“You intend to throw off your shackles by force of arms?”
“We have been planning it ever since Paul’s murder. We have armed ourselves with good weapons and ammo, stolen from our enemies.”
“Do you really think you can defeat both Malosh and Haldane?”
“We have no choice.”
“Indeed, it appears you do not.”
Isabel stepped up to him and said, “Will you fight with us?”
“Either my companions are safe or they are not. Either way, there is nothing more I can do for them at present. Under the circumstances I would be most honored to join your cause. My gun and my sword are at your service, madam.”
No sooner had he finished speaking than a string of muted explosions burst almost directly overhead.
“Grens,” Doc said.
Then came the clatter of machine-gun fire, likewise muted by the layers of intervening rock.
“Malosh’s real attack has started,” Isabel said.
A moment later the subterranean room was jarred by a rocking blast. The walls and floor shuddered violently, and with an awful grinding roar, a section of the stone ceiling broke free and came down on top of them. As Tanner grabbed Isabel’s arm and swung her out of the path of the massive deadfall, clouds of dust whooshed over them and the other survivors, extinguishing most of the torches.
They coughed and gasped in the dim light. More gren explosions came from above; though less powerful, they still shook the chamber. With a groan, another chunk of the weakened roof broke loose and crashed to the floor.
“Gather the weapons and ammo!” Isabel shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here before the rest of the ceiling comes down.”
The ville fighters hurried to obey her.
Doc picked up a dropped torch so he could help. As he stepped forward, he almost kicked a man’s head that was sticking out of the rubble on the floor. The face was a strangled black, the eyes popped out of their sockets and dangling upon his blood-suffused cheeks. Hidden from view, his torso had been crushed flat by a huge block of stone. He had bitten off his own tongue by reflex.
It lay on the floor under his nose.
Ryan stretched the cramps out of his legs while blasterfire raged on the gorge side of ville. He figured the Haldane sec men who weren’t assigned to defend the north wall would be scrambling up the slope of loose scree on the south side, eager for the chance to rip off a few clips at a pinned down enemy. The machine gun in front of them was his one and only concern.
The steady chatter of blasterfire was loud enough to cover conversation. Ryan waved for J.B. and Mildred to come closer to him.
“The big gun position is going to be tough to crack,” he said. “Its kill zone runs through nearly 180 degrees of arc. And there’s just bare ground between it and us.”
“The officers brought along plenty of grens,” Mildred countered. “Fraggers.”
“The emplacement’s SUV is buttoned up tight with plate steel,” Ryan told them. “Windshield and side windows are covered. The wag is sitting on its rims, and the undercarriage is mebbe six inches off the ground. The only decent-size opening is in the roof behind the machine gun, the port for the gunner. It’s going to take a hell of a pitch to drop a gren down that hole.”
“Nothing but net,” Mildred said.
“Nukin’ hell!” J.B. exclaimed, looking up as a flare burst high over the ville. It reflected in his spectacles, casting a sickly red light as it drifted down out of sight behind the wall of dirt and rubble.
If they could see Malosh’s attack signal, the trooper behind the Haldane machine gun could, too.
So much for surprise.
“Get ready,” Ryan said, tightening his grip on the SIG-Sauer and bracing himself to charge over the top of the cliff.
Farther down the cliff edge, he saw Malosh’s officers yank the pins on the grens they each held. Counting out loud, they let the safety levers flip off, then lobbed the bombs in high arcs toward the emplacement.
Pure chuck and duck.
The machine gun opened up at once, strafing the edge of the cliff with 7.62 mm NATO rounds.
Ryan couldn’t hear the grens land because of the roar of blasterfire. The hard, cracking explosions were impossible to miss, however.
Whump! Whump! Whump!
As the companions crouched, shrap sizzled and whined through the air scant inches above their heads. The stench of burned Comp B swept over them.
And the machine gun went dead.
Mildred and J.B. started to move forward. Ryan put out both arms, holding them back.
Other norm fighters concealed below the summit weren’t as cautious. Following their officers’ command, the first twenty vaulted the cliff edge and charged.
The M-60 came to life at once.
Amid the 550-round-per-minute thunder and the howl of flying lead, men and women screamed and fell. Those who weren’t flattened by gutshots or head shots in the first twenty-five feet abruptly reversed course and tried desperately to dive or jump over the cliff edge to cover.
Some of these unlucky ones were lifted in the air by multiple bullet impacts and thrown over the cliff. They toppled soundlessly down the cliff face. Others reached the edge only to be cut down before they could make the headfirst leap. A man whose skull was largely shot away slipped past J.B., who instinctively reached out for his arm and missed. The body slid by, limp as a rag bag, rapidly gathering speed.
