Cyan light spurted from a gunbarrel so hot that the scales on Ferad's left arm were lifting to trap a blanket of insulating air.The polished wood and stones inlaid into the groined ceiling reflected the shots as they echoed with the screams.
Ferad's peripheral vision was better than that of a human, an adaptation crucial to a Molt teleporting into the confusion of a battle or hunt who had to receive a great deal of data about his immediate surroundings in the first instant. The flash of white drew Ferad to the left, the powergun's barrel shimmering its own arc through the air before him.
None of them were armed.The ballroom was like a nursery tunnel, females and infants and all of them helpless as the veriest newborn—but it had to be done.
One of the Tribunes stood in glistening white, facing Ferad though the three shrieking females in between were scrabbling away. The theme elder fired, clearing a path for his next bolt by taking a female at the point where her bare skin met the ruffles at the base of her spine. Her corpse scissored backward, its upper portion scarcely connected to the splaying legs, and the other two females—now in gowns only half pastel—were thrust from either side to close the gap.
The trio had been caught not by the general confusion but by the grip of the Tribune's arms, protective coloration and, in the event, a shield.
Ferad, wishing for the first time in decades that he had the muscles of a young adult, squeezed off another bolt that parted the white-gowned male from his females,only one of them screaming now and the gown covered with the residues from the flash-heated steam. Had Ferad been younger, he could have leaped on the Tribune, thrusting the heavy powergun against his target and finishing in an instant the business it had taken two shots to prepare. But a young, athletic warrior could never have gotten here, and the Tribune was now sprawled on the floor, his back against the wainscoting and only his palms and spread fingers between his face and the white iridium disk of the powergun muzzle.
The Molt's gun did not fire. Ferad had already spent the last round in his magazine.
The theme leader dropped his useless weapon on the floor, where wood and wax crackled away from the barrel. The hours he had spent in locating the urns here in Belvedere, in gripping them with his mind, were gone from memory. The antechamber of the tunnel system which had been the center of his existence for a hundred and forty years was a dazzling beacon though a thousand kilometers separated it from the theme elder.
For the instant only.
The ballroom and the carnage, almost as dreadful to Ferad as to the humans surviving, trembled for a moment, superimposed on the stone and lamps and shouting warriors of the nursery cave.
Two humans made a final impression on him: the male knocked down by the first bolt, now trying to rise; and another in the khaki of the mercenaries, so much more dangerous than the forces of the settlers themselves. This mercenary must have wedged his way through a counter-current of bodies in screaming panic. His hand was raised, a pistol in it, and there was a blue-green flash from the muzzle that Ferad did not quite see.
In his millisecond of limbo, the theme elder wondered what success his rival, Sopasian, was having.
"There's a Molt—" said Lieutenant Hawker as the tone in his left earpiece gave him a distance and vector, bloody close, but the target designation was figured from the jeep and not where he himself stood a couple paces away.
The trooper sent to collect Hawker's gun snatched the weapon away, nervous to be reaching into the crossed cones of fire of the tribarrels to either flank. "Drop it,he said, cophead!" the headquarters trooper snarled,just as somebody shouted to Hammer from the other combat car, "Sir, we've got'n incoming!"
For operations against the Molts, all the Slammers' line armor—the tanks and combat cars—had been fitted with ionization detectors similar to those on the team's jeep. For reasons of space and the need for training to operate more sophisticated gear, however, the detectors which equipped the big blowers were relatively rudimentary. The troops of A Company, Hammer's personal guard, were picked as much for technical skills as they were for ruthlessness and lethality—qualities which were not in short supply in the line companies either. The man calling, "Thirty-five left, eight meters—Colonel, he's coming right beside your car!" was getting more precision from his hardware than Hawker would have thought possible.
The big lieutenant stepped over the body of the Oltenian officer, setting the limbs a-twitch again when the sole of his boot brushed a thigh. The trooper with Hawker's gun holstered his own pistol so that he could level the automatic weapon as he turned toward Hammer and the combat car.
"Loot!" called Profile Bourne, familiar enough with Hawker to know that the lieutenant's disquiet was not simply because a warrior was about to attack. The White Mice could handle that, the Lord knew, they weren't poofs who needed a picture to figure which end to piss with.
The trooper who had advanced to take Bourne's gun as his companion did Hawker's was now poised between the sergeant and Hammer, impaled on the horns of a dilemma.
Bourne held his weapon muzzle-high, the barrel vertical and threatening to no one who had not seen how quickly he moved. The left hand, however, was thrust out like a traffic warden's—a barrier in defiance of the pistol which the man from A Company still pointed.
The fellow in the combat car had the vector right and the distance, but there was something wrong with what he'd said.
Hawker dropped into his seat in the jeep and laid the infant Molt beside him as Hammer's own combat car slid a few meters upslope, swinging so that the two manned guns still covered the expected target without threatening the dismounted troops besides. The flashing holograms of Hawker's display shifted simultaneously with a subtlety that no tone signal could have conveyed.
"Drop it or you're dead,trooper!"the manin front of Profile shouted,but even as he spoke, his pistol and his eyes were shifting to the danger behind him, the tribarrels that might be aligned with his spine.
"Colonel, it's right under you!" shouted the man on the combat car's detector.
Hammer's great car spurted sideways like fluff blown from a seed pod and the digits on Hawker's display shifted as quickly.
"Colonel!"the lieutenant bellowed,trying to make himself heard over the fans of the big blowers roaring in the machine equivalent of muscles bunched for flight. His unit link was to Henderson's infantry company, and tonguing Central wouldn't have given him the direct line to Hammer that he needed now.
"It's in your car!" Hawker shouted as he leaped out of the jeep, snatching for the submachine gun that had been taken from him.
The Molt was so old that wrinkles showed like dark striping on his face as the warrior appeared in the fighting compartment between Hammer and the other gunner, both of them craning their necks to scan the rocky ground beside the car. If their body hairs felt the sudden shift in electrostatic balance as the autochthon appeared behind them, that warning was buried in the subconscious of veterans faced with a known threat.
"Contact!" the A Company detection specialist shouted into the instruments on which his attention was focused, and his companion at the wing tribarrel triggered a shot into the empty soil by reflex. The Molt warrior's wiry arms held, raised, a blade of glittering blue steel; the junction between Hammer's helmet and body armor was bared as the colonel stretched to find a target before him.
Hawker caught his gun, but the trooper holding it wouldn't have been in the White Mice if he were soft. He held the weapon with one hand and rabbit-punched the lieutenant with the other, an instinctive, pointless act since Hawker was wearing body armor; but the trooper held the gun as the Molt's sword swung downward, unseen by anyone but Hawker—