Stanislaus hit his jump gear as O'Grady's fire hammered the face of the tower. The Rump Marines had separated their cannon's firing positions, and no doubt they'd dug them in as deeply as they could. But they hadn't gotten enough dispersion, and they couldn't dig in deeply enough and still have useful fields of fire. He didn't have time to stand around and gawk, but he got a good enough look to know that anyone who'd been manning one of those cannon was either dead or cowering in any hidey-hole they could find.
Even that brief glance upward was almost more than he should have spared. Like all of his surviving Marines, he was covering the distance between his start position and the tower in prodigious, low-trajectory jumps. The problem was that low-trajectory jumps didn't give much margin for clearing obstacles like ornamental walls and fountains, and it was actually harder to land, recover, and jump again on a low trajectory than on a high one. Stanislaus experienced one of the pitfalls of low-trajectory urban power jumps when he cleared a marble-faced planter box and landed squarely in the middle of a big, multi-jet fountain.
Water flew everywhere, but that didn't bother him at all. What did bother him was that the floor of the fountain's basin was a good meter lower than he'd anticipated. It wasn't that much of an unexpected drop, but the basin was also honeycombed with plumbing to feed the fountain jets, and Stanislaus' zoot gyros whined in protest as they fought to keep him upright when his right foot abruptly stopped moving.
They almost pulled it off, but he slammed down on his right knee, better than hip-deep in the water. He recovered quickly, but somebody with an assault rifle or a flechette gun opened up on him as he scrambled back to his feet. Hypervelocity projectiles turned the fountain's water into a dense fog. They also whined, screamed, and howled as they skipped off of Stanislaus' zoot.
He swore viciously and hit his jump gear again-hard. It blasted him out of the fountain on a sharper trajectory than he'd really wanted, but being a moving target was more important than keeping as close to the ground as possible. He needed out of that bull's-eye before someone turned up with something heavier.
More fire chewed up the tower's side plaza-spewing dust, this time, not mist-and something big, heavy, and high-velocity slammed into Stanislaus' left shoulder. It drove him forward and down, and he barely managed to tuck an armored shoulder under before he hit. The impact sent him skittering across the plaza pavement like a berserk bowling pin, and he grunted at the impact, even through the zoot's inertial damping systems, as he crashed into the tower's outer wall and came to an abrupt stop.
He showed himself up into a sitting position, breathing hard, and triggered a quick diagnostic. The zoot's pauldron had survived the impact, whatever it had been. It was badly dished, and the zoot computer dropped a flashing red caret into the corner of his HUD to remind him not to expose the weakened area to any more fire than he could help, but he was effectively intact. Which was more than he could say for his rifle.
He grimaced and drew his "sidearm." There'd been some raised eyebrows aboard Longbow at his nonstandard choice of backup weapons, but no one had chosen to object after they saw his range simulations scores with it. The sawed-off plasma carbine was a vast improvement over the old, original single-shot weapons, but only someone in a zoot could survive the back blast and thermal bloom of firing the thing. It was relatively short ranged, and had a maximum magazine capacity of only five rounds, but not even a zoot could survive a direct hit from it. Unfortunately, he'd never expected to use the thing indoors, and he made a fervent mental note to liberate something a bit less fractious from the first Rump Marine he encountered.
He took a quick look at his HUD, and his mouth tightened. Three more green fireflies had turned amber, and one had turned red, but it looked like all the survivors were across the fire zone, and a couple of Marines from First Platoon's third squad turned up beside him. At least he had someone to watch his back now, he thought. And now that he did, all they had to do with their two understrength platoons was clear a two hundred-story building, about whose interior architecture they knew nothing at all, of a completely unknown number of opponents with equally unknown weapons capabilities.
Nothing to it, he told himself, and slammed an armored, exoskeleton-powered foot through the glass doors in front of him.
None of them had ever experienced anything like it.
There weren't that many of the Rump holdouts in the tower, really. No more than two or three dozen of them, Stanislaus estimated. But every one of the bastards had a combat zoot, and they'd obviously raided the heavy weapons locker before they chose the position for their strongpoint, because the auto cannon on the west wall were the lightest of the weapons they'd dug into prepared firing positions around the tower's perimeter. But given their relatively low numbers, they didn't have enough people to keep all of them manned at once, and as they realized Stanislaus' people had broken into the tower, they were forced to pull off the perimeter weapons to deal with their attackers.
That was undoubtedly a godsend to Major Urowski's people outside the tower, Stanislaus thought bitterly, but it didn't help his people one bit. And unlike Stanislaus, the defenders obviously did have a fairly good idea of the building's layout. They were waiting on stair landings, around corners, covering lift shaft doors, and Stanislaus' people had already used almost all of their sensor remotes before they ever got this far. Without remotes to toss around blind corners or lob up a stairwell, the quarters were so tight and the sensor interference so severe that at least half the time the only way Longbow's Marines discovered one of those waiting ambushes was when the ambushers opened fire.
Stanislaus' hard-clenched jaw muscles ached as still more of his people went down. Most were "only" wounded, thanks to the protection of their zoots. But not even a zoot was much help when someone poked his helmet cautiously around a blind corner and someone else, in another zoot, blew that helmet off his shoulders with a plasma lance.
It was insane. The defenders couldn't win, not in the end, whatever they did. They had to know that. But they didn't seem to care, and they'd stockpiled plasma lances, grenade launchers, and even rocket launchers to use inside the tower. The destruction was unbelievable. Modern towers like this one were almost unbelievably tough for civilian construction, and he had no doubt the basic structure was going to survive whatever he and the defenders might do. But its interior walls had never been designed to resist that sort of fire even momentarily. Even major structural girders disintegrated like shattered glass when they took hits from shoulder-launched rockets designed to destroy heavy armored vehicles. Stanislaus supposed he should be grateful the lunatics had at least not opted to use HVMs. Apparently, even they had no desire to set off the equivalent of a low-yield tactical nuke inside the same corridor as themselves.
But that was about the only heavy weapon Stanislaus and his depleted fire teams failed to encounter as they fought their way savagely up, up, ever upward. Walls disappeared. Fire suppression systems tried-and failed-to extinguish the conflagration raging steadily upward with the combat. They were civilian systems, and their designers had never dreamed for an instant that they would be called upon to deal with bursts of plasma or the deliberate use of flamethrowers.
The tower's central, loadbearing core survived more or less intact, but as more and more of the less essential interior partitions were shattered, the tower itself became a chimney. A blast furnace. Air roared in through the shattered façade, sucked into the maw of the fires raging like some huge, unchecked beast, and the combatants hunted one another through the vestibule of Hell. Even combat zoots found the temperature levels hard to handle, and as the furnace blazed hotter and hotter, the chance of anyone surviving even a tiny breach in his armor essentially disappeared.