The starship came out of its envelope just long enough to unload the first rack of bombs. It flashed yellow, then it was gone-hypersonic and untouchable by anything not also in a star-drive envelope. The ship's hull, heated by its microsecond exposure to atmospheric friction, left a lambent afterimage above Smiricky #4.

The flash meant nothing to Lieutenant Albrecht Waldstejn, Supply Officer of the 522nd Garrison Battalion. Above the western end of the valley where the flash had appeared, the sky now danced with sparks that grew as they tumbled closer. The sonic boom had not arrived. The bomb clusters which shed velocity and their ablative shells in balls of fire were only an unexpected light phenomenon to the young Federal officer.

His companion, Colonel Guido Fasolini, had seen thirty years of war on almost as many planets. Bombing from a starship was a difficult technique to master, but the mercenary colonel had seen it before. He did not deny his senses by insisting that the Republicans here on Cecach could not possibly be doing it also. In the long run, that meant that Fasolini had probably hired his Company on with the wrong side again.

In the short run, it meant that he had about fifteen seconds to get his ass under cover.

"Come on!" Fasolini roared to his companion. Waldstejn was still staring in bemusement at the sky. The younger man turned to see the mercenary sprinting for the nearest shelter as fast as his stumpy legs could carry him. There would be time to get the details later, Waldstejn thought as he ran after the Colonel.

They were at the lip of the shelter when the first shock hurled them in.

It was the sonic boom rather than the stick of bombs hitting. The over-pressure of a three-kilo-tonne starship at Mach 5 was colossal. It flattened everyone in the compound who had not already ducked. Dust shuddered and rose among the dry grasses of the valley. The pall spread in a broad wake to mark the spacer's track on the ground beneath.