The gunner didn’t get a chance to correct his aim.
Surrounded by the blam!blam!blam! of projectiles and whizzing bits of casings mixed with brick chips, Malaveda spun and aimed. He walked a line of cyan flashes across ten centimeters of wall, up the transom, and into the window—
As Vierziger reholstered his glowing pistol. He’d drawn and fired twice in an eyeblink. His bolts had punched the gunner in the face, one to either side of the nose. The barrel of the machine gun tilted up and vanished as the gunner slumped.
“Watch our back!” Vierziger repeated. He slammed the jeep’s control yoke forward. The little vehicle skittered ahead. It held its alignment but slid slightly to the right when it emerged from the alley and met a breeze down the main boulevard.
The manhole cover hadn’t budged since Vierziger shot the man who’d lifted it. Malaveda kept the steel disk at the corner of his eyes as his conscious mind followed what his partner was doing.
Vierziger’s holster was metal or a temperature-stable plastic, because it didn’t melt or burn from contact with the pistol’s glowing iridium muzzle. Judging from the way he’d drawn it both times that speed was an absolute essential, the richly decorated handgun was Vierziger’s weapon of choice.
He nonetheless handled the heavy 2-cm powergun with an ease that belied his slight frame, as well as with flawless accuracy; and it was with the shoulder weapon presented that he waited now.
The jeep was too light to be stable without a man aboard. Its flexible skirts hopped on irregularities in the pavement, spilling air from the plenum chamber.
Vierziger fired twice as the vehicle bobbled its way toward the building. His first bolt ignited the interior of a room whose window had shivered away in the bomb blast. Malaveda hadn’t seen a human target, but Vierziger probably had, and the baby-faced killer had hit everything he’d aimed at this night.
The flare of cyan plasma filled the enclosed space momentarily. An instant later everything flammable, including the paint, was a mass of orange flame. The transom belched a great fireball when something, munitions or an accelerant, added its energy to the inferno.
Vierziger’s second shot was into the window from which the machine gun had fired. Malaveda hadn’t noticed additional movement there until the bolt hit the muzzle of the automatic weapon just lifting back over the transom to fire. Plasma converted fifteen centimeters of the gun’s steel barrel to gas. The superheated metal erupted in a red secondary flame as it mixed with air.
How had Vierziger hit a target so small at thirty meters, with an off-hand shot?
The jeep crashed into the half-open doorway at 50 kph. That was fast enough to crunch the front of the vehicle pretty thoroughly, though without doing serious damage to the building. The jeep’s plastic frame fractured in a series of angry clicks.
Vierziger fired the remaining three 2-cm rounds into the wreckage. He picked his spots, blowing open a pair of fuel cells with each squeeze of the trigger.
The hydrocarbon fuel normally realized its energy in a cold process using an ion-exchange membrane. Now it blazed outward, enveloping the jeep in fire hot enough to involve the body panels and upholstery as well. The mushroom of flame rose roof high. It barred the building’s rear street door as effectively as the presence of a tank could have done.
And that freed Vierziger and his partner for other activities.
Malaveda thought he saw the manhole cover move. He fired, rattling the disk in its coaming as the powergun bolts blew divots off the top of the steel.
Vierziger stripped in a fresh clip, then tossed Malaveda his bandolier of 2-cm ammo. “Follow me, swap guns and load when I tell you!” he ordered. “Now!”
The newbie had no business giving a non-com orders, but the present situation ignored what the Table of Organization might say. “Yessir!” Malaveda shouted.
Vierziger wasn’t wearing body armor; he’d claimed it would interfere with his driving. Now he reached left-handed into one of his tunic’s front bellows pockets and drew out a red-banded grenade that he had no business carrying.
He struck the safety cap off against the side of the building with casual ease. Malaveda had seen troopers trying to arm a grenade that way, proving how macho they were. He’d never seen anybody succeed so perfectly, and with such little concern, as Vierziger did now.
Vierziger’s right hand was on the 2-cm weapon’s pistol grip, holding it like a massive handgun. He fired point-blank into the edge of the manhole cover. Sub-machine gun bolts made the steel disk stutter. The heavier charge flipped it like a tiddlywink. Vierziger tossed the grenade into the opening, put his back against the alley wall, and fired another bolt down the hole to disconcert anybody who might have the notion of throwing the grenade back up.
The lid hit the pavement a meter from the hole, spinning on edge with a nervous clang-g-g-g until the grenade went off beneath. It was a bunker buster. It atomized a mist of fuel through the air ten cubic meters of tunnel, then detonated the mixture in a blast that ruptured the pavement all the way to the mouth of the alley. Vierziger, poised with his knees flexed, rode out the ripple of concrete, but the unexpected jolt knocked Malaveda down.
Vierziger jumped into the pillar of gray smoke gushing from the manhole. “Follow me!” he shouted as be disappeared underground.
Malaveda followed. It didn’t occur to him not to.
There was a ladder. Malaveda climbed down it, facing outward; clumsy because of the sub-machine gun in his right hand and the bandolier of 2-cm ammo swinging from his left. The helmet slapped filters over Malaveda’s nose as he stepped into the noxious efflux from the grenade explosion. Four rungs down, he switched his visor to thermal imaging.
In thermal mode, the helmet converted temperature gradients to shapes. Malaveda hopped forward to keep from stepping on the pair of bodies scrunched at the base of the ladder. Another corpse lay on its back a few meters down the tunnel.
Vierziger moved ahead of Malaveda. The atmosphere swirled with blast residues which showed as pastels on the helmet visor.
The tunnel was purpose-built as an escape route, not a converted sewer main. It was round with a two-meter cross-section. The walls were monocrystal filament wound on a resin core. The matrix shattered when the fuel-air explosion flexed it beyond its resilient capacity. Swathes of monocrystal hung down like ancient cobwebs, but the structure hadn’t collapsed as yet.
Vierziger fired his heavy shoulder weapon. Shock waves down the tunnel made Malaveda stagger, even though he was behind the shooter. Hot vortices spun off to both sides of the ionized track, expanding until they filled the cylindrical space.
The tunnel dead-ended at the ladder up into the alley. The lid on the alley end had locking dogs to avoid the risk of discovery by a utility crew. Either would-be escapees had undogged the lid, or the heavy jolt of plasma had flexed the disk enough to spring the bolts.
Vierziger broke into a run. The 2-cm weapon was butted against his shoulder. He fired twice more. Each jet of plasma heated the air like a mulling iron thrust into a beaker of wine.
“Feed me!” he screamed, still running, thrusting the shoulder weapon out behind him. Malaveda grabbed the gun by the forestock, too close to the glowing iridium muzzle, but he didn’t drop it.
He slapped the receiver of the sub-machine gun into Vierziger’s hand. Vierziger holstered the pistol that was pointing again as if by magic and presented the automatic weapon. He hadn’t slowed.
Malaveda stumped along behind the killer. Sweat broke out all over his body. The filters kept his lungs free of ozone and the poisons streaming from empty cases which spun from the powergun’s ejection port. His eyes burned and patches of bare skin prickled.