There was no sign of the shooter. If his ammunition had gone off, its flash was lost in the immense violence of 20-cm bolts.
Huber’s legs were splayed before him; his hands waved in the air. Captain Orichos caught his right wrist and bent close. “Should I take your gun?” she shouted. “Can you—”
“I’m all right,” Huber said, forcing the words out. The shock had numbed his diaphragm; breathing was one agony among many. He braced his left arm against the side armor, then let the car’s lurch help Orichos lift him to his feet again.
On his feet but not upright; he was still half doubled over and he was pretty sure that he’d vomit if he tried to straighten fully. Via! but he hurt.
Deseau’s gun thumped a burst toward the top of the cone. Huber didn’t see a target there; Frenchie was probably just proving to himself and others that he was alive and functioning . . . which is what Huber was doing, after all.
“I’m all right!” he repeated, forcefully and with more truth this time. He took his tribarrel’s grips in his hands as Fencing Master lurched to the top of the ridge, the western battlements of the Volunteer fortress. Below was the interior of the partial cone, and beyond that the sea.
Aircars ranging from the big trucks that could haul twenty or more armed men to hoppers with one seat and room for a sack of groceries were mixed indiscriminately on the crater floor. The drivers had squeezed in wherever they’d seen a place to set down. The Volunteers had left Midway in a near panic; they probably hadn’t landed here in much better emotional condition.
There wasn’t room in the tunnels to conceal so many vehicles, so the calliopes had been the Volunteers’ only means of protecting their hope of escape if things went wrong—as they were certainly going wrong now. Those calliopes were molten ruin, but there was no need to waste shells on the aircars. They were perfect targets for Fencing Master’s tribarrels.
A few minutes ago there’d have been only a handful of Volunteers in the open. The maze of tunnels would’ve seemed safety until those inside realized that the Slammers would with certainty penetrate the outer defenses and so control the tunnel entrances. Now several of the armored doors had swung back; black-uniformed figures were running for vehicles. Huber’s view was like a child’s of a stirred-up anthill.
A Volunteer drew a holstered powergun and fired in the direction of Fencing Master as he ran. One of the bolts snapped only twenty meters overhead, but that was dumb luck: nobody was that good, not with a pistol. Learoyd’s short burst vaporized everything between the Volunteer’s neck and his knees without any need for luck. He was an expert using a stabilized weapon with holographic sights. Learoyd could’ve put a round into his target’s left nostril if he’d wanted to.
The accompanying infantry squads spaced out to either side of Fencing Master, taking firing positions along the ridge. Foghorn still labored a hundred meters down the slope. Huber didn’t have leisure to see how Jellicoe’s section was doing on the eastern edge of the cone where a deep gully complicated the approach, but he knew she’d get them into action as quick as anybody could.
An aircar lifted. Huber fired as he tracked it, his bolts splashing behind the accelerating vehicle for a moment before three flashes walked up the fuselage from the back. The car, a luxury model, flipped over and crashed under power. Ruptured fuel cells sprayed their contents over a dozen other vehicles, some of which also started to burn.
“Cue aircar motors!” Huber shouted, shifting his AI to mark the electromagnetic rhythms of fan motors spinning. “Gunners—”
Going to intercom.
“—hit the moving cars, not the men!”
Three more vehicles tried to take off. One didn’t have enough altitude and collided immediately with the truck parked ahead of it. As it tumbled, Learoyd’s burst chopped the car’s belly open.
The infantry were shooting at individual targets. Though their weapons were semi-automatic, a single 2-cm bolt was enough to disable an aircar—let alone kill the driver.