“Come on!” Cronje said. “We’re getting out of here now, Sandoval! That’s an order!”
“What about Captain Covington?” Vicky demanded. “We can’t leave him and Cam down here!”
“Then you stay with them, you crazy, worthless bitch!” Cronje screamed back at her. “The rest of us are getting the hell out of here!”
I should have been shocked when he boosted out of there, not even stopping to help fight off the Tahni troopers, just heading straight out through the ruined awning. I should have been outraged at a Marine officer leaving his troops behind. Instead, I was numb, unsurprised. This was the end, the one I’d been expecting.
“Get out of here, Vicky,” I told her. “You have to make it.”
“No,” she told me, the words flat and broaching no argument. Another Tahni battlesuit dropped down on us and she stood her ground in the midst of a lightning-storm of electron fire and returned it with her plasma gun. “You think I risked my career to get that piece of shit Cronje to come rescue you just to leave you down here? If you stay, I stay. That’s how it’s going to be.”
“Jesus,” Covington murmured, pushing himself up on his hands, getting what was left of his feet beneath him. “Get a room, you two.”
Then he hit the jets and flew straight at the central solenoid, and I knew exactly what he was going to do.
“Vicky, in here!” I yelled, grabbing her armor by the shoulder plastron and shoving her toward the narrow opening in the far wall, concealed in the shadows even from my thermal and infrared, absolutely no light shining through it.
She nearly tripped over the bodies of Marines, but turned the stumble into a lumbering run, and disappeared into the darkness. I was right behind her, the narrow walls like the mouth of a great beast swallowing us both, and a claustrophobia I had never felt before clawed at my gut, but I didn’t look back. I didn’t even look back when light brighter than a sun exploded behind us, flooding the maintenance tunnel with an impossible, shadowless glare that seemed to penetrate even the blind face of my helmet.
The concussion hit just as we emerged from the other end of the tunnel and into what might have been a pump room for the water coolant system. I say might have, because I had about one second to notice the details of the chamber, to take note of the water pipes and other equipment before the blast tossed me across the room. I hit the opposite wall and I hoped the crunch I heard was concrete breaking and not my bones. The stars, though, they were all mine, floating in front of my eyes, blocking the much less interesting view of bits of the roof collapsing down around us.
“Get out,” I croaked, not even able to see Vicky through the flares in my vision, much less tell if she was even conscious, much less on her feet. “The building’s coming down.”
“This way,” she said, but I couldn’t even make out where she was to follow until I squeezed my eyes shut for a second and tried again to focus them.
She was heading for a cargo door, sealed with some sort of rolling, metal curtain. I whispered a prayer that it wasn’t too well-built, and for once, God seemed to be listening. Vicky’s battlesuit ripped through the thin metal as if it wasn’t there, strips of it peeling away in her wake and I could, at last, see the grey light of dawn. And a slightly brighter glow from behind us, from the west.
We lumbered out on a gravel road and I turned around to look. Where the central hub had been was a column of glowing smoke rising into the air, beyond a fire, not quite a nuclear explosion or we wouldn’t have survived it. The plasma had vented catastrophically and taken the central reactor tokamak with it.
Taken Captain Phillip Covington with it.
“He’s gone.”
The words hissed out of their own volition, like the air escaping a balloon. They seemed to take a part of my soul with them.
“The Skipper’s gone.”
16
“Lt. Alvarez.”
The voice crackled in my headphones, distorted and staticky, and I knew, on some level, that it wasn’t the first time I’d been called. I still didn’t reply, staring at the rising cloud from the explosion, trapped in a mental loop. There were certainties in the universe, laws that couldn’t be violated. The speed of light in a vacuum in real-space, the inverse-square law, the conservation of mass…and the immortality of Captain Phillip Covington.
Nothing could kill him. He’d outlive the heat-death of the universe, just a few basic particles, radiation, and Phillip Covington. Everyone knew that. And now he was dead. He’d done it himself, so maybe the truth was that the Skipper was the only one who could kill the Skipper.
“Cam,” Vicky said, and I could almost feel her hand on my arm, even though it was impossible.
Her voice broke the spell, and I blinked, reality coming back into focus. We were still standing on the gravel service road, still facing the roiling black cloud that was Covington’s tombstone, but it wasn’t just the two of us anymore. A Vigilante suit was standing at the top of the earthen wall separating
