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heads together like a housewife cracking eggs, then threw them away. The
others could perhaps have burned him down where he stood, but they were afraid
of hitting their comrades, or perhaps just afraid. The invisible snipers were
still picking off soldiers; Blade felt more than once the wheet of a bullet
sailing past his ear. As the soldiers scattered, Blade picked up a beamer and
sprinted for the same bushes that he had seen Leyndt dive into. A soldier
heading for the same goal did not move fast enough, and Blade used the beamer
to chop him squarely in half.
As he dove under cover, a bullet seared across his thigh, the pain making him
grit his teeth, and he heard the crackle of beamers rise more loudly than ever
before behind him, toward the main buildings, and sudden, chopped-off screams
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as the beamers tore men apart. The fighting there had suddenly flared up also;
were the same people that were picking off the soldiers out here also at work
there?
For a moment Blade was wild with frustration. Wounded or not, he wished he
could do something useful in this battle besides keep his head down to avoid
having it drilled by his own side, something that would account for another
half-dozen Conciliator soldiers. But the snipers were shooting so furiously
into the area that moving around would have been suicide.
Leyndt had finally fainted; Blade felt to make sure her heart was still
beating. Since she was not seriously hurt he stopped worrying about her and
concentrated on scanning the area visible to him, beamer ready to pick off any
Conciliator troops that might drift into view.
One did; Blade dropped him with his second charge for a moment he had
forgotten that a beam weapon has no recoil, and overcompensated enough to
throw his first shot off target. He thought of going out and retrieving the
man's beamer as a spare for himself or a weapon for Leyndt, but too many
wildly aimed bullets were still slapping through the branches and into tree
trunks and whipping up clumps of turf.
He didn't know who the attacking marksmen were, but he was certainly prepared
to greet them as friends. He found it hard to believe they could be Union
people, unless
There was an explosion of half a dozen rifles going off all at once, making
echoes bounce from tree to tree, and a silence following that broken only by a
single groaning voice. Then a figure darted out into the clearing, a beamer in
one oversized hand and a large conventional-looking rifle slung over his bowed
back. Blade grinned as he saw the blue face, and he was already rising from
his cover when Stramod shouted:
"Blade, the battle is over. Come out!"
Chapter 9
«^»
Stramod had been as competent a commander as the now very dead Conciliator
leader had been an inept one. He had made full use of one of his
most-cherished projects, a long-secret series of tunnels dug from the
subbasement of the central building out to the edges of the grounds. When the
attack came in and it became obvious that a direct counter-attack on the
surface would be suicidal, he had led the fourteen picked men of his action
squad through the tunnels to take the Conciliators in the rear. Their hunting
rifles could hit accurately at several times the effective range of the
beamers, and their surprise had been almost complete. Blade and Leyndt had
made an invaluable diversion by concentrating nearly a quarter of the enemy's
total strength in one place, standing around in the open, "fat, dumb, and
happy."
After panic set in among the soldiers, a counter-attack from the main
buildings finished off the battle.
Blade's thigh wound was only a shallow flesh wound, painful as it was. Leyndt,
newly clothed and conscious, treated it with dressings and tissue-restoring
salves, and assured Blade that it would heal within a few days if he could
manage to stay off the leg. Stramod laughed harshly at that. Leyndt looked at
him, somewhat puzzled.
"But surely; Stramod, now that they know our strength, they'll think twice [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]