Meyer swung her stinger and shot holes in the air. Two more grenades sailed from separate points along the tramline. The grenadiers weren’t showing more than a hand and wrist for a fraction of a second. One grenade landed wide, but the other bounced toward the lip of the transformer pit.
“Down!” Meyer screamed to the gun crew as she hunched low. Fragments of casing and concrete flew in all directions.
The plasma cannon stopped in mid-burst when the grenade exploded. Bloch bellowed a curse. One of the cannon’s bipod legs had been blown off. Santini stuck his left forearm under the gunbarrel to support it.
A second tank, starkly terrible in the glow of ions from bolts which its shielding had shrugged off, glided around the wreckage of its sister vehicle.
Meyer jumped out of the transformer pit and ran toward the tramline. Sooner or later the Spooks were going to throw a grenade into the pit. If the blast didn’t kill the strikers outright, it would stun them for the fellow with the laser to finish off.
She was ten feet from the tramline when a grenadier raised himself to throw. He saw Meyer’s armored figure stumping toward him and dived back with a gobble of horror. The Spook with the laser rose an instant later. Meyer was standing almost on top of him. Her stinger blew him inside out.
Without lifting her finger from the trigger, Meyer hosed the two grenadiers cowering against the cogged track. Sparks, concrete dust, and bits of flesh sprayed from where the pellets hit.
Meyer turned toward the transformer pit. The cannon was firing again. Only a series of plasma bolts in rapid succession could hammer through a tank’s magnetic shielding. The tank halted as its fusion powerplant shunted all available power from the lift fans to the shield. It wasn’t enough. A moment later Bloch’s sixth pulse of thermonuclear energy hit the tank itself.
The shockwave spalled the inner face of the armor across the fighting compartment. The Kalendru crew were all dead before the next round ruptured the powerplant’s containment bottle in a greater secondary explosion.
Meyer hadn’t noticed her hard suit’s weight and chafing when she charged the Spook position. Now she felt drained and dizzy. She sucked at the teat supplying water from the integral canteen as she took a second step toward the pit.
A black spot flecked the sky at the corner of her eye. Meyer threw herself to the ground. She was still falling when the missile launched from Active Grid plunged into the transformer pit.
The concrete rippled, slamming Meyer on the chest. She flipped onto her back like a pancake. The walls of the pit channeled the blast and fragments skyward, but the gun, the crew, and the transformer itself vanished utterly in a white flash.
Where the hell was the rest of the Unity invasion force?
The steps to the admin building’s second floor were individually taller and more shallow than those of human structures. The Spook running down them hooting had no trouble until Leinsdorf ripped his white tunic to bloody shreds an instant before Farrell got his stinger on target.
A striker with smoke still curling from the nozzles of her jump belt appeared at the top of the stairs. She shot the Spook again as he toppled forward.
The floor plan of the port administration building was almost circular: almost, because of Kalendru distaste for right angles and constant-radius curves. The ground floor was a bullpen with office cubbies around the outer walls and an open concourse in the center.
Farrell didn’t suppose there could be a design that would have provided a better kill zone for the volley of grenades and 4-pound rockets his strikers sent through the clear facade of the building as they charged. There’d been twenty-odd Spooks present, but only one or two had survived long enough to be killed by stinger pellets. The upper story must be broken into smaller spaces.
Strikers now crouched at the side windows and the door to the parking lot behind the building. Farrell’s visor overlaid images from the helmets of a guard from each quadrant. The ghost viewpoints were each an eighth-field 30 percent mask across the top. They interfered to a degree with Farrell’s normal vision, but he was used to operating that way. He had to keep track of everything that was happening or else he’d get his people killed.