Cyan bolts licked the pod. The solid rocket fuel burned in a huge yellow ball, technically not an explosion but wholly destructive of everything within its ten-meter diameter.
At least one of the missile warheads did detonate. The white flash of forty kilos of HE punctuated the saffron fireball. The tractor-trailer combination blew apart. Blazing debris rained across the landscape, igniting the houses of Hamlet 2 and the heads of the ripe grain in the paddies.
On the other side of the display, Mother Love’s three tribarrels clawed the infantry packed into the civilian vehicles. Ammunition and grenades went off in secondary explosions, but the stabbing cyan plasma itself did most of the damage. The Association troops were too crowded to fight or flee in the first instants of the ambush, and those instants were all that remained to scores of them.
A stray bolt ruptured the fuel tank under a truck cab. Kerosine, superheated and atomized by the plasma, expanded into an explosive mixture with the surrounding atmosphere—
And flash ignited, just as it would normally have done when injected into the cylinders of the truck’s diesel engine. Bodies and body parts flew up in the mushrooming flame, but most of the Association troops had already been killed by gunfire.
“You wanted to know what?” Coke shouted over the wail of the siren. He gestured to the screen which glowed with the light of the scenes it displayed. “That’s what, General, and there’s a lot more Association units out there tonight than those.”
An automatic cannon opened fire from a bunker on the perimeter of Fortress Auerstadt. The gunners probably didn’t have a real target. They were shooting at shadows or livestock.
That was the right response to the present circumstances. With the base fully alerted, any attack Association troops made would be fragmentary instead of coordinated and overwhelming. In all likelihood there would be no attack. At daybreak the National Army would be able to concentrate on scattered companies of their opponents.
“Why that’s …” the Marquis said, staring at the console display. “That’s a massacre!”
Coke was surprised that his nominal superior had enough military knowledge to make that perfectly accurate assessment of what was happening in Parcotch.
As soon as the shooting started, the combat cars’ drivers fed full power to the lift fans. Howling like banshees as the fans sucked in vast quantities of air to pressurize the plenum chambers, spraying water and soupy mud in all directions from beneath their skirts, the fifty-tonne behemoths accelerated toward Parcotch Hamlet 3 from two directions.
While her wing gunners destroyed the rocket launcher, Sergeant Lennox had opened fire on the community itself. Lennox didn’t have a line of sight to the vehicles leaving the hamlet eastward from The Facts of Life’s starting position half a klick distant. Instead she shot up the buildings.
The structures had thatch walls and roofs of corrugated plastic sheeting, supported by wood or plastic frames. All the construction materials were flammable at the temperature of copper plasma. Houses, the school building, and the community center all burst into flame, spreading panic and confusing the enemy.
Everything moving this night was a foe and a target. The Frisians’ only chance was to hit hard and keep on hitting before the enemy forces could organize their superior numbers. In the morning, every corpse in Hamlet 3 would be tagged as an Association soldier or an Association supporter. Like other forms of history, after-action reports are written by the survivors.
Mother Love bounced onto the Auerstadt Road from the dike which had concealed the vehicle in the darkness. The gunners depressed their tribarrels, raking the troops who’d jumped into the fields to either side of the causeway. A gout of steam flew up at each bolt, whether it hit a flooded paddy or superheated the fluids within a soldier’s body.
The flames enveloping the hamlet rolled in redoubled fury, whipped by The Facts of Life’s powerful drive fans. The combat car bellied through the blaze at a walking pace, firing continuously from all three weapons. Cyan bolts cut down the soldiers who had jumped from wagons and truck beds to run toward the fancied safety of the buildings.
Lennox made a point of destroying each of the stalled vehicles. Blazing fuel geysered over the paddies, igniting rice and troops alike.
“Good Lord!” the Marquis said. He turned from the display to Coke and continued, “Get those tanks back here now, you fool! How dare you leave me at risk at a time of such danger?”
“Yessir,” Coke said. “They’re on their way back now.”
The Facts of Life bulldozed burning wreckage off the causeway, clearing the route by which to return to Fortress Auerstadt. The driver was buttoned up within his compartment, using the curved bow slope to butt aside a truck festooned with corpses.
The tribarrels continued to fire. The visors of Frisian commo helmets could be switched to either light enhancement or thermal imaging modes. The latter could pick up bodies even through the shallow water of the paddies.
Captain Wilcken blurted something, clawed his personal sidearm out of a white patent leather holster, and pointed the small-bore projectile pistol at General the Marquis Bradkopf. Colonel Jaffe was drawing his pistol also.
Part of Coke’s mind reasoned:
Wilcken and Jaffe were supporters of the Association of Barons. They intended to assassinate Bradkopf in conjunction with the attack, leaving Fortress Auerstadt leaderless at the moment of crisis. In panic, Wilcken has gone ahead with the plan even though circumstances have obviously changed….
That was with the conscious part of his mind. Reflex thumbed off the safety of Coke’s sub-machine gun as his left hand slapped the foregrip and his finger took up the slack in the trigger.
The first bolt blew plaster from the wall above the TOC’s doorway. The next four hit Wilcken in the chest and neck at point-blank range, virtually decapitating him.
Officers and their gorgeously clad mistresses screamed and threw themselves down. Coke body-checked the Marquis, knocking him to the side and clearing a shot at Colonel Jaffe. Jaffe’s pistol was only half out of its holster. To Coke’s adrenaline-speeded reactions, the colonel didn’t seem to be moving at all.
The air stank of burned flesh and vaporized blood. Wilcken toppled backward, his head dangling onto his chest by a tag of skin. The pupils of the dead man’s eyes had tilted up into the skull.
Coke’s second burst winked cyan on Jaffe’s corneas. The colonel’s chest burst like a blood-filled sponge. The pistol in his hand fired a single shot into the floor. The bullet moaned away in sparks and a spurt of powdered concrete.
“Traitors!” gasped the Marquis, half-sprawled where Coke had knocked him, supporting his torso on the spread fingers of his right hand. “They were—uh!”
Coke was poised for a further threat, sweeping the bullpen over his sub-machine gun’s holographic sights. The iridium barrel glowed white from the nearly instantaneous bursts. Heat waves trembled through the haze of powergun matrix and smoldering fabric.
Officers and their women hugged the littered floor, some of them with their hands crossed over their heads. The trio of enlisted personnel huddled behind the overturned table at which they had been sitting.
No one else was touching a gun. Jaffe’s disemboweled body thrashed, but he was as dead as the headless Captain Wilcken. Everything was safe—
Except that General the Marquis Bradkopf vomited blood onto the concrete floor, then pitched facedown into the bright pool.
The hilt of a narrow-bladed dagger projected from his back. Bradkopf’s youthful mistress stared fixedly at the weapon. There was blood on her little finger and the heel of her right hand. Her tongue dabbed at it.
“Bloody hell,” Coke whispered. He didn’t shoot the girl, the third of the assassins. At this point, it wouldn’t do any good.