by David Drake
The automatic weapon in the car's turret traversed the slope toward which the vehicle advanced, making a great deal of dust and racket without affecting in the least the warrior who must have teleported directly between the car and the personnel carrier. Bourne didn't fire at the Molt, knowing that the armored vehicles shielded their attacker and that the poofs across the swale would respond to the submachine gun's "attack" on their fellows, no matter how good their fire discipline might be.
"Via! Three more, Profile," Lieutenant Hawker said, his pointing arm shifting 15°° to the right as the swale rang with the sound of a magnetic limpet mine gripping the steel side of the vehicle against which it had been slapped.
Rock broken by heavy shells, brush smoldering where the bursting charges of the antipersonnel bomblets had ignited it. No target yet, but Profile loosed a three-round burst to splash the boulders twenty meters from the oncoming APC and warn the poofs.
The armored car dissolved in a sheet of flame so intense that the shock wave a fraction of a second later seemed a separate event. A trio of Molts froze out of the air where Hawker had pointed and Bourne's own shots had left glazed scars on the stone a moment before.
He had a target now and he fired over open sights, two rounds into the back of the first warrior and three at the second, who leaped up into the last bolt when molten stone sprayed from the boulder sheltering him. A storm of fire from at least twenty Oltenian guns broke wildly on the general area. The Loot was shouting,"Close Profile!" his big arm pointing behind the jeep, but nothing this side of Hell was going to keep Bourne from his third kill—the Molt crouched behind his steaming powergun, firing into the APC as fast as his finger could pull the trigger.
Only when that Molt crumpled did the sergeant spin to shoot over the racked electronics modules replacing the jeep's back seat.Bourne lifted the heat-shivering muzzle of his gun even as his finger took up slack in the trigger. If he had fired as he intended into the center of mass of the warrior coalescing a meter away, the satchel charge the Molt was clutching to his chest would have gone off and vaporized the jeep. Instead, the distorted face of the autochthon dissolved in a burst so needlessly long that even Profile knew that he had panicked.
"Seventy-five,"the Loot was saying, and Bourne rotated toward the new target while the decapitated remains of his previous victim toppled backward. In the swale below, the APC crackled with what sounded like gunfire but was actually the explosion of ammunition within its burning interior. Seventy-five meters, a rough figure but there was a tangled clump of ground cover at about that distance in the direction the Loot was pointing, a flat-topped block jutting like a loggia garden into the gully. Bourne squeezed off what was intended to be a two-round burst alerting the poofs deployed on the further side.
There was a single cyan flicker from the submachine gun—he'd emptied the magazine on the previous Molt, leaving only one lonely disk in the loading pan.
Cursing because the warrior homing on the block was going to get a shot in for sure and the Loot was already pointing at another vector, the sergeant swapped magazines.
His eyes were open and searching the terrain for the new target, two hundred meters to the front and closer to the Oltenian battalion than to the jeep. The right handgrip enclosed the magazine well, and a veteran like Bourne had no need to look down for hand to find hand in an operation as familiar as reloading.
He had no need to worry about the warrior his shot had marked, as it turned out.
The standard poof shoulder weapon,a stubby shotgun, did not, with its normal load of flééchettes, have the range of the target. The outside surface of the gun tube could be used as the launching post for ring-airfoil grenades, however, like the one that hurled a pair of Molts in opposite directions from its yellow flash in the center of the target. Turret guns from armored vehicles were raking the blasted area as well, even hitting the corpses as they tumbled.
Could be some a' the poofs had sand in their craws after all.
A powergun too distant to be a target for Bourne under these circumstances was emptied in the direction of the jeep as fast as some warrior could pull the trigger. The bolts weren't really close—some of them were high enough for their saturated blue-green color to be lost in the sunlight. The trio that spattered rock eighty meters from the jeep—forty meters, twenty—were not less terrifying, however, for the fact that the next three missed by more than the sergeant could track.
