Outlanders 27 awakenin.., p.22
Outlanders 27 - Awakening, page 22
KANE WATCHED strikes sparkle off the snout and flanks of the onrushing armored wag. The rocketeers hadn't gotten the range yet. Their missiles had screamed right over the smoking cupola to blow big bright holes in the night, filled by dark as quickly as pebble craters in a flowing stream. But the autoblaster men were hosing down the beast for true. He could see strikes flashing on its side armor and sharply angled snout.
"Damn," Grant grunted beside him. "They got some big ones."
"Balls, mebbe," Kane said, "not brains."
He frowned. The sound of his own words, barely audible even to himself over the horrific racket erupting just a few hundred yards away, set alarms buzzing in his head that he had no trouble hearing.
Something was wrong. Blood wrong!
"Mebbe they just decided to go out in a flash of fire and make a quick end of it all," he said. Speaking each word felt like a trip-hammer blow to his windpipe from the inside.
As Kane spoke, a demi-globe of fire sprouted like a mushroom from the big wag's right side. A LAW fired from the flank had struck full center, right at the turret root. Still the monster came on as if determined to engage its bigger cousin in a butting contest.
Kane's longtime partner and back watcher heard the doubt in his voice even though he could barely make out the words. "You're not getting one of your point man's gut feelings?"
"You know it."
Then Kane leaped to his feet, waving his shadow-suit clad arms and screaming into the face of the din.
BOLT WATCHED HITS from his 20 mm chin gun sparkle right along the length of the huge armored wag. They're doing dick! he realized in impotent rage.
Hardly anyone was even bothering to shoot at him. The hundreds of outlander scum on the ground were devoting all their loving attention to the armored vehicle pinned in the spotlights from the monster wag.
Well, so much the better. "Kozlowski," he called to his pilot, "take us around. Let's hit this huge son of a bitch in the ass and see if that wakes the bastards up!"
THE EIGHT-WHEELED armored wag hit the shoulder of the odd bump of hill behind which Titano had lurked in wait for it. As it ramped up, its right front wheel struck a projecting lump of rock. With surprising deliberation the LAV rolled to its left. The right-hand tires broke loose in sprays of black dirt, and the steel beast fell to its side with a concussion Kane felt in his belly as he lay on the ground. Momentum carried it on ten yards past Titano's front hatch.
Whooping triumph, Lakota warriors boiled up from hiding like cicadas being born from the earth. A dozen, fifteen, twenty rushed upon it, blasters discarded or forgotten, each man avid to be the first to touch the fallen monster.
Kane actually recognized the first man to the wag when he slapped it with a horny palm and then turned to raise his tomahawk in the air in triumph. The young warrior was named Horse thief. A Cheyenne, his victory seemed to madden the Lakota, who swarmed onto the toppled wag disregarding the menace of the still-spinning tires, which had the torque to rip a man apart with those big cleats. Let the Cheyenne have the glory of touching mere metal; to a Lakota true and good would go the honor of seizing any crew who might somehow yet be breathing inside as entertainment for the coming victory dance!
And Kane knew at once just exactly what his gut was telling his forebrain was wrong. He jumped up waving and yelling, "No, no, get back. Sky Dog, get them off that fucking thing!"
TWO HUNDRED YARDS back down the valley, the iron- hard hand of Joe Weaver pointed a small molded-plastic device that looked like a TV remote from a long-dead time toward his fallen steel steed and pressed a button. Responsive to its radio command, two detonators, each attached to satchel charges filled with five kilos of C-4 plastic explosive, flashed off. The meticulous ex-lawyer and machinist had left three, but one had been disabled by the antitank rocket strike.
Two were more than enough to start the armor bulging outward in a blast that would eventually rip wide open the whole upward flank of the LAV. The sudden hellstorm of superheated gas turned the armored interior into a furnace even as the shock wave started sympathetic explosions among the hundreds of kilograms of munitions stored within.
