It was obvious that the first step was to capture the Duke himself, and that the easiest way of doing that was to attack his ground-car motorcade en route between Lymdon and his mansion. Many plans for how to do this were discussed and discarded, but eventually a consensus emerged.
The Brazos lay in wait for the Duke's motorcade about five miles from the mansion. Wrapped in the Arbiter Cloak, she hung crossways over the road at an altitude of about fifty feet, her starboard cargo hatch gaping open. The closed port hatch was padded with all the cargo nets the crew could find. Uriah and Jacques lurked in the corridors either side of the cargo bay, while Verral stood at the open airlock hatch just forward of the bay. Reagan was ensconsed in the dorsal laser turret. (Confused? Check the deckplans!).
As the four sleek limos came into view, Captain Maclean set the huge starship moving, keeping pace with the lead car's 40mph speed, directly above it. Once he'd matched speeds, he and Cassandra counted down - and sprang into action!
The ship's radio and radar jammers blasted into life, interrupting all communications in the area. The Arbiter Cloak fizzled eerily and the ship shimmered into visibility. Instantly, Maclean cut the gravitic drive holding her up - and she dropped fifty feet squarely on top of the lead car of the motorcade. Three thousand metric tons of armoured gunship was more than enough for the job; the car was squashed instantly flat into a thin layer of tinplate oozing red paste at the edges.
The internal grav plates and inertial dampers protected the crew of the Brazos from the effects of the fall - though the noise was like the end of the world! - and those watching from the starboard side had a moment to glimpse the terrified faces in the front seat of the Duke's car before it hit the ramp and careered into the cargo hold. The driver, by some frantic miracle of reflexes, managed to slam on the brakes and swing the wheel, but all he achieved by this was to slam his side of the vehicle into the bulkhead. The front RH side wheel collapsed and the driver was flung across his wheel, dead or stunned.
Uriah tapped a switch and the pre-arranged pattern of grav plates - a track roughly a car's-width down the centre of the bay - shifted from 1g nominal to 4g pseudogravity. Instantly, there was a crunch! as the car's suspension failed and the three remaining wheels collapsed and the two guards in the left side of the car, who'd been trying to open their doors and draw weapons, slumped helplessly back into their seats. The Duke didn't move either, but the guard in the rear right seat managed to get out, ducking behind the car and drawing his handgun while looking for a target.
Uriah and Jacques moved into the bay at this point, rifles raised and pointed at the man, and they called on him to surrender. Seeing how outnumbered he was, he dropped his pistol on the roof - whence it skittered off onto the floor - and slumped to the ground, whimpering in terror.
While all this was happening in the bay, the ship itself had not been idle. Lifting off again vertically, the Brazos tilted sharply to starboard, allowing the top turret scope to fire almost vertically downwards, though not discommoding the occupants of the slowly-closing cargo bay, thanks to the artificial gravity. Reagan lined up the heavy triple laser cannon with care, and blasted the third car of the motorcade into a smoking crater. As he traversed to the final vehicle, the driver wrenched it into reverse and smoked his tyres as he raced backwards to get away, but to no avail; a second massive blast obliterated it as well. Tidying up, the sniper treated the flattened point car to the same medicine, removing all evidence of what had originally happened to it.
Once sure all the Duke's guards had surrendered, Jacques mercilessly gunned them down; witnesses would be a real problem. He and Uriah, restoring normal grav, hauled the Duke out and pinioned him, then pitched the car out of the hatch again to crash to the road below, whereupon Reagan duly blasted it. Cassandra killed the jammers and reactivated the Cloak and the ship lifted away back to orbit.
Dragging the stunned and dazed Duke through into the sickbay, the Marines strapped him securely to one of the gurneys there, and administered basic first aid. Then Artanis laid his long alien fingers on either side of the Duke's head and slid a mental probe into the man's mind.
With much hesitancy and confusion caused by the strangeness of the human mind, the Protoss Templar sorted through the memories stored in his brain.
Floating to the surface came the details of the Ultramarine Conspiracy. Duke Henry was one of a triumvirate behind the plan; his co-conspirators were Sector Admiral Manfred Strongbow, and one Severina Destri, evidently a scion of the great Destri megacorporation family.
