“Harris, get out of there,” somebody screamed over the interLink. The name Ritz showed. I did not recognize the name. The part of my brain that recognized people and names had closed down for the evening.
A flechette brushed across the side of my helmet. I roared in anger and squeezed the trigger of my gun. Men came from my left and my right. The bastards grabbed me and hauled me back away from the window. I screamed and struggled. I would have shot them, but they piled on top of me and held me down.
Somebody pulled my helmet off my head. Still trying to free my arms, I looked up and growled like an animal. “Get off me. Get off me! I’ll kill you all,” I screamed.
Somewhere in the distance, there were muffled explosions. Flames coughed out of open doorways. Clouds of smoke and dust billowed in from the stairwells. Men had tossed bombs or grenades down the stairs. I did not care. All I cared about was killing, I needed to kill, and these crazy bastards were holding me down. I wanted to kill them. Once I killed them, I would go after the enemy. The calm and the music of battle had left me, they faded from my mind like a drug evaporating from the brain of an addict, and all that they left behind was the need for more.
I fought. I struggled to get loose. A man in combat armor slapped me across the face, his hardened armor glove slamming my cheekbone like a hammer. I was a rabid dog. I turned, stared at him, silently dared him to do that again.
They might have been speaking to each other, but they used the interLink. My helmet was gone. I could not hear them as I snarled and fought to free myself.
Until that moment, I still held my M27 in a hand that was buried under a pile of Marines. I felt the stock slipping from my fingers. I felt desperate, crazed, like a man held underwater.
A part of my brain watched the struggle like an innocent bystander witnessing a mugging. In one of my mind’s many eyes, I could see that I had turned into an animal. I could see myself clearly, and I hated what I saw.
But that part of my brain was a distant satellite. The rest of my consciousness had shut down entirely. All that remained was anger and instinct. I needed to free myself and to kill, I needed to kill more fiercely than a man held underwater needs to breathe. Life, death, right, wrong, nothing mattered except killing, feeling the hormone in my brain, the missing song of battle.
With the gun out of my hand, I managed to pull my right shoulder free of the men who had piled on top of it. The man in the armor slapped me across the face a second time. If he’d lived another minute, he might even have hit me again, but the doors to the stairs slammed open and men in glowing armor invaded our world.
Not even trying to understand the events around me, I watched as fragments of plaster chipped from the ceiling and walls. Men fell to the floor. The men who had wrestled me down now tried to pull me away. I flailed. I kicked. I got one arm free and slammed my fist into one of my attackers. I hit the front of his helmet. His head jerked back, but I did not even put a crack in his visor.
More men dropped. Some fell in spasms. Some fell still, their blood leaking from pin-sized holes in their armor. I brushed men off my other arm, kicked wildly, and I was free.
My desperation slackened. The part of me that still had intelligence told me to put on my helmet. I lay on my stomach, propelling myself along the ground by faking convulsions. With the Unifieds just entering the floor, I rolled to my side so I could slip my helmet back over my head without being seen. Once I had my helmet secured, I wrapped my hand around the stock of my M27, it might have been my M27, and I played dead. I lay in a pile of dead Marines. I saw the men sprawled on the floor around me and realized they’d died trying to save me.
I played possum, a paisley piece in a collage of dead bodies—one that the Unified Authority might never find. Natural-borns ran past the bodies without sparing a second glance. Knowing that anyone they shot would die, they did not worry about the wounded.
Sensibility slowly set in. I was not entirely in control. I felt some semblance of thought coming back to my brain.
“Ritz. You there?” I asked. I felt ashamed of myself; but I did not have time for embarrassment. There would be a time to apologize, but it would come after the battle. For now, I had shown enough weakness already.
“Harris?” I heard doubt, maybe even fear.
“Did you send men to save me?” I asked.
He answered my question with one of his own. “Where are you?”
“What do you have in the way of explosives?” I asked. I was about to suggest demolishing ourselves and the building. My Liberator programming would not allow me to detonate the bomb myself, but I thought maybe I could give the order. Then something caught my attention and I forgot about bombs.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
I lay on the ground, doing my best imitation of a corpse, albeit one that had fallen with a gun still in his grip. My arms stretched past my head, my finger still on the trigger. Thanks to my armor, I could breathe and still look no more alive than the dead men around me. An intelligent Marine might notice the lack of blood leaking from my armor, but there was plenty of blood on the ground around me. About twenty U.A. Marines had already walked past without giving me a second glance.
The glow of their shielded armor had died. The batteries must have run out, though I had no idea what could have caused it.
The Unifieds walked through the dead, stepping over bodies, ready to fire flechettes into anything that moved. These were the men on point, the sacrificial lambs …the canaries in the air vents.
“Ritz, listen to me. I think their armor is running out of juice.”
“What?” he asked.
“The batteries in their armor are running out of power.” I shifted ever so slowly, gradually rolling to one side, allowing my left arm to loll in place while shifting the M27 in my right hand so that I could aim it. “Their shields are out.”
No one noticed. I was just another corpse, just another piece of trash on the floor. As I fumbled to free an RPG from my belt, I watched the door to the stairwell. A never-ending parade of men in flickering armor strode through the opening.
Working blind, I managed to snag a grenade from my belt. I twisted it in my hand. An RPG would have worked better, but the grenade would do. I would use it to create a distraction; and then, in the confusion, I would escape.
One of the Unifieds meandered past me, then stopped. He just stood there, sightseeing in the empty spaceport, I supposed, no more than ten feet from me. His armor winked on and off before it went out entirely. He looked in my direction, and I froze. After a moment he took a step toward me. If he inspected me more closely, he might notice that I was holding a grenade in my left hand and an M27 in my right, and that I had no holes in my armor and no blood oozing from my helmet. In fact, I did not look especially corpselike, not that this shit-for-brains natural-born would have noticed.
“Ritz, where are you?” With my helmet over my head, I could talk, and the bastards around me would not hear my voice or see my mouth move.
“I’m on the third floor,” he said.
“What’s the situation?”
“They haven’t sent anyone up here.”
“Yeah, they’re still securing this floor,” I said.
“I can get you out of there, General. I can …”
I hissed, “Shut up and listen.” It was harsh. I was still in the tail end of combat reflex, my every instinct was to kill. Ritz, the Unifieds, civilians, at that point it didn’t matter. The violence welling up in my brain no longer cared about sides or alliances.
“There’s going to be some trouble down here,” I said. “Let’s see how they fight without their shields.”
The U.A. bastard hovering around me walked over for a closer look. Would he notice the way I rested my
