"I think it's a little tight now," Suilin said, trying gingerly to lift the commo helmet away from his compressed temples.
"Right," said Cooter. "Now pull the tab over the left ear. Just a cunt hair."
"Time t' stoke the ole furnaces," said Gale, handing something small to Cooter while the reporter experimented with the fit of his helmet.
When Suilin drew down on the tab as directed, the helmet lining deflated with an immediate release of pressure. It felt good—but he didn't want the cursed thing sliding around on his head, either; so maybe if he pulled the right tab again, just a—
"And one for you, buddy," Gale said, offering Suilin a white-cased stim cone about the size of a thumbnail. "Hey, what's your name?"
"Dick," the reporter said. "Ah—what's this?"
Cooter set the base of his cone against the inner side of his wrist and squeezed to inject himself. "Wide-awakes," he said. "A little something to keep you alert. Not much of a rush, but it beats nodding off about the time it all drops in the pot."
"Like Tootsie Six," Gale said, thumbing forward with a grin.
The front of the column was completely hidden from Flamethrower. Task Force Ranson had closed to fifty-meter separations between vehicles as soon as they entered the forest, but even Blue Two, immediately ahead of them, had been only a snorting ambiance for most of the past hour.
"Junebug's problem ain't she's tired," Cooter said with a grimace. "She's . . ." He spun his finger in a brief circle around his right ear. "It happens. She'll be okay."
"But won't this . . . ?" Suilin said, rolling the stim cone between his fingers. "I mean, what are the side effects?"
As a reporter, he'd seen his share and more of burn-outs, through his business and in it.
Cooter shrugged. "After a couple days," the big man said, raising his arm absently to block a branch swishing past his gunshield, "it don't help any more. And your ears ring like a sonuvabitch about that long after. Better 'n getting your ass blown away."
"Hey," said Gale cheerfully. "Promise me I'll be around in a couple days and I'll drink sewage."
Suilin set the cone and squeezed it. There was a jet of cold against his skin, but he couldn't feel any other immediate result.
Flamethrower broke into open terrain, a notch washed clean when the stream below was in spate. The car slid down the near bank, under control but still fast enough that their stern skirts sparked and rattled against the rocky soil. Water exploded in a fine mist at the bottom as Rogers goosed his fans to lift the car up the far side. They cleared the upper lip neatly, partly because the bank had already been crumbled into a ramp by the passage of earlier vehicles.
Blue Two had been visible for a moment as the tank made its own blasting run up the bank. Now Flamethrower was alone again, except for sounds and the slender-boled trees through which the task force pushed its way.
"Lord, why can't this war stop?" Dick Suilin muttered.
"Because," said Cooter, though the reporter's words weren't really meant as a question, "for it to stop, either your folks or the World Government has gotta throw in the towel. Last we heard, that hadn't happened."
"May a bloody happened by now," Gale grunted, looking sourly at the sky where stars no longer shared their turf with commo and recce satellites. "Boy, wouldn't that beat hell? Us get our asses greased because we didn't know the war was over?"
"It's not the World Government," the reporter snapped. "It's the Terran Government, and that hasn't been the government on this world for the thirty years since we freed ourselves."
Neither of the mercenaries responded. Cooter lowered his head over his multi-function display and fiddled with its dials.
"Look, I'm sorry," Suilin said after a moment. He lifted his helmet and rubbed his eyes. Maybe the Wide-awake was having an effect after all. "Look, it's just that Prosperity could be a garden spot, a paradise, if it weren't for outsiders hired by the Terrans."
"Sorry, troop," said Gale as he leaned past Suilin to open the cooler on the floor of the fighting compartment. "But that's a big negative."
"Ninety percent of the Consies 're born on Prosperity," Cooter agreed without looking up. "And I don't mean in the Enclaves, neither."
"Ninety-bloody-eight percent of the body count," Gale chuckled. He lifted the cap off a beer by catching it on the edge of his gunshield and thrusting down. "Which figures, don't it?"
He sucked the foam from the neck of the bottle and handed it to Cooter. When he opened and swigged from the second one, Gale murmured, "I'll say this fer you guys. You brew curst good beer."
