Deathdealer swung onto the western approach, pushing as well as dragging tangled masses of concertina wire. The tank shook herself like a whore waggling a come-on. A touch of her skirts pulverized half a meter of bridge abutment.
"—civvie, no threat. Over."
As Albers accelerated forward, Deathdealer's stern rebounded from the concrete and slapped the three-axled truck that had been waiting to cross the bridge. The lighter vehicle danced away from the impact with the startled delicacy of a horse shying. Ten meters from the pavement, the crumpled wreckage burst into flame.
"All Tootsie elements," Ranson relayed. "Vehicles at the west approach are no threat, repeat, no threat. Six out."
Warmonger blasted through a cloud of powdered concrete as Willens pulled them clear of the bridge. Blue One fired his tribarrel into the houses to the right. There was no sign of hostile activity or even occupation. A ball of wire still dragged twenty meters behind the tank, raising a pall of dust.
One of the tires of the overturned bus revolved lazily. The vehicle lay on both its doors. Figures were climbing out of the windows. They flattened as Warmonger swept by behind the tank.
Stolley's tribarrel snapped over the civilians as he fired across the river, trying to nail the Consie riflemen from this better angle. Rock flashed and gouted, but the muzzleflashes bloomed again.
A trooper screamed on the unit push.
Junebug Ranson's eyes were glazed. Her mouth was open.
Ozone and matrix residues from her tribarrel flayed her throat as she fired into the village, shattering walls and roofslates.
It was very beautiful in the hologram of her mind.
Five-year-old Dickie Suilin screamed, "Suzi!" as his older sister squeezed his nostrils shut and clapped her other hand over his mouth. The flames arcing over the skirts of Flamethrower roared their laughter.
He could breathe after all. A mask of some sort had extended from the earpieces of the commo helmet as soon as the inferno waved an arm of blazing diesel fuel to greet the combat car plunging toward it. Suilin could breathe, and he could see again when overload reset his visor from thermal display to optical.
Though there wasn't much to see except flames curling around black steel skeletons, the chassis of trucks whose flammable portions were already part of the red/orange/yellow/white billows.
Even steel burned when Suilin raked it with his tribarrel. Faces bloomed into smears of vapor and calcined bones. . . .
Blue Two grunted head-on down the road, spewing a wake of blazing debris to either side. Cooter's driver followed, holding Flamethrower at a forty-five degree angle along the edge of the cut.
The slant threw the men in the fighting compartment toward the fire their vehicle was skirting. Gale clung to the starboard coaming. Cooter must have locked his tribarrel in place, because he was frozen like a statue of Effort on its grips.
And Dick Suilin, after a hellish moment of feeling his torso swing out and down toward the bellowing flames, braced his feet against the inner face of the armor and grabbed Cooter by the waist. If the big lieutenant minded, they could discuss it later.
Something as soft-featured and black as a tar statue reached out of the flames and gripped the coaming to either side of Suilin's tribarrel. The only parts of the figure that weren't black were the teeth and the great red cracks writhing in what had been the skin of both arms. The thing fell away without trying to speak.
Only a shadow. Only a sport thrown by the flames.
"Help me, Suzi," the reporter whispered. "Help me, Suzi."
Blue Two sucked fire along with it for an instant as the tank cleared the ambush site. Then the return flow, cool sweet air, pistoned Hell back into its proper region and washed Suilin in its freedom as well.
This car was Flamethrower. For the first time, Suilin realized how black was the humor with which the Slammers named their vehicles.
The driver brought them level with a violence that banged the skirts on the roadway. Suilin grunted. He reached for the grips of his tribarrel, obeying an instinct to hang onto something after he lost his excuse to hold Cooter.
Powerguns punctuated the night with flashes so intense they remained for seconds as streaks across the reporter's retinas. His mind tried desperately to process the high-pitched chatter from the commo helmet—a mixture of orders, warnings and shouted exclamations.
It was all meaningless garbage; and it was all terrifying.
The downslope to the left of the roadway was striped orange by the firelight and leaping with shadows thrown from outcrops anchored too firmly in the fabric of the planet to be uprooted when the Padma River flooded. Muzzleflashes pulsed there, shockingly close.
A bottle-shaped yellow glow swelled and shrank as the gunman triggered his burst. The gun wasn't firing tracers, but the corner of Suilin's eyes caught a flicker as glowing metal snapped from the muzzle.