Shattered concrete crumbled beneath a blanket of roiling dust. Metal glinted. The cyborg opened fire.
Milligan dropped through his opening to the fourth story. On the remote image, powdered lime blazed fiercely white as it drank energy from the cyborg’s laser.
The hostile hurled itself upward, firing a hypervelocity missile as it came. Beta’s laser flux deformed but could not deflect the projectile. The cyborg, struck squarely, lurched back from a hammerblow instead of a penetrating rapier thrust.
The hostile was a Throg in powered battle armor, tripodal and seemingly the size of a dump truck. Either the operator was twice as big as any Throg Milligan had ever seen before, or the aliens who built the suit had retained their natural shape while constructing something more nearly akin to a tank than powered battle armor.
As Beta tumbled away from the hittile’s punch, the Throg finished the job with the laser in one of its triple arms. The remote image degraded momentarily, then blanked into the snowy emptiness of death.
Milligan switched off the remote channel. “Captain,” he called, surprised that his voice didn’t quiver, “we’ve got a Throg in armor, a mother-huge one. Platt and me are going to need help soonest. Soonest!”
Platt had cleared most of the unarmored locals on this story with laser and fragmentation grenades. The single room was a sea of ruddy flame. Smoke veiled the optical spectrum while the heat played hell with Milligan’s IIR, despite low-pass filters which excluded the fire proper.
The building shuddered. A suit as massive as the Throg’s made things jump just by walking. Milligan launched an Eye Fly in vague hope that he could thread it down to the third story to watch what the Throg was doing.
That was silly. He didn’t have time to control the little remote sensor. Anyway, the reinforced-concrete flooring would limit the information it sent by spread-band radio as badly as it did Milligan’s direct sensor inputs.
“Platt, up to the sixth floor,” Captain Wittvogel ordered. “Milligan, cover him and follow. If it’s just one Throg, then three of us can handle him.”
“That’s a lie!” Ambassador Razza broke in unexpectedly. Milligan had forgotten she was present, with a suit that gave her full access to the squad’s commo net. “There aren’t any Throgs here! You’re trying to trick me so that I don’t get the, the data!”
Platt, halfway across the big room, slapped a frame charge against the ceiling above him. “No you idiot!” Milligan shouted. “Use the hole I’ve—”
“Ambassador, you’d better withdraw n—” the captain began.
The floor directly under Platt quaked upward in a gush of flames fanned to multiple brightness by the Throg’s frame charge. Shattered concrete avalanched away, leaving a black square instead of support.
Platt reacted fast, firing his jets, but he didn’t have the instinctive control that was the only thing that might have saved him. The newbie’s powered battle-armor banged into the concrete ceiling and ricocheted down to the blazing floor.
Milligan’s laser licked the Throg’s central arm as the alien aimed another hittile. The rocket motor blew up in the launching tube with a spew of yellow flame.
The Throg lifted through the hole it had blown in the floor. Its laser, pulsing with a flux so dense that airborne particulate matter exploded from the beam’s path, caught Platt on his second bounce. Bits of the newbie’s armor flew off in sparkling arcs before the scuttling charge devoured the remainder.
The Throg’s third arm flailed in Milligan’s direction, ripping out railgun projectiles. Though the Throg had three weapon stations, the single mind controlling them couldn’t split its attention any better than a human’s could. The slugs plowed the ceiling and blazing floor, but none of them touched Milligan as he leaped for the only shelter sturdy enough to withstand his opponent’s power: the utility shaft, a square-section tube of structural concrete.
Milligan fired as he moved, lighting one of the Throg’s leg joints white for the instant it took to punch part of the railgun’s hosing burst through the weakened armor. The Throg stumbled, skewing the creature’s laser response into a touch of scarlet pain across Milligan’s buttocks rather than a finishing blow.