“Going fast, eh?” Zefla grinned, dashing past.
The second foil reflector dropped and spread ten metres ahead of Sharrow. She stopped, breathing hard, a furnace in the back of her throat. Zefla jogged on, fifty metres in front of her. Sharrow looked back; the train came on, still slowing; the noise stayed almost constant as the slipstream ebbed and the wail of protesting superconductors gradually faded as the train drew closer.
Then it was above her, the carriages flicking past just a couple of metres over her head; the train’s sleek nose hit the second foil screen and held it, tearing it from its stays so that the glistening membrane wrapped round the snout of the front carriage, snapping and cracking around it until the train drew to a stop.
She was just behind the rear of the last carriage; it hung, swinging slightly from the white line of track. She ran on, jumping ridges in the limestone and following Zefla, her gun out ready in front of her. Zefla glanced back.
Suddenly something dropped out of the train from the second-last carriage, between Sharrow and Zefla. In the same instant as it came fluttering down from the still-swinging hatch she recognised the gold and black shape as a Huhsz uniform. Sharrow knew Zefla would dive for cover just there. Sharrow went in the same direction, dropping into the cover of a corrugation in the karst, her gun tracking the falling uniform.
The Huhsz officer’s cape hit the ground as empty as it had been when it left the train. Dust rose. She aimed at the opened hatchway. A hand gun and face appeared. She waited. Hand gun and face withdrew again.
A movement to her right made her heart race briefly before she realised it was the shadow of the train on a long ridge of karst by the track-side; she was seeing what must be Dloan and Cenuij’s shadows as they got into position above the train.
Sharrow shifted her position a few metres along the shallow trench into better cover.
Something else fell from the train, at its nose; the foil screen flashed and glittered, rustling to the ground.
“Shit,” Sharrow breathed. She touched the side of her mask. “Foil’s fallen off,” she broadcast. “Break something.”
“Right,” Dloan’s voice said.
They’d smeared the second foil with glue so that it would stick to the front of the train, but obviously it hadn’t held; now the railway’s technicians and controllers back in Yadayeypon would be looking at their screens and read-outs and seeing a clear view in front of the train and probably no indications of damage. Soon they would start thinking about letting the train continue on its way again.
There was a pause, then a loud bang from above. Sharrow relaxed a little; that ought to be Dloan and Cenuij doing something terminal to the train’s power supply. A brief grinding noise overhead, and the sight of the second-last carriage settling down a little lower and sitting very still while the other carriages swayed slightly, confirmed that its superconductors were no longer holding it up inside the monorail; the train was trapped.
She glanced back, down to the end of the train and beyond. A line of dust a kilometre or so away was Miz in the All-Terrain. She looked back to the hatch; a larger gun appeared, and a face; the gun sparkled.
The ridge of karst Sharrow had been crouched behind earlier dissolved in an erupting cloud of dust and a rasping bellow of noise as a thousand tiny explosions tore through the brittle, eroded stone. Sharrow was too close to do anything but curl up and try to shield herself from the shrapnel slivers of stone whirling away from the devastation. Debris pattered against her back; a couple of the impacts stung like needles. She tried to roll further away, then when the noise stopped but she could hear rifle shots, leapt up, firing.
Bullets sparked round the empty hatch; the hatch cover itself clanged and jerked and swayed as Zefla’s fire hit and pierced it from the other side.
There was a percussive thump from the hatch; something flashed into the ground and exploded. The air was filled by a crackling noise and the ground under the hatch leapt and danced with tiny explosions, all raising dust about the initial impact site; there was an impression of blurring, buzzing, furious movement in the air.
Sharrow ducked down, cursing. She pulled a small flare from her satchel, lit it and lobbed it to one side of the spreading ripple of explosions.
They’d fired a flea-cluster round. The individual microgrenades each had twelve random, explosive bounces to find the heat signature of a human being nearby, then they would blow up anyway. Properly used they were devastating, but the canister was designed to be lobbed, not fired straight down into the ground; she guessed less than half the micro-grenades had survived the initial shock.
Sharrow kept down, waiting for one of the deadly little pebbles to land at her feet, doubting that any of them would be distracted by the burning flare. Then a stuttered ripple of noise announced the tiny grenades had self-destructed. She peeked up, gun ready.
A head appeared looking down from the hatchway. She shot it. The man’s head jerked once, as though nodding at something; then it hung there, and a limp arm flopped out of the hatch. Blood started to fall towards the dark cape lying on the karst. The arm and head were pulled away inside. She fired the rest of the magazine, watching most of the bullets spark and ricochet off the train’s underside.
“Fuck this,” Sharrow said. She kept the rifle trained on the hatch one-handed, reloaded it, then pulled the HandCannon out of her pocket, put it to her mouth and sprang the magazine, catching it in her teeth; she turned it round with the hand holding the pistol, pushing the magazine home again. She tight-beamed to where she thought Zefla was. “Zef?”
Nothing.
“Zef?” she broadcast.
“Morning,” Zefla drawled, almost lazily.
“Cover.”
“Okay.”
Zefla started firing at the hatch door again. Sharrow fired too, then scrambled out of the karst trench and ran, leaping over the corrugations, towards the small crater where the flea-cluster round had landed. She got almost underneath the hatch; Zefla stopped firing. Sharrow aimed the rifle at the underbelly of the train carriage just in front of the hatch, then fired a dozen rounds into the metal. Some ricocheted; one whined past her left shoulder. She took out the HandCannon and fired into the same area, the recoil punching back into her hand and shaking her whole arm as the gun bellowed; the A-P rounds left neat little holes in the carriage skin.
Something moved in the hatchway she loosed the rest of the pistol’s rounds into the hatchway itself, the noise changing from the sharp crack of the Armour-Piercing shells to the whine of the flechette rounds. Then she ran, back and to one side, out from under the train. She rolled into cover, crying out as a sharp edge of karst sliced through her jacket and cut her shoulder. She sat up, quickly rubbed her shoulder, then reloaded while Miz pulled up the All-Terrain directly under the train’s last carriage.
From here she could see the top of the train and the monorail itself. Dloan and Cenuij had disappeared; there was a hint of an opened section on the roof of the last carriage.
Suddenly the Huhsz carriage shook; its windows shattered and burst, spraying out. There was a sharp, manic buzz of noise she recognised, and a series of popping, crackling noises; a couple of the flea-rounds jumped out of the shattered carriage and leapt around like tiny firecrackers on the karst surface for a few seconds, then they detonated. The wrecked Huhsz carriage stayed silent; grey smoke drifted from it.
“What the fuck was that?” Miz broadcast from the All-Terrain.
“Flea-cluster,” Sharrow said. “Cenuij? Dloan?” she called urgently.
“Here,” Cenuij sighed.
“You guys all right?” Zefla’s voice said.
“Both fine; they tried to roll a flea-cluster at us. Our large friend rolled it straight back in at them and closed the door. He’s just gone in for a look round.”