"Blue Two, roger," the warrant leader said, knowing the AI would transmit his words as a green dot on Ranson's display—even if all seven responses came in simultaneously.
"When the shooting starts, team," the command channel continued, "go like hell. Six out."
The first soft-skin had passed beneath Herman's Whore and was continuing toward the bridge. The armored vehicles would have burning trucks to contend with in their rush,but Ortnahme realized Ranson couldn't pop the ambush until all six targets were within the killing ground.
The second truck was a civilian unit with a mountain landscape painted on the passenger door and MASALLAH in big metalized letters across the radiator. Other than that, it was the same as the first: a stake-bed with twelve rubber tires and about sixty bloody Consies in back.
MASALLAH. God help us. They'd need God's help when the tribarrels started slicing into 'em.
The third truck came abreast with its gearbox moaning. Yokel maintenance was piss-poor, at least from what Ortnahme'd seen of it. Guess it didn't matter, not if they were handing over their hardware to the Consies.
Nobody in the trucks looked up, though they were within fifty meters of Task Force Ranson. Half the distance was vertical . . . which was a problem in itself for Ortnahme, since the guns in the turret and cupola of Herman's Whore couldn't depress as low as the pintle-mounted weapons of the combat cars.
"Tootsie, this is Blue One," said the radio. "Vehicles approaching the bridge from the west, too."
"Bloody marvelous," somebody muttered on the general push. It might have been the warrant leader himself.
"Roger, Blue One," replied Ranson coolly. "They're stopping, so it shouldn't affect us. Six out."
The gunnery pipper didn't bear on the trucks when they were directly below Herman's Whore. Life being what it bloody was, that's where Ortnahme's target would be when the balloon went up.
"Simkins,"the warrant leader said,"when I give the word, get us over the edge. Got that? Not even a bloody eyeblink later."
"Yes sir," agreed the intercom. "Ah, sir . . .?"
Ortnahme grimaced. The fourth truck was below them. "Go ahead."
"Sir, won't the guards be even more alerted if we start shooting before we cross the bridge? Than if we'd gone sooner, I mean?"
"Yeah," Ortnahme said,stating the bloody obvious,but this wasn't the time to tear a strip off the kid. "But we don't want a Consie battalion waiting for us on the other side, do we? It's the hand we got, kid, so we play it."
"Yes sir," Simkins agreed. "I just wondered."
From his voice, that's all it was.
Maybe Simkins hadn't figured out that one real likely response from an altered guard detachment would be to blow the bloody bridge—maybe with most of Task Force Ranson learning to fly a hundred meters above the Padma River.
The fifth truck, Yokel Army again, grunted and snarled its way onto Screen Two. Ortnahme's pipper quivered across the canvas top, bloody useless unless the Consies all died of fright when the main gun ripped over their heads, but he still had a view of the troops. There was something funny about this lot. They were wearing armbands, and their uniforms—
"All Tootsie elements—"
"Simkins, go!" the warrant leader shouted.
Herman's Whore lurched sideways and down. Startled faces glanced upward in the magnified display, warned at last but only a microsecond before the command push added, "Fire!"
The pure, heart-wrenching blue of powerguns firing saturated the roadcut. Ortnahme's foot took up the slack in the gun pedal as his tank slid—and the orange pipper slid down onto one of the mouths screaming in the back of the fifth truck.
The 20cm bolt merged with a white and orange explosion. The whole truck was a fireball. Heated by the plasma, the steel chassis blazed with even greater venom than the contents of the fuel tanks and the flesh of the soldiers at the point of impact.
Ortnahme switched to his tribarrel as the tank rushed down the slope, its fans driving into a sea of flame.
Not that it mattered, but the troops in the truck he'd just destroyed weren't wearing black uniforms.
Three blazing figures lurched out of the inferno. Ortnahme shot them down, more as an act of mercy than of war.
They were in camouflaged National Army fatigues with black armbands, and they were carrying National Army assault rifles.
Not that it mattered.
"Fire!" June Ranson heard her voice say. Her visor opaqued, shutting out the double microsecond dazzles of Deathdealer's main gun firing almost on top of her, but the momentary blindness didn't matter. The battle was taking place within a holographic screen while Ranson watched it from above.
Her tribarrel scissored bolts across those of Stolley's weapon, turning fist-sized chunks of the leading truck into meter-diameter flashes colored by material that vaporized and burned: rubber/metal/wood across the truck; cloth/flesh/munitions as the muzzles lifted into the bed.
Metals burned with a gorgeous intensity of color, white and red and green.
The target exploded into a lake of fire that screamed. Willens kept Warmonger as high on her fans as he could as the combat car entered the roadcut at a barely controlled slide and cranked hard right to follow Deathdealer up the bridge approach.
The filters of Ranson's helmet snapped into place as flames whuffed out like crinolines encircling the combat car. For a moment, everything was orange and hot; then Warmonger was through.
Junebug Ranson was back in the physical world in which her troops were fighting.
The Adako Beach community was a few hovels on this east side of the Padma River.There were twenty or thirty more dwellings,still unpretentious,beyond the gravel strand across the stream. The bridge itself was a solid concrete structure with a sandbagged blockhouse on the far end and a movement-control kiosk in the center of the span.
The blockhouse and kiosk had been added in reaction to the worsening security situation. When Deathdealer's main gun punched the center of the blockhouse twice, the low building blew apart with an enthusiasm which the ammunition going off within did little more than color. Swatches of fiberglass fabric from the sandbags burned red as they drifted in the updraft.
A bus was waiting on the other side to cross the bridge. It lurched off the road and heeled slowly over onto its side, its headlights still burning. The truck behind it didn't move, but both cab doors flew open and figures scuttled out.
A man without pants ran from one of the huts near the bridge approach and began firing an automatic rifle at Deathdealer. Sparrow ignored—or was unaware of—the fleabites, but Stolley triggered a burst in the Consie's direction.