They would not win the battle but it would help immensely. The ACS, their most cherished hero dead, would be livid but confused. If Mike O’Neal could die, what were they facing?
If his son could die…
It was an instant, a flash of neurons that processed more information in less time than the most sophisticated AID. A gestalt of total oneness.
A perfect moment for any warrior.
Mike didn’t really need Shelly to scream. He was looking more or less right at the sniper. The positioning had been… superb. It was as if the man had read his mind. The sniper had him dead to rights. And Mike knew, looking at the weapon, at the shooter, that he, Lieutenant General Michael O’Neal, holder of two Medals of Honor and the Globe of Valor, was dead.
There were other things that Mike, in that brief moment, knew. The man, he was certainly a man despite the concealing clothing and body armor, was a juv. How Mike knew he couldn’t say. His steadiness? His calmness? The set of his perfect shooter’s position? It didn’t matter. This was a man who had been in combat for a long time. There was no way in hell he was going to miss.
Blue eyes. The shooter was all away across the atrium, far too far away to see that sort of detail, and firing through a narrow port. But it was suddenly as if Mike had the vision of an eagle. The man had blue eyes.
His rig-out was… perfect. Every item was placed just so. Some of them had subtle angles to them that made it almost look messy, but it wasn’t. The placement was more… combat feng shui. Sometimes it wasn’t best for a magazine holder to be directly up and down. Tilted, slightly, might work a bit better.
This was a man who had honed his skill for years, decades. Centuries?
Training, experience and sheer monkey survival instincts lifted Mike’s right arm at lightning speed, bringing his under-arm microgrenade launcher in-line. The slot was remarkably small but it wasn’t as if Mike hadn’t hit smaller targets.
Before the first grenade was out of the launcher, however, he knew two more things.
The sniper recognized him. There was no motion, no widening of the eyes. But something, a form of telepathy in the zen state of that moment, told General O’Neal he was both recognized and that the recognition was unexpected. That the sniper was as shocked as he was.
The second thing almost made him check his fire.
The sniper lifted his finger from the trigger.
The armored door snapped back up but two of the antimatter grenades had made it through. The hide vanished in a ball of plasma as antimatter touched matter and engaged in an orgy of mutual annihilation. Whoever the sniper was, whyever he had chosen not to kill General Michael O’Neal, was a mystery.
“Jesus, General,” the lieutenant snapped, practically jumping into the air. “Are you okay?”
“Never better,” Mike replied, calmly. “As I was saying…”
Cally had her hands together as if praying, thumbs under her chin and index fingers pressed against her lips. Tears were streaming down her face.
Tommy reached over and put his hand on her shoulder.
“Cally… Do you want me to take it?”
“I’m just focusing,” she said. “Dammit! How in the hell did they take him down? The hide was cloaked, the position was armored and it was Papa!”
“They’re… very good,” Tommy said, gently. “Some better than others.”
“Miss O’Neal,” the AID said carefully.
“What?”
“I’ve parsed data from your late grandfather’s PDA,” the device replied. “I have an identification on the enemy commander. Who also was the person who… fired on your grandfather’s position.”
“Lieutenant Cuelho,” Cally said. “We already know who the commander of the force is.”
“Correction,” the AID said. “The senior officer present is not Lieutenant Arthur Cuelho. It is Lieutenant General Michael O’Neal.”
Corporal Erin Melvin Doyle was of the opinion he was having a bad day.
“Jesus Bloody Christ!” he shouted as a blast of plasma more or less cooked the entire corridor. Fortunately, he was standing around a corner and it only heated up his suit a bit. It would have cooked any unprotected human, or lesser protected human, within twenty feet.
He stuck his grav-cannon around the corner and triggered a burst on remote, managing to snag the plasma gunner. But then two grav rifles fired back, filling the corridor with trails of silver fire.
“This ain’t workin’, Bigfoot,” SPC Ray Joseph Hutchinson said calmly.
Like Hutchinson it was Doyle’s first taste of combat but, also like Hutchinson, he’d been an instructor in ACS, using the incredibly lifelike simulations, for over four years. Frankly, so far actual combat had been easier than their sims. “I would recommend an alternate route.”
“Roight ’ch’are, Hutch,” Doyle said, pulling out a suicide bar. “You don’t like us coming down this corridor, we’ll go down the one under it.”
“Stand by,” his AID said. “Incoming orders.”
“ ’Bout bloody time,” Doyle snapped.
“Not the corridor under it,” the AID said, karating the ceiling. “Go up. Two levels. Then across and down.”
Both grav-cannons swiveled upwards, blasted in a circle and in a moment both suits were gone.
“They left,” Corporal David Hines said. “That’s… odd.”
“They didn’t leave,” Sergeant Blevins said. “Use your ears.”
As some of the ringing in his ears from the battle died — grav-cannons fired at relativistic speed made a sonic-crack from hell — Hines could make out a series of thumps, crashes and explosions. It was, despite the muffling of multiple walls, fairly easy to follow. When a blast of relativistic velocity depleted uranium hits Galplas it tends to cause a bit of a noise. First going up. Then across accompanied, even at this distance, by the distinct sound of boots, a crash.
“What was that?” Rich Widemann muttered. The only Bane Sidhe assigned to the short team of DAG, he was feeling a bit out of his depth.
“Door?” Hines said.
“Wall,” Blevins replied stoicly. “I think they just punched through it. They’re going around us.”
Hines looked at the heavy plasteel armored door they were guarding and made a moue.
“If we’re supposed to keep them from going through the door and they attack us from the other side of the door…”
“We stop them,” Blevins said.
“I’m just saying. If we’re supposed to keep them out of there and they’re already in there, fighting to keep them in there just sort of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?”
“We were ordered to hold this intersection,” Blevins said. But even he was starting to look puzzled.
“Yeah,” Hines said. “But because of the door!”
“They’re coming down,” Widemann said.
“I’m just saying,” Hines said.
“We hold the intersection,” Blevins snapped, turning to face the door.
“Okay,” Hines said, waving his grav rifle. “No issues. I’m just saying. They’re probably going to blow it. Shouldn’t we sort of back away?”
“Okay,” Blevins said, nodding. “Point.”
The threesome crouched behind a hastily constructed barrier ten yards from the door in question. In the distance there was banging.
“You guys ever see this movie?” Widemann asked with a puzzled tone. “Real old one. Horrible CGI. But it’s got this guy in black armor with this cape?”