Redliners by David Drake

Farrell started to go back. Leinsdorf grabbed him.

“We’ll cover him!” Abbado called. Glasebrook was with him; the rest of 3-3 had paused among the first line of parked vehicles.

Leinsdorf nodded gratefully. He half-walked, half-carried the major ten strides toward the pickup point before Farrell gave up and jogged willingly on his own. Thunder pulsing intermittently from the west might be the extraction boat.

Abbado sighed and armed his remaining rocket. He and Glasebrook would help the striker from Heavy Weapons—carry him, needs must, because whatever the guy’d done was damned sure the reason that tank wasn’t squatting on the pickup point right now. But first the striker had to make his own way through the circle of debris that only a hard suit could survive.

And maybe the boat would still be waiting when the three of them got to the pickup point.

* * *

The range to the hilltop where the pair of Kalendru were setting up a clip-fed rocket launcher was nearly a thousand yards. Farrell could see them clearly, magnified a hundred times in his stinger’s holographic sight, but he either couldn’t hit them or the pellets didn’t have enough energy at that range to put the targets down.

The extraction boat would land in the center of the storage lot. As strikers withdrew toward that point, C41’s base of fire collapsed. Now the Kalendru could raise their heads long enough to observe and engage the strikers.

Farrell lay full-length on the roof of an APC swathed in anti-oxidant fabric. He took a deep breath and squeezed a short burst from the trigger as he breathed out. The stinger’s butt was against Farrell’s shoulder and he gripped firmly with both hands. Even so the weapon’s slight recoil jerked the magnified sight picture up from the target.

A Kalendru shell hit between a pair of tarpaulin-covered trucks and detonated with a bang. The whole line of vehicles shuddered away from the blast. They’d been stored without fuel cells, but fabric and lubricants started to burn. Some of the Spook troops must be observing for the batteries back at Active Grid.

If the extraction boat didn’t come soon, there wouldn’t be anybody to extract.

Farrell lowered his weapon onto the distant target again. One of the gunners jumped up and clawed at his face. The other Spook was staring behind him at the roaring western sky. Farrell’s finger squeezed without his conscious volition. As he did so, another striker’s rocket hit the Spook weapon. Gun and crew vanished in a blue-white flash.

The boat came in low. It was a flattened cylinder eighty feet long and twenty wide, with the hatches already open along the rear two-thirds of the hull. Oval intakes sucked air through a fusion torus. The gas—any atmosphere would do—was expelled as high-velocity plasma to drive and support the vessel until it reached an altitude from which its magnetic drive could push against the planetary field. Lasers and light shells sparkled against the boat’s blackened armor as it overflew the Kalendru infantry.

“C41, go! Go! Go!” Nadia Broz shouted over the command channel. “All strikers aboard in sixty seconds!”

The landing boat hovered, then dropped hard onto the field. The pilot landed with the thrusters shut off to avoid endangering nearby strikers. Three Spook missiles detonated twenty feet above the vessel. Smoke drifted from the point defense turrets in the bow and stern. The triple shockwave rocked the boat but didn’t damage it. Strikers started jumping aboard.

Something blew a sullen smoke ring from the Spook-held woods. The fighting had lit several fires. One of them had reached a case of ammunition or grenades.

Farrell looked over his shoulder. Dust and varicolored smoke rose from beyond the warehouses. Some of the buildings were burning also. Farrell’s eyes didn’t see any strikers that his visor’s location chart had missed.

“For Chrissake come on, sir!” Leinsdorf snarled. He gripped Farrell’s shoulder and slid him off the APC by main force. Farrell had stopped to provide cover while his strikers withdrew, so he and Leinsdorf still had a hundred yards to run to the boat.

The coil guns in the pickup boat’s two lateral blisters raked the Spook positions. The weapons worked by the same principle as stingers but flung half-ounce projectiles. Trees shattered and rock outcrops disintegrated into sparks and lethal fragments.

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