He gave the bottle to Suilin.
It was a bottle of 33, cold and wonderfully smooth when the reporter overcame his momentary squeamishness at putting his lips on the bottle that the mercenary had licked. Suilin didn't realize how dry his throat was until he began to drink.
"Look," he said, "there's always going to be malcontents. They wouldn't be a threat to stability if they weren't being armed and trained in the Enclaves."
"Hey, what do I know about politics?" Gale said. He patted the breech of his tribarrel with his free hand.
A branch slapped Suilin's helmet; he cursed with doubled bitterness. "If Coraccio'd taken the Enclaves thirty years ago, there wouldn't be any trouble now."
"Dream on, turtle," Gale said over the mouth of his own beer.
"Coraccio couldn't take the WG's actual bases," Cooter remarked, quickly enough to forestall any angry retort. "The security forces couldn't hold much, but they sure-hell weren't givin' up the starports that were their only chance of going home to Earth."
Gale finished his beer, belched, and tossed the bottle high over the side. The moonlit glitter seemed to curve backward as Flamethrower ground on, at high speed despite the vegetation.
"You shoulda hired us," he said. "Well, you know—somebody like us. But we'll take yer money now, no sweat."
Suilin sluiced beer around in his mouth before he swallowed it. "Only a fraction of the population supported the Consies," he said. "The Conservative Action Movement's just a Terran front."
"Only a fraction of the people here 're really behind the Nationals, either," Cooter said. He raised his hand, palm toward Suilin in bar. "All right, sure—a bigger fraction. But what most people want's for the shooting to stop. Trust me, turtle. That's how it always is."
"We've got a right to decide the government of our own planet!" the reporter shouted.
"You bet," agreed the big lieutenant. "And that's what you're paying Hammer's Slammers for. So their fraction gets tired of havin' its butt kicked quicker 'n your fraction does."
"They're payin' us," said Gale, caressing his tribarrel again, "because there's nodamnbody in the Yokel army who's got any balls."
Suilin flushed. His hand tightened on his beer bottle.
"All Tootsie elements," said a voice from Suilin's commo helmet. "We're approaching Phase Line Mambo, so look sharp."
The reporter didn't fully understand the words, but he knew by now what it meant when both mercenaries gripped their tribarrels and waggled the muzzles to be sure they turned smoothly on their gimbals.
Dick Suilin dropped the bottle with the remainder of his beer over the side. His hands were clammy on the grips of his weapon.
That was the trouble with his learning to understand things. Now he knew what was coming.
When Henk Ortnahme rocked forward violently, he reacted by bracing his palms against the main screen and opening his mouth to bellow curses at Tech 2 Simkins.
Herman's Whore didn't ground 'er bloody skirts, though, as Simkins powered her out of the unmanned gully between Adako Creek and the Padma River . . . and Warrant Leader Ortnahme wouldn't a been bouncing around the inside of his tank like a pea in a whistle if he'd had brains enough to strap himself into his bloody seat.
He didn't shout the curses. When he rehearsed them in his mind, they were directed as much at himself as the kid, who was doing pretty good. Night, cross-country, through forested mountains—pretty bloody good.
"All Tootsie elements," boomed the command channel. "We're approaching Phase Line Mambo, so look sharp."
Phase Line Mambo: Adako Beach, and the only bridge for a hundred kays that'd carry tanks over the Padma River. Consie defenses for sure. Maybe alerted defenses.
Simkins wasn't the only guy in Herman's Whore who was getting a crash course tonight in his new duties.
"Company," said somebody on the unit push, musta been Sparrow, because the view remoted onto Ortnahme's Screen Three had the B1 designator in its upper left corner.
The lead tank overlooked the main east-west road through the forest; Sparrow must've eased forward until Deathdealer was almost out of the trees. Half a dozen light vehicles were approaching from the east, still a kilometer away. They were moving at about fifty kph—plenty fast enough for anything on wheels that had to negotiate the roads in this part of the continent.
