Cormac hit the ground and rolled, then came up onto his knees swearing and really wishing he'd brought the first aid kit too. But he had no time for pain now. He carefully hung the tool bag, with the two bombs inside, from his left shoulder, then rested the rifle across his left forearm, tucked close to his body, and set off along the root-laden ground between the dying skarches, giving himself plenty of cover but staying parallel with his ATV. Taking into account the amount of time it took him to get from the vehicle, he began silently counting down from four-hundred-and-fifty. In a moment he was gasping, and the vehicle was pulling ahead of him. A sight to one side gave him pause: a wrecked mosquito autogun, a scattering of bloody field dressings and a single corpse in ripped-up chameleoncloth fatigues. This proved, along with earlier mention of another battalion coming in, that there was more going on out here than evidenced by the rumours Yallow had heard.
The ATV was still in sight…. three hundred, two hundred and ninety-nine…
Then he heard the whine of a distant motor, the crashing and bumping of something heavy moving fast through the rough woodland. Then, at two hundred, it came into sight ahead. Cormac crouched behind a deadfall of skarches that had obviously fallen long before the Prador arrived to trash this world, and watched. Something shrieked and he dropped lower.
Rail-gun? A fucking rail-gun?
Chunks of metal flew from the vehicle he had occupied. It shuddered, but just kept on rolling. Pure luck that nothing had struck under the passenger seat, for the vehicle cabin looked like a pepperpot. The other ATV slowed. A second fusillade smashed into his own ATV, but still no detonation and still it kept on rolling. The other turned abruptly and stopped. His own vehicle rolled on and crashed into its side, its wheels still turning, then abruptly something inside it died and it shuddered to stillness.
Armed with pulse-rifles, three troops piled out. Cormac noted only the driver remaining in the other vehicle, so he assumed Carl and one other were still back at their original position. They showed no wariness of anyone occupying Cormac's ATV—why should they, anyone inside would have been paste. One of them climbed up and, after a bit of a struggle, pulled open the door, which just fell off its hinges to the ground.
…seventy, sixty-nine…
Damn, he was a minute out.
The man dropped back down to the ground and turned to his fellows. He said something, then waved a hand towards the surrounding woodland.
Shit.
Light glared inside the wrecked cab and then that cab just disappeared with a gravelly crump. Things hissed through the surrounding skarches, dropping thick, dry leaves and tearing off fibrous chunks in dusty explosions. A cloud of oily smoke occluded view, a red fire burning at its heart, and someone was screaming. Cormac guessed his countdown had been too slow. He stepped out from cover, gazed for a moment at a spanner imbedded in the deadfall he had been hiding behind, then jogged towards the mess. The increasing heat of the fire started shoving the smoke higher, but there was no sign of the three troops. He slowed to a walk, carefully surveilling his surroundings. Then he saw the inward face of a skarch coated with bits of flesh and tatters of clothing, and nearby a boot lying smoking like some cartoon depiction of the results of an explosion, only this one still had a foot inside. He trod on offal, warm under his bare feet and guessed only a meticulous search would find all the remains.
The screaming dropped to an agonised gasping. It was coming from the cab of the other ATV, which was now burning too. Cormac pointed his twinned weapon at where the driver should be and fired. A double line of pulse-fire punctuated the air to that cab, punched holes through metal and sprayed burning debris all about, and the groaning abruptly ceased. Cormac quickly moved on, breaking into a trot.
Four bad guys down, but Carl and the other one, about a quarter of a mile ahead of him, had now been thoroughly forewarned. Cormac kept moving at a steady jog, following tracks made by their ATV. He hit an upslope through dead bushes of black convoluted twigs, brittle and crushed flat. Amidst these, knowing he was now close, he slowed, then got down on his belly and crawled. Finally reaching the head of the slope he could see down through the skarches to the ruin of a small composite dome house, but there was no sign of anyone nearby. Now, he should slowly and carefully work his way down there, crawling like this, but really, he didn't feel physically capable of doing that. He took one of the two explosives out of the tool bag, reset its timer to ten minutes, hit the button and shoved it into the bushes ahead of him, then crawled backwards until the ruin was once again out of sight. Standing up he ran to his left where the rise he was on sloped down again to the level of the ruin. It was counterintuitive, since the best tactical position would be to come down from higher ground to the right.
Running, he damned the dry skarch debris on the ground since it was near impossible to run on them without making a noise. Shortly he reached the level of the ruin, but it was not yet visible through the trees. He squatted down beside a multiple skarch stump coated in fungus like spilt custard and waited
The bomb went off with a satisfying flash and glaring explosion, with the added benefit that shortly afterwards a number of skarches started to fall. Cormac ran towards the ruin, using what cover he could and frequently altering his course. No sign of anyone. Shortly he arrived at the curved wall of the ruin and squatted down. His best course in any other circumstances would have been to toss his remaining explosive into the building, but if the CTD was in there such an action stood a chance of breaking the antimatter flask. What now? It belatedly occurred to him that Carl and his companion might have moved away from this building and now had it in their sights, knowing it would be the focus of anyone coming here—that's what he would have done in their position. He wasn't thinking straight. He should have waited out there, perhaps for hours, until one of them put in an appearance. Then again, he was in no condition to wait any length of time.
Carefully he surveyed his surroundings trying to work out where they might have hidden themselves. Two locations seemed probable: the bushes on the slope to the right where he had detonated the bomb, and an area to his left where a skarch had fallen and caught between two others—plenty of cover there. He chose the fallen skarch, since if they had been in the bushes they would probably have retreated from the smoke spreading from where a fire still burned. He selected a skarch with a trunk a yard thick in a straight line to that location, took a couple of paces to his left and ran for it.
Immediately pulse-gun fire stabbed across the intervening space, past him to the right and impacting the ruin wall. He had just moved in time—whoever was shooting at him must have had him targeted. He fired back as he ran, multiple shots exploding along the length of that fallen trunk, shearing off leaves and blowing up dusty clouds of burning fibrous pulp. The firing at him ceased momentarily, giving him just enough time to get to cover behind his selected skarch, then pulse-gun hits thrummed against the other side of the tree, flinging everywhere debris that looked like chunks of frayed rope and generating a cloud of dust and smoke, then they again ceased.
"It seems you are what we thought you were," Carl called.
Cormac did not want to bother replying, but he needed to know where both Carl and that CTD were; he was certain Carl's voice had not issued from nearby that fallen skarch.
"Wrong, Carl," he replied. "I'm just a grunt, which probably tells you something about the abilities of Samara and her crew." He paused deliberately for a moment. "Or rather, it tells you something about the abilities they used to have."