“Three, this is Four,” Barbour broke in. “Don’t advance just yet, I want to run the alley. Over.”
“What do you—” Coke said.
A blast of shots and powergun bolts glanced from within the alley. A man screamed. Three gunmen—an Astra and two L’Escorials, each unaware of the others’ presence until that moment, burst onto the street. Coke cut them down arm’s length from his muzzle in a single long burst.
Two fireflies which had expended their magazines but were still lethally threatening drifted into sight above the men they had chased to their deaths. The devices’ static suspension sputtered faintly, like hot grease.
Across the street, Vierziger’s bolts lit a gunman who’d been similarly chased into sight. The fireflies turned and rose to comb the next pair of alleys in similar fashion.
“Two to One,” Sten Moden reported. “We’ve run out of missile targets, so we figured we’d work east from where you started. Is that a roger? Over.”
“One to Two,” Coke said. “Roger, but use the fireflies for the action, keep them loaded. Break. Four, put half the fireflies at Two’s disposal. One out.”
Neither Daun nor Moden was properly combat material, but Sten was right: a few L’Escorials would have kept away from the battle on their end of town. They weren’t the hardcore gunmen, obviously. Nonetheless, they couldn’t be simply ignored.
The trio on the ground were nearing what had been Astra headquarters. The stench of blood and death was overpowering. Heat from a burning vehicle—plastics and the rubber tires blazed long after the fuel had been consumed—drove Coke into the center of the street. His boots slipped on blood and flesh pureed by the explosions.
A man who breathed in rhythmic gasps tried to stuff coils of intestine back into his belly. Coke sighted on the dying man’s head, then shifted his weapon back to the search for possible threats.
He knew it would have been kinder to finish off the L’Escorial. He just didn’t have the stomach for that particular mercy on top of so much other killing.
A figure running, its limbs jerking like those of a wind-whipped scarecrow.
The man turned as Coke fired. Coke moved on. At every further step, his mind flashed the terrified visage which his bolts had lighted and blown apart.
Coke and Margulies leapfrogged again. Across the street Vierziger kept pace. Coke’s bare hands prickled. Ozone and flakes of matrix plastic, spattered molten from the guns’ ejection ports, had eaten away the outer layer of skin. Thirst was a red furnace within him, and his feet dragged with the effort of walking.
A man in a red vest with a leather fringe, kneeling and moaning a prayer at a locked doorway as a firefly made passes toward him.
Coke shot, then shot again as his bolts flung the man into the door and the corpse caromed back. Not men, not things; merely motion.
One of Coke’s sub-machine guns jammed. He’d replaced the barrel twice, but the light-metal receiver warped from the heat of continuous firing. He threw it away and picked up a similar weapon which lay beside a man Margulies had decapitated.
The weight of Coke’s ammunition had lessened. He’d emptied the pouches of two of the three bandoliers he’d belted on before the start of the action….
The three Frisians reached the western end of Potosi. There were no more targets. Coke didn’t know how much time had passed. His hands were swollen. They felt as though they were twice their normal size.
“Pretty well does it, s-s-Matthew,” Margulies croaked. “I was wrong about fireflies. They come in handy s-sometimes.”
Two of the fireflies had vanished while working the alleys ahead of Coke and his partners. Hit by lucky shots or mechanical failure, it didn’t matter; they’d served their purpose.
The remaining unit hung close above the Frisians, hissing like a restive cobra. Coke hated the fireflies even more than he had before he’d operated with them. It was as bad as being allied to people who ate the men they killed.
Cyan flashes quivered across the forest in the direction of the spaceport. A moment after the shots, the Frisians heard the blat of a diesel engine being pushed.
The port operations van, its headlight flicking up and down like a conductor’s baton as the vehicle flew over the washboard surface, raced toward Potosi. A circle of cooling metal on a quarter panel indicated that a fleeing gunman had hit the van when it failed to stop for him.
“Bloody hell!” Coke said as he lurched into the middle of the roadway. “Why did she take a chance like that? She could have been killed!”
“Sir!” Margulies warned. She dropped to a kneeling position with her back braced against the building as she aimed her 2-cm weapon. “That may not be your friend!”
Coke waved the sub-machine gun in his right hand. It felt immensely heavy, as if he were waggling a full-sized tree to get attention. The sky behind him was bright enough to cast his fuzzy shadow toward the oncoming vehicle.
The van fishtailed to a halt. The engine lugged but caught itself again without dying.
Pilar stuck her head out the side window. “Matthew!” she called. “Madame Yarnell’s back, and she’s come with a regiment of mercenaries! She says they’re going to clear the syndicates off Cantilucca and set up new factors before Marvela has time to react. Matthew, get in! They’ll kill you too, I’m sure of it!”
“Bloody hell!” Lieutenant Barbour blurted over the commo net. “One, this is Four and she’s right, I wasn’t monitoring the port. Four transports have set down and there’s another requesting landing instructions. It’s the Heliodorus Regiment and I’d estimate—”
A pause for instant mental synthesis of data that a normal interpretation team would have required an hour to complete.
“—over two thousand troops. I don’t know the equipment standard; it isn’t in my data base. Over.”
“Mary, you drive,” Coke ordered as he got in on the passenger side of the van. “Pilar, get into the back, it’ll be safer. How much fuel is there in the tank?”
“Matthew, I’m really sorry,” Barbour added. The needless and unprofessional comment showed how nervous he was. “I should have been watching the port. Four over.”
Barbour had run up to six fireflies simultaneously from a console that hadn’t been built for the purpose. Who did he think he was? The Lord God Almighty, that he should be omniscient?
“The Heliodorus Regiment’s light infantry,” Johann Vierziger said as he swung open the van’s rear door and sat, cradling his 2-cm weapon. The van now had a sting in its tail. “Wheeled transport, no fighting vehicles; coil guns with explosive bullets.”
“The tank’s about half full,” Pilar said. Instead of getting into the back as ordered, she slid to the middle of the front seat where her thigh pressed Coke’s. “The gauge doesn’t work, but there should be enough fuel to go a hundred kilometers or more.”
“And there’re about three thousand bodies on the TO and E,” Coke said to Vierziger as Margulies gunned the van forward. Data that hadn’t been downloaded into the intelligence officer’s console for lack of need bubbled to the surface of the combat veterans’ minds. “Not that anybody ever landed with his complete table of organization strength.”
Verbally keying the AI in his helmet, he continued, “Four, this is One. We’ll pick up you and the eastern element, then keep going as far as we’ve got fuel for. Which apparently isn’t very fucking far, the roads being what they are, but maybe we can improve our transport on the way. Break. Two and Five, do you copy? One over.”
“One, this is Two,” Sten Moden replied. His voice was breathy. “We’ll join you at L’Escorial HQ. We left the launcher there, and we may need the rounds we’ve got left. Over.”
“One, this is Four,” Barbour said. “I’m packing the console for travel now. Out.”
The intelligence officer shouldn’t have been able to override his commanding officer’s transmission—which is what he’d done, stepping on Coke’s attempt to protest about Moden’s plan. On the other hand, if Barbour couldn’t control the net, he wouldn’t have been as good as he’d repeatedly proved himself.