The pointman pulled the trigger, but his shot went wide. The Maniax had the launcher readied, and put an anti-tank missile into his stomach.
He was torn backwards, his hands flailing, and he got a grip on the doorjamb. He was completely impaled, his combat suit stoved in, the trefoils of the missile sticking out of his gut. The rocket fizzled, and shot through him, exploding against the gallows on the other side of the square.
Jessamyn could see right through the hole in the dead man. His sidekick froze, and was cut down by fire from all quarters.
A phosphorus grenade rolled in through the door, and everyone dived for cover.
She could see the explosion through closed eyelids. Her heat sensor sent pain signals to her greymass.
'Freak,' she swore. 'You realize, of course, that this means WAR!'
X
Manolo was pleased. It was all according to the plan. Casualties so far were acceptable. As far as he was concerned, the loss of all personnel in the field with the exception of Bronson Manolo could be classed as an acceptable casualty rate if it got the job done. Not that he was callous. H-M had a hefty policy with General Disaster to provide for the dependents of those lost or handicapped in the service of the Agency.
His mapscreen was lighting up all over. Terhune had laid down all the fire diey needed, and Rodriguez's team was in town, cutting loose.
'Gas station, saloon, hotel, town hall…' He checked off the targets as they flared.
He flicked the counter. 0347. Within a five mile radius of the town square of Dead Rat, there were 0347 warm people, excluding the H-M personnel in their combat gear.
Ooops, 0345. No, 0341. The number fell, as the people cooled.
He dug a brew out from the cooler under his chair, and flipped the ringtop.
This was proving to be a stroll.
As balls of fire filled the interior of the Silver Shuriken, Jessamyn dived for a window. She crashed through a tinsel and spray-snow Christmas decoration and, curled up tight, turned head over end through the air, landing neatly on her feet in the street.
One of the soldiers stood in front of her, presumably awestruck behind his or her faceplate. She shot through the helmet, and the soldier sagged to the dirt.
Two more of the space invaders skidded around the building, bringing up their guns. She got them both with a single burst, and sprinted away, zig-zagging down a side-street.
It was a clear night. The half-moon shone down placidly.
0326.
Jitters had his gun back, with just one bloody buggering round left in it, so he would jolly well have to put it to freaking good use, wouldn't he, by jove.
Curtius Kenne was cut in half by a falling beam, worse luck, so he couldn't use his one shot to spread the cowboy's greymass on the wall. There was no place like the thick of battle for settling an old score. So many people were dying that no one would notice a few more.
Jitters had been splashed with some of the liquid fire from the grenade, but he was lucky enough to have been blown through a hole in the wall by the blast. He rolled in the sand, until most of the flames were out.
There were troops yomping down the main street of Dead Rat. It was like being back at Goose Green. But he wasn't going to withdraw tactically this bloody buggering time, no sir, not with brass knobs on…
He held his gun up in readiness. His hands weren't shaking now.
0318.
Gretchen Turner knew she should never have left Des Moines with Barry, the electrofence salesman. Her mama had said as much, but D-M was such a zeroville. Barry had been a rat, all right. He'd left her in a town just like Dead Rat. Since then, those had been all the places she'd known. But Magda ze Schluderpacheru was better than the other madams, the Silver Shuriken could have been a nice place with a little work. The girls were nice. They had a nice team. Gretchen couldn't feel anything below her chin, and she knew that wasn't good. She couldn't see either. There was fire all around. As she blacked out, she thought it was a pity she hadn't gotten round to finishing the Christmas decorations.
0317.
An armoured ve-hickle trundled slowly through the town, searchlights revolving on the roof. That would be some kind of command module, Jessamyn knew. That gave it a high spot on her list of things to put out of commission.
0314.
Simon Threadneedle, late of GenTech, switched off his pain with the circuitbreaker he had inserted into his own greymass. The combat unit had sprayed napalm or some napalm analogue into the Silver Shuriken, and he was clothed in fire. Nothing would get the stuff off him until it burned itself out. This was the sort of juice that burned even underwater.
It was amazing what modern technology could accomplish. The GenTech labs couldn't do anything about the common cold and no government had been able to develop a workable public transport system, but when it came to deathware, why, there were wonderful new toys on the market every fall, just in time for Christmas.
His blastic-laced flesh melted away, and the durium bonesheaths heated up. He didn't know how high a temperature they could take before they went into shutdown, and he supposed he wouldn't get a chance to record his findings if he did pursue the experiment to the end. His clothes had burned away instantly, as had all his bodily hair and most of his skin. Tarnished metal shone through his musculature as he walked through the fire. He stepped out of the wall of flame onto the steps of the saloon, and strode, still burning, into the street.
A soldier tried to shove a bayonet into his throat, but the steel buckled against his adam's apple superconductor. With fiery hands, he lifted the besuited killer off the ground, and bent his back until it snapped. Gunfire rattled against his pectoral shields, and he staggered backwards from the blast. He was holding up even better than he had hoped.
0307.
'Large concentration of bodies coming our way,' said Danny Riegert from the monitor. 'Looks like a lynch mob.'
'Get ready to rock and roll,' Susie Terhune snapped, taking the controls of the chainguns. The command unit was in its strategic position in the town square. The roofguns swivelled.
'Forty or fifty, armed and angry.'
'Wait till you can distinguish their heartbeats on the sensor.'
'Yes, ma'am.'
Her husband had left her the year before for some Tex-Mex bitch, claiming that she was too boring to live with. Chuck and Benny, her kids, whined that she was never home. She had just had painful surgery to remove an ovarian cyst that had turned out to be benign. And she had never seen the Pacific Ocean.
She tapped keys, and flicked switches.
'A hundred yards, and closing…'
'Tell me when they get to Fifty.'
'Yes, ma'am.'
The computers hummed, as the smart bullets picked their targets. Once locked on to a heartbeat pattern, they would whizz around like fireflies until they found the precise biosignal that would allow them to explode. What do you know, these babies really did have your name written on them.
'Fifty.'
She turned on the maxiscreamers, and the riot-control noise boomed through the town, shaking teeth loose, bursting eardrums, bringing rickety buildings down.
'Spot on. They're running around like chickens at a geek convention.'
The smartguns locked, and flashed READY at her.
