“It’s a train,” Huber snapped. “They’re not going to turn around, they won’t even be able to slow down.”
Deseau grimaced and pushed execute. Fencing Master’s tribarrels slewed to the right and elevated under the control of the gunnery computer.
“The C&C box’ll divide our fire so that the whole train’s covered,” Huber continued, deliberately speaking to his whole crew over the intercom rather than embarrassing Padova by singling her out for the explanation. “We’ll shoot it up on the fly, not because that’ll damage the enemy but—”
Fencing Master’s tribarrels fired, six-round bursts from the paired wing guns and about ten from Deseau’s as it destroyed an aircar by itself. Padova jumped, instinct telling her that the gun’d gone off by accident. She blushed and scowled when she realized what had happened.
Above the horizon to the north, a cottony puff bloomed and threw out glittering sparks. The flash of the explosion had been lost in the distance, even to Huber who’d been looking for it.
“—because if we don’t, we’ll have whatever military force is aboard that train chasing us,” Huber continued, giving no sign that he’d noticed Padova’s mistake. “We’re going to have enough to do worrying about what’s in front without somebody catching us from behind.”
The gunnery computer returned the tribarrels to their previous alignment. Huber and Deseau touched their grips, swiveling their weapons slightly to make sure that a circuitry glitch hadn’t locked them; Padova quickly copied the veterans. Yeah, she’ll do.
A column of black smoke twisted skyward near where the white puff had appeared in the sky. The second Solace scout hadn’t blown up in the air, but its wreckage had ignited the brush when it hit the ground.
“Six, this is Two-six,” Messeman said. “I’ll take my Two-zero car out of central control to cut the rail in front of the train. All right? Over.”
“Roger, Two-six,” Huber said. He thought Messeman was being overcautious, but that still left seven combat cars to deal with a six-car train.
Sunlight gleamed on the elevated rail and the line of pylons supporting it across the dark green fields. The train itself wasn’t in sight yet, but at their closing speed it wouldn’t be long. Huber settled behind his gun, staring into the holographic sight picture.
Fencing Master came over a rise too slight to notice on a contour map but all the difference in the world when you were using line-of-sight weapons. The train, a jointed tube of plastic and light metal, shimmered into view, slung beneath the elevated track.
“Open fire,” Huber said calmly. His thumbs squeezed the butterfly trigger.
Padova’s bolts were high—meters high, well above even the rail—but Huber and Deseau were both dead on the final car from their first rounds. Huber traversed his gun clockwise from the back of the target forward. Frenchie simply let the train’s own forward motion carry it through his three-second burst so that his bolts crossed with his lieutenant’s in the middle of the target. By that time Padova corrected her aim by sawing her muzzles downward.
The car fell apart, metal frame and thermoplastic paneling alike blazing at the touch of fifty separate hits, each a torch of plasma. The Solace mercenaries on the train carried grenades and ammunition, but those sparkling secondary explosions did little to increase the destruction which the powerguns had caused directly.
The second car back had something more impressive in it, perhaps a pallet of anti-armor missiles. When it detonated, the shockwave destroyed the whole front half of the train in a red flash so vivid that even daylight blanched. The low pressure that followed the initial wave front sucked topsoil into a dense black mushroom through which the rear cars cascaded as blazing debris.
“Cease fire!” Huber ordered. “Don’t waste ammo, troopers, we’ve worked ourselves out of a job.”
He took a deep breath; his nose filters released now that the air was fit to breathe again. Plasma bolts burned oxygen to ozone, and the matrix holding the copper atoms in alignment broke down into unpleasant compounds when the energy was released. Huber’s faceshield had blocked the direct intensity of the bolts to save his retinas, but enough cyan light had reflected into the corners of his eyes that shimmers of purple and orange filtered his vision.