Henry's objectives were to back a seccession of his sector from the Imperium with the Ultramarines, then to strike for the Purple itself. The details of how he was to achieve this latter were a little blurry, but his desire for the throne was a diamond-sharp light.
His memories knew that he had files detailing the entire scope of the project, but he didn't have the details in his memory - just a knowledge of where to find them. He had a clear conviction that his computer systems, being isolated from any outside comms, were immune to external crackers.
In the face of this complete uncovering of his guilty secrets, Henry's demeanour progressed from stubborn, through worried to despairing. When Jacques stepped forwards and offered him the chance to turn his coat, he leapt at the chance, without showing the smallest remorse at who he must be betraying. Jacques lifted an eyebrow at Artanis; the Protoss nodded slightly - the man evidently meant what he said, at least at the moment. Securing him in one of the vacant staterooms, the team moved on to phase two.
Landing, they unloaded the APC. Duke Henry was persuaded to radio his home and explain that he was working late, but that he was sending a Marine courier with an important pack of papers who would arrive presently - giving appropriate names and IDs to cover the marines. Jacques changed into his dress blues, and carrying the Duke's own briefcase, posed as the courier, and Uriah, Reagan and Verral came along as his guards. Appropriate insignia were attached, and Verral carefully inspected everone before they mounted up and set off.
Arriving at the main gate, they were passed through by the guards, and parked as requested in the main car park. [1] At the front door of the mansion were two guards in ballistic cloth uniforms, who checked their papers again and directed them to the office of the Duke's personal secretary, J Kenneth Blackwell. Of him, the Duke had said, "I can do you papers to get to him, but I can't be sure he'll see sense like I did."
As they passed through the halls [2,3] Uriah and Verral peeled off and took post to secure the area. Reagan stopped just inside the side door outside Blackwell's office[4] , and Jacques went in.
Inside, Jacques took the initiative straight away, bullying Blackwell into turning off the omnipresent security camera. Then he laid it on the line - sort of - telling Blackwell that the project was blown, but portraying himself as a courier sent by Duke Henry to extract and secure the project data files.
Blackwell took some persuading, but eventually led the way to the computer room [6] and evicting the technicians who normally inhabited it. As they passed one door [5] they caught sight of the unmistakable massed screens of the security centre. While Jacques continued to blarney him about the "current situation", Reagan logged into the computers with the passwords Artanis had extracted from Henry's brain, and drained the entire Project data into a dataslug before wiping it irrevocably.
Blackwell, though obviously not adept with computers, became suspicious at the empty screens that started appearing. Turning to Jacques, he demanded to know what was going on and to see more documentation. Jacques opened the briefcase - facing him - and suddenly lunged at the man, driving a hypodermic into his arm. With a muffled cry, Blackwell slumped and was guided to a chair by the Marine.
Outside, the guard in the hall heard something, and started to peer around the door. Uriah curtly ordered him back into place, and an argument developed, which nearly ended in Uriah striking the man. Jacques defused the situation by walking casually out of the computer room, still "talking to" Blackwell.
Marching down the hall, Jacques, still posing as a visiting officer, bulled his way into the security office and browbeat the man there into issuing an Evacuation Alert. Klaxons sounded, and on the ranks of monitors the Marines could see staff and security troops rushing hither and thither as they prepared to abandon the building and decamp to the hangar and landing pad outside.
Something caught their eyes. On a monitor showing the cellars, they saw quite clearly a room carpeted in the dreadful Creep produced by the Zerg. This, however, was connected to an assortment of human-made gadgets. A stunted midget Hatchery lumped in the middle, and grouped around it were four humanoid figures, kneeling in the stuff with their eyes closed.
Another screen caught Reagan's eye. In an upstairs hall, two armoured forms were walking purposefully across the corridor. The pattern of the armour was familiar, though the version they'd seen before was prototypical and these were fully functional.
Ultramarines!
For some of the more interesting documents looted from the computers in the mansion, click here and here and here.
