Cursing, Gabhart swung the laser rifle to his shoulder. As he did so, the autofire stopped, but the aggravatingly slow, single shots persisted at his back. The colonel didn’t take the time to hook up the weapon to the optics of his battle suit, but laid the rifle’s open sights on the pile of rubble that Hat Man was using for cover and squeezed the front trigger. A petawatt of pure energy turned the moisture trapped inside the material to nuke-heated steam in about a femtosecond. With a solid whack and a big puff of dust, the chunk of concrete exploded.
Hat man had cover, but not for long.
The colonel quickly detonated three more slabs of concrete, forcing the shooter to abandon his hide. The man ran like a bush bunny, very low and very fast across the rubble field. As he zigzagged from one cover to the next, because of the poor shot angle, the colonel was unable to take him out.
Gabhart lowered the weapon and two more single shots boomed from the rear. The bullets made hollow thunks as they struck high on the unprotected side of the missile. When he turned, he saw a pair of darkslashes in the rocket’s bottom stage, about six inches apart, just below the thrust ring. There were three other dents as well, clustered above the second stage’s stabilizing fins.
As much as he wanted to scream at that moment, he didn’t. There was too much to do. He quickly checked the map grid to make sure their attackers were in full retreat, then ordered his people back to inspect the exterior of the missile and its payload for other damage.
With all of them on the job, the survey took less than ten minutes to complete and when it was done, the colonel asked the systems engineer for a damage report. “Give me the good news first,” Gabhart told him.
“No worries on the second stage,” Ockerman said. “I think we’re looking at some minor repairs to the guidance controls, which we can make in a few hours. But I don’t like those two rips in the first-stage booster. It’s possible we’ve got something more serious going on inside there. From the position of the damage, we could even have a small breach in the main engine housing.”
No one said a word.
They just stared at the twin slashes in the missile’s white skin.
An engine breach could mean a fuel leak, and a fuel leak meant disaster.
The door to Shadow World might have just slammed shut.
Gabhart broke the heavy silence. “Okay, let’s not panic, just yet,” he said. “Let’s get the damaged outer panels off the bottom stage and see what we’re really looking at.”
HER HEAD REELING, Mildred raised herself on an elbow.
The canyon around her reverberated with the sounds of gunfire and explosions. As she tasted her own blood in her mouth, she had no idea what had happened, except that she had been leveled, blind-sided, and that Krysty lay unmoving, sprawled across her legs.
The redhead’s prehensile hair hung as lank and limp as string. For an instant Mildred thought the woman was dead. With a sinking heart, she squirmed out from under Krysty’s weight and checked for a pulse at her throat. It was there, weak and thready. What scared her worse was the state of Krysty’s pupils, which were so dilated that her emerald-green eyes looked almost black. She was still alive, but only just.
Mildred quickly examined her for evidence of a wound and found none. Krysty’s skin was pale and clammy to the touch; she showed the signs of having suffered an overwhelming traumatic shock.
About the time Mildred finished her exam, the gunfire stopped. She caught a flicker of movement across the rubble field to the north. It was Doc, Dean and Jak, circling away from Moonboy’s city center. The attack had been a bust. Time to bag it, girl, she told herself.
After stuffing Krysty’s side arm into a pocket of her fatigues, she wrestled the unresisting woman into a fireman’s carry.
Though Mildred had a stocky build, with powerful legs, it was a tough job lugging Krysty over broken ground. She hurried as fast as she could after her companions, but she couldn’t catch up with them.