The highest-ranking of the survivors was Top. First Sergeant Ellen Campbell had taken more than one hit, and her suit was coated a carbon black over the matte grey. God alone knew how badly she was hurt inside it, but she limped over to me, unfazed by the electron beams impacting the wall behind us.
“Alvarez,” she rasped, her voice matching the battered condition of her suit, “about time you got here.”
“Sorry I’m late, Top. Where’s the Skipper?”
“Down there.” She pointed to the base of the solenoid with her plasma gun. “He took the last two Boomers down there about three minutes ago to try to destroy the solenoid. We laid down suppressive fire, but the Tahni managed to get suits down to take him on and I ain’t heard a thing from him since.”
“If they got the Boomers,” I said, “how the hell are we going to take this thing out?”
“Plasma guns ain’t gonna do a damned thing to it,” she agreed. She was slurring her words. Not a lot, just enough to let me know she was hurting, maybe already woozy from pain meds. This wasn’t good. “It’s designed to handle plasma.”
I could barely hear her, even with the volume in my earphones turned up all the way. My Marines were crowded into a space barely thirty meters across, their plasma guns blasting every few seconds, the volleys timed with the rest of Delta to keep a solid wall of fire going toward the Tahni. The concussion of the constant wave of superheated gas going outward along with the lightning-crack of the occasional answering electron beam was like trying to hold a conversation in the center of a thunderstorm.
“I’ve got to get to him,” Top told me, shuffling forward, her armor half-toppling like she was drunk. “I’ll pull him out of there…”
“Top,” I said, putting my Vigilante in front of hers, blocking her way. “You’re in no condition to go down there, and neither is your armor.”
“We going in to get the Skipper?” Bang-Bang asked, huddled beside me, crouching down slightly to stay behind the dead Marines.
“Negative,” I told him. “We aren’t going anywhere. You are going to stay up here and lay down covering fire. I’m taking one fire team with me down there to relieve the Skipper and carry out the mission.”
“Sir!” he protested. “You’re the only officer here!”
“And the mission is shutting down this fucking reactor, Sergeant,” I reminded him. “I’m not needed up here directing fire against a distraction, I’m needed to finish the fucking mission. That’s why the Skipper was down there instead of up here.” I motioned at the Tahni. There were about three platoons of them over across the hub, maybe sixty or seventy meters away, equal our strength. “When I say, I want you to…”
The sky exploded.
That wasn’t what actually happened, of course, but at the time, it was close as I could come to understanding it. One second, the white, plastic awning stretched across the top of the reactor hub, and the next, it was sheathed in flames, burning fragments raining down around us. And on the heels of the burning awning were High Guard battlesuits, and a wave of missiles aimed not well, but in our general direction.
I had less than a second to act and no time at all to think, and the only coherent thought blaring in my head was not to be caught sitting there.
“Jump!” I bellowed on the general net, not wanting to leave out anyone who might have tagged along from another company.
I took my own advice and hit the jets, heading straight up into the teeth of the Tahni force, firing my plasma gun as I flew, all thoughts of taking out the reactor forgotten in a desperate attempt to just survive the next few seconds. In retrospect, it must have been a missile. They were crashing down on top of us, hitting the service walkway, blowing burning fragments out of the concrete walls, and one must have detonated just a bit too close.
Red flashed in my visor, useless warnings telling me what I already knew. I’d been hit, my jets were out, and I was falling.
It was nearly fifty meters down, way too far to survive, and I was going to hit hard enough to shatter my spine and fracture my skull, and there was no way in hell anyone was going to get me to a stocked medical bay on a ship in time to save my life. But something was just beneath me, something grey and metal, with the face of a golem, boosting up on reactor-powered jets. It was a Tahni High Guard battlesuit, one from the two platoons who had been just below us. He’d launched himself to strike at us before we could attack the incoming force, and I caught him in mid-air, arms going around his thick neck, the articulated claws on my left hand digging into the softer metal at the thing’s shoulder joint and hanging on with every ounce of energy my suit had.
His jets weren’t powerful enough to keep us both airborne, and we began to descend, slower than the fall had been but just as sure. He thrashed and tried to shake himself free of me, tried to smash his back
