“It’ll be my pleasure, Sergeant.”

  Anxiously, Gabriel waited for the shuttle to emerge. He stayed low, but by looking past the end of the gravity car, he had a view of the intersection. Unfortunately, in their current positions, the squad was likely visible to the Ex’Kaminar.

  Seconds went by and the resonance from the shuttle’s propulsion seemed to get no louder. Gabriel guessed this was a trick caused by the reflection of sound, and he kept his gaze fixed on the side street.

  Slowly, as if it were in no hurry whatsoever, the transport emerged into sight. The vessel was about fifteen metres in length, five across the beam, more or less cuboid in shape and with a dozen retracted landing legs underneath. An evil-looking six-barrel repeater was slung beneath the shuttle’s nose, and that was its only armament.

  For almost a minute, the transport hovered stationary at the intersection, and at a twenty-metre altitude. The vessel rotated steadily about its vertical axis and Gabriel knew it was looking for something.

  Not something. The Galos module.

  Thirty seconds later, Gabriel was struggling against his urge to order the vessel’s destruction. He was about to open his mouth when the transport suddenly descended.

  “Shit,” said Hennessey. “I think it’s about to deploy troops.”

  If the enemy shuttle deployed, it would be a real disaster for the squad, and Gabriel couldn’t allow it to happen. Now that the Sagh’eld transport was at ground level, it had reduced visibility over the street, so Gabriel urged his soldiers to stay low and run for the entrance to the target building.

  “Not you, Private Castle. You’re staying with me.”

  “Do you see me moving, Sergeant?” said Castle with a grin.

  Gabriel couldn’t afford to delay the order any longer. “Put a rocket into that shuttle, soldier.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Castle came to his feet smoothly, in such a way that his rocket tube came up with him, already resting across his shoulder. Rising with him, Gabriel brought the sight of his gauss rifle to eye level. The side door of the transport was descending to form a ramp. In the bay beyond, Sagh’eld soldiers waited to exit.

  With a soft whine of gauss coils, Private Castle’s launcher spat out a missile.

  “Rocket out,” said Castle.

  The rocket sped across the hundred metres towards its target, leaving the acrid scent of propellant in its wake. Although he had no need to waste the ammunition, Gabriel’s anger was still with him and besides, he liked to get in some shooting practice whenever the opportunity presented itself. As Castle’s rocket was mid-flight, he put a gauss shot straight through the head of a Sagh’eld soldier. Adjusting his aim, Gabriel was about to try for a second kill when the rocket entered the shuttle’s interior bay and detonated in a flash of plasma.

  The explosion didn’t have the power to rip the transport into pieces, but it was more than potent enough to wreck such a small and lightly armoured vessel. Gabriel didn’t even wait for the blast to fade; he gave Castle a thumbs up before indicating it was time to make a run for the door.

  As Gabriel had feared, the door to the target building had not opened smoothly, and it was stuck about a quarter of the way across its aperture. Corporal Ziegler and Private Damico were big, strong bastards and they were hard at work fixing the problem. Three heaves got the opening wide enough for the soldiers to pass, and Corporal Hennessey was first through.

  “Come on, come on,” said Gabriel, as the squad members in front of him hurried through the opening.

  Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the blazing wreck of the shuttle. It wasn’t much payback for what the Sagh’eld had done to Cornerstone, but it was a start. Certainly, the crew of the transport would have lacked the time to transmit news of the attack, so now it came down to how quickly the personnel on the Ex’Kaminar detected the loss of the vessel.

  In a handful of seconds, Gabriel and his soldiers would be off the street, and the crew on the enemy battleship would be left guessing from which direction the attack had been launched. After that, their only quick solution would be the utter destruction of every structure in the vicinity, and Gabriel didn’t think they’d do that in case the Galos was damaged in the attack.

  As he passed through the doorway, he smiled grimly at the thought. For the first time since arriving at Lorimos, Gabriel felt like he might just have the tiniest sliver of control, and it felt good.

