enough to take out the others. He popped a mesh grenade over the pile, then ran around the side and zapped them as they struggled.
“Osprey in,” said Danny.
“Can I get my view of the building now?” he asked Kick after the Marines flooded out of Osprey.
“Roger that,” said the Flighthawk pilot. “Two seconds away.”
Danny toggled between an IR and a penetrating radar view, preferring to see the details himself rather than using the synthesized and annotated image the computer provided.
“Freeze,” he said, getting a good visual of the facility. It looked like there was only one man here besides themselves; he was two corridors down to the right.
“With you,” said Egg, following as Danny set out cautiously.
Starship saw the boat darting into the harbor. He knew it wasn’t theirs — the computer had the Marines dotted out with daggers — but he hesitated, as if his brain were trying to process the information and couldn’t find the next branch in the logic tree.
Gun in the boat.
Big gun.
Something else.
“Company,” he said finally. “I’m taking them out.”
He leaned on the stick, starting the Flighthawk downward. But then something tingled in his brain — the other half of the thought that had started a millisecond before. He pulled back, nailing the throttle slide to full just as the missile flared from the boat.
Missile.
They were gunning for the Osprey, coming in over his right shoulder.
“Flares!” he yelled, hitting his diversionary devices.
Ordinarily, he would have jinked away, ducking the surface-to-air missile that had just been launched, getting himself to safety. But something had pushed off the instinct for survival; something deeper took over — he kept the Flighthawk on her course, directly into the path of the oncoming missile.
The shoulder-launched SA-14 hurtled upward at something approaching Mach 1. Though primitive by Dreamland standards, the Russian-designed heat-seeking missile was nonetheless an effective weapon when properly handled. The sensor in its nose ignored the flares, sucking the heat signature of the large aircraft it had been aimed at. But then something juicier stuck itself in its face — the tailpipe of the Flighthawk, flashing within a few meters of the weapon. The missile jerked itself to the right, following the hot scent of its new target, but it couldn’t quite keep up. Afraid that it would lose everything, it ignited its charge, sending a spray of shrapnel through the air.
Starship felt the small robot spinning to its left before he actually lost the U/MF; whatever sixth sense it was that helped him fly the plane knew he was down.
The last feed from the cam in the Flighthawk’s nose showed the Osprey just a few yards off. The frame froze, as if the tiny aircraft wanted to show that its death had not been in vain.
“Nail the motherfuckers in the boat,” Starship told Kick. “I’m outta the game.”
Boston’s visor portrayed the interior of the building in a ghostly gray. A door sat at the far end of the room, leading to a hallway. There was an office at the end outside the range of the helmets’ low-power radar; two guards were holed up there, marked in the small sitrep view in the lower left-hand corner of the screen supplied by the Flighthawk sensors. The guard icons blinked steadily, indicating the view had not been updated in more than thirty seconds.
Sergeant Liu moved ahead stealthily. Boston saw a shadow in the hall and steadied his taser at the doorway.
“One coming,” he told Liu.
“Wait,” said the team leader, his voice so low Boston could hardly hear it. “We want both.”
The Taiwanese guard appeared in the doorway, holding an M-16. Boston steadied his weapon, watching the man peer through the dark room. He seemed to know they were there somehow. Boston decided he could take no chances, and fired his weapon. The doorway burned blue and the guard fell to the ground. Liu dove through the doorway from the side, spinning left in the direction of the offices where the guards had been earlier. As he did, the sitrep updated itself as the Flighthawk flew overhead once more.
“Other guard’s still in the office,” Boston told Liu.
“Yeah,” hissed the team leader, and Boston belatedly realized that Liu was now close enough for his helmet-borne radar to pick up the guard.
By the time Boston reached the hallway, Liu was next to the doorway. He reached inside his fogsuit and took out a small tube that looked a bit like an old-fashioned folding carpenter’s ruler. He unfolded it, hooking a wire into one end and then pushing it around the corner.
The near-infrared view was capable of greater detail than the radar, and had the advantage of not giving off a detectable radio wave. Liu configured the feed so it could be shared by the team members; a small window at the right of Boston’s visor opened and both men saw the guard inside, huddled behind a desk at the left of the room.
A Minimi machine gun sat on one side of the desktop; the guard was pounding a computer keyboard, possibly erasing information. The computer had obviously been hardened against electromagnetic pulses somehow.
“Flash-bang?” whispered Boston.
Too close to the door to risk speaking, Liu fisted a yes signal and Boston reached below his fogsuit for the grenade. He thumbed off the tape as he slipped forward, crawling along the floor and then sliding the grenade into the room.
Time altered its shape in the scant seconds before the grenade went off. Boston felt Liu move, then stop; things flew into fast-forward as the grenade flashed.
“In,” said Liu, but by the time the word settled into Boston’s skull, the guard at the computer was falling backward, zapped by the discharge of Liu’s taser.
Boston ran to the computer.
“No. Check for explosives,” said Liu. “I have the computer.”
Boston clicked the bottom of his helmet visor, selecting a sniffer mode optimized for explosive materials such as C-4. The unit got two significant hits back in the main part of the building; the computer ID’d them as five- hundred pound bombs.
There ought to be more explosives, Boston thought — I’m not even picking up what would be used for the nuke.
“Boston,” said a controller back at Dream Command. “If you guys are secure, we need you to use Probe I so we can locate the nuke. We haven’t caught it yet.”
Boston stepped out of his fogsuit and pulled out the probe, an ultra-sensitive ion detector that looked like a long wand from a vacuum cleaner and weighed a little more than three pounds. By the time he had the device out and working, Liu had slapped a special modem on the parallel port of the computer and began sending the contents of its hard drive back to Dreamland.
Boston walked slowly through the hall, passing his arm back and forth. The readings were being relayed directly back to Dreamland for analysis through his Smart Helmet system; he had no idea what the unit was picking up, only that his own Geiger counter had not detected radiation serious enough to warn him away.
Large metal-working machines dominated the left side of the room. Wooden boxes and other items were lined neatly on the other wall; most of the middle was empty.
“How we looking?” Boston asked the Dreamland people as he walked toward the area where the explosives sensor had found the two bombs. They were packed into slatted wooden crates, the sort that were used to ship vegetables back in the States. Boston thought these might be the nukes, but in fact they were a bit too small and filled with conventional explosives.
Sergeant Liu joined him when he was about three-fourths done.
