He parsed all three of those options as Tyrus Rechs shot down everyone in the lobby. Some distant part of his mind worked the self-preservation side of the equation. His crew had tried to take down the armored bounty hunter with blaster fire, but the man moved swiftly and violently, working the scattergun like it was second nature. It only carried six shots, but in the hands of someone as skilled as Rechs—and Loth knew the man’s reputation wasn’t unfounded—it was more than enough to ruin everyone’s day.
When the scatterblaster finally ran dry, Rechs tossed the weapon aside. The tac bag was already low on charge packs and he was allocating what remained for the little Jackknife the marine carried.
Rechs trotted back to the elevator the marine covered him from and hefted the wounded legionnaire onto his back once more.
“Lyra, bring in the Crow as close as you can get to my loc. We’re coming out.”
Rechs turned toward the marine.
“I’ll clear everything in front of us. You keep them off our backs. My ship is coming. We keep moving. Copy?”
She had that faraway look in her eyes. Like she had reached her limit. Or had been elsewhere mentally and wasn’t sure where she was now. Understandable. Rechs had been there many times.
“Copy, Marine?” he said again.
There was no other way than this. She had to see the last fifty meters through on her own. It was the only way.
“Copy,” she said, suddenly coming back to the present.
Rechs nodded. “Fifty meters and we’re out.”
He could already hear the howl of the Crow coming in, the whine and roar of the starship’s engines erasing the blaster fire they were about to move out into.
And Tyrus Rechs didn’t hesitate to take that first step. “Let’s move.”
62
The old light freighter registered as the Accadian Comet came in hard and fast, swooping down over wagon wheels rising to needle points. The sky began to settle from red to purple twilight, and lights were coming on across the city, competing with the fires in the streets. Smoke and haze gave everything that soft-focus look, as though all of this were some late-summer harvest festival.
Even as the Crow set down in the wide plaza before the Excelsior Arms, flaring her repulsors, venting engine gases, and deploying her three massive landing struts, the bomb in the building detonated, fracturing the structure’s spine around the fifth floor.
Loth had his mobile blaster teams, hidden inside commandeered sport utility sleds, ready to engage anyone who came out of the building. He’d decided there was no running from Zauro. Best case for him now… they wounded the prisoners and recaptured. Most likely outcome… they killed the legionnaire. And that would just have to be explained. Not great. But probably not bad when it was all added up.
Loth had wired and placed the explosives himself. His EOD training had been expert level. The device would fracture the spine of the building high up enough to drop the upper levels down onto the lower levels, creating a cascade implosion. The thing would essentially collapse down on itself and not out into the street where it had the possibility of hitting the convoy if it was still in the area.
The original plan had been not to be anywhere near the area, but plans had a way of coming apart at first contact. So this had been an excellent bit of operational foresight on Loth’s part. Not dropping the building onto its side in the street the way an amateur might.
And just as an unidentified freighter sat down in the wide plaza where four major streets intersected among the burned-out stores and general ruined lifelessness of the old city, floor five erupted, blowing out debris and glass in a sudden blossom of explosive force. Spectacular, but no real threat to anyone not directly inside the building.
An ominous and titanic groan sounded from the building’s central spine.
The entire thing would fully collapse in the next thirty seconds, but to Loth that seemed well back on his list of things to worry about. For at that moment, Tyrus Rechs, the man himself, carrying his legionnaire prisoner, came running out of the collapsing building, the entire time shooting a massive sidearm in staccato automatic bursts at everyone on the street. And that damn female marine followed close behind, putting blasts into the armored sport utility sleds, killing one of the drivers in her first shots. Ruining his plans.
Reaction teams from the convoy erupted with return fire from their vehicles at the same instant the top floors began to collapse. Maybe they weren’t aware the building was coming down.
Or maybe shooting back seemed more pressing.
All of this was about to get very messy.
Overhead, a marine SLIC came in hot.
Loth started to doubt he was getting out of this. But that wasn’t going to stop him from trying. If he had to kill his way to an escape pod, he would. In that moment he switched over from running a crew—leading—to focusing on his own survival.
His people just didn’t know it yet.
A tidal wave of debris and dust flooded out from the collapsing building and drowned the street in its wake. It was all-consuming, billowing out to demand that everyone in its path surrender to its force. Men coughed, their mouths full of the stuff. And as the dust blew across the street like a rolling storm front, the building offered its last residual groans and crashes. And then there was an ominous silence through which nothing could be heard except distant warning sirens and sled alarms.
Loth reached out in the blinding swirls of dust. He felt his lieutenant next to