  The interior of the building was in an emergency state like all the others. Four exits led from an entrance room which contained what Gabriel was sure had once been reception desks. They, along with all the other furniture, were now hardly recognizable.

  “Looks like a few died here,” said Hennessey. She banged her palm onto the access panel in the hope that the entrance door would close. It didn’t.

  “Dozens,” said Gabriel, his eyes sweeping the room.

  The corpses of the personnel who’d died to the incendiaries were little more than mounds of char on the floor, which suggested the Sagh’eld had firebombed this area extensively.

  Gabriel couldn’t let the atrocities become a distraction. He kept his mind firmly on the mission and strode for one of the two southern exits. According to the base map, there’d be a main corridor heading east somewhere along this way. Exiting the building from that corridor would bring the squad almost exactly to the last known location of the Galos module.

  Despite everything, Gabriel and his soldiers were coming ever closer to the target location. Naturally, the Galos might be elsewhere, in which case the mission would likely be over.

  However, every mission had a chance of failure, and Gabriel had long ago learned that success was most often earned through hard work and skill, usually with some luck stirred in for good measure. Consequently, he didn’t dwell too much on what he’d find at his destination. Either the Galos would be at the target location, or it wouldn’t. If it was the latter, then he’d decide what to do from there.

  Continuing south, the corridor was intersected several times. The heat from the incendiaries had penetrated deep within the building and a fine layer of char covered almost every surface. When Gabriel paused once to run his fingers through the grime, they left greasy smears behind.

  Accompanying the char was an odour of heated metal and burned-out tech. While the metal didn’t smell too bad, some of the melted plastics had a vile stench, and underlying everything was a sickly sweetness coming from the numerous dead bodies. The personnel here hadn’t made it as far as the emergency shelters, and many had perished in the corridors as they fled.

  Gabriel wanted to be out of the place as soon as possible, so he hurried the squad along. Had it not been for all the bodies in the way, he’d have run as fast as he was able, just in case the Ex’Kaminar crew decided to fire their Thak cannons into this building, like they’d done to the storage warehouse.

  No shots and no missiles came from above and Gabriel became progressively more confident that the Sagh’eld had discovered that the Galos wasn’t in the storage bay of the Phalanx transport. Having learned of the error, maybe the Ex’Kaminar’s crew would be more discriminate with the battleship’s weaponry.

  Of course, the side effect of that would be a massive deployment of Sagh’eld ground troops, allowing the enemy to sweep through the remains of Cornerstone in search of the Galos.

  Just thinking about it was enough for Gabriel to increase his pace as much as he dared. The squad encountered no surviving personnel on their way through the building and soon, they were at the building’s eastern exit.

  With luck, the Galos module would be outside and not too far away. Gabriel had been lucky before and he hoped for another healthy dose of it now.

  THIRTEEN

  Upon opening the exit door, Gabriel looked out onto another street. By its size and the quantity of burned-out traffic, this was one of the main thoroughfares running through the base.

  When Gabriel directed his gaze north, he believed he could see all the way to the landing field. South, the road continued die-straight, flanked by a variety of structures.

  Many of those structures in both directions had suffered an intense bombardment from both incendiaries and missiles, and the lights of many fires added a red tinge to the dark skies. As a consequence of the Sagh’eld attacks, several buildings had collapsed, while others were canted precariously across the road. Directly opposite the doorway where Gabriel was standing, a high tower leaned crazily, and looked as if it might fall at any time.

  “What a damn mess,” said Corporal Hennessey, peering out from the opposite side of the doorway.

  Gabriel didn’t answer, and his eyes continued taking in the details. He reckoned he could see part of the main research centre farther south, though the conflicts of dark and firelight made it impossible for him to determine any specific details. RH Rose had already said that the research centre had been spared the firebombing, so Gabriel was sure it remained intact.

