Lyssa looked at him, clearly concerned, but nodded. “Right.”

She stepped closer to him and Eric wrapped an arm around her waist as she threw one over his shoulder and stepped onto his boots. The summoned chute returned on command and Eric smoothly clipped on before letting it pull them both off the roof and into a sweeping dive, taking them on an arc into the park and below the tree line.

He kept them moving as fast as he could, but the chute wasn’t designed for high speed, and carrying an extra person who wasn’t locked in necessitated that he take at least a modicum of care. So he stayed low, skimming the ground in order to avoid being an easy target. The trees skimmed by, whipping at them sharply in passing, close enough that Eric had to shield Lyssa’s face as they moved.

Eric dropped suddenly, a couple hundred meters into the park, and the hit the ground in a controlled tumble.

“What is it?” Lyssa demanded as she rolled to her knees and scrambled behind a rock.

Eric cut the chute loose and let it fly clear as he hit the power on his GWIZ and leveled it to the south. “They’re coming back up this way and we were about to lose our cover.”

Lyssa looked around and nodded.

They had been following the walking path that curled south along the reservoir. He’d thought about going north, but it would have put them in the open longer. Now he wished that he’d gone with his first instinct.

“Get ready to run for it,” Eric advised as he primed the GWIZ.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to kill a few of them,” he told her simply. “You’re not remotely armed for this, so run.”

Lyssa scowled, but nodded. She’d never liked running, not since she was very young, and her time in the Corps had hammered that character trait home all the stronger. At the moment, however, he was right. Her pistol was a peashooter against the enemy here, and she was unarmored.

Though, honestly, she wasn’t certain that the MilSpec armor the captain was wearing would do him all that much better than her Kevlar and ceramic vest.

“Good luck,” she hissed, then bolted away, keeping as low as she could.

Eric didn’t bother responding. He just popped up from behind the cover and leveled the alien gravity weapon, stroking the trigger lightly as it fell even with the Drasin soldier drones.

The crack of the diamond projectile making a mockery of the speed of sound shook the world around him, but because of the weapon’s design and his own armor insulation, Eric didn’t feel or hear a thing. He did see the shock wave expand out behind the shot, however, kicking up dust and debris in a rooster tail straight into the soldier drone.

The projectile slammed into its target with power comparable to the heavy explosives dropped by the Stryker teams, delivering its kinetic payload almost perfectly as the diamond shattered and tore through the target with vicious force. The heavy alien drone was picked off the ground and thrown back, molten silicon splattering the park.