A dull blue line began jumping through the remoted image, three centimeters from the right edge of the screen. Nothing wrong with the equipment: Deathdealer's transmission was just picking up interference from another circuit, the one that aligned the tank's main gun. . . .
"Don't Shoot!" June Ranson snarled on the command channel before she bothered with proper communications procedures.
Then, "Tootsie Six to all Tootsie elements. Form on Blue One, east along the roadcut. Don't expose yourselves, and don't shoot without my orders. These're probably civilians. We'll wait till they clear the bridge, then we'll blast through ourselves while the guards 're relaxing."
Herman's Whore rocked as Simkins shifted a bit to the left, following the track of the car ahead. They'd intended to enter the roadcut in line ahead, where the slope was gentlest; now they'd have to slide down abreast.
A sputter of static on the commo helmet indicated one of the subordinate leaders, Sparrow or Cooter, was talking to Tootsie Six on a lock-out channel.
Ranson didn't bother to switch off the command push to reply, "Negative, Blue One. Getting there twenty minutes later doesn't matter. The bridge guards'll 've seen the truck lights too; they'll be trigger-happy until they see there's no threat to them."
No big deal. Line abreast was a little trickier for the drivers, but it was about as fast . . . and it put Task Force Ranson in a perfect ambush position, just in case the trucks weren't civilian after all.
Herman's Whore nosed to the edge of the trees, swung to put her port side to the roadcut, and halted. She quivered in dynamic stasis.
Ortnahme cranked up the magnification on his gunnery screen, feeding enhanced ambient light to his display. He had a better angle on the trucks than Blue One did, and when he focused on the figures filling the canvas-topped bed of the lead vehicle—
Blood 'n martyrs!
"Tootsie Six," hissed the general unit push before Ortnahme could call his warning, "this is One-Six. They ain't civilians."
The leading truck had National Army fender stencils and a Yokel crest on the passenger door, but the troops in back wore black uniforms. Ortnahme scanned their faces at a hundred magnifications. Bored, nervous—yeah, you could be both at the same time, he knew that bloody well himself. And very bloody young.
"Roger," said the command channel crisply. "All Tootsie elements, I'm highlighting your primary targets. On command, take 'em out before you worry about anybody else."
That truckload wasn't going to get much older.
Ortnahme's remote screen pinged as the view from Deathdealer vanished and was replaced by the corner tag R-for-Red 6 and a simple string of magenta beads, one for each truck. The second bead from the end was brighter and pulsing.
"Blue Two, roger," the warrant leader said, knowing the AI would transmit his words as a green dot on Ranson's display—even if all seven responses came in simultaneously.
"When the shooting starts, team," the command channel continued, "go like hell. Six out."
The first soft-skin had passed beneath Herman's Whore and was continuing toward the bridge. The armored vehicles would have burning trucks to contend with in their rush, but Ortnahme realized Ranson couldn't pop the ambush until all six targets were within the killing ground.
The second truck was a civilian unit with a mountain landscape painted on the passenger door and MASALLAH in big metalized letters across the radiator. Other than that, it was the same as the first: a stake-bed with twelve rubber tires and about sixty bloody Consies in back.
MASALLAH. God help us. They'd need God's help when the tribarrels started slicing into 'em.
The third truck came abreast with its gearbox moaning. Yokel maintenance was piss-poor, at least from what Ortnahme'd seen of it. Guess it didn't matter, not if they were handing over their hardware to the Consies.
Nobody in the trucks looked up, though they were within fifty meters of Task Force Ranson. Half the distance was vertical . . . which was a problem in itself for Ortnahme, since the guns in the turret and cupola of Herman's Whore couldn't depress as low as the pintle-mounted weapons of the combat cars.
"Tootsie, this is Blue One," said the radio. "Vehicles approaching the bridge from the west, too."
"Bloody marvelous," somebody muttered on the general push. It might have been the warrant leader himself.
"Roger, Blue One," replied Ranson coolly. "They're stopping, so it shouldn't affect us. Six out."
The gunnery pipper didn't bear on the trucks when they were directly below Herman's Whore. Life being what it bloody was, that's where Ortnahme's target would be when the balloon went up.
