Shots are whizzing above their heads. They’re kissing ramp. They’re crawling along it. They reach the door to the tower that it abuts and scramble inside. Bullets whine around them.
“Don’t stop,” says the mech.
Nor do they. They race up a stairwell. It’s littered with bodies in and out of armor. Some of those bodies are still smoking. The mech gets in front of Haskell. They keep on climbing stairs.
They reach the topmost floor. The room’s heaped with consoles and chairs and bodies. The air’s still thick with the fumes from the firefight that went down here scant minutes ago. Through the windows they can see remnants of the Citadel still protruding above the clouds. One window’s missing altogether—along with part of the wall around it. The whole scene shines with unearthly light.
“Stay away from the windows,” says the mech.
“To the roof.”
Haskell pulls open one last door, sprints up one last set of stairs. These are narrower. They end at a trapdoor on the ceiling. She pulls it open. The sky that’s revealed isn’t really sky anymore. It’s just something twisting through all manners of colors.
“Now what?” says the mech. He’s still standing at the bottom of the staircase, trying to cover the control room and trapdoor simultaneously.
“Now we get help,” says Haskell.
“Can you raise anyone?”
“I can’t even signal.”
The EMP pulse fucked her head almost as much as his armor. Half her thoughts have faded into blur. Half her eye-screens are gone. She can still function. But her zone capability is gone.
“So how are you going to get us out of here?”
“Let me get back to you on that,” she replies.
Fuck,” says Maschler.
“No luck on the redundants,” says Riley.
“Reboot,” says the Operative.
“Already tried that,” says Maschler.
“So do it again.”
They shut the whole thing down, slot new batteries in, start it back up again. The batteries work. The screens flare back to life. But there’s no life in them. They’re spewing gibberish.
“Fuck,” says Riley.
“Maybe all that shit’s going to miss,” says Maschler.
“Care to stake your life on it?” asks the Operative.
“What would you have us do?” asks Riley.
“I’d have you start the engines,” says the Operative.
“Thanks,” says Maschler.
“Let me clarify,” says the Operative. “You’ve already lined us up. We don’t need to steer. All we need to do is fire the burners.”
“Huh,” says Riley.
“So?” asks Maschler.
“So how do I get to the motors?”
“Go outside,” says Riley.
“Great,” says the Operative. “Let’s go.”
“All of us?” asks Riley.
“You and I will suffice.”
What the hell are you doing?” asks Marlowe.
“The only thing I can,” the razor yells.
She’s firing tracer rounds through the trapdoor, letting them go at rapid intervals to flare across the sky.
“Morse code,” she says.
“They’re probably a little busy up there,” says Marlowe. He goes from body to body, taking various devices: several grenades and a phosphorus charge that someone apparently was about to detonate to prevent this room from falling into Jaguar hands. Marlowe hooks his newfound possessions onto his belt. He hears a noise outside, looks up.
Just in time to see something roar past the window.
He screams at the razor to stop firing. She does. They hear something land on the roof.
“They must have come up from the basement,” Marlowe shouts.
“We’ve got no armor,” whispers the razor.
Marlowe looks around the control room. The suit he glimpsed outside had light armor: not a match for what he was wearing earlier but far superior to what he’s got now. Marlowe steps back into the jumble of debris and bodies on the floor, kicks a shattered suit aside, grabs the assault-cannon that suit’s still clutching, rushes back up the staircase. He’s shouting at the razor to get out of his way. He rushes out onto the roof, starts firing at the suited Jaguar who’s just alighted upon it: and who now gets drilled through the visor by hi-ex armor-piercing rounds from Marlowe’s weapon. The Jaguar goes down, smoke pouring from his helmet. Marlowe hears suit thrusters below the level of the roof: he hears the razor scream. He races to the edge of the roof, leaps.
For a moment he’s plunging. As he does he catches a glimpse of another suit, hovering in front of a nearby tower that’s been turned into more of an inverted melting icicle through the pounding of the now-silent space-to-grounders. Marlowe fires more hi-ex rounds, blows that suit backward into the tower even as he plunges past the hole in the wall of the control room—and sticks his feet out, finds purchase, twists into the control room itself. His head just misses torn metal. The Jaguar who’s just entered the control room through that hole is advancing on the staircase where the razor’s ensconced. Marlowe opens up: the suit whirls, burning—and then exploding as its motors ignite. Marlowe fires several more rounds for good measure, steps past what’s left of that suit.
And hits the floor. Because every window’s being shattered. The room’s filling up with fire. Marlowe crawls along the floor to the staircase, steps into its shelter. The razor’s standing there, her gaze flicking between the sky and a still-intact computer monitor set into the wall.
“Bought us maybe thirty seconds,” he tells her.
But the woman doesn’t answer save to gesture at the sky. Marlowe glances at it—sees some kind of signal light flashing up there. “They’re responding,” the razor says.
“What are they saying?”
“They’re not sending ships.”
“Then we’re fucked.”
“Not quite,” she says. She starts to explain but stops as the room beneath comes under heavy fire. A barrage of explosive shells starts tearing away what’s left of those walls. The stairway they’re in shakes. It keeps on shaking.
And stops. The firing cuts out.
“What the fuck,” mutters Marlowe.
“Beats me.”
But then they hear it from somewhere down below. It’s some kind of distant rumbling. Some kind of far-flung echo. It seems to be coming from within this building rather than outside. It’s not just one thing either. It’s many things. It’s the same thing. It’s many voices.
Shouting.
“The militia.”
“The suits are whistling up the dogs.” Marlowe eyes the stairs.
“We’ve got to move.”
“Where?” Marlowe leans into the doorway, hurls frag grenades across the room and down that stairwell. But when the explosions die away, the shouting’s still there.
Only louder.
“How long do you think we have?” asks the razor.
“Maybe about another thirty seconds,” replies Marlowe. “How long do we need?”
They hear something else through the shouting. Something’s scraping along the roof, closing on the trapdoor. It’s dropping through.
A tether.
“Grab it,” says Marlowe.
She does. And as he follows suit, he primes the phosphorus charge, tosses it at the foot of the stairs. The tether’s going taut. They’re being hauled at a run up what’s left of the stairway. They lift their feet, loop their legs around the tether. They soar through the trapdoor, leave the roof behind.
And rise into the burning heavens.
Riley and the Operative make their way back through the chamber in which the latter rode out the initial climb. They trail cable out behind them.
“Careful,” says Riley.
But the Operative says nothing. It’s noticeably colder back here. The light from the glowsticks they’ve triggered plays fitfully upon the walls.
“Look familiar?” asks Riley.
“Not anymore,” says the Operative.
Riley shrugs. He moves to the door that leads to the cargo. He works the manual, slides the door open. The two men float like undersea divers into the bay. Which—since it’s nearly full—is really just a narrow passage.