"Loot!" the driver called desperately. The burring fragment could be ignored as so many dangers survived had been ignored before. But the Molt warrior who by now was in full control of his body and whatever weapon he held, somewhere beyond the waving curtain of grain . . . "Which way, Loot, which way!"
"Hold it,"said Lieutenant Hawker, an order and not an answer as he jumped to his full meter-ninety height on the seat of the jeep with his gun pointing over the driver's head. There was a feral hiss as Hawker's weapon spewed plastic casings from the ejection port and cyan fire from the muzzle. Profile Bourne's cheeks prickled, and a line of vegetation withered as the burst angled into the grain.
There was a scream from downrange. The sergeant slammed his throttle and the nacelle angle into maximum drive even as his teammate dropped back into a sitting position, the muzzle of his powergun sizzling as it cooled from white to lambent gray. The scream had been high-pitched and double, so that the driver did not need to hear Hawker say, "Cop! It was a female and a kid, but I thought she had a bloody satchel charge!"
It wasn't the sort of problem that bothered Bourne a whole lot, but he didn't like to see the Loot so distressed.
The reason Fox Victor was having problems—beyond the fact that they were poofs who couldn't be trusted in a rainstorm, much less a firefight—was obvious on this, the reverse slope of the gully which formed the actual choke-point for the support column. Low retaining walls curved back into the sloping hillside like arms outstretched by the arched opening in their center: the entrance to what the Oltenians called a Molt nursery cave.
In fact, the underground constructs of which this was a small example were almost never true caves but rather tunnels carved into igneous and metamorphic rocks of dense crystalline structure. The sedimentary rocks which could be cut or leached away into caves by groundwater were of no use as beacons for teleporting autochthons—and thus of no use in training young Molts to use their unique abilities.
By being surrounded from earliest infancy with living rock whose crystals were in a constant state of piezoelectrical flux, Molts—male and female alike—began to teleport for short distances before they could crawl. As they grew older, prepubescents played in the near vicinity of their nurseries and gained a familiarity with the structure of those rocks which was deeper than anything else they would meet in life.
And when called to do so by military need, Molt warriors could home on even the smallest portions of the particular locality in which they had been raised. Shelling that broke up the gross structure of a slab did not affect the ability of warriors to concentrate, though the damage would ordinarily have at least delayed younger Molts trying to locate it for teleportation. The result, at least for poofs without the instruments to detect warriors before the shooting started, would be disastrous.
Now, while the pair of Slammers were flat out with nothing but a 15° slope to retard the jeep, the possibility of a Molt teleporting to point-blank range beside them was the least of Profile Bourne's worries. The bolt that snapped into the hillside thirty meters away, fluffing and dimming shell-set grass fires in its momentary passage, was a more real danger. The microfragments from the firecracker round had cleared the crest and face of the ridge, but a Molt somewhere out there, far from the immediate battle scene, continued to snipe at the jeep undeterred. The autochthons were not, in the main, good marksmen, and the vehicle's speed made it a chance target anyway to a gunman a kilometer distant.
But the chance that let the bolt blow a divot from the soil and splinters from the rock close beneath might easily have turned the jeep into a sizzling corona as electrical storage cells shorted through driver and passenger. It was nothing to feel complacent about, and there was no way to respond while the jeep was at speed.
If only they were about to join one of the Slammers' tank companies instead of a poof battalion! Snipers would learn that they, like dogs, got one bite—and that a second attempt meant the ground around them glowed and bubbled with the energy released by a tank's main gun or a long burst from a tribarrel.
That didn't, of course, always mean that the first bite had not drawn blood . . . .
A less skilled driver would have let his jeep lift bow-high at the crest where the ridge rolled down its other slope. Bourne angled his fan nacelles left, throwing the vehicle into a sideslip which cut upward velocity without stalling the jeep as a target silhouetted in two directions. The grass and low brush of the crest were scarred by the bomblets, and a lump half-hidden by the rock which had sheltered it might have been a warrior caught by the shrapnel.
While Bourne concentrated on his own job, Lieutenant Hawker had been on the horn with the poof battalion commander, their Central-relayed conversation audible to the driver but of no particular interest.All Sergeant Bourne cared was that the Oltenian troops not add their fire to that of the Molts already sniping at the jeep. Men so jumpy from being ripped without recourse might well fire at any target they could hit, even when the intellectual levels of their brains knew that it was the wrong target.
"Profile, a hundred and fifty!" the lieutenant ordered. His left arm reached out through the flashing hologram display in the air before him, converting its digital information into a vector for his driver's gun.
The sergeant grounded the jeep in a stony pocket far enough below the crest to be clear of the Molt marksman who had fired as they climbed the back slope. Molts could teleport in within touching distance, but this time that was the plan; and the rocks jumbled by a heavy shell provided some cover from distant snipers.
Bourne did not fire. He knew exactly where the Molt was going to appear, but spraying the area a hundred and fifty meters down the wash would have been suicidal.
Like most of Hammer's troopers,Sergeant Bourne had seen the wreckage Molt warriors made of Oltenian assaults. He hadn't really appreciated the ease with which disaster happened until he saw what now took place in the swale.
The water cut depression in a fold between crystalline ridges was now studded with rubble cracked from both faces by armor-piercing shells and the blazing remains of half a dozen Oltenian vehicles. The human bodies blended into the landscape better than did equipment marked out by pillars of smoke and sometimes a lapping overlay of kerosene flames, though the corpse halfway out of the driver's hatch of an armored car was obvious with his lifted arms and upturned face—brittle as a charcoal statue.
The single firecracker round had been intended only to clear the Molts briefly from the area. A poof armored car and armored personnel carrier were trying to make a dash across the gully during the lull, however, instead of waiting for the Slammers to get into position as Hawker had directed. Some might have said that showed exemplary courage,but Profile Bourne couldn't care less about fools who died well—which was all this crew was managing.
The automatic weapon in the car's turret traversed the slope toward which the vehicle advanced, making a great deal of dust and racket without affecting in the least the warrior who must have teleported directly between the car and the personnel carrier. Bourne didn't fire at the Molt, knowing that the armored vehicles shielded their attacker and that the poofs across the swale would respond to the submachine gun's "attack" on their fellows, no matter how good their fire discipline might be.