Before reaching that point, she had to go over the top of the ridgeline: always a risky moment. But I’m bulletproof. Gotta be. And besides, the best defense is a strong offense.
She snaked over the top of the ridge, was pleased to discover no one was shooting at her, and started angling down her side of the gorge, the one that led farther up into Gunung Klabang’s northern foothills. She could see the approaching insurgents being bunched together by the narrowing gap between the slopes. Behind them, the Hkh’Rkh—understanding that if they didn’t press the pursuit, the humans would escape up and over the slopes—steamrolled their way through the undergrowth. One more went down, but the rest kept coming. And behind, there was a rapid, irregular rustling in the undergrowth: one or more Arat Kur in combat suits, maintaining their typical serpentine. She looked for the inevitable remote units that hovered around them, saw about three of the flying pancakes and one larger aerial unit, possibly carrying a weapon. Arat Kur usually worked in pairs, but there was no sign of a second one or its remote units. Possibly it had been an earlier casualty. She continued to side-run down the slope.
Two more of the Indonesian irregulars had been hit—which, given the power of the Hkh’Rkh weapons, usually meant killed. However, one was still alive and crawling away through the weeds. His movement attracted the attention of one of the enemy skirmishers. Without breaking its stride, the Hkh’Rkh swerved in that direction, took a longer, higher leap, and landed with the calar talon of his foot striking down into the middle of the human’s back. The man—or, as Opal saw when his face jerked up momentarily, the boy—stiffened, then went limp.
Opal’s brow grew hot and then cold. She checked the range in the scope: ninety-two meters. She nuzzled into the stock. She had wanted to close a little more, but screw it. For you, kid, she thought, and squeezed off two rounds.
The Hkh’Rkh stopped in the middle of his next stride, looked down as if trying to see the eight-millimeter hole where a tungsten-cored round had gone in, and then fell backwards, gargle-yowling and holding the spurting maroon crater that had erupted at the base of his long neck. Hkh’Rkh weapons—including the tribarrel—ripped into the tree that had been Opal’s cover.
But as soon as she had squeezed the trigger the second time, Opal had launched into a forward roll. Two somersaults later, she was eight meters farther down the slope: bruised, but the enemy counterfire was passing safely overhead. Half the Hkh’Rkh line, smelling a box ambush, wheeled to charge her old position, firing as they came, still looking higher up the slope.
Should’ve checked your thermal scopes first, suckers. She let them close to within sixty meters, set the selector switch to three-round bursts, and started sprinting towards them, staying low, firing at any movement she saw in her front ninety-degree arc.
At first the Hkh’Rkh obviously had no idea where the fire was coming from. With Opal’s low posture and rapid approach through the dense foliage, they couldn’t track the muzzle flashes and simply would not have believed that a single human was countercharging straight into the middle of their skirmish line. The three skirmishers in the center had gone down before the rest realized what was happening, stopped, dropped into their own crouches and started lining her up—by which point she was only twenty meters from their line. She targeted the one straight ahead of her without slowing. She snapped off two bursts—the second for insurance—and ran past his thrashing body just as the other Hkh’Rkh started opening up.
And had themselves in a crossfire. With the center of their line gone, and Opal between their flanks, the ends of their line started pouring largely blind fire through empty space and into each other. Opal went low, looked for some solid cover as tattered foliage started raining down on her, saw a pair of parallel downed trees a few meters away. She raised her weapon into the hailstorm overhead, fired a few rounds. She waited for the sustained thunder of the magazine-emptying responses to end abruptly, then kicked up from the soggy ground into a two-stepped sprint and then a long dive, which landed her between the two tree trunks as the air livened with a renewed torrent of projectiles.
As if in response, the opposite slope seemed to explode. Along the full length of the Hkh’Rkh column, from the now half-rotated skirmish line all the way back to the Arat Kur and overwatch sharpshooters, a sudden blast of flame and smoke jetted down from eight meters up the opposite ridgeline. Stretching a hundred meters back beyond the entrance into the dead-end ravine, the long line of explosions echoed quickly off other slope, sounding like two roars in fast sequence. However, even that double-blast didn’t drown out the vicious whine that filled the air around Opal, shredding leaves, pulping and spattering wood fragments from the tree trunks to either side and snatching the helmet off her head into the brush behind. Directional mines—fitted with flechettes?
Opal’s speculation was drowned out by eager shouts in bahasa; the “fleeing” insurgents had reversed direction and were charging back into the kill zone they had prepared. Well back from the entry to the ravine, the Arat Kur remotes were orbiting in their automated distress pattern. Scratch one Roach. A number of the Hkh’Rkh, still standing, wheeled unsteadily toward the charging insurgents. Most of their armor seeped dark red in multiple places as they trained their weapons on the approaching farmers and truck drivers.
From the far slope, Opal heard the distinct crack of a weapon like hers: an eight-millimeter CoBro liquimix assault rifle, set on high velocity. One of the Hkh’Rkh went down. Another crack: another Hkh’Rkh dropped out of sight. Then at least three more rifles—caseless, from the sound of them—joined in, the weaker weapons double- and triple-tapping every target they engaged. Opal stayed low and used the moment to think. With a rebel victory almost in hand, what might still go wrong? What might have been overlooked? It had been a sound box ambush, made devastating by her unexpected contribution. Everything was probably accounted for—
Except for a second Arat Kur. What if the second half of the invariably paired Arat Kur hadn’t been a casualty? And what if he hadn’t been on the ground but waiting, watching, from one of their airborne sleds?
Opal stuck her head up—and heard, rather than saw, the answer to her question: the high, thin whine of downsized turbofans were just barely audible, if one listened carefully between the rolling, firecracker sputtering of small arms. But where—?
Of course, from behind the Indonesians. On the opposite side of the gorge, a broad disk was already sweeping down the slope toward the rear of the ambush line that had triggered the claymores and was now busily picking off the Hkh’Rkh survivors. Damn: they didn’t expect the Arat Kur sled, couldn’t hear it, wouldn’t see it. And there was no time to do anything except—
Opal stood, heard bullets close around her. She hit the magazine release for her rifle’s underslung launch tube: the columnar magazine fell out, sprinkling twenty-five-millimeter rocket-assisted projectiles at her feet.
A bullet—whose, she could not tell—cut through her right trouser leg.
She pulled an antivehicle RAP off her web-gear, inserted it in place of the magazine, slapped the cover up. Locked and loaded.
Wood chips sprayed up past her eye. Someone was coming awful close. But no time for cover.
She sighted the weapon, centered the scope on the approaching disk, saw the combat-suited Arat Kur it carried, like a cubist roach riding bareback on a pie-plate. The laser range finger indicated seventy-six meters. She changed the integral laser to target designation mode, activated the warhead’s self-guidance package, snapped on the arming range override, saw the red “0” illuminate, and squeezed the trigger.