Benzamir jumped forward, kicked a huge foot out, followed it up with half-turn and hand-spike slash that skittered shrieking across the surface of Nilssen’s abdomen. Still reeling, his opponent found it difficult to strike back. But blows that would have caved in a man’s ribs bounced off the shielded armour. Strikes had to be precise, timed, and meant.
Nilssen’s arm came over Benzamir’s shoulder, a shove gone wrong. Benzamir stepped inside, slamming his back against him and then throwing him. The battlesuit flew, banged down hard in the soft ground.
‘Warning,’ said Benzamir’s suit. ‘Overload.’
He unfurled his wing-like radiator array and ran at Nilssen again. He was down to half a dozen remotes, but Nilssen, who had none left, found that as fast as he used missiles and pop-up cannon, lasers would destroy the launchers themselves. Benzamir’s suit was heating up, but the radiators should shed the excess. He’d taken little damage, but Nilssen’s front armour was badly compromised.
Nilssen was on his feet, but his left arm, the one Benzamir had used as a lever, was hanging useless. They fought and kicked, stabbing at each other in lightning-fast moves, remotes circling and boiling off composite when they had the chance. Nilssen fell back under the onslaught, Benzamir concentrating on the weakened breastplate for his most penetrating attacks.
The moment Nilssen deployed his own radiators, the remotes changed tactics, pouring as much heat as they could into the black wings. Instead of keeping the suit cool, they were cooking it inside out.
Nilssen dropped to his knees. Benzamir swung his fist at his head, once, twice, three times. It ripped off with a shriek and bounced away.
‘Go on, then. Finish it,’ Nilssen grunted.
‘We could have all lived,’ said Benzamir. ‘Instead, we all have to die.’
The ground vibrated as if it was the surface of a drum. The air shocked hard. Plastic shattered, stone broke, metal bent, anything not tied down flew.
Benzamir was jerked off his feet. He landed curled up. The sky flashed into incandescence. He waited for a bar of molten light to vaporize the hab and everything inside.
There was a second concussion, a third, as hypervelocity sabots turned domes into craters. The power flickered as the generator vanished in a mushroom cloud; the secondary kicked in.
Still he waited. The noise and the shaking died down. He could faintly hear the lightning crack of Ariadne’s laser as she picked off unshielded targets. Nothing else.
Slowly it dawned on him that she’d had no intention of destroying the living hab, despite it being the plan they’d both agreed on. She loved him too much, and she’d lied to him.
He got back up. Nilssen had fallen flat on his chest: he could no longer see what was going on, and Benzamir was in no rush to tell him. The curved front of the living block was ragged, the windows gone, the structure warped by the colossal impacts so close by. The people inside would be deaf and bleeding from the overpressure transferred through the dome, which had flexed and bent, but not broken. His remotes lay inert on the ground, stirring feebly.
The triple doors were beckoning him. He reached them unsteadily – all his sight lines were out of true – and transmitted what he hoped was still the access code.
Before he could be proved wrong, his vision blinked red. Without hesitating, Benzamir threw himself aside, turned his shoulder under his body and jumped up again. His radiators closed and opened, hissing and crackling with effort, just as the first salvo of rockets screamed by. His pop-ups took care of the second volley, but right behind the missiles were two undamaged battlesuits still streaming with pond water.
Benzamir had spent himself on defeating Nilssen. He had nothing in reserve because he hadn’t thought to keep anything back.
‘Ari! Can you hear me?’
The two battlesuits were on Benzamir, going for his legs, trying to bring him down.
‘Warning. Overload.’
He blocked and dodged, while he tried to come up with an idea that might save himself.
‘Warning. Overload.’
He was in heat shock. He couldn’t think. His instincts traded blows with the battlesuits, dodged their lunging attacks, fired off the last of his guns and rockets in an attempt to reduce them to smoking debris, and still he had two enemies to fight.
This was what they wanted, what they’d planned from the start. They had known he couldn’t resist Peter Nilssen’s challenge. They’d goaded him into losing his temper and he’d ended up losing everything.
‘Warning. Critical overload.’
He had to disengage. Run. But they were hitting him as hard as he had hit Nilssen. He kept on pulling back, letting them get the advantage, taking damage, until his back was against the first set of pressure doors.
He heard a bang. A few moments later and a little closer, another.
Then he put everything into one jump. He arced through the air, hands and feet splayed. If he was wrong, they’d be on him in a moment, and there’d be no recovery. They’d just stamp on his chest until it broke.
A bubble of utter darkness bloomed inside the dome, necklaced with flickering strands of rainbow colours. It consumed the doors, swallowed up the ground in front of them. Then, with a pop of inrushing air, it burst.
A gust of hot, dry wind blew over the white-hot edges of the severed airlock. One of the battlesuits reacted faster than the other: that one survived. Its companion was speared by a violet beam of light that shone down the tunnel and crackled with energy.
Ariadne, flying so close to the ground outside that she made the sand dance, gave the pulse everything she had. She burned through the outer armour, heated the body inside until it turned to plasma, then punched out the back plate in an incandescent wave of gas. The armour ballooned outward until it abruptly transformed into a shockwave of vapour. Burned shards of carbon and metal pattered down all around the pair of leg stumps.
The laser cut through the far side of the unshielded dome and fused a sand dune into glass, then the hellish light blinked off.
One on one. Neither had any weapons left: it was down to brute force. The remaining battlesuit caught Benzamir around the waist and started to squeeze. They staggered, locked together in a drunkard’s walk. They fell into the lowest floor of the habs, destroying them, spewing gouts of masonry and fragments of supporting beams.
Benzamir realized he had both arms free. He felt for his opponent’s head, wrenched it off with a tortured shriek, but still it crushed him.
‘Warning. Structural failure.’
In a moment of blinding clarity, he extended a hand spike and rammed it down through the neck. The iron grip around him slackened. The other man had to know what he was doing. He kept pushing, probing and hoping.
He was shoved away, tottering back, unable to turn at the waist. The other suit, blind, started to deploy an emergency camera to work out where it was, where anybody was. The hab block was beginning to collapse around them.
Benzamir edged forward. The camera, an aerial with a fish-eye lens, spotted him, and the battlesuit kicked out at him, catching him on an already damaged leg and sending him spinning over.
He didn’t have the strength to rise. He could have died then, had his enemy pressed their advantage. But he hesitated, suspecting a trick, waiting to see if Benzamir would truly stay down.
Alessandra threw a fist-sized sphere behind the battlesuit. It heard the noise, turned, and was momentarily distracted by a woman in Arab dress calmly inspecting her pulse rifle to see where her finger needed to go and firing three plasma rounds into its chest.
The bomb expanded into a thing of terrible beauty. It caught the battlesuit up past its waist, with one arm held fast. With its free hand the suit frantically struck at the space-time surface, desperately trying to break out. Dark light grew around the bubble’s circumference. Then it disappeared, dragging loose dust into the vacuum.