Though Colonel Hammer didn't leave his people hanging if there was any way around it.
The dark arch of the nursery tunnel into which Bourne headed the jeep was a perfect aiming point—hitting the center of a large target is easier than nailing a small one. The sergeant expected the entrance to be crisscrossed by the dazzling scatter of bolts squeezed off with all the care of which Molt marksmen were capable. He figured he had no hope save the autochthons' bad aim or bad timing. That there were no shots at all was as pleasant a surprise as he'd had since the night a whore tried to kill him with what turned out to be an empty gun . . . .
The tunnel was three meters wide and of simple design,an angled gallery rather than a labyrinth of interconnected chambers. The same purpose was achieved either way: the encouragement of the very young to teleport to points separated from them by solid barriers.
The same stone angles were just what the doctor ordered to block sniper fire—and as for anybody teleporting directly into the cave, they were cold meat as soon as the Loot's equipment picked them up.
"Safe!" the driver cried happily as he yanked the tiller left at the first 60° break, an edge of polished black granite that had not been dulled by rubbing shoulders as it would have been in a structure occupied by humans.
The warrior just around that corner pointed his Oltenian shotgun squarely at Profile's face.
Molt cave systems were not unlighted—the autochthons actually saw less well in dim conditions than humans did. The roof of this particular tunnel was painted with a strip of—imported—permanent fluorescent, powered by the same piezoelectrical forces which made the rock a beacon for teleporters. It gave off only a pale glow, however, inadequate for irises contracted by the sun outside, so it was in the jeep's front floods that the Molt's eyes gaped. His shadow against the gleaming stone was half again his real height, and the muzzle of the gun seemed broad as the tunnel.
Bourne fluffed his front fans to full screaming lift with his right hand.
He could have shot, have killed the warrior. Man and Molt were equally surprised, and Profile Bourne's reflexes were a safe bet against just about anybody's in those situations.
And then the charge of flééchettes, triggered by the warrior's dying convulsion, would have shredded both men from the waist upward.
Lieutenant Hawker shouted as he fired through the hologram display which had failed to warn him. The Molt was already within the tunnel before the jeep entered,so there were no indicia of teleportation for the apparatus to detect.They should have thought of that,but the lightning-swiftd anger of the snipers outside had made the cave mouth a vision of safety like none since Mother's bosom.
That was the sort of instinctive error that got your ass killed, thought Hawker as his energy bolts scarred long ovals across the ceiling's fluorescence, ricocheting further down the tunnel in diminishing deadliness, and the Molt's shotgun blasted deafeningly into the uplifted skirt and plenum chamber of the jeep.
The screech of the jeep striking and skidding along the tunnel wall at a 45° angle was actively painful to Profile Bourne. You didn't get to be as good a driver as he was without empathy for your vehicle, and the shriek of metal crumpling was to the sergeant comparable to skidding along a hard surface himself. But he'd done that too, thrown himself down on gravel when shots slammed overhead. You do what you gotta do; and anyway, the Molt's body when the jeep hit it provided a pretty fair lubricant.
Their forward velocity had been scrubbed off by the contact rather than killed by the vectored fans in normal fashion. Bourne chopped the throttle so that the braking thrust would not slam them back against the far wall. The jeep slumped down onto its skirts again, its back end ringing on the stone a moment before the whole vehicle came to rest.
The sergeant knew that he ought to be watching the next angle in case another warrior, prepared by the racketing death of the first, came around it shooting. Instead he closed his eyes for a moment and squeezed his hands together hard enough to make the thin flesh start up around the print of each fingertip. Lord, he'd almost pissed himself!
When he opened his eyes, he saw the tiny, glittering dimple in the steel flooring just between his boots. It was a flééchette from the shotgun charge which had come within a millimeter of doing the warrior's business—or half of it—despite the fact that the roof of the plenum chamber was in the way.
Lord and martyrs!
"Lord and martyrs," muttered Lieutenant Hawker as he stepped out of the vehicle, and curst if he didn't seem as shook as the driver felt. "Don't worry, got it on aural," he added with a nod toward the hologram display and a left-handed tap on the earpiece of his commo helmet. The data relayed through the headset was less instantly assimilable than what his eyes could intake through the holograms—but there were only two directions from which an attack could come in the tunnel.
Anyhow, Profile figured that he needed to walk out the wobbles he could feel in his legs. Maybe the Loot was the same.
Before the sergeant left the jeep, he switched off the headlights which would otherwise be only a targeting aid to whatever Molts were around. The rock quivered when he stepped onto it, an explosion somewhere, and he cursed or prayed—who knew?—at the thought that another salvo of penetrators on the back slope of the ridge might bring the bloody ceiling down and accomplish what the autochthons had failed to do. What the hell, nobody'd ever told him he'd die in bed.
Bourne skidded at his first step. He glanced down, thinking that the stone beneath his boots must have a glass-smooth polish. It wasn't that—and the Molt with the shotgun deserved worse, it'd been too cursed quick for him.
The two Slammers used handsignals at the next angle,five meters further down the tunnel. They could as easily have subvocalized the plan on the intercom, but Profile's quick tap on his own breastplate and the Loot's grimace of acceptance was all that it took anyway.
Bourne put a single shot against the facing wall, the bolt crackling like shattered brick as it bounced from the stone.A fraction of a second later,the sergeant himself went in low.
The shot might have drawn a reflexive return from anyone poised to meet them around the angle—but there was no one, no adult at least: they were in the nursery itself, a circular room no wider than the tunnel from which it was offset to the left, just around the second angle. There were eighteen reed and moss crèèches like the pips on an instrument dial, and about half of them still squirmed with infant Molts.
"S'all right, Loot!" Bourne shouted as he rolled into a sitting position; and for all the encouragement of his words, his ankles were crossed in a firm shooter's rest beneath him. "S'all clear, just the babes."
The flash of the shot was still a retinal memory to Bourne as he glanced around the chamber, blinking as if to wash the spreading orange blot from the black surface of his eyeballs. The scars of the ricochet were marked by powdered stone at a constant chest height along the circularwall.No significant amount of energy would have sprayed the infants, but they were mewing fearfully anyway.
The Loot came in behind the muzzle of his gun—you didn't leave decisions of safety to somebody else, even Sergeant Bourne, not in a place like this.
The Molt in the crèèche closest to Bourne teleported neatly into his lap, scaring the sergeant into a shout and a leap upward that ended with the infant clamped hard against him and the muzzle of Lieutenant Hawker's submachine gun pointed dead on. The little Molt squealed even more loudly.
"Let's get the cop outa here before the locals put a flame gun down the tunnel and investigate later," Hawker said as he ported his weapon again, making no apology for aiming it toward a teleporting autochthon, even one in Bourne's lap. "Doesn't seem those Molts'll snipe at us here, what with the little ones in the line of fire."