The calliope in the holographic sight picture—its iridium barrels gleaming against the frame of baked-finish steel and the taut-faced Volunteers crewing it—slumped like a sand castle in the tide. The impacts were smears of emptiness, but the image cleared in snapshots of destruction, headless bodies falling and white-glowing cavities eaten from the carriage and gun tubes.
The target’s magazines detonated. The flash scooped the square-bottomed firing notch into a crescent five meters across. A mushroom of vaporized rock lifted from the site. Nothing remained of the calliope and its crew.
Blasts and gouts of lava spurted from a dozen places on the crater’s rim as combat cars raked the enemy with their tribarrels. Deseau and Learoyd both fired at the turret of an armored car which the Volunteers had held beneath the crater rim until the Slammers were within range of whatever weapon it mounted. Satellite imagery from Central cued the troopers’ AIs, so they were waiting with their thumbs on their triggers at the instant the armored car’s crew drove up a ramp into firing position.
The turret of high maraging steel blazed in a red inferno before its gun could swing on target. Internal explosions must have killed the whole crew, because they didn’t attempt to back the vehicle or bail out of it.
Deseau and Learoyd continued firing, eating away the rock to get to the car’s hull. They didn’t have a better target—other tribarrels had cleared the rest of the Volunteer positions—and they saw no reason to stop shooting at something that might possibly be useful to the enemy. A fireball of exploding fuel finally ended their fun.
Fencing Master bucked onto humped, barren ridges of hard rock. Layers of ash blown from the vent had formed most of the nearby landscape, but here magma had rolled out of cracks in the base of the cone and solidified. The steel skirts clanged and squealed, scraping showers of red sparks.
Huber grabbed the coaming with his left hand. Captain Orichos shouted as the car bounced her forward into Deseau. Frenchie snarled a vivid curse, but he didn’t lose his grip on the tribarrel.
“They’re running!” somebody shouted over the general channel. From the voice and the way the AI let it cut through the chatter of a dozen or more excited soldiers, Huber figured it was Captain Sangrela. “Get the bastards! Get ’em all!”
The Volunteers had spent years building Fort Freedom. In addition to tunnels carved through the cone, they’d dug hundreds of bunkers on the volcano’s outer face. The squads and fire teams placed there hadn’t run earlier because there was no way out except up a bare slope; by the time they’d had a good enough look at what was coming toward them, they were more afraid to show themselves than they were to stay.
The shriek as combat cars crossed rock and the nearing intake howl of the fans changed the equation. First a few, then many scores of Militiamen clambered out of their holes to dash for the rim and what they hoped was safety. It was near suicide, but with the tanks continuing methodically to pulverize bunkers, running may still have been the better option even so.
The Volunteers’ black uniforms would’ve blended well with the slopes of compacted ash, but the Slammers’ helmets keyed on motion. A forest of translucent red carets lit on Huber’s faceshield. All he had to do was swing his sight picture onto the thickest clumps and squeeze his trigger, letting Fencing Master’s movement hose the burst across running victims. Bodies and severed limbs bounced against the rock, shrouded in smoke from burning uniforms.
“Get the bastards before they grow their spines back!” Captain Sangrela screamed. “Get ’em all!”
Some Volunteers fired from their bunkers or turned to fight like cornered rats as cyan bolts slaughtered their comrades. A burst hit Fencing Master’s bow slope and ricocheted in dazzling violet streaks. The car’s armor rang like a trip hammer working, but that was just a fact of life. Huber’s skin prickled and his throat was as raw as if he’d drunk lye.
Fencing Master reached the cone. It was steep, forty degrees on average and occasionally almost vertical where weather had sheared the concreted ash. Tranter fought his controls, fishtailing the car so that they mounted the slope in a series of switchbacks instead of fighting gravity head on. The combat cars had a higher power to weight ratio than the massively armored tanks did so they could climb the cone, but it still took finesse to do it well.
A powergun bolt stabbed over the rim of the fighting compartment’s armor, splashing the interior. The cyan brilliance blew a chunk of iridium into a white-hot bubble between Huber and Deseau.
The gas flung Huber backward, tearing his hands from the tribarrel. He felt as though he’d been slammed in the crotch by a medicine ball.
Heat penetrated a moment later. The fabric of his uniform was temperature resistant, but the metal resolidifying as a black crust over the khaki had vaporized at something over 4800 degrees. I’ll worry about it later….
Frenchie’d gone down also. He was still holding his tribarrel’s left grip, but that was the way a drowning man clutches flotsam. Litter on the floor of the compartment had ignited, twigs and leaves which had whirled into the vehicle during the march as well as plastic wrappers and similar human trash.
Learoyd ripped short bursts toward what was now blank hillside above them: the Volunteer sniper had ducked into his foxhole after firing, and the slope itself concealed the opening. The shooter must’ve been lucky to hit a target he couldn’t see till he showed himself, but he was also good. If he thought he was safe because he was out of sight again, though—
The rock Learoyd’s 2-cm bolts was splashing into fist-sized divots of glass suddenly erupted as though the volcano had gone active again. Two tanks hit it, then doubled the initial impacts as soon as their main guns could cycle. Each bolt lifted a truck-sized volume of compacted ash which strinkled down again on the breeze.
There was no sign of the shooter. If his ammunition had gone off, its flash was lost in the immense violence of 20-cm bolts.
Huber’s legs were splayed before him; his hands waved in the air. Captain Orichos caught his right wrist and bent close. “Should I take your gun?” she shouted. “Can you—”
“I’m all right,” Huber said, forcing the words out. The shock had numbed his diaphragm; breathing was one agony among many. He braced his left arm against the side armor, then let the car’s lurch help Orichos lift him to his feet again.
On his feet but not upright; he was still half doubled over and he was pretty sure that he’d vomit if he tried to straighten fully. Via! but he hurt.
Deseau’s gun thumped a burst toward the top of the cone. Huber didn’t see a target there; Frenchie was probably just proving to himself and others that he was alive and functioning …which is what Huber was doing, after all.
“I’m all right!” he repeated, forcefully and with more truth this time. He took his tribarrel’s grips in his hands as Fencing Master lurched to the top of the ridge, the western battlements of the Volunteer fortress. Below was the interior of the partial cone, and beyond that the sea.
Aircars ranging from the big trucks that could haul twenty or more armed men to hoppers with one seat and room for a sack of groceries were mixed indiscriminately on the crater floor. The drivers had squeezed in wherever they’d seen a place to set down. The Volunteers had left Midway in a near panic; they probably hadn’t landed here in much better emotional condition.
There wasn’t room in the tunnels to conceal so many vehicles, so the calliopes had been the Volunteers’ only means of protecting their hope of escape if things went wrong—as they were certainly going wrong now. Those calliopes were molten ruin, but there was no need to waste shells on the aircars. They were perfect targets for Fencing Master’s tribarrels.