Voyage Across the Stars (86 page)

There were still occasional shots in the near distance. With luck, that meant Lordling’s team was policing up its area too.

“Coming through!” Yazov shouted again. Coyne seemed to think the tribarrel was operable, because he now crouched in the sidecar saddle with his hands on the weapon’s double grips.

“Come on then, curse you!” cried a voice too cracked for Yazov to identify the speaker. “And we’re bloody glad to see you!”

Yazov risked a glance outward. This side of the garden faced a gray stone building. The facade was shattered by powergun bolts. A limousine and half a dozen emergency vehicles burned in front of the structure, a van of some sort burned around to the right side, and the lower floor of the building itself burned like the box of a wood stove.

The flames had driven Doormann security personnel out of the building. The bodies of at least a dozen guards lay in a straggling windrow where submachine-gun fire had laid them.

Ned Slade dangled Lissea Doormann from the cavity that had been a window on the second floor. She pushed off from the wall so that she landed in the drive, well clear of the black smoke gushing from the doorway. Slade jumped after her. It took him a moment to rise again to a crouch.

Yazov led his men through the hedge. Lordling’s team appeared from the woods behind the shattered structure. The firetruck snorted along behind them as Westerbeke steered it between the well-spaced boles.

Lissea helped Slade stand. His commo helmet was skewed sideways. A powergun bolt had grazed it, melting the outer sheathing and shattering the ceramic core. Slade reached down to grab the ammo pouch of a fallen guard. Lissea pulled him upright again. As the rescue team closed in on the couple from both directions, she kissed Slade full on the lips.

“Water!” Ned croaked. “Gimme—”

Three mercenaries thrust their condensing canteens at him. Herne Lordling tried to push the nipple of his canteen between Lissea’s lips, like a clumsy father feeding a newborn. She snatched the canteen out of his hands and drank greedily on her own.

“Hey, Harlow,” Coyne called. He was astride the driver’s saddle of the captured trike, which he’d maneuvered out through the hedge despite the curb. “Come drive this thing and I’ll work the tribarrel.”

“Have you got transportation?” Lissea asked Yazov.

The skin was peeling over her right cheekbone, and the brows and eyelashes were scorched away. Ned didn’t remember how that had happened. It might have been a hostile bolt striking almost too close, but Lissea’s own weapon could have done it when a guard lunged unexpectedly up the blazing staircase. The Telarian had grappled Ned from behind and was pushing him toward the window. Lissea leaned close to be sure of her target and fired one round.

“Like hell you’ll get me on that!” Harlow said. “If I wanted to die, I’d eat my gun.”

“We’ve got a truck,” Lordling said. “Westerbeke’s coming in it.” He looked drawn. Three of the two-magazine pouches of his bandolier were empty, and the submachine gun he carried now wasn’t the weapon he’d had when he left the
Swift.

“Chicken!” Coyne gibed. “Okay Hatton,
you
drive. And don’t give me any lip!”

Hatton looked uncomfortable, but in the midst of a firefight, the big gunman was too high on the pecking order for a ship’s crewman to object. Hatton took over the trike’s steering chores as Coyne settled behind the tribarrel on the sidecar.

The firetruck pulled up beside the burning building. The troops climbed aboard. Men moved deliberately, as though they had walked forty klicks and knew that the day’s work was not yet over.

“Here’s a helmet, ma’am,” Raff said to Lissea. “It was Ingried’s. He bought it back there.”

The Racontid had four mutually opposable fingers on each hand. He gestured toward the woods with two of them while the other pair gripped the commo helmet he was offering to Lissea.

“He have any kin?” Ned wondered aloud.

“Get aboard
now
or we’ll be telling yours that we left you behind,” Herne Lordling snapped.

“We’ve been lucky,” said Yazov. “We’ve been
bloody
lucky.”

The firetruck pulled out. Lissea and Herne were in the cab; Westerbeke drove. Ned hugged his chest close to the chromed vertical rail at the side of the tailboard. If he let himself dangle at arm’s length, the first serious turn would send him flying from the vehicle.

Hatton started off leading the firetruck in normal escort fashion, then realized that Westerbeke would be choosing the course. The three-wheeler pulled onto the grassed shoulder to let the bigger vehicle accelerate past.