Bourne's burst toward the Loot's latest warning was careless if not exactly frightened. He couldn't see anything and it was less of a threat than the snipers now ranging on them anyway . . . and then, when the Molt leaped into his vision while poof guns chopped furiously, the sergeant realized that the warrior was hiding from him, from the jeep, and fatally ignoring the Oltenians.
"Fox Victor," Lieutenant Hawker ordered, "roll 'em," and the bolt that shattered a boulder into fist-sized chunks ringing on the jeep came from the angle opposite the previous sniper.
"Loot, it's—" the driver said, reaching for the throttle left-handed. A hilltop barely visible puffed white, shells answering a satellite report of sniping, but that alone wouldn't be enough to save their ass. The trucks and armored vehicles of the poof battalion were rumbling from cover; a couple autochthons fired at them, missing badly.Via! If they could miss the broad,flat sides of an APC,how did they get so bloody close to the sheltered jeep?
"Right," said Hawker as he glanced at his display, still and yellow as it vainly awaited more teleporting autochthons,"let's ro—"and the last word was swept away by his driver's fierce acceleration out of the pocket of stone which had become an aiming point for the enemy far off.
The Loot was on Central's push, now, calling for panzers and a salvo of artillery, while Bourne jinked back up and away and the air winked with ill-aimed sniper fire. The bastards didn't need to be good, just lucky, and the bolt that fried sod a millisecond before the jeep's skirts whisked across it was almost lucky enough. Central was answering calmly, dryly—their butts weren't on the line!—but that wasn't something the sergeant had time for anyway. They'd done their job, done it bleedin' perfectly, and now it looked like they'd be lucky to get out with a whole skin.
Well, that was what happened when you tried to support the poofs.
As the jeep topped the ridge a second time but in the opposite direction, a bolt snapped past it from the far side of the grain field and coincidentally a truck blew up in the swale behind. The detection team could not prevent the support battalion from taking casualties when it traversed open ground.What the Loot's warnings—and Profile's own submachine gun, its barrel reeking with sublimed iridium and the finish it burned from the breastplate to which the elastic sling held it—had accomplished was to eliminate the warriors who knew the terrain so well that they could place themselves within millimeters of an opponent in the gully.There were surely other Molts with a nursery association with this area, but the autochthons—thank the Lord!—didn't have the organization to make a massed response to a sudden threat.
They didn't need to, of course, since a handful of warriors could stall a poof battalion, and weeks of long-range sniping eroded the Slammers' strength to no human purpose.
The shock wave from a six-tube salvo skewed the jeep even though the shells impacted on the far side of the ridge and none closer than a half kilometer to the course down which Bourne was speeding to escape. The Loot was having the Slammers' hogs blast clear the flanks of the Oltenian battalion, crumbling rocks that would otherwise stand as beacons for Molts bouncing closer to shoot down the axis of the swale. The poofs should've done that themselves, but their artillery control wasn't up to civilized standards, and their gun crews minced around in a funk fearing a Molt with a satchel charge would teleport aboard an ammo transporter. Which had happened often enough to give anybody the willies, come to think.
The warrior who had snapped shots at them earlier now had at least a pair of supporters—one of whom was too bloody good. Bourne spun and braked his vehicle,
fearing the brief pause during which their original downhill velocity was precisely balanced by thrust in the new direction. Lord help 'em if the Loot's request for heavy armor didn't come through the way the artillery support had done.
Though Colonel Hammer didn't leave his people hanging if there was any way around it.
The dark arch of the nursery tunnel into which Bourne headed the jeep was a perfect aiming point—hitting the center of a large target is easier than nailing a small one. The sergeant expected the entrance to be crisscrossed by the dazzling scatter of bolts squeezed off with all the care of which Molt marksmen were capable. He figured he had no hope save the autochthons' bad aim or bad timing. That there were no shots at all was as pleasant a surprise as he'd had since the night a whore tried to kill him with what turned out to be an empty gun . . . .
