I whirled and dropped, bringing up my weapon in the same motion. The unmistakeable whirr of an augmented military disruptor broke the dead silence, and the air half a meter above me shimmered and danced.
I rolled behind a low fountain with the sharp tang of ozone burning in my sinuses. There were still no other rebels in sight. Their net was losing cohesion already. Bad coordination combined with bad planning - they were much too slow to adjust. Not that I was complaining.
I swept a short burst of disruptor fire across the square to discourage freshly arriving rebels and darted across the broken marble slabs, ducking into one of the streets leading off the square. Two men were crouching in doorways, obviously intending to block the street, but apart from them, there was no living being in sight. Within a moment or two, there was no living being in sight at all.
The old-fashioned electronic lock that secured the front door of the building to my left offered no resistance to my decoder. I hurried through deserted office rooms and up the stairs, checking my equipment as I ran. The disruptor was three-quarters charged, five batteries left. The scrambler was active.
As an afterthought, I tapped the repulsor field's tiny screen and learned that the unit was fully functional. Though I wasn't likely to find a use for the thing - how often did anyone get caught in an attack through solid projectiles and not have to move? Moving within the field's vortex was slower than moving underwater.
Arriving at the top floor, I discovered there was no sign of an access to the roof. Didn't the natives worry about fire? The nearest window overlooked a small courtyard boasting a single, scrawny tree. I hauled myself to the sill, stepped outside and vaulted over the edge of the roof, using the wooden shutter as a foothold. The rooftops were clear. No reading from the portable sensor - the rebels were still scrambling the signals.
This rebel group was a problem. They were off-planet mercenaries and knew what they were doing. They'd managed to take the town that housed the planetary defence system controls, and the ships we had in orbit were not powered up for leaving.
There'd been no way to get a regular combat unit through the rebels' line of defence at the city limit in time to prevent the worst. Normal rebels wouldn't have been able to break the codes to the planetary defence system, but this group had both the technology and the experts. Three of them, originally... Now, only the captain himself.
And by shooting at me just now, and missing, he'd foolishly given away his future location together with his present one.
Carefully scanning the streets below, I made my way across the rooftops, keeping low. It was just a question of arriving where he was going before he did. Without being picked off by one of his rebels along the way.
A figure in a grey combat suit ducked around a corner ahead and I hurled myself backwards and to the side. There was no way to entirely avoid the shot the second rebel took from a window across the street, however.
The energy bolt slammed into my left shoulder in the same instant I incinerated the sniper's chest. The rebel below ducked back into cover: I ignored him, leaping across a gap between rooftops and taking myself out of his range. He was in the wrong place to reach his captain in time.
I could still move my arm, so the wound couldn't be that serious. Fortunately, disruptor wounds don't bleed - the heat cauterizes them.
Far more difficult to ignore than the pain was the sickening stench of scorched flesh. I hate that smell. It brings up bad memories.
Several blocks further down, I caught the captain as he skidded down a side-street and squarely into my line of fire. There was stunned surprise on his face - and there was another rebel on a roof several buildings behind me.
I hurled myself from the roof without hesitation, slamming down on the controls of the repulsor field at my belt. Startlement turned to open-mouthed astonishment on the face the rebel leader turned up to me.
At the last moment before impact, the familiar bone-grating vibration thrummed through my body and a colorless haze sprang up before my eyes, blurring the pavement that was rushing up. The field had been designed to repulse objects considerably smaller than a planet, and its circuits didn't survive the first second of massive overload, but in that second, they absorbed the force of my fall. I dropped to the ground from the height of no more than a meter, rolling and coming up with my disruptor at the ready.
The mercenary stood frozen to the spot, his weapon still tracking the vector of my fall, his brain clearly lagging behind in a similar way. He made a prime target.
Nothing happened when I pressed the trigger.
I snapped my gaze downwards to discover that, impossibly, my weapon was out of charge. The energy surge from the field's collapse must have wiped the battery.
The captain was still bringing his own disruptor to bear when I moved, dodging once and kicking up his wrist. He tried to evade, but was too slow. Bones crunched; I scooped his fallen weapon from the ground.
His disruptor did work.
So much for this rebellion.
| Tuesday, October 14, 1997 |
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