Profile Bourne tapped the general's knee for attention, then gestured with the open, savage cup of his tattooed right hand toward the images which now hung over the jeep's bow. The modules projected a three-dimensional monochrome of the escarpment, including the heavy forest at its foot and the more scattered vegetation of the gentle reverse slope.
The Oltenian wondered fleetingly where the imaging sensor could be: all of the patrol's vehicles hid behind the barrier of trees, which concealed the escarpment as surely as it did the trucks. The angle was too flat for satellite coverage, and aircraft reconnaissance was a waste of hardware—with the crews if the aircraft were manned—in a military landscape dominated by light-swift powerguns. Perhaps it was a computer model using current satellite photography enhanced from a data base—of Hammer's, since the State of Oltenia had nothing of its own comparable.
The image of the rock face shattered. Instead of crumbling into a slide of gravel and boulders the way the hillock had done earlier when struck by penetrators,the escarpment held its new, fluid form as does a constantly replenished waterfall.
The rain feeding this spray was of bomblets from the firecracker rounds being hurled by all eighteen tubes of the Slammers' artillery. It was a prodigiously expensive undertaking—mechanized warfare is far more sparing of men than of material—but it was the blow from which Radescu prayed the Molts in this region would be unable to recover.
Each shell split in the air into hundreds of bomblets which in turn burst on the next thing they touched—rock, leaf, or the face of a Molt sighting down the barrel of his powergun. The sea of miniature blasts created a mist of glass-fiber shrapnel devouring life in all its forms above the microscopic—but without significantly changing the piezoelectrical constant of the rock on which the autochthons homed.
Hawker's detectors continued to flash notice of further Molts springing into the cauldron from which none of them would return to warn the warriors who followed them to doom.
Lieutenant Hawker was as still as the jeep, though that trembled with the shells pawned vibration of the earth on which it now rested. Sergeant Bourne watched not the image of the fire-rippled escarpment but the detector display. His grin was alive with understanding, and he tapped together the scarred knuckles of his hands. Every violet numeral was a Molt about to die.
Short bursts were an inevitable hazard, impinging on Radescu's senses not by their sounds—even the wash of the main bombardment was lost in the ballistic roar of the shells themselves—but by the fact that shafts of sunlight began to illuminate the forest floor. Stray bomblets stripped away the foliage they touched, but the low-mass shrapnel was not dangerous more than a meter or two from the center of each blast.
The Oltenian was nonetheless startled to see that the backs of his hands glittered in the sudden sunlight with glass fibers scarcely thicker than the hairs from among which they sprang. He had been too lost in the image of shellfire devouring the Molts to notice that it had put its mark on him as well.
The ionization detectors had been quiescent for almost a minute when the face of the escarpment slumped, no longer awash with firecracker rounds. Through the pulsing silence as the shellfire ceased came the rumble of collapsing rock—the final salvo had been of penetrator shells, now that the Molts had either recognized the killing ground for what it was or had run out of victims to send into the useless slaughter.
Like a bright light, the thunder of shellfire left its own afterimage on the senses of the men who had been subjected to it. Radescu's voice was a shadow of itself in his own ears with all its high frequencies stripped away as he said, "Platoon, forward. Each crew find its own path to the crest and await further orders."
Lord who aids the needy! thought the general as the jeep rocked onto its air cushion again. He was alive, and he had apparently won this first round of his campaign to end the war.
The second round: the command group of the Army had been his opponent in the first, and he had won that too. Both victories due to the pair of mercenaries before him; and to the harsh, unexpectedly complex, colonel who commanded them.
With no need to match his speed to that of the trucks, Bourne sent his jeep through the remaining half-kilometer of forest with a verve that frightened Radescu—who had thought the initial salvo of shells passing overhead had drained him of any such emotion for months.
A few trees had grown all the way up to the original face of harder rock, but for the most part hard-stemmed scrub with less need for water and nutrient had replaced the more substantial vegetation near the escarpment. Everything, including the thin soil, had been swept away by the salvoes of antipersonnel bomblets. The paths down which tons of rock shattered by the penetrators slid were scarcely distinguishable from the stretches to either side which were untouched by the heavy shells.
The surface of an airless planetoid could not have been more barren; and there, at least, Radescu's nostrils would not have wrinkled at the smell of death.
Bourne took his right hand off his gun butt long enough to pull rearward a dashboard lever while his left squeezed the hand throttle on the tiller wide open. The lever must have affected the angle of the fans within the plenum chamber, because the vehicle began to slide straight up the slope, stern lifted almost to a level with the bow like that of a funicular car.
The original angle of the escarpment had been in the neighborhood of one to one. The salvo of penetrators had shaken portions of the overhang down into a ramp at the foot of the slope, easing the ascent at the same time it changed the electrical signature. The sergeant's bow-on assault was still a surprise, to the Oltenian and to the Slammers' lieutenant, judging from Hawker's quick glance toward his fellow. The rear fans, those directly beneath Radescu and the electronics modules, spun with the angry sound of bullets ricocheting as they drove the vehicle upward.
Both mercenaries had locked their face shields down, less for visibility than for protection against pebbles still skipping from the hill's crumbled facade. Dust and grit, though blanketed somewhat by the overburden of topsoil from the further slope, boiled in the vortices beneath the skirt of the jeep.
The trucks of the patrol's Oltenian element crawled rather than loped in their ascent, but they were managing adequately. Their tires were spun from a single-crystal alloy of iron and chrome, and they gripped projections almost as well as the fingers of a human climber. Such monocrystal filaments were, with beef, the main export props of the economy of human Oltenia.
The Molts provided traders with the lustrous, jewel-scaled pelts of indigenous herbivores and with opportunities to mine pockets of high-purity ores. The senses which permitted the autochthons to teleport were far more sensitive and exact than were the best mechanical geo surveying devices in the human universe. Even so, Molt trade off-planet was only a tiny fraction of that of members of the Oltenian state.
The needs of the autochthons were very simple, however. As the jeep topped the rise, bounced fully a meter in the air by its momentum, a bolt from a powergun burst the trunk of one of the nearby trees mutilated in the hammering by firecracker rounds.
Bourne swore savagely in a language Radescu did not know,then cried,"Loot?" as he whipped the jeep in a double-S that brought it to a halt, partly behind another of the stripped boles which were the closest approach to cover on the blasted landscape.
"Take him," said the lieutenant as he rolled out of his seat before the jeep had fully grounded. As an afterthought, while he cleared his own weapon in the vehicle's shelter, he added, "Via, General, get down!"