His quiet choice made her proud and sad at the same time, a feeling that was wild and lonely and right. Even worse than the Leadville government controlling this nanotech would be no one having it at all. Young had no intention of blowing up what so many people had struggled so hard to attain.
They were slow, the jeep straining to pull its load, but even at twenty-five miles per hour they were up Folsom Boulevard and moving north on 54th before they heard the planes again.
The fighters crossed overhead, a sky quake. Pressed between D.J. and Cam at the rear of the jeep, not down in the bench seat but perched on the rim of the vehicle’s body, Ruth tried to look around but lowered her head before she lost her balance.
They bumped through the adjoining yards, briefly dodging eastward, then continued north on 55th. Half a block later they pointed west. From this point on it was a straight shot back through nineteen residential blocks until they approached the highway, and Jennings accelerated to keep up with the ’dozer.
“We’re going to make it,” Young said.
The enemy C-130 came head-on over square shapes of the city horizon, low and lazy, and Ruth twisted her head around again to look for the sun, completely disoriented.
Were they driving the wrong way? “Where are—”
Other voices made a confusion of the radio: “Jesus they’re the airport’s south of right at us!”
They couldn’t be lost. There was only one path back through the ruins, so the big cargo plane must be flying out of the west rather than eastward from the mountains. Soon it would pass over the freeway directly toward them.
Objects tumbled down behind the aircraft. Canisters of the snowflake nano-weapon.
Ruth tried to scream and couldn’t, lungs caught, already dead— No. The snowflake would be useless against people in containment suits. The tumbling objects were men, thick with gear, and long appendages whipped upward from each human figure and rippled and spread. Parachutes.
Already there were half a dozen rectangular gliders seesawing down in the C-130’s wake.
29
A wet shock of blood hit Cam’s faceplate as Jennings lurched back from the steering wheel. The snap of the man’s head was abrupt and vicious, and Cam jerked and shouted as gunfire rolled over the street.
Dead, helmet torn, Jennings bounced forward again from his seat and fell across the wheel. The jeep swerved left at thirty-five miles per hour, slowing as his boot slid off the gas but rammed on by the trailer’s weight and inertia.
The shift of momentum was a steepening terror in Cam as his thinking exploded.
Past the Thirty-eighth block, Olson had spotted an olive drab glider hung up in a cluster of trees, its harness open, the paratrooper gone — and Captain Young had shrugged and said to keep going. They knew they were surrounded. They knew they were outnumbered. Counts varied but they agreed that more than forty chutes had swept down from the C-130, gathered mostly in a large batch ahead of them and a smaller group behind.
Young hoped to bluff their way through, but the sniper’s kill shot had been timed with at least one other marksman.
Eyes wide, mind wide, Cam saw Trotter spin off the roof of the bulldozer’s cage ten yards ahead. Farther on, muzzle flashes erupted along the squat brick wall of an apartment complex and from behind the corners of a condominium building, more than a dozen erratic bursts on and off like a firing of synapses.
The ’dozer took the brunt of it. Sparks and yellow paint dust jumped up from the hard iron and Sergeant Olson fell with Trotter. In the driver’s seat Dansfield bucked and shook, shredded as a few rounds chanced between the slats of armor and then pinwheeled back and forth.
Riding shotgun in the jeep, Young shouldered against Jennings’s body to straighten the wheel. Too late. He kept the jeep and trailer from jackknifing — and maybe from turning over as the trailer’s mass continued forward — but bad luck had a red Toyota minivan angled across their path.
They struck the van doing twenty-five or more, their right fender punching the corner of its rear end. Both vehicles rocked and the smaller, heavier jeep butted against the minivan’s side.
No one was wearing safety belts. Jennings and Young couldn’t fit into theirs, unable to sit properly because of their air tanks, and in back Cam and the three scientists were perched together above the bench seat.
Impact threw Cam sideways into Young’s back. Todd, opposite him, began to topple out of the jeep but was hit by the side of the van at the same time that Ruth and D.J. were carried forward over Cam in a tangle of bodies. Someone’s arm mashed his headset against his skull.
Pinned beneath them, against the dashboard, Young squirmed out through the open side of the jeep.
On the radio a man wept — who else had been shot? — and they were all breathing like dogs. Cam dragged himself into the space that Young had cleared, then dropped onto the asphalt. Blunt jigsaw chunks of safety glass rolled like pebbles under his forearms and belly.
The minivan and the jeep had come to rest in a cockeyed T-shape, the trailer bent around to make something like a triangle, and to Cam’s widened perceptions the little import van felt like a huge bulk between himself and the paratroopers.
Then a knot of rifle rounds tore through the dented panel above his head and slammed into the jeep. Tink tak tak.
“Cover cover gimme anything!” That was Young. His faceplate had a stress fracture across his brow and he looked past Cam at the trailer with one eye shut, the skin on that cheekbone and temple rubbed raw. “Newcombe!”
Two minutes ago Cam had considered asking for a pistol. They had extra guns stripped from the Marines, but Young had been off the general frequency, communicating with their pilots and maybe Leadville as well, and the spare gun belts were on the trailer with Newcombe and Iantuano—
Jennings. There was a gun on Jennings’s corpse.
Even as Cam thought it, crabbing onto his knees, Young and someone on the trailer managed a small amount of return fire — the sporadic, heavy bark of Glock 9mm pistols. Young didn’t even bother to aim, his arm thrust under the minivan.
The paratroopers responded and Cam stayed flat as a shower of glass clattered over him, mixed with slower-falling shreds of paint, plastic, and upholstery. But the rifle fire didn’t sound as concentrated as before. Some of the troopers were advancing, he realized, and must have ducked at the pistol shots.
Young was slowing them down but probably not by much.
Cam rose from the asphalt against all instinct, overcoming his own fear-stiffened muscles. Any safety the ground provided was a lie. If Leadville had been negotiating with Young since their first exchange, it was only a ploy. This ambush was Leadville’s true response, and showed a willingness to pick up whatever pieces were left rather than risk recapturing nothing at all — and if Cam and the others were overrun here in the street, they could all expect a bullet in the head.
So close, the troopers would kill them out of self-defense, to prevent them from detonating the explosives Young had threatened to use.
Cam hunched into the side of the jeep and clawed at Jennings. He screamed when a bullet sang off of the jeep beside him, near enough that the vibration went into his chest. Then he ducked back to the ground, dragging Jennings by the neck.
He glimpsed Todd above him, still lying in the rear of the jeep and using his body to shield Ruth and D.J. Todd’s voice was a mantra, a mumble, his headset either damaged or knocked off somewhere inside his suit: “Down, down, stay down!”