Holman slammed the tank down again. They hit with a crunch, followed by a second shudder as the ground collapsed over the Consie bunker.
Holman rocked her fans. Dust and quartz pebbles flew back, covering the corpses in the gully like dirt spurned by a cat over its dung.
"Sergeant?" called the voice in Wager's intercom. "Sergeant? Want to make another pass?"
Wager was trying to catch his breath. "Negative, Holman," he managed to say. "Just bring us level with Deathdealer again.
"Holman," he added a moment later. "You did just fine."
Their position in line was second from the left, but Dick Suilin glimpsed the remaining combat car on his side only at intersections—and that rarely.
Its powerguns lit the parallel street in a constant reminder of its lethal presence. A burst quivering like a single blue flash showed Suilin a hump on what should have been the straight slope of a barracks roofline across the next intersection.
The reporter fired; the empty clip ejected with the choonk of his weapon.
Before Suilin's grenade had completed its low-velocity arc toward its target, the figure fired back with a stream of tracers that looked the size of bright orange baseballs. They sailed lazily out of the flickering muzzle flashes, then snapped past the reporter with dazzling speed.
The splinter shield above Suilin rang,and impacts sparkled on the iridium side armor. How could the Consie have missed—the reporter thought.
A tremendous blow knocked him backward.
His grenade detonated on the end wall of the building, a meter below the machine-gunner. Cooter, screaming curses or orders to their driver, squeezed his trigger button. Cyan fire ripped from both the weapon he gripped and the left wing gun, slaved to follow the point gun's controls.
Suilin didn't hurt, but he couldn't feel anything between his neck and his waistband.He tried to say,"I'm all right,"to reassure himself,but he found there was no air in his lungs and he couldn't breathe. There were glowing dimples in the splinter shield where the machine-gun had hammered it.
I'm dead, he thought. It should have bothered him more than it did.
His grenade had missed the Consie. Tracers sprayed harmlessly skyward as the fellow jumped back while keeping a death grip on his trigger.
Cooter's powerguns lit and shattered roof tiles as they sawed toward, then through, their target. The machine-gun's ammunition drum blew up with a yellow flash.
Suilin's hands hurt like hell. "Via!" he screamed. A flash of flaming agony wrapped his chest and released it as suddenly, leaving behind an ache many times worse than what he remembered from the time he broke his arm.
Both the mercenaries,faceless in their visored helmets,were bending over him. "Where you hit?" Cooter demanded as Otski lifted the reporter's right forearm and said, "Via! But it's just fragments, it's okay."
Cooter's big index finger prodded Suilin in the chest. "Yeah," he said. "No penetration." He tugged at something.
Suilin felt a cold, prickling sensation over his left nipple. "What 've you—" he said, but the Slammers had turned back to their guns.
The car must have paused while they checked him. Now it surged forward faster than before.
They swept by the barracks. Cooter's long double burst had turned it into a torch.
Suilin lay on his back. He looked down at himself. There was a charred circle as big as a soup dish in the fabric cover of his clamshell. In the center of that was a thumb-sized crater in the armor itself.
The pockmark in the ceramic plate had a metallic sheen, and there were highlights of glittering metal in the blood covering the backs of both Suilin's hands. When the bullet hit the clamshell armor and broke up, fragments splashed forward and clawed the reporter's bare hands.
He rose, pushing himself up with his arms. For a moment, his hands burned and there were ice picks in his neck and lower back.
Coolness spreading outward from his chest washed over the pain. There were colored tabs on the breast of the armor. Suilin had thought they were decorations, but the one Cooter had pulled was obviously releasing medication into Suilin's system.
Thank the Lord for that.
He picked up the grenade launcher and reloaded it. Shock, drugs, and the tiny bits of metal that winked when he moved his fingers made him clumsy, but he did it.
Like working against a deadline. Your editor didn't care why you hadn't filed on time; so you worked when you were hung over, when you had flu . . . .
When your father died before you had had time to clear things up with him. When your wife left you because you didn't care about her, only your cursed stories.
Dick Suilin raised his eyes and his ready weapon just as both the combat car and the immediate universe opened up with a breathtaking inferno of fire.
They'd reached the Headquarters of Camp Progress.
It was a three-story building at the southern end of the encampment. Nothing separated the pagoda-roofed structure from the berm except the camp's peripheral road. The berm here, like the hundred-meter square in front of the building, had been sodded and was manicured daily.
There were bodies sprawled on the grass. Suilin didn't have time to look at them,because lights flared in several ground-floor windows as Consies launched buzzbombs and ducked back.
The grenade launcher's dull report was lost in the blurred crackling of the three tribarrels, but the reporter knew he'd gotten his round away as fast as the veterans had theirs.
Unlike the rest of Camp Progress, the Headquarters building was a masonry structure. At least a dozen powerguns were raking the two lower floors. Though the stones spattered out pebbles and molten glass at every impact, the walls themselves held and continued to protect the Consies within them.
The grenade was a black dot against the window lighted by bolts from the powerguns. It sailed through the opening, detonated with a dirty flash, and flung a guerrilla's corpse momentarily into view.
The oncoming buzzbomb filled Suilin's forward vision. He saw it with impossible clarity, its bulbous head swelling on a thread of smoke that trailed back to the grenade-smashed room.
The close-in defense system went off, spewing miniature steel barrels into the path of the free-flight missile. They slashed through the warhead, destroying its integrity.When the buzz bomb hit the side of the combatcar between the left and center gun positions, the fuse fired but the damaged booster charge did not.
The buzzbomb bounced from the armor with a bell sound, then skittered in tight circles around the grass until its rocket motor burned out.
Cooter's driver eased the vehicle forward, onto the lawn, at barely walking speed. The square was normally lighted after sunset, but all the poles had been shot away.
Dick Suilin had spent three days at or close to the Headquarters building while he gathered the bulk of his story. Clean-cut, professional members of the National Army, doing their jobs with quiet dedication—to contrast with ragged, brutal-looking mercenaries (many of whom were female!), who absorbed such a disproportionate share of the defense budget.