“Team,” he said to his distant crewmen, “go!”
Codrus and Thomson fired from the sandstone ridges to either flank. Their weapons tapped energy from the Dirac Sea underlying the real-time universe, so the range—less than three hundreds meters in any case—was no hindrance.
Sightlines could have been a problem. Since Dresser had only two flankers, it didn’t matter that they had clear shots at only the first and last vehicles of the convoy. The tops of the huge egg transporters were visible from the crewmen’s positions, but the supply truck had vanished beneath the sharp lips of the gully.
The beams from the A-Potential weapons were invisible, but at their touch the magnetic shielding of the escort vehicles flared into sparkling cataclysm. Dresser’s helmet visor blocked the actinics and filtered the visual uproar. He continued to have a sharp view of the vehicles themselves—undamaged at the heart of the storm.
The A-Pot weapons could focus practically limitless amounts of power on the magnetic shields, cancelling their effect—but the beams couldn’t focus through the shields. The escort vehicles stopped dead. Their power supplies shunted energy to the shields—to be dumped harmlessly back into the Dirac Sea—but as soon as the A-Pot beams were redirected, the escorts would be back in the battle.
“Mines,” Dresser said to the audio controller in his helmet, “go!”
The gossamer, high-explosive mesh the scouts had spread across the floor of the gully went off. There was a green flash, a quick shock through the bedrock which slapped Dresser ten centimeters in the air, and—a heartbeat later—the air-transmitted blast that would have deafened the sergeant without the protection of his helmet.
The explosive’s propagation rate was a substantial fraction of light speed. The blast flattened the two escorts from the underside before it lifted them. Their wreckage spun into the air.
Though the supply truck’s shields were unaffected, the shockwave bounced the lighter vehicle against the side of the gully. It caromed back and landed on one side. Its shields hissed furiously, trying to repel the washed stone. The generators didn’t have enough power to levitate the truck, and the ground wasn’t going to move.
Mass and magnetic shielding protected the egg transporters. The huge vehicles lurched, but neither showed signs of damage. The leading transporter plowed through the wreckage of the escort. The driver of second transporter cut his controls to the right. Bow weapons, their existence unguessed until this moment, blasted an alternate route into the sandstone wall.
The mine’s unexpected groundshock lifted Dresser, then dropped him back on the hard-padded couch of his skimmer. He tried to aim his weapon.
The bow of the leading egg transporter pointed directly at him. A panel had recessed to clear the muzzle of an axial weapon like the one carving a ramp through kilotonnes of rock. Its bore looked big enough for a man to crawl down.
Codrus caught the Ichton vehicle with his A-Pot weapon. The beam held the huge transporter as rigid as a moth on a pin. The screens’ watery glare vanished.
Dresser raked the undefended target lengthwise with his drum-fed rocket launcher.
The launcher cycled at the rate of two rounds per second. It was easy for an experienced gunner like Dresser to control the weapon during short bursts, despite the considerable recoil: though the barrel was open at both ends, highly-accelerated exhaust gas gave a sharp backward jolt to the sides of the tube.
Dresser’s first rocket exploded on the muzzle of the Ichton gun. The next two green flashes shredded the bow of the transporter as recoil shoved Dresser and lifted his point of aim.
He lowered his sights and fired again, probing deeper into the Ichton vehicle through the damage caused by his initial burst. His helmet dulled the slapbang! of the shots and protected his retinas from the bright explosions. The rocket backblast prickled like sunburn on the backs of his bare hands.
A sulphurous fireball mushroomed from the rear of the transporter, far deeper than Dresser had been able to probe with his rockets. The shield generators failed. Codrus’ weapon now cut spherical collops from the vehicle.
Dresser shifted his aim to the remaining transporter. He thought he had half the twenty-round drum remaining, but he knew he was too pumped to be certain.