General. Hurt her, and you won’t believe how much worse you’ll make it for yourself.”
“There is nothing you can threaten me with worse than what will happen if I give myself up. You understand me?”
“I can promise you won’t be executed.”
“So that I can enjoy the effects of a neural net wipe? Ha! That’s worse than a clean death in battle! No! Here is how we play this, American. Ilse here, lovely lady that she is, will come with me, as a guarantee of your good behavior. You and your men will back off. You will clear these corridors! You will permit us to leave. No interference! You will arrange to have a flyer meet us at the surface, with an AI pilot slaved to my direct neural control, and with a range of at least ten thousand kilometers. The flyer will take me to a destination of my choosing … and I may release Roettgen there, if I am satisfied that you have not followed us. Now, put your weapons down and move back!”
A red targeting reticule was centered on Korosi’s faceplate, and Koenig wondered if the Marine was going to try for a head shot, firing from his hip. Had Korosi not been wearing combat armor, Koenig knew, Swayze might have tried it … but splash off the armor’s surface could burn the unarmored Roettgen quite badly.
Of course, Swayze might choose to accept the collateral damage, injuring the hostage in order to kill the hostage taker. He might even accept the hostage’s death. According to Fallen Star’s operational orders, finding and rescuing Ilse Roettgen was secondary to taking down Janos Korosi.
So the easy solution would be to burn Korosi down now, even if it meant the former Confederation president’s death. It would not have been Koenig’s personal choice, but then Koenig was not the one linked to Swayze’s laser rifle.
“Okay, okay,” Swayze said after a long and agonizing moment. “You win.” The targeting reticule winked off, and slowly the Marine lowered his rifle, placing it on the floor at his feet. “Don’t hurt her!”
“The rest of you! Put down your weapons!”
“Do as he says, Marines,” Swayze told the others. He shifted to the general tactical frequency. “Listen up, Marines! Clear the passageways. Korosi is coming up … with a hostage.”
“Transport, Staff Sergeant,” Korosi said. “Arrange for us a flight out of here.”
“Okay, okay,” Swayze said. “Meteor! This is Marine One-Five! I want a Chipper on the ground on top of this fort ASAP!”
Meteor was the code name for the battalion HQ running this op, while Chipper was military slang for a C-28 Chippewa robot transport. Definitely long-range enough for the ten-thousand-kilometer range Korosi specified. Koenig contemplated that requirement. Ten thousand klicks was enough to reach any of the three space elevators—in Ecuador, Kenya, or Singapore. But what then? Korosi had to know that he would be tracked. No doubt he had confederates waiting for him someplace.
Koenig turned the problem over in his mind. They wouldn’t be waiting for him off-world; the space elevators were too easily blocked, too easily powered down, isolating him. The likeliest scenario would be to touch down very briefly someplace on Earth along a direct line of flight to one of the elevators … and effectively disappear as the robotic transport continued its flight.
Damn it, it was imperative that Korosi not be allowed to escape. If he did, the war might grind on for years more, a guerilla action fought in jungles and villages and mountains from South America to Africa to Southeast Asia.
Koenig wasn’t linked in directly to Swayze’s thoughts, his internal monologue. That degree of electronic telepathy required more sophisticated equipment than was available here … and wasn’t desirable in any case. But he couldn’t help but wonder what the Marine had in mind. Clearly, the man was working toward an idea …
Swayze, unarmed now, raised both gauntleted hands. “Look, General … take me instead, okay? She’ll be nothing but trouble. I’ll promise to behave …”
Korosi laughed. “What … you? You’re an NCO, a foot soldier! What makes something like you as valuable as the former president of the Earth Confederation?”
Swayze took a couple of steps forward, his hands still raised. “Simple: I know the full deployment of the Marines for this assault … and I know the plans that were set in motion to trap you here, to keep you penned up. I know the troop deployments topside here, and I know what naval assets we have in orbit. General Korosi, I could help you. A lot.”
Another cautious step …
“No closer!” The Confederation general gestured with the needler, warning Swayze back.
It was enough.
Since the first half of the twenty-first century, military armor had incorporated feedback cybernetics that allowed the wearer to lift and carry far greater loads than were possible for an unarmored individual. Neural augmentation—new circuitry nanochelated throughout the living brain—made it possible for an armored man to react and move more quickly as well. Clad in their Mark I armor, Marines possessed both superhuman strength and speed.
Janos Korosi was almost certainly enhanced as well … but not enough.
Swayze’s gloved hand snapped down and out with blinding speed, closing around the needler, the glove’s palm blocking the weapon’s muzzle. Korosi’s hand clenched convulsively: he fired and Swayze screamed. The needler’s power pack gave it the ability to shoot eight pulsed bursts of coherent light or a single beam lasting a few seconds. Korosi had the weapon set for a beam, and the five-millimeter thread of laser light melted through the glove, Swayze’s hand, and the top side of the glove within perhaps half a second.
By then, though, the Marine had twisted Korosi’s arm out and back so that the weapon was no longer pointed at the hostage. Swayze crowded forward, grappling with the Confederation general, continuing to grip the smothered weapon with his terribly injured hand as he knocked Roettgen aside and interposed his own body between the two. He kept squeezing, too, for as long as his armor’s glove could exert the pressure, crumpling the needler’s tough plastic body in his grip even as molten metal and ceramic charred the palm of his hand. In-head readouts showed Swayze’s doloric levels—the amount of pain he was enduring—shooting up at first, then beginning to fall … either as Swayze’s enhanced brain stifled the pain response, or as the nerves in the more sensitive parts of his hand burned away and shock began to set in.
Korosi struggled in Swayze’s grip. The laser failed—either crushed to uselessness or its power pack drained—and Swayze wrestled the general to the ground. The other Marines were leaping forward now and piling on, grabbing Korosi’s thrashing legs and arms.
“Nem! Nem! Engedj el!” Korosi screamed, his native Magyar immediately translated by Swayze’s in-head. “No! No! Let me go!”
Swayze subdued the man at last through the simple expedient of sitting on Korosi’s chest, cradling his wounded hand as his armor’s med units began treating him.
And with that, Koenig knew that the fight for Fort Douamont was over.
VFA-96, Black Demons
LEO
0019 hours, TFT
Lieutenant Connor threw her Starblade into a hard-left roll and engaged her forward grav projector. A brief burst of acceleration at twenty thousand gravities and she was hurtling past the incoming projectiles, several of which flared into vapor as she brushed them with the intensely warped pucker of space just ahead of her fighter. Two of the Todtadlers ahead and below twisted around to meet her, but she caught one in a target lock with her PBP-8 and slammed it with a high-energy particle beam, flashing the fighter into star-hot vapor.
The Pan-European Todtadlers—Death Eagles—were highly advanced, modern fighters. They easily matched USNA fighters like the SG-101 Velociraptor, but they were utterly outclassed by the newer Starblades. Connor could feel her mind