There were thousands of them. They began to merge into larger constructs as they broke through the surface and crawled toward the Headhunters on Hill 165.
Bradley clapped Sie on the shoulder. Light shimmered across the track of ionized air from the muzzle of her weapon to the patch of molten rock across the swale. “Save your ammo!” Bradley shouted.
He pushed himself through the tight opening between the ground and the dugout’s top cover, then reached back inside for his shotgun. RAG grenades had a maximum range of 500 meters, and the aerofoil charges in the shotgun itself were probably useless against this enemy even at point blank.
Bradley ran in a crouch toward the crew-served plasma weapon in the second dugout to the right. He expected bullets—bolts—something, but the enemy machines merely continued to roll down the slope like a metal-ceramic sludge.
Even at a thousand meters, bullets from Marine assault rifles seemed to have some effect on the individual machines. An object in a marksman’s killing zone flashed for a moment within a curtain of rock dust cast up by deflected bullets. After the third or fourth sparkling hit, the machine slumped in on itself and stopped moving.
When two or more machines joined, the larger unit shrugged off bullets like a dog pacing stolidly through the rain. Only a direct hit from a plasma bolt could affect them—and Weapons Platoon had only a hundred rounds for each of its belt-fed plasma weapons.
Bradley knelt at the back of the gun pit. “Raush!” he ordered. “Blair!”
The crew triggered another short burst. Air hammered to fill the tracks burned through it, and ozone stripped the protecting mucus from Bradley’s throat.
He reached through the opening and prodded the gunner between the shoulder blades with the shotgun’s muzzle. “Raush, damn you!” he croaked.
The gunner and assistant gunner turned in surprise. Their eyes widened to see the gun and Bradley’s face transfigured into a death’s head by fear.
“Single shots!” the field first ordered. “And wait for three of the bloody things to join before you shoot! Don’t waste ammo!”
Bradley rose to run to the other 1st Platoon gun pit, but Kowacs was already there, bellowing orders.
Nick understood. You could always count on the captain.
Raush resumed fire, splashing one and then a second of the aggregated creatures into fireballs with individual bolts.
Not every aimed shot hit. The machines moved faster than they seemed to. The survivors had covered half the distance to the Headhunter positions.
Bradley loped across the hilltop. His load of weapons and ammunition weighed him down as if he were trying to swim wrapped in log chain. Without radio, face-to-face contact was the only way to get plasma weapons from distant gun pits up to where they could support 1st Platoon.
Bradley thought of dropping the bandoliers of shotgun ammo he was sure were useless, but his hand stopped halfway to the quick-release catch.
This didn’t seem like a good time to throw away any hope, however slim.
* * *
“Grant!” Kowacs shouted into the A-Pot communicator as a shining, five-tonne creature lumbered up the slope toward the dugout. It was the last of the attacking machines, but it was already too close for either of the crew-served plasma weapons to bear on it. “We need support fast! Bring the Haig down! We need heavy weapons!”
Sienkiewicz fired three-shot bursts from her assault rifle. The bullets disintegrated as orange-white sparkles on the creature’s magnetic shielding, a finger’s breadth out from the metal surface.
Sie’s plasma weapon lay on the floor of the dugout behind her. The muzzle still glowed a dull red. She’d fired her last two plasma rounds an instant apart when a pair of low-slung creatures lunged suddenly from dead ground to either side.
Those targets now popped and bubbled, melting across the face of the rock from their internal energies; but there was one more, and Sienkiewicz was out of plasma charges.
Kowacs dropped the communicator and aimed his rifle. The creature was fifty meters away. It was shaped roughly like an earthworm, but it seemed to slide forward without quite touching the rock.
The dark patch just above the rounded nose might be a sensor window. Anyway, it was Sie’s aiming point, and maybe two rifles firing simultaneously—