wasn't quite a zero-deflection shot yet. He swung through the tail surfaces and continued the graceful motion even after his trigger finger stroked with the sights centered between the forward cockpit and the glittering dial of the prop.
All he'd wanted to do was to bring the aircraft down, to punch his laser through the thin plastic hull and smash the engine block. The fuel tank was directly behind the diesel. It ruptured, hurling a ball of blazing kerosene over hundreds of square meters of the nearest buildings.
The pilot and observer were the two largest pieces of debris from the explosion. They were burning as they fell, but impact with the ground would have been instantly fatal even if they'd survived the blast.
'Now we'd better leave,' Gregg said as he reloaded.
'Not yet!' Ricimer said crisply.
He clicked off the interior light, then pointed to the blond prisoner wearing ground-personnel flashes. 'You! How do we turn out these area lights?' Though Ricimer was inside the blockhouse, the toss of his head adequately indicated the four pole-mounted floodlights bathing the site.
'There's no switch!' the Fed bleated. 'It's got a sensor, it goes on and off with sunlight!'
The Commandatura darkened suddenly as a Federation official had the same idea and executed it with dispatch.
Jeude stood up. He still carried the repeating carbine he'd liberated from a Venerian officer on Punta Verde. He shot out the first bulb, worked the bolt, and missed the second. The reflector whanged as the bullet pierced its rim.
Jeude finished the job with the remaining three cartridges in his magazine. The blockhouse and its surroundings weren't in the dark, but now the illumination came from the burning buildings fifty meters beyond the bollards.
'Why don't we go back now, Piet?' Gregg asked in much the voice that he'd have offered a cup of coffee. He had four charged batteries remaining, plus the one in the laser. His fingertip ticked over the corner of each in the satchel. He didn't touch the battery contacts, because the sweat on his skin would minusculy corrode them.
The siren on the Commandatura began to sound.
'Because if we go back now. .' Ricimer said. His voice seemed calm rather than controlled, and he spoke no louder than he needed to for Jeude and the wall gun crews all to hear him.'. . we meet the empty cars returning from mirrorside. We have to wait until they've all come through.'
'Christ's blood!' Dole said as he realized how long
Ricimer turned on the bosun like an avenging angel. 'Mr. Dole!' he said. 'I suggest that you remember that the next words we speak may be those we have on our lips when we go to meet our God. Do you understand?'
Dole swallowed and fell to his knees. He pressed his palms together, but his face was still lifted toward his captain with a look of supplication.
Ricimer shook himself and bent to lift Dole to his feet. 'He'll understand,' Ricimer muttered. 'As He'll understand the fear that causes me to lose my temper.'
A bullet, fired from somewhere within the town, slapped the front of the blockhouse. Gregg didn't hear the shot, and he couldn't spot the muzzle flash through the glare of burning buildings either. The nearest portion of the street was lighted by the houses and scattered pools of kerosene, but beyond that the pavement was curtained in darkness.
'Madam Ch'Kan,' Ricimer called to the Molt leader. 'Get your people to cover. There's room for most of you in the blockhouse without affecting our ability to fight. Jeude-if you stay there to the side, you won't be as well covered when it comes time to run for the tramline.'
Jeude shook his head. 'Those loopholes, they're nothing but bull's-eyes. I'll take my chances here, thank'ee kindly.'
He patted the waist-high breastwork of boxed microchips which hadn't been carried back to mirrorside yet.
The Molt leader chittered to her fellows. Four of them lay behind crates the way Jeude had. The rest-there were about twenty on this side of the Mirror-shuffled quickly into the blockhouse and knelt, beneath the level of the loopholes.
Another bullet sang past nearby. The sound ended abruptly as the projectile vanished into the Mirror.
Lightbody flinched instinctively. Stampfer muttered a curse, and the frozen stillness of the other crewmen showed that they too were affected by the unseen snipers.
All of the Federation guards had carried firearms. Piet Ricimer chose a captured weapon, a long-barreled breechloader, and the owner's cross-belts with about fifty tapered cartridges in the loops. He carried the gear over to Jeude, deliberately sauntering. Gregg chuckled.
Crewmen watched Ricimer through the loopholes in the side of the blockhouse. He set the rifle beside Jeude and said loudly, 'Here. I don't like to trust repeaters not to jam.'
Fed soldiers volleyed. There were six or eight of them, sited on a three-story rooftop some two hundred meters away. This time a breeze parted the curtain of flame enough for Gregg to see the nervous yellow winking of muzzle flashes. The structure beneath them was dark, but Gregg knew where it must be.
'Gunners!' he shouted as he locked down his visor. '
The flashgun jolted in his hands. Smoke may have scattered the coherent light somewhat, but not to a great enough degree to prevent the bolt's impact from shattering the concrete roof coping.
White-hot lime in the cement hadn't faded below yellow when Jeude fired toward it with his carbine. Stampfer, professionally quick and angry with himself for feeling windy a moment before, was almost as fast. The 1 -kg shell burst with a bright flash that hurled a Fed soldier backward.
The
Gregg stepped back into the blockhouse as he changed batteries in his laser. The breechblocks of the wall guns clanged as the gunners cammed them open, then closed again after the loaders dropped in fresh rounds. Propellant residues from the shell casings smelled like hot wax.
An empty cart emerged from the transition layer. The Molt pushing it took three steps forward, numbed by the Mirror, before he noticed the battle going on around him. He gaped.
Ch'Kan shouted to the laborer. He broke into a multijointed trot, pushing the car to the end of the branch. There it was out of the way of later comers like the one already entering realside.
A bullet struck one of the metal bollards and howled horribly away. None of the Venerians seemed to notice. The wall guns banged.
Piet and Jeude aimed out over their breastwork. The crewman fired as fast as he could work his carbine's bolt, then picked up the powerful single-shot. Ricimer watched as much as he aimed, but after a moment he fired. Gregg saw shards of glass fly into the street from a window eighty meters away.
Gregg raised his visor to scan for a worthy target. He had only four charges left, and the flashgun was too valuable a weapon to empty with indiscriminate firing. He thought of taking one of the captured rifles, but instinct told him not to put the laser down.
Something was coming around the corner where the street leading to the tramhead kinked and hid whatever preparations went on beyond it. The flashgun came up. Gregg closed his eyes over the sight picture and fired.
Actinics from the bolt pulsed orange through the skin of Gregg's eyelids. The blockhouse shuddered behind a puff of dust and smoke. The Feds had brought up a landing array from one of the ships, three 4-cm barrels on a single wheeled carriage. The shells were comparable to those thrown by the wall guns in the blockhouse.
Only one tube fired before Gregg's laser stabbed into the open magazine attached to the trail of the array's carriage.
The blast was red and went on for a considerable while, like a man coughing to clear phlegm. Some shells burst like grenades against walls and rooftops where the initial explosion hurled them. The bodies of the crew, Molts and humans both, lay around the ruined weapon. Burning scraps of clothes and shell spacer lighted them.
