There was much furtive exchanging of glances among the Implementers, and finally a Senior Assault Leader shuffled forward.
"Director," he began, still cringing out of habit, "we've followed your commands, and launched all ordered attacks against our fellow inferior beings of the Resistance. But now these
Marines
have landed from orbit. The word is that their elite units have got powered combat armor straight out of the Fourth Global War!"
"What of it?" Gromorgh's translator produced its usual expressionless Raehaniv. Inwardly, he was astonished. These worms were so terrified that their normal cravenness was in abeyance, overshadowed by something they feared more than the neurolash.
"Director, we're willing to face the Resistance, as we've shown. But if you send us out there now we'll be slaughtered! Send
them
!" He pointed at the cyborgs who flanked Gromorgh, bulking even huger than normal Korvaasha, the chamber's dim light reflected from their dully gleaming metal surfaces.
Gromorgh made a small gesture, and one of the cyborgs snapped up an arm that ended in a short tube tipped by a now-clenched grasping mechanism. Faster than sight, with terrible force, the tube telescoped itself out to three times its at-rest length and punched through the Senior Assault Leader's chest.
The Implementer tried to scream, but his opened mouth produced only a gout of blood. The cyborg rotated the tube, a kind of wet crunching sound was heard, and then the tube was yanked out, clutching the Implementer's heart in its metallic grasp.
The cyborg held the heart on display for an instant, then flung it into the crowd of Implementers. It smacked one of them in the face before falling to the floor.
"Are there any further complaints or suggestions?" asked Gromorgh in the mechanical tones of his voder.
He waited until the chamber was clear—about five seconds—before turning and making his way to the elevator that took him down to the command center. The rest of the ruling council was there, observing the progress of the battle on a battery of screens.
"Well, Director," Lugnaath greeted him, "have you resolved the problem of your Implementers' insubordination?"
"I believe they are now sufficiently motivated, Third Level Embodiment. But, as we realized from the first, their usefulness has limits. I will continue to expend them, of course, but it may soon be necessary to commit the cyborg units in a frontal counterattack. As you can see"—he indicated the main city map, with its color-coded lights—"the feral inferior beings have by now found the termini of almost all our tunnels and are in the process of sealing them with explosives. Soon it will no longer be possible to launch surprise flanking attacks. It was the prospect of having to frontally assault the new elements that have arrived from orbit that discouraged the Implementers."
"Vermin!" Sugvaaz spoke venomously. "I have always felt that you rely far too heavily on them. But is a counterattack necessary at all? You have repeatedly assured us that this fortress is impregnable to ground assault."
"And so it is, Conservator," Gromorgh assured him, carefully not adding the defeatist thought that it could have been made even more impregnable by the simple expedient of setting—and making known—a nuclear device to obliterate the fortress and the city around it if an attack were to succeed. "We could simply sit here and crush any attempts to gain entry. But that would leave us in a stalemate with the inferior beings effectively controlling most of the city. The purpose of the counterattack is to smash their ground-assault capability, not merely stymie it. This is especially important in view of the fact that matters are not going well with the other three urban headquarters." He indicated readouts from around the globe. "Not unexpected, of course; this fortress is stronger than those by orders of magnitude, and all the cyborg shock units are here. So it is vital that we impress upon the inferior beings the futility of attacking us here, placing them back in their original dilemma of having to either destroy us—and their capital city—with nuclear weapons or try to wait us out before relief arrives from the rest of the Unity."
Sugvaaz was silent. "Very well, Director," Lugnaath said. "So ordered."
Naeriy stumbled again as she made her way through the wreckage-strewn streets. She cursed in the English that was so much more suited to the purpose than Raehaniv. The sun was getting higher, and sweat trickled down her inside the shipsuit. Still, she couldn't complain. It was a minor miracle that she had been able to ease her wounded fighter down to within a few meters of a vacant lot before the gravs had died and she'd fallen the rest of the way. The landing had shaken her up, but nothing was broken. Now she proceeded cautiously toward the sounds of battle.
