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Another explosion later and we were through.

“Think we can risk the elevator?” I asked.

“Backup power is running still,” Dale said. “It’s a small pebble-bed nuclear reactor deep underneath the city. It’ll keep.”

There were three more thick doors to blast. But there was no one to worry about the alarms we continually set off. So it all went fast.

The final explosion revealed a long tunnel with flickering lights, thick bars lining the rooms running along each side, with one final vault just beyond.

“Jackpot,” whispered Teller. He licked his lips.

On my right I could see the glimmer of gold bars, stacked as high as my chest.

Each sub room was filled with precious metals. All here for the taking.

______

WE MOVED quickly, using a motorized pallet dolly that just fit in the elevator. The first two sub rooms were cleaned out, and with each trip we deposited the gold bars into empty ammunition chests in the back of Eric’s Pelican.

It filled up quickly, and there was a lightness in the air as we cracked jokes and imagined what we’d do with our share.

The Pelican almost literally groaned with gold, and we had to move a Shiva warhead out to start adding a layer of chests full of gold to the walkway.

“Any more and she won’t fly,” Eric warned.

“There’s just one more room. We’ll get a few more chests in here, then we’re done,” Felicia said.

Back under the bank we detonated the door to the last vault. The lights flickered from the pulse as we opened the door, coughing and hacking from the dust that had been kicked up. Shadows filled the room, shifting and moving as the lights struggled to come on.

Then the lights quit flickering and steadied, and we realized that the shadows were still moving. They were human-shaped shadows.

A hand reached out from behind the bars and grabbed at me. “Are you here to save us?” asked a tiny voice, and I looked down into the large, wide blue eyes of a little boy.

“THANK GOD you came,” said an older man, a schoolteacher who’d been chosen to stay with the children while the adults armed up and marched downriver to fight the Covenant.

That had been days ago.

The entire group was camped out in the last gold storage room, spreading out what supplies they had on towels on top of more wealth than any of them could have ever have previously imagined touching.

“We’ve seen what they’ve done to other worlds,” Julian, the schoolteacher, said. “We got as deep underground as we could . . . hoping maybe we could avoid the worst of it. The others had already left the city for the nearest spaceport. There weren’t many children left by the time the Covenant actually landed.”

They were not nearly deep enough. But I didn’t say anything.

“Just hold on a second, sir, we need to confer a moment.”

Felicia had frozen in the center of the hallway, but moved when I approached. “What the hell do we do?” I hissed. “We can’t just leave them here.”

“I don’t know,” she whispered back. “But how many are there? What can we do?”

“We have a spare Pelican . . .”

She cut me off. “Let me think. In the meantime, get those last three chests of gold up to Eric.”

“And how are we going to explain that?” I asked, a bit louder than I intended.

Felicia walked over to the open door that led to the room the children and their caretaker were in. There were thirty of them, I figured, from a quick head count. “Julian, that was your name, right? I’m Colonel Felicia Sanderson. I’m an orbital-drop shock trooper. We’re here under orders to retrieve the gold bullion, as part of the necessity to fund the war effort against the Covenant. You’ll have to understand, these orders are our first priority. In the meantime, if there is anything you need, food, water, we’ll provide that to you as we try to think about how to safely get you out of here.”

“Thank you, thank you so much,” the teacher said.

Dale and Orrin had finished loading the dolly.

I pulled Felicia back farther away. “We need to call in extra Pelicans.”

“Don’t tell me what we need to do. We’re going to load this last bit up, then