Voyage Across the Stars (87 page)

Larger fragments sprayed outward; finely divided dust
whoomped
up into another mushroom. Ned fell sideways. Broken concrete slid, pinning his right boot. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see.

He flipped the sling over his head so his weapon hung crosswise on his chest, clearing both hands to tug at the weight holding his foot. The individual chunks were small enough, head-sized or thereabouts; but the jagged corners caught at one another like puzzle pieces. Some of them were still joined by twists of finger-thick reinforcing rod.

The main gun fired. The impact lifted Ned free and flung him in a stunning somersault down again on the bed of rubble.

By accident or design, the tank gunner was doing precisely the correct thing. So long as he continued to fire into the wrecked building, there was no chance that the mercenaries lairing there would be able to disable the tank. Disruption from the 20-cm bolts kept the team from aiming accurately, and there was a high likelihood that the huge impacts would kill them all despite the excellent cover the concrete provided.

The tank cruised parallel with what had been the long side of the temple. The turret was rotated ninety degrees from its midline carriage position, so the fat, stubby muzzle overhung the swell of the plenum chamber.

A line of cyan flashes licked across the tank’s bow slope. Someone was shooting at the vehicle from straight ahead.

Ned unslung his weapon and leaned against a tilted slab to steady his aim. His vision danced cyan and its orange reciprocal, and his lungs felt as though he was trying to breathe the contents of a heated sandbag.

Herne Lordling stood in the track of the firetruck across the topmost of the three terraces. He turned his submachine gun sideways, loaded a fresh magazine, and emptied the weapon again in a single dazzling burst toward the Telarian tank.

There was absolutely nothing useful the light charges could do to the massively armored tank—

But they could draw the attention of the tank’s crew, and they did so. The turret gimballed around to bear on the new target. Ned fired, Raff and Yazov fired, Josie Paetz fired—his submachine gun wasn’t going to help any more than Herne’s but it didn’t matter; this was no time to save ammo.

The skirts surrounding the tank’s plenum chamber were steel—thick but not as resistant to powergun bolts as the iridium armor of the hull. Ned and Yazov planted five bolts each along the swelling curve, blowing divots of white blazing steel and leaving holes you could stick your fist through.

The main gun fired. Everything within a meter of where Herne Lordling stood dissolved in a flash of blue so saturated it could have cut diamond.

Raff’s first magazine of rockets had HE warheads. They left sooty black scars across the skirts, denting but not piercing the steel. The Racontid reloaded faster than Ned or Yazov. The next four rockets were tungsten penetrators that sparkled through the skirts, with at least a chance of clipping fan nacelles within the plenum chamber, besides.

The cushion of air which should have floated the tank’s height roared out through the holes in the skirts. The tank dug its port side still deeper in the soil and sodded to a halt. Its turret rotated toward the ruins again with the deliberation its great mass demanded.

Ned got up and ran, bandolier flapping and his heavy shoulder weapon held out at arm’s length like an acrobat’s balance bar. The team had disabled the tank, but they couldn’t destroy it. There was nothing to stay around for except certain death from the battering the tank gun would give the ruined temple.

The building had been eight or nine meters across, though in collapse the fragments slumped over a wider area. Paetz and Yazov dodged around the rear of the pile and threw themselves down.

Raff had chosen a firing position on the far side of the ruin to begin with. The Racontid vanished to safety in a clumsy jump. His arms and legs flailed like those of a cat flung from a high window.

Ned stepped to a heap on the fractured roof from which to push off in a similar leap. He might break something when he landed six or eight meters away, might even knock himself silly, but the turret was turning and—

The mound was powder over a grid of reinforcing rods. Ned’s right leg shot through a rectangular gap. The rods clamped him just above the knee. If they’d caught him just a little lower, inertia would have torn all the ligaments away from the joint. As it was, the pain was agonizing—and the thumb-thick rods held him as firmly as a bear trap.

Ned looked over his shoulder. The tank’s 20-cm gun steadied in perfect line with his torso. In the far distance, motion in the corner of Ned’s eye marked a second Telarian tank following the furrow dragged by the first. Cyan light so bright it was palpable engulfed the disabled tank.

