And then, suddenly, the fire roaring down the stairwells abruptly ceased. There was still shooting going on-a lot of it-but it was no longer aimed at Stanislaus and his assault teams. His HUD was suddenly speckled with a dozen green fireflies on the floor above him, and he bounded to his feet.
"Come on!" he bellowed, and hit his jump gear one last time.
The prodigious bound send him up the final flight of stairs like an old-fashioned rocket. It was, he realized, an incredibly stupid stunt which should have made him a sitting duck for any defender. But Huang's sudden thrust up the lift shafts had worked. The Rump fanatics had more immediate things to worry about as deadly accurate fire ripped into them from the rear, and they wheeled to face the shocking, unanticipated attack from behind them . . . just as Stanislaus erupted from the stairwell, already firing.
It was a gymnasium, a corner of his mind noted. A big, open space, almost as badly on fire as the floor below, with the charred carcasses of exercise equipment looming up amid the bodies and the cases of ammunition the holdouts had stockpiled here. But only a fragment of his attention applied itself to the architecture. All the rest of it was focused on killing his enemies before they killed any more of his Marines, and he got off three grenades while he was still in midair, then touched down, still firing.
After two hours of murderous combat which had reduced the entire tower to a seething volcano of internal fires, it was all over in less than seven seconds from the time he hit his jump gear.
There were no Rump survivors.
"All right, people." Stanislaus managed to keep most of his own exhaustion out of his voice as he looked around the survivors of Longbow's company. It had entered Cimmaron with two hundred and six officers and enlisted personnel; the fifty-seven survivors, less Amber Section, fitted into the fire-gutted gymnasium around him easily.
"We've got the tower," he went on, "such as it is and what's left of it. But there's still the rest of the city out there. Let's get this area policed up. Tse-lao, make sure we've found all the wounded-theirs, if any, as well as ours. Fuchien, you're in charge of sorting through all this ordnance. We burned a hell of a lot of ammo on the way in, so let's reammo from what we've got here, as much as we can. Shu, your squad has perimeter security. Let's move, people."
As Huang and the other two noncoms set about executing his orders, Stanislaus walked across the burning gymnasium to the tower's outer wall, looking for a clear transmission path for his com. He found a three and a half-meter breach in the wall and stepped into it.
"Snaphaunce One, Longbow One," he said wearily.
"Longbow One, Snaphaunce One. What's your situation?"
"We have the objective. I'm down to roughly sixty effectives, and low on ammo, but we've captured a good bit of ordnance. I'll need a little time to reorganize before I c-"
"Skipper."
Stanislaus' sentence chopped off in mid-syllable at the single word from behind him. It came over his priority dedicated link to Huang Tse-lao, but that wasn't what jerked him back around from the hole in the wall. No. What jerked him back like a garrotte about his throat was the raw, bleeding anguish in the sergeant's tone.
"What?" he asked quickly. Huang was bent forward, as if his zoot's "muscles" had somehow failed, and he carried something in his arms. Stanislaus couldn't see see the small bundle clearly, but the sergeant was hunched over it.
"Longbow One, Snaphaunce One," Major Urowski's voice said over his com. "Longbow One, your transmission was interrupted. Say again all after 'reorganize.' "
Stanislaus heard him, but it was only noise, without meaning as he tried to understand what had happened to his sergeant.
"Skipper," Huang half-sobbed. "Skipper . . . it was-Oh, sweet Jesus! This was a school, Skipper."
Stanislaus Skjorning's heart seemed to stop. He looked around the gymnasium almost automatically, and for the first time noticed how small most of the equipment was. Realized the stature of the people it was sized to fit.
He stepped forward, and Huang raised his helmeted head, staring at him through his battle-scarred visor while tears ran down his face. The sergeant held out his arms, and a saw-edged blade of agony went through Stanislaus as he recognized Huang's "bundle" at last as the small, horribly burned body of a little girl.
"Dozens of them, Skip," the sergeant said hoarsely. "My God, my God-there are dozens of them, all huddled together in a classroom back there, all dead!"
Stanislaus' soul cringed at the thought. They must have been up here, on the top floor, when those fucking lunatics decided to turn their building into a fort, he thought. Did the bastards even know they were here? Did they care? And what does it matter? My God, what they must have gone through before we killed them all in the end.
"Tse-lao," he said. Then stopped and cleared his throat. He reached out and put both armored hands on the sergeant's shoulders.
"Tse-lao, we didn't-you didn't-do this. We didn't choose where those Rump bastards decided to fight from. They did, and in defiance of their own system commander's orders not to fight."
"But, Skipper-" Huang began, his voice harrowed with the agony of grief, horror, and guilt.
"We didn't know, Tse-lao. We couldn't know. And-" Stanislaus drew a deep breath and gently, very gently, took the tiny, pitiful body in his own armored arms "-there's nothing we can do for them now."
Huang stared at him, mouth quivering, and Stanislaus laid the dead girl carefully on an exercise bench.
"I know, Tse-lao," he said quietly. "I know exactly what you're feeling. But there's still hundreds of bastards just like the ones in this tower out there." He jerked a hand in the direction of the breached wall. "They need us-and I need you."
"I-" Huang paused, then straightened. He drew a deep, shuddering breath, and nodded inside his helmet. "I understand, Skipper. I'll . . . be all right."
"No, you won't, Tse-lao," Stanislaus said. "And neither will I. But we'll deal with it together, later. All right?"
"Aye, aye, Skipper," Huang said in a stronger voice.
"Good." Stanislaus gripped his armored shoulder again for a moment. "But one thing we can do. Every one of them goes downstairs out of this fire with us. I promise you. That much at least we can do for them and their families."
"Yes, sir. I'll take care of it."
"Good," Stanislaus said again, and turned back to the hole in the tower wall.
"Snaphaunce One," he said, and a part of him was horrified by how calm, how . . . intact, his voice sounded in his own ears, "Longbow One. Sorry about the interruption, Major. My people just found some . . . civilian casualties up here. We'll be bringing them out with us. Now, what I was saying, is that I'm going to need a little time to reorganize around my casualties. I estimate-"
Lieutenant Stanislaus Skjorning, Terran Republic Marines, went on speaking crisply, clearly, doing his job, while deep inside he wept.
CASUALTY
Li Han woke unwillingly. There was something horrible, she thought in drowsy terror. Something waiting-
She opened her eyes to a pastel ceiling and brilliant sun patterns, dancing and leaping as the window curtains fluttered, and relief filled her.
It had been a bad dream. She raised a hand to her forehead. A nightmare. If it had been real, she'd be dead. And she wasn't even . . .