was thick out there, huh?' the COB asked.
'If you don't mind my sayin,' COB, it was thick as shit.'
'Yeah, you did good, Ensign. Thanks.' Wallace shook the ensign's hand and turned toward the next wounded soldier. By the insignia on his UCU top, it was an AEM. The PFC was missing his right leg from the knee down. The kid's name was Willingham. Wallace smiled at the marine and looked around the basketball court–sized triage area. This was going to take some time. He'd be there awhile, if there were no urgent calls from the bridge.
'All right, Gunny, there is floor about ten meters down. There's an elevator and a stairwell.' PFC Howser shined her suit lights around the room, looking for signs of life or booby traps. She didn't see any. 'Clear.'
'Bates, go.' Tommy told the corporal. Then he dropped in behind him. The rest of the Robots dropped in behind them.
'I've got an elevator shaft, Tommy,' Bates called to him.
The room was pitch black. The explosion of Tommy's suit power core had knocked out every system in the place at that level. It had been strong enough to overload the SIF that was being projected around the control bunker. The AEMs had to keep their visors down and their QMs and IRs going. The visor and DTM displays were just as vivid as if they were standing in bright daylight on a perfectly clear day.
'I bet that ain't gonna work, Bates.' The second lieutenant bounced in carefully beside Suez. 'See if you can get it open.'
'Yes, sir.' Bates started fumbling around, trying to get a grip on the crease where the two elevator doors met. 'Hell with that,' he said and then kicked the shit out of it.
The door caved in, and he reached down and tore it the rest of the way off.
'Hey, look at that,' Howser said. 'The elevator car isn't here.' She looked over the edge of the shaft and pinged it with her rangefinder. 'Shit, the bottom of this thing is one hundred and fifty meters down.'
'Get back, Howser,' Top ordered the private. Bates and Tommy quickly dropped back from the opening, pulling their rifles up to ready.
'What gives, Gunny?' Howser asked.
'The last time we were at the bottom of an elevator shaft, we ended up in a firefight. Think about it, Howser. The elevator car is at the bottom. Elevator cars wait where they were last used until somebody presses a button somewhere else.' Tommy had a feeling that the shit wasn't over for the day just yet. That was the life of a marine—always in the shit.
'What d'you think, Colonel?' Tommy asked Roberts.
'It's tight quarters, but there ain't but one way to do it,' Roberts replied.
'Shit, I figured that. Looks like we'll need to be careful and climb a good eighty meters or so down. Tommy held his HVAR over the edge and pointed it down. He used the sighting-scope system to give him a zoomed view of the shaft. There was a ladder up the shaft, but it would be tough to climb in an e-suit.
'Colonel, wait. We should just get the
'Fuckin' A,' Bates whispered to himself.
'Second Lieutenant Nelms, that is a goddamned stellar idea,' Roberts replied. 'But first we'll have them send down a gas bomb or two. We don't want to damage the facility, but we may get lucky and catch them sleeping with their faceplates up. Stay alert, Robots, but chill while I set this up.'
It didn't take long for Colonel Roberts to get the QMT approved. The QM sensors on the suits managed to generate enough data to create rough a map of the underground facility. At the bottom of the shaft was a very large chamber with other side chambers. The colonel decided to have the marines teleported to the center of that room.
'Okay, Robots, we're doing this from an outward-facing circle defensive posture,' Top told them. 'Visors down, form up.' Howser, Bates, Cross, Hubbard, and Suez knelt in a circle and Top, the second lieutenant, and the colonel stood in the center back-to-back. One instant the AEMs were standing in the top-floor room of the blown-to-shit governor's mansion and the next they were in the middle of a room the size of a hangar bay. There were consoles lining the walls and equipment strewn about, but there were no signs of any kind of life.
'Fan out,' the colonel ordered. 'Recon. And keep those visors down—there should be plenty of residual gas floating around.'
The team spread out in every direction, pinging away with sensors and being careful. They were alert, with all sensors and eyes looking for booby traps. The best they could tell, there were none. Tommy was pretty sure the place had been abandoned. That would mean that