  Rose had also expressed her belief that the Sagh’eld were about to storm the building, so it was likely many thousands of enemy troops had deployed in that direction, though from Gabriel’s position in the doorway, they were not visible.

  Directing his gaze upwards, he couldn’t immediately spot the Ex’Kaminar, though he could hear it well enough. Giving a hand signal to indicate that his squad should stay put, Gabriel ventured a few cautious paces out onto the street. He still couldn’t see the enemy vessel, so he continued until the battleship came into sight.

  The enemy vessel had moved to the south-east, where it appeared to have halted its bombardment. Standing in place for a few moments, Gabriel tried to gauge how much visibility the Sagh’eld warship had over the main thoroughfare. Partial visibility at best, he reckoned, with the east-side buildings providing substantial cover from the enemy sensors.

  “The last known position of the Galos module is approximately one hundred metres north of our position,” said Gabriel, turning his attention that way.

  Vehicles crowded the road, and he couldn’t see anything that looked as if it might have been part of an escort. There again, some of the wrecked vehicles were so large they impeded his sight, and the road was also covered with other debris – rubble, sheets of twisted alloy and heat-shattered windows - which had fallen from the adjacent buildings.

  As Gabriel was mentally plotting a route north that would offer the most cover, his attention was caught by a sharp creaking sound coming from close by. The creaking turned into a tearing and crunching sound, and that’s when Gabriel saw that the building opposite had finally given up and it was toppling directly towards the storage facility.

  For a split second he wavered between closing the door and risking it becoming jammed, or leaving it open and have his squad hurt by debris coming in through the opening. With a growl of indecision, Gabriel operated the access panel, and the door closed.

  “We’re all going to be two feet tall when that building lands on us,” said Private Chan conversationally.

  A couple of the soldiers threw half-hearted curses his way, but that was as far as the responses went. The squad members crouched low, and Gabriel did likewise.

  Even though the door was closed it did a poor job of blocking out the noise from outside. The tearing sound turned abruptly into an almighty crash and Gabriel felt the floor shudder beneath him with the force of the impact. He glanced around anxiously, but the walls and the ceiling remained intact.

  The initial impact faded, to be replaced by numerous lesser crashing sounds from the street outside. Gabriel listened until the noises became less frequent, and then he pushed himself to his feet.

  “There’s going to be some dust out there,” he said.

  “Are we waiting for it to settle, Sergeant?” asked Corporal Ziegler. “We don’t have comms.”

  Gabriel had seen recordings of buildings being demolished before, and he remembered the generated dust being so voluminous that it seemed like it would take forever to settle.

  He shook his head. “We don’t have the time, Corporal. Let’s make the best of it and use it as cover.”

  Once everyone was ready, Gabriel placed the palm of his right hand on the access panel, wondering what kind of new hell would be waiting outside.

  The door opened without so much as a judder, and a cloud of dust, thick with both grit and fine grey powder, drifted inside. Gabriel listened long and hard for the sounds of larger debris which might still be falling. All he heard was a clattering of smaller pieces coming down like a heavy rain.

  “We’re going to stick together and head north – fast - until we have visibility,” said Gabriel. “Now, let’s go.”

  He went first through the doorway. The dust reduced his visibility to less than three metres, which was enough for him to spot any obstacles. Having given his orders, Gabriel didn’t stop and he didn’t turn. Instead, he pressed on at a walking pace, his gaze jumping from place to place.

  Overhead, the collapsed building was completely obscured, but he could hear the stressed creaking of its structure, like its immense weight was ready to come down on him. Pieces of grit and smaller stones fell continuously and clattered off Gabriel’s shoulder plates. He gritted his teeth and ignored them.

  The ground was strewn with rubble in all shapes and sizes, along with pieces of broken windows. Every footstep crunched into the layer of grit covering the ground, and Gabriel felt completely isolated.

  Gotta get out of this.