Coyne waved cheerfully. Ned wasn’t sure the trike would even be able to follow on its small wheels if Westerbeke headed through soft terrain, but he didn’t have enough energy to worry about that now.

Ned felt cold. His stomach was threatening to vomit up the water he’d drunk moments before. If his commo helmet worked, he could have listened to the chatter among the rest of the team, but he didn’t have even that.

Raff, Yazov, and Paetz were on the tailboard with him. The Racontid looked at Ned’s submachine gun, then lifted the weapon between paired fingers to stare at it muzzle-on.

Ned looked also. The iridium barrel had sublimed under heavy use until the bore was almost twice its normal diameter.

Ned grimaced and reached for the equipment pouch that should have carried two spare barrels and a barrel spanner. He wasn’t wearing the pouch. His present gear was what he’d taken from the limousine’s crew. Doormann Trading Company had never dreamed its guards would shoot a barrel out.

Raff grinned with a mouthful of square vegetarian teeth. He offered Ned the 2-cm weapon and bandolier which he wore slung beside his own rocket gun. “Better, yes?” he said.

“Better,” Ned agreed. “Ingried’s?”

He dropped the burned-out submachine gun onto the tailboard beside him.

“Ingried’s,” the Racontid confirmed.

The weight of the 2-cm weapon reassured Ned. When he draped the bandolier over his shoulder, it clacked against the pair of submachine gun magazines in the left side-pocket of his tunic. He thought the magazines must be empty or nearly so, but he didn’t guess they were doing any harm where they were.

When the terrain rolled, Ned caught glimpses of the gun towers on the perimeter wall. The team was nearing its goal. Westerbeke had been keeping to the roads, perhaps in consideration of the men on the three-wheeler.

The firetruck approached a replica of a Greek temple on the crest of a barely perceptible knoll. The reliefs on the triangular pediment were painted in primary colors, with red and blue predominating. The stone of the structure itself was stained a creamy off-white.

Civilians stood on the temple porch, staring at the vehicles and the gang aboard them. The Telarians didn’t appreciate that the mercenaries were really exactly what they looked like, a band of heavily armed pirates, murderous and as deadly as so many live grenades.

Coyne stood on his footboards and doffed his helmet to the watching civilians. Ned looked back sourly at him, wondering how the fellow could have the mental or physical energy left to clown.

A civilian shouted to the man next to her and pointed. She was looking at something in the distance.

The trike exploded in a jet of cyan brighter than the sun. The thunderclap of a 20-cm bolt from a tank’s main gun shook even the heavy firetruck.

Ned raised his eyes. A tank, streaming stripped branches and pushing a mound of loam ahead of its bow skirts, shuddered its way through a belt of flowering dogwoods a kilometer away.

Ned reached to key his helmet, remembered that the radio didn’t work, and checked the load of the 2-cm powergun that he’d ignored since Raff handed it to him. Ned was alive again, fully functional.

“Behind the building, fast!”
Yazov shouted through the integral mike. “
Tank coming!”‘

The firetruck fishtailed wildly. Westerbeke had failed to react quickly enough, and one of the others in the cab forced the steering wheel over against the driver’s grip.

The second 20-cm bolt clipped the nearest of the four free-standing columns across the temple facade. If Westerbeke had made the hard left turn as ordered, at least half the bolt’s energy would have centerpunched the vehicle instead of blasting a cavity in a wall of brick and climbing vines nearly a kilometer beyond the intended target.

The column, concrete beneath a marble finish, exploded violently. Head-sized fragments broke the shaft of the next pillar over and hammered the building’s front wall. Concussion and flying stone knocked down all those standing on the porch. Calcium in the concrete blazed with a fierce white light.

The pediment lifted with the initial shock. It settled back, cracked, and fell on the twitching bodies beneath. Seeing Telarians killing their own people didn’t make Ned feel better about the things he’d done; but it reminded him that this was war, and war had its own logic.

The firetruck pulled down the back of the knoll on which the temple stood—at least a temple in appearance, whatever the Doormanns were using the structure for in present reality. Westerbeke had slowed to sixty kilometers per hour to maneuver: the full tank of water made the vehicle top-heavy as well as sluggish.

Ned bailed off the tailboard, reflexively executing a landing fall, and rolled upright again. Heartbeats after Ned left the firetruck, Raff, Paetz, and Yazov jumped away from it also.

