Ortnahme switched to his tribarrel as the tank rushed down the slope, its fans driving into a sea of flame.
Not that it mattered, but the troops in the truck he’d just destroyed weren’t wearing black uniforms.
Three blazing figures lurched out of the inferno. Ortnahme shot them down, more as an act of mercy than of war.
They were in camouflaged National Army fatigues with black armbands, and they were carrying National Army assault rifles.
Not that it mattered.
“Fire!” June Ranson heard her voice say. Her visor opaqued, shutting out the double microsecond dazzles of Deathdealer’s main gun firing almost on top of her, but the momentary blindness didn’t matter. The battle was taking place within a holographic screen while Ranson watched it from above.
Her tribarrel scissored bolts across those of Stolley’s weapon, turning fist-sized chunks of the leading truck into meter-diameter flashes colored by material that vaporized and burned: rubber/metal/wood across the truck; cloth/flesh/munitions as the muzzles lifted into the bed.
Metals burned with a gorgeous intensity of color, white and red and green.
The target exploded into a lake of fire that screamed. Willens kept Warmonger as high on her fans as he could as the combat car entered the roadcut at a barely-controlled slide and cranked hard right to follow Deathdealer up the bridge approach.
The filters of Ranson’s helmet snapped into place as flames whuffed out like crinolines encircling the combat car. For a moment, everything was orange and hot; then Warmonger was through.
Junebug Ranson was back in the physical world in which her troops were fighting.
The Adako beach community was a few hovels on this east side of the Padma River. There were twenty or thirty more dwellings, still unpretentious, beyond the gravel strand across the stream. The bridge itself was a solid concrete structure with a sandbagged blockhouse on the far end and a movement-control kiosk in the center of the span.
The blockhouse and kiosk had been added in reaction to the worsening security situation. When Deathdealer’s main gun punched the center of the blockhouse twice, the low building blew apart with an enthusiasm which the ammunition going off within did little more than color. Swatches of fiberglass fabric from the sandbags burned red as they drifted in the updraft.
A bus was waiting on the other side to cross the bridge. It lurched off the road and heeled slowly over onto its side, its headlights still burning. The truck behind it didn’t move, but both cab doors flew open and figures scuttled out.
A man without pants ran from one of the huts near the bridge approach and began firing an automatic rifle at Deathdealer. Sparrow ignored—or was unaware of—the fleabites, but Stolley triggered a burst in the Consie’s direction.
The hovel disintegrated into burning debris under the touch of the cyan bolts. The Consie dropped flat and continued firing, sheltered by the rocky irregularity of the ground. Another set of muzzleflashes sparkled yellow from closer to the streambed. A bullet rang on Warmonger’s hull.
The long span between the concrete guardrails of the bridge had been narrowed by coils of concertina wire, reducing the traffic flow to a single lane past the central checkpoint. A round, pole-mounted signal board, white toward the east and presumably red on the other face, reached from the kiosk.
An attendant bolted out of the kiosk, waving his empty hands above his head. He was running toward the armored vehicles rather than away, but he didn’t have a prayer of reaching safety in either direction.
The flash of Deathdealer’s main gun ended the possibility of a threat lurking within the kiosk and crisped the attendant on his third stride.
“All Tootsie!” Ranson shouted. “Watch the left of the near side, there’s bandits!”
The gunners on her combat cars were momentarily blind as they bucked out of the fireball to which they had reduced the trucks. That made them a dangerously good target for the riflemen firing from the downslope.
Those Consies were good. Caught completely by surprise, hideously outgunned—and still managing to make real pests of themselves. Hammer could use more recruits of their caliber—
To replace the troops this run was going to use up.