The car’s Automatic Defense System banged twice, blasting tungsten pellets from the strips just above the skirts. They shredded the buzzbombs in the air, killing one of the rebels who happened to be in the way of the remainder of the charge.
Ruthven shot before his gun was on target, hoping his blue-green bolts chewing the landscape would startle the rebels. The remaining rebel fired. Because the car’s bow was canted upward, the third buzzbomb approached from too low to trip the ADS. The warhead burst against the skirts, punching a white-hot spear through the plenum chamber and up into the driver’s compartment.
Several lift fans shut off; pressurized air from the remaining nacelles roared through the hole blown in the steel. The car grounded, rocked forward in a near somersault, and slammed to rest on its skirts.
The first impact smashed Ruthven’s thighs against the hatch coaming; pain was a sun-white blur filling his mind. When the car’s bow lifted, it tossed him onto the bales of rations and personal gear in the roof rack. Ruthven was only vaguely aware of the final shock hurling him off the crippled vehicle.
He opened his eyes. He was on his back with the landscape shimmering in and out of focus. He must’ve been unconscious, but he didn’t know how long. The car was downslope from him. One of its fans continued to scream, but the others were silent. Black smoke boiled out of the driver’s compartment.
He tried to stand up but his legs didn’t move. Have they been blown off? They couldn’t be, I’d have bled out. He’d lost his helmet, so the visor no longer protected his eyes from the sky-searing bolts of plasma being fired from the knoll above him. The afterimages of each track wobbled from orange to purple and back across his retinas.
Ruthven rolled over, still dazed. Pain yawned in a gaping cavern centered on his right leg. He must’ve screamed but he couldn’t hear the sound. When the jolt from the injured leg sucked inward and vanished, his throat felt raw.
“It’s the El-Tee!” somebody cried. “Cover me, I’m going to get him.”
Another buzzbomb detonated with a hollow Whoomp! on the right side of the command car. Momentarily, a pearly bubble swelled bigger than the vehicle itself. The jet penetrated the thin armor, crossed the compartment, and sprayed out the left side.
Ruthven started crawling, pushing himself with his left foot and dragging his right as though the leg were tied to his hip with a rope. He couldn’t feel it now except as a dull throbbing somewhere.
He wasn’t trying to get to safety: he knew his safest course would be to lie silently in a dip, hoping to go unobserved or pass for dead. He wasn’t thinking clearly, but his troopers were on the knoll so that’s where he was going.
A rebel ran out from behind the command car shouting, “Protect me, Lord!”
Ruthven glanced back. His sub-machine gun was in the vehicle, but he wore a pistol. He scrabbled for it but his equipment belt was twisted; he couldn’t find the holster.
The rebel thrust his automatic rifle out in both hands; the butt wasn’t anywhere near his shoulder. “Die, unbeliever!” he screamed. A 2-cm powergun bolt decapitated him. The rifle fired as he spasmed backward.
One bullet struck Ruthven in the small of the back. It didn’t penetrate his ceramic body armor, but the impact was like a sledgehammer. Bits of bullet jacket sprayed Ruthven’s right arm and cheek.
He pushed himself upward again, moaning deep in his throat. He thought he might be talking to himself. A skimmer snarled through the high grass and circled to a halt alongside, the bow facing uphill. Nozzles pressurized by the single fan sprayed grit across Ruthven’s bare face.
“El-Tee, grab on!” Rennie shouted, leaning from the flat platform to seize Ruthven’s belt. “Grab!”
Ruthven turned on his side and reached out. He got a tie-down in his left hand and the shoulder clamp of the sergeant’s armor in his right. Rennie was already slamming power to the lift fan, trying to throw his weight out to the right to balance the drag of Ruthven’s body.
The skimmer wasn’t meant to carry two, but it slowly accelerated despite the excess burden. Ruthven bounced through brush, sometimes hitting a rock. His left boot acted as a skid, but often enough his hip or the length of his leg scraped as the skimmer ambled uphill. A burst of sub-machine gun fire, a nervous flickering against the brighter, saturated flashes of 2-cm weapons, crackled close overhead, but Ruthven couldn’t see what the shooter was aiming at.
The skimmer jolted over a shrub whose roots had held the windswept soil in a lump higher than the ground to either side. Ruthven flew free and rolled. Every time his right leg hit the ground, a flash of pain cut out that fraction of the night.
A tribarrel chugged from behind, raking the slope up which they’d come. Ruthven was within the new perimeter. Half a dozen Royalists huddled nearby with terrified expressions, but E/1 itself had enough firepower to halt the rebels. They’d already been hammered, and now more shells screamed down like a regiment of flaming banshees.
Firebase Groening was northeast of Firebase Courage, so the hogs were overfiring E/1’s present perimeter to reach the rebels. Somebody …Sergeant Hassel? …must be calling in concentrations, relaying the messages through the command car. The vehicle was out of action, but its radios were still working.
Rennie spun the skimmer to a halt. “Made it!” he shouted. “We bloody well made it!”
Ruthven found his holster and managed to lift the flap. Beside him, Rennie hunched to remove his 2-cm weapon from the rail where he’d clamped it to free both hands for the rescue.
A buzzbomb skimmed the top of the knoll, missing the tribarrel at which it’d been aimed and striking Sergeant Rennie in the middle of the back. There was a white flash.
The shells from Firebase Groening landed like an earthquake on the rebels who’d overrun the Royalist camp and were now starting uphill toward E/1. In the light of the huge explosions, Ruthven saw Rennie’s head fly high in the air. The sergeant had lost his helmet, and his expression was as innocent as a child’s.
“Good afternoon, Lieutenant Ruthven,” Doctor Parvati said as he stepped into the room without knocking. “You are up? And packing already, I see. It is good that you should be optimistic, but let us take things one step at a time, shall we? Lie down on your bed, please, so that I can check you.”
Ruthven wondered if Parvati’d put a slight emphasis on the phrase “one step.” Probably not, and even if he had it’d been meant as a harmless joke. I have to watch myself. I’m pretty near the edge, and if I start overreacting, well….
“Look, Doc,” he said, straightening but not moving away from the barracks bag he was filling from the locker he’d kept under the bed. “You saw the reading that Drayer took this noon, right? I’m kinda in a hurry.”
“I have gone over the noon readings, yes,” Parvati said calmly. He was a small, slight man with only a chaplet of hair remaining, though by his face he was in his early youth. “Now I would like to take more readings.”
When Ruthven still hesitated, Parvati added, “I do not tell you how to do your job, Lieutenant. Please grant me the same courtesy.”
“Right,” said Ruthven after a further moment. He pushed the locker to the side and paused. The garments were new, sent over from Quartermaster’s Stores. The gear on the command car’s rack had burned when they shot at rebs trying to get to the tribarrel. The utilities Ruthven worn during the firefight had been cut off him as soon as he arrived here.
He sat on the bed and carefully swung his legs up. He’d been afraid of another blinding jolt, but he felt nothing worse than a twinge in his back. Funny how it was his left hip rather than the smashed right femur where the pain hit him now. He’d scraped some on the left side, but he’d have said that was nothing to mention.
“So,” said Parvati, reading the diagnostic results with his hands crossed behind his back. The holographic display was merely a distortion in the air from where Ruthven lay looking at the doctor. “So.”