A shout. Daniella turned her head. Thom was running towards them, his phaser gripped firmly in his hand. "They're onto us!" he yelled. "Targeting lidar just lit up this building! Come on, move!"
"I can get him when he swings round again!" Maury shouted back.
"No!" snapped Thom. "They've got better range, they'd fry us before you got the shot off. No time to argue! Move!"
And they moved, Maury manhandling the two-metre tube of the missile launcher and swearing all the way, Daniella struggling under the weight of the munitions satchel, refusing to let the other two see she was struggling -
They reached the manhole with scant seconds to spare, dived down it and pulled the cover to. Once, Daniella had gagged at the stench of Einsteingrad's main trunk sewer; now, it smelled like safety, like home, almost. Through the closed cover, they heard the shrill warble of Siohonin disruptors, heard the roar of flames and the crashing of shattered masonry as the warehouse building they'd been using as a vantage point collapsed in ruins.
"Damn those horn-head -" Maury began a long and inventive tirade, cut short when Thom came up to him and put one hand on his partner's shoulder.
"We can't afford to get ourselves killed now," Thom said simply. "They're still strafing the capital, and we don't have contact either with the home defence militia, or with Starfleet. It's up to us to keep the fight going until the military can regroup and push them off the planet."
He spoke with quiet conviction and intensity. Her brother had really grown into this role, Daniella reflected. Maybe Starfleet would be the right career choice for him after all.
"So what do we do now?" she asked.
"Link up with Sidak and Tahn," said Thom, "at the main waste processing plant. Then I reckon we take the service tunnel by the reclamation pipe, here -" He jabbed a finger at the map. The map was a plastic sheet, with the plan of the sewers drawn in luminous ink; low-tech, it wouldn't show up on scans, wasn't vulnerable to information warfare attack. The map was a lifeline, a talisman - it had saved them already, so many times.
Now they trooped through the malodorous tunnels, heads bowed, finding their way by the occasional maintenance lamps, not daring to turn on flashlights. Somehow, the Siohonin had ways of finding their targets. The citizens' defence militia had found that out, the hard way.
They paused for breath in the hollow of a maintenance supplies bay. "We got any word from Starfleet?" Maury asked. "Anything at all?"
Thom shook his head. "We reckon some of the frigates got out, though. They must have raised the alert at Starfleet Command by now. The Vespasian bought them time enough before they -" He fell silent. They had all heard the last transmissions from the cruiser USS Vespasian as the Siohonin fleet closed in.
Thom allowed them three minutes of rest before they pressed on. Daniella shouldered the munitions pack, tried not to think about how much it weighed... or how much it had weighed. They had seven photonic missiles left, three cartons of ammunition for the photon mortar, some plasma grenades - Daniella reproached herself for not knowing exactly how many plasma grenades they had left. She would make a count, at the first opportunity.
They reached the reprocessing plant, a mechanical wilderness of pipes and concrete, walkways and hatches. An army could hide in it for days. The thin Vulcan Sidak was there, and his friend Tahn. Daniella didn't know the name of Tahn's species; she was small and slight, with skin like tree bark, and a pair of antennae bristling from her forehead. The five of them crouched beneath a metre-wide pipe, and while Sidak and Thom talked tactics, Daniella counted the grenades. Sixteen. Was that enough? She had no idea.
"The Siohonin cannot exert effective control without ground forces," said Sidak. "Logically, transporter operations are too hazardous, given the random radiations associated with a battlefield, as well as such active transporter interdiction as we still possess. They must, therefore, attempt to land troop ships."
"And the capital is the obvious place to start," said Thom, "and we've already taken out some of the ground troops they have landed, so they must send reinforcements."
"Yes. The most logical approach for landing troop ships, given the site of the city's spaceport, is here." Sidak sketched in a line on a map of the city. "The dam face for the reservoir affords an adequate vantage point - and, if the Siohonin aim to take the city intact, they cannot respond with heavy weapons for fear of breaching the dam."
"If they aim to take the city intact," said Maury gloomily.
"It is logical to assume that is their intention."
"Yeah," said Maury, "but the horn-heads haven't shown a lot of restraint so far...." He shook his head, and picked up the missile launcher. "It's our best chance to hit them, though. Do we go for it?"
"I got some comms traffic off the Siohonin net." Tahn spoke up for the first time. "Something big's happening in an hour or so. Have to guess it's a troop drop."
It seemed like wishful thinking to Daniella, but she said nothing. They had to do something... they had to believe that what they did would make a difference.
Uncomplaining, she hoisted the munitions pack onto her shoulders and set off on the steep climb up the service tunnel to the dam. Her back ached, her thigh muscles burned. She steeled herself to ignore it - after all, it was no worse, wasn't it, than a hard day's training? She would not let the others down... even little Tahn was keeping pace, gamely, uncomplaining. She would keep going. However long it took. Whatever it took.
She sighed quietly with relief, though, when they reached the end of the tunnel and stepped out onto the rim of the dam.. After so long in the tunnels, the daylight was dazzling. She crouched down and peered over the ferroconcrete parapet. Behind her, the waters of the reservoir were placid, untroubled; before her and beneath her, Einsteingrad was spread out, columns of smoke reaching into the sky from the most recent sites of Siohonin bombardment.