For a moment Big Bob's helpless carcass, wheels spinning futilely like an upended high-tech beetle, simply vanished in a dome of yellow-white glare, for all the world like the fireball of a tactical nuke. Perched beside the moaning Major Mike atop the gear strapped to Little Alice, Joe Weaver felt a momentary tug of nostalgia for the national labs, whose corridor walls were decked with hundreds of pictures of various stages of nuclear and thermonuclear shots from around the world, back in the old atmospheric-testing days. They were in truth quite pretty.
So was this.
He tossed the command detonator away. "Let's go," he said.
"Hang on," Sean Reichert commanded, and put the pedal to the metal.
KANE FELT SOMETHING like a steel claw close on his ankle. Then it was yanked from beneath him. He fell to the ground with a slam and a curse.
To either side of them warriors had forgotten they were supposed to be waiting in ambush—for two vehicles, not one—and leaped to their feet to cheer their victory. Kane heard a strange rushing sound with just an edge of whistle. Then a sound like a cleaver striking meat.
Something fell heavily right across his legs, flopping. Wet spray struck his cheek as he turned his head to look back.
The half-naked body of a Lakota warrior lay sprawled across him. Or rather half a body. Blood slogged black from the stump of torso, driven by residual hydrostatic pressure and the twitching of the great thigh muscles, now deprived of CNS control. The man had been cut neatly in two at about the short ribs by a chunk of armor blasted from the toppled wag, spinning like a circular saw.
"You can thank me later," Grant said from the ground beside him. He had let go of Kane's leg. "Remind me," Kane said.
A BODY SAILED out Titano's open side hatch, wreathed in thin blue flames and strings of white smoke. The man who had been standing in the doorway had been lucky enough to catch a face and chestful of metal frags expelled from the blast at rifle-shot velocity, which drove the life right out the back of him. Maybe a hundred of those fragments had been white phosphorus, and each was now busily and inextinguishably cremating him from the inside out.
Others had not been so lucky. They lived. For a few horrific moments, anyway.
Big Bob had ceased to exist save as a weird flower of jagged metal flattened outward on the ground. It was as if it had been a giant surprise package with Hell inside and under pressure. At least twelve of the fleetest warriors waiting at the base of the fire sack had simply been vaporized by the blast, including the Horse thief. Others were strewed around, some reduced to wet components, others writhing, others flailing and shrieking as Willy Peter devoured them. There would be wailing in many lodges of the Lakota the following morning, and for many days thereafter.
A warrior appeared in the MCP's hatch with an M-16. He began shooting his own comrades with quick tribursts. The Lakota were willing enough to help their enemies expire in torment, but watching their own people slowly burn was more than they were willing to take. He was silhouetted by a strange dancing hell glow from hundreds of WP particles that had been dusted into Titano's interior through the open hatch. Puffs of white vapor from fire extinguishers curled out around him; the warriors within were quickly discovering that wouldn't cut it. Each and every fleck would have to be dug out with pliers or a knife tip.
The blaster's mission of mercy was rudely interrupted when he himself was blasted back into the weirdly glowing interior of the giant armored wag, trailing ribbons of black blood from a chest suddenly shattered by a pulse of .50-caliber slugs.
WREATHED in muzzle-flashes, Little Alice bounced and tore right through the devastation that once had been the unbreakable base of a perfectly crafted ambush, right through the blaze of lights from the front and flanks of the giant MCP. Hardly anybody shot at them. The men on the ground were still too dazed by the horrific turn of events—not to mention the sheer physical shock of the high-ex blast's pressure wave—to do much. Such gunners inside Titano as hadn't strayed from their mounts were shooting at the lone Deathbird still circling them like an angry wasp.
Reichert needed both hands to steer the little car past the smoking wreck of its big brother at forty miles per hour. Robison and Doted were blasting madly from their machine guns, ignoring the G-forces that slammed them this way and that against restraining straps that were all that kept them from being launched into the air like projectiles themselves. Joe Weaver had strapped himself to the roll bar with a web belt and was holding on with one hand while shooting Larry Robison's autoloading Saiga combat shotgun with the other.
They passed, unscathed, down the forbidding armored flank of the MCP and onward toward the narrow gap that was all that lay between them and safety.
