The building had elected to fall north of their position, but part of it crumbled off in the process and came toppling down close enough to give them all a bit of a heart condition. He dropped the power on the GWIZ and joined the door gunner as they kept hammering the drones that continued to throw themselves at the Cherokee, even as the building collapsed under them.

Then captain and crew were clear, pulling up and above the top of the next building before dropping down into the manmade canyon of the streets beyond.

“That was too damn close, sir.” The pilot swore at him.

Eric just shrugged. “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, son. We’re alive, we’ve got our civvies. Get us back to the evac point.”

There was a quiet for a time, but finally the pilot grudgingly acknowledged him.

Eric grinned. The fight was over. The war would continue, obviously, to the final end, but for now the fight was over and he could enjoy the satisfaction of the moment. It was one of the few pleasures that existed in combat.

The evacuation point was an armed camp.

Thrown up in just a few short hours, it had been mined for over two kilometers around the perimeter and had guard towers armed with heavy rail cannons along the primary line. Inside there was a flood of humanity, most armed to the teeth, dirty, and tired . . . but they were alive, and they were angry as hell for the most part.

Eric pushed through the throng of people, his armor giving him near immunity to whatever beef they thought they might have with him or the world in general. He watched as a heavy lifter took off, another one landing, and he knew that a few hundred more would be on their way to a safe zone.

If there is such a place.

Dallas had mostly been cleared out weeks earlier, of course. What was here were the most stubborn and the most stupid, with a liberal mixing of the most brave. Some days it was hard to tell which was which, but that wasn’t exactly unusual in Eric’s experience. You needed a good mix of all three to stay in a war zone of one’s own volition, especially one like this when you only had older military and civilian weapons at your disposal.

He’d heard of, and seen, some of the damage the Dallasites managed with old chem-fired weapons and was dutifully impressed. Granted, it required anti-matériel guns to penetrate the Drasin hide, but that barely slowed the defenders of Dallas down. Rigging improvised explosives from anything and everything they could find in the nearly abandoned city had become a game, a challenge, and a point of pride to them, and they had proved to be good at it.

It was over now.