A few minutes ago there’d have been only a handful of Volunteers in the open. The maze of tunnels would’ve seemed safety until those inside realized that the Slammers would with certainty penetrate the outer defenses and so control the tunnel entrances. Now several of the armored doors had swung back; black-uniformed figures were running for vehicles. Huber’s view was like a child’s of a stirred-up anthill.
A Volunteer drew a holstered powergun and fired in the direction of Fencing Master as he ran. One of the bolts snapped only twenty meters overhead, but that was dumb luck: nobody was that good, not with a pistol. Learoyd’s short burst vaporized everything between the Volunteer’s neck and his knees without any need for luck. He was an expert using a stabilized weapon with holographic sights. Learoyd could’ve put a round into his target’s left nostril if he’d wanted to.
The accompanying infantry squads spaced out to either side of Fencing Master, taking firing positions along the ridge. Foghorn still labored a hundred meters down the slope. Huber didn’t have leisure to see how Jellicoe’s section was doing on the eastern edge of the cone where a deep gully complicated the approach, but he knew she’d get them into action as quick as anybody could.
An aircar lifted. Huber fired as he tracked it, his bolts splashing behind the accelerating vehicle for a moment before three flashes walked up the fuselage from the back. The car, a luxury model, flipped over and crashed under power. Ruptured fuel cells sprayed their contents over a dozen other vehicles, some of which also started to burn.
“Cue aircar motors!” Huber shouted, shifting his AI to mark the electromagnetic rhythms of fan motors spinning. “Gunners—”
Going to intercom.
“—hit the moving cars, not the men!”
Three more vehicles tried to take off. One didn’t have enough altitude and collided immediately with the truck parked ahead of it. As it tumbled, Learoyd’s burst chopped the car’s belly open.
The infantry were shooting at individual targets. Though their weapons were semi-automatic, a single 2-cm bolt was enough to disable an aircar—let alone kill the driver.
One and then both cars of Jellicoe’s section opened fire from the other side of the crater. Foghorn finally not only mounted the rim but started down the steeper inner slope, wreathed in the grit its steel skirts rasped from the soft rock. Solid cyan streams lashed from its guns.
Deseau either didn’t hear Huber’s order or ignored it, instead laying his sights onto an entrance. He squeezed his trigger till a blast within spurted a cloud of smoke and yellow flame into the sunlight; the tunnel collapsed.
Three Volunteers rose together behind the bed of a truck, aiming at Foghorn for the split second before Huber shot them down. One’s carbine fired skyward as his head exploded. Huber’d been swinging his gun onto the car behind the men; its driver leaped out and flattened on the ground. The empty vehicle started to loop before falling sideways and crashing.
Fuel fires and the foul black plumes of burning plastic rose from dozens of vehicles. Nobody was coming out of the tunnels anymore, and the Volunteers surviving on the crater floor either huddled beside cars—there was no “behind” to the crossfire from the rim— or raised their hands in surrender. Many of the latter had their eyes closed as if they were afraid they’d see death coming for them.
“Sierra, cease fire!” Captain Sangrela called. “The enemy’s radioed to surrender! Cease fire!”
A carbine fired. The whack of the electromagnetic coils might’ve gone unnoticed in the chaos, but the clang! of the slug ricocheting from Foghorn’s armor was unmistakable. Some Volunteer hadn’t gotten the word….
Huber hadn’t seen the shooter, but Deseau did: his tribarrel was one of five or six guns which spiked the closed cab of an aircar. That car and three more nearby erupted in fireballs. A body panel fluttered skyward, deforming in the heat of the blast that lifted it.
“Cease fire!” Sangrela repeated angrily. His jeep was so heavy with electronics that he hadn’t been able to reach the rim, so he didn’t know the reason for the additional gunfire. “Cease fire!”
The shooting stopped. Arne Huber took his hands from the tribarrel grips and flexed them cautiously, afraid they’d cramp. He might need to use them if things got hot again. The underside of his chin was as stiff and painful as if it’d been flayed. The skin there’d caught some of the iridium vaporized when the bolt hit inside the fighting compartment.
“Cease fire!” said Captain Sangrela, but nobody was firing anymore.
“Blood and Martyrs!” Deseau wheezed, raising his faceshield. “I’m as dry as that rock out there!”
Huber’d had the same thought. In turning toward the cooler that still should have a few beers in it, he caught sight of Captain Orichos’ expression: she looked as though she’d just been told she was Master of the Universe.
It shouldn’t have disturbed Huber, but it did.
It’d been pouring rain. Now that the afternoon sun was out, the tents steamed and the clay had already started to bake to laterite. Ash lay as a slimy gray coating over ridges in the soil, but the sides of the rain-carved gullies were the color of rust. Dead treetrunks stood like tombstones for the forest that had once grown here.
“What a bloody fucking awful fucking place!” Deseau snarled, flipping up the front of his poncho without taking it off; the rain could resume any moment. “Learoyd, did you ever see such a bloody fucking awful fucking place?”
“Sure, Frenchie,” Learoyd said, frowning as he tried to puzzle sense out of the question. “Remember Passacaglia, where the dust got in everything and we kept burning out drive fans? And that swamp the place before that? And where was it everybody got skin fungus if they didn’t wear their gas suits all the time? Was that—”
“Yeah, well, this’s still a crummy place,” Deseau muttered. He saw Huber smiling and grimaced, turning his head away. Frenchie’d been around Learoyd long enough to know the trooper had too much trouble with the literal truth to make a good audience for a figure of speech—even a figure as simple as rhetorical exaggeration.
Looking eastward toward a dirigible unloading what seemed to be empty shipping containers, Deseau went on, “I wish to hell they’d let us go when the local cops arrived. They can handle anything that’s left, can’t they?”
Dirigibles full of Gendarmes and the supplies needed for an open-air prison had begun arriving within a few hours of the collapse of Volunteer resistance. Huber, and Captain Sangrela, and probably every other trooper in the task force, had thought Sierra would be released immediately. The optimists had even hoped they’d be sent back by way of Midway, with a few days of leave as a reward.
Surviving a major engagement like the one just completed made even level-headed troopers optimistic.
Central hadn’t felt that way. Sierra had stayed where it was for the three days it took for a column from Base Alpha to reach them.
“It won’t be long, Frenchie,” Huber said. He quirked a smile. “It shouldn’t be long, anyhow.”
There were worse places, just as Learoyd said, but this was bad enough in all truth. The Slammers had snagged tents from the loads brought in to house the prisoners, but they didn’t help much. You could keep the rain from falling on you, but the ditches the troopers dug around the tents hadn’t been enough to stop streams of ash-clogged water from finding their way in from below and soaking everything.
Huber looked over at the POW camp which lay between Task Force Sangrela’s defensive circle and the slopes of what had for a short time been Fort Freedom; it was now Mount Bulstrode again. The prisoners had it worse than the troopers did, of course. There wouldn’t have been enough tents to go around even if the Slammers hadn’t imposed their tax on defeat, but accommodations weren’t what was probably worrying the former Volunteers. The Slammers knew they’d be leaving within a few days, maybe even a few hours. The prisoners weren’t sure they’d be alive in a few hours.