“I’ll take rear guard,” Thorne volunteered.
Was Thorne entertaining thoughts of dying heroically, thus avoiding the inevitable court-martial? For a moment, Miles entertained thoughts of letting it do so. It would be the Vorish thing to do. The Old Vor could be a bunch of assholes, at times. “You get those clones to the shuttle,” Miles snapped in turn. “Finish the job you took on. If I’m paying this much, I want to get what I’m paying for.”
Thorne’s teeth bared, but it nodded. They both galloped after the squad.
The double doors opened onto an enormous concrete-floored room, which obviously nearly filled the big building. Red– and green-painted catwalks ran around a girdered ceiling high above, festooned with looping cables of mysterious function. A few harsh pale lights shone down, casting multiple shadows. He blinked in the gloom and almost lowered his infra-red visor. It appeared to be an assembly area for large projects of some kind, though at the moment there seemed to be nothing in progress. Quinn and Mark hesitated, waiting for them to catch up despite Miles’s urgent gesture for them to hurry on. “What are you stopping for?” he barked in furious fear. He skidded to a halt beside them.
“Look out!” someone yelled. Quinn spun, raising her plasma arc, seeking aim. Mark’s mouth opened, the “o” foolishly echoing the circle of his gray hood around his face.
Miles saw the Bharaputran because they were looking square at each other, in that frozen moment. A team of brown-clad Bharaputran snipers, probably come up through the tunnels. They were scrambling along the girders, barely more prepared than the Dendarii they pursued. The Bharaputran had a hand-sized projectile weapon launcher of some kind pointed straight at him, its muzzle bright with flare.
Miles could not, of course, see the projectile, not even as it entered his chest. Only his chest, bursting outward like a flower, and a sound not heard but only felt, a hammer-blow launching him backward. Dark flowers bloomed too in his eyes, covering everyone.
He was astonished, not by how much he thought, for there was no time for thought, but by how much he felt, in the time it took for his last heartburst of blood to finish flowing through his brain. The chamber careening around him … pain beyond measure … rage, and outrage … and a vast regret, infinitesimal in duration, infinite in depth. Wait, I haven’t—
Chapter Seven
Mark was standing so close, the report of the exploding projectile was like a silence, pressing in his ears, obliterating all other sounds. It happened too fast for understanding, too fast to close the eyes and defend the mind against the sight. The little man who had been yelling and gesturing them onward fluttered backward like a gray rag, arms outflung, face contorted. A spray of blood spattered across Mark with stinging force, part of a wide half-circle of blood and tissue-bits. Quinn’s whole left side was scarlet.
So. You are not perfect, was his first absurd thought. This sudden absolute vulnerability shocked him unbearably. I didn’t think you could be hurt. Damn you, I didn’t think you could be—
Quinn was screaming, everyone was recoiling, only he stood still, paralyzed in his private, ear-stunned silence. Miles lay on the concrete with his chest blown out, open-mouthed, unmoving. That’s a dead man. He’d seen a dead man before, there was no mistaking it.
Quinn, her face wild, fired her plasma arc at the Bharaputrans, shot after shot, till hot ceiling fragments started to fall lethally back down around them, and a Dendarii knocked her weapon aside. “Taura, get them!” Quinn pointed upward with her free hand.
The monster sergeant fired a rappel-hook upward, which wrapped around a girder. She rose upon it at full acceleration, like a mad spider. Between the lights and the shadows, Mark could scarcely follow her progress, leaping at inhuman speed along the catwalks, until broken-necked Bharaputran security personnel began raining down. All their high-tech half-armor was no protection at all against those huge, enraged clawed hands. Three men fell in a welter of their own blood, their throats torn out, an insane bombardment; one Dendarii trooper, running across the chamber, was almost smashed beneath an enemy body. Modern warfare wasn’t supposed to have this much blood in it. The weapons were supposed to cook everyone neatly, like eggs in their shells.
Quinn paid no attention, scarcely seeming to care about the results of her order. She knelt by Miles’s side, her shaking hands outspread, hesitating. Then they dove and pulled off Miles’s command helmet. She flung her own squad leader’s helmet to the floor and replaced it on her smooth gray hood with Miles’s. Her lips moved, establishing contact, checking channels. The helmet was undamaged, apparently. She yelled orders to perimeter-people, queries to the drop shuttle, and one other. “Norwood, get back here, get back here. Yes, bring it, bring it now. On the double, Norwood!” Her head swivelled away from Miles only long enough to shout, “Taura, get this building secured!” From above, the sergeant in turn bellowed orders to her scurrying troopers.
Quinn pulled a vibra-knife from her belt sheath and began cutting away Miles’s fatigues, ripping through belts and the nerve-disruptor shield-suit, tossing the bloody fragments aside. Mark looked up, following her glance, to see the medic with the float-pallet returning, hauling his burden across the concrete. The float-pallet counteracted gravity, but not mass; the inertia of the heavy cryo-chamber fought his attempts to run, and fought him again as he braked and lowered the pallet to the floor near his dead commander. Half a dozen confused clones followed the medic like baby ducks, clustering together and staring around in horror at the ghastly aftermath of the brief sharp firefight.
The medic looked back and forth from Miles’s body to the loaded cryo-chamber. “Captain Quinn, it’s no good. It won’t hold two.”
“The hell it’s not.” Quinn staggered to her feet, her voice grating like gravel. She seemed unaware of the tears running down her face, tracking pinkly through the spatter. “The hell it’s not.” She stared bleakly at the gleaming cryo-chamber. “Dump her.”
“Quinn, I can’t!”
“On my order. On my hands.”
“Quinn …” The medic’s voice was anguished. “Would he have ordered this?”
“He just lost his damn vote. All right.” She took a deep breath. “I’ll do it. You start prepping him.”
Teeth clenched, the medic moved to obey. He flipped open a door at the end of the chamber and removed a tray of equipment. It was all in disarray, having been used once already and hastily re-packed. He rolled out some big insulated bottles, keyed open the chamber. Its lid popped, breaking the seal, I rose. She reached within, unfastening things that Mark could not :. Did not wish to see. She hissed, as instantly-frozen skin tore from r hands, but reached again. With a grunt, she heaved a woman’s greenish, empurpled nude body from the chamber and laid it on the floor. It was the smashed-up bike-trooper, Phillipi. Thorne’s patrol, ring Bharaputran fire, had finally found her near her downed floater some two buildings away from her lost helmet. Broken back, broken limbs; she’d taken hours to die, against all the Green Squad medic’s heroic efforts to save her. Quinn looked up and saw Mark ring at her. Her face was ravaged.
“You, you useless … wrap her.” She pointed to Phillipi, then hurried around the cryo-chamber to where the Blue Squad medic now sit beside Miles.
Mark broke his paralysis at last, to scuttle around and find a thin foil heat wrap among the medical supplies. Frightened of the body, but too terrified by Quinn to disobey, he laid out the silver wrap and led the cold dead woman up in it. She was stiff and heavy, under his cringing touch.