“We lost a track!” Nara said, grinding the gears as she tried to maneuver with the one that remained.
Ryan pushed up from the floorboards. Driven by a single track, the APC was turning in a very narrow circle.
“Out!” Nara cried. She jumped from the driver’s seat and yanked the visor off Damm’s head. ‘ ‘Out or we’re cooked!”
“WHAT’S WRONG with Bailey?” the gunner said.
“Has he lost his frigging mind?” He had no more than gotten the words out when the man running toward them was blown into halves. Behind the two-part corpse, the other APC was moving quickly away.
It was only then that Major Lujan realized the people he hunted weren’t in the fog.
“Shoot the APC!” he cried. “Shoot them!” Before the gunner could obey, laser pulses slammed the side of the vehicle, jolting it sideways. Lujan flattened the accelerator and shouted, “Burn ’em! Burn them, goddammit!”
The weapons system engineer opened fire on the fast-moving vehicle. The sustained beam of the laser cannons let out a banshee howl. A foot and a half in diameter, the solid, lime-green ray sizzled across the crowded street, chasing after the other APC.
Beyond the rear end of the target vehicle, stretching as far back as the building facades, were masses of tightly compressed humanity. The full-power cannon blast melted through them as if they were made of candle wax. All the way back to the facades, people died, their bodies not merely bisected, but exploding horrendously as the liquids inside them instantaneously reached fusion temperature.
Lujan couldn’t hear the shrieks of agony over the cannon’s wail.
It was too late to do anything about the mess, even if he’d wanted to.
The gunner cut an arc of absolute destruction through the assembled multitudes, killing in the space of a few seconds God only knew how many people. His unbroken stream of fire sawed through the ground floors of a row of distant buildings, causing their upper stories to collapse.
Then he found the target.
The laser lit up the side of the APC, shooting a shower of green sparks in all directions. The facing drive track snapped, and its two-foot-wide treads went flying. With the APC disabled, the weapons system engineer finally eased off the cannons’ trigger.
“I got them!” he cried. “They’re dead meat!”
Lujan watched the smoke coiling up from the side of the wounded vehicle, watched as its driver tried to move away and instead clanked around in a feeble circle.
“Finish them,” the major ordered.
There was a terrible roar to Lujan’s left and something jarred the outside of the APC, jolting him hard against his seat harness. It wasn’t the roar of cannon. It was the roar of human voices.
Thousands upon thousands of them.
The major realized with a start that he hadn’t been watching the mob; he’d been preoccupied. He immediately gunned the engine. The transmission strained, but the tracks wouldn’t move. Somehow they’d been jammed. The crowd noise was so loud he could hardly think.
Sensing his own impending destruction, Lujan shifted madly back and forth between forward and reverse gears, trying to dislodge the obstacle and break the tracks free. The APC shuddered, then began to rock as hundreds of people threw their bodies against its side. Hammering on the hull, they tipped the vehicle onto its right track, then the edge of its right track. With a sickening crash, it toppled over onto its side.
Lujan unbuckled himself at once and scrambled over the back of his chair. “Pulse rifles!” he shouted at the gunner, who was still seated. “We’re gonna have to fry our way out of here!”
Snatching up a laser weapon from the floor and thumbing its fire selector to full power, the major rushed for the rear doors. Before he could reach them, the APC took a tremendous hit, delivered not by massed human hands but by massed high explosive. The shock blast sent him flying helmet-first into the ceiling of the passenger compartment, knocking him out.
When Lujan regained consciousness, he was on his back on the pavement outside the APC. There was a sharp pain in his rib cage every time he tried to sip air.