Two men shot at Warmonger from the ditch across the road.
Ranson fired back. Bolts ripped from the rotating muzzles of her powergun and vanished from her sight. It wasn’t until the lower half of her visor blacked momentarily and the upper half quivered with cyan reflections that she realized that she’d been aiming at the remote image from Deathdealer.
Part of June Ranson’s mind wondered what her bolts had hit, might have hit. The part in physical control continued to squeeze the butterfly trigger of her powergun and watch the cyan light vanish in the divided darkness of her mind. . . .
The night ahead of Dick Suilin was lit spitefully by the fire of the other armored vehicles. He clung to the coaming of Flamethrower’s fighting compartment with his left hand; his right rested on the grip of his tribarrel, but his thumb was curled under his fingers as if to prevent it from touching the trigger.
There were no signs of Consies shooting back, but a farm tractor had collapsed into a fuel fire that reminded Suilin of the bus after his bolts raked it.
Oh dear Lord. Oh dear Lord.
Gale was lighting his quarter with short bursts. So far as the reporter could tell, the veteran’s bolts were a matter of excitement rather than a response to real targets. Lieutenant Cooter gripped the armor with both hands and shouted so loudly into his helmet microphone that Suilin could hear the sounds though not the words.
Both veterans had a vision of duty.
Dick Suilin had his memories.
When the armored vehicles prickled with cyan bolts, they re-entered the reporter’s universe. It had been very easy for Suilin to believe that the three of them in the back of Flamethrower were the only humans left in the strait bounds of existence. The darkness created that feeling; the darkness and the additional Wide-awake he’d accepted from Gale.
Perhaps what most divorced Suilin from that which had been reality less than two days before was the buzzing roar of the fans. Their vibration seemed to jelly both his mind and his marrow.
Since the driver slid his throttles to the top of their range, Flamethrower’s skirt jolted repeatedly against the ground. Suilin found the impacts more bearable than the constant, enervating hum of the car at moderate speed.
Task Force Ranson swung raggedly at an angle to the left. Each armored vehicle followed a separate track, though the general line was on or parallel to the paved highway.
Suilin had ridden the la Reole/Bunduran road a hundred times in the past. It was easy to follow the road’s course now with his eyes, because of the fires lit by powerguns all along its course. The truckers’ cafe and fuel point at the top of the ridge, three kilometers from la Reole, was a crown of flames.
Flamethrower lurched over a ditch and sparked her skirts on the gravel shoulder. The driver straightened his big vehicle with port, then starboard sidethrusts. The motion rocked Suilin brutally but seemed to be expected by the veterans with him in the fighting compartment.
Gale shot over the stern, and Cooter’s weapon coughed bursts so short it appeared to be clearing its triple throats.
A dozen civilians huddled in the ditch on Suilin’s side of the car. All but one of them were pressed face-down in the soft earth. Their hands were clasped over the back of their heads as if to force themselves still lower.
The exception lay on her back. A powergun had decapitated her.
Suilin tried to scream, but his throat was too rigid to pass the sound.
“Shot!” crackled his headphones, but there was shooting everywhere. As armored vehicles disappeared over the brow of the ridge, all their weapons ripped the horizon in volleys. Cooter had explained that the Consie siegeworks were just across a shallow valley from where Task Force Ranson would regain the road.
A Consie wearing crossed bandoliers rolled upright in the ditch fifty meters ahead of Flamethrower. He aimed directly at Suilin.
Cooter saw the guerrilla, but the big lieutenant had been raking the right side of the road while Gale covered the rear. He shouted something and tried to turn his tribarrel.