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But then the pi
The missiles began hitting at the same moment the tank's turret gun slashed a melon-sized plasma charge into the root of the pi
It was still airborne when it passed the edge of town; then its counter-grav failed as well, and it crashed into the hillside, not far from where the second warning salvo had hit. The fuel and ammunition still aboard made another respectable fireball, but one harmless to anything except the landscape.
Ryder forced herself up off her face, coughed to clear smoke and heat from her lungs, and looked at the nearer wreckage. Euvinophan's vehicle park and dump were completely enveloped in smoke where they weren't spewing flame. Bits of smoking debris made an ugly fringe around the area, and over the roar of the flames she could hear the satchel charges and ammunition cooking off.
Hydrogen-enriched fuels are useful both for propelling armored fighting vehicles and for demolishing them. She reminded herself to include that in any book of tactical tips she ever had published by the Admiralty House Press.
She saw no point in looking for Chung's tank. The playground had been well inside the fireball area. Even the ruins of the school were half-invisible, and the other half was thoroughly on fire.
Please, God. Let the blast wave have killed him before he had time to burn alive.
She was going to cry if she went on with thoughts like that, and she had more than a hundred of her people close enough to see her do it, which was bunching up too much if the bad guys had anything left—
"Spread out, you damned sheep!" she yelled. "Tactical formations, now. This isn't over and it won't be a carnival even when it is!"
The shriek of an incoming rocket made her whirl, with one ghastly moment of thinking second pi
The first rocket hit one of the scout cars, flinging it over on its side. The raiders' tribarrel had already been dismounted, though, and its crew was setting up. Now they dodged behind a half-ruined wall and returned fire.
The com tech was dragging Ryder toward something she couldn't recognize but which looked solid. They ducked behind it just as a second rocket hit five meters to the major's right.
Her rifle flew out of her hand. A rock smashed into her right cheek, and she sprawled out from behind cover. She was rolling back toward the com tech, who was huddled over his equipment, when a storm of solid rounds punched her all over, and a plasma pulse charge ripped at her legs.
Suddenly the painkillers weren't working. Neither, it seemed, was shock. She hurt terribly in several places, tried to roll toward where her rifle had been without knowing what she was going to do when she reached it, but passed out from the pain before she rolled over more than twice.
The last thing she thought she heard was mortar rounds, crashing down on top of the Peep counterattack.
EIGHT
Shuna Ryder decided that she was hurting too much to be dead, so she wasn't. When she tried to move, she hurt even more. She didn't quite keep silent, so all at once Chief Bexo was standing over her stretcher.
"Good . . ." she said.
"You ought to feel pretty awful," Bexo said in a flat voice.
"I mean . . ." She had meant that it was good to see him alive and on duty, not that she felt at all good. She felt considerably worse than awful.
Then she felt worse still, because Bexo and another SBA—a Sea Fencible—had to move her to treat her, and the pain won another victory over the drugs. This time she screamed.
"We're all out," Bexo said, almost whispering, as if a loud voice would add to Ryder's pain. "Everybody we could find, even the dead. You're aboard Nautilus. We're going home."
Nautilus? Wasn't there a famous submarine by that name? A long time ago, and back on Old Earth, maybe. This wasn't it. The deck was wood and smelled of fish. She smelled other things too. She vaguely remembered that they were sick bay smells.
Well, if she hurt this much, it only made sense for her to be in sick bay.
She also remembered that it was a good place for catching up on your sleep.
* * *
Citizen Commissioner Testaniere's counterattack lasted through the second salvo from the puppet bombardment ship. At the first salvo, the Euvinophan soldiers fled. Some of them didn't abandon their weapons, though they all "abandoned the field," in the old phrase from elitist history books.
"The ones who hung on to their rifles probably thought their chief was going to take it out of their pay," Citizen Sergeant Pescu muttered. He had half a dozen minor wounds and burns but looked ready to go on fighting all day.
The Navy people held until a shell from the second salvo blew their CPO—whose name Testaniere wished he had learned—into bits. The same shell also wounded Citizen Sergeant Pescu in the stomach and both legs. His fight was over, and the last Field Police followed the Navy.
At that point, Testaniere ordered a withdrawal out of range, leaving the bodies but bringing the wounded. The handful of surviving People's fighters had three vehicles. Perhaps they could reach open country, make contact with the incoming Euvinophan troops, and at least find a temporary sanctuary in the warlord's camp on the other side of the mountains.
But the Royal Army was at last out in force, and the fugitives met the first roadblock before they'd gone two klicks. Testaniere signaled everyone else to stay in the vehicles, dismounted, and walked toward the roadblock with his hands open and empty. He would have waved the traditional white handkerchief, if everything he was wearing or carrying hadn't been black with soot and dirt.
"I surrender, on condition of medical care for our wounded," he said.
For a moment he thought the sergeant in command either didn't speak Standard English or was refusing the request.
"We are combat soldiers of the People's Republic of Haven," he said. "We are entitled to honorable treatment. The Royal Army has suffered few losses today, but this might change if you do not accept our surrender."
Several gun muzzles rose, but a first lieutenant stepped out of one of the vehicles and approached Testaniere. "Of course, we accept your surrender under those conditions." He pulled a radio from his belt and spoke rapidly in the Chuiban dialect Testaniere knew well enough to recognize as a call for medics.
Then he stepped up to Testaniere, so that only the People's Commissioner could hear him. "Our treatment will be honorable even for you, but recall that when you return to your homeland, it may be otherwise."
That was a large understatement, Testaniere thought. He was a dead man, and his family and friends might die with him, or at best see the inside of a prison or labor camp for more years than they could survive.
Now the lieutenant was holding out his own sidearm, a solid-shot caseless-cartridge pistol, butt-first. "The honor you have shown to all here, and that we wish to show to you, allows a solution. I hope you are not too filled with `revolutionary consciousness' or any other such nonsense to have forgotten what it is."