A Molt wearing a Federation sash stepped out of the blockhouse. "Halt!" he ordered in Trade English. "Who are you?"
Adrien shot the alien in the head. "C'mon, boys!" he cried. "They're just Molts!"
The wall gun mounted at one of the loopholes fired a 1-kg explosive shell into Adrien's chest. Ricimer saw his brother's body hurled back in a red blast. Adrien's helmet and bits of his shattered breastplate gleamed in the flash of the second gun, which fired from the other side of the door. The round hit a Dalriadan, blowing off both legs and lifting his armored torso several meters in the air.
Guillermo knelt and lifted Piet Ricimer in a fireman's carry. The Molt had discarded his weapons to free both arms.
Rifle bullets pecked craters in the surface of the blockhouse. A Venerian jumped into the cab of the other truck. A shell struck the engine compartment and blew blazing kerosene across the men falling back in confusion. The cannons' muzzle flashes were yellow-orange, brighter than those of the bursting charges.
Guillermo jogged down the dusty street. Only the wall guns were firing. A crewman passed them, screaming, "Jesusjesusjesus!" Ricimer saw the man was missing his right arm.
That was the last thing he noticed before night stooped down on him with yellow pinions.
38
Umber
Flame burped over the roofs of the darkened city. The light was gone before Gregg could jerk his head around to watch it directly. The sound which came a moment later was hollow, choong rather than a bang.
"What was that, sir?" Dole called from the control room. "Was it a bomb?"
A post-mounted tannoy and omnidirectional microphone connected the unprotected gun deck on the fort's roof with the thick-walled citadel set off in a corner below. The latter had room for only the battery controls and one person, the fort's human officer.
The emergency generator had fired up without hesitation when external power failed after the explosion. It was a ceramic diesel of Venerian manufacture. Trade would have been a lot simpler.
Gregg stared at Umber City. The center of the community was a rose and magenta glow, though the flames were too low to be seen above the buildings on the southern side of town. "No," he said.
He realized that his bosun couldn't hear him. He turned and called loudly toward the microphone array, "No, it was probably a fuel tank rupturing in the heat. Don't bother us with questions, Mr. Dole."
"Watch it! Watch it!" Stampfer cried.
A cutting bar's note rose to a high scream as the gun mount twisted enough to free the sides of the blade. Gregg pressed himself against the roof's chest-high windscreen. The light metal bonged from the pressure.
A Dalriadan tugged his cutting bar hard to free it and jumped clear. A tag of metal fractured. The heavy plasma cannon sagged slowly toward the deck, restrained but not supported by the remaining mount.
"There we are!" the crewman said triumphantly. "Let 'em try to use that one as we take off."
"One down," Stampfer said, "three to go. Get at it."
He looked over to Gregg. "We're not equipped for this, sir," he added apologetically. "It's a job for a machine shop, not cutting bars."
"Do what you can," Gregg said. "Likely that the Feds'll have other things on their minds by the time we lift."
"I wish they'd tell us what was going on," one of the Dalriadans said wistfully.
"They've got their own duties!" Gregg blazed. "So do you! Get to it!"
He turned, more to hide his embarrassment at overreacting than to look at the city. He wished somebody'd tell him what was going on too. The sophisticated handheld radios Ricimer had bought for the expedition couldn't listen in on calls on the net that weren't directed to them.
When the Dalriada fired its main battery and the target went up in a gigantic secondary explosion, Gregg and his outlying squad spent nearly a minute convinced there'd been a catastrophe. Dulcie had finally responded to Gregg's call, but he didn't know anything about what Piet and the landing party were doing either.
Stampfer, the two crewmen on deck with him, and John changed batteries in their cutting bars and sawed at a mount of another 20-cm cannon. Gregg had expected to disable the guns as he left the fort by blasting the control room. Though the fort did have director control, the individual cannon each had a mechanical triggering system that was too simple and sturdy to be easily destroyed.
That meant they had to cut the gun mounts-properly a third-echelon job, as Stampfer said. But you did what you had to do.
Gunfire thumped from the east end of town. Gregg squinted in an attempt to see what was happening-nothing at this distance, not even the flicker of muzzle flashes.
He glanced back at his men. They hadn't heard the shooting over the howl of their bars, and they probably wouldn't have understood the significance anyway.
The weapons firing were bigger than handheld rifles. The expedition hadn't brought any projectile weapons that big.
A car with a rectangular central headlight sped toward the fort from the west end of town. The vehicle wasn't following a road. It jounced wildly and occasionally slewed in deep sand.
"Watch it!" Gregg cried. "We've got company. Dole, Gallois, can you hear me?"
"Yessir-ir," crackled the tannoy. One Dalriadan guarded the prisoners in the ready room, while Dole kept track of distant threats in the control room. All they needed for this to become an epic disaster was for the Earth Convoy to arrive while the raid was going on. .
"Don't shoot!" he added. "They may be our people."
They might be a party of whirling dervishes from the Moon, for all he knew. Why the hell didn't anybody communicate?
"Stampfer!" he said. "Cut away this fucking shield for me, will you?"
He kicked the windscreen; it flexed and rang. "It won't stop spit, but I can't shoot through it with a laser."
Stampfer triggered his bar and swept it through the screen in a parabola, taking a deep scallop out of the thin metal. The windscreen depended on integrity and a rolled rim for stiffening. The edges of the cut flapped inward, shivering like distant thunder.
The car swung to a halt beside the door on the fort's north side. It was an open vehicle with three people aboard, all of them human. They were armed.
"Hold it!" Gregg called, aiming the flashgun. The flat roof was three meters above the ground.
"You idiots!" screamed the woman who jumped from the left side of the car. "We're under attack! Are you blind?"
She waved a pistol in Gregg's direction.
"Drop your guns!" Gregg ordered. "Now!"
His visor was down, but the light outside the fort was good enough that he could see the woman's expression change from anger to open-eyed amazement.
The two men climbing from the other side of the car put their hands in the air. The woman fired at Gregg.
He didn't know where the bullet went. It didn't hit him. He put a bolt from his flashgun into the fuel tank of the car. The tank must have been nearly empty, a good mix of air and hydrocarbons, because it went off like a bomb instead of merely bursting in a slow gush of flame.
The shock threw the woman against the fort's wall and straightened Gregg as he groped for a reload. She was screaming. Gregg raised his visor and tried to locate the others. Somebody was running back toward Umber City. He couldn't see the remaining Fed; he was probably in the ring of burning diesel.
A bullet whanged through the north and south sides of the windscreen but managed to miss everything else. The shooter was in one of the houses, but the twinkling muzzle flash didn't give Gregg a good target.
He keyed the radio. "Gregg to Ricimer!" he shouted. "We're under attack. What is your status? Over!"