It took luck to wreck the Throg’s knee while shooting on the fly, but you didn’t get that kind of luck unless you were good to begin with. Milligan crouched beside the utility shaft, aware that neither luck nor skill would preserve him much longer.
The Throg’s heavy armor would be clumsy in open terrain, an easy target for a human who knew what he was doing. In a point-blank slugfest, though . . .
The hovering Eye Fly’s signal in Milligan’s remote quadrant showed the Throg edging clockwise around the shaft, slowed by injury but still mobile. Milligan matched the creature centimeter by centimeter. Both armored figures were close to the concrete.
“Captain Wittvogel,” Milligan said. “I really need some support down here.”
He couldn’t break for the hole in the ceiling or through an exterior wall. The alien would catch him on the fly, as it had Platt and the cyborg out in the Gendarmery camp. Milligan and the Throg were here on the fourth story together until one of them died.
If the ambassador didn’t believe there were Throgs in Grant Dupree, then the purpose of the mission was just what Porter had claimed: to loot the Grantholder’s credit accounts. But Razza had been wrong—
So Porter was dead, and they were all going to be dead very shortly. The only good thing about the situation was that the Throg had weaponry powerful enough to flick the pick-up boat out of the air. The ambassador couldn’t abandon her armored infantry and expect to survive herself.
The Throg tried a bank shot with its laser, ceiling to support beam. The backsplash bathed Milligan unpleasantly, but the surfaces weren’t good enough reflectors to make the attempt dangerous. Concrete glowed white, fading slowly as it cooled.
A laser slapped briefly on an upper story. Milligan didn’t know what Wittvogel was shooting at, but eventually the surviving gendarmes were going to get organized enough to take a hand. “Captain—” Milligan said.
“Back from the shaft, Milligan!” Wittvogel ordered. “Now!”
So far as Milligan could see, moving away from the concrete shelter would be suicide. He obeyed anyway, in a soldier’s reflex. Captain Wittvogel didn’t give orders just because he liked the sound of his own voice; and anyway, there wasn’t a good choice available.
Milligan jumped for a corner, his back to a support beam. The Throg sprang awkwardly around the edge of the utility shaft, its railgun and laser pointing. The missile Milligan detonated had wrecked the launcher as well.
The sensors of Milligan’s suit quivered but didn’t fail in an attenuated electromagnetic pulse. The Throg collapsed in a pile of battle armor, no longer powered because the scrambler had destroyed its control circuits.
Milligan heated the back of the Throg’s neck joint with his laser, then sent three penetrators through like icepicks into the alien’s brain before it could reset its suit. Scuttling charges began to destroy the armor, working inward from the limbs.
Milligan’s helmet recorder had full evidence of Grantholder Dupree’s treasonous congress with the Throgs. He lifted through the fifth story and back up to the smoke-wrapped office on the sixth.
The technicians hugged one another instinctively. Wittvogel and the ambassador were faceless in their armor.
“Captain, how did you do that emp?” Milligan blurted, using modulated laser to keep the discussion private.
Wittvogel picked up a technician bodily and tossed him through the roof hatch. On spread-band radio, audible to Razza as well as Milligan, he said, “I cut the shielding on a power lead with my laser and popped a scrambler beside it. The EMP travelled down the cable trunk in the central shaft. The conduit gave the pulse a linear form, so it didn’t fry your suit too.”
Razza headed for the hatch, climbing rather than trusting her control of the suit’s jets. Holding the remaining technician in his arms, Wittvogel added loudly, “That trick was the only way I could save Ambassador Razza’s life.”
As soon as the ambassador’s legs were clear, Wittvogel jetted upward. Milligan followed the captain so closely that exhaust turbulence banged him into the hatch coaming as he exited. He scarcely noticed the shock after everything he’d been through.