medevac Ontos was already gone. Garroway pushed off from the deck, diving in a flat trajectory through the narrow space to snag Armandez and awkwardly grapple her into his arms. Triggering his suit gravitics, he propelled the two of them together back past the Marine perimeter.
A solid wall of Xul warriors surrounded the handful of Marines. “Everyone get out!” Garroway yelled. According to his helmet electronics, he was the senior man present, and it now was up to him to get the last of them out.
“How are we gonna get Nikki out?” PFC Lauden yelled, slashing at the oncoming tide with his mass driver.
“Never mind, damn it! Just clear out! Now!”
“Aye, aye, Gunny!”
The other Marines began clambering into their pods.
Marine histories were full of stories of valiant last stands, of a last Marine who stayed behind to cover his squadmates as a tide of enemy fighters rolled over his final position. Garroway had no intention of becoming another.
He also wasn’t leaving Armandez behind. Towing her along, following the homer beacon flashing in his mind, he made his way to his M-CAP, still imbedded in the passageway’s overhead.
The problem was that M-CAPs were definitely one-Marine vehicles. Two people might squeeze into one together, if they were real friendly … and if neither was wearing their bulky Type 664 combat armor.
Working quickly, Garroway stuffed the unconscious form of the wounded Marine up into his M-CAP, literally stuffing her as far up the narrow opening as he could manage. The nearest Xul warriors were almost on him. …
Again, he triggered his slicers, extending the ultra-hard, ultra-thin blades to their full extent. Positioning himself directly under the opening to his pod, he slashed hard with his left arm … then his right …
His own legs, severed high up on the thighs, spun to either side, trailing globules of rapidly freezing blood and lubricant. The pain didn’t hit him immediately, wouldn’t hit him, he didn’t think, for a few precious seconds, if he didn’t let it. …
He did immediately feel the shock of falling pressure, like a hammer blow to his lungs. Air shrieked out of his armor into the surrounding hard vacuum until his suit’s inner layer, reacting automatically to the falling pressure, sealed over the gaping stumps of his legs. Garroway was already pulling himself up into his pod, as biting cold and lung-searing decompression threatened to drag him back into unconsciousness … and death. He had to struggle to work his torso up past Armandez’s legs; even minus his own legs, he wasn’t sure there was enough room inside the bottle for two.
It was starting to hurt now. A lot. …
His armor’s built-in medinano dispensers were already firing swarms of microscopic healers into his bloodstream, however. Anodynes began dulling the sharp shriek of pain; fluorocarbons began picking up where the near-vanished oxygen had left off; artificial coagulants began sealing off the wounds, stopping blood loss while cerebral monitors blocked the onset of shock.
It was a near thing. The inside of his helmet visor was iced over, and he was having trouble seeing. By feel, he found the pod’s linking plate and slapped his open palm across it. Numbers and status readouts flickered through his mind, but he ignored them, triggering the hatch seal.
He felt the hatch iris shut just below his sealed-off stumps, the scraping sensation threatening to override the anodynes. A warning light flickered on in his mind, followed by a verbal readout. “M-CAP hatch seal failure. M-CAP hatch seal failure.”
Damn. Even with his legs gone, he wasn’t in far enough to let the bottle’s hatch seal shut.
The hell with it. The bottle wasn’t supposed to accelerate with a hatch open, but he overrode the watchdog circuit and thought-clicked the launch command. There was a grating rasp, then a sudden shock as the pod broke free, accelerating clear of the Xul fortress.
For a moment, he half feared sliding out an open hatch beneath him as the pod accelerated on its way, but he appeared to be well wedged into place. Exploring with his gloved hands, he decided that the bottle’s outer hatch had, indeed, cycled closed; it was the inner hatch that was blocked open by the stumps of his legs, and that was what was causing the alarm. The bottle’s rather narrow-minded AI didn’t think the craft was sealed and ready for flight unless all hatches were shut, sealed, and locked.
He dismissed the irritating alarm. There was nothing he could do about the cause, and he appeared to be safe for the moment.
Well, safe from the threat of being left behind, at least. His warning indicators showed enemy fire passing close by his craft.
He goosed it, ordering full acceleration and praying the inertial dampers were working well enough to shunt aside the fearful pressures of a high-G boost. There was no time, no place for subtlety in the escape. With the fortress fully alerted to the Marine incursion, there was no hope of sneaking away unseen. The M-CAP’s nano coating lowered the craft’s visibility at all electronic wavelengths, making it tough to see and track, but at point-blank range it was hard not to pick it out, by the distortion it caused against the background starfield, if nothing else.
Through his interface with the tiny craft, he could see the fortress, looming huge as it receded astern, and a sky filled with streaks of white fire. Weapons fire—whether human or Xul—was in fact invisible in vacuum, but the pod’s computer painted the tracks in as a flight aid. With a thought, he banished the special effects; there was nothing he could do in the way of actively dodging incoming fire, and seeing those bolts was both distracting and terrifying. If his pod was hit in the next few minutes, he would never feel the blast that killed them.
He ordered the pod’s computer to establish a course consisting of random jinks that would continue to bear on the stargate.
Without the flashing lights and energy bolts, surrounding space took on an almost surreal aspect of beauty, majesty, and peace. The Xul bastion continued to dwindle astern, as the stargate slowly grew larger ahead. In the distance, the glowing spiral of the Milky Way Galaxy stretched across half of heaven, as beautiful, as insubstantially delicate as a dream. Green icons floated between him and the gate, a scattering of pinpoints marking Bravo Company’s other M-CAPs.
One pinpoint flared for an instant, a dazzling star, then vanished. Corporal Levowsky’s pod, according to the readout. PFC Hollander’s pod went next. Damn! …
He forced himself to ignore the ongoing roll call of Marines who would not be retrieved. Some of the escaping Marines were going to get nailed just by sheer chance, judging from the volume of hostile fire, and those Xul laser and plasma bursts were hot enough to reduce an M-CAP and its passenger to thin, hot gas in an instant.
At this point, it was down to sheer chance. The Marine pods all were jostling and jinking their way toward the stargate. Some percentage of them would not make it. Which ones were hit, which ones made it, that now was entirely in the laps of the Gods of Battle.
Garroway had another alarm to contend with as well, and, once again, it was something he couldn’t do much about. He’d lost much of the air inside his armor when he’d breached his own suit. In the moments since, his armor had been struggling to replenish internal pressure from the life support system in his backpack. He was no longer chewing cold vacuum, which was a distinct improvement … but by tapping the rebreather source gases in his tanks, he’d sharply lowered
