“Shane!” Zanzibar yelled, ignoring Tetsami. “Shane! Who are they? How many? Where?”
Damn it, Zanzibar, she might be dead. Tetsami uncurled from the seat and found footing to stand upright. They only had minutes, maybe seconds—and Shane was the only one to see their attackers. Tetsami looked at Shane, who was still wedged in the passenger footwell where she’d taken cover. Shane was now in a fetal position, glued to the ground by the chair and the warped front of the van.
“Shane?” Tetsami said.
There was a groan and Zanzibar almost pushed Tetsami aside to get at Shane. That was enough. “Damn it, Zanzibar! Cover our ass. You’ve got the fucking weapon!”
Zanzibar looked startled.
“NOW!”
The mental logjam broke, and Zanzibar took cover and watched out the broken rear of the van.
That was a waste of three seconds. “Shane?”
Another moan. Then, “I think I’m trapped in here.”
“Where are they?”
“Only saw the one. Octagonal high-rise. Roof. North.” Shane began to breathe heavy. “Marines. Colonel’s cleanup crew.”
“How many?”
Shane took a long time to answer. After another moan she said, “At least three. Snipers cover the intersection, ambush. Ground team, maybe.”
Shane had to pause to breathe. Her voice sounded wet. “Circle to get us ...” Shane’s voice faded and she didn’t respond when Tetsami tried to rouse her. At least her breathing was steady.
After too long assessing Shane’s condition, Tetsami asked, “You hear that, Zanzibar?”
“Yes, damn it. This weapon gives us shit for cover from those snipers. It’s a short-range plasma rifle. It’d hold off a ground team, for a while. But the snipers can hold us down here indefinitely. All they have to do is frag the van.”
“You see any snipers?”
“One. The guy who took off the rear of the van is halfway up the trapezoidal building to the east of the intersection.”
“Any cover out there?”
“The construction above us blocks the guy to the north. But the guy to our east—” She waved out the missing rear of the van with her gun. “I could look right at him if I took a step outside. Right on the other side of the highway from us.”
“Does the road offer any cover?”
“Thirty meters of open dirt with no cover between here and there. We’d never make it.”
“No idea where number three is?”
“Not even if there is a number three.”
Now what? Tetsami looked out the shattered windscreen in the front of the van. The van had come to rest at the southeast corner of the construction. She was looking down the length of the south side of the building, looking at robot workers, stacks of construction equipment, the foreman’s command trailer, and the base of one of the massive, now-frozen construction cranes.
Tetsami got an idea.
She scrambled over next to Zanzibar at the other end of the van to see out the back.
“Watch it! A few more centimeters and you’ll be in the line of fire.”
Across the dirt no-man’s-land was the highway, on the other side of the highway was the base of the tower that supported the second sniper, and over the intersection was the ass end of the northeast crane—shorter than the business end, it stuck out well over the intersection.
Tetsami stumbled over to the front and the windshield, but she couldn’t see the business end of the crane. She tried to remember if it was one that carried a girder. As she tried to see it up through the skeleton of the new building, she decided it had been.
“Zanzibar, I’m going to try something.”
“What?”
“I’m making for the foreman’s trailer.”
“What?” Zanzibar looked over her shoulder at Tetsami, then toward the windshield and the trailer. “That’s fifty meters, in the open, with no idea where the third sniper is.”
“I’m covered from the first two, and I have a force field.”
“One and a half seconds max against a military laser carbine.”
“Cover me if someone starts firing.”
“Damn it, this thing has no range.”
“It’s a bright light that’ll screw up their aim.”
“Oh, shit,” Zanzibar ducked and made over to the windshield so she could cover Tetsami’s run.
“Do you have any better ideas?”
“No, and that’s the problem.”
Tetsami spared one glance at the green light on her field generator. It was lit. Her otherwise-invisible field was operating.
She nodded at Zanzibar, stepped out the broken windshield, and began running. A flash dazzled her and she felt a fiery dagger lance into her right shoulder. Her force field had soaked up some of a carbine blast, but a lot had gotten through. She could smell synthetic fibers smoldering.
Tetsami was under the sights of the third sniper.
She kept running.
She weaved out from under the laser for a moment, and suddenly her shadow was dancing ahead of her, pointing toward the trailer. The massive ruddy light had to be Zanzibar’s return fire. The plasma rifle was like a signal flare behind her.
Tetsami spared a breathless glance at her field generator, the indicator light faded from red to amber. Another beam lanced ahead of her and Tetsami ducked and rolled in the dirt.
Halfway there.
The third sniper was above her and to the right. That would put him somewhere up in the building’s metal skeleton. Figured.
Tetsami leaped to her feet and kept running toward the trailer, and cover.
Another shot of energy hit her. The beam struck her leg, and she felt burning heat in her calf and smelled her jumpsuit starting to smolder. She looked down. A line of strobing color was diffracting into rainbow circles that flashed along the perimeter of her field over her leg, as if the laser had hit an invisible elliptical shell surrounding her. The fact she saw anything at all meant that her field generator was about a second from overload.
The box at her belt that generated that ellipsoid field was flashing a red warning light and beeping at her furiously. Her leg was beginning to cook.
Five meters from the trailer, she removed the generator from her belt, tossing it as she jumped for the side of the trailer.
She hit cover against the side of the foreman’s trailer at the same time her field generator exploded. Tetsami crumpled to the ground, breathing heavily, waiting for that laser carbine to slice her unprotected body in half. After a few seconds it seemed that wasn’t going to happen.
She looked up and back. Zanzibar was poking the plasma rifle out the windshield and up toward the murky scaffolding. As Tetsami watched, she pumped off a cone of red-orange energy that hurt to look at and lit the entire construction site. Zanzibar must’ve cranked the beam all the way up. She glanced in Tetsami’s direction and gave her a thumbs-up.
Tetsami had been fortunate. The trailer was parked at an angle to the construction. Its shadow blocked the third sniper’s view of her.
She stood up, right leg a little wobbly, and slid along the trailer, back glued to its side. Near the rear she came to an entrance. She tried the handle.
Locked—
“Damn it.”