She glanced at the cowering technicians. They’d opened their cases and were attaching leads to the console’s input slots. “Get to work, damn you!” she added.
Milligan looked up. He couldn’t make eye contact with his captain through their armored suits. As he tried, he realized there weren’t any options anyway. He swore softly.
Wittvogel took a bomb from Milligan’s satchel. A lanyard jerked loose the safety pin. The charge would go off at its next contact. A fragmentation grenade, dangerous to the techs and the equipment, bounced up out of the hole but fell back onto the fifth story before it exploded.
“Your choice,” the captain said.
“Mine,” Milligan replied. With luck, the locals would concentrate on the new opening while Milligan dropped in through the original one. He fired his laser through the hole, keeping to an angle that protected him from a direct reply but might bounce his beam usefully from the wall of the chamber below.
All hell was breaking loose in the Gendarmery camp. Somebody there had been alert enough to fire at Kappa, the cyborg who was supposed to enter the palace from the north and clear the basement while his partner—Porter, as it turned out—took care of the ground floor.
The shot hadn’t damaged Kappa, but it deflected him from his orders, never a hard result to achieve with a cyborg. Kappa was rampaging through the Gendarmery camp, blowing up tanks and other heavy equipment. The gendarmes’ attempts to engage the swift-moving target only increased the carnage in their own dense ranks.
Milligan pulled the last incendiary from his satchel. “Ready!” he called.
Wittvogel blew the frame charge. Milligan hurled his bomb into the hole before him. He leaped into the inferno with his laser arm outstretched. Three railgun projectiles rang on his suit before he hit the floor.
He was in it bad. The fifth story was a single room built around the utility shaft. It was a barracks for the Grantholder’s bodyguard, and there were at least a dozen soldiers in or getting into powered battle armor. The local suits weren’t up to Hegemony spec, but they were plenty good enough to win at twelve to one odds.
“Scrambler! Scrambler!” Milligan screamed as his laser ripped a local point-blank and two more powered suits spun from the empty fireball of Wittvogel’s bomb to engage the real threat. The entrance round had broken up when it hit the solid casing of the utility shaft. Strewn explosive burned red, adding color to the spluttering white of the incendiaries.
Milligan curved his right middle finger back to his palm to bring up his weapons display. A rocket banged into his breastplate and ricocheted off. He staggered. The warhead didn’t have time to arm before it hit him, but it went off with an orange flash and a huge Wham! on the wall it struck next.
The display read emp. Milligan fired the scrambler grenade toward the armored local twenty meters away, across the big room. Another scrambler spat down from Wittvogel on the sixth floor an instant after Milligan got his away.
There was nothing in particular to see when the electromagnetic pulse generators went off. The cold reaction didn’t even burst the scrambler’s thermoplastic casing. Milligan couldn’t see anything anyway, because the emp shut down his powered battle armor as surely as it did the local suits.
Everything went black. Milligan’s terrified breathing roared in the absence of the normally-hissing environmental system.
Scrambler grenades burned out circuits, whether the electronics were operating or on standby but connected to a power source. Equipment on the floors above and below five, shielded by wire mesh/concrete barriers, wouldn’t be affected. All circuitry on the fifth story fried.
Milligan reset his suit by forcing his left index finger against his thumb. When the mechanical switch connected, the suit’s duplicate control boards, then the sensors, came back to life.
Wittvogel leaned down through the hole shooting. Local battle armor, frozen in weird postures when the metallic muscles lost power, were easy targets. Suits blazed in the laser flux. The redundant circuitry of Hegemony powered battle armor was expensive, beyond the ability or desires of Grant Dupree’s financial arbiters. The local suits would be cold metal until someone carried them to a major repair facility.