Gunfire was a blue-green shield against the roar from the plaza, but in the moments between bursts the mob's voice asserted itself over the numbness of ringing breech blocks and slamming air.The stair head was now within a hundred meters as the gun drove onward. There was a haze over the target area—steam and dust, burnt lime and burning bodies.
Desoix's face shield protected him from the sun-hot flash of his guns. Events, thundering forward as implacably as an avalanche, shielded him from awareness that would have been as devastating to him as being blinded.
With no target but the roiling haze, Desoix triggered another burst when they were ten meters from the stair head. Fragments blown clear by the impacts proved that there had been people sheltering beneath eye level but accessible to the upper pair of gun tubes.
"Sir?" a voice demanded, Lachere slowing and ready to ground the vehicle before they lurched over the scars where the bollards had been and their bow tilted down the steps.
"Go!" Desoix shouted, knowing that the plenum chamber would spill its air in the angle of the stair treads and that their unaided fans would never be able to lift the calliope away once they had committed.
Koopman and his company of Slammers weren't going anywhere either, unless they all succeeded in the most certain and irrevocable way possible.
The stench of ozone and ruin boiled out from beneath the drive fans an instant before the calliope rocked forward. Gravity aided its motion for an instant before the friction of steel against stone grounded the skirts. The plaza was a sea of faces with a roar like the surf.
Bullets rang off the hull and splashed the glowing iridium of one port-side barrel. The doors of the mall at the head of the main stairs were open toward the plaza. Men there were firing assault rifles at the calliope. Some of them were either good or very lucky.
Desoix rotated his gun carriage.
"Sir!" Senter cried with his helmet against the lieutenants. "Those aren't the mob! They're the Guard!"
"Feed your guns, soldier!" said Charles Desoix. The open flood gates filled his sight hologram.
He rocked the firing pedal down and began to traverse his target in a blaze of light.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Tyl's index finger tightened. The gunstock pummeled his shoulder. The center of his face shield went momentarily black as it mirrored away the flash that would otherwise have blinded him.
A finger of plastic flipped up into his sight picture, indicating that he'd just fired the last charge in his weapon. He reached for another magazine.
A hospital orderly stopped trying to claw through the mass of other panicked humans and turned to face Tyl. He was less than ten meters away and held a pistol.
Tyl raised the tube of 2cm ammunition to the loading gate in the forestock and burned the nail and third knuckle of all the fingers on his left hand. He'd already put several magazines through the powergun, so its barrel was white hot.
He dropped the magazine. The orderly shot him in the center of the chest.
There was no sound anymore in the plaza. Tyl could see everything down to the last hair on the moustache of the orderly collapsing around a bolt from somebody else's powergun. His armor spread the bullet's impact, but it felt as if they'd driven a tank over his chest. Maybe if he didn't move . . . .
The calliope which was canted down the west staircase opened fire again.
Only three of the eight barrels were live at the moment. Individual bolts made a thump as ionized air ripped from the barrel; they crossed the plaza a few meters over Tyl's head as a microsecond hiss! and a flash of light so saturated that it seemed palpable.
Everything the bolts hit was disintegrated with a crash sharper than a bomb going off, solids converted to gas and plasma as suddenly as the light-swift bursts of energy had snapped through the air. The plaza's concrete flooring gouted in explosions of dazzling white—
But the crowd was packed too thickly for that to happen often. The calliope's angle allowed its crew to rake the mob from above. Each 3cm bolt hit like the hoof of a horse galloping over soft ground, hurling spray and bits of the footing in every direction before lifting to hammer the surface again.
Bodies crumpled in windrows. Screaming rioters climbed the fallen on their way toward the main stairs, already packed with their fellows. The guns continued to fire.
"If I can hear, I can move," Tyl said, mouthing the words because that was his first movement since the bullet hit him.
He knelt to pick up the magazine he had dropped. The pain that flooded him, hot needles being jabbed into his whole chest, made him drop the empty gun instead.
He couldn't breathe. He didn't fall down because his muscles were locked in a web of flesh surrounding a center of pulsing red agony.
The spasm passed.
Tyl's troopers were spread in a ragged semicircle, centering on the building from which they'd deployed. He was near the east stairs; the treads were covered with bodies.
Rebels had been shot in the back as they tried to run from the soldiers and the blue-green scintillance of hand weapons. If they reached the top of the stairs, Gun Three on the seafront hurled them back as a puree and a scattering of fragments.
The west stairs were relatively empty, because the mob had time to clear it in the face of the calliope staggering toward them. They died on the plaza floor, because they'd run toward the debouching infantry; but the steps gleamed white in the sunlight and provided a pure contrast to the bodies and garments crumpled everywhere else in muddy profusion.
Tyl left the 2cm weapon where he'd dropped it; he raised his submachine-gun. It felt light by contrast with the thick iridium barrel of the shoulder weapon, but he still had trouble aiming.
It was hot,and Tyl was as thirsty as he ever remembered being.Ozone had lifted all the mucus away from the membranes of his nose and throat. The mordant gas was concentrated by shooting in the enclosed wedge of the plaza. The skin of Tyl's face and hands prickled as if sunburned.
He aimed at a face and missed high, the barrel wobbling, sending the round into the back of somebody a hundred meters away on the main stairs.
He lowered the muzzle and fired again, fired again, fired again.
Single shots, aimed at anyone who looked toward him instead of trying to get away. Second choice for targets were the white robes of orderlies, most of whom had been armed—though few enough had the discipline to stand in chaos against the mercenaries' armor and overwhelming firepower.
Third choice was whoever filled the sight picture next.None of the mercenaries were safe so long as one of the others was standing.
The calliope opened up again. Desoix had unjammed and reloaded six of the barrels. A thick line staggered through the mob like the track of a tornado across a corn field.
Tyl fired; fired again; fired again . . . .
Chapter Thirty-Four
It was very quiet.
Desoix watched the men from Gun Three's doubled crew as they picked their way across the plaza at his orders. Sergeant Blaney was leading the quartet himself. They were carrying their submachine-guns ready and moving with a gingerly awkwardness, trying to avoid stepping in the carnage.