Coming to the end of a block she peered around the corner of a building, then jerked her head back quickly. The men she had seen had a look about them that suggested a group of deserters rather than a patrol. But they were unquestionably Implementers; they hadn't discarded enough of their gear to disguise that fact. She slowly reached for her laser sidearm.
Suddenly her upper arms were grabbed from behind with brutal strength. "Hey! Over here!" her assailant shouted. "Look what I've found!"
The other Implementers—ex-Implementers?—trotted around the corner. "Well, well," one of them leered, watching Naeriy's futile struggles. "A flier—one of these new arrivals who've fucked everything up for us!" He turned to the others. "We can't stay around here too long, but there's no reason we can't take a short break for a little fun."
He stepped forward and ran a hand over Naeriy's shipsuit, lingering to squeeze a breast with vicious force. Her gasp of pain brought a smile to his face. "Let's see—how do you get one of these suits open? Well, there's one way." He drew a knife. Naeriy recognized a monomolecular-edged blade. "Of course, the suit isn't all this is gonna cut . . . ."
A
crack!
sounded, and the Implementer's head exploded in a pink-and gray mist that caused her eyes to blur. A wall down the street crumbled outward as the first of the towering suits of powered combat armor came crashing through it. The other Implementers started to bolt, but the Marine had switched his railgun to full-automatic now that he didn't have to carefully avoid hitting Naeriy, and he scythed them down, their bodies blossoming out in a shower of gore as the hypervelocity slugs tore through them. Naeriy's captor held onto her—hoping to use her as a hostage?—but she kicked backward sharply. As his grip faltered she wrenched her right arm free, grabbed her laser pistol, and thrust it up under his jaw before pressing the firing stud. For a moment the stench of cooked brains and evacuated bowels overcame her. The next thing she was aware of was the deep, concerned voice.
"Naeriy, is that you? Are you okay?"
She looked up and recognized the dark face behind the powered armor's viewplate. "Yes, Major Thompson, I'm all right—thanks to you. My fighter was hit and I was trying to find your troops."
"Well, it looks like you've found us," he said cheerfully. "Now we need to get back to the main body ASAP. These flanking actions seem to have died away, and we're getting ready to assault the fortress itself." He reached down with one arm and scooped her up. "If you'll permit, we can travel faster this way. And none of us have been able to figure out a way to get fresh from inside one of these tin suits!"
Her laugh had an edge of released hysteria, but at least it was a laugh.
The counterattack came as they were nearing the fortress. Behind a wave of Implementers, blasted down almost contemptuously by the Marines, came the cyborgs, supported by weapon turrets that only now revealed themselves, rising up through the wreckage and belching death from heavy weapons to which powered combat armor meant little more than ordinary combat dress, or naked flesh. Their fields of fire were limited as long as the cyborgs were deployed, of course. But DiFalco knew that if they defeated the counterattack it would only be to face unrestricted fire from those massive plasma guns and mass-driver artillery when they assaulted the fortress. And he had to force down a rising suspicion that this was going to be tougher—a
lot
tougher—than they had suspected.
"We've got to send the Resistance troops back, Joel," he yelled into his communicator, above noise that even the armor's soundproofing couldn't keep out.
"Why?" He could barely make out Thompson's voice.
"Because it's murder to send Dorleann and his merry men against the cyborgs, damn it! They'll be eaten alive—they're just simply playing out of their league, and you know it!" He took a breath. "I said this was your show down here, Joel, but if I have to make this an order . . ."
"No need, Skipper; you're right. But let me keep a couple of Resistance special weapons squads on the front line. They've got some stuff that can make the cyborgs say 'Ouch.' And they're willing—
God
, but they're willing!"
"Permission granted. I'll do the same. Signing off." As he spoke the last words, the cyborg squad broke upon them with the blinding speed that seemed to belie their bulk.
Semiportable mass driver guns manned by Marines in nonpowered combat armor fired back in a continuous crackle as their slugs broke mach. Those hyperdense rounds, accelerated at such a velocity, would have stopped a main battle tank of Earth, DiFalco reflected as he got his plasma gun up; the cyborgs would keep coming for a little while through a burst of them. Marines in powered armor fired back with their various arms (each was, in effect, a walking special weapons squad) and the sheer concentration of firepower became more than the heat-containing urban battlefield could seemingly hold.
