Standing up would expose him to fire from deeper in the compound, but the risk was minimized because they had circled around. The aircraft itself now blocked a direct view of the assault.
Washaskie hurriedly began pulling pipe bombs from his pack, setting them out for Jak to grab. Then the stocky warrior lit his cheroot with a wooden match, puffing mightily to get the tip of it glowing.
Spread out in half circle, the warriors awaited the baron’s signal.
When he jumped to his feet and chucked the first bomb, the others followed suit.
Jak held out the fuse end of the bomb and a kneeling Washaskie applied the end of his cheroot to the jutting, twisted-paper stub. The second the gunpowder inside
started to sputter and spark, Jak turned his head, located his target, then rotated his hips, and from the soles of his feet let the sucker fly.
Burning Man’s bomb exploded with a blinding flash, about three feet short of the target, but with enough force to rock the aircraft on its skids. The baron’s shrill cry of triumph hung in the air for an instant before being smothered by a ragged string of similar detonations, retina-burning flashes and rocking concussions. Glass shards and hot shrap sizzled overhead. Gouts of cordite smoke briefly obscured the target.
Jak and Washaskie immediately fell into a rhythm.
Light and chuck, then duck.
Light and chuck, then duck.
The ground underfoot quaked from consecutive volleys of explosions, and new seams opened up, racing across the surface.
In the one-sided melee, some of the bombs fell short, some actually hit the aircraft and bounced off. And others skittered across the smooth glass, skittered beyond their target and dropped into the pits where the slaves had been trying to sleep. As the bombs exploded in the pits, plumes of ragged flesh and severed limbs flew skyward, like they were shot from a cannon, black gobs against the flame orange and fire red, falling back as gruesome rain upon the massif.
Though Jak’s ears were numbed by the explosions, he could hear the screaming, and the whine of the shrap.
The unfortunate overshoots and their spectacular consequences didn’t dent Washaskie’s mood one bit. Grinning like a triple-stupe droolie, he puffed hard on the cigar to heat the glowing coal.
The string of explosions continued. Fifty yards ahead of them, the aircraft shuddered again and again, swallowed up in enormous flashes. The rearmost propeller sheared off. Shrap gnawed holes in the edges of the main rotor.
Then all of the warriors found the distance, Jak included.
Six pipe bombs bounced under fuselage and exploded nearly simultaneously, blasting the gyro off its skids. Heat and shock enveloped both of its belly pods, and the fireball ballooned as a cluster of red-tipped missiles self-launched with a roar. Three feet above the surface, they chased one another across the diameter of Ground Zero, just over the heads of the slaves cowering in the sleeping pits, then plowed into the ridge on the far side and exploded in interlaced balls of light.
Washaskie seemed to get a big charge out of that, his eyes full of glee as he clenched the butt of the cigar between his teeth. Then his head snapped back, his chin suddenly pointing skyward, like it had been mule-kicked. And all the stuffing came out of him. He slumped onto his back on the glass.
Jak thought he’d been clipped by a piece of flying shrap. He knelt over the warrior and looked at his face. There was a hole in his cheek directly under his left eye. A round, black hole. Blood began to pour from it.
Washaskie’s eyes opened. They were glazed with shock. He was still alive, but he wasn’t smiling anymore.
The echoes of the pipe bomb explosions were still rumbling in the distance when something kicked up
a bright puff of dust beside Jak’s boots and ricocheted across the massif.
Not shrap, he thought.
Jak grabbed hold of Washaskie’s collar and started dragging him away, across a landscape that offered no cover. As he did so, bullets smashed into the glass five feet ahead of him and then three feet to the right.
The sniper was bracketing his shots, trying to zero in on a moving target.
Ryan and J.B. beelined for the lee of the ragged ridge. The one-eyed man hadn’t paid much attention to the landscape feature when they had been brought here against their will the first time. As prisoners of the she-hes at Ground Zero, the companions had spent the daylight hours slaving deep underground, and when they were released topside after dark, they had had other, more pressing things to worry about, like starving or freezing to death. The change in tactics, from defense to offense, had altered the perspective. Now the eroding structure had strategic value. Nukeglass boulders couldn’t stop full-metal-jacketed bullets or tribarrel blasts, but they did conceal the assembled attack force and its movements.
