thrashed to get my attention as I removed the various sections of my armor from the bag. After laying out the armor, I gazed at the assortment of weapons Mars had brought me.
I leaned in, and said, “Well, Ava, nice seeing you again.”
She brought up a foot and tried to stomp it on my face; but she was slow, and she telegraphed the kick. I dodged her foot, and said, “That wasn’t very polite.” As I closed the door to the turret, I could hear her kicking and shouting.
Freeman must have captured them, Ava and her new lover. Maybe it was Mars. I did not have time to think about it; but if I survived Terraneau, I would have a debt to repay.
It took me under a minute to strip out of my service uniform and step into my bodysuit. In another thirty seconds, my armor was in place.
“Mars, are you on?” I asked over the interLink.
“Sounds like it’s getting hot out there,” he said. That was an understatement. By that time, the other half of the door had caved in. A fusillade of militia bullets struck the jackknifed truck and dug into the walls and ceiling. Sunlight and bullets and the sound of explosions poured in through the tunnel entrance.
Retreating deep into the tunnel and hiding behind whatever protection the engineers had installed would be easy, the trick would be stalling the militia so that they did not have time to kick in the doors. We would not fight them, per se, so much as slow them down; but even that had to be timed just right. If we stalled too long, we might get ourselves cooked in the bargain.
“Get your men in deep,” I told Mars. “Get settled in and get the doors ready.”
Someone fired a grenade into the scaffolding where I had last seen Freeman. The grenade burst, sending smoke and flames and twisted pipes in every direction. My helmet deadened the sound, and my armor absorbed the percussion, giving the explosion a dreamlike feeling, and I felt no fear and realized that my combat reflex had already begun.
The militia fired automatic weapons along the walls, their bullets kicking up sparks as they struck steel pipes. “Freeman, where are you?” I asked over the interLink. As I checked for Freeman, I saw Lieutenant Nobles climb behind the wheel of the Jackal that carried Ava and her lover. He drove away.
Freeman answered my query with action instead of words. Three men tried to sprint from the entrance of the tunnel. Using his sniper rifle, Freeman picked them off.
I spotted him by following the angle of his rifle fire. He had taken cover behind a crane. “The engineers built a steel barrier a quarter mile in,” he said in his low, ineffable voice. “We need to get back there.”
A few of Mars’s men tried to come back and help us; but they were engineers, not combat Marines. They crawled along the walls and froze when the gunfire erupted, and I told them to get back into the tunnel and guard the door. “Fall back,” I shouted over the interLink on a frequency that every man could hear. They did not need to be told a second time.
Several guns opened fire. Shooting blindly into the tunnel, the militia leaders hoped to keep us pinned while some of their men tried to flank us. They made a mistake. They overestimated our numbers. They must have thought there were dozens of us instead of two men hiding in the shadows along the wall. They fired toward the center of the tunnel, then they sent out six men who ducked low and sprinted for cover. Freeman picked them off, starting with the man in the rear and working his way forward. He hit them so quickly that the first four went down before last ones noticed.
A grenadier spotted Freeman. As he stepped out to fire an RPG, I picked him off with my M27.
“Where are you?” I asked Mars over a frequency that only he and Freeman would hear.
“We’re dug in behind the next blast wall, about a quarter mile in,” he said.
“Okay, we’re going to try and work our way back to you.”
“Your girlfriend escaped,” Mars said.
“Shoot her if she gives you any trouble,” I said. I wasn’t joking.
The sound of a large engine caught my attention. The growl of the engine seemed to fill the tunnel, drowning out the gunfire. It became louder, then vanished under the thunder of a shell striking the jackknifed truck. The blast sent the truck skidding along the street, kicking up a trail of sparks as large as dandelions. A Targ Tank had entered the tunnel. Low to the ground and very fast-moving, Targ Tanks were the Jackal killers and troop displacers of the battlefield.
The tank fired a second shell into the truck, sending it into a slow roll. It crashed into a concrete barrier and smashed it to rubble. Still rolling, the truck rammed into a scaffolding platform and crushed it like a house of twigs. The tank headed toward a dark corner in which Freeman knelt behind a bulldozer.
I pulled my first grenade launcher, flipped the safety, and fired. Before the pill even hit, I’d chucked the first tube and pulled out a second. The first grenade hit home, striking the turret just behind its guns. The second shot caused the tank to skid sideways, crumpling the turret and bending the cannon so that it hung askew.
By that time, I had found a new hiding place. Rocket-propelled grenades were great for killing tanks, but they left a trail of fine smoke that stretched from your target to your front door. I had barely dug into my new spot, semisafe behind a concrete barrier, when Freeman said, “Harris, we’re out of time. We have to get behind the wall.”
Knowing that the militia would spot me the moment I left my new hiding place, I sprang from behind my barricade. I caught a quick glimpse of men pouring into the tunnel, then I began my sprint, thinking I might just survive this action. The militia would shoot at me, but they would not fire missiles. If they fired missiles, they might rupture the walls of the tunnel, and lake water would flood in.
“Mars, close the gates,” I shouted over an open frequency. I knew Freeman would be listening.
“Where are you?”
“We’re on our way,” I said. By the time I said that, it was already a lie. We were both pinned down. The militia had spotted me. Bullets rang out and chipped at the ceiling and the walls of the tunnel.
Freeman fired off the charges I had seen him placing by the front of the tunnel and something amazing happened. Instead of triggering a massive explosion, the charges burst into a wall of flames that filled the tunnel from roof to floor in a solid sheet of fire. He triggered a second of those explosions, then a third.
The militia fired bullets through those flames, shooting blindly, not compensating for the downhill grade. Running just ahead of me, Freeman spun and set off one last explosion. I did not stop to watch the fireworks. I dashed ahead, making my way through the tunnel until I reached the front metal doors, where I did not so much stop as fall. Panting for air, I skidded behind a crane, then slid for cover. Freeman ran in beside me.
Mars and another engineer watched us from behind the door. I could see them; but I could not see if there was concern on their faces.
Bullets struck the heavy metal door; but this was shielded metal, and they might as well have been shooting spit wads for all the damage their bullets would do. The sound of the bullets was faint, a dull thud, then that stopped.
And then the event began.
A quarter of a mile deep in the tunnel, I did not hear or feel a thing; but when I looked back up the tunnel, I caught a brief glimpse of the glowing red sky, the color of lava or maybe molten metal. Anyone near the front of the tunnel was already ash; but this far in, with the lake distributing the heat, we were safe. There was plenty of cool air in the tunnel; and as long as we stayed behind the metal door, we’d be safe from the backlash when the superheated atmosphere came down. Freeman and I dashed the last few yards and ducked behind the door. By that time, though, the shooting had stopped.
The last thing I saw as the engineers rammed the doors in place was a passel of militiamen lined up like stones in a cemetery. They stood facing toward the mouth of the tunnel, their backs bathed in shadow. Beyond them, I could see just a sliver of open sky in which the colors were all wrong, and the air itself seemed to have caught on fire.
They must have all seen what I saw before they sealed the doors. Ava, her courage spent and her strength gone, sat on the ground crying like a child. When her boyfriend tried to comfort her, she pushed him away. Mars’s army of engineers stood silent. I lost track of Freeman.
It was crowded in the tunnel, Mars had a thousand men in his Corps of Engineers; but I think every soul in that tunnel went through the next dark hours feeling alone. Mars came to me and said something about Noah closing the doors of his ark. I heard the words, but I wasn’t listening. I did not respond.
