Redliners(10)

Three Kalendru ran out of the distant hangar. Two had lasers; the Spook in the middle lifted a long launching tube to his shoulder.

Blohm shot the rocketeer first. The Spook dropped his tube and staggered backward, but he stayed on his feet.

This was long range for a stinger. The pellets depended on kinetic energy for their effect, and air resistance scrubbed off velocity. Kalendru lasers had better performance than stingers at ranges of three hundred yards and beyond, but it wasn't often you had to worry about shooting the breadth of a starport.

Blohm raised his point of aim slightly for the second target. The burst hit the Spook in the face and throat. He flung up his hands and fell backward.

The third Spook looked around wildly. Blohm nailed him in the upper chest, then gave him a second burst when he didn't go down. That Spook and the rocketeer collapsed together in a tangle of spindly limbs.

Blohm hoped Abbado made it clear. Well, he'd done what he could.

There was lots of room in the crawlspace. The extruded-metal joists were several feet off the ground across most of the building. A guy could live in a space like this if he had food and everybody left him alone. He'd have no decisions to make at all.



The truck went over a sunken tramline at forty miles an hour. They must have crossed the same trench headed for the hangar, but Abbado didn't remember the jolt being so bad. The present condition of the truck's running gear probably had something to do with it.

Glasebrook bounced high enough to dent the cab roof with his helmet. He shouted a curse.

"Quit bitching, Flea," Abbado said. "There's people who'd pay good money for a ride like this!"

A shell landed where the truck had crossed the tramline seconds before. Horgen dragged the steering yoke to the right, fighting the vehicle's tendency to drift left because of the flat tires on that side.

"They can have my fucking ticket then!" Glasebrook said. He fired at a freighter on which nothing moved but wisps of smoke from all the open hatches.

More shells hit, well behind and this time to the left of the truck. Horgen continued to steer right. Her elbow rang on Flea's breastplate.

A heavy weapons squad had set up in a pit near where C41 landed. Abbado couldn't tell whether they'd been a rocket or a plasma cannon crew, because a shell had scooped everything out and sprayed it high in the air like ejecta from a volcano.

Bits of hard suit lay in a circle around the pit where they'd fallen. None of the pieces was larger than a gauntlet and half a forearm. One of the strikers lay spreadeagled nearby with a full complement of appendages attached to the armored torso. Blast effects were funny things. Sometimes you'd find a corpse with all his clothes blown off but not a mark on his skin.

"Hang the hell on!" Horgen said as she fought the yoke. She wanted to turn into the alley between the warehouses and the collapsed ruin that had been the big transient compound, but the vehicle wasn't responding the way it should.

The truck was supposed to steer all eight wheels, but there seemed to be more damage than just the flat tires. Glasebrook gripped the right horn of the yoke and forced it down against whatever was dragging.

The truck skidded. Metal shrieked, but they were turning, they were going to make it.

Movement caught the corner of Abbado's eye. He turned his head and looked squarely at the shape waddling into the port from the north.

Abbado pointed his stinger by instinct, but he didn't bother firing. While doing so would definitely get its attention, he could piss out the truck's window and have just as much chance of damaging a Kalendru tank.

* * *

"They're eight minutes out," Nadia shouted to Farrell. He'd handed responsibility for orbital communications to her when they left the jammer to automatic operation in the admin building. "They'll be approaching from the west. One vessel."

It'd be a tight squeeze getting C41 aboard a standard landing boat intended for fifty strikers. Of course they didn't have the usual amount of heavy equipment on this extraction.

And again, a fifty-place vessel might be about the right size.

Farrell was in the cab of a construction tanker with plow-like nozzles on the underside to inject plasticizer into the ground. It was in the row nearest the back of the warehouses. Leinsdorf squatted beside Farrell, nursing his plasma tube and looking grim. Captain Broz stood on the tread of the giant earthmover adjacent. Farrell liked having Nadia close because of her electronics skills, though that increased the risk he and his XO would buy it simultaneously.

The rest of the strikers were spread through the ranks of Kalendru vehicles, mostly near the back of the field. The Spook artillery hadn't begun targeting the storage field.

Spook sensor technology was excellent, but the amount of metal and electronics in the park were perfect concealment for the scattering of humans. C41 was going to need all the help it could get to stay alive until the boat arrived.