“Fire the frame charge, Milligan!” Captain Wittvogel ordered.
Was he standing on the rectangle of explosive? He hopped sideways again. Bullets raked the office, harmless but sawing on Milligan’s nerves when they ricocheted from his armor. Locals were prising back the firedoor. He triggered his railgun toward the wall and detonated the frame charge with his left index finger.
Though the trough shape focused the explosive’s effect against the flooring, the blast still knocked Milligan another step sideways. That was good, because a local used the mousehole to fire a kinetic-energy hittile that wasn’t a damned bit affected by the smoke which shrouded Milligan’s laser into near uselessness. The rocket-driven tungsten slug snapped at Mach 5 through where Milligan should have been, through the block wall, through a concrete beam with a blast of sparks from the reinforcing rods, and out into the night.
The hittile would have punched at least into the powered battle armor if Milligan had been in its path.
The rectangle of floor sagged from one short side instead of falling cleanly. The concrete was reinforced by wire mesh, not rods. Strands the charge hadn’t severed acted as a hinge, popping one by one under the weight of the 15-cm thick slab. A laser blazed up through the hole.
“Get him!” screamed a local as the firedoor jerked up its sloping track against the force of gravity a hand-span at a time. The next room must be huge to have allowed the hittile’s backblast to expand without the overpressure killing everybody enclosed with it.
Milligan placed short bursts through the door opening and the riddled wall. His left hand snatched an incendiary bomb from the carrier on his right hip which balanced the frame charges. He didn’t dare let the railgun overheat or he was fucked for good and all.
He dropped the bomb through the opening onto the fifth story. As he did so, the chamber from which the locals fired at him belched flame past the firedoor, out the mousehole, and through every hole Milligan’s penetrators had picked in the block wall.
“Coming through!” Captain Wittvogel called. The hypersonic crack of his railgun firing single shots punctuated the words. “Coming through, Milligan. Don’t shoot!”
The firedoor, driven by the full strength of a suit of powered battle armor, shot along its track and banged against the stops. Wittvogel strode through the archway, troll-huge and the most beautiful thing Milligan had ever seen. The door slid down again, shutting off the sea of fire beyond.
Captain Wittvogel surveyed the office. The chamber from which he’d entered was a conference room, wrapped now in flame but no danger to a fully-armored soldier. Air sucking through the mousehole helped to clear smoke from the office.
“Clear to come down, sir,” he called on the general channel. Switching to line-of-sight laser commo, he added to Milligan alone, “The pick-up boat’s on the roof, and Razza’s in it.”
Wittvogel’s bomb satchel hung empty. He must have thrown his load of three incendiaries together. The railgun merely brought mercy to the locals still twitching in the flames. “Your charge and the missile backblast covered the hole I put in their ceiling,” he explained. “It doesn’t do to get too focused in this sort of business.”
The steel emergency hatch to the roof beside the building-center elevator shaft opened. A rope-and-batten ladder dropped. Two men carrying locked cases, technicians of some sort, wobbled down into the office. Their eyes through the goggles of their respirators looked terrified.
Milligan’s incendiary bomb had driven back the shooters on the fifth story briefly, but now a laser probed the hole in the office floor again. A workstation, constructed primarily of inert plastic, burst into flame. The technicians were hunched beneath an unbearable weight of fear. They crawled to a console served by armored leads.
Milligan leaned toward the hole. He pulsed his own laser twice without bothering to aim. Wittvogel laid a frame charge on the floor three meters from the existing hole. “Wait till I go,” the captain said. “Then come in, but don’t forget I’m down there too.”
“No!” Ambassador Razza ordered as she dropped from the roof wearing a light powered suit. Because the ambassador didn’t have experience with the servos, she overcorrected and banged into the elevator/utility column. “Wittvogel, you stay here and guard me.”