And now the dream was going to end, and I wasn’t sad or angry, because all dreams end.
Then I wasn’t alone, and it wasn’t a dream. There were three Vigilantes beside me, laying down suppressive fire. Delp was beside me, standing straight, firing his plasma gun into the incoming horde of High Guard suits, ignoring the electron beams ripping up dirt and pavement and rock all around him, ignoring the charred, smoking groove through his left shoulder pauldron that had to have hurt like a son of a bitch. On my other side was Vicky, pulling me up by my left arm, and behind them was…Top? What was she doing here?
And it wasn’t just them. Even the three of them couldn’t have held the High Guard off long enough to get me out. Coil gun rounds were slicing giant wedges through the lines of Tahni battlesuits, fired from almost a klick away, and I realized that Top had brought the Boomers with her.
The scream of turbojets penetrated the din from way too close overhead.
“Dammit, Cam!” Vicky yelled. “Jump!”
And I did.
Something smashed me in the face and the world ended in brilliant light.
Except it didn’t. Not for me.
I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t see anything but bright flashes of color, couldn’t move. But I knew I was alive. I don’t know how I knew. I was a Catholic, sort of, and I guessed somewhere deep down, I still believed in an afterlife. So, I don’t know why I was so sure that I was alive rather than a spirit about to leave my battered body behind and ascend into Heaven, but I was.
Maybe it was the idea that I didn’t believe a spirit would be feeling this much pain.
I waited for the armor to tell me what was wrong, what was broken, what was burned, but it said nothing, showed me nothing. I sucked in a breath, held it, tried to get my heart rate and respiration under control. Hyperventilating wouldn’t accomplish anything. I felt around for the emergency release and yanked it downward, freeing the catches of the chest plastron, sending it swinging outward. A convection-oven heat sucked the breath from my lungs and I nearly passed out, sagging against the interior padding for a few seconds before I could manage to gather up enough strength to pull myself out.
The suit was on its side, resting on the left shoulder, and most of the heat was coming from the exterior metal. It had been scorched black, none of the markings and stencils visible anymore, and it looked as if the joints at the elbows and knees were partially melted. I jumped out with ginger, hesitant motions, trying not to touch the outside of the suit, cringing with pain despite my best efforts as just being within centimeters of the hot metal made blisters rise on my hands.
I cursed and just jumped out, trying to get clear, landing hard on my shoulder and side because I didn’t want to try to catch myself with my burned hands. They weren’t the only thing burned. My combat fatigues weren’t melted away, but that was more a testament to their construction than my condition. Black scorch marks ran from my thighs down to my ankles and I could feel the dampness beneath my clothes where blisters had risen and burst and the only reason I wasn’t in unspeakable agony was the pain-killers the armor had dosed me with before it had lost power.
The pain was a dull ache, just below the point of tolerable, but I ignored it. I had more important things to worry about. My Vigilante had come to rest in the lee of a collapsed building, and the haze blowing across at street level made it difficult to tell anything else for a good ten seconds. Then a hot breeze washed away the smoke and I saw the hell the airstrike had left behind.
I was a good five or six hundred meters from where I’d started the jump, and I couldn’t have sworn as to how much of that was my jump-jets flying me there and how much was me being carried by the blast. The ragged hole in the road hadn’t been enlarged all that much by the missiles from the assault shuttle, but the rubble had been shifted and where there had once been chunks of broken cement, now there were bits of burning metal and the scattered corpses of High Guard battlesuits. Dozens of them, pieces of dozens more, littered the square, along with similar but slightly different shapes that had to be Vigilantes.
How many of us had died before the strike? How many during?
Where was Vicky?
A battered, scarred Vigilante came down on a whining roar of jump-jets, touching down with a metal-on-concrete impact that shook the ground beneath my feet even a dozen meters away.
“Alvarez,” Top’s voice was loud and distorted over external speakers probably damaged in the fighting. “You okay?”
I hissed out the breath I’d been holding, disappointed that it wasn’t Vicky and immediately guilty for being disappointed.
“I have been better,” I admitted. I hesitated, knowing what I wanted to ask, what I needed to ask, but asking the question I was supposed to ask first. “Casualties?”
“A lot. Six dead, mostly from Second Platoon.” Which made sense. They had the least combat experience. I should have left them behind at the palace, in hindsight, but I hadn’t known if the force at the palace would need to be able to fight off the enemy and I trusted Cano and his platoon more. “I think we have about a dozen
