The slug veered to the right again, as if the bullets were being diverted around their intended target.
That couldn’t be fucking happening, he thought as he frantically worked the bolt.
AS SOON AS the shooting started, Giggly Jane’s job was done. Laughing hysterically, she dashed across the street and down a path between the shanties. She laughed even louder a few seconds later when she stumbled onto the three-dimensional puzzle that was all that was left of Spadecrawler and Jones.
She was still laughing when the rattraps snapped and the jump-ups rose. A beam of green light flicked across her forehead and cut completely through her skull just above the ears, slicing her brain in two. Before her dead body could fall, fifty other laser beams, reflected back and forth off the spinning mines, transsected her torso and limbs in countless, crisscrossing ways.
Most of her hit the ground in neat two-inch chunks.
Chapter Nine
A fine gridwork of lime-green appeared before Colonel Gabhart’s eyes.
Though it seemed to be about a foot-and-a-half from the tip of his nose, the map simulation was actually computer-projected on the inside of his helmet’s visor. One of the squares at the extreme left side of the grid blinked on and off. They had more company.
“Key nineteen,” Gabhart said to his battlesuit. The gridwork display instantly dissolved, and he was looking through the lens of a motion sensor at the edge of their defensive perimeter. Four humanoid figures carrying crude projectile weapons made a stealthy approach from the west.
“Nineteen off,” he said.
Before resuming work on the rocket gantry, Gabhart checked the elapsed time, which was projected in the upper-right corner of his field of view. In exactly twenty-two minutes, the launch vehicle was going to pass through the rift. Because there was no direct communication with Earth from the Shadow side, there was no way for him to stop the transfer. No way to speed it up, either. The comm blackout was a function of the structure of the pathway. It dictated that the entire operation be organized around a prearranged timetable. Accordingly, Gabhart and his team were working on a tight and inflexible schedule.
Time was also critical because existing technology and resources were being pushed to the limit. It took an unbelievable amount of power to create the pathway. And once it was in place, it had to be sustained, or there was no guarantee it would terminate in the same location when reconstructed. Each time the Shadow end of the pathway was opened, it caused an even bigger power drain. On the Earth side, in an effort unprecedented in human history, countless millions were sacrificing their own comfort and safety for the sake of this expedition.
Gabhart was grateful for the rigid schedule. It kept his team focused on step-by-step details. There was no time to surrender to the gut-churning agoraphobia that the wide-open spaces produced. No time to stew over the terrible weight of their isolation, or of their responsibility to those who had sent them. No time to consider the danger. Though this wasn’t supposed to be a suicide mission, it had plenty of potential for turning out that way, surrounded as they were by a vast uncharted territory full of unknown hazards.
From the base of the mobile gantry, John Ockerman, the systems engineer, and Pedro Hylander, the biologist, had uncoiled the heavy, blast-proof ignition and telemetry cables from their spools, and were dragging them across the street, toward the ATV and launch control. Nara Jurascik, the team biochemist, and Marshall Connors, the geologist, stood beside the ATV, prepping its onboard computer for hookup. All electronic and software systems had to be triple-checked to make sure they had survived the crossing intact.
Like Gabhart, the others were soldier-scientists, line officers blooded in the Consumer Rebellion of 2099, five volunteers selected out of a global human population teetering above one hundred billion. They had been judged the best not just by their academic training or combat experience, but also by their bio-compatibility with the latest generation of Totality Concept technology.
The entire interior surface of the battlesuit was its control panel. Complete mastery of one’s physical bodytotal muscular controlwas required to operate the body armor at maximum efficiency. On top of that, few human brains were capable of collating the avalanche of information the battlesuits provided, of shifting back and forth under the most extreme pressure, between complex real and virtual environments, and, in a fraction of a second, making critical and correct decisions.