Beta-Three stared at him. “Respected Intendant, what do we—?”
“Rifles of triad one and two; suppress the revetment. Rifles of triad three; engage the — the creatures. Shotgunners: charge to thirty meters range and engage the creatures with single slug rounds. Full automatic. Now!”
Pehthrum’s clones rose up from the tall, spiky thickets in which they had been hiding, started firing at the revetment. But that withering fusillade did not generate the multidirectional spray of wood that the Intendant had been expecting. So: an earthen redoubt behind it. Clever.
The two riflemen firing at the tall creatures were passable marksmen, but only passable: most of their hits did more to enrage the long-legged behemoths than incapacitate them. Concentrating most of their fire on the largest specimen, they did inflict some wounds that looked mortal, but in the sense that they would kill in minutes or hours, not before the infuriated animal completed its charge.
And still the riflemen of triads one and two were dutifully and futilely peppering away at the revetment. By the Progenitors’ scrofulous testicles, have these accursed clones no greater sense than this? “All rifles on the creatures; shotguns hold your ground and fire, point blank!”
As his men started to follow these orders and the first of the charging quadrupeds stumbled under the more intense fire, Pehthrum, hanging back, took the Jufeng dustmix rifle off safety, snapped over the trigger selector so that it would fire the underslung launch tube, and selected a conventional high-explosive grenade from the rotary cassette just in front of the trigger guard. He shouldered the weapon, braced it by wrapping its sling around his arm, raised the barrel slightly in the direction of the revetment — and noticed a small, color-changing dot on his sleeve, which vanished in the same instant he saw it. A laser designator? Dung and submission! “Get down!” he tried to scream over the clones’ chattering rifles and shotguns. “Concentrate your fire on—!”
* * *
Caine nodded to Thnessfiirm. “Fire the first five MAPHs.”
Thnessfiirm bobbed her compliance and tapped a thick control rod with several of her rings.
From a clearing thirty meters behind the revetment, angry sibilant hisses up-dopplered and materialized in the form of miniature antipersonnel heat-seekers, each only fifteen millimeters in diameter. They sped through the dwindling melee between the water-striders and weasel-monsters, bypassed the shotgun and rifle wielding clones that had closed with the one charging strider, and disappeared, fire-tailed, into the bodies of the rearmost enemy troops. The one who had held the long weapon was hit first. His torso exploded from inside, clumps of flesh and bone bursting outward as the lower half of his body swayed, and then toppled. Before it hit the river’s silty shore, three of the riflemen who had remained behind to provide a base of fire were also hit, two with similar results. The third shrieked as his left arm was blown off at the shoulder.
Riordan saw this and, peripherally, the slow fall of the much-mauled water-strider. He moved the laser designator from one clone to the next, starting with the rearmost and moving forward. “Launch the next three,” he ordered Thnessfiirm.
But the fairly neat arrangement of targets was rapidly becoming chaotic. Some of the water-striders were hooting and stomping at the attackers in what seemed to be threat displays. Several of the clones swerved away from the huge creatures, two of whom, finding themselves only twenty meters from the revetment, charged it. Caine quickly cancelled the primary designations for the next flight of MAPHs, painted these two new, rapidly approaching threats, ducked, saw Qwara crouching, watching, aghast at the speed with which the carnage had taken place. He stabbed an arm out to grab her: “Get dow—!”
A jackhammer stutter. The top of Qwara Betul’s head smeared away under a shower of shotgun slugs — just as three of the MAPHs raced over her falling corpse. An eyeblink later, three small, sharp explosions beat a nearby, percussive tattoo. Caine leaned down to look out the observation slit they’d built into the revetment: there wasn’t much left of the two charging clones, and it was difficult to determine where their remains ended and those of the pulped upt’theel began. But the rifleman’s weapon was apparently intact…
Rifle rounds peppered the top of the revetment, the treetops: one of the convector subtaxae tumbled from a frond tree, emitting a sound that was part chirp, part bleat.
Unsymaajh appeared, swinging downward from behind the canopy of the cone-tree that stood at the juncture of the revetment and the fronds that had hidden the water-striders. The big convector’s long arm stretched down to scoop up his fallen taxonmate—
A flurry of fire from back near the river: Unsymaajh seemed to writhe upward in midglide and then collapsed, blood trails marking his descent like dotted lines.
Caine rolled to the other side of the vision slit, ducked back and then out to get a quick look. The four surviving clones had doubled back and discovered their dead commander. One had found the Jufeng, was lowering it; that weapon was probably what had killed Unsymaajh. Of the other two, the one who was armed with a shotgun had put it aside, was inspecting which of the fallen riflemen’s weapons was still serviceable. Caine called to Thnessfiirm, who had retreated into the far corner of the revetment and was shivering as if she had been dropped in ice water. When the traumatized cerdor failed to respond, Riordan scrambled over, gently helped her raise the control rod into their shared field of vision. “Thnessfiirm, I need you to launch two MAPHs. I need you to do it now.”
Thnessfiirm’s head bobbed and weaved erratically, and she was emitting a wheezing buzz, but her rings clacked against the rod with shuddering purpose.
Caine rolled back to the vision slit, aimed the designator, painted the clone with the Jufeng — and ducked back as an improbably loud roar of weapons-fire accompanied a hailstorm of high-velocity rounds that clawed and ripped at the edges of the slit. Now that they’ve spotted me, they are likely to—
Only then did Riordan realize that the gunfire hadn’t merely come from the enemy rifles; that thundering crescendo had been caused by the simultaneously launching Slaasriithi MAPHs.
But not just the two Caine had called for: Thnessfiirm had fired all of them.
A flock of the bright-tailed missiles sped over the bodies of clones and upt’theel and water-striders and streaked to a ruinous convergence upon the wielder of the Jufeng. He disappeared in a set of overlapping explosions that left no trace of him, and very little of his weapon.
But with the miniature antipersonnel heat-seekers gone, the rest of Riordan’s strategy was in ruins. Fatal ruins. Caine turned to Thnessfiirm, about to ask why the cerdor had launched all of them: had she misheard? Had it been a command error? Had she been panicked? But the answer was obvious at first glance: Thnessfiirm was still quaking, still sitting folded into the back corner of the revetment, her own wastes pooling out from beneath her.
Unsymaajh dead, Qwara dead, Thnessfiirm in shock: Riordan crawled to the other end of the revetment, risked a peek around that leaf-shrouded corner.
The three surviving clones were advancing at a trot, weapons at the ready. The water-striders, not under immediate attack, hooted their challenges, stood their ground, but wavered, uncertain what they should do as the soldiers gave them a wide berth.
One chance. And it almost certainly means my death to try: to roll out, grab the Pindad just a few yards away and get back behind the revetment. It’s not much of a plan, but short of running and leaving Thnessfiirm to die and our rear undefended, it’s the only plan I’ve got. Caine gathered his legs under him, felt his overtaxed heart hammering in his chest, heard his own wheezing breath—