Turning to the right, Ryan and J.B. followed the curve of the barrier. They were searching for a gap, a notch, a hole in the concretized rubble that would give them a protected shooting platform. The harsh glow from the kliegs streamed over the top of the sawtoothed ridge. The backside they paralleled was cast in a pit of hell darkness. Traveling at a slow walk they traced four hundred yards of the circumference before they found what they were looking for.
A beam of light speared out of the side of the ridge.
It cut through the surrounding shadow, angling up and fading into the night sky.
Close inspection revealed two overturned slabs of nukeglass, each more than a foot thick, and ten times that long, cemented crossways into the ridge matrix. The slabs formed a long, low tent bordered and mounded on each side by melted and congealed quartzite rubble. The light poured through the apex of their joining.
Ryan and J.B. began to carefully clear the loose material that blocked entry. The far end of the break in the wall looked down on the site. With the rubble removed, it had a relatively flat floor. And there was just room enough for the two of them and the Steyr to fit inside. There was also a back way out in case they had to stage a quick retreat.
A perfect hide.
They crawled into position on their stomachs, Ryan first, and ended up shoulder-to-shoulder on the edge of the overlook. His upper body propped on his elbows, J.B. thumbed back his fedora and peered through Burning Man’s binocs. Ryan uncapped the Steyr’s scope and likewise began to survey downrange.
From this vantage point he could see both sides of the ore processor. One battlesuit-clad she-he was overseeing the loading of the hopper and operation of the processor. It was the only sign of a cockroach aboveground that he could find.
Though Ryan had a shot he could make on the she-he, there was no point in targeting that enemy. He knew that the Steyr’s 7.62 mm rounds would have no effect. The battle armor’s EM shield would deflect them a foot or so
before they made contact, sending the rounds ricocheting harmlessly into the night.
He shifted his field of view to the right, taking in the camp turncoats who were laying into the ore-cart-pushing slaves with boots and occasional gun-butts. The guards were urging the miners to move faster.
In front of the mine entrance, sleeping slaves outnumbered their oppressors at least ten to one, but no one stirred from the pits in the nukeglass to come to the aid of the beaten and kicked. They either were too tired to put up a fight, or too afraid their comrades wouldn’t back their play, and that they’d be hung out to dry. Or maybe the she-hes had taken their loved ones belowground, splitting up family groups, holding them as hostages in order to maintain control of a large workforce.
Ryan lined up the gyro in the scope’s viewfield, then elevated the sight to look beyond it to the ridge’s opposite rim. The combination of glare of the kliegs, the residual heat shimmering in waves off the massif’s surface, and the distance, which was better than half a mile, made picking out man-sized targets difficult. With the scope held steady, it took him a minute or two to search out and verify pinpoints of approaching movement. It would have taken him a lot longer than that if he hadn’t known the direction Burning Man and his bomb throwers were coming from.
Half-hidden by the shimmer, the whitefaces advanced, paused, advanced, moving on their bellies from scant cover to scant cover.
Ryan swung his sights back onto the compound, checking in turn the gyro, huts, ore processor and mine entrance. “Don’t see any threats to them yet,” he said.
“Nobody’s looking their way,” J.B. agreed without lowering his binocs. “Better get ready to rip. They’ll be in arm range soon.”
Ryan dropped the bolt action’s safety, but kept his finger outside the trigger guard and his eye peering through the scope. The first explosion came a couple of very long minutes later, a thunderclap and flash that sent a geyser of smoke, shrap and glass jetting up into the night sky. The rocking concussion rolled through the massif; Ryan could feel the grinding rumble against his stomach muscles.
Before all the debris had fallen back to earth, a shower of glass fragments still glittering in the klieg lights, a flurry of subsequent explosions blossomed around the gyro, ringing it in fire and smoke.
The noise of the overlapping blasts was deafening. And their shock waves rippled through the glacier.
There was no answering response. As had been hoped, the sudden attack and its ferocity had taken the camp by surprise.
From Ryan’s elevated viewpoint it looked like the compound was being shelled by artillery.
Plumes of thick smoke swept across the nukeglass. Then came the bark and squeal of simultaneous pipe-bomb detonations, explosions that lifted the gyro into the air.
A cluster of red-tipped projectiles burst out from under it, out of the billowing smoke and flame, a slow-mo horror that suddenly speeded up as the rockets achieved full thrust, heading in a straight line right for them.
“Oh, fuck, oh, fuck,” J.B. groaned.
