Lucky for Kris, Jack had grabbed her elbow the second the fountain gave up flinging water skyward. He pulled her after him as he half fell through the bank door.
A Marine sapper still stood behind the door whose lock she’d recently blown so Marines could enter. Even as the sound of weapons fire filled the air, the trooper pushed the door open for Jack and Kris.
“Thank you,” Jack said as he half yanked, half pulled Kris through the door.
The Marine said, “You’re welcome,” and winced as cannon fire slammed into the door, half knocking her down.
Most of the weapons fire missed Kris. Not all. One round clipped her ankle, shattering her armor there, but it did its job and protected her soft flesh.
Still, it stung like the dickens.
As the door swung closed behind them, it was stitched by slugs. Good armored glass that it was, it held, showing shattered stars where it was hit. As it slowly closed, shattered stars got shattered stars on them. The glass bowed in from the pressure of all the high-powered rounds it was taking.
“Let’s get out of here,” Jack said.
The sapper held open the second door, and they scooted inside.
“Admiral Krätz, that didn’t go so well. You got any more bright ideas,” Jack snapped.
“Is Kris all right?” he asked, sounding sincerely worried.
“I’m fine. My ankle got clipped, and it’s hurting a bit, but I’m okay. Honestly, do you have any other ideas?” she asked, trying to make it sound sincere.
“I guess now we do it the easy way,” the admiral said. “Since she has resisted arrest, I don’t see any reason we can’t bring the full force of empire down upon her.”
“The full force of empire?” Kris asked.
“The Navy,” Vicky answered.
“Oh no,” Kris said. “Marines, get down. Way down. Visors down. Go on internal oxygen,” she shouted.
“What the hell?” Jack said, but he was locking his suit down and rolling across the bank floor looking for a solid pillar to get close to. Kris put her back up against a column and grabbed her knees, something not easy to do in battle armor.
She also did her best to be small, something really not easy to do in armor when you’re a six-foot-tall gal.
Once, Kris was dirtside when a corvette fired two 18-inch pulse lasers at targets near her position. Those had been only pulse lasers, weak things firing a short burst of power.
Her ears had rung for the rest of the day, and her body had hurt well into the next from the noise and overpressure.
Once, Kris fought a major space battle, defending her home planet from being bombarded by six killer battleships bent on blasting Wardhaven back into the Stone Age. A lot of Kris’s friends died defeating those battleships, but they protected their home from taking that beating.
Now, Kris was just a thousand meters from the target of just the kind of battle lasers that had been intended for her home.
She didn’t look. To look would be to die.
Instead, she watched it secondhand, reflected in the polished marble of the bank’s inner wall. The N.S. tower was just a shadow, surrounded by the bright glare from sky and water.
Then Kris’s visor went dark to protect her from blindness. Even as everything around her disappeared, a single bright light, straight as an arrow, made the tower shine.
The top floors melted away in less time than it would have taken to blink. Then two, three, no, four more lines of light added their input to the halo of shining fire around the tower.
Pulse lasers had power, but only for a second or two. Battleship lasers had more power, and they poured it out for long-sustained seconds. Battle lasers were intended to cut through six, eight, or ten feet of reflecting ice that shrouded other battleships. Battleships also spun along their long axes at twenty revolutions a minute. This allowed armor that was being boiled by a hit to rotate away from the slashing laser fire before it burned through to the ship below.
Battleships were made to hammer and be hammered.
The N.S. tower was not built with that kind of beating in mind. It had no ice shell. It was not spinning. It was on the receiving end of huge amounts of power and could do nothing but burn.
Burn and collapse.
Kris watched the fuzzy reflection on the marble in front of her as the tower got shorter and shorter and shorter. She wasn’t sure, but it looked to her like some of the laser fire went silent, only to be replaced as more cannons came online.
The reflected tower on the wall shrank until it stood no taller than the ground around it, but still the lasers burned.
While Kris’s eyes were locked on the reflected glory in front of her, her ears, even through the suit, were telling her the atmospheric pressure around her was going wild.
The bulletproof windows of the bank had taken hits, hits shown by the line of stars across the windowpanes. The windows had withstood cannon and machine-gun fire.
Now, the power of the sun was come to earth. The air twisted and roiled in torture and took its vengeance where it could.
The windows above where Kris huddled bowed in, heated up, melted, and flew across the bank in less time than it took to think of it. Drops of flaming glass splattered into surreal patterns on the wall where just a second ago, the tower had been reflected.
The air in the bank rushed out the void that had been windows, trying to fill the swirling tornado that now spun where the tower had once stood against the sky. Desks and furniture did their level best to follow the gale winds. One solid wooden desk smashed into the wall a handsbreadth away from Kris.
Jack crawled back to throw himself over Kris. She pushed him back and slid herself under the desk. He backed himself in to cover the opening.
Just as quickly as it had come, the laser fire was gone. If that brought silence, Kris didn’t notice it; her ears still rang. If it brought calm, Kris couldn’t see it; her visor only slowly went from darkest to dark to not quite so dark.
“You okay?” Jack asked over net.
“Mostly. I think. Maybe,” Kris admitted to the possibility.
“Admiral, if you’re still online,” Jack said, “would you do us a favor next time you do us a favor. Give us a bit of warning.”
“I hope you will excuse me if I say that it seemed like a good idea at the time. If you can arrange to return to the Wasp, I understand that the Forward Lounge is a very good place to hold a victory party. There, with no recordings running, I think I can better explain what I intended to do, even if I didn’t quite manage to do it.”
“If killing us was your intention,” Jack grumbled, “you didn’t quite manage to do it.”
“I assure you, that was never my intention.”
“Jack, we better get out of from under this desk. I think it’s starting to burn,” Kris said.
Not only the desk, but the bank around them, it seemed. What wasn’t solid marble was indeed catching fire.
Marines who’d spent the bombardment upstairs in the bank were hastily coming downstairs, many limping, others helping. Kris found that if she wanted to move, it involved limping along with Jack’s help.
The street was littered with fallen trees, fallen building facades, and tossed cars and trucks. Kris stared for a second at the pleasant park that had once surrounded the N.S. tower. It looked like a moonscape, burned and blown clear of vegetation of any kind.
Where the tower had stood, a new appendage of the bay now lapped. The water that had rushed into the hole in the ground boiled and steamed from the molten slag that gave the only hint that a building had once occupied the land.
“I wonder how many people were in there with Ms. van da Fitz?” Kris asked.
“We’ll likely never know. Unless someone had a backup copy stored off-site of all the data in that tower, I doubt there’s another place with a full list of who worked and lived there, or anywhere else on this entire planet,” Jack said.