  Fifty metres from the doorway, Gabriel thought the dust might be thinning a little, but his visibility range was still only a few metres. Stopping by a huge, melted transport – still hot from the incendiary attacks - he turned and saw Private Damico right behind him, his Karn-3 repeater held in both hands. Beyond Damico, other shapes emerged into sight.

  Resuming, Gabriel was forced to divert west around the transport, and when he emerged around the far end of the vehicle, he discovered that many smaller gravity cars had been abandoned with little room between them. Halting again, Gabriel looked all around him. Given the quantity of traffic, he suspected the Galos device would be close to its last-known position, and he didn’t want to walk past it.

  “It has to be somewhere close,” he muttered.

  Thirty metres farther, and Gabriel’s visibility was noticeably improved. Now, he could see the collapsed building, the closest edge of which was only about ten metres south and lying across the road like a fog-shrouded bridge. It still sounded like it was about to break apart at any moment.

  Not wishing to be close by when it happened, Gabriel pressed on. Now that he could see better, he was able to plot a more efficient route through the gravity vehicles, and soon, he was right on the spot where the Galos module’s escort sent its last transmission.

  Emboldened by the cloaking dust, Gabriel clambered on top of one of the gravity cars, the surface of which was above two hundred Celsius. From his new vantage, Gabriel scanned the surrounding area.

  “Do you see anything, Sergeant?” asked Corporal Hennessey.

  Gabriel didn’t answer immediately, while he continued his visual sweep. A short distance north, and only just within the range of his sight, he caught a hint of a shape taller than the surrounding vehicles.

  “There might be something north,” Gabriel said, dropping once more to the ground. The windows of the vehicle he’d climbed down from were shattered, and the scent of charred bodies reached his nostrils. He stepped away. “Let’s go.”

  Setting off north once more, Gabriel soon arrived at the place where the Galos module’s escort had been killed by the incendiaries. A large transport vehicle, with an open back and a partially melted roof, had come to a halt in the middle of the road. The transport had evidently been in the middle of heavy traffic when the firebombs detonated, and it had collided with several other vehicles before its gravity engine failed, dumping it on the ground.

  Gabriel approached cautiously. When he was a few metres from the transport, the temperature reading on his HUD registered a drop in the ambient temperature. With each subsequent step, the reading fell further. Gabriel was curious, but not concerned. It wasn’t unusual for tech to be super-cooled, and he guessed the Galos module was the same.

  Motioning for the rest of the squad to keep watch, Gabriel stopped at the back of the transport and looked into the passenger space. Bench seats ran along both sides, and the personnel – a dozen in total - who’d been sitting on them had been killed by the incendiaries.

  In the centre of the space was a one-metre cube made from a material so dark it almost seemed to draw what little light there was into itself. There was dust here, but none had landed on what Gabriel knew without a doubt was the Galos module.

  The cube was mounted on a ten-inch-thick gravity drive of a type used to transport compact, yet heavy objects. Since the gravity drive was the exact same width as the Galos module, Gabriel assumed it had been custom-built for this singular purpose.

  “Is it in there, Sergeant?” asked Private Galvan. The soldier was crouched at the nearby corner of the transport, and his eyes stared into the dust.

  “I reckon,” said Gabriel.

  Slinging his rifle, he climbed the three rungs of the ladder which gave access to the transport’s passenger area. The air temperature was now far below zero, though the chill seemed to be suppressing the worst of the stench from the corpses. Stepping closer, Gabriel stopped less than a metre from the device. The Galos was surprisingly hard to focus on, as if it was indeed sucking light into itself and thereby denying Gabriel’s eyes a chance to see it properly.

  Concentrating hard, and turning his head left and right, he thought perhaps there was a pattern on the module’s surface, but he was entirely unable to make it out, or to be sure it was even there.

  Thinking to be clever, Gabriel took a brief recording of his helmet feed and played it back. To his surprise, the Galos module showed up as an area of dull static and nothing more.