“General King is a Marine,” Ramsey said. “He’ll do what has to be done.”
Ramsey cared little for General King and hadn’t been impressed with the man so far. He’d never expected to find himself defending King to anyone else.
But Norris was the outsider here. The Marines did not abandon their own.
Chamber of Seeing
Deeps of An-Kur
Eleventh Period of Dawn
The Zu-Din gave the command: Attack!
God-warriors spilled from narrow access passageways into the main caverns, shrieking battletruth and grappling with the enemy. The enemy warriors, three of them protected by layers of impossibly tough armor, did not go under with the first onslaught, but the sheer ferocity of the assault knocked them back and swept them along, like wood chips on a flood.
Sag-ura gudibir, human slave-warriors, joined the attack this time, rushing forward with shrill yells, brandishing their weapons, and the Godmind noticed an interesting fact. The enemy warriors hesitated at the sight of members of their own species, hesitated and held their fire until the advancing mass was almost upon them.
The enemy opened fire at the last possible moment, their flame-weapons ripping through the packed mass of lightly armored or naked slave-warriors to hideous, shrieking effect. And then the defenders were slammed back against the cavern wall. Through the artificial senses of the Abzu-il, the Godmind watched and listened as the three became two…then one. Then the enemy warriors were dead; a human slave danced in the passageway, holding high a bloody head still encased in an armored helmet.
Another held the relay, a small, silver canister resting on tripod legs on the floor of the passageway.
The Godmind communicated its orders, and the warriors returned to the side passages. In moments, as the relay was carried deeper into the mountain, the transmission between the nuclear device and the enemy forces outside was severed.
There’d been a possibility, of course, that loss of signal would trigger the device, but the Godmind felt secure in probabilities. Military devices would be designed to allow for power failures or equipment breakage. With a weapon as powerful as the nuclear device left in An-Kur’s control center, the Enemy would want positive control, the ability to trigger the thing deliberately rather than risk an accident with potentially devastating consequences.
It had a great deal of experience with humans and human reactions from which to draw.
The Enemy would be reacting to the Godmind’s assault very swiftly now, however. Sensors buried in the surface of the mountain’s peak scanned the sky, watching for the spacecraft in orbit. The calculations would have to be extraordinarily precise, with no room for error….
The mountain’s sensors picked up the heat and radar signatures of a number of spacecraft coming in from the east…but these were too small and too fast to be the primary targets. Another invasion wave, then, landing craft bearing more ground troops. The Godmind overrode the simple and somewhat limited artificial intelligence of the Kur-Urudug. Wait…wait…there! Rising now above the eastern horizon…the signatures of three huge, orbiting spacecraft.
The Godmind targeted the lead vessel, as the power within An-Kur’s deep core swiftly mounted.
ARLT Command Section, Dragon
One
Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar
2354 hours ST
They’d underestimated the Ahannu, and badly…that, or the Marine ARLT had just had its legs cut out from under it by one hell of a coincidence. And in Captain Warhurst’s experience, coincidence was nothing more than a myth used to explain relationships that no one understood.
He was kicking himself mentally for not having followed his first impulse and deploying a sizable contingent of Marines to guard the nuclear warhead in the alien control center. General King’s orders had been specific, though, and he wouldn’t have been able to leave troops in the mountain’s control center without risking direct insubordination.
But damn it, if he’d even left a ready-strike team in place within easy reach of the nuke, just in case something went wrong…
And things certainly were wrong now, with the telltale magnetic flux within the mountain building, the relay in Ahannu hands, and all contact with the nuclear weapon lost. Someone with the appropriate trigger codes would have to go inside the mountain again to get within range of the weapon in order to set it off. That meant Lieutenant Kerns, with a fire team in support.
If that was the order to come through from orbit. The trouble was, he’d put through an up-link call to either Colonel Ramsey or General King, but so far neither had responded. The suddenness of the renewed attack had caught everyone off balance.
If the order didn’t come through…would he be able to blow that mountain anyway? Against orders? He might have to in order to save the Derna.