Surface Detail(53)

“Still there!” (Different voice 4.)

“Hit it, Gulton.”

A bright yellow-white line lanced down from where the ceiling had been, smashing into the hangar deck where Vatueil had been positioned earlier and creating an exploding white ball of plasma. This blew outward in a boiling cloud behind a wave-front of condensing particles of molten metals; metre-scale yellow-glowing fragments of the floor went tumbling everywhere at various speeds, mostly high. He saw one piece somersaulting towards him, bouncing once off the floor and once off the ceiling. He did not have enough time to move. Perhaps if he had not been hunkered down he might have been able to avoid it.

The piece of wreckage impacted hard on the armoured body of the thing he was inside. It impacted badly, too. Not a flat side or even an edge hit first but a jagged point. It smacked into his top, off centre so that it half-spun him and sent the piece of wreckage spinning into the shoulder section of his left Main Weapon Pod.

Everything shook. Damage control screen-spreads filled his field of vision. There was a further impact from above. It was relatively slow, implicitly high inertia, crushing.

“Fuck you, motherfucker! Fuck you fuck you fuck you!” (Genius.)

“Sir, ordnance discharged, sir.” (Gulton.)

“Fuck me, I think my anal plug just exited my fucking suit.” (Different voice 2.)

“Oh, that’s spatted. That is one spatted shitfuck of an Armoured Combat Unit.” (Different voice 3.)

“Got to have done it. Got to have fucking done it. Take fucking that, you miserable three-legged space tank motherfucker.” (Genius.)

“Last one in’s an officer. No offence, sir.” (Different voice 2.)

“Steady. Just hold. Those things are tough.”

He was injured. The machine he was in was now sub-optimal. It was called an Armoured Combat Unit.

The protective clamshell had taken a serious kinetic hit and was refusing to open, disabling the upper sensory dome. His left Main Weapon Nacelle had been torn off by the same piece of wreckage. Four Secondary Weapon Pods were non-operational and the upper secondary weapon collar had jammed. Something had damaged his Main Power Distribution Unit, too. He didn’t know how that had happened but it had. Now he couldn’t move his legs properly. Some secondary power left in his Number One leg. That was all. Difficult to estimate how much power or leverage was available.

Some piece of heavy equipment from the ceiling above, the source of the earlier high-inertia impact, appeared to be pinning him to the deck. Additionally, the condensing metals from the plasma event seemed to have spot-welded some parts of himself to some other parts of himself and some parts of himself to the hangar floor.

He rotated another set of disposable sensors into place on the right shoulder. This would be all he had to work with for now.

He would have to stay where he was. He could still turn, though there was a grinding sensation when he did and he could not turn smoothly, which contra-indicated tracking-firing.

He couldn’t see much. The lower sensory dome was obstructed by the squat cage of his immobile legs.

“Okay. Trooper Drueser. You have the honour, I believe.”

“Sir.” (Genius = Drueser.)

The figure came in through the curved entrance, bouncing on all fours and keeping very low to the hangar deck, a medium kinetic rifle tripodded on its back, barrel sweeping back and forth.

Vatueil let it go well past him, almost to the tipped, torn part of the hangar floor, then quietly lobbed a superblack snowflake grenade just behind it. The magnetic launcher produced no exhaust, the superblack coating kept the projectile stealthed and it was too dark for the trooper to have much chance of seeing the round curving towards him through the vacuum.

He launched a second round aimed to fall right on top of the suited figure if it stopped about … Now.

The first grenade hit the deck two metres behind the trooper, then detonated with a flash and a floor-thud. The figure had stopped and spun round. The trooper was caught inside the hail of millimetre- and centimetre-scale fragments.

There was a shriek. (Drueser.)

The back-mounted gun fired twice at where the first grenade had detonated. Then the second grenade landed. It was supposed to fall right on top of the figure but landed half a metre to its left side and half a metre in front it because of his own sensor-compromised aiming and the fact that the trooper had been blown backwards by the fragment shower from the first grenade.

The second grenade had been set to detonate on contact. The detonation caused the figure’s head to kick back. It also tore off and then disintegrated Drueser’s helmet visor, causing an obvious pressure-loss event. The figure collapsed to the floor without further movement or transmitted sound.