“None of us does this lightly,” green said.
“So,” he said. “We go to the next level.”
“Yes,” blue said. “We cheat.”
“We hack, we infiltrate, we sabotage,” green said. “Those are war skills too.”
“Let’s not make excuses for ourselves,” purple muttered. “We’re still breaking an oath.”
“We’d all rather have achieved victory with our honour fully intact,” green said sternly, “but our options now are either an honourable defeat or the sacrifice of our honour for at least a chance of victory. However achieved, the outcome justifies the sacrifice.”
“If it works.”
“There are no guarantees in war,” green said.
“Oh, there are,” blue said quietly, looking away into the darkness. “It’s just that they guarantee death, destruction, suffering, heartache and remorse.”
They were all silent for a moment, alone with their own thoughts.
Then green rattled the wires of its trapeze. “Enough. We must plan. To the details.”
They hadn’t seen him. Two were where the plasma event had taken place, one was at the body of the trooper Drueser, one was somewhere he couldn’t see and the other two knelt just ten metres away, almost in front of him, twelve metres in from the curved entrance.
“Bit of the fucker over here. One of his arm-weapon pods.” (Different voice 2.) The two kneeling in front of him looked round, almost at him. That was helpful, telling him where trooper Different voice 2 might currently be.
“Fuck all over here. Sir.” (Gulton.)
One of the two kneeling figures had continued to look in his direction after the other had turned away again. He appeared to be looking straight at him.
“Is that another bit under that—?” It was the one who had said he was Major Q’naywa. His gun had started to level, pointing straight at him.
He fired both his available laser rifles at the two kneeling men, achieving multiple hits with high out-splash but minimal reflectivity and several observed-piercing hits, though the Major Q’naywa figure was partially shielding the one behind, who was probably Different voice 4. He followed up with a couple of Anti-Armoured Personnel/Light Armoured Vehicle minimissiles.
At the same time he swung his remaining Main Weapon Nacelle round to target the part of the hangar where he’d been earlier and where Gulton and Koviuk were now. He used the railgun, set to Scatter. Tiny hyper-kinetic rounds made a disintegrating haze out of the tipped section of floor, the bulkheads and ceiling.
As the Main Weapon Nacelle had deployed, it had roughly tracked across the location of the trooper kneeling by the body of trooper Drueser, so he’d loosed a trio of General Purpose High Explosive/Fragmentation Subscale Missiles towards them. Then he lobbed five more Subscales towards the centre of the railgun’s targeting area, cutting their engines off almost as soon as they exited the Weapon Nacelle so that they fell into the part of the target area he couldn’t see.
From the start, he had been pumping round after round of snowflake, heatseeker, emission-homing and movement-primed grenades overhead, guessing at where Different voice 2 might be, behind him in the hangar. Some of the grenades ricocheted off the ceiling but that did not really matter.
The trooper Major Q’naywa and the figure behind him disappeared in the twin explosions of the minimissiles. Unidentifiable gurgling screams might have been Gulton and Koviuk. They cut off quickly as the railgun rounds continued to eat away at the bulkheads, floor and ceiling. The Subscales erupted in the centre of the hangar, creating a billowing cloud of gasses and debris. The two troopers, one of them Drueser, who was already dead, vanished in the fireballs.
The lobbed Subscales landed in a spread in what was left of the hangar’s rear corner, filling it with a brief haze of plasma, gas and shrapnel.
He stopped firing, railgun magazine depleted by 60 per cent.
Debris trajectoried, impacted, ricocheted, fell back, tumbled, slid, became still. The gasses dissipated, mostly through the wide, curved entrance that framed the view of the big bright blue and white planet outside.
No transmissions.
The only traces of the troopers he could see were ambiguous in nature and quite small.
After nearly nine minutes he used what power he had in his single operational leg, trying to lift himself free from whatever was pinning him. The attempt failed and he knew he was trapped. He thought there was a high likelihood he had not killed the trooper who’d been somewhere in the hangar behind him, but his attempt to rise, which had caused some movement of the wreckage around and over him, attracted no further hostile attention.