"Simkins," the warrant leader said, "when I give the word, get us over the edge. Got that? Not even a bloody eyeblink later."
"Yessir," agreed the intercom. "Ah, sir . . . ?"
Ortnahme grimaced. The fourth truck was below them. "Go ahead."
"Sir, won't the guards be even more alerted if we start shooting before we cross the bridge? Than if we'd gone sooner, I mean?"
"Yeah," Ortnahme said, stating the bloody obvious, but this wasn't the time to tear a strip off the kid. "But we don't want a Consie battalion waiting for us on the other side, do we? It's the hand we got, kid, so we play it."
"Yessir," Simkins agreed. "I just wondered."
From his voice, that's all it was.
Maybe Simkins hadn't figured out that one real likely response from an altered guard detachment would be to blow the bloody bridge—maybe with most of Task Force Ranson learning to fly a hundred meters above the Padma River.
The fifth truck, Yokel Army again, grunted and snarled its way onto Screen Two. Ortnahme's pipper quivered across the canvas top, bloody useless unless the Consies all died of fright when the main gun ripped over their heads, but he still had a view of the troops. There was something funny about this lot. They were wearing armbands, and their uniforms—
"All Tootsie elements—"
"Simkins, go!" the warrant leader shouted.
Herman's Whore lurched sideways and down. Startled faces glanced upward in the magnified display, warned at last but only a microsecond before the command push added, "Fire!"
The pure, heart-wrenching blue of powerguns firing saturated the roadcut. Ortnahme's foot took up the slack in the gun pedal as his tank slid—and the orange pipper slid down onto one of the mouths screaming in the back of the fifth truck.
The 20cm bolt merged with a white and orange explosion. The whole truck was a fireball. Heated by the plasma, the steel chassis blazed with even greater venom than the contents of the fuel tanks and the flesh of the soldiers at the point of impact.
Ortnahme switched to his tribarrel as the tank rushed down the slope, its fans driving into a sea of flame.
Not that it mattered, but the troops in the truck he'd just destroyed weren't wearing black uniforms.
Three blazing figures lurched out of the inferno. Ortnahme shot them down, more as an act of mercy than of war.
They were in camouflaged National Army fatigues with black armbands, and they were carrying National Army assault rifles.
Not that it mattered.
"Fire!" June Ranson heard her voice say. Her visor opaqued, shutting out the double microsecond dazzles of Deathdealer's main gun firing almost on top of her, but the momentary blindness didn't matter. The battle was taking place within a holographic screen while Ranson watched it from above.
Her tribarrel scissored bolts across those of Stolley's weapon, turning fist-sized chunks of the leading truck into meter-diameter flashes colored by material that vaporized and burned: rubber/metal/wood across the truck; cloth/flesh/munitions as the muzzles lifted into the bed.
Metals burned with a gorgeous intensity of color, white and red and green.
The target exploded into a lake of fire that screamed. Willens kept Warmonger as high on her fans as he could as the combat car entered the roadcut at a barely-controlled slide and cranked hard right to follow Deathdealer up the bridge approach.
The filters of Ranson's helmet snapped into place as flames whuffed out like crinolines encircling the combat car. For a moment, everything was orange and hot; then Warmonger was through.
Junebug Ranson was back in the physical world in which her troops were fighting.
The Adako beach community was a few hovels on this east side of the Padma River. There were twenty or thirty more dwellings, still unpretentious, beyond the gravel strand across the stream. The bridge itself was a solid concrete structure with a sandbagged blockhouse on the far end and a movement-control kiosk in the center of the span.
The blockhouse and kiosk had been added in reaction to the worsening security situation. When Deathdealer's main gun punched the center of the blockhouse twice, the low building blew apart with an enthusiasm which the ammunition going off within did little more than color. Swatches of fiberglass fabric from the sandbags burned red as they drifted in the updraft.
A bus was waiting on the other side to cross the bridge. It lurched off the road and heeled slowly over onto its side, its headlights still burning. The truck behind it didn't move, but both cab doors flew open and figures scuttled out.