The tunnel was three meters wide and of simple design,an angled gallery rather than a labyrinth of interconnected chambers. The same purpose was achieved either way: the encouragement of the very young to teleport to points separated from them by solid barriers.
The same stone angles were just what the doctor ordered to block sniper fire—and as for anybody teleporting directly into the cave, they were cold meat as soon as the Loot's equipment picked them up.
"Safe!" the driver cried happily as he yanked the tiller left at the first 60° break, an edge of polished black granite that had not been dulled by rubbing shoulders as it would have been in a structure occupied by humans.
The warrior just around that corner pointed his Oltenian shotgun squarely at Profile's face.
Molt cave systems were not unlighted—the autochthons actually saw less well in dim conditions than humans did. The roof of this particular tunnel was painted with a strip of—imported—permanent fluorescent, powered by the same piezoelectrical forces which made the rock a beacon for teleporters. It gave off only a pale glow, however, inadequate for irises contracted by the sun outside, so it was in the jeep's front floods that the Molt's eyes gaped. His shadow against the gleaming stone was half again his real height, and the muzzle of the gun seemed broad as the tunnel.
Bourne fluffed his front fans to full screaming lift with his right hand.
He could have shot, have killed the warrior. Man and Molt were equally surprised, and Profile Bourne's reflexes were a safe bet against just about anybody's in those situations.
And then the charge of flééchettes, triggered by the warrior's dying convulsion, would have shredded both men from the waist upward.
Lieutenant Hawker shouted as he fired through the hologram display which had failed to warn him. The Molt was already within the tunnel before the jeep entered,so there were no indicia of teleportation for the apparatus to detect.They should have thought of that,but the lightning-swiftd anger of the snipers outside had made the cave mouth a vision of safety like none since Mother's bosom.
That was the sort of instinctive error that got your ass killed, thought Hawker as his energy bolts scarred long ovals across the ceiling's fluorescence, ricocheting further down the tunnel in diminishing deadliness, and the Molt's shotgun blasted deafeningly into the uplifted skirt and plenum chamber of the jeep.
The screech of the jeep striking and skidding along the tunnel wall at a 45° angle was actively painful to Profile Bourne. You didn't get to be as good a driver as he was without empathy for your vehicle, and the shriek of metal crumpling was to the sergeant comparable to skidding along a hard surface himself. But he'd done that too, thrown himself down on gravel when shots slammed overhead. You do what you gotta do; and anyway, the Molt's body when the jeep hit it provided a pretty fair lubricant.
Their forward velocity had been scrubbed off by the contact rather than killed by the vectored fans in normal fashion. Bourne chopped the throttle so that the braking thrust would not slam them back against the far wall. The jeep slumped down onto its skirts again, its back end ringing on the stone a moment before the whole vehicle came to rest.
The sergeant knew that he ought to be watching the next angle in case another warrior, prepared by the racketing death of the first, came around it shooting. Instead he closed his eyes for a moment and squeezed his hands together hard enough to make the thin flesh start up around the print of each fingertip. Lord, he'd almost pissed himself!
When he opened his eyes, he saw the tiny, glittering dimple in the steel flooring just between his boots. It was a flééchette from the shotgun charge which had come within a millimeter of doing the warrior's business—or half of it—despite the fact that the roof of the plenum chamber was in the way.
Lord and martyrs!
"Lord and martyrs," muttered Lieutenant Hawker as he stepped out of the vehicle, and curst if he didn't seem as shook as the driver felt. "Don't worry, got it on aural," he added with a nod toward the hologram display and a left-handed tap on the earpiece of his commo helmet. The data relayed through the headset was less instantly assimilable than what his eyes could intake through the holograms—but there were only two directions from which an attack could come in the tunnel.
Anyhow, Profile figured that he needed to walk out the wobbles he could feel in his legs. Maybe the Loot was the same.
