Everything was shouting and chaos. Fencing Master drove between gunpits, firing with all three tribarrels. Huber aimed down at a howitzer, hitting the recoil mechanism. Hydraulic fluid sprayed, then exploded as the car swept past.
It was impossible to pick targets but there was no need to choose: every bolt served F-3’s purpose, to throw the Solace forces off-balance so that they’d be unable to react as the thin-skinned, highly-vulnerable vehicles of Battery Alpha drove through the siege lines, blacked-out and at moderate speed. If Lieutenant Messeman’s escorting combat cars had to shoot, then the plan had failed. All F-3’s gunners had to worry about was not hitting friendly vehicles, and their helmet AIs kept them from doing that.
Deseau’s tribarrel jammed. Instead of clearing the sludge of melted matrix material from the ejection port, he grabbed his backup 2-cm shoulder weapon and slammed aimed shots at men running in terror.
“Blue section, withdraw!” Huber shouted, hosing a group of trailers around a latticework communications mast. Their light-metal sheathing burned when the plasma lashed it. “All units, withdraw!”
An orange flash lit the base of the clouds. Huber ducked instinctively, but the shockwave followed only a heartbeat later. The blast shoved Fencing Master forward in a leap, then grounded them hard. The skirts plowed a broad ditch till the car stalled. The gunners bounced against the forward coaming, and the shock curtains in the driver’s compartment must’ve deployed around Padova.
A red-hot ball shot skyward and had just started to curve back when it exploded as a coda to the greater blast that’d flung it into the heavens. Somebody’d hit an ammo truck or a dump of artillery shells offloaded for use.
Huber hadn’t been trying to keep control of his platoon in the middle of a point-blank firefight, but now one of the five green dots along the top of his faceshield pulsed red. At the same instant a voice cried, “Somebody help us! This is Three-seven and our skirts are clean fucking gone! Get us out!”
The man shouting on the emergency channel was Three-seven’s commander, Sergeant Bielsky—the retread with the limp—but he was squeaking his words an octave higher than Huber had heard from him in the past.
“Fox, this is Three-five!” Sergeant Tranter said, his transmission stepping on Bielsky’s. “We’ve got them, we’re getting them out, but cover us!”
Padova had lifted Fencing Master and started to turn clockwise to take them back over the berm where they’d entered: if they left the firebase by the opposite side, the north-facing bunkers might rip them as they crossed the cleared stretch. Now instead of continuing her turn, the driver straightened again and accelerated to where Three-seven lay disabled in the center of the compound. Huber fired short bursts into a line of shelters that the huge explosion had knocked down. Hostiles might be hiding in the piles of debris, clutching weapons that they’d use if they thought it was safe to.
Another orange flash erupted, this time near the eastern edge of the compound. It wasn’t as loud, especially to senses numbed by the previous explosion, but two more blasts stuttered upward at intervals of a few seconds.
Fencing Master rounded a line of wrecked trucks, several of them burning fitfully. Car Three-seven lay canted on its starboard side beyond. Bielsky hadn’t been exaggerating: the blast that shook Fencing Master had torn the port half of Three-seven’s plenum chamber wide open. The gunners were clambering aboard Tranter’s Fancy Pants as that car sawed the darkness. It was a wonder that they’d survived; they must’ve had enough warning to flatten themselves on the floor of the fighting compartment.
Huber’s faceshield warned him of motion to his left rear. He pivoted the tribarrel. A pair of Solace soldiers knelt on a ramp slanting up from an underground bunker Huber hadn’t noticed until that moment. The muzzles of their sub-machine guns quivered with witchlight, light-metal driving bands ionized by the dense magnetic flux that accelerated slugs down the bore. Three-seven’s armor sparkled and one of the escaping crewmen flung his arms up with a cry.
Huber blew the men apart with a dozen rounds before Fencing Master’s motion carried him beyond the bunker entrance. Something flew over Huber’s head and bounced down the ramp, then exploded: Frenchie’d emptied his powergun and was throwing grenades.