"Damnation!" A sharp male voice stirred his memory as he fought to open eyes glued tight with rheum. Something sounding like tearing linen identified itself in his mind as a blaster being fired: Air molecules reacting with particles.
Silence.
He rubbed his face with encrusted fingers and rolled over, hearing grit crunch under his armor. Every bone felt pulled out of joint. The dull ache that had filled his dreams shot hot and angry through his head.
"Rotted Gods," he gasped. "What the. "
"Shut up," a woman's voice hissed from somewhere.
He blinked into the gloom to clear his sight. Rain pelted through half a roof to spatter on splintered timbers, crumbled masonry and sagging flooring. One ear seemed dead. Targa! The bombing, the flight through Kaspa to try and find their forces, the ambush… it all came back.
So black. A fragment of his memory stimulated him to reach for the IR visor. It slid halfway down and caught, leaving the world eerily half-visible. He had to tug it the rest of the way; but he could see. MacRuder huddled near a wrecked window, assault rifle ready, searching the blackness and storm. Gretta crouched by the blasted doorway, covering the stairs as she squinted down the sights of her assault rifle.
His bladder angrily demanded to be emptied.
A lance of violet light erupted from the stairway and out through the missing portion of roof. Sinklar understood. The Targans had blown it away. Gretta waited.
He tried to swallow. His tongue stuck in the dryness and gagged him. He felt for the water flask and pulled the flattened pieces from his belt. That was when he noticed his combat armor — blood caked, horribly battered with bits of metal and masonry siding sticking out at angles. The armor had saved his life.
Unabashed, he moved to the depths of the room and urinated against the remaining wall. MacRuder's rifle spurted a short rip into the darkness.
He crawled over to where rain had collected on the dirty floor and sucked up as much as he could from the pool that had formed. Grit stuck in his teeth; a foul aftertaste slimed his tongue. But soothing moisture trickled down his raw throat.
He rolled onto his back and let the rain wash his hot fevered face.
"How you feeling?" MacRuder asked, voice flat, emotionless.
"Like somebody pulled me through a singularity — sideways," Sinklar rasped. "What's the situation?"
" 'Bout as good as last time. Bad. We're up here and they can't get us until they bring up some heavy stuff. I don't think that'll be long either. Something's moving around down there." MacRuder didn't take his eyes off the streets below.
"They tried the steps twice," Gretta added. "I taught them better."
"This is a tower of some kind?" Sinklar asked, seeing bits of roofs through the blown away sections of wall.
"Yeah, take the high ground." MacRuder ran a muddy hand over his IR visor to smear at the rain. "Another great military axiom from Academy."
Sinklar crawled over to look. Their tower stood at the point of a V-shaped block. Across the street from them, and down, rain slashed the slanted roof for a subterranean warehouse access. Two poles supported a drooping banner advertising storage rates and the comm number to contact for information.
"What kind of night vision are they using? Active or passive?" Sinklar began pulling at his equipment belt. The concussion had hopelessly smashed most of the gear.
"Passive. Must be some sort of light amplifying system."
"Got a grenade left?"
"One. Why?"
"Want to get out of here before they set up whatever they've got that's big enough to blow us away?"
"You bet your rosy red rectum, scholar. What you got in mind this time?"
"Simple physics."
"Like what?"
"Like I'm hoping gravity still works. Only we have to create a diversion and blind them for at least thirty seconds."
"I see, passive night vision, huh? And I'll bet you can swipe a flare from Gretta, too."
Sinklar checked his ruined equipment and cursed under his breath. Scrambling, he crawled painfully to where Gretta Artina crouched to cover the stairway. "I need your flare unit and your survival cable."
"Got a plan? Heard you whispering with MacRuder over there. How you feeling?" She barely took time to glance at him before she sighted down the black stairwell again.
"They don't make words that gruesome," he whispered, taking the articles she pulled from her belt. "One ear doesn't work. Shattered the tympanic membrane, I think. That and I feel like I've been strained through a Myklenian wine filter. Everything aches."
"Yeah, well — listen, get us out of this mess, and I'll massage every square inch of your body." She gave him a quick grin and a wink.
"Maybe we'll just settle for dinner, huh?" he added lamely, aware of how unsettled he was by her attention.
"Just dinner?"
"Well, it's that I… You see, I was always involved with my studies and…" He didn't need this — not now! He turned to scuttle away only to feel her hand on his arm.
"Rotted Gods! You're a virgin
"Shhh! Someone might hear. Besides, what about MacRuder?"
"We'll talk about that later, scholar. For now, I like your style. You go to work. If we live through this, I'm going to turn your starship inside out!" She slapped him on the elbow to get him moving.
His muscles were trembling in protest by the time he made it back to MacRuder's crumbling window.
"Virgin, huh?"
"Why me? Here, hold onto this." He handed one end of the survival line to MacRuder. "She didn't have to bellow it all over the Gods' cursed city!" He made a knot and tied MacRuder's end off to one of his belt grapples. An angular chunk of mortar gave him the weight he needed and he used a piece of loose wire to bind it to the grapple.
"Now what?"
"Now I wish I'd spent more time at apple ball than at books." Sinklar frowned across the distance.
"So, what do you need? I used to pitch six-forty in league play."
"I should have known. Throw it over and between those poles." Sinklar handed him the grapple-wired mortar.
MacRuder made a perfect toss. The mortar carried the grapple across the space and tore loose from the thin wire when the line snapped taut. The grapple fell neatly behind the banner. Reeling the line in, it caught in the bottom of the fabric.
"Hope it don't tear," MacRuder grunted.
"Makes two of us," Sinklar agreed. "Get ready. Lift your IR visor or it will blind you just as bad as them when I light the fire. Understand the principle?"
"Yeah."
Crawling to the stairway, Sinklar sent Gretta after MacRuder. Taking a deep breath, he lifted his rifle and fired a series of bursts down into the blackness, blowing out the few bits of wall left from Gretta's defense. Blasting the mortar away opposite him, he prayed the roof wouldn't fall in and tossed the grenade out on a fifteen second fuse. He ripped his IR visor up, plucked up the flare pistol, and shot each of the flares up through the holes in the roof as he ran.
The bright light left him squinting. Gretta took hold and jumped, sliding down the line. MacRuder gripped the cable,
swallowing hard. The flares lit the surroundings, exposing running figures
in the street.
"Go!" He shoved MacRuder out and grabbed the line. He made sure his rifle was slung and umped out into open space, feeling friction from the line heating his gloves.
Gretta caught MacRuder and pulled him onto the narrow roof. Sinklar slid down on top of them. At that instant the grenade sundered the top of the tower, showering debris on the streets below. Angry shouts carried in the night. In a split second decision, he raised his feet, plowed into both of them, and they all slid, clattering down the rain-wet tin roof in a tangle of limbs as blaster fire ripped the night. One of the poles holding the tattered banner shattered.