To his weapons system engineer, the major said, “Stay alert when the doors open.”
The gunner nodded. As the cluster of cannons came to life, swiveling, searching for targets, the mob fanned back, opening up a clear path to the other APC.
” After Bailey ducked out the rear doors, Lujan followed him on infrared as he crossed over to the other APC and beat his gauntleted fist against the front of the hull.
“I THINK WE’RE GOING to have to do something,” Nara said. “He’s not going to go away.”
The next round of thuds over her head was even more insistent.
Then from outside, an amplified battlesuit voice said, “Open the rear doors. Got to talk.”
“He wants in,” Damm said.
“The second that other APC finds out it’s us in here, it’s going to open fire,” Nara said, “which means we’ve got to be moving and firing first. And that leaves Ryan to handle the guy outside.”
“Got it covered,” the one-eyed man replied. “Just give me another one of those little mine things.”
Damm reached into a pouch on his combat harness and passed him a shaped charge.
The pounding shifted to the rear door. “Come on, hurry up and let me in,” the crackling voice said. “The natives are restless, and it’s starting to get a little hairy out here.”
“It’s gonna get way hairier,” Ryan said.
He opened one of the doors just a crack. When the guy outside stuck his armor-gloved fingers in the gap to grab the edge, Ryan caught him by the wrist, kicked the door open and jumped out beside him. A hip check knocked the man off balance, and he fell forward onto the APC’s rear deck, with the toes of his boots still on the pavement. Ryan straddled the soldier and pressed his chest against the man’s back, trapping his hips against the top of the bumper.
“See this?” Ryan said, holding the explosive disk under the guy’s black helmet. “It’s for you.”
Then he slammed the charge to the guy’s back, hauled him to his feet and pushed him out into the street. Behind Ryan, Nara gunned the APC. He grabbed for a handhold and stepped up on the bumper as she clanked away.
The man in the battlesuit screamed through his speaker for help, frantically trying to reach the disk on his back, running a mad, zigzag course for the other APC. The way he was swinging his arms, it looked as if he were being attacked by a swarm of invisible hornets. The mob found the sight comical; they laughed as they pointed at him, not understandingor caringwhy he was in such a state.
Over the top of the APC’s passenger compartment Ryan saw the battlesuit flash in the middle, a clear white light passing all the way through it. There was a wet bang, and the battlesuit was severed in two. The lighter of the two sections, the one with arms and a head, skittered some distance across the pavement.
Fragments of the sheared body armor sprayed out in a wide circle, chopping down the nearest spectators like a scythe. Some clutched minor wounds; others were facedown and never going to get up.
Despite the injuries its members had sustained, the mob loved the show. It was much better than the tell-yous. Rarely, if ever, did they get freewheeling improvisational entertainment. Cheering, they swarmed in to collect souvenirs. Unlike the lethal wounds served up by laser weapons, the slap charge produced a messy chill. With hands dripping gore, the crowd fought over detached plates of armor, a boot, a triblaster with a shattered receiver and delaminated muzzle.
Nara had traveled about thirty feet when Damm touched off the APC’s cannons. Bolts of green light flashed across Gloomtown. Like ground-level, horizontal chain lightning, it slammed into the side of the other APC, making it torque around on its tracks. Because the vehicle survived the attack and wasn’t instantly cut in two, Ryan figured it had to have some kind of defense against its own brand of weaponry. Anticipating a return of fire, he dived back inside the passenger compartment. And just in time.
The APC’s interior hull glowed green for an instant, and in the same instant, the heavy vehicle was shoved hard to the right. Its tracks screeched as they scraped across the concrete. Not buckled to a safety harness, Ryan went flying into the illuminated wall, and it was like hitting the side of a blast furnace. As he bounced off the searing hull, caustic smoke erupted from the cables and pipes between the I-beams. The APC continued to grind along the pavement as if pushed by a giant, angry hand. When the vehicle came to a stop, it was tilted slightly off to the left.