Mike checked his own energy levels, shrugged his shoulders and began chasing after the retreating C-Dec, backpack over his shoulder.
He turned on the run adjustment and his legs began to blur. The massive cube filled the sky above him as he approached. With three final strides he bounded into the air and floated up under anti-grav. The weapons and detectors of the Posleen ship were designed to fight space weapons. There were lasers that could pick a hypervelocity missile out of the air. There were plasma cannons that could slag mountains. There were detection systems that could spot enemy ships at a light-hour. None of them were designed to spot a single armored combat suit.
The cloaking holograms and subspace suppressors, the radar and lidar deceptors, carried him inside the space-designed defenses and to the very skin of the space cruiser. He clamped his gauntlet to the skin of the ship high on one facet and hand over handed upward to the nearest large weapon position.
"Michelle, all-frequency override broadcast," he said softly. He clamped the backpack to the skin and then double-clamped it for security. "Maximum priority. Nuclear detonation, thirty seconds. Slug current coordinates."
"Yes, sir."
He swung outward on his clamp and hooked his finger through the pin of the old-fashioned grenade he had "borrowed" from the French guard. He was completely out of timers or, for that matter, detonators.
"Michelle."
"Yes, Lieutenant."
"It's been nice working with you," he said, watching the timer creep downward.
"Thank you, sir."
"Put that letter to my wife on the net, dump your guts to command, and please tell the platoon to seek shelter. Its work here is done."
"Already done, sir. Nuke warning protocols specify an immediate data dump. It has been nice working for you. May the Alldenata keep you."
"Thanks." Suddenly he felt a series of detonations through the skin of the ship as a line of flechette ricochets moved towards him. His armor slammed into the skin of the ship and rattled like a pea in a pod. He felt the inertial damping system fail.
"Michelle?" he shouted as the suit systems cut out without warning. Only a viselike grip prevented the metallic gauntlet on his right hand from slipping off the clamp handle. The ship began to drop sharply, turning the face he was attached to towards a mass of Posleen pouring onto the roofs below.
"Warning, warning!" said a slurred metallic voice, faintly familiar, the suit entity, his own gestalt, "Suit failure imminent! Suit failure imminent! AI-D damage: one hundred percent, Environmental damage: one hundred percent, Power systems: Emergency backup. Power system failure twenty seconds!" Posleen rounds continued to erupt around him and he felt a tearing sensation in his abdomen as an HVM smashed into the ship only yards away. He knew it was now or never.
"I love you, hon," he said and let go of the clamp; the grenade pin went with him. As he swung out and down he manually overrode the suit systems and set the suit to maximum inertial protection. It was a long shot but what the hell.
* * *
Az'al'endai pounded the console and hooted in triumph.
"These threshkreen burn beneath my talons!" he shouted, looking around toward Arttanalath, his castellaine. The diffident kessentai shook his sauroid head from side to side as the view-screens filled the room with the light of the descending primary.
"You drive them too hard, Kenellai. These thresh are tricky as the Alld'nt."
"Nonsense," snorted the brigade commander in derision. He fluttered his crest and shook his head. "You are an old toothless fool." He triggered another blast from the plasma primaries at the dodging suits. It was like fighting fleas with a blow torch, but it got two of them.
"Look how these metal-clad thresh burn! They are like stars in the night sky!" Most of the stations in the control room were empty but that was normal; the ships were designed to be run by no more than a single God King. The fact that the battle depended almost entirely on the decisions of quirkily programmed computers never crossed the mind of the kessentai. How the ship ran was how it ran. They no more understood it than a chimpanzee understands television. It works, I can change the channel. Voilà.
"Az'al'endai!" came the cry from a side channel. It was that thrice-damned puppy, Tulo'stenaloor.
"What do you want?" raged the commander. "First you kill my eson'antai, then you destroy my oolton', then you flee, then you—"
"Az'al'endai, shut up!" roared the impatient battalion commander. "You have a metal threshkreen on the side of the oolt' Posleen! He must be up to no good. We are firing at him now!"
"What?" shouted the suddenly confused ship commander. "Uut Fuscirto! Where are those detectors?" He hunted the panel in front of him, then realized that the control was at one of the other positions. But which one?
"Cursed Alld'nt equipment!" he shouted, hurrying from position to position. At the third he recognized the symbols he sought and slammed his talons into the appropriate buttons. The readouts made him gasp. He slapped the communicator button at the detector station.
"Tulo'stenaloor! Fire! Kill it! It has an antimatter bomb!"
He ran back over to the primary controls, pushing the babbling castellaine aside, and began to turn the oolt' Posleen toward Tulo'stenaloor's oolt'ondai. As he did so another beacon began to squawk and at its cry of doom he slammed the course downward in a panicked reach for safety.
* * *
Lieutenant O'Neal's suit was buffeted aside by the descending ship, the massive structure descending faster than the acceleration of Diess' light gravity. The buffet was the last thing Mike felt, as the fragmentation grenade went off in near simultaneity.
The grenade initially caused massive failures on the part of the grav-gun ammunition and the suit grenades. The rifle ammunition used a dollop of antimatter as its propellant charge. Under normal use a small energy field, similar in design to the personal protection field, would reach out and shatter the miniature stabilization field that prevented the antimatter from contacting regular matter. Another field held the antimatter away from the breech of the weapon so that it only contacted the depleted uranium teardrop. When the antimatter touched the uranium, the two types of matter were instantly converted into a massive outpouring of energy.
This energy was captured in a very efficient manner and used to accelerate the uranium round down the barrel of the grav-gun.
When the conventional French grenade went off, it shattered a large number of the antimatter stabilization fields immediately around it. Each of these fields contained an antimatter charge equivalent to two hundred pounds of TNT. There were several hundred in the backpack.
The rupturing of the rifle ammunition in turn smashed the antimatter grenades. The grenades actually held a smaller charge than the rifle rounds, but the casing provided much more in the way of shrapnel and that proved providential.
The canister from the shuttle also contained antimatter. Quite a bit of it.
The ubiquitous substance was the primary energy source for all high-energy systems in the Galactic Federation. In the case of the combat shuttles it was the source of choice because of its high mass-to-energy ratio. The shuttles not only had to have an energy source that could carry them for short interplanetary hops, but also one that could fuel their terawatt lasers.