"Not a problem."
"Good, let's get Hal out."
"Where's Dennis?"
Lawrence looked around. There was a Skin suit lying in the middle of the street, badly mangled. The second jeep must have hit it full on. "Shit!" Dennis's telemetry grid was flatlined.
Don't grieve for the newly dead—they never thank you. Secure the platoon. Lawrence could hear Ntoko growling it out.
He released Hal's safety straps and lifted the kid out of the rear seat. "Bring the medical kit," he told Odel.
An explosion rocked the street. Lawrence saw a fireball burst out of the second jeep as the wreckage levitated off the ground.
"Amersy, get to cover. We've been ambushed. Seek and destroy."
"Roger that."
The two Skins lying flat on the ground beside the blazing jeep scrambled to their feet and sprinted for the nearby houses.
Lawrence wrapped one arm around Hal, lifting him gingerly, then reached down into the passenger seat for the smart missile rack. He stepped into the house through the demolished wall.
The room inside was empty. He kicked the door open and went through into a dark hallway. There were six identical doors and a stairway. He hurried down to the far end and kicked the last door open. It was another empty room. Tiny cracks of light leaked around the boarded-up window. He eased Hal down in a comer.
Odel put the medical kit down and snapped the top open. "Have we got anything that'll help?"
"I don't know." Lawrence picked out a diagnostic probe and switched it on. He was relieved when the small display pane lit up. The em pulse hadn't damaged electronics that were off at the time of the attack. Data began to flow into his AS.
There was the sound of a carbine firing in the distance. "Odel, go help them."
"You bet."
"Hey, be careful out there. These bastards look like they know what they're doing."
"So do I."
Amersy ran along an alleyway leading off the main street. There wasn't a lot of cover. The prefab houses were spaced a regulation twenty meters apart. The grid of streets almost allowed him to see from one side of town to the other. It also gave the ambushers the same field of vision. And he didn't know where they were.
Lewis had ducked away at the second house, heading off down a side street. Amersy raced on for a little while, then took a turning. He called up the Dixon map file, inertial guidance plotting his position. The Skin AS gave him a rough estimate of where the little projectile had come from. His link with Lewis gave him the other man's location, plotting that on the map as well.
"Lewis, we need to pincer them. You getting this tactical data?"
"It's online, Corp."
"Keep going straight on for a hundred and twenty meters. I'll be three streets to your left. They should be between us."
"Roger."
Lewis jogged along the route Amersy's AS had provided. His carbine slid out of its arm recess. When he got to the intersection he stopped and peered around the corner. There was a flash of motion two houses down. His AS replayed the image. It was a woman in her mid-twenties, dressed in jeans and a yellow T-shirt. She was carrying some kind of pearl-white cylinder in her left hand. The AS couldn't match it to any weapon in its catalogue file.
He switched carbine rounds to depleted-uranium and fired straight through the wall. The composite paneling in front of him disintegrated as the high-penetration rounds went straight through. Nothing in the houses was solid enough to stop one. His Skin AS gave him a spread pattern that had a high strike probability. He stopped firing and started to run to the corner where the woman had disappeared.
"Got a hostile, Corp. In pursuit."
"Roger that. Did you get them?"
Lewis reached the end of the street and jumped. It was a trajectory no hostile would be expecting. He flew past the end house, a meter and a half in the air. Carbine pointing down the street, sensors sweeping. There were puncture holes in the houses left by the depleted-uranium rounds, three foundation piers had shattered, but no body. His feet hit the ground and he was still running. He dashed behind a house and crouched beside a foundation pier.
"Shit, I missed, Corp."
"Okay. Let's close in, they're here somewhere."
Lewis got to his feet and turned down the street toward the corporal. He'd gone maybe ten paces when his neat display grid dissolved into a jazz of indigo lightning bolts. "What the hell...? Jesus, not now." His Skin's neurotronic pearls must have taken a bigger hit from the em pulse than he'd thought. He waited for the e-alpha fortress to reboot the crashed software. Instead the indigo swarm evaporated, leaving him without any data at all. "Son of a bitch."
He'd almost come to a halt when the woman stepped out from behind a house twenty meters ahead. She just stood there, watching him.
Lewis snarled, bringing the carbine up. Even without targeting graphics he could hit a pebble at this distance. The carbine didn't fire. He squeezed his trigger finger twice, three times, an impulse that was linked directly to the weapon. Nothing.
He started to run toward her. If she was counting on him not using brute force against a woman, she was about to find out the hard way just how big a mistake she'd made.
All of a sudden his legs weren't making any progress. It was as if he were wading through thigh-high mud. In dismay he realized his Skin muscles had stopped supporting him. His ordinary leg muscles were having to move the entire Skin suit.
"Corp!" he yelled, hoping his speaker was still functioning. "Corp, the fucking Skin's crashed. Corp!"
It became impossible to move. The Skin muscles had solidified, entombing him. He toppled over. For whatever reason, his visual sensors remained online. The side of his vision field showed him the woman walking toward him at a leisurely pace. She stopped beside him, the toes of her worn sneakers almost touching his shoulder.
Lewis was having to suck every scrap of air down into his lungs. The fail-safes! What had happened to the fail-safes? He wanted to shout up at the woman to help him, to open the Skin suit. But there was no air.
The woman leaned over slightly, as if she were studying him. Then she held a hand out above his helmet, fingers spread wide. She slowly closed the hand, fingers curling in to make a fist.
Lewis felt the Skin muscles flex. For an instant he believed the e-alpha was finally rebooting the entire suit. Then the Skin muscles began their contraction. He found enough air to scream as his ribs cracked. The last thing he saw was the hand above him squeezing tight.
Lawrence's AS had come up with very little to help Hal. What the kid needed was a whole new set of medical modules. Some of the ones he was using were so specialist that Lawrence wasn't even sure Memu Bay had replacements. All they had in the kit was field-aid systems and capsules of the drugs that the organ support modules used.
The diagnostic was showing abnormal blood chemistry. Lawrence's AS produced a list of drugs to combat the condition. But he didn't know if that blood chemistry was wrong given Hal's state. In the end he settled for injecting small doses.
Hal groaned, his head moving slowly from side to side.