The vehicle continued on, accelerating slowly out of its S-curve. Westerbeke kept the temple and the knoll itself between him and the hunting tank. The truck climbed a triple terrace of flowering shrubs and disappeared for the moment through an arched gateway.

An air-cushion tank was capable of twice the firetruck’s best speed empty, and the half-track’s path cross-country was unmistakable. The tank would destroy the truck and everyone aboard it—Lissea included—if somebody didn’t stop the tank first.

That was what Ned Slade was here for. Somewhat to his surprise he found he was heading a team. He’d jumped at the side of the building, out of the tankers’ line of sight only if he stayed low. The other three mercs scrambled toward him from the rear of the temple.

Ned waved them down. He stood, presenting his powergun and screened only by the mass of the temple beside him.

The tank had covered half the intervening distance. The driver didn’t have enough field experience to handle the huge vehicle properly off-road, where the surface was less resistant than paving to highly pressurized air. He should have tilted his fan nacelles closer to vertical to keep a finger’s breadth between the ground and the lower edge of his skirts. As it was, the tank plowed a shallow trench across the carefully tended soil.

The tank wasn’t alone. Four air-cushion jeeps, similar to those the
Swift
carried, flanked the bigger vehicle. Each jeep mounted a tribarrel on a central pintle.

One of the gunners saw Ned and opened fire. His 2-cm bolts formed a quivering rope that smashed the side of the building like a wrecker’s ball, several meters above their intended target.

Ned shot the gunner, shot his driver, and shot the driver of the other near-side jeep. Then he ducked and ran as though he’d just lighted the fuse of a demolition charge.

Which, in a manner of speaking, he had. The tank turret rotated as the two jeeps described complementary arcs and collided in a spray of plastic and bodies. The gunner of the second vehicle, the only crewman Ned hadn’t killed, landed like a sack of flour thirty meters from the wreck.

The tank fired. Tribarrel bolts had punched holes in the temple wall, even though the weapon was firing at a slant. The charge of the 20-cm main gun blew the whole side of the building in. Because the concrete had no resilience, the enormous heat-shock shattered it. Refractory materials sublimed instantly to gas. The concussion threw Ned flat and sprayed him with gravel-sized bits of wall.

Either the tank gunner was uncertain about what lurked in the eruption of dust and blazing lime, or he was rapt in a sudden orgy of destruction. The tank fired twice more into the temple, blasting inner partition walls and the furnishings into self-immolating fireballs. Trusses slipped because their support pillars were broken. The main roof tumbled in as the porch had done moments before. A jet of flame-shot smoke spurted from the wreckage.

Ned crawled blindly on his hands and knees, wheezing and trying to blink away the grit covering his eyeballs. His damaged helmet was gone, and the nose filters probably wouldn’t have worked anyway.

Hands grabbed and held him as other hands expertly tied a moistened kerchief across his nose and mouth. “I had to get us better cover,” Ned gasped when he could speak.

Raff held him; Yazov had provided the field-expedient filter. The dust cloud spread as it settled onto the rubble, covering an increasing area with its white pall. “Paetz,” Ned ordered, “take out the jeeps. The rest of you aim low, punch holes in the skirts. It can’t move if the plenum chamber can’t hold air.”

He clambered onto a slab of concrete, looking for a firing position in the shifting wreckage. “Come on, out of sight! And don’t shoot at the tank till I give the signal—they’ll pull off if they figure what we’re doing. Come on!”

Josie Paetz ran out at an angle from the collapsed building. A tribarrel chased the motion. Suspended dust flashed and scattered the concentrated packets of plasma well above the mercenary.

Paetz chose his point, ducked, and then rose again, firing when the two maneuvering jeeps crossed in line with him, three hundred meters away. Both vehicles spun out of control.

The jeep crews were in body armor. The burst of submachine-gun fire—it was only eight or nine rounds all told—wasn’t enough to guarantee lethality with hits on armored torsos, so Josie aimed at faceshields. Although the haze of dust combed the bolts and reduced their effect, all four of the targets were dead before the careening vehicles flung them out.

Paetz ran back, hurling himself toward cover. The tank began to swing wide of the crumpled building, keeping two hundred meters clear. The main gun fired again, shocking the ruins like a boot kicking an ash pile.