warming up on their pads. The fully loaded aircraft burst into flames as incendiary rounds ripped into them, setting off their fuel tanks and ammo. The exploding air-to-ground rockets on board the burning Hoppers zoomed all over the tarmac, and within seconds the fuel dump went up with an enormous
whoosh!
A huge column of black smoke rose high above the airfield, orange flames licking hungrily skyward, and then
kaboom!
—the ammo dump went up.

The Gabriel commander, a young sergeant, ordered his vehicle to one side of the field and took in the damage. His driver whistled. "We did all
that
?"

"Great Dagon be praised," the sergeant muttered. He looked around. He was alone in the burning waste that had been the airfield. No one had followed him from the column, so he assumed they were all engaged along the road. "Come on." He tapped his driver on the helmet. "Let's drive around this mess and onto the road. We'll come up behind the SG and give them a taste of Hell!"

Meanwhile, back at the road, the supporting infantry, greatly outnumbered by the SG force, dismounted resolutely and returned fire as best they could. Their commander knew they were doomed, but he hoped to delay the reinforcing column long enough so the main body of the battalion could crack Wayvelsberg open.

Then the fire from the Special Group began to slacken. The column commander peered cautiously over a small mound of dirt. Men in black uniforms were streaming back into the barracks complex. They were retreating! They were bottling themselves up in their barracks! He looked at his watch. It was 1829.

Zechariah followed Bass into the room. "My God!" he shouted, seeing Comfort covered with blood. He rushed to his daughter's side.

"Father!"
She sat up and threw her arms around him.

"Lie still, lie still! You're wounded!"

"No! No, Father! The blood belongs to him." She nodded toward the bodies on the floor. "He shot the Leader, and then I stabbed him, and then—Charles!
Charles!

" Comfort began to laugh and cry at the same time.

"Who are these two?" Bass asked, gesturing toward the dead men.

"Herten Gorman and Dominic de Tomas!" Comfort shouted happily through her tears, "They're dead! They're dead!" She was almost dancing with joy.

Raipur, weapon at the ready, came through the door, followed closely by Uma. He took in the shambles at a glance, then cautiously opened the door to the outer office.

"Oops!" He slammed it shut. "There are men with weapons out there!" he warned Bass.

From behind them, down the stairwell, they heard the sharp
crack! crack!
of weapons firing. Seconds later Colleen and Chet stumbled into the room. "Men are coming up the stairs!" Colleen gasped.

"We got two of them," Chet added, "but there are more coming behind them!"

Comfort had thrown her arms around Bass, and now he gently removed them.

"Not now," he said, and shoved his rifle at her, then drew his sidearm. "You know how to use this. You did a good job with that knife."

Bass turned to the others. "Chet, Colleen, cover the stairway. Comfort, Uma, you stay as far back from that outer door as you can. Zechariah, Raipur, you come with me. We're going to clear out those guys on the other side." He flicked on his comm.

"Shipper, Shipper, this is Customer! We are at Home. I say again, we are at Home.

Aw shit, screw this call sign shit! De Tomas and Gorman are dead. I say again, dead. Do you hear me? Over. Goddamnit!" he shouted. "Where the hell are you?

We're in! We cut the snake's head off! Where the hell are you people?" Nothing but static. "Damned crap! This high-tech shit
never
works!" He tossed the comm into a corner.

"Wait!" Uma shouted. "These charges. They have time fuses. We can set them for a couple of seconds and toss them down the stairs and out there."

"Good God, woman, good thinking! Quick!" There were two left. "All right, one down the stairs, and I'll toss the other out this door, and then we go through shooting. Then, folks, it's time to fix bayonets!"

"We don't have bayonets!" Raipur gasped.

"Simulate, then. Ready?"

But before they could spring into action there was a series of heavy explosions close by. They could feel the concussions in the floor under their feet. "I believe that is the cavalry," Zechariah said. Raipur looked at him questioningly. "I read that in an old book somewhere," he said, embarrassed.

Both the outer office and the stairwell were empty. It was 1833.

CHAPTER 30

The Great Hall of Wayvelsberg Castle was an utter shambles. Where great speeches had once inspired thousands and mystic ceremonies of initiation had echoed through the darkened recesses, chaos now ruled. The massive likeness of Heinrich the Fowler had sustained a direct hit and lay in fragments all over the hall. Only Heinrich's massive feet stood intact on their pedestal.

Gaping holes in the roof and walls, testaments to the work of the Gabriels'

gunners, allowed the morning sun to cast its rays like brilliant golden fingers into the farthest corners of the hall. Discarded weapons, clothing, wreckage, and body parts littered the flagstone floor. A Gabriel armored fighting carrier sat just inside the foyer, where it had come to rest after smashing through the fortress's defenders the night before. The barrel of its high-energy pulse gun jutted toward the roof at an impossible angle, and its armor was pitted and buckled from numerous hits. Its rear ramp was down, bloodied first-aid dressings and items of individual equipment could be seen in the troop compartment, and black pools of blood had coagulated on the floor and walls. A sticky smear of lubricants slowly spread from under the Gabriel's broken chassis, and greasy boot prints fanned out from around the ruined behemoth, viscous evidence of the infantry's victorious and bloody passage through Wayvelsberg Castle's portals.