A man without pants ran from one of the huts near the bridge approach and began firing an automatic rifle at Deathdealer. Sparrow ignored—or was unaware of—the fleabites, but Stolley triggered a burst in the Consie's direction.
The hovel disintegrated into burning debris under the touch of the cyan bolts. The Consie dropped flat and continued firing, sheltered by the rocky irregularity of the ground. Another set of muzzleflashes sparkled yellow from closer to the streambed. A bullet rang on Warmonger's hull.
The long span between the concrete guardrails of the bridge had been narrowed by coils of concertina wire, reducing the traffic flow to a single lane past the central checkpoint. A round, pole-mounted signal board, white toward the east and presumably red on the other face, reached from the kiosk.
An attendant bolted out of the kiosk, waving his empty hands above his head. He was running toward the armored vehicles rather than away, but he didn't have a prayer of reaching safety in either direction.
The flash of Deathdealer's main gun ended the possibility of a threat lurking within the kiosk and crisped the attendant on his third stride.
"All Tootsie!" Ranson shouted. "Watch the left of the near side, there's bandits!"
The gunners on her combat cars were momentarily blind as they bucked out of the fireball to which they had reduced the trucks. That made them a dangerously good target for the riflemen firing from the downslope.
Those Consies were good. Caught completely by surprise, hideously outgunned—and still managing to make real pests of themselves. Hammer could use more recruits of their caliber—
To replace the troops this run was going to use up.
Sparks cascaded in all directions as Deathdealer entered the bridge approach and Albers, the only experienced tank driver in the task force, dropped his skirts so low they scraped. The truck-width passage across the bridge was too narrow for the blowers, and there wasn't time for the lengthy spooling and restringing of the barriers that would've been required during a normal down-time move.
June Ranson felt the satisfaction common to any combat soldier when circumstances permit him to use the quick and dirty way to achieve his objective. But that didn't mean there weren't risks. . . .
Deathdealer hit the first frame and smashed it to kindling while loops of wire humped like terrified caterpillars. Strands bunched and sparkled. The tank slid forward at forty kph, grinding the concertina wire between the guardrail and the vehicle's own hundred and seventy tonnes.
The wire couldn't stop a tank or even a combat car, but any loop that snaked its way into a fan intake would lock up the nacelle as sure as politicians lie. A bulldozer with treads for traction was the tool of choice for clearing this sort of entanglement; but, guided by a driver as expert as Albers, a tank would do the job just fine.
Warmonger followed Deathdealer at a cautious fifty meters, in case a strand of wire came whipping back unexpectedly. Willens drove with his hatch buttoned up above him, while Ranson and her two gunners crouched behind their weapons. The blades of a drive fan weren't the only thing you could strangle with a loop of barbed wire.
Steel rubbed concrete in an aural counterpart of the hell-lit road the task force had left behind them. Sparks ricocheted in wild panic, scorching when they touched. Ranson smelled a lock of her hair that had grown beyond the edge of her helmet.
Deathdealer's tribarrel fired. Ranson didn't bother remoting an image of Sparrow's target, and there was nothing to see from behind the tank's bulk now.
"Six," said her commo helmet, "Blue One. The bus 'n truck 're—"
Deathdealer swung onto the western approach, pushing as well as dragging tangled masses of concertina wire. The tank shook herself like a whore waggling a come-on. A touch of her skirts pulverized half a meter of bridge abutment.
"—civvie, no threat. Over."
As Albers accelerated forward, Deathdealer's stern rebounded from the concrete and slapped the three-axled truck that had been waiting to cross the bridge. The lighter vehicle danced away from the impact with the startled delicacy of a horse shying. Ten meters from the pavement, the crumpled wreckage burst into flame.
"All Tootsie elements," Ranson relayed. "Vehicles at the west approach are no threat, repeat, no threat. Six out."
Warmonger blasted through a cloud of powdered concrete as Willens pulled them clear of the bridge. Blue One fired his tribarrel into the houses to the right. There was no sign of hostile activity or even occupation. A ball of wire still dragged twenty meters behind the tank, raising a pall of dust.
