The Kalendru infrared signatures made them stand out like flags against the foliage and damp ground. Human troops wouldn’t have been any better off. The strikers could track targets crawling forward for hundreds of yards. When a Spook raised his head, several stingers or a 4-pound rocket blew him apart. Sun-heated equipment hid C41 as effectively as absorbent sheeting could have done.
The orange digits 3-3 lit a corner of Farrell’s visor indicating a priority report from the squad leader, Sergeant Abbado. “Six, a tank’s entered the field from the north. We’re observing, but we don’t have shit to stop it. Over.”
Farrell switched to visuals from Abbado on the left side of his visor. The Kalendru tank was an opalescent dome moving onto the field with the care of a blind man. It was too wide to pass through the space between the transient compound and the end warehouse without touching, but the tank’s armored sides would simply brush the rubble apart.
“Three-three,” Farrell said, “take firing positions but don’t do anything till I get there. Out.”
He grimaced to Leinsdorf and ordered curtly, “Come on. Nadia, you’re in charge.”
“Five minutes!” she called back.
C41 didn’t have five minutes before the tank had joined them in the storage lot. The pickup boat would have to abort if there was a hundred-megajoule laser waiting for it.
The magnetic shielding that protected the tank against directed-energy weapons was also its main weakness. The flux was so dense that it bent light itself: the driver and gunners looked out through a rainbow curtain as dazzling as the light-shot mist at the base of a waterfall. Inertial guidance took the vehicle over mapped terrain and computer enhancement aided image resolution, but the tank crew still had to grope across the landscape unless it dropped the shield. Besides the blindness, the laser couldn’t fire while the shield was in place. The tank was limited to its secondary battery of projectile weapons.
Farrell ran toward the channel he expected the tank to use. The driver might plow directly through the warehouses, but that risked filling the drive fans with debris and immobilizing the vehicle. Though the intake ducts were kinked and protected with several sets of baffles, sand and tiny pebbles showered from a collapsing building could still choke the fans.
Farrell’s quartet of 4-pound rockets rattled against his breastplate as he jogged along a line of vehicles. Leinsdorf had a dozen more. The bodyguard almost never fired rockets during an operation, but he carried a triple load on general principles. Even if Abbado and his strikers had used up their rockets in their assault on the hangar, Farrell and Leinsdorf between them carried enough for the purpose.
The magnetic shield didn’t affect projectiles—in either direction. The tank’s outline quivered within the iridescent dome as an automatic cannon fired at the block of warehouses, perhaps the only target the gunner could make out. Explosions clocked at half-second intervals.
The 4-pound rockets wouldn’t do more than scratch the tank’s paint. Even a 50-pounder—the last of them had disintegrated an APC that rose to scan the storage field for targets—couldn’t have penetrated the tank’s armor. A volley of light warheads might cause the Spooks to lower their shielding for a moment to see what was happening, though.
What would be happening then was Leinsdorf nailing the tank with his single-shot plasma weapon.
The roar of the tank’s fans staggered Farrell as he stepped into the gap between buildings. The walls channeled sound the way a tidal bore focuses surf. Though the tank was only halfway across the port, its shimmering mass filled the field of view.
Abbado’s strikers squatted in the wreckage of the transient compound. They’d slewed a heavy truck across the middle of the open space, but that was more to draw the Spooks’ attention than in any hope of blocking the tank.
The tank fired a dozen explosive shells into the truck, which shuddered on its suspension. Tires and upholstery began to burn. Rounds that missed burst among vehicles parked in the field beyond.
Leinsdorf drew Farrell down in a crouch at the corner of the warehouse. He was waiting for the shooting to stop before they darted across the open space. The tankers couldn’t see a moving figure through the enveloping rainbow curtain, but Leinsdorf didn’t want his major to run into a random shell.