Needs must. McQueen strafes the ceiling with a short, wide burst, doing more damage than their unseen assailants but at least he’s breaking up their party. As he does this the rest of the windows blow out. Small chunks of stone punch the plaster on the far wall with impacts as crisp and clean as bullets. One of them hits him in the back but his pack absorbs most of the force.
“Lie down,” he orders the science team, and they do. The soldiers are down too, on their knees and peering at an oblique angle around the edges of the broken windows, trying to get a glimpse of the enemy without swallowing a piece of ballistic geology.
“Foss,” McQueen snaps. “Phillips.” He points at the ceiling, where the sounds of digging and scrambling are suddenly louder. The enemy made short work of the slates and now they’re going through whatever else is up there. With luck that will be wooden beams. Otherwise it’s just lath and plaster. They’ve probably got a couple of seconds before they have to deal with vertical incoming.
But Rosie comes first and she comes like thunder, the sweetest sound McQueen has ever heard. The bogeys up on the roof are hearing her too, and no doubt seeing her as she rolls up the steep incline of the main street towards them. Good. Rosie with her guns up is a terrifying sight. They must be shitting breezeblocks right now.
The colonel can’t take the corner cleanly. There just isn’t room to turn something of Rosie’s generous dimensions without hitting something. So he doesn’t even try. He comes round wide, smashing through the frontages of shops, folding benches and litter bins down to two dimensions, then he swerves at the last moment to scythe into the street they’re on. Even so, he doesn’t have enough room to manoeuvre. A lamp post is torn out of the ground and falls full length across the road, from pavement to pavement. It lies there like a toppled tree for half a heartbeat before Rosie’s treads crush it flat.
McQueen grabs the radio. “Extend the airlock,” he yells. “We need an umbrella!”
The massive vehicle comes to a stop at last, with the mid-section door right opposite the door they entered through. The scientists scramble up and start to head for the exit, but McQueen brings them back with a terse bark. “Wait for it.”
The colonel extends the airlock, all the way to the door of the building. That glass is everything-proof. If someone up on the roof has a gun pointed down at them, or even just a pebble and a leather strap, the crew will only be exposed for a fraction of a second as they sprint across from the protection of the doorway to the sanctuary of the airlock. Even McQueen would have trouble setting up a decent shot in that kind of timeframe.
“Okay,” he tells his people, “lead off. One at a time, like before. Cover the civilians, then go over yourselves. Foss, you and me run tail.”
The geek squad is quick and efficient for once. With their lives on the line they remember every combat drill they were ever put through, every skip and jump. They descend the stairs quickly and quietly. McQueen notices as Dr. Penny runs by that she is uninjured. Her duck-and-cover was a reflex, not a response to a wound.
He lingers in the doorway, and Foss stays behind too without a word being spoken. They wait, rifles in hand, to see if anything comes down through the ceiling, but nothing does. Finally they retreat backwards out of the room and slam the door.
When they get to the bottom of the stairs, the whitecoats are already scooting through the airlock doors with Phillips and Sixsmith to either side, watchful and ready.
They get the hell out of there, by the numbers. Only Khan seems a little breathless as they duck and run, a little clumsy, but then she’s used to manoeuvring without a seven-month baby bump.
Dr. Fournier is waiting for them right inside the mid-section door, trying to look like he’s actually got something to do here, yelping out orders as though anyone is listening.
“Keep the platform clear! Leave room for the people who are coming in behind you! Cycle the doors as soon as the last man is in!”
The last man is McQueen. Foss, who was second to last, has shuffled in backwards so she can cover him as he comes. He gives her a curt nod of thanks and walks on by, trusting her to lock up behind him.
“What if Stephen—?” Dr. Khan protests, but McQueen isn’t really listening so he misses the rest of the sentence. He dumps his gun and climbs into the turret.
The doors slide shut and the airlock retracts. Rosie backs out the way she came, smashing a lot more infrastructure with her arse end.
They reverse onto the main street where they swing around in a wide, destructive arc. But not as destructive as it’s about to get.
The field pounder, in these close quarters, is useless. The shells would punch through the walls of Invercrae and sail right on. The flamethrower, though, is a different proposition entirely.
The lieutenant slams down the priming lever and rotates the turret through most of a circle. He aims at the building they’ve just come from and cuts loose, sweeping the house from the roof on down.
In seconds, it’s one big bonfire. After that, he sprays the buildings on either side, with a view to catching anyone who saw the turret turn and jumped clear. Finally, he picks targets at random. Invercrae goes up like dry tinder around them and behind them.
McQueen hears a yelling from the bottom of the turret steps, in more than one voice. He shuts off the primer, rests the gun and descends to find Dr. Khan and Foss wrestling while the men look on in various states of bemusement or horror. Khan was trying to get up into the turret and stop him, presumably, and Foss blocked her way.
The lieutenant gestures to Phillips and Sixsmith, who restrain the doctor as gently as they can, pulling her off Foss like a limpet off a rock. “Motherfucker!” she yells, with the accent on the third syllable. She immediately tries to throw herself at McQueen, but the soldiers hold her tight. He sees Dr. Sealey contemplate a rescue, then very sensibly take a step back as his sense of self-preservation kicks in.
“You bastard!” Khan shouts. “Stephen is out there! Stephen is out there and you burned it down!”
He doesn’t have any answer to that. He hadn’t forgotten Greaves; he just didn’t believe there was any chance at all that the kid was still alive. Or if he entertained a doubt, a small one, it didn’t weigh very much against the urgency of paying out Invercrae and her invisible residents for what they just did to Lutes. He is groping for a way to put this into words that Dr. Khan will understand, but she’s still screaming at him so he can’t get any headway.
It’s right then that Rosie slows.
Stops.
The intracom hisses and crackles.
“Friendlies,” the colonel says. “Mid-section door. It’s Greaves. Bring him aboard.”
Khan is the first to move. She hits the lock. Sealey and Akimwe join her, quickly throwing the manual safeties that Foss has only just engaged.