A pair of Ichtons jumped from a hatch in the side of the transporter stalled in the beam of Thomson’s weapon. Codrus, bulky and rounded in the hard suit which was an integral part of the A-Pot system, stood up on his ridge to rip the vehicle while Thomson’s beam grounded its shield.
Dresser punched three rockets into the transporter’s broadside. Green flashes ate meter-diameter chunks from the plating. The individual Ichtons turned together and fired their handweapons at Codrus.
The rock beneath the crewman blurred into high-temperature gas. The Ichton projectiles were near the range at which the flux expanded beyond coherence and the miniature generators failed. If Codrus hadn’t been shooting, his A-Pot suit might have protected him against the attenuated forces—
But an aperture to fire through meant a gap in the opposite direction also. Circuits in the A-Pot suit crossed, then blew in a gout of sandstone so hot it fluoresced.
“Ship!” Dresser shouted into the audio controller. He slammed a pair of contact-fuzed rockets through a hole blown by the previous burst. “Go!”
Ten klicks away, SB 781 was lifting from her camouflaged hide. The AI would execute the flight plan the AI had developed. Dresser could override the machine mind, but he wouldn’t have time—
And anyway, he might not be alive in five minutes when the boat appeared to make the extraction.
Bright gray smoke rolled in sheets out of the two lower holes in the transporter’s plating. Flame licked from the highest wound, sullenly red, and the smoke it trailed was sooty black.
The transporter began to slip back down the ramp its gun had carved. The forward half of the vehicle was shielded, but smoke and flame continued to billow beneath the blue glow.
Thomson shrieked uncontrollably on the team frequency as she lashed the two Ichtons with her weapon. The creatures’ personal shields deflected the beam—to Dresser’s surprise, but if you couldn’t touch the target, it didn’t matter how much energy you poured into the wrong place.
Dresser kicked the bar behind his left boot to power up his skimmer. It induced a magnetic field in the rock with the same polarity as that in the little vehicle’s own undersurface.
The skimmer lurched a centimeter upward, throwing off Dresser’s aim. The last rocket in his magazine missed high. The transporter was beginning to sag in the center.
“Thomson!” Dresser shouted. “We want a prisoner!”
The rock beneath the Ichtons first went molten; then froze and shattered into dust finer than the sand that had once been compacted to make stone; and finally expanded into a white fireball that drank the Ichtons like thistledown in a gas flame. When transformed into a real-time analog, Thomson’s A-Potential energy easily overwhelmed the Ichton defenses.
The skimmer wobbled downhill. Dresser steered with his feet on the tiller bar while he lay on his left side and fumbled a fresh magazine onto his rocket launcher. The Ichtons fired at movement. . . .
“Kill the fucking bastards!” Thomson screamed.
The front half of the damaged transporter began to crumple like overheated foil beneath its magnetic shielding. High-voltage arcs danced across the plates, scarring the metal like fungus on the skin of a poorly-embalmed corpse.
“K—” said Thomson as her A-Pot beam drew a streak of cloudy red sky from another universe into the heart of the transporter. The back half of the vehicle blew up with a stunning crash even louder than that of the minefield that initiated the contact.
Because Dresser’s skimmer was in motion, he was spared the groundshock. The airborne wave was a hot fist that punched fire into his lungs and threatened to spin his little vehicle like a flipped coin. The skimmer’s automatic controls stabilized it as no human driver could have done, then shut down. Dresser kicked the starter again.
“Bastards!” shouted Thomson as she rode her own skimmer forward in search of fresh targets.
The explosion slammed the overturned supply truck into the gully wall again. The magnetic shielding failed; one side of the vehicle scraped off on the rock. A living Ichton, suited and armed, spilled out along with other of the truck’s contents. Another of the creatures was within the gutted vehicle, transfixed despite its armor by a length of tubing from the perimeter frame.