Splashed by at least a ton of molten glass, the guards dropped, slid, fell to the ground. The liquid cascaded over their helmets, shoulders and weapons. Though their battlesuits protected them from the extreme temperature, they were coated by the molten glass. As the thin layer quickly chilled, it hardened, cementing the segmented plates together. The joints of the suits no longer bent. The arms wouldn’t move, the legs wouldn’t flex. The troopers turned to statues as they tried to rise.
Jak’s sustained burst had evaporated the mine entrance’s overhang, forming a semicircular crater on its threshold. The four frozen troopers were no longer protected by the tunnel ceiling. They fell under a hail of hurled pieces of ore.
The two guards in the dimple began picking off the stone throwers one by one.
Mildred rose up to a kneeling position and fired, sweeping her laser beam through the klieg light’s tripod legs. She angled the cut so it would fall onto the men in the dimple.
The huge lens crashed into the hole. The weight of the housing pinned the troopers. A blinding arc of discharged power was followed by a cloud of oily black smoke. The arc light continued to flash, and the smoke became a plume. Inside the dimple, fire enveloped the guards.
The surviving troopers were on the move, and they moved with purpose, as a fighting unit.
Jak saw that he and Mildred were about to be flanked. “Follow!” he said, leading Mildred around the end of the sledge line.
With energy pulses whistling at his heels, he dived behind the toppled water tank.
Mildred tried but couldn’t follow because of the intensely focused fire. If she’d made for the water tank, the overlapping pulses would have chopped her into a hundred small pieces. She darted instead to the left, rounding the far side of the ore truck. As she made the turn around the back bumper, she got a look at the enemy position.
The remaining troopers had banded together. There were five of them, and they fired from the same spot. They knelt on the flat just back from the crater where the mine entrance used to be, and where their comrades still lay trapped inside their own glass-glazed battlesuits.
“Dammit to hell,” Mildred muttered.
By now, the troopers had to have called for help from Slake City, which meant reinforcements were probably on their way. Which meant she and the other companions had run out of luck.
The massed fire from the top of the mine had already accomplished one thing: it had split her and Jak up, which allowed the troopers to concentrate their fire on one or the other position. They started by pouring it onto hers, on the opposite side of the half loaded ore truck.
Everything was okay for a minute or two, then molten glass began seeping out from under the rear gate. It splashed on the ground, cutting deep pits in the surface. Mildred was forced to abandon her position and move to the front of the wag.
Across the compound, she could see Jak, dead white against the rusting steel of the water tank. He was unable to return fire because of the barrage of laser pulses striking the front of the tank. The water remaining inside the toppled cylinder had started to boil. Clouds of white steam rolled up through the splits in the tank’s welded seams.
He flashed her a hand signal. Five fingers, counting down.
She nodded back.
They had no choice.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Krysty put her ear to the door of her windowless cell. Outside in the hallway, she heard the sounds of boots running and the rumble of heavy objects being rolled along the floor. She drew her head back. Something was up. Something had changed; she could sense it.
The invaders weren’t just rearranging the furniture in their grim hive.
They were mobilizing for something.
An attack on some other nearby barony?
That was inevitable. As was the barony’s fall. None of the self-crowned lords of Deathlands could withstand the power of the black army. And the destruction of the existing social order was just the first step in a larger plan. From what Ryan had told her, nothing was sacred to Dredda and her sisters. Everything was subject to interference, to manipulation. After the invaders had conquered and enslaved the human opposition, they would use their science to bleed the resources dry, to distort and pervert the existing lifeforms. This same philosophy had led to the destruction of their planet, but they had learned nothing from that experience. Each thoughtless, shortsighted step of theirs by default dictated the next, and the next, and the next. It was as if they were jumping from ice floe to ice floe in a partially frozen river. They deluded themselves into believing that progress was occurring, when actually the icebergs were getting smaller and smaller and farther and farther apart as the current picked up on its way to the thundering falls.