Final impact

His goggles rendered everything bottle green. Hundreds of bullet holes appeared as faint jade circles. The roof, which was now supporting him, felt very insecure, as if it might collapse under his weight as soon as he shifted position. He felt a light tap on his arm.

Private Haigh was lying along a thin wooden beam, beckoning him over. Very carefully, but with as much haste as he dared, Harry inched across while the trooper moved forward to give him room.

Haigh gestured Forward and Harry nodded, checking his watch. They had six minutes. The private wriggled along the narrow beam without any apparent effort, snaking around the joists that blocked their advance every ten meters or so. Bigger, older, and less flexible, the heir to the throne had slightly more trouble, almost rolling off the beam more times than he’d care to remember. He could imagine himself crashing down through the ceiling and dropping with a bone-cracking thud into no-man’s-land. Just before the Germans blew him apart.

The crawl space was a deadly, surreal environment, jammed with plumbing, duct work, and electrical wiring, the last of which sparked and fizzed as ricochets and misdirected bullets sliced through live circuits. Harry felt as though he were sneaking between tectonic plates that might shift at any moment and crush the life out of him. He switched from low-light to infrared, to better keep track of exposed electrical wires, which could kill him just as quickly as the gunfire. Creeping around the joists slowed him even further, and, checking the time hack in the corner of his goggles, he cursed softly.

They had a minute and a half left.

Three rounds punched through the ceiling next to his head and he tensed, assuming he’d been spotted and was about to get stitched up. The heat of the gun battle below produced eerie cones of infrared illumination, including the spot where the burst had punctured the roof. But nothing further happened.

He scurried forward to catch up with Haigh, who was waiting for him a few meters ahead. The youngster had even managed to spin himself around so that he was facing his commander.

“I reckon this is it, Colonel.”

Harry risked leaning out from the beam and pressing the lens of his NVGs up to a couple of closely spaced bullet holes. He discovered that if he shifted uncomfortably-and precariously-to his left, he could just make out what might be the camouflaged back of a German below them.

The time hack counted down.

04

03

02

01

00

“Go! Go! Go!” Harry cried. They both rolled off the beam and let their full weight collapse the flimsy roof tiles.

Sergeant Major St. Clair gathered what men he could at the upturned table: eight in all, including Ronsard, leaving the French bird and three troopers to watch over the prisoners. They had orders to make sure von Braun and Dornberger did not survive if the colonel’s plan didn’t come off.

As the tac-net time hack flashed a two-minute warning, he pressed his throat mike and whispered, “Fix bayonets.”

The men all quietly drew out their new standard-issue sawback blades. Captain Ronsard fitted his with commendable alacrity-for a Frog. Must be all that time in England. Nobody loved a bayonet charge like the British army.

St. Clair unsheathed his own custom-made 21C Dark Ops fighting knife. It felt like an old mate’s handshake. The double-thickness blade was forged from a hybrid alloy of five high-tensile metals and a surgical-grade monobonded carbon, nanonically hardened to give it a superfine edge without any brittleness. Back up in twenty-one it had been his habit to polish the blade in pig fat, a practice he’d given away shortly after the Transition. Only ragheaded nutjobs cared about getting stuck by “Ol’ Porky,” as he’d christened the evil-looking weapon. The boxheads, on the other hand, just didn’t like it up ’em at all. For a supposedly warlike super-race, they turned into a bunch of fuckin’ girly-men when things got up close and sticky.

The time hack counted down.

03

02

01

00

They held fire, lest they hit their own men. St. Clair heard a loud crash as Private Haigh and the colonel suddenly dropped out of the roof about three meters behind the German barricade. The rough staccato trip-hammer of two Ivan guns, pounding out six hundred rounds a minute each, started up as the Germans’ own rate of fire trailed off in confusion and panic.

A war scream, a bellow, and St. Clair was up, leaping the barrier. Ronsard and the other men were right there with him. It was a potentially suicidal attack. The Germans were now caught in a rough crossfire, but that meant that his men were firing in the direction of Windsor and Haigh. He couldn’t locate them in LLAMPS view, and hoped they’d dropped into cover of some sort, but for now his job was simple.

Close with the enemy, and destroy them.