As they hit the ground, Ryan got a glimpse of the APCs ringing them. For an awful instant he thought they were going to take crossing lanes of fire, but Damm was too fast. Before the APCs could shoot, he squirted the van, engine howling, through their perimeter.
Beside Ryan, Nara stopped counting under her breath and pressed the detonator with both thumbs.
A fraction of a second later they were slammed from behind by a concussion so awesome that it made Ryan lose consciousness. The moment of relative peace was short-lived. He was jarred awake again as the blast-lifted rear end of the van crashed back to the ground and the impact drove his stomach into his throat.
Ahead of them, sheared by the power of the blast, uncountable tons of hanging slime dropped from the ceiling. Damm swerved around the newly made hills of wet slunk and ground his way through the intervening valleys. All four wheels spinning, the van threw up a rooster tail of green bacterial slime that splattered over the back windows. Behind them, the enemy APCs vanished in darkness.
Even so, Damm didn’t back off on the speed. He drove like a maniac, forcing the van on an erratic, yawing, churning course around and over the obstacles. Though they had escaped the death trap, there were no cheers from the mercies.
Ryan thought this was strange. Then all became clear.
A green lance as thick as a man’s body slashed past the right side of the van. If the light was blinding, the heat was worse. In a fraction of an instant, it blistered and bubbled the armored window glass. It turned the van’s metal wall to liquid. One of the mercies sitting ahead of Ryan let out a shrill scream, and kept on screaming.
Ryan looked over the seat back and saw the guy was stuck to the wall. His shoulder had been leaning against it; his flesh and bone had melted along withand intothe glass and steel.
Before the pursuit could fire again, Damm cut the wheel hard over and sent the van in a wild, sideways skid.
Chapter Twenty
Satisfied with the main rotor’s rpm, Captain Ockerman released the skid clamps. As the gyroplane jumped off the trailer and into the night sky, he addressed the passenger sitting in the contour chair directly behind him. “We’re out of here, Pedro,” he said through the helmet comm.
“‘Oh, baby.” Hylander groaned at the rapid ascent.
Ockerman smiled at the pull a sudden three g’s of gravity squashing his backside into the seat. Yeah, yeah, it was good .
In the cargo pouch at the waist of his battlesuit, the FIVE systems engineer carried a tiny memento a single, flattened .44-caliber lead ball.
He had pried the crude projectile from deep inside the first stage of the missile. After penetrating the exterior skin, the bullet had plowed through a nest of control cables and smashed one of the guidance servos, coming to rest harmlessly against the outer housing of the main engine. Fortunately, there were double and triple backups of all critical systems, so even though they’d lost a servo, no serious damage had been done. The control cables were easily and quickly respliced. It had taken more time and effort to fill and smooth out the damage to the exterior panels, which had the potential for causing dangerous air friction and fatal drag at escape velocities.
The whole repair process, from start to finish, had wasted just forty minutes. With the missile now safely transferred by crane onto its gantry, only two technicians were required to monitor the remaining diagnostics, which were all automated. The colonel, in his infinite mercy, had decided to let his systems engineer, his biologist and his geologist all take a little recess, while he completed the prelaunch work with Bennett, the lieutenant who’d driven the missile across from Earth. In another four hours, they’d have the missile fully prepped and in countdown mode. Liftoff was scheduled to take place a little after dawn the following day.
Because they couldn’t risk another attack and perhaps some more serious damage to the launch vehicle, once the repairs were finished Gabhart had given Ockerman, Hylander and Connors the green light to hunt down and eliminate the potential threat.