The hole into the top floor was identical to the one at ground level. Because the building’s cladding didn’t support any weight, it was the same thickness at all levels. The palace had its own generator. Lights were on inside, though they merely backlit swirls of smoke from bedding ignited by the shellburst. The suit switched to Imaging Infra-Red before Milligan had a chance to.
Milligan hesitated in the air, letting gravity and his upward inertia come into balance before he made the next move. He jetted his suit forward, chopping the fuel-feed with the same motion. When his foot touched the crossbeam, he was walking rather than flying.
There were three doors into the huge bedchamber by which Milligan entered the palace. The explosion had blown off the doorpanels. Somebody stepped into the center doorway, shouting a question. Milligan riddled him/her with the railgun in his right forearm. He meant it for a short burst, but he fired a full hundred rounds before the AI shut the circuits down to cool.
OK, he’d been spooked, but he was all right n—
Movement in both the other doorways. Snap-shot right, railgun again but the trigger-pull as gentle as a mother’s kiss. The target was wearing a breastplate that absorbed kinetic energy from Milligan’s ring penetrators. As a result, they flung the body backward instead of simply killing him/her.
The local in the left doorway fired an electron beam. Milligan’s sensor displays flared white, though the internal read-outs didn’t jump.
Later in the mission there might have been a problem, but for the moment Milligan’s suit was in blueprint condition. The shielding held. His weapon switches were live, however. A transient tripped a pulse from the laser in Milligan’s left forearm, pointed at nothing in particular.
The palace’s interior walls had a cinder block core. That glowed white when the laser ripped the sheathing away. Upholstery and ornate wooden furniture exploded into flame. The local ducked or was driven back by the fireball. Freed from the electron beam’s overload, Milligan’s sensors clicked back on.
He fired a short burst waist-high through the wall—the core was tough, but it wouldn’t stop depleted-uranium ring penetrators moving at 5.5 kph. The local staggered into the open again, stumbling over his/her dropped electrogun.
This time Milligan’s laser was aimed and waiting. His pulse ripped the target.
Milligan strode through the corpse, burst by its own super-heated body fluids, and into the large office beyond. His shoulder jounced the edge of the doorway, deforming the metal jamb and crumbling cinder blocks.
The suit had switched back to straight optical. The carets Milligan didn’t have time for indicated there were people in the office, half a dozen of them, ducking behind desks and consoles. Trying to hide, trying to find cover from which to snipe at the unexpected intruder . . .
Milligan toggled his weapons’ switch to frag, pointed with his left little finger to select a five-meter range, and twitched the finger six times across the arc of the room.
The anti-personnel grenades choonked from the launcher on his left shoulder. They burst in the air with saffron flashes, hurling out a sleet of glass whiskers. The shrapnel wouldn’t do more to powered battle armor than buff the paint, but it carved flesh from the bones of unprotected humans.
When screaming figures leaped from where they’d hidden, Milligan snapped railgun projectiles through them to finish the job. Because of Ambassador Razza’s orders, he didn’t want to rake the consoles themselves with his penetrators.
Porter had a friend in the Earth Embassy here on Monticello. For ‘friend’ read ‘lover’. Milligan didn’t know which sex, and that sure-hell wasn’t a question he was going to ask Porter.
While the squad suited up for the mission, Porter said, “You bet Razza wants to keep this operation secret. She wants to secretly transfer Dupree’s credit accounts to her own bank.”
The cyborgs must have heard the comment, but none of them reacted. Even if true, it was non-essential information so far as they were concerned, like the color—gray-green—of the walls here in the embassy basement.
Milligan looked at her. “Do you know that?” he’d asked.
“Do I know the sun’s going to come up tomorrow?” Porter sneered. She was blond, stocky and very short—less than a meter-fifty. Maybe because of that, Porter made a point of being the toughest person in any group. With the force multiplier of her powered battle armor, she could come pretty close.