Man O' War, стр. 72
Peste's sneer turned sour at the memory. He started bringing the needier down, fully intending to shoot Hawkes and be done with it. But he was distracted by a sudden noise behind him. Half turning, he saw Martel push her wheelchair across the room toward him. For an instant his attention was split in two directions, paralyzing his ability to act.
Hawkes leaped. The needier fired. Martel screamed.
36
"WECAN'T SIGHT THEM!"
Variations on the same panicked sentence were repeated a dozen times over. Peste's second-in-command scanned the dust cloud himself, trying to spot any heat activity within it. Standing up to peer into the valley, he could not understand what was happening.
"Where are they?" he muttered. Moving his helmet back and forth, he tried desperately to spot the fierce red glow their heat generators should have been throwing off. All he could see were tiny ghost shadows of energy residue—barely visible trace patterns—nothing he could target. "Where the hell are they?"
The man knew the cold energy for the hydraulics—the radio sets; all the other smaller suit functions—would not give out anything their weapons could lock on to.
But the heat-pac generators. You can always spot those. So where are they? Where are they?
The thought was the second-in-command's last as a blast from below tore through his helmet, slicing off the top of his head. His pressure suit staggered, wobbling back and forth on the edge of the butte. Finally it toppled,falling over into the canyon. The man inside was dead before it had started to move.
On the cul-de-sac's floor, Scully and his troops were making up for their bad start, taking the battle to the renegades. The old security man had been right. He had feared they would not be able to take their enemies by surprise. When he had told everyone to dress as heavily as possible, he had had their heat-pacs in mind. He remembered the complaints his people had made then. Helping one of his lieutenants sight the mortar he had had brought down from the Bulldog's stores, he thought, Nobody complaining now, I see.
Then, with the small mobile cannon stabilized and ready, he signaled the order to launch. The mortar's internal tracker zeroed in on the largest concentration of heat forms outside its program-set perimeter and then fired. Seconds later, a half dozen of the renegades were hurtling down, jarred loose by the cannon's first blast. Three lay dead where the shell had gone off.
The mortar launched again. Then again. In a matter of moments, scores of the enemy had fallen. Random shots rang down from the hills, but they found nothing inside the growing dust cloud. The renegades could not even target muzzle flashes through the ever-thickening billow.
"Keep after 'em," bellowed Scully into his helmet mike. "Sight and shoot. We've got them on the run. Pick 'em off, kill 'em all."
Through the dust, the old security man took careful aim at the warm, red outline of a figure desperately crawling down the side of the canyon wall. He coolly squeezed off his round, watching it flash straight toward the red glow. The figure froze, bounced, then dropped straight down and out of sight.
"Good," spat Scully, the word a curse hurled at all his foes. Then, scanning about for his next target, he shouted to his troops encouragingly, "They started this little game . . . now let's show 'em how to play it!"
In the cold silence of the dark Martian canyon, the opening battle of the solar system's first interplanetary war continued. The weapons were new, the techniques different. But in the end the motivations for the struggle were the same ones as always . . . as old as time, and just as pointless to the dead.
HAWKES FELT THE STING OF THE FEW NEEDLES THAT HAD connected with his side, ripping his clothes, his skin, muscle. He slammed into Peste with all the force he could muster. He had not tried to grab the man's weapon from his hand, or to strike a blow. His attack had been one of strict projectile force, aiming to bowl the man over.
It worked. Peste went down hard. His weapon hand struck the edge of the bed frame. The needier was jarred from his grasp, sent bouncing off toward the opposite wall.
Hawkes did not try to break their fall. He landed on Peste as hard as he could, driving his elbow into the man's stomach. They collided with the floor roughly, the shock of contact pounding through them both.
"You fuck," gasped Peste, struggling for breath. "I'll kill you."
Hawkes clambered to his knees. Putting everything he had into one punch, he made a clawed fist and launched it toward the renegade's throat. As his stiff fingers slammed into the man's Adam's apple, he felt something break underneath.
Peste exploded into a raging mill of arms and legs. Hawkes was thrown off balance, falling to one side. He landed badly on his shoulder, bouncing the back of his head off the floor. Struggling to his feet, Peste turned and kicked Hawkes in the stomach, then did it again.
As the ambassador howled in pain, the renegade closed in, aiming a splintering kick at the ambassador's ribs. The blow knocked all the wind from Hawkes and left him gagging on the floor.
Peste staggered back, gasping for air himself. He would kill the ambassador and then make his escape. Even with most of the security people in the colony gone, he knew there was no sense in taking any more chances.
You're dead, old man, he thought. I'm not wasting another minute on you. I'm just getting my gun, filling you full of tiny holes, and then getting back to carving out my throne.
Peste turned in the direction he knew his needier had fallen. When he did, he found Martel kneeling weakly at the