"I'M STARTING to admire these guys," Grant said grudgingly. "But they're really starting to piss me off." "It's about over now," his partner said. He wasn't shooting. Neither was Grant. He could tell himself it was because he didn't want to burn ammo on a lousy target, which was true, or that the car and its mad-brave occupants were heading for certain destruction in less than a handful of seconds, also true. The fact was, both men recognized the small, slim figure sitting in the backward-facing position at the rear of the little car despite the camou battle dress that covered up most of her milk-white skin.
Let the Lakota finish this. Kane and Grant would concentrate on doing their best to keep the hyper-excited warriors from chilling Domi.
And then they would wring some answers out of her well-turned little white ass.
IT WAS REICHERT'S TURN to raise a rebel yell as they passed out of the pool of brilliant light cast by the armored monster's floods. His left thigh burned like fire from a bullet strike, but the Kevlar-backed spider silk had stopped it.
"Is everybody alive?" he shouted.
Even through the bone-conduction speaker taped over his mastoid process he could barely hear the replies for the ringing in his ears. But he got three responses.
Then four, as Major Mike chimed in, piping in falsetto, "I'm not dead yet."
I wonder how ticked Domi'd be if she knew that was another movie quote, Reichert thought, filling with admiration for the older man's bravado.
Then an old one-lung truck with its bed piled high with hunks of native granite rolled out of the night to their right, dead across their path.
Chapter 26
Brigid Baptiste felt her whole being tighten as she watched the green blob that was the openwork scout car, fruited with smaller, more intense blobs, rush headlong toward a gap between two almost unbroken lines of other vaguely man-shaped blobs. She knew that was the final piece of the trap, the final fatal ambush, with both Kane and Grant on hand to insure the kill stroke fell cleanly and was neither dodged nor deflected.
The spy sat was catching the scene on the eastern face of the Bitterroots at a strong oblique. The satellite online had only infrared capabilities at night, no light enhancement. It would soon be beyond a position in which it could show them any images of the battle.
No sat orbited in position for their distant watcher to hand them off to--or none whose existence Lakesh, who stood beside Brigid in the control center fidgeting his weight from one foot to the other, would acknowledge. Given that he was still plainly infatuated with Domi, he was probably playing any and all aces he happened to be secreting in the sleeve of his white lab coat.
He showed no sign of purposeful movement to her peripheral vision. She couldn't bear to turn away from the screen, any more than she could bear to watch. She spoke without looking at him.
"Are you sure you know what you're doing? Or are you trying to grab all the marbles, and running a real serious risk of losing them all at one stroke?"
He did turn his round head to glare at her with intense blue eyes that seemed to be the last thing about him visibly to age. She realized her voice had rung with far more bitterness than she had intended. Still, she didn't regret it or try to mitigate it after the fact.
Lakesh controlled himself with an effort Brigid could feel. He turned his face back to the big screen. "Let me put it this way to you, my dear Brigid," he said stiffly. "We all are playing for the highest stakes here, and I do not mean just in this instance. We wage war for humanity's future. For its very soul. I must gamble with the lives of my friends—people who are very dear to my heart, and whether you acknowledge it or not, I do not only mean our most beautiful females such as yourself.
"But you must also admit I wager my life no less readily than any others. And in this present case I hold to my belief that all parties of interest to us are likely to find some way to survive this encounter. Should any of them fail to do so—" he hunched and relaxed his shoulders, beginning to stoop again with returning age "—then they are not the implements I deemed them to be, and their loss will be small loss to our cause... however deeply we feel it in our souls."
Inside Brigid's mind red flames reared. She felt a sudden blazing desire to turn the flames upon him, to sear him for his callousness, for his manipulation—no less of her, right now, than his too human, too feeling, too vulnerable chess pieces away across the dark, forbidding mountains. But she felt the pressure of his eyes on her again. And something inside her, the imperturbable archivist, began to play cooling mists on the inferno within.
"Do you truly not have faith in our friends, most precious Brigid?" Lakesh asked, quite ingenuously to her ears. "Mine remains most firm."
