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A light on his HUD was flashing. It was Imala, trying to get his attention. He debated keeping her muted until he reached the shaft, but the flashing light became more insistent, and eventually he gave in and reopened her audio.
She was yelling, frantic, midsentence "--extended all the way! They've all extended!"
"Imala, slow down. What's extended?"
"The cannons! I see eight of them extended. No, nine."
"Cannons?"
"Formic cannons, Vico. Outside the ship. The one over the hole, it's extended, too. Something is coming. I've got movement on my Eye. Over forty contacts, heading toward us."
"You mean ships?"
"Fanned out, coming from multiple angles. A hundred and sixty klicks out and moving in fast."
A fleet, Victor realized. An attack. But who would be attacking? The Americans had already lost their fleet. Who else had that many weaponized fighters?
"The Formics are firing!" said Imala.
"Show me," said Victor.
A vid feed appeared on his HUD. A half dozen of the Formic cannons were in view, each of them slinging pellets of green plasma into space in a steady stream of glowing destruction.
"Show me the contacts," said Victor.
A second window appeared on his HUD showing blinking dots moving toward a center target. The fighters were coming in hot, but the cannons were picking them off easily. Two of the dots winked out, then three, six. They were nimble things, Victor saw. They juked right, then left, spinning and dodging in a way Victor didn't think possible. But the pellets persisted, and one by one the dots on his screen winked out until only six remained.
"Who are they, Imala?"
"No idea. The Eye can't identify them."
On Victor's HUD, one of the remaining six fighters disappeared, destroyed. Then another, then another, leaving only three.
"What do we do?" asked Imala. The panic in her voice had been replaced with a calm resignation. Victor would never make it to the shuttle in time, and they both knew it. The fighters would fire on the ship with their nukes long before Victor was halfway up the shaft. And if he ran for it and the fighters failed, then he would have revealed himself to the Formics in the cargo bay for no reason.
No, if he moved he was dead.
And anyway even if he could make it to the shuttle, it would only be to die with Imala instead of alone; any blast from the Formic ship would kill them both.
He wanted to say something comforting to Imala, an expression of gratitude perhaps, or an apology for dragging her into this, the kind of parting words that people share when death was imminent. He owed her that much. But every sentence that formed in his head felt trite and awkward and overly dramatic, so he said nothing.
On the vid feed, one of the Formic cannons slammed into the hull in a twisted heap, like a metal can suddenly crushed by a giant invisible boot. Then another cannon crumpled. And another.
"What's happening, Imala?"
"I don't know. The cannons are collapsing."
"They can't collapse. There's no gravity."
And then there was gravity. All around him. One second he was weightless, the next he was pressed flat against the side of the cart, heavy and disoriented, the weight of the duffel bag and all of the tools crushing him. The debris in the center of room fell all at once, a mountain of wreckage crashing down, crushing Formics, banging and colliding in a deafening boom. The Formic pulling the cart was now tipped far to one side away from the wall, nearly upside down, it's legs flailing, trying to get purchase. If not for the anchor bar still locking it to the track, it would have plummeted downward.
Every part of Victor felt as if it were being crushed. His organs were heavy in his gut; his muscles were pressing down upon his bones; his helmet, his suit, everything was smothering him, squeezing him. The world became fuzzy and dark at the edges. He was blacking out. Imala was yelling in his ear.
The cart suddenly shifted, bending downward, tilting to the side, nearly dumping him off. Victor scrambled to hold on, suddenly awake, the impossi
bly heavy mass that was his body sliding toward the edge. His hands clung to one of the cart's traces, his feet dangling, his grip sliding downward inch by inch. He could see far below him. Fifty meters down the ship debris had clustered into a pile of twisted metal and jagged points, like a mountain of dirty knives waiting to receive him.
The duffel bag, by some miracle, had snagged on a corner of the cart and now rested on the cart's side above him. The strap of the bag, tight around Victor's chest, was all that kept him from falling off. He needed to secure himself another way, he realized, get a better grip on the traces, lock himself into the wall somehow. If the bag tore loose, the weight of the tools would pull him down like a stone.