The first wave of the attack was over. None of the attackers had survived it.
When the officers reared back and chucked a second round of grens, the emplacement ceased fire. This time the gunner wasn’t caught off guard. When he saw the grens arcing toward him, he abandoned the gun and ducked into the protection of the armored wag.
With three distinct thunks the grens hit the hood of the Suburban and bounced or rolled off.
Again, they hadn’t managed to hit the hole.
Explosions ripped the air, shrap screamed and smoke billowed.
“Go!” the officers shouted to the norm fighters.
The second wave of attackers surged over the hilltop, shouting at the tops of their lungs. They burst onto the killing ground, now a blood-slick obstacle course of sprawled bodies. The machine gun roared from its hard site, sweeping through the skirmish line like a weed trimmer. The fire was so concentrated that some of the poor bastards were nearly cut in two. All were cut down. Before the wounded could crawl over the edge to safety, the gunner methodically stitched up their backs with lead.
This was going nowhere.
“Give me a gren!” Ryan bellowed through cupped hands at the officer closest to him.
Without hesitation, the man dug out another fragger from his bag and underhanded it to him.
Ryan caught the bomb in his left hand. “Cover me,” he told J.B. and Mildred.
He waited for the officers to pitch the third helping of predark grens. He waited for the rocking triple blast. But he didn’t wait for the smoke to clear to gauge the effect.
An instant after the overlapping explosions shook the air, with the shrap still flying, Ryan was up and over the cliff edge. He ran low and quick through the rolling white smoke, his bootheels sliding and crunching over the bodies and body parts.
Blasterfire rattled at him from another gunpost far to his right, the one that defended Sunspot’s western gate. The machine-gun bullets slapped and shook the bodies at his heels, but no fire came from the smoke-shrouded emplacement in front of him.
As he raced for the bumper of the SUV, the gren smoke began to thin out. A dark head and shoulders popped up behind the roof-mounted M-60. Ryan saw the gunner shoulder the stock and grip the foregrip. Then he tipped the barrel down to put him in its sights. Ryan threw himself against the Suburban’s grille as the machine gun cut loose, blasting ragged rents through the leading edge of the hood, just above his head.
Smoke gone, target acquired, J.B. and Mildred opened fire on the shooter from the edge of the cliff. A combination of 9 mm rounds and .38 caliber slugs rained on the makeshift gun turret, sparking off the steel-plate armor.
The gunner reacted by swinging up his sights, walking a stream of hot lead toward them.
With the machine gun howling overhead, Ryan holstered his SIG and pulled the gren’s safety clip and yanked the pin. Holding down the safety lever, he crawled from the front to the left side of the wag. When he was below the front passenger door, as close to the gunner as he could get, he let the lever flip off. He sprang to his feet and stuffed the gren in the gap between the edge of the hole and the very startled man’s back.
One thousand one.
The gunner tried to turn the muzzle on him, but Ryan blocked the barrel and gas cylinder’s swing with his forearm. Suckers were hot, too. Burned his skin right through his jacket.
One thousand two.
Ryan looked into the man’s eyes.
A dead man’s eyes.
One thousand three.
The gunner pulled the machine gun’s trigger and held it pinned, firing wild, trying to take the one-eyed man to hell with him.
One thousand four.
Ryan dropped to his knees, letting the roaring barrel pivot over his head.
Whump!
The explosion knocked the one-eyed man flat on his butt and made him go both deaf and blind for an awful instant. But the real force of the blast was focused upward, through the aperture in the SUV’s roof. It blew the gunner clean out of the makeshift turret. He landed facedown and smoking on the Suburban’s hood. Half of him did, anyway, from the waist up. The rest was a goulash of bloody shreds and stripped bones.
Smoke continued to pour out of the turret hole and for a few frantic seconds belted .308 rounds cooked off, hammering in vain against the inside of the armor plating.
When the cook-offs stopped, Ryan waved J.B. and Mildred forward.
The gun emplacement at the gate tried to nail them as they crossed the bloody ground in a sprint. A volley of 7.62 mm rounds plowed the earth and spanked the bodies in their wake. They dived for cover behind the smoking hulk of the Suburban. Protected by the side of the emplacement, J.B. and Mildred knelt next to Ryan, gasping for breath.
The one-eyed man looked back toward the cliff edge and saw one of the officers running toward the berm with a hefty satchel charge.
The smoke from inside the SUV had thinned.
