Nobody was going to get a chance to do that. A tell-tale indicated Milligan’s weapons were live again. He ignored the suits and aimed instead at movement, soldiers scrambling out of their useless armor. Railgun slugs picked the locals off before they could find hand-held weapons with which to reply.
The last bodyguard pounded at the elevator’s call-plate, though he must have known that the emp had burned out those circuits too. Milligan’s projectiles snapped through the body and sparked red against the elevator’s metal door beyond.
“All clear, Captain!” Milligan called. His voice was a shrill squeal that reminded him of how frightened he’d been.
“Fourth story clear!” Platt reported an instant later. “But it was soldiers, not servants.”
Special duty gendarmes, Milligan presumed. The newbie wasn’t good enough to have handled a roomful of powered battle armor by himself.
“Captain, I’ve got the ground floor clear,” Porter said, her voice a half-step higher than usual, “but there’s something in the base—”
The palace shook. Porter’s voice cut out.
Milligan switched to a remote view from Porter’s display. The upper left quadrant of his screen fuzzed with empty static, telling him what his gut already knew: nothing was broadcasting on that channel.
There was a white flash from the middle of the Gendarmery camp. A hypervelocity missile had skewered Kappa like a butterfly on a pin. The cyborg’s scuttling charge destroyed the evidence of Hegemony involvement.
The projectile was much more powerful than the one which had narrowly missed Milligan on the sixth story. It had been launched from the ground floor of the Grantholder’s Palace.
“I’ll get the bassid!” rumbled Alpha, the cyborg covering the second story; a statement rather than a report, and purely rhetorical.
“Alpha, hold where you are until—” Captain Wittvogel ordered.
A laser fired on a lower floor, then metal belled. Alpha had cut through the elevator door, then kicked the tags of metal away so that he could jump into the shaft. You might as well pray as give orders to a cyborg who’d already made up his/her/its mind. There was at least a chance that God would listen to you.
Milligan pulled the second of his frame charges free of its holder and deployed it on the scarred concrete floor. A quick echo-sound indicated the fourth story of the palace was laid out on the same pattern as the fifth: a single room divided by frail partitions rather than structural walls.
Whoever was in the palace basement had proved they could take out Hegemony soldiers one at a time. That meant—to anybody but a kill-focused cyborg—that the squad’s survivors had to join in order to meet the threat with massed firepower.
Milligan, Platt, and Beta could link on the fourth story, moving through the floor of the fifth story and the ceiling of the third. Elevators and staircases were easy: easy ways to die. You never used them in a hostile building.
Unless you were a cyborg in a hurry. Alpha dropped on his jets to ground-floor level. The palace rocked with the backblast of another powerful hittile, punching through the elevator door and Alpha’s breastplate before the cyborg could even start to cut his way clear with his laser. White fire flashed up the shaft and bulged the doors beside Milligan.
A frame charge went off on a lower story. Platt or Beta, probably Beta because Platt was too shook, yammering to the captain for direction. All the kid needed to do was hold what he’d got, help was coming.
Milligan triggered his frame charge. The blast shocked dust waist-high across the open room. The slab sagged but didn’t fall cleanly. Milligan stamped on it, breaking one side loose.
He switched his remote to Beta. It took a moment of disorientation before Milligan realized the cyborg was looking down, not up, through a freshly-blown entrance hole. Instead of forming with Platt on the fourth story, Beta had decided to go after the unseen hostiles alone.
Milligan kicked at the hanging slab again. It broke apart. Half of the concrete sandwich swung to either side of the hold before tearing loose to fall.
In the upper left quadrant of Milligan’s display, a ten-square meter section of the second-story’s flooring lifted to a frame charge fired from below. Beta, poised on the third story, aimed both laser and railgun. The cyborg’s arms, extended to fire, showed at the lower edge of the remote viewpoint.