There were too many Vigilantes, seemingly as many as the High Guard, and there couldn’t have been. I glanced at the transponder readout and saw an IFF signal from Vicky’s platoon, guessed at that instant what had happened. The Tahni force Cronje had been fighting had bypassed his position and headed here, and at least Vicky’s platoon had pursued.
We weren’t alone, but I was still riding a Tahni battlesuit to the ground floor. He managed to toss me away just before we hit bottom and I crashed to my back, the wind going out of me despite the cushioning inside the suit. It bought him a second, maybe two before I could move, and it would have been enough. He had the emitter of his electron beamer lined up with my head and would have ended me,
Except a plasma blast from my right ended him first. His head vanished in a supernova of burning gas and he stayed upright, frozen like a statue, his gun still pointed at me, his dead finger probably still on the trigger.
“How the hell did you get down here, Alvarez?” Captain Covington asked.
He was leaning against the far wall, both his legs burned off above the knees, surrounded by a pile of our dead and theirs.
“Jesus Christ, sir,” I hissed, looking at him. The suit’s legs were longer than ours, of course, but his own had to have been taken off at least somewhere near the top of the shins, and the thermal bloom would have cooked him higher than that.
“Don’t worry, son,” he said, his voice sounding curiously detached, like he was watching all this from orbit and relaying a transmission down to a remotely-piloted suit. “The pain-killers in this thing are pretty powerful. Not feeling a thing.”
“Is there another way out of here, sir?” I asked, stumbling over to him, trying not to trip over the dead.
“There’s a service tunnel back that way,” he said, motioning with his off hand to our left. I peered down that way and noticed a slight lightening of the stygian darkness. “But it doesn’t matter, I’m not walking anywhere. We need to take down this reactor. From what’s going on up there, I’m not sure how much time we have left.”
“Take it out with what, sir?” I wondered. “The Boomers are gone.”
I flinched at a thunderous detonation just a few dozen meters overhead, edging closer to the overhang that protected the Skipper’s position. It had been cramped and close down here before a dozen battlesuits had been trashed and scattered in every conceivable place I could put a foot down flat. I was nearly standing right on top of him, and I tried not to look at what was left of his legs, afraid I would see through the ragged, melted armor into the ravaged flesh beneath it.
“Take it out with me,” he said, not a note of concern in his voice for the chaos above us.
“What are you talking about, sir?” The pain-killers could be getting to him, I thought.
“Remember Warrant Officer Mutterlin?” he asked me, seemingly apropos of nothing. “Mutt, back on Inferno? In the armory?”
I did, of course. He’d taught me everything I knew about the inner workings of a Vigilante, and he’d probably saved my life a dozen times over, though he’d never know it.
“Yes, sir, but what….”
“It’s a shame we couldn’t bring Mutt with us,” he went on, rambling a bit, I thought. “But the man got severely space-sick, not a damned thing the drugs could do about it. But he probably did better teaching new Drop-Troopers the secrets of the suit than he would have repairing damaged Vigilantes after a battle. And of course, if he’d been on the Iwo, he’d be dead right now. But he taught me something he didn’t tell too many Marines, something that could have got him in big trouble.” He chuckled with just a hint of insanity behind the sound. “You see, Cam, this isotope reactor we wear on our backs, well…it’s quite the little firecracker. It wants to explode and the R&D teams had to spend quite a few years figuring out ways to keep it from exploding. So, if you know the way around all those safety procedures, it’s not impossible to make the damn thing explode.”
“Sir,” I blurted, “there is no fucking way I’m going to let you…”
I don’t know what clever and assertive remark I’d been about to make, but I didn’t get the chance. The battle above us spilled down into our laps and I threw myself over Covington’s prone form as a High Guard suit crashed down only meters away, trailing fire. Two more were heading for us and I fired at one of them reflexively, but they went down to plasma fire from above, and two Vigilante suits touched down beside us. Their IFF transponders announced their identity bright and clear, yet I had trouble believing it.
One was Vicky Sandoval, and the other was Captain Cronje.
“Come on, Alvarez, Phillip,” Cronje snapped at Covington and me, gesturing with one hand, the other aiming a plasma gun upward. “Every fucking High Guard and Shock-trooper in the city is heading for this reactor. We have to get the hell out of here now.”
“My God, sir,” Vicky gasped, finally seeing Covington’s legs. “Come on, Cam,” she urged me. “Help me grab him. Together, we can fly him out of here.”
“You two get him,” I told her. “My jets are damaged. Read-out says they might be usable again once the turbines cool down, but I’m ground-bound until then. Get him out of here and I’ll try to get out on foot.”
A missile struck the