Way too quickly.
Cross ventilation. J.B. noticed it, too. His eyes widened behind his smeared spectacles.
“The gun position has got an open exit door on the ville side of the berm,” Ryan said. “Let’s use it.”
J.B. climbed into the hulk first, followed by Mildred.
“Oh, man, there were at least three guys in here,” she groaned as she dropped down. “They’re all turned to spray paint.”
Ryan slipped behind the ruined M-60 and lowered himself through the hole in the roof. At once he was slammed by the coppery sweet reek and the intense residual heat. Blood and pulverized bone and pureed intestinal contents dripped from every interior surface. Eyes on the prize. Stuck through the Suburban’s open rear doors was a three-foot-wide, corrugated steel culvert pipe that ran through the berm wall. J.B. had already disappeared down it. Mildred was right on his heels.
As Ryan dropped to his knees, something heavy landed on the backs of his calves. He looked over his shoulder to see the canvas satchel of high explosives. About thirty pounds worth, he figured. He didn’t try to throw it back out again. If the strap got hung up on the machine gun, or if the officer was still outside, throwing it wouldn’t do any good. Throwing it would just eat up precious seconds. He didn’t waste them cursing, either.
“Move!” he yelled at Mildred and J.B. “Move!” Then he crawled over the slimy gore like a madman, hurling himself into the narrow culvert. He couldn’t fault the officer’s strategy, even if he was about to be made a victim of it. It made perfect sense to set a charge in a tunnel under the wall. Get a much bigger hole that way.
Ryan slid out of the open end of the pipe and hit the ground running.
J.B. and Mildred were moving toward the nearest cover, ignorant of what was coming. There was no time to fill in the pertinent details. “Hurry!” Ryan cried. “Faster!”
A split second before the explosion, they ducked behind a rusting cabover camper propped up on concrete blocks.
Too close to the SUV as it turned out.
Way too close.
The boom was tremendous. It made the previous gren blasts seem like firecrackers. The pressure wave alone knocked the camper off its blocks and it tipped over, almost landing on top of them. A heartbeat later came a flash of intense heat, then boiling clouds of dust and smoke. Big rocks and chunks of concrete sailed down through the obscuring smoke, thudding to earth all around them.
The satchel charge had blown the Suburban apart and taken out a pie-shaped wedge of berm. As the smoke lifted, Malosh fighters poured through the gap.
Only to be met by ravening waves of automatic weapons fire from the Haldane defenders.
Bullets slammed into the roof of the overturned camper, slicing ragged holes in the sheet aluminum. Ryan, J.B., and Mildred whirled to face the fresh attack. Some seventy-five yards away, Haldane soldiers crouched next to the culvert opening of the gateside gunpost, firing assault rifles.
Ryan swung the SIG up in a two-handed grip, punching out a tight string of single shots.
K
RYSTY AND
J
AK WERE
waiting on the path halfway up the cliffside when the satchel charge detonated with a sudden flash of light and a rolling boom. The concussion shook loose dirt and scads of small rocks, causing minor avalanches all along the slope. Krysty had to put a hand out to steady herself.
Then it started raining.
Boulders and chunks of concrete blown sky-high bounced down the cliff face, as did the gun post’s front axle and V-8 engine block. The norms closer to the summit were swept off the path by falling heavy debris. Screaming, cartwheeling bodies flew past. Along the base of the cliff, a rubbish heap of rock, metal and torn flesh accumulated.
Krysty thanked Gaia that she hadn’t seen Ryan in free fall. That didn’t mean he or the others were okay, though. The explosion was much more powerful than she’d expected, and that worried her.
Someone shouted down from the cliff top. “They’ve broken through the berm. Let’s go! Everyone up!”
Krysty and Jak advanced behind the last of the norm fighters. Behind them came the swampies and their highly excited dogs. The hellhounds could smell the blood and the fear in the air. Krysty could smell it, too. The drooling animals scrambled up the path, half dragging their stumpy handlers.
As Krysty climbed toward Sunspot ville, the small-arms fire above intensified. Haldane defenders were trying to turn back the spear point of the assault.
With Jak at her side, she jumped onto the summit, her Smith & Wesson 640 in her hand. The first thing she saw was the smoking ruin where the SUV gunpost had been. The satchel charge had blown a twelve-foot gap in the berm. Nothing of the wag remained. Ryan, Mildred and J.B. were nowhere in sight. Heavy blaster-fire sawed back and forth inside the berm as they ran through the litter of bodies and body parts. The corpses closest to the explosion were burning like guttering candles.