Panchin shot at a supply truck and for once hit his target. Greasy flames enveloped the crates stacked on the bed. Men jumped off the other side of the vehicle and ran unharmed into the night.
Panchin's iridium barrels glowed so brightly that his faceshield had to gray out their glare. The long burst Sergeant Jonas fired to destroy the tank had jammed his tribarrel. He tilted his weapon up to chip with a knifeblade at the matrix material gumming his ejection port.
Cortezar swung Hula Girl hard left on the track within the outer ring of vehicles. Half a dozen rebel soldiers squatted behind their APC and the sandbag wall they'd started for a sleeping bunker. They fired at Hula Girl with automatic rifles. Panchin slewed his gun toward them. A bullet whanged Jonas' weapon. The impact spun the tribarrel on its pintle. Like a white-hot baseball bat, the lower muzzle knocked the sergeant down.
A second artillery vehicle blew up. This time at least four rounds detonated simultaneously. The blast threw Hula Girl ten meters sideways into a heavy tractor with an earthmoving blade. The combat car rotated a half turn and stalled because Cortezar had dropped the controls when her helmet bounced off the side of her compartment.
Panchin screamed in fear and clamped his trigger. There was a sound like water dropped into an ocean of hot grease, and the center of his faceshield became a shadow with cyan edges. The protective spot collapsed to show the ruin of an air-cushion vehicle, still glowing but no longer so bright that it could etch retinas.
"Drive!" Sergeant Jonas said. "Drive!"
Hula Girl shuddered, rose minusculy, and turned to lurch off the northern edge of the knoll between a pair of Sulewesan APCs. One burned sluggishly; the other was as still as a grave though apparently undamaged.
More Brazilian rockets exploded. Hula Girl pogoed twice even though this time high ground shielded them from the shockwave. Debris from a previous explosion must have set this one off because Frosty wasn't shooting and Panchin's tribarrel had jammed.
Hula Girl tore through the night. Tracers arched across the sky, but the rebel laager was out of direct sight. There was a risk that the car might hit a large boulder, but Cortezar was driving with a touch as deft as a brain surgeon's.
Panchin knelt with his hands clasped over the chestplate of his armor. He knew he ought to clear his tribarrel, but his whole body was shaking.
Ericssen worked on Sergeant Jonas' forearm. "It's just a bruise!" the sergeant said. His voice was tight with pain.
"So the medics at Scepter Base take the splint off," Ericssen said equably. "Where's the harm in that? Now, you just relax until the blue tab—" the analgesic injector built into Slammers body armor, beside the red tab which injected stimulant "—kicks in."
The night behind them belched yellow again. The shockwave was a dull thump instead of a world-devouring roar when it reached Hula Girl several seconds later.
"I never thought it'd work," Panchin whispered.
"Hey snake?" Ericssen said. "You did good to nail that second calliope before it waxed us. I didn't even see it till you lit the spics up."
"I'm glad," Panchin said. He closed his eyes, then opened them again very quickly. He'd throw up if he closed them.
"Blood and martyrs!" Cortezar said. "I don't get it. We were shaking hands with those bastards and we didn't even know they were the other side. And them too! It don't make sense that if everybody's the same they're all trying to kill each other."
The overhead net sagged. The bullet-damaged stake had bent and might break at any moment.
"Maybe in some universe there's got to be a difference before people kill each other," Panchin said to his clasped hands. "That's never been a requirement in the universe humans live in, though."
Code-Name Feirefitz
"LORD, WE GOT ONE!" cried the trooper whose detector wand pointed toward the table that held the small altar. "That's a powergun for sure, Captain, nothing else'd read so much iridium!"
The three other khaki-clad soldiers in the room with Captain Esa Mboya tensed and cleared guns they had not expected to need. The villagers of Ain Chelia knew that to be found with a weapon meant death. The ones who were willing to face that were in the Bordj, waiting with their households and their guns for the Slammers to rip them out. Waiting to die fighting.
The houses of Ain Chelia were decorated externally by screens and colored tiles; but the tiles were set in concrete walls and the screens themselves were cast concrete. Narrow cul-de-sacs lined by blank, gated courtyard walls tied the residential areas of the village into knots of strongpoints. The rebels had elected to make their stand outside Ain Chelia proper only because the fortress they had cut into the walls of the open pit mine was an even tougher objective.