The smoke of battle hung over the vast emptiness in a hazy pall, most of it concentrated toward the roof, where tendrils gradually filtered out through the holes.

The effect of the sunlight casting rays through the smoky veil would have been beautiful were it not for the smell that permeated everything—the reek of high explosive and charred flesh, the dank mustiness of extinguished fires and the fetid odor of ruptured water and sewer lines.

As word of the castle's fall spread throughout Kingdom in the early hours of the morning, army commanders far and wide sent messages of support and loyalty to General Lambsblood. A battalion of military police was flown in just after the battle to assist in processing prisoners, of whom there were hundreds—demoralized Special Group men, bureaucrats, office workers trapped in the building when the battle started, and de Tomas's cabinet officials. They had been assembled into small groups and put under guard at convenient places in and around the fortress. The civilian workers were taken first, and most of them had been released. The Special Group men meanwhile hunkered in disconsolate bunches, awaiting transportation to a proper prisoner of war compound, where they would be thoroughly interrogated.

The members of de Tomas's cabinet who had taken refuge in Wayvelsberg the night before were being held separately under heavy guard. They would be the first of the regime to go on trial, and the commander on the scene was taking no chances that any of them might opt out by suicide.

It took hours to secure Wayvelsberg after its outer defenses were cracked. The infantrymen went room by room, from the dungeons to the roof. What they discovered in the dungeons was shocking, and it went a long way toward explaining why anyone who resisted them afterward was shot without mercy.

"We're staying right where we are," Bass had told his party. They could hear the battle raging outside, and then in other parts of the building. "Worst thing you can do in a situation like this is go wandering the halls."

"Charles," Zechariah Brattle said, extending his hand, "God bless you for all that you've done for us!"

"Hear, hear!" the others shouted. Now that the tension of Comfort's rescue had been broken, they felt giddy on the effects of adrenaline.

"Charles," Zechariah continued, "God has taken two of the dearest people from me that any man could wish for, but He gave me you, and you saved the one person who can give any meaning to the rest of my life." He hugged Comfort and would have hugged Bass too had the Marine not busied himself with his weapon.

Embarrassed, Bass finally said, "Well, let's cover up these bodies for now, shall we? This guy lived like a prince." He gestured at the room's plush furnishings. "And if I'm not mistaken, there's a wet bar somewhere around here and probably cigars to boot. Let's look."

There were, and they found them and enjoyed them, and when at last a haggard infantryman kicked in the door from the outer office, he was astonished to see seven disheveled survivors propped up in the furniture, toasting two bloody corpses covered with drapes torn from the windows.

At last, Zechariah Brattle drank cold beer.

"First thing we have to do," Jayben Spears said as he picked his way cautiously around the spilled oil and over the piles of disgusting rubbish littering the floor, "is form an interim government."

"Who, sir?" Brigadier General Banks asked.

"That, Ricardo, is the question, isn't it? I haven't seen anything this bad in more years than I care to remember," Spears mused, taking in the ruin and wrinkling his nose at the smell. "Let's find who's in charge and offer him Confederation's services."

"First thing I want to do is get this army some communications equipment that works," Banks muttered. Ambassador Spears had also lost communication with the attacking force during the most critical phase of the action.

A begrimed officer approached them. It was Major Devi. "Mr. Ambassador!

General Banks! Prentiss!" He shook hands all around. "I have good news. Dominic de Tomas and Herten Gorman are dead. I've seen the bodies. And Bass and my sister and that Brattle man and the others who went with him are safe! They're upstairs, ah—" He laughed. "—well, frankly, sobering up! But come over here and let me introduce you to someone." He led them to a makeshift aid station in one relatively undestroyed section of the Great Hall.

"General Lambsblood!" Spears exclaimed. He knelt beside the general's litter.

"We're about to put him into a stasis unit, sir," a medical officer said.

"Doctor, I'm Jayben Spears, the Confederation's ambassador to your world." He extended his hand and they shook. "The entire medical suite available on the CNSS

Marne
is at your disposal if you need it," Spears said. "General, we thought for sure you were dead!"

Lambsblood grinned. "I didn't tell them
anything
," he said. "Not a thing. I think Dieter and Ben Loman are still alive too," he added. "They didn't finish us off. How are my men?" A strange expression came over the general's face, as if he were trying to maintain his train of thought, and then he smiled beatifically and said, "I'd like the cream of onion soup for lunch, steward, and—and..." His voice trailed off.