Window

Andrew dashed down the hallway toward the window, knowing that he was only going to have the one chance and that window of time for it was abysmally small. He snapped open the harness on his hip and pulled his pistol forward, a practiced motion that made it possible for him to do while he was running.

"Are you insane?" The voice was coming from the headset shoved into his ear. He knew it was the voice of his commander, and he knew that she was about to tell him that what he was going to try and do was not only idiotic, but impossible. He was going to die attempting it. But he was going to die regardless in the coming moments, and he'd rather go out trying something impossible that might save the lives of others than playing it safe to buy himself a little more time. "I know what you're going to do! Do you seriously think that you even have a chance of succeeding?"

"Maybe I don't," he said aloud, knowing that the microphone pushed against his cheek would pick up the sound, "but I can't just stand around and not try. I need to do something. And we both know that that ship is carrying enough weapons to change the course of this war, and if it lands in enemy hands we're all going to die."

"You have a pistol, and you're on the sixth floor of a building! If you break through that window, even assuming that that ship doesn't have bulletproof glass in the windows, the precision required to hit the pilot with a square shot to the face while falling is far beyond human capacity. You won't have the time to aim, even if you could aim that precisely. There are a hundred things working against you right now. It's a one in ten billion shot, if not staggeringly higher!"

"And that's a chance that I'm going to take."

He fired two rounds into the window as he approached it, weakening it just enough that when he slammed his weight against it, the glass shattered and didn't slow him down as he passed into the open air. A dozen feet below him he could see the plane hovering in place, waiting for permission to land. He only had a few seconds before he would be below it. He swung his pistol forward and pulled the trigger as many times as he could, firing round after round into the cockpit. He dropped past it an instant.

The last thing he saw before his face was crushed inward by the rising ground was the slight waver in the plane's positioning.