One of the tires of the overturned bus revolved lazily. The vehicle lay on both its doors. Figures were climbing out of the windows. They flattened as Warmonger swept by behind the tank.
Stolley's tribarrel snapped over the civilians as he fired across the river, trying to nail the Consie riflemen from this better angle. Rock flashed and gouted, but the muzzleflashes bloomed again.
A trooper screamed on the unit push.
Junebug Ranson's eyes were glazed. Her mouth was open.
Ozone and matrix residues from her tribarrel flayed her throat as she fired into the village, shattering walls and roofslates.
It was very beautiful in the hologram of her mind.
Five-year-old Dickie Suilin screamed, "Suzi!" as his older sister squeezed his nostrils shut and clapped her other hand over his mouth. The flames arcing over the skirts of Flamethrower roared their laughter.
He could breathe after all. A mask of some sort had extended from the earpieces of the commo helmet as soon as the inferno waved an arm of blazing diesel fuel to greet the combat car plunging toward it. Suilin could breathe, and he could see again when overload reset his visor from thermal display to optical.
Though there wasn't much to see except flames curling around black steel skeletons, the chassis of trucks whose flammable portions were already part of the red/orange/yellow/white billows.
Even steel burned when Suilin raked it with his tribarrel. Faces bloomed into smears of vapor and calcined bones. . . .
Blue Two grunted head-on down the road, spewing a wake of blazing debris to either side. Cooter's driver followed, holding Flamethrower at a forty-five degree angle along the edge of the cut.
The slant threw the men in the fighting compartment toward the fire their vehicle was skirting. Gale clung to the starboard coaming. Cooter must have locked his tribarrel in place, because he was frozen like a statue of Effort on its grips.
And Dick Suilin, after a hellish moment of feeling his torso swing out and down toward the bellowing flames, braced his feet against the inner face of the armor and grabbed Cooter by the waist. If the big lieutenant minded, they could discuss it later.
Something as soft-featured and black as a tar statue reached out of the flames and gripped the coaming to either side of Suilin's tribarrel. The only parts of the figure that weren't black were the teeth and the great red cracks writhing in what had been the skin of both arms. The thing fell away without trying to speak.
Only a shadow. Only a sport thrown by the flames.
"Help me, Suzi," the reporter whispered. "Help me, Suzi."
Blue Two sucked fire along with it for an instant as the tank cleared the ambush site. Then the return flow, cool sweet air, pistoned Hell back into its proper region and washed Suilin in its freedom as well.
This car was Flamethrower. For the first time, Suilin realized how black was the humor with which the Slammers named their vehicles.
The driver brought them level with a violence that banged the skirts on the roadway. Suilin grunted. He reached for the grips of his tribarrel, obeying an instinct to hang onto something after he lost his excuse to hold Cooter.
Powerguns punctuated the night with flashes so intense they remained for seconds as streaks across the reporter's retinas. His mind tried desperately to process the high-pitched chatter from the commo helmet—a mixture of orders, warnings and shouted exclamations.
It was all meaningless garbage; and it was all terrifying.
The downslope to the left of the roadway was striped orange by the firelight and leaping with shadows thrown from outcrops anchored too firmly in the fabric of the planet to be uprooted when the Padma River flooded. Muzzleflashes pulsed there, shockingly close.
A bottle-shaped yellow glow swelled and shrank as the gunman triggered his burst. The gun wasn't firing tracers, but the corner of Suilin's eyes caught a flicker as glowing metal snapped from the muzzle.
Specks of light raked the car ahead of Blue Two. Red sparks flashed up the side armor.
On the commo helmet, someone screamed lordlordlord.
The tribarrel wouldn't swing fast enough. Dick Suilin was screaming also. He unslung his grenade launcher.
Blue Two's main gun lit the night. Rock and the damp soil beneath it geysered outward from the point of impact, a white track glowing down the slope for twenty meters.
Flamethrower's driver flinched away from the bolt, throwing the thirty-tonne car into a side-step as dainty as that of a nervous virgin.
