Something as soft-featured and black as a tar statue reached out of the flames and gripped the coaming to either side of Suilin's tribarrel. The only parts of the figure that weren't black were the teeth and the great red cracks writhing in what had been the skin of both arms. The thing fell away without trying to speak.
Only a shadow. Only a sport thrown by the flames.
"Help me, Suzi," the reporter whispered. "Help me, Suzi."
Blue Two sucked fire along with it for an instant as the tank cleared the ambush site. Then the return flow,cool sweet air, pistoned Hell back into its proper region and washed Suilin in its freedom as well.
This car was Flamethrower. For the first time, Suilin realized how black was the humor with which the Slammers named their vehicles.
The driver brought them level with a violence that banged the skirts on the roadway. Suilin grunted. He reached for the grips of his tribarrel, obeying an instinct to hang onto something after he lost his excuse to hold Cooter.
Powerguns punctuated the night with flashes so intense they remained for seconds as streaks across the reporter's retinas. His mind tried desperately to process the high-pitched chatter from the commo helmet—a mixture of orders, warnings, and shouted exclamations.
It was all meaningless garbage; and it was all terrifying.
The downslope to the left of the roadway was striped orange by the firelight and leaping with shadows thrown from outcrops anchored too firmly in the fabricof the planet to be uprooted when the Padma River flooded.Muzzle flashes pulsed there, shockingly close.
A bottle-shaped yellow glow swelled and shrank as the gunman triggered his burst. The gun wasn't firing tracers, but the corner of Suilin's eyes caught a flicker as glowing metal snapped from the muzzle.
Specks of light raked the car ahead of Blue Two. Red sparks flashed up the side armor.
On the commo helmet, someone screamed lord lord lord.
The tribarrel wouldn't swing fast enough. Dick Suilin was screaming also. He unslung his grenade launcher.
Blue Two's main gun lit the night. Rock and the damp soil beneath it geysered outward from the point of impact, a white track glowing down the slope for twenty meters.
Flamethrower's driver flinched away from the bolt, throwing the thirty-tonne car into a side-step as dainty as that of a nervous virgin.
Blue Two and the combat car both accelerated up the bridge approach. The tank's turret continued to rotate to bear on the cooling splotch which its first bolt had grazed. If it fired from that angle, the bolt would pass within ten meters of Flame—
The tribarrel in Blue Two's cupola fired instead of the main gun.
Suilin straightened and fired a burst from his own tribarrel in the same general direction. He'd dropped the grenade launcher when he ducked in panic behind the hull armor. He was too rattled now to be embarrassed by his reaction—
And anyway, both the veterans sharing the fighting compartment had ducked also.
You couldn't be sure of not being embarrassed unless you were dead. The past night and day had been a gut-wrenching exposition of just what it meant to be dead. Dick Suilin would do anything at all to avoid that.
Traces of barbed wire clung to the cast-in guardrail supports. Large sections of the rail had been shattered by gunfire or smashed at the touch of behemoths like Flamethrower. Blue Two swung its turret forward again, releasing a portion of the fear that knotted Suilin's stomach, but only a portion.
Gale fired his tribarrel over Flamethrower's stern. Bolts danced off the left guardrail and streaked through the ambush scene. Their cyan purity glared even in the heart of the kerosene pyre which consumed the trucks and their cargo. The bolts vanished only when they touched something solid.
Flamethrower was the last vehicle in the column. Suilin turned also and hosed the fire-shot darkness, praying that there would be no wobbling muzzle flashes to answer as a Consie rifleman raked Flamethrower as he had the car ahead of them.
They slid past the further abutments at fifty kph. There'd been a blockhouse there, but it lay in steaming ruins licked by rare red tongues of flame. A truck burned brightly, well down the steep embankment supporting the approach to the bridge.
On its side, between Flamethrower and the truck, lay a tipped-over bus. A Consie gunman silhouetted by the truck, aimed at Suilin from a bus window.
Liquid nitrogen sprayed into the chambers of Suilin's tribarrel as it cycled, kicking out the spent cases and cooling the glowing iridium of the chamber before the next round was loaded. The gas was a hot kiss blowing back across the reporter's hands as he horsed his weapon onto the unexpected threat. The tribarrel was heavy despite being perfectly balanced on its gimbals, and it swung with glacial torpor.
"Not that—" screamed Suilin's headset. Two-cm bolts ripped across the undercarriage of the bus, bright flashes that blew fuel lines, air lines, hydraulic lines into blazing tangles and opened holes the size of tureens in the sheet metal.
The line of bolts missed by millimeters the man whose raised hand had been shadowed into a weapon by the flames behind him. The civilian fell back into the interior of the bus.
No-no-no—
Suilin's screams didn't help any more than formal prayers would have done if he'd had leisure to form them.
When it first ignited, the ruptured fuel tank engulfed the rear half of the bus. The flames had sped all the way to the front of the vehicle before any of the flailing figures managed to crawl free.
Somebody patted the reporter's forearms; gently at first, but then with enough force to detach his death grip from the tribarrel.
" S'okay, turtle," a voice said. "All okay. Don't mean nothin'."
Suilin opened his eyes. He'd flipped up his visor, or one of the mercenaries had raised it for him. Cooter was holding his forearms, while Gale watched the reporter with obvious concern. He wasn't sure which of the veterans had been speaking.
The river lay as a black streak behind them as the road climbed. Adako Beach was a score of dull fires, big enough to throw orange highlights on the water but nothing comparable to the holocaust of the truck convoy.
And the similar diesel-fed rage which consumed the bus.
"No sweat," Cooter said gently. "Don't mean nothin'."
"It means something to them!"the reporter screamed. He couldn't see for tears, but when he closed his eyes every terrified line of the civilian at the bus window cleared from the surface of his mind. "To them!"
"Happens to everybody, turtle,"Gale said."There's always somebody don't get the word. This time it was you."
"It won't matter next century," Cooter said. "Don't sweat what you can't change."