"Do you want me to come?" Alita asked. He shook his head, then tapped his earpiece. "Hector'11 talk me through to where I have to go. You stay with Shari."
"Be careful," she told him. "Those ... those parasites are hard to kill."
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"Believe me, I will."
At last. He could do something.
Dieter lay in the bottom of the crater on his back, his lower body submerged in muddy water as flame lit the sky. He could hear only a distant rumble now through the stuffed-head ringing muffling his ears, though he felt each thumping detonation transmitted through the trembling ground pressed up against his spine. The air in the crater had grown hot enough to sear the lungs if you gulped it down too fast, and a howling, hot wind was blowing away from the harbor, where repeated Hellbore blasts had superheated the atmosphere, creating one hell of a powerful, artificial high-pressure weather cell.
Modern combat, he reflected, was not a place for unprotected human beings, not with six-megaton-per-second firepower, not with weapons that chucked tiny pieces of starstuff at targets unguessably distant.
As he stared up into the zenith, he saw a single sharp, short pop of light, lasting for only an instant but clearly visible against the dark blue of the sky. He saw another . .. then a rippling cascade of ten or twelve more. Within a few seconds, the sty seemed filled with rapidly flickering points of light.
Stunned by Hector's brain-numbing Hellbore barrage, he couldn't at first imagine what he was seeing, what those sparkles and flashes might be. Then it connected. If the Bolo was smashing incoming !б!*! meteors with its primary weapons, there must be a fair amount of dust, droplets of molten iron, sand-sized flecks of debris, and gravel-sized chunks left over. Even vaporized, a one- or two-ton meteor's mass didn't simply vanish, and all of the leftovers would still be heading in the same general direction as the original projectileўdispersing somewhat over a large part of the hemisphere facing themўand they would still be
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traveling with most of the rock's original speed. Those flashes, Dieter thought, must be sand grains and smaller bits of debris hitting the upper atmosphere at high speed, expending their considerable kinetic energy as brilliant, individual flickers of light.
A blue-white lance of dazzling light stabbed down from the zenith, vanishing in a silent flare halfway to the horizon. The rapid-fire flickers continued, interspersed occasionally by bigger, bolder stabs that left distinct trails across the sky. One line of blue fire vanished behind the eastern rim of the crater, somewhere in the general direction of Griffenburg, to the south, followed by a silent flare of light that rose silently above the horizon. Several moments later, he felt the shock through the ground and heard the long, drawn-out rumble of thunder. That one, he thought, must have been an unusually big fragment that had slipped past Hector's barrage. Most of the pieces were burning up when they hit Cloud's upper atmosphere, but a few of the big ones were getting through.
He hoped the Bolo was able to pick out the ones that posed a threat to the harbor area; for the first time in quite a long time, he found that he very much wanted to live.
With rocks falling out of the sky, however, and no place to hide but the crater gouged out by the boulder that had flattened Celeste, it seemed that he wasn't going to have much say in the matter.
Colonel Wal Prescott had no intention of being left out of this fight. As the sky flared purple-white and a rumbling shockwave rocked through the ground, he stood up, clutching the silvery, metallic snake of a clacker tentacle that he had just torn from a downed !"!*! sentry with his one good hand.
"How many soldiers do we have here?" he screamed,
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his voice thin against the howling backdrop of thunder, but the meaning plain enough to the half-hundred or so men and women lying in the shallow waters of the bottom of the pit.
"Me!" a naked, bearded man missing his left eye shouted, rising to his feet. A !0!0! floater hovered nearby, and the man swatted it down with a swipe of one hand too fast to follow. Clutching the frantically buzzing captive close to his chest, he cracked its shell and extracted one glittering, faceted camera eye. "That's for my eye, ne shouted waving the gleaming trophy. "Lets go get us some more!"
'The turners!" a woman cried. "Let's get the skekking turner trusties!"
Lightning flared across the sky, accompanied by crashing thunder, as the mob surged from the pit, with Wal only nominally in the lead.. ..
"Turn left at the next branching of the corridor," Hector's voice said in his ear. "Be careful. I am detecting movement and a magnetic flux of nearly two hundred twelve gauss in the power plant accessway where there should be none."
"Roger that," Jaime said. He raised the power gun, hefting its reassuring mass in his hand. It's a shame, he thought, that Hector doesn't have internal security cameras. He did, actually, at the airlocks and entranceways, but Bolos were not really designed to carry living personnel, despite the amenities of their Battle Centers, and more useful senses than sight were used to keep watch on their internal areas.
