slammed into the wall behind them and Von Paleske went down in a heap.
Shannon lunged back around the corner, grabbing at Von Paleske’s harness and dragging him back with her, not realizing until he was behind cover that Sergeant Morales had a hold of the other side of the man’s armored vest. Tom Crossman and Sergeant Jurgensen moved up quickly from the rear and leaned out from behind cover, laying down a wall of return fire. The medic slid in beside Von Paleske and Shannon rolled out of the way to give him access to the wounded man, then scrambled to her feet and joined Crossman and Jurgensen at the corner.
Tom Crossman was ducking behind cover to swap magazines, so Shannon crouched down and lunged into the corridor, bringing her carbine to her shoulder. One of the three biomech troopers was down, but the other two stood their ground, lacking any sort of instinct for self-preservation. Shannon’s weapon sight linked automatically with the reticle in her helmet and she lined up the aiming crosshairs with the faceplate of the biomech on the right and squeezed the trigger. The carbine bucked slightly against her shoulder and a three-round burst punched through the tough polymer over the biomech’s face, blood spraying out among a scattering of polymer shards as the manufactured humanoid collapsed forward.
The last biomech fell just moments after as Crossman and Jurgensen concentrated their fire on it, and just as suddenly as the cacophony had begun, it ended in a ringing echo and then dead silence. Shannon jumped up and stepped over to the medic, who was kneeling down beside the prone form of Von Paleske, wrapping a smart bandage around his left thigh.
“How is he?” she asked, using the external speaker on her helmet.
“I’ll be okay, ma’am,” Von Paleske answered for himself. “I can make it.”
“He caught a couple in the chest,” the medic told Shannon, ignoring the man’s protestations, “but the armor stopped them… got some bad bruising there, maybe a cracked rib or two. But he’s got a through-and-through on the leg that might have nicked his left femur. The smart bandage should stop the bleeding, but he won’t be running anywhere for a while.”
“Gunnar,” she said to Von Paleske, putting a hand on the wounded man’s shoulder, “I want you to get back to the tunnel entrance and tell Reynolds that we’re facing biomechs. Make sure he communicates that to the lander, and make sure the crew of the lander knows that anything that tries to fly out of this installation needs to get shot down, no questions asked.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Gunnar Von Paleske replied with a resigned sigh. Shannon and the medic helped him to his feet and he began limping gingerly back the way they had come.
“Move out!” Shannon ordered the rest.
“Morales, you take point,” Tom Crossman ordered the junior Sergeant.
Morales led them off down the left hand corridor, past the sprawled and motionless forms of the biomechs, moving even faster than before: she knew, as did Shannon, that their best bet was to get to the target as quickly as possible and get out. The long corridor was lined with open doors, Shannon saw as they jogged through it, all of them living quarters for installation personnel and all of them empty. Shannon wondered if they’d been evacuated prior to Riordan’s decision to run or if they were hold up somewhere else in the installation, alerted by some silent alarm after the explosion had breached the door.
Shannon slipped a rifle grenade from her tactical vest as she ran and slid it home into the launcher mounted beneath her carbine’s barrel; she nodded to herself as she saw Morales do the same. The corridor turned sharply to the right just ahead and Morales slowed as they reached the corner, lunging into a crouch then extending her carbine around the corner to use the connection between her rifle sight and her helmet reticle to check for enemies.
“Clear,” she announced, rising from her crouch and scrambling around the corner. Following her, Shannon saw that the hall ended just twenty meters down in a security door, bare but for an ID scanner.
“Breach it,” Shannon ordered Morales curtly, waving the rest of the unit forward and into position. “Four frags inside once it’s down,” she told Crossman. She winced at the realization that the missing personnel might be on the other side of that door, but shrugged the thought away: those people knew exactly what they were doing and what the consequences could be.
Morales shrugged off her backpack and retrieved the remaining breaching charges from it, pealing the backing off of each block to bare the strong adhesive and then sticking each to a key point on the door.
“Set,” she announced, slipping her pack on and backing away from the door. Tom Crossman, Sergeants Jurgensen and Wellington and Tech-2 Martinelli all took out grenades and armed them, waiting to the side of the door, while the others stacked up and made ready to charge inside.
“Blow it,” Shannon ordered, her grip tightening on her carbine as she looked away from the door to keep her visor safe from shrapnel.
In the scant second before Morales hit the switch to ignite the explosives, everything seemed to come into sharp focus in Shannon’s vision, down to the dust motes dancing in the air beneath the ceiling light panels and the antiseptic white of the polymer liners that coated the ancient stone of the walls.
“Detonating!” Morales announced, mashing her thumb into the control.
A wave of backpressure forced Shannon against the wall and she could feel the plastic lining vibrating like a drumhead. She took a step forward to keep her balance and turned in time to see Tom and the other three NCOs throwing grenades through the smoke-filled gap where the door had been. The grenades went off so close together that they sounded like a single, massive blast and the light shining through the haze of smoke dimmed as ceiling panels were blown out.
Morales and Martinelli were moving forward to enter the smoke-shrouded room when a burst of gunfire came through the opening, barely passing between them and sending them both diving for cover. Shannon angled her carbine around the edge of the jagged hole where the door had been and used its thermal sensors to see through the thick smoke and dust: there were at least a half dozen figures laid out and broken on the floor, but another four were still standing, heat glowing white on their weapons as they fired.
“Tom!” Shannon transmitted over her helmet radio to be heard over the shooting. “Four Gomers, between one and three o’clock! With me on two!” The NCO took a position at the edge of the doorway, carbine at the ready. “One… two!”
She and Crossman leaned out and the NCO sent a trio of quick full-auto bursts at the two biomech troopers on the right, while Shannon launched her rifle grenade at the other pair. They were only about ten meters away, but the grenade’s integral ballistics computer accounted for the distance and when it struck the biomech trooper in the chest, it used internal baffles to focus the explosion forward and to the sides.
The grenade exploded with a gut-punch concussion that blew the biomech into chunks of flesh and bloody armor; the jets of plasma from the side burned fist-sized holes through the neck and chest of the one next to it, blasting it off its feet and sending it plowing into the other two troopers. All three went down in a heap and Crossman emptied his magazine into them, putting burst after burst into the faceplates of their helmets until they stopped moving,
Fire control systems sprayed a fog of chemical foam into the room, adding another level of haze to the smoke that still wafted through the room, until an emergency ventilator activated and the mix of white chemical cloud and black smoke spiraled into a pair of large fans set in the walls. As the room cleared, Shannon became aware of several things in a moment: first, the room was the same one that Jameson had seen them holding Antonov. The transparent cell walls bisected the room; the other half was filled with monitoring and control stations, many of them blasted into charred and shattered pieces by the grenades.
The second thing she noticed was that Antonov was standing behind that clear wall; shadows playing across his craggy face in the patchy light from the few surviving ceiling panels, arms crossed as he watched them with what she could have sworn was amusement. And she also saw that he was not alone: also in the cell, flanking him, were half a dozen biomech troopers, their weapons trained on the former dictator of the Russian Protectorate, and beside them Kevin Fourcade and Brendan Riordan. Fourcade seemed impassive, as if he were watching a movie, his face bland and expressionless; while Riordan’s was flushed with anger, frustration and fear. His big right hand was filled with a pistol, pointing back and forth between Antonov and the general direction of Shannon and her troops, but that hand was shaking.
Slowly and almost casually, Shannon rose from behind cover and stepped through the doorway, her carbine held across her chest. She could see out of the corner of her eye Tom Crossman rising to join her, but she motioned
