Though there wasn’t much to see except flames curling around black steel skeletons, the chassis of trucks whose flammable portions were already part of the red/orange/yellow/white billows.
Even steel burned when Suilin raked it with his tribarrel. Faces bloomed into smears of vapor and calcined bones. . . .
Blue Two grunted head-on down the road, spewing a wake of blazing debris to either side. Cooter’s driver followed, holding Flamethrower at a forty-five degree angle along the edge of the cut.
The slant threw the men in the fighting compartment toward the fire their vehicle was skirting. Gale clung to the starboard coaming. Cooter must have locked his tribarrel in place, because he was frozen like a statue of Effort on its grips.
And Dick Suilin, after a hellish moment of feeling his torso swing out and down toward the bellowing flames, braced his feet against the inner face of the armor and grabbed Cooter by the waist. If the big lieutenant minded, they could discuss it later.
Something as soft-featured and black as a tar statue reached out of the flames and gripped the coaming to either side of Suilin’s tribarrel. The only parts of the figure that weren’t black were the teeth and the great red cracks writhing in what had been the skin of both arms. The thing fell away without trying to speak.
Only a shadow. Only a sport thrown by the flames.
“Help me, Suzi,” the reporter whispered. “Help me, Suzi.”
Blue Two sucked fire along with it for an instant as the tank cleared the ambush site. Then the return flow, cool sweet air, pistoned Hell back into its proper region and washed Suilin in its freedom as well.
This car was Flamethrower. For the first time, Suilin realized how black was the humor with which the Slammers named their vehicles.
The driver brought them level with a violence that banged the skirts on the roadway. Suilin grunted. He reached for the grips of his tribarrel, obeying an instinct to hang onto something after he lost his excuse to hold Cooter.
Powerguns punctuated the night with flashes so intense they remained for seconds as streaks across the reporter’s retinas. His mind tried desperately to process the high-pitched chatter from the commo helmet—a mixture of orders, warnings and shouted exclamations.
It was all meaningless garbage; and it was all terrifying.
The downslope to the left of the roadway was striped orange by the firelight and leaping with shadows thrown from outcrops anchored too firmly in the fabric of the planet to be uprooted when the Padma River flooded. Muzzleflashes pulsed there, shockingly close.
A bottle-shaped yellow glow swelled and shrank as the gunman triggered his burst. The gun wasn’t firing tracers, but the corner of Suilin’s eyes caught a flicker as glowing metal snapped from the muzzle.
Specks of light raked the car ahead of Blue Two. Red sparks flashed up the side armor.
On the commo helmet, someone screamed lordlordlord.
The tribarrel wouldn’t swing fast enough. Dick Suilin was screaming also. He unslung his grenade launcher.
Blue Two’s main gun lit the night. Rock and the damp soil beneath it geysered outward from the point of impact, a white track glowing down the slope for twenty meters.
Flamethrower’s driver flinched away from the bolt, throwing the thirty-tonne car into a side-step as dainty as that of a nervous virgin.
Blue Two and the combat car both accelerated up the bridge approach. The tank’s turret continued to rotate to bear on the cooling splotch which its first bolt had grazed. If it fired from that angle, the bolt would pass within ten meters of Flame—
The tribarrel in Blue Two’s cupola fired instead of the main gun.
Suilin straightened and fired a burst from his own tribarrel in the same general direction. He’d dropped the grenade launcher when he ducked in panic behind the hull armor. He was too rattled now to be embarrassed by his reaction—
And anyway, both the veterans sharing the fighting compartment had ducked also.
You couldn’t be sure of not being embarrassed unless you were dead. The past night and day had been a gut-wrenching exposition of just what it meant to be dead. Dick Suilin would do anything at all to avoid that.