The massively armored bow slope burst inward from the jet of plasma. Everything within the fighting compartment ionized instantly; ready charges for the main gun and the cupola tribarrel added their portion to the ravening destruction. The fusion bottle ruptured and the turret, a 60-tonne iridium casting, spun into the air like a flipped coin.

For a moment, Ned could neither see nor hear because of the blast. He had closed his eyes instinctively when the muzzle yawned to spew his own death, but eyelids could only filter, not bar, the cyan intensity. The shockwave of metal subliming in the energy flux made the air ring like a god’s struck anvil. It lifted the turf in a series of ripples spreading from the point of impact on the tank’s bow.

The anti-starship weapon from the gun tower on the eastern horizon fired again. The second Telarian tank exploded. This time the hull shattered. The vehicle’s dense iridium flanks flew outward, crumpling like foil in a flame.

Deke and Toll Warson had removed the lockouts from the fire-control computers, thus turning the captured gun tower into a support base for the teams within the Doormann estate. They’d taken their bloody time about it, but close only counts in horseshoes—

And hand grenades.

Ned began to laugh, humor or hysteria, he really didn’t care. “Hey!” he croaked, “somebody get me out of here! Hey, can anybody hear—”

Yazov’s boots thumped on the rubble. Raff had flung the big man halfway up the pile as if he were a sandbag. Yazov scrambled closer, detaching the cutting bar from his belt. His nephew followed him in a similar high-angle trajectory.

Yazov thumbed the bar’s trigger to test the tool. The blade hummed eagerly. “Some of them laughed when they saw all the gear I was carrying,” he remarked smugly. “ ‘He’ll need a jeep, he can’t walk with all that cop,’ they said.”

“I’m
glad you’ve got it,” Ned remarked. The veteran sounded perfectly normal: too normal. He wondered just how well Yazov was doing inside.

He wondered how well
he
was doing inside. He’d be all right so long as he kept everything on the surface, though.

“You bet you’re glad,” Yazov said. He chose a point, set the bar against it, and cut through the mild steel rods with a shriek and a shower of red sparks. “You can’t have too much gear when it drops in the pot. You know that, don’t you, Slade?”

“You bet,” Ned agreed. When the powered blade howled through a second joint, he felt some of the pressure release. He still wasn’t free.

Josie Paetz stood beside his uncle, changing the barrel of his submachine gun. He was smiling, all the way through. His face was more terrifying than the bore of a 20-cm powergun.

Yazov made a third careful cut. “There,” he said, offering Ned his shoulder for a brace.

“I’ll lift him,” said Raff, who had climbed the ruin normally. The left side of the Racontid’s body was blackened where a nearby bolt had singed the normally golden pelt.

The stench of burned hair clung to Raff, but he seemed to be in good shape regardless. His gentle strength raised Ned like a chain hoist, vertically, with none of the torquing that could shear and tear.

Ned checked his powergun. It had a full magazine. He must have reloaded after firing the second clip into the tank’s skirts, but he couldn’t imagine when or how he’d done it. “Let’s get going,” he said aloud.

His right leg hurt like hell, but it supported him. Raff nonetheless kept an unobtrusive grip on Ned’s equipment belt as they descended the pile of debris.

“Cutting bars are great when you have to get in close, too,” Yazov said conversationally. “You ever do that, Slade?”

“Yeah,” Ned said. “Once. Lissea shot him off me.”

They headed along the path the firetruck had torn across the grounds. The swale at the base of the terraces would have been boggy, but the landscape architects had run perforated tiles under the turf to a catch basin disguised in the base of a sundial.

“Well, keep it in mind,” Yazov said. “Beats hell out of a gun butt. Though a sharp entrenching tool, that can work pretty well too.”

Yazov sounded nonchalant, but he looked to the other side as the team skirted the crater of vitrified soil the main gun bolt had punched where Herne Lordling briefly stood. “You know,” he added, “I never liked that bastard. I still don’t. It’s a hell of a thing. I still don’t like him.”

“I don’t think it had much to do with liking,” Ned said, wishing that his eyes didn’t blur like this. “It was a matter of doing his job. Like we all did.”

A smoothly resilient path led through the brick archway. The truck must have followed it, though they couldn’t see the tread marks. For the moment, the gun tower that was their destination was out of sight also.

