“Exactly.”
“We’re here for you, Captain,” I said, the shoulders of the Vigilante shrugging along with mine. “What’s the plan?”
“We have three Boomers left,” she told me, motioning down the line to my left, where the fire support suits were kneeling awkwardly, their coil gun tubes digging into the dirt as they tried to stay behind cover. “I’ve been holding them back, but now that we have you, I have no choice but to try.”
She hesitated and I knew I wasn’t going to like what she said next.
“I’m going to send everyone over the top,” she decided. “It won’t be pretty, and we’re going to lose a lot of people, but it’ll give the Boomers time to target the mecha.”
“Shit.” I hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but there it was.
“I know,” she admitted. “But I’m all out of ideas.”
I was about to agree, but then I discovered that I wasn’t.
“The reactor. We took out the main fusion plant,” I said, talking myself through it as much as explaining it to Geiger. “That means the air defense turrets are being powered locally. Probably something right in that building.”
“So?” she demanded, stress and impatience turning her voice ragged.
“So, we can take out the local reactor and shut down the anti-aircraft turrets, then let the shuttles take out the mecha.”
“There’s no time for that! The longer we fuck around here, the more likely they’re going to lose patience, take their chances and just send that Goddamned thing walking this way and pound right into our lines!”
“No, they won’t,” I assured her. “If they had the will to take those sorts of chances, the High Guard wouldn’t have retreated when we hit them. They would have sent the mecha in right then. They’re happy to sit there and wait us out, because they think time is on their side.”
“And you think it’s not?”
“Just give me a few minutes,” I pleaded. “I have a guy who can help with this.”
“You have five mikes to give me a plan,” she said. “After that, we’re going over the top.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I fought against a pre-military instinct to run to William Cano and lean in close for a private conversation. It wasn’t necessary with the armor and private, line-of-sight comm nets, but it was still hard to resist.
“Cano,” I said, “you were training as a reactor tech before you got in the Academy, right?”
I didn’t have to see his face to imagine the confused frown dragging down his rounded, pudgy features.
“I was,” he admitted, “but I’d only been taking classes for a year. I wouldn’t be able to work on one.”
“And I don’t need you to,” I cut him off. “I just need you to tell me what they have powering those air defense turrets and how to find it and take it out.”
“Oh, uh, well…,” he dithered and I bit back an impatient curse. We didn’t have time for this, but I knew pressuring him wouldn’t help any. “It would be fairly small, like the size of the reactor on a shuttle. Most of it would be underground, but the cooling system would have to be at least partially above ground. Probably liquid nitrogen and they’d need a hook-up outdoors where they could refill it. Hold on a second.” There was inspiration in his voice and I wanted to encourage it, so I stayed silent and let him do his thing.
His thing, as it turned out, was launching a spy drone. It rose from his backpack like some sort of oversized, prehistoric mosquito, and I was about to tell him it would get shot down in a heartbeat, but Cano surprised me with his ingenuity. He flew the quad-copter parallel to our lines, using the retaining wall for cover, taking it off to the left, the opposite way from the service road the High Guard had come down. I tied into its feed, hoping to get something useful from it before the troops in the bunkers saw it and wasted a KE gun burst to take it out.
The retaining wall ended at a drainage ditch, maybe two meters deep and the same across, and he kept the drone beneath the edges of the depression, riding the concealment as far as he could until the thing had to pop up at the left corner of the building. Cano gave it a burst of speed, trying to get behind the cover of the wedge-shaped walls, but I thought I caught just a half-second glimpse of three huge transmission dishes out beyond the left edge of the building. The place was a mix of the pragmatic lines of a Tahni military base with the artistic designs of their cities, angular and curved in ways that made no practical sense to my human aesthetic, broad at the base and narrowing sharply at the roof in what seemed to me to be a huge waste of space.
One thing made sense, though, rising above aesthetics and art, rising out of the pavement at the rear, left-hand corner of the building. There was a wire fence around it, probably for safety, to keep someone from accidentally running into it with a cargo loader since the Tahni didn’t seem to worry about crime or vandalism. I wasn’t a technician, nor had I even taken a few classes in it like Cano, but I could still tell the machinery was some sort of high-pressure valve meant to deal with something super-cooled and potentially dangerous.
“There it is,” Cano said, and if he could have pumped his fist without looking like an idiot, he would probably have done it, from the tone of triumph in his voice. “There’s the liquid nitrogen fill valve.”
“And no one’s guarding it,” I mused. “All right, bring the drone around the other side of the building. When they notice it, I want them to think we were trying to spy out the positions of the High Guard troops.”
I didn’t wait to see. I’d had five minutes and about four and a half
