'Thanks,' smiled Bragg quickly, then turned to hunch and squint out of the window port. He squeezed the trigger assembly. The twin guns barked deafeningly in the confines of the cab. Milloom paused in his recitation, and covered his ears with a grimace. Tuvant shuddered, but kept working dutifully to play the ammo-belts out clear and clean. Shell cases billowed through the air like chaff.
Bragg's first devastating salvo had gone wide, passing over the top of the nearby cliffs. He grinned at himself and adjusted his aim.
'Try again…' he murmured. 'What?' asked Tuvant. 'Nothing.'
Bragg opened fire again, the barking chatter of the paired guns filling the cab again. Now his shots were stitching along the valley wall and crossing the far dunes. Something he touched exploded in a violent plume of red fire. Bragg played his guns around that area again for a minute or so.
Out on the dunes, with the convoy circled behind him, Merrt crawled forward, re-adjusting his aim. He could hear the anxious but determined voice reciting the Emperor's Prayer over his ear-plug and it filled him with a sense of right and dignity. He blinked dust out of his eyes. He'd ditched his sand-goggles the moment he'd hit the ground. Larkin had told him that nothing should get between a sniper's scope and his naked eye. You only saw the truth of the world when your eye was clear and you were looking down your scope, Larkin had said in training. Merrt smiled at the memory. He remembered how Larkin would often carry his scope around in his thigh-pouch and take it out to look at people through it. To tell if they're lying,' he always said.
Merit's scope wasn't lying now. He could see over three dozen bandits advancing over the dunes under cover of the foggy dust kicked up by the firefight. They were running low, heads down, hugging the contours of the ground. Merrt took aim at the nearest one. He sighed and fired, timing his finger to the moment of respiratory emptiness so nothing in his torso would jerk the aim. The laser burst punched through the top of the bandit's bowl-helmet, presented as it was by his head-down approach. 'The shot probably passed down through his skull, his neck and his torso, following the line of his spinal column, Merrt thought, as the figure dropped stone dead in a crumpled pile.
He adjusted his aim and took another bandit in the face when he looked up to take a bearing. A slight swing to the left, and another came into his sight, scurrying forward to gain new cover. A sigh. A squeeze. A slight recoil. The figure flipped back and fell still.
Merrt readjusted and was about to target a small group of infantry when their position dissolved in a haze of heat and outflung debris. Missile hit, he thought.
Rahan and Nehn were keeping the aim of the missile turret low, sliding off single shots that hugged the ground cover and buried themselves in the foe. Mkteeg edged the half-track along The lip of the folded dunes, skirting the enemy as best he could. His weapon crew had almost expended their missiles, so he set the drive in idle and clambered back into the turret bed to set up the stub-gun folded away in a deck-locker.
He had it up and lashed in to the armoured side panel of the track as Rahan volleyed off five missiles high into the air. They looked like burning javelins as they arched over the desert and flew down onto unseen targets below the dune.
Mktea fired the autocannon mount Laymon had been manning until the feeder belt jammed and the gun glowed red. With a curse, he snatched up his lasrifle and dived over the side. Enemy las-fire reached his vehicle a moment later and blew it up in a shower of metal debris that pattered around him as he crawled through the sand. Mktea felt a sharp and painful impact in his ankle. Looking back, prone on his belly, he realised his combat trousers were smouldering from the wash of cinders and a thick piece of metal debris had pierced his foot.
He beat down the fire then rolled over to yank the debris from his ankle. It was the shattered handle of his vehicle's auto-gun return, he realised. The pain was immense. He pulled at it and passed out momentarily. Coming to, he realised that the shrapnel wasn't going to come free from the bones of his foot without a surgeon. He chewed down a handful of painkillers, and as the heady high smacked into his brain, he rolled over and began firing his lasgun into the dune crest behind him.
Wheln blasted away from his vehicle's turret next to Brostin, who had ditched his flamer for a lasrifle. Bandits were running at them from a scoop of low-lying desert, and they shot everything that moved.
Mkendrik realised his guns were out as the last of the belt-feed whickered through the slot and the weapons coughed dry. Bandit troops were all over him, charging up to take his machine. He pulled out his laspistol and shot the first one through the head, gutting the second and blowing a knee off the third. Then he took a glancing wound in the left shoulder that turned him sideways and knocked him to the deck. There was a roaring sound.
Meryn's bike came over the rise in a puff of dust, landing hard, Caffran hammering the enemy with his guns. Meryn slewed to the left as Caffran played the cannons around, exploding most of the enemy who were in eye- shot. The others scrambled for cover.
'Come aboard!' Meryn shouted over the roar of his engine and Mkendrik leapt onto the flat-bed next to Caffran. Meryn gunned the engine and they hammered straight at the enemy lines.
Tiring from the back of his vehicle, Logris, one of Mkoll's elite scout brigade, realised his driver was losing it. Fulke was crying out, screaming, resisting the hammer of weaponsfire. He slewed the bike around, away from the action.
'Pull us back around! The war's over there!' Logris bellowed Fulke said something absurd and gunned the motor of the outrider towards the comparative safety of the convoy circle. Logris climbed forward over the ammo boxes and feeder-cables strewn across the back-platform of the bike. He came upon the whimpering Fulke from behind and slammed his head sideways into the armour panel of the pilot's door. The bike shuddered to a sidelong halt as Fulke went limp.
Logris spat on the driver. 'Coward,' he said, then turned back. Enemy troops were scurrying across the cracked dust-land towards him. He took out his lasgun and armed it.
'Let's go,' he said to them, though they couldn't hear.
Bragg pulled back from the window and released his finger on the trigger assembly. 'What?' Tuvant asked.
'Get out,' Bragg said suddenly. 'You and Milloom, get out of the cab and back onto the trailer.'
'Why?'
'Tire-patterns…'
'What?'
Bragg turned and cursed at the Caligulan driver. 'Tire-patterns! Tire-patterns! They're concentrating their fire on the tractor units. It's the freight they want! If you want to be safe, get into the sections they don't dare shoot
