Abbado hoped the vehicle was still in shape to extract 3-3 in a few minutes, but that wasn’t the first thing on his mind just now.
Methie’d transferred from a mechanized infantry unit to the Strike Force. Because he’d used a coil gun and because of his bum leg, Abbado assigned him to the APC’s turret. Methie sawed a line of half-ounce slugs through the club’s facade ten feet above the ground. The air cracked like stones shearing.
Somebody had rehung the door in the hours since the strikers had been here previously. The latch was tacked back to the panel with a sheet of brown plastic. Abbado blew the mechanism apart with his stinger and slammed through. A kick would have been quicker, but the weapon made a point he hoped the locals understood.
Some of him hoped the locals understood. The rest was perfectly willing to splatter the guts of any bastard who came for him.
The doorman, the same sergeant who’d been there the first time, bellowed with pain. The stinger pellets along with everything they hit at such short range had disintegrated. The bits the doorman got in the way of had eaten away a chunk of his uniform and the skin beneath. It must have felt like being sandblasted.
Could’ve been worse, buddy.
The strikers wore helmets and body armor. Abbado hunched so that the point of his shoulder caught the sergeant in the pit of the stomach as he went by.
The visor’s capabilities hadn’t been much help outside because the swirling dust was opaque across the whole RF spectrum, but enhancement turned the dim interior lighting as bright as a drill field. There were a lot more people present than there had been earlier in the evening. Very few of them even had the sense and reflexes to flatten when coil-gun shot cracked overhead in a shower of splinters from the front wall.
They could scream though. They were doing that even before Abbado’s stinger sawed a zigzag in the drop ceiling.
Other strikers were firing. Light enhancement turned the stingers’ muzzle aura into flaring brilliance. C41 didn’t go in much for non-lethal weaponry, but Matushek had found a crate of riot gas grenades. He lobbed them into the middle of the room.
As ordered, Methie shut down the coil gun after the initial burst. Abbado’d been afraid Methie would get overexcited and drop the muzzle with 3-3 in the club. Besides, the projectiles travelled a hell of a long way. Even on Stalleybrass there were places Abbado knew he’d afterwards regret having shot up.
Large chunks of the ceiling came down. Half the overhead lights were out; flickers showed where powerlines were arcing.
“Watch it, Sarge!” Glasebrook warned. Abbado ducked. The doorman flew past and hit the bar with his arms and legs flailing. Something crunched and it wasn’t the furniture.
The part of the crowd that could still move stampeded toward the rear of the hall. A place this big probably had an oversized fire exit with crash bars. If it didn’t, well, safety regulations for rear-echelon motherfuckers weren’t Abbado’s concern.
He slapped a fresh magazine in the stinger’s butt, then emptied it into the back ceiling in a single slashing burst. Flocked insulation swirled down like an explosion in a pillow factory. Pellets flashed when they hit the metal stringers. Reloading again, Abbado let the spring-loaded sling snug the weapon back against his right armpit as he used both hands to vault the bar.
Gas spread like thin smoke from the middle of the room where the grenades had landed. Abbado switched his visor from enhancement to infrared before he bent and began jerking dispenser trays out of the beer cooler. The gas scattered light in the visible band, but it didn’t seem to affect the longer IR rays.
His helmet filters were in place but he felt the back of his hands prickle. He sure hoped the shit wasn’t absorbed through the skin. The gas wasn’t supposed to be fatal. From the look of the REMFs puking their guts up among the overturned tables, though, some of them wished they were dead.
Abbado slapped trays up on the bar behind him. Matushek was emptying another cooler. Two of the bartenders huddled at the far end, their hands clasped over the back of their necks. The remainder of 3-3 was hauling the loot outside or chewing more of the building apart with their stingers. One good thing about a rear-echelon base was you could count on weapons being locked in armories. Even strike companies had to turn in their hardware.