Clutching the Steyr in his left hand, Ryan grabbed his old friend by the back of the collar and hauled him bodily out of the rear of the hide.
No time to run, they dropped to their knees and covered their heads.
Overlaid explosions 125 feet away lit up the night, jolted the ground and sent up a towering spray of hot metal and shattered glass. A hail of chunks and slivers rained down on their backs.
As the concussion faded away, Ryan thought he heard the crack of assault rifle. Single shot.
J.B. had heard it, too. “That’s an AK,” he said with conviction.
Then a burst of autofire rattled up from the compound.
The defenders of Ground Zero had definitely come out of their stupor.
Ryan and J.B. scrambled back into the hide. Looking through the binocs, J.B. said, “Got a shooter on the left side of the water tower.”
Ryan swung the Steyr’s sights onto the structure. A lone rifleman stood on the elevated platform, longblaster shouldered and aimed toward Burning Man’s force. Through the scope Ryan saw the rifle bucking. A fraction of a second later he heard the gunshot clatter.
To compensate for the difference in elevation, Ryan put the sight’s post two feet low of center chest. As he struggled to get his breathing and heart-beat under control, he rested the pad of his finger on the trigger, tightening down to just above the break point.
“Nukin’ hell! Ryan, take him out!” J.B. exclaimed.
But before he could do that, the shooter in the view
field moved five feet farther away on the platform, spoiling the shot. Ryan released the finger tension and let the trigger spring back.
The man on the tower resumed rapid-firing at the warriors caught without cover on the nukeglass.
Ryan reacquired the target, which had now turned sideways to him. He put the top of the post on the shooter’s waist and smoothly broke the trigger. The Steyr boomed and bucked hard against his shoulder.
Riding the recoil and regaining the sight picture, Ryan saw the man slammed against the side of the tank. He lost hold of his rifle and it tumbled off the platform. Then the shooter slumped, his knees buckling, and rolled off after it. He hit the ground headfirst beside one of the supporting legs and didn’t move.
“Another one,” J.B. announced as Ryan worked the longblaster’s bolt action, flipping out a smoking hull, then chambering and locking down on a live round. “On the ladder, on the right…”
A second potential shooter, AK slung over his back, was scrambling up the ladder that led to the tower platform.
“If he gets around to the rear of tank you’ve got no shot, and from there he’ll still command the kill zone,” J.B. warned.
Ryan held the sights on the middle of the man’s back, a foot below his head, and dispensing with the niceties of breath and heartbeat control, got off a shot. Even though he got the scope back on the target as the bullet struck, he couldn’t see the point of impact. The man suddenly stopped climbing. He stood there for an instant, frozen, clinging to the ladder’s rungs, then just let go with both
hands. He toppled off the ladder backward and crashed to the ground at its foot.
Then the shit totally hit the fan. And it happened so quickly, there wasn’t time to think, it was all Ryan could do to react.
A wave of superintense heat slammed the front of the hide, making him jerk back his hands and groan a curse. The emerald-green laser beam was so hot it remelted the nukeglass like slabs of candlewax. An instant later a volley of bullets smacked into the face of the ridge inches from their position.
Ryan heard a sizzling sound, and his nose was struck by a nasty smell. When he looked beside him, he saw that drops of melted glass were burning holes through the brim of J.B.’s treasured fedora.
“Fuck!” the Armorer exclaimed, ripping the hat off his head as they scooted backward, out of the dissolving shooting blind. Slapping the fedora on his hip, he snarled, “The bastard fucked up my hat.”
As they ran low and fast back the way they’d come, to try and join up with Besup’s forces before they began the main assault, Ryan put together the chain of events in his mind. He guessed that the she-he standing by the ore processor had used her battlesuit’s infrared sensors to locate the hide after he touched off the first shot. And that the emerald-green laser beam the cockroach fired had worked like a pointer, lighting up the target for the conventional weaps of the turncoats.
“Whoa!” J.B. said, catching Ryan by the shoulder. He pointed in the direction of the road, which crossed their path at a right angle. “Over there, who is that?”
Whoever it was, he was running away from Ground
Zero, his head lowered, legs pumping hard. Even in the dim light, without the aid of optics, he looked hefty.
Ryan swung the Steyr to his shoulder and looked through the telescope. Beside him, J.B. raised the binocs.
The runner had no hands.