All four aircraft street-skimmed in toward the tower, zig-zagging all the way to take every possible advantage of buildings, trees, and rubble. Hivel rounds snapped past the flier, and once Ramsey felt the solid shock of a heavy detonation close by. His helmet readout warned of a gamma pulse; someone was firing antimatter rounds at them. He felt another thump as the gun’s plasma weapon fired, knocking down an incoming rocket that had targeted them.
He saw a sudden flare as one of the incoming Specter guns took a direct hit despite its evasive maneuvering. According to his link, both Daley and Hearst jumped clear as the aircraft crumpled and slammed into the rubble-clogged street below.
The remaining three tactical carriers reached the base of the skyscraper at the same instant, changing vectors to travel straight up the sides of the tower in a stomach-wrenching maneuver that was only partly eased by the inertial dampers in Ramsey’s armor.
Three seconds, the pilot AI whispered in his mind, and he opened his eyes in time to see of blur of ferrocrete and structural ornamentation flashing past.
Two seconds … one second …
Another gut-twisting shift in vector, and the Specter gun slipped over the rampart encircling the top of the tower. A mental command, and he was released from the craft’s unfolding leg, dropping onto the roof, striking, rolling, coming up with his mag-pulse rifle raised, his helmet electronics already tracking the nearest threat. The weapon was set to AI control, and he let his suit guide him; the weapon triggered as soon as it had a solid targeting lock.
The first Muzzie rifleman went down, his armor hammered by a rapid-fire barrage of magnetic pulses. The top of the building became a bewildering and rapidly unfolding blur of motion and weapons fire, as two of the other Specter guns came up over the ramparts and released their payloads of Marines.
The Specter gun carrying Howell, Beck, and Santiago took a direct hit as it hovered above the rampart, an antimatter blast flashing with deadly brilliance at the edge of the tower. Ramsey overrode his weapon control and shifted aim to the Muzzie gunner—a low threat because he was facing away from Ramsey as he manhandled the massive A.M. accelerator for a second shot, but he was trying to target the three Marines on that side of the tower as they fell from the burning transport. Ramsey triggered his weapon, and the enemy soldier folded backward around the kinetic impulse slamming into his spine, his weapon cartwheeling across the roof with the impact.
A warning went off in his mind; gunners were targeting him. He cut in his jumpjets and sailed across the roof, pivoting in midair to target one of the Muzzie gunners who was standing up behind a waist-high ferrocrete barrier, tracking Ramsey as he sailed through the air.
The stricken Specter gun slammed into the edge of the tower, metal burning furiously, catching and holding for a moment before rocking back and off the roof, crashing to the street eighty-four-stories below. The remaining two guns hovered above opposite sides of the building, ninety meters apart, coordinating their plasma weaponry with the fire from the eight Marines now fanning out across the roof.
A transparent wall overlooked the rooftop, a penthouse or upper story of some sort, enveloped in hanging plants, and with a sunken interior that formed a well-protected redoubt. The transparency—plastic and shatterproof—melted as someone inside detonated a thermal charge. An instant later, a swarm of APerMs emerged and arced into the sky before descending on hissing contrails—antipersonnel missiles, each the size of a man’s forefinger, each with an on-board AI smart enough to identify an enemy’s armor signature and home on it relentlessly, each with a dust-speck’s worth of antimatter in magnetic containment. Ramsey’s armor fired a countermeasures charge, and flashes of actinic brilliance from the hovering guns picked individual missiles out of the air with hivel kinetic-kill rounds each the size of a grain of sand. The sky turned to white fire. …
At first he thought the threat had been neutralized, and he started moving forward once more. In the next instant, his helmet display flashed warning; there were still APerMs in the air.
He triggered another countermeasure burst … but it was too little, too late, and he couldn’t get them all. APerMs slashed into Howell and Beck, who was bounding alongside her, blasting gouts of molten laminate from their armor, knocking the two Marines backward.
“Thea!” Ramsey screamed, and then he was standing twenty meters from the open penthouse, hosing the low, cavern-like opening in front of him with his flamer. One of the hovering Specter guns with a good line of sight added lance after flaring lance of plasma energy to his fire; Ramsey could see figures writhing and incinerating within the flames.
Turning, he bounded across the rooftop to the two fallen Marines. Corporal Gerry Beck was dead, his helmet punctured, then exploded from within. There was a lot of blood, and only smoking, blackened shards remained of helmet and skull.
Staff Sergeant Thea Howell, however, was still alive. The AP round had struck her in the chest, shattering ribs, rupturing a lung, flooding her torso with hard radiation, but her diagnostic feed showed she was still alive as her armor struggled to control the damage. She was already deep in medical support stasis.
Thea. …
Crouching above her body, he turned his fire against a last remaining clump of Muzzie gunners behind a ferrocrete wall. One of the Specter guns burned down the last of them, and the firefight came to an abrupt end.
But Ramsey continued to hold the broken body of Thea Howell, letting his own armor make automatic feed connections and linkages so that he could bolster her suit’s damaged support systems.
Besides being a fellow Marine and the platoon’s senior NCO, Thea was an old friend, and frequently his lover.
She was family.
And he didn’t want to see her die. …
USMC Recruit Training Center
Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars
1045/24:20 local time, 2003 hrs GMT
Garroway felt … alone. Alone and utterly empty.
And he couldn’t even mind-click himself a serotonin jolt to lift the settling black mist of depression … or ask Aide for help.
“I know you’re all feeling a bit low right now,” Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst said, smiling. “But I have just the ticket! We’re going to run. Comp’ney, lef’ face! For’ard harch! Double time, harch! …”
Garroway still felt dazed and lost. After his ten-minute session with the Navy corpsmen in the sickbay, he’d been led back out into the weak sunshine of the Martian morning and marched to chow.
He’d barely tasted the food, and ate it automatically. After that there’d been an indoctrination class, with an assistant DI lecturing the company on Corps tradition, and on what it meant to be a Marine.
And now, they were out in the cold once more, running. Who the hell was he trying to kid? His first six hours in the Corps, and already he wanted to quit.
Something, though, was keeping him going … one tired foot after the other.
Aiden Garroway had been born and raised in the 7-Ring orbital complex in Earth orbit, a son
