The truck had a three-man cab, but the three weren’t supposed to be humans in battle gear. The Kalendru were long-limbed, gray-skinned humanoids. From a distance they appeared hairless, but if you looked closely you saw that their skin was covered with fine down.
Kalendru were on average taller, slimmer and significantly quicker than Terrans. Because Spooks weren’t as strong, their troops carried lighter, less-powerful weapon loads. A striker learned fast, though, that if you missed your first shot the Spook was going to get in the second one.
Horgen had the truck up to forty miles an hour. Immediately ahead the hangar door closed with a rattle that Abbado hoped meant it was fairly flimsy. “Hang on, boys!” he said as he pulled himself into the cab and crossed his arms over his faceshield. “The party’s about to start!”
They hit the quivering door with a crash louder than the battle going on all over the spaceport.
Each of the two 16-round cannisters of plasma cartridges weighed a hair over forty pounds, and there was the weight of the air-cushion dolly besides. Striker Esther Meyer liked to tell herself she was as tough as any man in C41, but right at the moment she was glad Sergeant-Gunner Bloch and Santini, the other loader, had paused to lift her dolly from the hold instead of leaving her to struggle with it alone. Meyer could keep moving despite the heat and constriction of her hard suit as long as anybody, sure; but hefting a full ammo dolly was largely a matter of mass and peak strength.
Stingers and the 4-pound rockets most strikers slung from their belts already raked the port area. Fourth Platoon (Heavy Weapons) was the last out of the ship. With their full armor and bulky loads they’d have needlessly slowed less heavily equipped strikers.
There was no return fire as yet but it’d come soon enough. When it did, the maneuver platoons would be damned glad of 50-pound missile launchers and the plasma cannon.
Sergeant Bloch was a big man who looked gigantic in his polished white armor. His dolly supported the cannon itself and a three-round belt of ready cartridges. Twenty yards to the northeast was a pit holding a transformer beneath surface level where it didn’t interfere with starships being hauled across the port in giant cradles. Bloch hunched toward it at a dead run. The pit was the best cover in his sector.
All Fourth Platoon personnel wore hard suits. The crews handling the triple launchers had to worry about the backblast of their own heavy missiles, and a mist of ions as hot as a sun’s corona bathed the cannoneers as soon as they began to fire their belt-fed weapons. The armor’s protection from enemy counterfire was a secondary concern.
Meyer heard the high-pitched scream of Spook lasers in addition to the snarl of stingers and the crackWHAM! of the strikers’ rockets. The port’s surface flared white at the corner of her eye as a beam burned concrete to glass and quicklime. The Spooks were awake, though for the moment they seemed to be spraying the landscape in panic.
Bloch stepped into the waist-high transformer pit and wrestled the gun onto its bipod in firing position. Santini simply pushed the ammo dolly in ahead of himself. The cannisters were padded against shock, but a direct hit from a laser might penetrate. The best result the crew could hope for then was a low-order explosion that might not kill them. If the bead of deuterium at the heart of each cartridge detonated, hard suits weren’t going to make any difference to the resulting thermonuclear explosion.
The captured freighter erupted smoke and another sheaf of anti-emitter missiles. Those were launched automatically when the unit’s artificial intelligence sensed Kalendru-type radio frequency emissions. The streak of light that ended in a lightning-sharp explosion in the transient barracks was a missile from one of 4th Platoon’s triple launchers. That was fast work, but the team had set up beside the ship because there wasn’t any cover in their direction anyway.
Meyer jumped her dolly into the transformer pit and followed it. Bloch fired his ready ammunition in three ravening pulses as fast as the gun would cycle. The ringing air glowed like the heart of a rainbow.