Redliners(45)

"Want me to—" Nessman said, rising to his feet.

"Contact!" the helmet warned. "Contact!"

Meyer pulled back the lever on the side of the guntube and let it go, switching power to the trigger mechanism. Launcher-fired grenades, two and then four more, went off near the perimeter to the northeast. One of them speared a branch skyward on a burp of orange flame.

Meyer horsed the weapon around to point in the direction of the blasts. The trunk slanted and the tree had been dead long enough that the bark fell away in large flakes under the gun's weight. The barrel wanted to slip down the log.

There were strikers a hundred yards away to the right of the weapon's current heading: two warning icons had flashed on the sight as it swung across them. Ten feet before the cannon's muzzle was a tangle of sapling and vines, knitted together in a gray and brown fabric. In a moment or two a company of Kalendru might come leaping over the barrier with their lasers ready and their inhumanly quick reactions. For now Meyer didn't have anything to shoot at.

Nessman, moving with care because he knew the hard suit made him clumsy, climbed onto the root ball beside Meyer. His visor was locked down. He pulled himself up hand over hand, kicking footholds in the mass of hardened clay. If his foot hurt, he didn't let it slow him.

Strikers chattered with excitement on the general push, but nobody had a better target than Meyer did. Another grenade went off, this time a hand-flung electric. It wasn't anywhere close to where Meyer expected the Spooks to be. She waited for her partner to cue her, working to control her breathing.

Nessman stood, balancing on the slippery trunk and six feet higher than before. "Vector, mark," he said, using the Heavy Weapons channel that only the two of them shared.

A vertical red line appeared on Meyer's faceshield display. It was about ten degrees left of where the gun pointed. She pivoted, bringing the sight pipper into line with the vector her partner transmitted. She was still aiming into the long pile of debris.

"Three Spooks," Nessman reported. "Four—"

A pair of pale saffron laser pulses stabbed for him. One turned a dead limb into a puff of smoke and splinters. The other hit Nessman's helmet with a flash and a crack like heartbreak.

Meyer squeezed the trigger. The barrier exploded into a fireball flinging detritus in all directions. The point-blank destruction shoved her as her body recovered from the cannon's recoil.

Plasma-scoured pits fogged the face of her visor. The vector line was brilliant against the muted background. Nessman was down.

Meyer realigned the cannon and fired again. Fifty yards downrange a treetrunk as thick as the one she used for a gun rest blew apart. The ends of the log lurched high; the twenty feet closest to the point of impact vanished in iridescent hellfire.

Kalendru—she couldn't tell how many, didn't care—had been just the other side of the log. The blast knocked them flat, but she saw movement. Meyer fired a third round along the channel she'd blown through the knotted wasteland, then a fourth on top of it.

Dead wood—dry, shattered, and heated to temperatures near those of a star's corona—bellowed upward in an inferno. Everything in front of Meyer was aflame. The tree on which the plasma cannon rested was beginning to smoke from the nearby blaze. Meyer's suit protected her from the heat.

She lowered the weapon's butt to the ground on her side of the log and staggered around the roots to find her partner or his body. From training she kept her stinger ready, but she didn't expect to need it.

Spooks didn't wear body armor. Meyer didn't think even she in a hard suit would have survived the fires of Gehenna she'd ignited to engulf these attackers.



"Watch this bastard," Abbado warned. He held the prisoner's right elbow; Methie held the left. Now that they'd dragged the grenade-stunned Spook all the way to Major Farrell near the ship, Abbado wished he'd brought Flea instead of leaving him with Horgen and the rest of the squad. "He bites."

The sergeant was barechested. His bloody tunic was draped over the Kalender's head for a makeshift hood.

Colonists crowded toward the command group with a rising murmur. It struck Abbado that in all likelihood no civilian on Bezant had ever seen a living Spook. "Give us some room, please!" said Top Daye.

Of course under normal circumstances, strikers didn't see living Spooks for very long either.

"Bites?" said Farrell. "Is he wounded?"

"Just knocked silly by a grenade," Abbado said. "I grabbed him and he bit the shit out of me. I, ah . . . I thought he might be rabid or something and the docs could . . ."

His wrist throbbed and was noticeably swollen. The Kalender's teeth, though delicate and smaller than a human's, were hell for sharp. The wound still oozed blood.