It was the least of their worries.
Silhouetted against the blue-white moon, the aircraft slowly turned its weapons pod toward them.
Chapter Twenty-One
As the van skidded through the slime, Nara threw an arm around Ryan’s neck and pulled him to the floor.
Then everything flashed green.
Though Ryan shut his eyelid, the blaze inside his head was brighter than any sun. Brighter and closer. For a terrible, interminable instant, the doors of a nuclear blast furnace gaped wide, and Ryan stood naked upon its hearth. The heat, like a head-to-foot body blow, hammered Ryan into the floorboards. Then it was gone. He lay beside Nara, every muscle in his body quivering and jerking from the shock.
He lifted his head and saw they were still sliding sideways, but they were no longer riding in an enclosed van. In the space of a heartbeat the roof above them had vanished, along with the upper third of the side walls, rear doors and windshield. The tops of all the seats were likewise cut through. Ryan pulled himself up to his knees, then onto the edge of the bench seat.
Five heads popped up in front of him, three mercie men and a woman, and Damm behind the steering wheel, fighting to regain control. On the seat directly in front of him, the guy stuck to the wall no longer had a head to pop up. Like the roof and walls, it had been vaporized. Scorched black from shoulder to shoulder, he spit and crackled like a smoldering log.
Ryan swiveled and looked behind him. The torsos and legs of two mercies sat rigidly on what was left of the rear seat. More headless wonders. Their clothing and flesh were fused to the smoking pillow of black slag at the new, lowered top of the seat.
He squinted as a battery of floodlights from the APCs in pursuit swept over the van’s interior. Whoever they were, they weren’t interested in taking or recovering prisoners.
Get them off us!” Damm shouted over his shoulder as he steered out of the skid.
“Tribarrels won’t stop them,” Nara shouted back. “Just slow them down!”
As Nara struggled to regain her balance and pick up her weapon, Ryan grabbed a pulse rifle from the floor. How well had he learned his lesson? It was final exam time. He thumbed off the safety and squashed the rear trigger. It locked back with a tangible click. Instantly, the weapon throbbed in his hands and burst after green burst shot through the middle of the rear door. Trigger still pinned, Ryan reached over the receiver and twisted the other control switch all the way to the right. The laser weapon screamed. A solid line of green connected the tribarrel’s muzzle and the van door. With a single, backhanded swipe, he chopped away what remained of the van’s rear doors, clearing them to the floor. Then he fanned the gallery ceiling behind, slicing free fifty feet of slime drape.
As it crashed to the ground, the headlights of the lead pursuer abruptly winked out.
The other two APCs veered wildly to avoid piling into the buried vehicle. It slowed them only for a second or two, then they were back on course. And closing ground.
“Do something, Damm!” Nara cried as she shouldered her weapon. “Before their weapons systems lock us in.”
Over the blinding glare of headlights, an even brighter light flared. When he saw the green flash, Ryan averted his eye and shielded his face.
The van lurched forward and up, suddenly weightless, suddenly airborne. The laser cannon had hit low this time, taking out all the wheels. The van dropped hard onto its bare suspension, and its momentum sent it spinning across the beds of slime.
There was nothing Ryan could do but hang on and hope. Between his boots, the floorboards looked like lace. Melted lace. Bacterial slime, scraped free of the ground by the van’s undercarriage, was forced up through the holes, sieved into a mass of thrashing green worms.
With a crash, they slammed sideways into a building wall, the impact cushioned by a pad of bacterial growth twenty feet deep. As Ryan bounced off the inside of the van, the slime curtain above broke loose from the ceiling and slopped down onto the roofless van. He was buried under a terrible wet weight. Choked by the stench of ammonia, he struggled to get free.