“Fuck!” said Vargas. “We better get this gear on, fast!”
Angie looked up from reading the manual. “Please allow half an hour for arming the first time you put on your power armor,” she read. “A trained and experienced wearer can bring that time down to five minutes, but expect the first time to be an awkward and frustrating experience, particularly without assistance.”
I shook my head. “We don’t have one minute, let alone five.”
Vargas motioned me toward the door. “Drop that portcullis! And make sure they can’t open it again!”
I ran back out and down the marble steps to peek out through the big door. The Guardians had taken cover in the thickets of statues and junk that lined both sides of the grand hall, and were creeping forward through them like ninjas. Their caution would buy us time, but would it be enough?
I looked straight up at the portcullis where it sat raised up into the ceiling. The chains that lifted and lowered it were attached at the top of the metal slab, hidden somewhere in the darkness up there, but the slot that it sat in wasn’t exactly tight. It had a clearance of about five inches on the far side, and ten inches on my side. I pointed the meson cannon up into it and leaned on the trigger.
I didn’t hit anywhere close to the chains, but the violet light showed me where they were, and I shifted my aim to touch the closest one. Molten metal started dripping down and spattering around my boots. I edged back but kept firing. There were three chains, one in the middle and one at each end, and they were massive, with links as thick around as my upper arm. Even the meson cannon was taking its time chewing through them.
I wasn’t halfway through the first one before the Guardians realized what I was doing and started shouting and spilling out from the stands of statues, firing their energy weapons at me as they came.
I stuffed myself in the shallow cover of the doorframe and screamed back over my shoulder. “Hey! Little help!”
Ace, Angie and Thrasher pounded down and joined me, firing from the threshold at the advancing horde, then backed up suddenly as the first chain snapped and there was a groan of shifting metal and a thud that moved the entire base and nearly knocked us and the Guardians off our feet.
“Damn,” said Angie. “Wouldn’t want to be caught under that.”
She and the others recovered a second quicker than the Guardians and started lighting up their front ranks with laser fire as I did the same to the chain on the far end of the portcullis. The Guardians pulled up short and split left and right again, shrieking and looking for cover as our fire cut through them. Unfortunately that didn’t do much to stop them shooting at me, and there was no place I could be except right in the doorway. It was the only way to get an angle on the chains. At least they weren’t trained soldiers, and most of their shots went wide, but the ones that hit were bitin’ my chitin hard. Pretty soon those lasers would be cooking skin instead of ceramic.
Angie saw my predicament and shouted back up the stairs. “Razor! Smoker!”
“Ten four! Incoming!”
Before my head could put together what those five random–seeming words meant, I heard something metallic tinking down the steps behind me, and then a little steel cylinder bounced past my left leg and rolled into the main hall.
“Cover your eyes,” said Angie.
I turned my head just as the cylinder exploded into roiling yellow clouds of smoke that rapidly filled the hall.
Angie slapped my shoulder. “Shift yourself!”
Under cover of the fog I ran across the doorway to other side and started shooting at the right–hand chain from almost directly underneath. It was gratifying to see from the lasers stabbing through the yellow smoke that the Guardians were still blindly shooting where I wasn’t anymore.
Ten seconds later, the second chain snapped and there was another knee–buckling thud as the portcullis fell free in its slot and boomed against the far side. When I’d got my balance back I leaned in to aim at the middle chain, but then I heard a tortured screaming coming from above, like somebody being torn apart. It wasn’t until Vargas jerked me back that I realized that it was the middle chain, unable to take the entire weight of the portcullis on its own. It was stretching like rubber.
“Look out!” Vargas barked. “It’s gonna—”
It did.
Ten tons of steel slab dropped out of the ceiling and hit the floor with a deafening crash less than an arm’s length from where Vargas had me around the neck. It bounced us a yard off the ground and dropped us on our armored behinds, then choked us with the cloud of dust and grit that rose up from the impact.
I sat up shaking with reaction, my heart going a mile a minute. A second slower and I would have been a thin red paste, power armor or no. As the dust cleared we saw that the door had smashed a foot–deep trench in the stone floor and sent cracks all the way up the marble steps.
“Well,” said Hell Razor, when he’d finished coughing. “They’re not getting through that.”
A worried look rumpled Vargas’s brow. “Yeah. And neither are we. We better look for another way out.”
There wasn’t one.
Well, there was, but nobody liked it but me.
We searched the whole of the inner sanctum, found a work bench, an art collection, a sled with the name Rosebud painted on it and, behind a chain–link fence, the weird, looming dragonfly shape of a helicopter — a real one this time, not a simulator, with machine guns and everything.
The others didn’t seem that impressed. They were already turning back to the door as I stepped to the fence and stared through it like a kid looking into a toy shop.
“Come on, Ghost,” called Angie. “We gotta check the other rooms again. Maybe there’s a hidden door somewhere.”
“Wait,” I said. “This is it. This is how we get out.”
Everybody laughed.
“And who’s gonna fly it?” asked Vargas. “You?”
I nodded. “There was a training simulator in Sleeper One. I learned how. We can fly it to Base Cochise.” I pointed up. “Look, the roof opens. It’s perfect.”
Angie came around and looked me in the face, serious as a judge. “Listen, Ghost, your danger meter is broken, you know that. You start shit and charge into situations that any sane person wouldn’t go into with power armor and an army at their back. And it’s only gotten worse with Athalia dead, so maybe you don’t see this the way the rest of us see it — sheer suicide.”
“But—”
She cut me off. “Even if you were the best student in the world, and learned every single thing that simulator could teach you, you still haven’t flown a real one. Do you really expect us to risk our lives climbing into that thing on your first flight? Leave it alone, brother. Leave it alone.”
“Alright, then,” I said. “How about this? If I can fly it up out of that hole in the roof and back down again for a safe landing, will you trust me then?”
Angie looked back at the others.
Vargas shrugged. “If he gets it together before we find another way out of here, we’ll see. If not, we spend shoe leather as usual.”
I gave him a salute. “Thank you, Vargas. Thanks.”
He turned away. “Don’t thank me for givin’ you permission to kill yourself. It’s disturbin’.”
So while the others dug around beneath the mountains of junk the Guardians had accumulated, looking for another exit, I got to play with the best toy I was ever going to have. Amazingly, the chopper was fueled up and in working order. It looked like keeping it that way had been some sort of holy duty, because there was a meticulously kept service log that noted all oil changes, maintenance, and part replacements going back decades — including the maintenance for the hydraulic roof, too. The thing the log didn’t have any entries for, even though there was a space for it, was flights. The crazy bastards had kept the thing ready to fly at a moment’s notice, but had never actually flown it. It made me wonder if they even knew how.