There were drifting shapes in the sky - Siohonin fighters, for the most part, though a few, a very few, interceptors from the defence force were still flying. Tahn knelt down beside Daniella, unstrapping a pack from her back. "Help me set this up," the little alien said.
The pack held a passive sensor rig, detectors which could track movements in the atmosphere. Under Tahn's terse directions, Daniella placed the little pyramid shapes of the antennae. They dared not use active sensors, not until the very last moment.
"Good," muttered Tahn, hunched over the instrument. "Good. Something's coming in, all right. Bigger than a fighter... smaller than one of their frigates...."
"On the course we anticipated?" asked Sidak. Tahn made an affirmative grunt.
"Set the shot up, quick," Thom ordered. He squeezed Daniella's shoulder as he scrambled past to check the exit to the maintenance tunnel, and she felt hugely grateful for the quick touch of her brother's hand. Quickly, she passed a photon missile from the pack to Maury, readied another. He might get a second chance, if he missed with the first. The Siohonin freighters were slow. Their atmospheric fighters, though, were pretty fast.
"It's reached the stratosphere," said Tahn. "Can almost feel the compression wave already."
There was a wind rising, Daniella thought. Or maybe it was just in her imagination. Maury was swearing under his breath as he checked and rechecked the missile launcher. Sidak was a stolid, calm presence, watching along the dam, phaser ready in his hand. Daniella felt for the sidearm at her own hip. She was not used to this. Not to any of this.
"Here it comes," said Tahn. Maury was down on one knee, the missile launcher raised, at the ready. There was a deep throbbing rumble like thunder in the air.
The Siohonin freighter hurtled overhead, its ungainly bulk blotting out the sun for a brief instant. And, in that instant, Maury fired. The launcher made a shrieking noise like some terrible animal -
But it was beautiful, Daniella thought, the missile itself becoming a silver streak of light, blossoming into a burst of yellow flame as it struck the Siohonin ship. The freighter slewed and dropped abruptly, smoke and blazing fragments jetting from one ruined engine... and suddenly it was toppling through the air, and off course, heading for the low rounded hills to the south of the city. The stricken craft disappeared behind the curve of one hill. An instant later, the hill was silhouetted in a burst of brilliant light, and a cloud of burning debris rose up above it. The ear-splitting sound of the explosion followed a few seconds later.
"Yes!" Maury yelled, almost inaudibly in the noise.
"Move!" It was Thom's voice. "Squad coming up the tunnel! Move!"
Daniella's mind raced. They would have to get to the other end of the dam, find the trails, scatter, head for the country, then double back and go to ground in the maintenance tunnels before the Siohonin sensors could sweep the area -
Tahn reached for her sensor device. Then she screamed, and glowed, flaring with light, an intolerable heat pouring off her, making Daniella flinch back. And then she was gone, nothing more than a scattering of glowing embers across the concrete surface.
"What the hell- ?" Maury stood aghast. "Where did that come from?"
"Move!" Thom shouted again. Daniella looked around in a panic. Where had it come from, whatever that force was, the one that killed Tahn? Was there a sniper somewhere, or -?
The shockwave caught her and knocked her off her feet, rolling her along the concrete until her legs were dangling over the edge, her feet splashing in the water of the reservoir. A Siohonin fighter - it had swooped overhead, not firing, simply bowling them over with the rush of its passage. Daniella's ears rang as she pulled herself back from the brink. Suddenly, there were Siohonin troops around them.
They were tall and bearded, their horns poking through slots in the metal helmets they wore. Most of them were military caste, wearing the field-grey uniforms with metallic chest panels, uniforms the people of Farnon's World had learned to loathe already. But one of them -
He wore robes of red and black and white, and there was the emblem of a stylized flame on his chest, and on the tip of the short rod he held in one hand. He was bare-headed, apparently unarmoured. The military caste held weapons, old-fashioned lasers for the most part, but this one held nothing in his hands but that flame-tipped rod. Daniella was most horrified by how young he was. He looked as though... as though he was the same age as her, and her friends.
"Rebels!" he said, in a high-pitched tone, as if his voice had not yet finished breaking. Thom dropped his phaser, raised his hands above his head. There were more Siohonin coming from the other end of the dam. Daniella realized bleakly that they had never stood a chance of escaping. But at least we brought the troopship down, she told herself. At least we did that much.
"Rebels!" the robed Siohonin repeated. "You defy the one true god! You bring harm to his worshippers, you try to stand in the path of our rightful conquest! You know now that you can never win! The one true god will not permit it! And now you will taste his vengeance!"
"We surrender," said Thom, thickly. "We surrender, and we request fair treatment as prisoners of war under applicable Galactic law." Maury should have said that, Daniella thought. Maury was going to be a lawyer.
"You are rebels," said the Siohonin, "no more than that." His gaze flicked across Daniella, dismissed her. "You have a female to serve you. She will be taken to serve us. As for the males -"
He raised the rod, and Thom and Maury and Sidak screamed and glowed and burned to ashes. It happened all in one instant, and Daniella was too stunned to speak, or scream, or grieve, as they seized her and took her away.
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