A klaxon moaned. The precise location was lost in the bordering shrubs, but it was close and getting closer.

The team melted into ambush position: Paetz and Yazov beneath flowering branches to the left, Raff in a similar position on the right, and Ned behind the end support of a stone bench set along the path for strollers. It wasn’t good concealment, but it would protect his torso against even a 2-cm bolt . . .

Yazov jumped up and ran into the center of the pathway. “Wait!” he cried, waving back to Ned who didn’t have a commo helmet. “Wait! She’s coming through!”

A three-wheeler skidded around the hedge-hidden corner twenty meters beyond the team. The metal tires chirped as Lissea braked hard to keep from hitting Yazov. She brought the little vehicle to a chattering halt just short of the veteran and raised her faceshield.

Ned stumbled as he ran to the three-wheeler because he couldn’t see for tears. “You’re all right?” he said.

“You’re all right?” Lissea echoed. “You’re all right?”

“Ma’am, you’re out on this alone?” Yazov said doubtfully, checking the vehicle’s tribarrel, still locked in its traveling position.

“It’s what I could find after the truck bogged,” Lissea said. “The fighting’s over. Lucas is in charge. He’s called a ceasefire with a general amnesty, and I’ve accepted.”

“That’s good,” Ned said. “He’s smart, Lucas is, but that’s
good
too.” Then he added, “I’m glad I didn’t kill him.”

“Come on,” Lissea said. “Everybody climb on. This will hold us if we’re careful.”

“It’s an overload,” Raff said doubtfully.

“Worse things have happened today,” Ned said as he settled himself on the pillion. He put his left arm around Lissea’s waist; the arm that didn’t hold his well-used powergun.

Ned stood with his hands on his hip bones, staring north from the roof-level banquet hall of the Acme. At the large table placed in the center of the room for the discussions, Lissea and Lucas Doormann worked out the final wording of their agreement with a civilian lawyer each in support. Both lawyers were female.

If you knew where to look and you used moderate magnification, you could see that one of the anti-starship weapons on the Doormann estate’s perimeter wall was trained on the hotel. The precaution was probably unnecessary, but nobody thought it was a bluff.

Nobody in his right mind thought it was a bluff.

There had been street traffic all night. Now that dawn had washed away the patterns of head- and tail-lights, the number of vehicles visible through the clear walls of the room increased exponentially. It seemed to be business as usual in Landfall City.

There had been virtually no damage in the city and rural areas outside the estate boundary. Within that perimeter, well—the Doormann Estate had been an enclave on the world it ruled. It would be some time before Telaria as a whole appreciated just what had happened on the previous day.

Ned made a sound in his throat.

“Sir?” said Deye, the Telarian in his late fifties standing at the window a few meters away. Deye was a military man by his carriage, though at the moment he wore ruffed civilian clothes. Lucas had made the Acme his temporary headquarters, but in this room, by agreement, the principals were supported by only two aides apiece.

“I was thinking,” Ned said. “About what they’re going to say. About us.”

Deye nodded seriously. “I lost some friends today, Ensign Slade,” he said.

The voices of the lawyers chirped at a high rate like gears meshing. They spoke and gestured simultaneously at the holographic display in the center of the table. The words fell into unison, as if the pair were giving a choral reading.

“But I want to say,” Deye continued, “I’m proud to have faced you. I wouldn’t have believed anybody could fight at the odds you faced. Fight and win, I’ll give you that; you
won!”

Ned looked at him.
Are you insane? We killed hundreds of people and most of them were civilians. We killed
thousands
of people, and we were ready to raze Landfall City to the ground if you hadn’t
capitulated!

Aloud he said, “That isn’t quite what I had in mind. And I . . . haven’t quite processed everything that’s gone on.”

Deye’s arm twitched. With a convulsive gesture, the Telarian extended his hand for Ned to shake or reject. He had the air of a man reaching into a furnace.

More embarrassed than he could have imagined ever being, Ned shook Deye’s hand. Ned had bathed as soon as they reached the hotel, but he still felt as though his skin was sticky with blood.

“Agreed?” Lucas said on a rising inflexion.

Ned and Deye faced around.