"Put this on, sir," Scratchard muttered to the captain as the fire trucks up the street ignited in the spray of burning fragments hurled from the demolition of the Slammers' excess stores.The actinics of the powergun ammunition detonating in its storage containers made exposed skin prickle, but the exploding gasoline pushed at the crouching men with a warm, stinking hand.
Roof floodlights, driven by the emergency generator in the basement, flared momentarily around the City Offices. Shadows pooled beneath the waiting troops. They cursed and ducked lower—or twisted to aim at the lights revealing them.
Volleys of shots from the mob shattered the lenses before any of the Slammers made up their minds to shoot. The twin pincers, from the plaza and from the House of Grace, were already beginning to envelope the office building.
The route north and away was awash in blazing fuel. The police aircar that roared off that way, whipping the flames with its vectored thrust, pitched bow-up and stalled as an automatic weapon raked it from the same roof as the falling masonry had come.
Scratchard had brought a suit of clamshell body armor for Tyl to wear—and a submachine-gun to carry along with a bandolier holding five hundred rounds of ammo in loaded magazines.
"We're crossing the river," Tyl said in a voice that barely danced on the spikes of his present consciousness. "By squad."
He hadn't gotten around to numbering the squads.There was a clacking sound as the sergeant major latched Tyl's armor for him.
Tyl pointed at one of the sergeants—he didn't know any bloody names!—with his lightwand. "You first. And you. Next—"
In the pause, uncertain in the backlit darkness where the other noncoms were, Scratchard broke in on the command frequency saying, "Haskins, third. Hu, Pescaro, Bogue, and Hagemann. Move, you dickheads!"
Off the radio, his head close to Tyl's as the captain clipped his sling reflexively to the epaulet tab of his armor and shrugged the heavy bandolier over the opposite shoulder, the sergeant major added, "You lead 'em, sir—I'll hustle their butts from here."
Even as Tyl opened his mouth to frame a reply, Scratchard barked at one of the men who'd appeared just ahead of him, "Kekkonan—you give 'im a hand with names if he needs it, right?"
Sergeant Kekkonan, short and built like one of the tanks he'd commanded, clapped Tyl on the shoulder hard enough that it was just as well the captain had already started in the direction of the thrust—toward the river and the squad running toward the levee wall as swiftly as their load of weapons and munitions permitted.
A column of men came around the northern corner of the building. Their white tunics rippled orange in the glare of the burning vehicles. The leaders carried staffs as they had when they guarded the procession route, but in the next rank back winked the iridium barrels of powerguns and the antennas of sophisticated communications gear.
They were no more than three steps from the nearest of the nervous Slammers. When the leading orderlies shouted and threw themselves out of the way, there were almost as many guns pointed at the troops as pointed by them.
"Hold!" Tyl Koopman ordered through his commo helmet as his skin chilled and his face went stiff. Almost they'd made it, but now—
He was running toward the mob of orderlies—Via! They weren't a mob!—with his hands raised, palms forward.
"This isn't our fight!" he cried, hoping he was close enough to the orderlies to be understood by them as well as by the troops on his unit push. "Squads,keep moving—over the levee!"
The column of orderlies had stopped and flattened like the troops they were facing, but there were three men erect at the new head of the line. One carried a shoulder-pack radio; one a bull-horn; and the man in the middle was a priest with a crucifix large enough to be the standard that the whole column followed.
Tyl looked at the priest,wondering if he could grab the butt of his slung weapon fast enough to take some of them with him if the words the priest murmured to the man with the bull-horn brought a blast of shots from the guns aimed at the Slammers captain.
The burning trucks roared. Sealed parts ruptured with plosive sounds and an occasional sharp crack.
"Go on,get out of here,"the bull-horn snarled,its crude amplification making the words even harsher than they were when they came from the orderly's throat.
Tyl spun and brandished his lightwand. "Third Squad," he ordered. "Move!"
A dozen of his troopers picked themselves up from the ground and shambled across the street behind him—toward the guns leveled on the mob from the levee's top. The first two squads were deployed there with the advantages of height and a modicum of cover if any of the locals needed a lesson about what it meant to take on Hammer's Slammers.
Tyl's timing hadn't been quite as bad as he'd thought. Hard to tell just what might have happened if the column from the House of Grace had arrived before Tyl's company had a base of fire across the street.
Two more squads were moving together. The leaders of the mob's other arm, bawling their way up the river road, had already reached the south corner of the City Offices. The cries of "Freedom, Freedom!" were suddenly punctuated with screams as a dozen or so of the leaders collapsed under a burst of electrostatic needles fired by one of the policemen inside.
Tyl heard the shots that answered the stunner, slug throwers as well as powerguns, but the real measure of the response was the barely audible clink of bottles shattering.
Then the gasoline bombs ignited and silhouetted the building from the south.
Tyl stood on the pedestrian way atop the levee, wondering when somebody would get around to taking a shot at him just because he was standing.
"Three and four," he ordered as the heavily laden troops scrambled up the steps to join him. "Across the river, climb over the barges. Kekkonan, you lead 'em, set up a perimeter on the other side.
"And wait!" he added, though Kekkonan didn't look like the sort you had to tell that to.
The rest of the company was moving in a steady stream, lighted between the two fires of the trucks and the south front of the building they had abandoned.
"Take 'em across, take 'em across!" Tyl shouted as the Slammers plodded past. The noncoms would take the words as an order, and the rest of the troops would get the idea.
The first two squads squirmed as they waited, their guns now aimed toward both pincers of the mob. Fifty meters of the west frontage of the City Offices were clear of the rioters who would otherwise have lapped around it. It wasn't a formal standoff; just the tense waiting of male dogs growling as they sidled toward each other, not quite certain what the next seconds would bring.
The last man was Sergeant Major Scratchard, falling a further step behind his troops with every step he took.
"We're releasing the prisoners!" boomed the array of loudspeakers on the building roof. Simultaneous words from a dozen locations echoed themselves by the amount of time that sound from the mechanical diaphragms lagged behind the electronic pulses feeding them.