A heavy weight crashed down on DiFalco's armored back and he went down, rolling over with the cyborg that forced itself on top with a strength exceeding even that of powered armor and tried to maneuver a forearm weapon mount of some kind against DiFalco's viewplate. The American made an activating motion with his jaw, and a foot-long blade of aligned crystalline steel sprang out of its powered sheath under his left arm. He drove it into the wiring at the base of the cyborg's "throat," and was rewarded by a crackling noise accompanied by sparks. With the cyborg momentarily "stunned," he pushed himself out from underneath and gripped one of its arms in his clamps with crushing force, and, with a tremendous heave, yanked the arm out. There was no blood, only the sparking of torn electrical circuitry. All lower-ranking Korvaasha were "cyborgs" in some degree, but one of these things was little more than a robot with an organic central processing unit that had once been a living being's brain.
In the instant it took the cyborg to assimilate the loss of the arm, DiFalco grasped his plasma gun, specially designed to be handled by the suit's clamps—his right arm's integral laser weapon would have taken too long to burn through that tough metal hide. The cyborg had just staggered erect when he got off an insanely short-range shot while lying on his side, and in a senses-overpowering blast the cyborg ceased to exist save as a charred, sparking stump above its legs. DiFalco felt singed despite everything the armor's temperature control could do, but at least the radiation shielding held—no warning squeal awoke in his ear.
As he performed the difficult maneuver of getting to his feet in powered armor, he saw that his troops had taken losses but were in possession of the field. He wondered how Thompson was doing.
"Damn it, Naeriy, I thought I told you to go to the rear!"
The young Raehaniv pushed back her borrowed combat helmet and looked up at Thompson defiantly. "I've attached myself to a special weapons squad—the Resistance people are showing me what to do. You've
got
to let me do something, Joel!"
"Oh, what the Hell!" Thompson closed up his viewplate and spoke through the outside speaker. "Get back to your unit, Marine!" he barked, and turned away before she could smile dazzlingly at him. "What a war!" he muttered to himself as he strode off. And he'd thought Colombia had been weird!
He continued his inspection of the perimeter, approaching a semiportable plasma gun emplacement. "What's the word, Suvarov?" he called out, recognizing the crew chief.
The Russian raised the faceplate of his nonpowered armor. "Quiet, Major. We seem to have stopped the counterattacks. At least we haven't seen any more cyborgs since . . ."
A nearby structure that held another strongpoint took a hit that showered them with debris, and Suvarov frantically closed his faceplate as he ordered the plasma gun swivelled in search of targets. They must be close, Thompson reflected, since they had gotten off a shot without benefit of the laser target designators that, as they must have learned by now, only alerted the Marines to the fact that they were being targeted. And they must also be doing without the heat sensors that the Marines' armor, with its IR cloaking feature, could defeat. So where
were
they?
Then they were visible, darting in and out of cover with that impossible speed. Thompson, whose plasma gun had long ago shorted out—at least it
seemed
long ago—put his mass driver gun on full auto and hosed one of them down, cutting the relatively vulnerable legs out from under it. Legless, it continued to try to hump itself forward with its arms. Fighting off a sensation of nightmare, Thompson put a burst through it lengthwise, from the top of the head down. It shuddered and jerked convulsively, as if from a heavy jolt of electricity, and finally lay still.
Suddenly, Suvarov's plasma gun, which had been laying down a barrage of lighning bolts and thunderclaps, blew up with a force that threw Thompson off balance. As he tried to right himself, a mass-driver slug crashed through the armor of his left arm with shattering impact, sending his own weapon flying and spinning him around to crash to the ground. His suit's biomonitor reacted instantly with a painkilling injection, but the sudden chemical influx left him barely aware of the cyborg that was approaching, training its weapon on him. He closed his eyes.
It was as well that he did, for he missed the explosion. His sound pickup automatically tuned out the deafening noise, and he kept his eyes shut as flying debris rattled like hail on his armor. When he opened them, there was only wreckage where the cyborg had stood. From behind a pile of rubble, Naeriy stood up, still shouldering the missile launcher that looked too heavy for her.