My boots slip against the slick tile floor and I skid around the corner.  The sound of gunfire chases me down the hallway.  The mission hasn’t been failed yet.  I can still do this.

“Jul!  I’ve got you!” my cousin shouts, as his back slams into a door as he rounds the corner several paces behind.  He rolls against the plywood panel just in time for several energy blasts to scorch burning holes where his heart would have been.

I nearly trip over my own feet by looking back at him over my shoulder.  These heavy boots were made for walking, and that’s all they want to do.  At the end of the hall I reach the stairs and briefly check the directions written on the little plastic card strapped to my forearm.  Our destination is up two floors from here if the intelligence was correct.  

The Troos don’t do a lot of remodeling when they capture our infrastructure, even when it’s inconvenient to them or helps us.  An old blueprint and a few former employees provided enough of the layout for me to be able to build a route that would take us in and out without fanfare.  Unfortunately, our enemy disagreed with that plan.

The door to the stairs is fortunately unlocked.  We crash through and start the climb.  Terry is barely a pace behind me, his longer legs propelling him much faster than I can run.  He fumbles to reload his magazine while running. 

Behind us, I can hear the unmistakable clatter of Troo claws on the tile.  They move faster than we do, but their traction is even worse than ours on these hard floors.

My lungs cry for mercy as I charge up the stairs.  If I weren’t in the habit of running so frequently for fun an in the current possession of a significant quantity of adrenaline this would be entirely torture.  As it is, I’ve not got a lot more energy reserves left in me to keep going at this pace.  Terry passes me on the stairs, leaping up them three at a time while I can only manage to skip one every few steps.

We hit the top of the stairs just in time for a Troo energy bolt to turn the metal handrail to my left into slag just before I reach to hold it.  Terry hits the exterior door with his shoulder and its hinges fail dramatically to drop it onto the ground outside.

I sprint into the courtyard and run past him.  Terry turns to guard my back again, his deadly little carbine at the ready.

One more glance at my little sketch of a map.  More detail would be useful, but anything that takes more time to read would be more hindrance than help right this second.

Here in the interior courtyard of the old fortress is our mission goal: a large stockpile of munitions, but our own conventional variety and the Troos’ own alien ones.  If the mission hadn’t already fallen off of all of its rails my goal would have been to disable them, to salt them with traps, and to make them more dangerous to those that wield them than those on the receiving end.

As it is, that goal is long dust.  Instead, I must destroy them entirely.

Planting the small charges doesn’t take long, but we don’t have long before the Troo reinforcements will arrive.  This far behind enemy lines, we counted on sparse security.  We counted wrong.

The first battery bank of the Troo energy weapons sits alone on the right.  I make haste in that direction, boots finding much better traction against the rough stone of the courtyard floors than they had the slick interior tile.  I catch sight of one of their little winged vehicles at the center of the courtyard at the same time that the backup extraction team crashes through the main courtyard door in an outdated tank.

Clouds of dust and debris fill the air and I cough hard into the scarf wound around my neck.  There isn’t time to stop and think.  I place the first small charge with the deadly energy weapons and sprint to the next stack.  The space between the piles is not too far that the short range remote signal on my tiny explosives will fail to trigger them at the same time.

Someone has put careful thought into making sure that one detonation does not bring down the whole building - but they were not prepared for incendiary scuttling charges rigged specifically to cause a fire hot enough to cook off everything.  I finish with the second before Terry opens fire on the Troos who pursued us up the stairs.  I hear their inhuman shrieks of pain echoing from the thick cement walls of the fortress.

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Gravel grinds in the treads of my boot as I charge across behind our friendly tank.  Its metal tracks raise sparks as it skids to a full stop while the turret spins quickly around to face forward again.  I drop the third tiny explosive out of my bag and fumble with shaking hands to activate it.  My hands were much steadier when we practiced this, but the artificial pressure of the timer is not the equal of the real terror of enemy guns.

There are two more stacks of munitions, piled carefully upon pallets.  I don’t know if I can get to all of them before we run out of time.

“Jul!”  The tank’s top hatch flops open with a clang loud enough to be heard even over the din of its engine growling as it pivots on its tracks.  “We’re encircled - leave the rest!”

“It won’t take but a second!” I shout back, “Mel, I can get them all!”

“No -” the tank commander cuts herself off.  “Not with the charges - use that!”  She thrusts one accusatory finger at the little flying machine.  Its rotary blades slowly turn in the breeze of the tank’s passing.

A pair of antimateriel guns sit mounted under the stubby wings.  I scrape the bottom of my memories for how to use the thing.

“Aye!” I confirm and drop my last charges where I stand and sprint to the flying machine instead.

“Fall back Terry!” the commander shouts, and Terry pulls away from the door to sprint toward the little copter. 

These machines are designed to fit our enemy.  Their seats support a person leaning forward to the controls, with foot pedals at an angle most uncomfortable for human legs to reach.  None of the safety harnesses fit me, so I neglect all of them.  If this fails and the machine falls out of the sky then I’m just going to have to roll those dice unaided.

The controls are complex, but I know just enough of the enemy’s language to read the labels.  No time for pre-flight checks.  I kick it on and the electric motors spin to life overhead.  The enemy’s efficient battery banks provide instant power that our fuel-burning engines can only dream of.

An enormous explosion rips out of the tank behind me.  Its main gun fires into a second floor balcony and cuts off the Troos from getting to us from overhead.  I try to ignore the fire and blood raining down on me.  Their blood is as red as ours, and one of them took that tank shell as a direct hit.

I don’t know what Mel had loaded with that shot, but I can just make out the sound of the autoloader sliding another shell into the chamber over the ringing in my ears.  The electric motors overhead whine as I kick at the thrust control behind my foot.

Terry lets his little carbine drop to hang from its sling and grabs the fire controls.  We’re up in the air with a lurch and a wobble when our intended extraction vehicle kicks into motion and exits through the hole it made when entering.  

I am not a good pilot.  I’m not even technically qualified to be a pilot.  But they built these things to be commercially viable as civilian personal transportation and they’re not exactly hard to control.  The AI that handles all the crazy hew and yaw that an antique helicopter’s pilot would be controlling manually makes them much less complicated to fly than even one of the recon gliders.

As soon as we’re clear of the second floor, I flip the detonator switch and Terry pulls the trigger on the copter’s weapons.  Impossibly bright white fire flares around from the phosphorus incendiaries I planted.  The horrible electric red light of the enemy’s energy weapons firing from the stolen copter blanches completely out in comparison.  We gain more height, but I can tell that it won’t be enough.

The ammunition cache goes up in glorious brilliance beneath us.  The conventional ammunition hit by the copter’s electric blasts ignites first, with explosions that shake the stone foundations of the fortress.  The battery packs for the Troo weapons follow a few seconds behind, emitting billows of thick black smoke before sending up great jets of flame.

I am still not a good pilot.  I’m not even qualified to fly a remote drone.  But the computer assistance in these things is second to none.

The copter rocks violently and threatens to tumble end over end.  If not for the automatic nature of the stability controls, it absolutely would have turned upside down and put both of us untethered passengers into its rotor blades.  My hands are cold and clammy on the controls and an icy feeling that has nothing to do with temperature slithers down my spine. 

Beneath us the floor gives out under the heat of the burning batteries and the pressure of the heavy explosives.  The basement levels collapse and the outer walls take on a threatening lean.  Smoke and dust and grit block out all view of the world outside.

A piece of flying debris hits the copter and I cling to the controls with every ounce of strength I possess.  It lists badly as we fly clear of the exploding fortress.

I have no idea where we are.

But we’re not going to be in the air for very long.