“Even if they’re able,” Top pointed out, “the debris cloud is going to block the line-of-sight link to the drone relays.”
How the fuck, I wondered, was she so calm?
“What are we gonna do, Cam?” Kovacs asked me. He was a quarter the way around the other side of the palace, across the square, guarding the open hatchway the Intelligence spooks had used to enter on that side. It had been a concealed emergency exit, but no one had tried to use it. Yet.
It was a damned good question.
“That’s Alpha,” Cano said from down below my position, off to the right, tucked in behind the burned-out APC’s. “We have to go help them.”
Cano knew who was in Alpha, knew what Vicky and I were to each other. And I thought, after all this time, that Billy Cano was finally my friend.
“We got our orders,” Verlander insisted. “We’re supposed to stay here and keep the enemy out.”
“Keep them out?” Cano repeated, disbelieving. “They’re gonna be coming from that fucking military base, Verlander!”
They were both right. Lt. Sarrat said nothing, too new to her rank, her position, and this company to feel comfortable voicing an opinion, I supposed. Not that it would have mattered. This was my decision.
It struck me between the eyes, freezing time in a blinding revelation, and I just knew. This wasn’t just a command decision; it was a personal one. It would define who I was and what I did from this point on, and I had seconds to make it. Like every decision I’d had to make in my life.
“Francis,” I said to Kovacs, my XO, the words pouring out without conscious thought, “I’m leaving you here with Cano and Fourth, and Top and the Boomers. Sarrat, Verlander, Sanderson, we’re going to relieve Battalion.”
I took a step off the parapet and gave my suit a burst of jump-jets to deposit me safely on the ground below.
“Follow me, Marines.”
Three kilometers. It didn’t sound like much, not in battlesuits that could run at thirty klicks an hour, could fly faster than that for short hops. But it stretched out like one of those endless hallways in a nightmare, where you can never quite reach the end. Dust and smoke swallowed me up after a kilometer and not even the IFF signals from the friendlies behind me could penetrate, much less from the ones ahead. Thermal was nearly useless since everything seemed to be on fire, and the only sensors that told me a damned thing were the sonic detectors.
My biological ears couldn’t make out much more than the loping crash of my own footfalls, but the suit’s computer systems were able to absorb everything; the sounds, their echoes, the interval of the echoes, pinpoint the direction they came from and assign it a likely source, then project that source on my Heads-Up Display in very lifelike computer animation.
What it showed me was a big, fucking hole. I didn’t need to guess what the explosion had been, I could see it, sort of. The military base wasn’t the usual thing we’d seen on so many Tahni worlds, not a collection of pragmatically-designed boxes at the edge of town, surrounded by empty space, maybe bordering on a spaceport that doubled as a landing field for fighters and cargo shuttles. No, this was something old, something pre-spaceflight maybe, a complex, steppe-pyramid type structure right at the center of the city, at the terminus of a broad road that came right through the heart of the place all the way from the spaceport.
The pyramid was gone now, smashed into powder by a railgun projectile from orbit along with buildings a couple hundred meters on either side of it, and that still hadn’t been enough to take out the underground bunker beneath it. Or, apparently to set off the shaped charges under the street. There had to have been dozens of kilos of the stuff, enough to blow a hole outward, to collapse the broad thoroughfare into the passage below for nearly two hundred meters from the wreckage of the ziggurat. Enough to take nearly a company of Vigilantes down into the hole with it.
And streaming out of that gigantic hole in the street were High Guard battlesuits. Dozens of them, maybe two companies of them. They had to be the last of the things in the city because the Fleet had pounded every collection of enemy forces they’d seen and the Tahni had no defense against it, no deflectors, no anti-ship lasers, nothing. Their orbital platforms had been destroyed before our drop-ships had even made atmosphere. This was their last full measure, the final stone they had to throw, and they were throwing it at me. And I couldn’t call in air support without killing our own people.
“Launch full complement of missiles, then volley fire and peel off on the hop!”
I didn’t have any expectation that the transmission would get through, even with laser line-of-sight, through the clouds of smoke and particulate haze, but Third was behind me, and even if they couldn’t hear me, they’d be able to detect what I was doing and imitate it. At least I hoped Delp would, since I didn’t have that much faith in Verlander.
I targeted four Tahni at random and launched my missiles one after the other, as fast as they could load, each of them kicking free with enough of a jolt to make me miss a step. When the last one had kicked free, I fired my plasma gun at the closest of the High Guard troopers, the first one out of the hole, then hit the jets.
I wasn’t sure how sophisticated the sonic sensors were in the High Guard suits, so I didn’t know if they’d detected me before, but they sure as hell saw me now. Electron beams cut through the smoke like lightning in a midsummer storm on Inferno, seeking me out, and I couldn’t quite clench my jaws against a scream as one of the beams of
