guys are in the shelter. You can’t miss the ugly bastards—they’re about the size of a ten-story building.”
“Copy that, Four-Seven. Stand by, and you may want to plug your ears down there.”
There’s no more conversation in the shelter as everyone tries to listen to the noises up on the surface, where the racket has diminished a little. It still sounds like a bunch of drunken sailors having a brawl in a mess kitchen, but the noise has moved off toward the back of the complex, where the fusion reactor and central heat exchangers are located.
There’s no warning, no engine noise to herald the arrival of the assault ships. The first indicator of the CAS flight’s presence is the low, rumbling roar of a large autocannon spitting out shells at an incredibly high rate of fire. Overhead, we hear a string of rapid explosions, and what sounds like hail on a metal roof. The Marines let out muted cheers as one of the creatures shrieks an obvious cry of distress in the distance.
“Go, Navy,” Corporal Harrison says. “Leave ‘em smoking.”
The sequence of sounds repeats itself several times as the Shrikes make multiple strafing passes. At one point, a burst wanders across the ground directly above our heads, and the impact of the high-velocity rounds shakes up the dust on the concrete floor of the shelter.
“Dropping the hard stuff,” the pilot of Hades Three-Zero warns us over the radio. “You fellas make sure you’re hanging on to something, ‘cause it’s going to rumble in a second.”
Everyone scrambles to find a spot to sit or crouch. Halley grabs me by the arm, and pulls me down to sit beside her in the doorway of the storage room.
“Hope they don’t overdo it,” she says. “I don’t think this place can stand up to a three-kiloton nuke.”
“They wouldn’t nuke this place,” I reply, without conviction. “Too much money up in smoke.”
“Let’s hope you’re right.”
A moment later, a pair of explosions shakes the ceiling over our heads, and it’s the loudest sound I’ve ever heard, even louder than the fuel-air explosion of the marooned drop ship back in Detroit. The floor heaves underneath our feet, knocking Halley and me into the privacy partition behind us. It gives way with a crack, and we tumble into the storage room beyond. I feel something raining down on my face, and look up to see a crack in the ceiling that’s at least as wide as my hand. I know I’m shouting by the sound resonating in my skull, but my ears aren’t working anymore. For a moment, I am convinced that Halley’s fear was justified after all, and that the Shrikes just dropped some tactical nukes onto our heads. Then the emergency lights go out, and the place goes completely dark.
For a little while, I’m blind and deaf. There’s an acrid smell in the air that’s making me cough. Some of the Marines out in the main room dig out their battery-operated field lights, and I shove the remnants of the broken privacy screen aside to let some light into the storage room. Halley is on the floor next to me, her hands folded on the top of her head. I nudge her to make sure she’s alive and conscious, and she looks up at me and exhales sharply.
“Gee, thanks, Navy,” she says with a cough. “What the hell did they just drop?”
“No idea, but we should be going now, I think. Something smells broken in here.”
Above our heads, the sounds of steady demolition have ceased. As my hearing gradually returns to normal, I can hear the Marines coughing and cursing in the next room, and the faint roar of the assault ships’ engines overhead. The low drone from the environmental system is gone, and the comms station has gone silent as well.
“Backup power’s out,” one of the civilian techs says.
“No shit,” one of the Marines replies.
“Open that hatch, or we’ll all suffocate. All we have left is the air in the room.”
“Check the other side first,” I caution, remembering our troubles getting out of the NNC on the Versailles. “You got a fire in that corridor, we’ll suffocate right now instead.”
“Hold up,” Halley interjects from behind me. “There’s a shitload of NIFTIs on the shelf over here. I wonder if they’re still any good?”
The civilian emergency rebreathers aren’t quite as sophisticated as the NIFTIs on Navy ships. The civilian versions are little masks with built-in oxygen supplies and filters, but they lack the thermal imaging component of