Blue Two and the combat car both accelerated up the bridge approach. The tank's turret continued to rotate to bear on the cooling splotch which its first bolt had grazed. If it fired from that angle, the bolt would pass within ten meters of Flame—
The tribarrel in Blue Two's cupola fired instead of the main gun.
Suilin straightened and fired a burst from his own tribarrel in the same general direction. He'd dropped the grenade launcher when he ducked in panic behind the hull armor. He was too rattled now to be embarrassed by his reaction—
And anyway, both the veterans sharing the fighting compartment had ducked also.
You couldn't be sure of not being embarrassed unless you were dead. The past night and day had been a gut-wrenching exposition of just what it meant to be dead. Dick Suilin would do anything at all to avoid that.
Traces of barbed wire clung to the cast-in guardrail supports. Large sections of the rail had been shattered by gunfire or smashed at the touch of behemoths like Flamethrower. Blue Two swung its turret forward again, releasing a portion of the fear that knotted Suilin's stomach, but only a portion.
Gale fired his tribarrel over Flamethrower's stern. Bolts danced off the left guardrail and streaked through the ambush scene. Their cyan purity glared even in the heart of the kerosene pyre which consumed the trucks and their cargo. The bolts vanished only when they touched something solid.
Flamethrower was the last vehicle in the column. Suilin turned also and hosed the fire-shot darkness, praying that there would be no wobbling muzzleflashes to answer as a Consie rifleman raked Flamethrower as he had the car ahead of them.
They slid past the further abutments at fifty kph. There'd been a blockhouse there, but it lay in steaming ruins licked by rare red tongues of flame. A truck burned brightly, well down the steep embankment supporting the approach to the bridge.
On its side, between Flamethrower and the truck, lay a tipped-over bus. A Consie gunman silhouetted by the truck, aimed at Suilin from a bus window.
Liquid nitrogen sprayed into the chambers of Suilin's tribarrel as it cycled, kicking out the spent cases and cooling the glowing iridium of the chamber before the next round was loaded. The gas was a hot kiss blowing back across the reporter's hands as he horsed his weapon onto the unexpected threat. The tribarrel was heavy despite being perfectly balanced on its gimbals, and it swung with glacial torpor.
"Not that—" screamed Suilin's headset. Two-cm bolts ripped across the undercarriage of the bus, bright flashes that blew fuel lines, air lines, hydraulic lines into blazing tangles and opened holes the size of tureens in the sheet metal.
The line of bolts missed by millimeters the man whose raised hand had been shadowed into a weapon by the flames behind him. The civilian fell back into the interior of the bus.
No-no-no—
Suilin's screams didn't help any more than formal prayers would have done if he'd had leisure to form them.
When it first ignited, the ruptured fuel tank engulfed the rear half of the bus. The flames had sped all the way to the front of the vehicle before any of the flailing figures managed to crawl free.
Somebody patted the reporter's forearms; gently at first, but then with enough force to detach his deathgrip from the tribarrel.
" 'Sokay, turtle," a voice said. "All okay. Don't mean nothin'."
Suilin opened his eyes. He'd flipped up his visor, or one of the mercenaries had raised it for him. Cooter was holding his forearms, while Gale watched the reporter with obvious concern. He wasn't sure which of the veterans had been speaking.
The river lay as a black streak behind them as the road climbed. Adako beach was a score of dull fires, big enough to throw orange highlights on the water but nothing comparable to the holocaust of the truck convoy.
And the similar diesel-fed rage which consumed the bus.
"No sweat," Cooter said gently. "Don't mean nothin'."
"It means something to them!" the reporter screamed. He couldn't see for tears, but when he closed his eyes every terrified line of the civilian at the bus window cleared from the surface of his mind. "To them!"
"Happens to everybody, turtle," Gale said. "There's always somebody don't get the word. This time it was you."
"It won't matter next century," Cooter said. "Don't sweat what you can't change."
Flamethrower slowed as Blue Two entered the woods ahead. When the trees closed about the combat car, Dick Suilin could no longer see the flames.
Memory of the fire began to dull. Only a minute. Only a few seconds. . . .
"Trust me, turtle," Gale added with a chuckle. "You stick with us and it won't be the last time, neither."