Before the sergeant left the jeep, he switched off the headlights which would otherwise be only a targeting aid to whatever Molts were around. The rock quivered when he stepped onto it, an explosion somewhere, and he cursed or prayed—who knew?—at the thought that another salvo of penetrators on the back slope of the ridge might bring the bloody ceiling down and accomplish what the autochthons had failed to do. What the hell, nobody'd ever told him he'd die in bed.
Bourne skidded at his first step. He glanced down, thinking that the stone beneath his boots must have a glass-smooth polish. It wasn't that—and the Molt with the shotgun deserved worse, it'd been too cursed quick for him.
The two Slammers used handsignals at the next angle,five meters further down the tunnel. They could as easily have subvocalized the plan on the intercom, but Profile's quick tap on his own breastplate and the Loot's grimace of acceptance was all that it took anyway.
Bourne put a single shot against the facing wall, the bolt crackling like shattered brick as it bounced from the stone.A fraction of a second later,the sergeant himself went in low.
The shot might have drawn a reflexive return from anyone poised to meet them around the angle—but there was no one, no adult at least: they were in the nursery itself, a circular room no wider than the tunnel from which it was offset to the left, just around the second angle. There were eighteen reed and moss crèèches like the pips on an instrument dial, and about half of them still squirmed with infant Molts.
"S'all right, Loot!" Bourne shouted as he rolled into a sitting position; and for all the encouragement of his words, his ankles were crossed in a firm shooter's rest beneath him. "S'all clear, just the babes."
The flash of the shot was still a retinal memory to Bourne as he glanced around the chamber, blinking as if to wash the spreading orange blot from the black surface of his eyeballs. The scars of the ricochet were marked by powdered stone at a constant chest height along the circularwall.No significant amount of energy would have sprayed the infants, but they were mewing fearfully anyway.
The Loot came in behind the muzzle of his gun—you didn't leave decisions of safety to somebody else, even Sergeant Bourne, not in a place like this.
The Molt in the crèèche closest to Bourne teleported neatly into his lap, scaring the sergeant into a shout and a leap upward that ended with the infant clamped hard against him and the muzzle of Lieutenant Hawker's submachine gun pointed dead on. The little Molt squealed even more loudly.
"Let's get the cop outa here before the locals put a flame gun down the tunnel and investigate later," Hawker said as he ported his weapon again, making no apology for aiming it toward a teleporting autochthon, even one in Bourne's lap. "Doesn't seem those Molts'll snipe at us here, what with the little ones in the line of fire."
"Right,"said his drive
r,kneeling to put the infant back in its—his? her?—crèèche. There were air shafts cut from the chamber's ceiling to the surface twenty or thirty meters above. Through them now sank, competing with the powergun's ozone prickliness, not only the ash and blast residues of the shelling but the stomach-turning sweetness of diesel fumes.The vehicles of Fox Victor had gained the ridge and should by now be advancing down the reverse slope, covered by shellfire against likely sniper positions.
"No,here,"said Lieutenant Hawker,reaching out with aleft hand that seemed large enough to encircle the infant Molt which he took from Bourne."You need to drive. We'll clear these out and then get a squad a' engineers to blow the place before it causes more trouble."
Little bastards looked less human than the adults, Bourne thought as he strode quickly back to the jeep, calm again with the tension of battle released by two sudden shocks within the tunnel.You could only be so scared, and then it all had to let go—or you cracked,and Profile Bourne didn't crack.The limbs of the young Molt were very small, more like those of a newt or lizard than of a human baby. Even as adults, the autochthons were shorter and more lightly built than most humans, but after a few years of age there was no difference in proportions.
"I suppose it's because the ones that crawl least do the other—teleport—better," said the Loot as he swung his big frame into the seat behind the displays, still holding the infant Molt. Via, maybe he could read his driver's mind; they'd worked through some curst tight places in the past few years. But it was a natural thing to wonder about if you saw the little ones up close like this, and the Loot was smart, he figured out that sort of thing.
Right now, the only thing Bourne really wanted to figure out was how to find a quiet spot where nobody would try to blow him away for a while. He'd given enough gray hairs to this buggering planet and its buggered poof army already!