A shot winked from one of the houses only a hundred and fifty meters away. The bullet slapped the concrete and ricocheted upward.
Gregg sighted, closed his eyes because he hadn't time to fool with the visor, and squeezed. His bolt cracked through an open window, liberated its energy on an interior wall, and turned somebody's bedroom into a belching inferno.
Nobody answered him on the radio. More Feds were shooting. A bullet that glanced from one of the plasma cannon splashed bits onto Gregg's hand as he reached for his battery satchel. Pity the fort's architect had made sure the big guns couldn't be trained on the city.
Dole knelt beside Gregg, fired, and reloaded. He must have cleaned his rifle of grit while he had time.
"Stampfer," Gregg called without looking behind him. "How long to disable all the guns?"
"Jesus, sir-"
Something moved between buildings. Gregg's snap shot was instinctive. Only when the rattling explosion followed his bolt did he realize that he'd hit another vehicle. This one was loaded with enough ammunition to flatten both the adjacent structures. He blinked as if he could wipe the afterimages of his own shot from the surface of his eyes.
"— at least a fucking hour!"
"Hey!" shouted a Dalriadan. "Hey, that Molt of ours just jumped off the roof and run away!"
"So let him go," Gregg snarled. "Dole, get back to the Halys. Don't light her up, I don't want to lose the radio-"
It seemed he'd already lost the fucking radio, so far as everybody in the main party was concerned.
"— but be ready to go. Leave me your rifle! Stampfer, can that gun you cut loose still fire?"
"You bet!"
"Get down in the control room. Send your men off with Dole, they're no good now. Don't worry about the prisoners, the tape'll hold long enough. Move, everybody!"
Dole fired again toward the city. "Sir," he said, "I don't want to leave-"
A bullet struck the center of Gregg's breastplate. His chest went numb with the whack! The inside of both arms burned as though they'd been scraped with a saw blade.
"Get the fuck out, you whoreson!" Gregg screamed as he lurched to his feet. He fired into the night, without a conscious target. A figure flung its rifle away and fell from a second-story window. It was a Molt. It lay on the ground, its Federation trappings burning brightly enough to illuminate the body.
Everyone else had left the roof. Gregg ducked below the level of the windscreen, no protection but it blocked his opponents' view.
The dismounted plasma cannon was already pointed generally to the north. Gregg put his shoulder against the barrel and tried to slew it more nearly in line with the houses from which the rifle fire came. The gun wouldn't move. His boots slipped on the deck.
"Dalriada to Gregg!" the radio flopping against his side shrilled. The voice might have been Dulcie's, though it was an octave higher than Gregg had heard before from Dulcie's throat. "For God's sake save yourself! Mr. Ricimer's dead and-"
Two plasma cannon blasted from the center of town, backlighting rooftops like a strobe light. Even as the second blast rang out, thruster exhaust blanketed the RF spectrum.
Gregg's radio roared with static. He prodded at it with a finger, trying to find the power switch. The static pulsed as he switched bands uselessly instead. He smashed the unit with the edge of his hand, using his torso armor as the anvil to his rage. Fragments of thermoplastic and electronic components prickled his skin.
The Dalriada rose on a huge billow of plasma, shaking the world. A moment later, the Peaches followed, dancing like lint above an air vent because of the larger vessel's exhaust.
Gregg screamed in fury, backed a step, and kicked the twisted gun mount with his bootheel. Metal creaked. He pushed again at the barrel, planting his hands as close to the muzzle as he could to maximize his leverage. The massive weapon slid a millimeter, then jounced across the decking for half a meter before it locked up again. The edge of the muzzle scored a bright line in the concrete.
Gregg jumped into the stairway to the ready room and hunched there. "Go ahead, Stampfer!" he shouted. He didn't have time to close the armored door above him. He'd seen figures scuttling toward the fort out of the corner of his eye. "Shoot! Shoo-"
The plasma cannon fired. The bolt, the residue of a directed thermonuclear explosion, struck the deck at a flat angle and sprayed out over a 120° arc. The portion of windscreen in the blast's path vaporized; the shockwave blew the rest of it off the fort's roof, along with everything else smaller than the other cannon. The rifle and bandolier Dole left according to orders were gone forever.
Scattered backflare seared Gregg's hands even though he huddled below roof level and clasped them against his chest. The cannon recoiled hard, shearing the remaining mount and dumping the weapon itself over the lip of the building.
Stampfer stumbled out of the control citadel. He mouthed words, but Gregg couldn't hear them. Gregg waved the gunner ahead and climbed after him to the blast-scarred roof.
The line of thirty houses facing the fort was on fire, every one of them. Some were built of concrete, but the surge of ions had ignited their interiors as surely as those of houses built of less refractory materials.
For a moment Gregg thought he was still being shot at. No bullets sparked or whined around him. Rifle ammunition was cooking off in the blaze.
There were still three mounted plasma cannon. Gregg stared at them transfixed. He could hold the fort himself while the Halys lifted the rest of his party to safety.
Stampfer seized Gregg by the hand and rotated him so that they were face-to-face. The Dalriadan patted the nearest plasma cannon with his free hand.
"C'mon!" he said, speaking with exaggerated lip movements to make himself more comprehensible to his half-deafened commander. "These're fucked good by the backblast. The training gear's welded. Let's get out while we can!"
Stampfer jumped off the south side of the deck, keeping the fort's bulk between him and the burning city.
Gregg followed. When he threw his arms out to balance him, pain lancing across his pectoral muscles stopped the motion. He fell on his face and had to shuffle his knees forward to rise.
He began running, ten paces behind Stampfer. The vessel's side hatch was open, and the glow of her idling thrusters was a beacon to safety.
39
Sunrise
Dole waited poised at the controls while a gust of unusual violence even for Sunrise channeled between the hulls of the Dalriada and that of the metal-built ship lying parallel to her. The wind settled to 15 or 20 kph.
"There!" the Halys' bosun said as he shut the thrusters down with a flourish. "That's greasing her in!"
"I'll go see what I can learn about why we were abandoned on Umber that way," said Stephen Gregg in an expressionless voice. He reached for the hatch control.
"Sir?" Dole said, sharply enough to draw Gregg's attention back from its bleak reverie. "Ah-d'ye think you're going to need the flashgun you're carrying?"
Gregg stared at him. "That depends on what I learn," he said evenly.
"Right, right," said Dole as he rose from the console. "So wait for a minute while I get my gear on too, okay?"
Stampfer got up from the attitude controls. He laced his fingers together over his head and stretched them against the normal direction of the joints. "I guess we'll all go, sir," he said toward the bulkhead. "It was all our asses they left to swing in the breeze, wasn't it?"
"Too right," murmured Gallois, already half into his hard suit.