“You just killed them,” Rob blurted. He was half blinded by tears and the after-image of the gunfire.
“Via, they did their best on us, didn’t they?” the sergeant snarled. His face was tiger striped by dust and sweat.
“No, not them!” the boy cried. “Not them—the girls. You just—”
Worzer’s iron fingers gripped Rob by the chin and turned the recruit remorselessly toward the carnage behind. The flirts had been torn apart by their own fluids, some pieces flung through gaps in the mangled cage. “Look at ’em, Jenne!” Worzer demanded. “They ain’t human but if they was, if it was Leon back there, I’d a done it.”
His fingers uncurled from Rob’s chin and slammed in a fist against the car’s armor. “This ain’t heroes, it ain’t no coppy game you play when you want to! You do what you got to do, ’cause if you don’t, some poor bastard gets killed later when he tries to.
“Now get down there and unhitch us.”
“Yes, sir.” Rob gripped the lip of the car for support.
Worzer’s voice, more gentle, came through the haze of tears: “And watch it, kid. Just because they’re keeping their heads down don’t mean they’re all gone.” Then, “Wait.” Another pause while the sergeant unfastened the belt and holstered handgun from his waist and handed it to Rob. Leon wore a similar weapon, but Worzer did not touch the body. Rob wordlessly clipped the belt, loose for not being fitted over armor, and swung down from the combat car.
The hitch had a quick-release handle, but the torqueing it had received in the last seconds of battle had jammed it. Nervously aware that the sergeant’s darting-eyed watchfulness was no pretense, that the shot-scythed grainfield could hide still another guerrilla, or a platoon of them, Rob smashed his boot heel against the catch. It held. Wishing for his driller’s sledge, he kicked again.
“Sarge!” Jake shouted. Grain rustled on the other side of the combat car, and against the sky beyond the scarred armor loomed a parcel. Rob threw himself flat.
The explosion picked him up from the ground and bounced him twice, despite the shielding bulk of the combat car. Stumbling upright, Rob steadied himself on the armored side.
The metal felt odd. It no longer trembled with the ready power of the fans. The car was dead, lying at rest on the torn-up soil. With three quick strides, the recruit rounded the bow of the vehicle. He had no time to inspect the dished-in metal, because another swarthy guerrilla was approaching from the other side.
Seeing Rob, the ex-farmer shouted something and drew a long knife. Rob took a step back, remembered the pistol. He tugged at its unfamiliar grip and the weapon popped free into his hand. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to finger the safety, placed just as the tribarrel’s had been, then trigger two shots into the face of the lunging guerrilla. The snarl of hatred blanked as the body tumbled facedown at Rob’s feet. The knife had flown somewhere into the grain.
“Ebros?” a man called. Another lid had raised from the ground ten meters away. Rob fired at the hole, missed badly. He climbed the caved-in bow, clumsily one-handed, keeping the pistol raised. There was nothing but twisted metal where the driver had been. Sergeant Worzer was still semi-erect, clutched against his powergun by a length of structural tubing. It had curled around both his thighs, fluid under the stunning impact of the satchel charge. The map display was a pearly blank, though the window above it still read incongruously 614579 and the red line on the detector screen blipped in nervous solitude. Worzer’s helmet was gone, having flayed a bloody track across his scalp as it sailed away. His lips moved, though, and when Rob put his face near the sergeant’s he could hear, “The red . . . pull the red tab . . .”
Over the left breast of each set of armor were a blue and a red tab. Rob had assumed they were decorations of some sort. He shifted the sergeant gently. The tab was locked down by a cotter pin which he yanked out. Something hissed in the armor as he pulled the tab, and Sergeant Worzer murmured, “Oh Lord. Oh Lord.” Then, “Now the stimulant, the blue tab.”