He looked back up at the screen. "Let us wait and see."
BOLT'S DEATHBIRD CIRCLED above the confusion of the battleground, which was no greater than the confusion that existed in the senior Magistrate's mind.
Claw Three lay half a klick to the west, a pyre with a yellow-white core. Even as the fugitive armored vehicle blew up, the Deathbird had taken a rocket from the huge war wag dead center of the pilot's view screen. He had been flash-blasted.
Mendoza had fared less well. Bolt had had to shut off that channel to avoid being distracted by the sound of the trapped man screaming as he was incinerated inside the wrecked helicopter.
Now Claw One circled the killing ground below while Bolt tried to make sense of what was happening. His relentlessly practical determination warred with the natural investigator within him. The action-Mag course was to say screw a bunch of questions, let the scum chill each other and then flash-blast the survivors. Which was going on anyway beneath his Deathbird's belly. But the cop in him wanted to know why. Not from abstract intellectual curiosity, which was not one of Senior Magistrate Bolt's cardinal vices, but from his obsessive devotion to serving his baron and barony for the greater glory of the Magistrate Division. These weren't just two random clots of coldhearts who happened to bump into each other and wound up scrapping and snarling at each other like rabid dog packs. These were two groups that should not exist under the unification program, far too well-armed and organized, carrying out purposeful actions against each other.
Cobaltville could suffer the existence of neither band to continue. Why they came to exist, how they managed to do so undetected and what brought them into conflict with each other were all questions of actual, immediate import to the barony. Possibly to all nine baronies; the answers might override the political imperatives driving the multisided civil war that was tearing the baronies apart in the wake of the imperator's fall.
Because if there were two such groups of lethally dangerous renegades...there might be more. Bolt knew not in the way of a physicist but the manner of an old street cop how sorely the universe detested two of anything. Experience had taught him there could be just one of a thing, or, obviously, none. But if two existed, the odds were overwhelming that a lot more did.
Which could mean the social contract enforced by the Program of Unification, the self-perpetuating cycle of guilt and compliance imposed upon the brutalized survivors of decades of disaster, was breaking down. Which was akin to the hinges of the gates of Hell rusting through.
For the moment, Bolt wasn't shooting at anybody. If by some chance the little car did blast through the waiting ambush, he could finish it off with his chin gun. But he would try to leave at least one renegade in shape to be interrogated, and order the ground force of Mags churning rapidly closer in their Sandcats to catch at least one of the bunch alive. Meantime, the more of each other the two groups chilled, the fewer casualties his own side would risk.
A flash filled his flat, slanted windscreen. Although his polarized goggles saved him being dazzled, he threw up black-armored arms in reflex. His huge jaw tightened as fragments slammed against the polycarbonate.
It held, though the slender war craft shuddered spasmodically. He lowered his gloved hands slowly, almost reluctantly to believe the Deathbird's armor had withstood such savage assault yet again. It had received quite a workout tonight.
But he was hearing something strange. In a sick moment he realized what it was.
Nothing.
The sibilant whine of the twin turbine engines had cut out. Undoubtedly their jet intakes had sucked in fragments from the explosion of whatever kind of warhead had gone off in front of them. FOD--Foreign Object Damage—had snapped delicate blades spinning at monster rpm, turning them into high-velocity projectiles that eviscerated the motors in an instant.
As he raised his head, he could feel the glow of red lights from his own instrument panel on his chin as if it came from heated metal. The rotor disk was still in reassuring place above, its shimmer blurring the stars. But it seemed to him he could see the two long shadows of blades beginning to resolve into visibility even as he watched.
"Yes, I know we're auto-rotating," he overrode his pilot's excited attempt to report the blindingly obvious. "Put us down as far from this goat screw and as close to our ground forces as you can. Damn!"
He slammed a fist futilely on his unresponsive board.
REICHERT YANKED the wheel hard left. The overloaded and high-piled DPV heeled way over. Her right-hand wheels actually left the ground for a heart-stopping instant.
