She fired all four rockets. The impulse of the trapped exhaust was an explosion in itself, rending her despite the hard suit.
Esther Meyer felt Matt’s warm arms lift her toward the radiance at the end of the tunnel.
“Councillor Lock?” Abbado said. “The major thought we ought to bring you in before dark. He’s worried it’s still dangerous out here.”
The civilian turned and glared at the strikers of 3-3. “It’s not dangerous for Esther now, though, is it?” he said in a cold, angry voice.
Abbado grinned. He’d figured Lock was sitting here in quivering terror, afraid even to stand up and walk away. Angry was good. This kind of angry meant the fellow hadn’t redlined after all.
“Come on, councillor,” Abbado said. “She wouldn’t want you to get your ass waxed now. Neither would we.”
“Krishna! that was a big fucker,” Caldwell said, looking at the snail’s remains. “What’s it doing, though? Melting?”
When the creature hunched itself vertical after destroying the bulldozer, Abbado’d thought the damned thing was going to jump right onto the strikers and retreating civilians. Instead it died where it was. It was an hour after things settled down that they’d figured out what Essie Meyer had done. Hell of a good striker, Essie was.
Lock sat fifty feet from where the snail collapsed. The hair on the right side of his head was matted with blood from a pressure cut and there was mud all over his back. He looked at Caldwell and said, “When I saw it swell over the trees I thought it must be pneumatic, a balloon. I even shot at it.”
Matushek picked up the stinger lying on the ground near Lock. He began to wipe it down.
“I’ll help you up,” Abbado said, offering Lock his hand to prod the civilian into motion.
Lock rose to his feet unaided. “It expanded with water like a sponge,” he said. “That’s how it could lie flat until victims came in range. Now that it’s dead, the water leaks out again.”
The snail was still a huge mound, but it’d shrunk noticeably since its collapse. Teeth fell out as the flesh pulled away from the roots. Abbado hadn’t made the connection with the water deepening into a pond around the corpse, though.
“Wouldn’t have been hard to nail it from orbit,” Horgen said. “When the Spooks were dropping asteroids, that’s sure hell the first place I’d have dropped one.”
“Wouldn’t have worked,” Abbado said. He put a hand on Lock’s shoulder in a combination of support and guidance. They started walking toward the camp. “Well, it would’ve smashed our friend there to a grease spot, sure, but the Spooks wanted to get into the control room below. That’s why they were here. Anything you could be sure of taking out the snail with, you’d bust up what they were looking for.”
“Except what Esther did,” Lock said.
Matushek nodded. “She had balls, all right,” he agreed.
The sky was turning brilliant crimson. The strikers were going to have to switch to light amplification any minute now, besides having to worry that the civilian would manage to walk into something that hadn’t gotten the word about humans being the good guys now.
“A lot of the folks’re planning to camp down inside tonight,” Abbado said, keeping the civilian focused on something other than what lay in a stinking pool behind him. There was no way in hell they’d be able to recover Essie’s body. “There’s no showers or anything, but at least it’s inside. There’s must be miles of corridor.”
“Me, I’ll stay above ground,” Caldwell said. “I always thought the best way to deal with a bunker was fill it full of explosive and blow it inside out.”
“Hard it is to find a faithful friend . . .” Horgen sang under her breath. She paused and asked, “Anybody know who built the place to begin with?”
“I asked the major,” Abbado said. “He says maybe it was the Spooks themself half a million years ago. The place feels like Spook work, anyway. You know, the way the angles are all off.”
It had gone from sunset to full dark in the time they’d been walking. Horgen was in the lead. Lock placed himself directly behind her and followed her steps precisely. A pretty bright guy, Abbado thought.