"Shit!" Horgen shouted when she realized they were coming in too fast. She goosed both lift fans but the armored personnel carrier still hit like a ton of old iron. They pogoed in the dust cloud before Horgen could chop the throttles, but Abbado and four strikers were already out.
The regular land-force driver had been willing to look the other way while his APC disappeared, but he'd refused to drive 3-3 on the operation. All the strikers knew the basics of an aircar, but they didn't have the trained reflexes. The APC's mass made it react deceptively slowly to control inputs.
Abbado hoped the vehicle was still in shape to extract 3-3 in a few minutes, but that wasn't the first thing on his mind just now.
Methie'd transferred from a mechanized infantry unit to the Strike Force. Because he'd used a coil gun and because of his bum leg, Abbado assigned him to the APC's turret. Methie sawed a line of half-ounce slugs through the club's facade ten feet above the ground. The air cracked like stones shearing.
Somebody had rehung the door in the hours since the strikers had been here previously. The latch was tacked back to the panel with a sheet of brown plastic. Abbado blew the mechanism apart with his stinger and slammed through. A kick would have been quicker, but the weapon made a point he hoped the locals understood.
Some of him hoped the locals understood. The rest was perfectly willing to splatter the guts of any bastard who came for him.
The doorman, the same sergeant who'd been there the first time, bellowed with pain. The stinger pellets along with everything they hit at such short range had disintegrated. The bits the doorman got in the way of had eaten away a chunk of his uniform and the skin beneath. It must have felt like being sandblasted.
Could've been worse, buddy.
The strikers wore helmets and body armor. Abbado hunched so that the point of his shoulder caught the sergeant in the pit of the stomach as he went by.
The visor's capabilities hadn't been much help outside because the swirling dust was opaque across the whole RF spectrum, but enhancement turned the dim interior lighting as bright as a drill field. There were a lot more people present than there had been earlier in the evening. Very few of them even had the sense and reflexes to flatten when coil-gun shot cracked overhead in a shower of splinters from the front wall.
They could scream though. They were doing that even before Abbado's stinger sawed a zigzag in the drop ceiling.
Other strikers were firing. Light enhancement turned the stingers' muzzle aura into flaring brilliance. C41 didn't go in much for non-lethal weaponry, but Matushek had found a crate of riot gas grenades. He lobbed them into the middle of the room.
As ordered, Methie shut down the coil gun after the initial burst. Abbado'd been afraid Methie would get overexcited and drop the muzzle with 3-3 in the club. Besides, the projectiles travelled a hell of a long way. Even on Stalleybrass there were places Abbado knew he'd afterwards regret having shot up.
Large chunks of the ceiling came down. Half the overhead lights were out; flickers showed where powerlines were arcing.
"Watch it, Sarge!" Glasebrook warned. Abbado ducked. The doorman flew past and hit the bar with his arms and legs flailing. Something crunched and it wasn't the furniture.
The part of the crowd that could still move stampeded toward the rear of the hall. A place this big probably had an oversized fire exit with crash bars. If it didn't, well, safety regulations for rear-echelon motherfuckers weren't Abbado's concern.
He slapped a fresh magazine in the stinger's butt, then emptied it into the back ceiling in a single slashing burst. Flocked insulation swirled down like an explosion in a pillow factory. Pellets flashed when they hit the metal stringers. Reloading again, Abbado let the spring-loaded sling snug the weapon back against his right armpit as he used both hands to vault the bar.
Gas spread like thin smoke from the middle of the room where the grenades had landed. Abbado switched his visor from enhancement to infrared before he bent and began jerking dispenser trays out of the beer cooler. The gas scattered light in the visible band, but it didn't seem to affect the longer IR rays.
His helmet filters were in place but he felt the back of his hands prickle. He sure hoped the shit wasn't absorbed through the skin. The gas wasn't supposed to be fatal. From the look of the REMFs puking their guts up among the overturned tables, though, some of them wished they were dead.
Abbado slapped trays up on the bar behind him. Matushek was emptying another cooler. Two of the bartenders huddled at the far end, their hands clasped over the back of their necks. The remainder of 3-3 was hauling the loot outside or chewing more of the building apart with their stingers. One good thing about a rear-echelon base was you could count on weapons being locked in armories. Even strike companies had to turn in their hardware.
Some of their hardware.
Abbado jerked the last tray out of the cooler and shouted, "Let's go!"
He grunted as he rolled himself back over the bar. Enough of the hormones had worn off that he was aware of his armor's weight again.
One-handed, Abbado tugged down his stinger and put half a magazine into coolers there hadn't been time to empty. Chrome-faced doors flew apart. At the other end of the bar Matushek paused to pat the upraised fanny of one of the bartenders, an even better way to increase the REMFs' demoralization.
Abbado ran for the door. Glasebrook was ahead of him with a stack of dispenser trays so high that the transom scraped the top one off. Abbado caught it as it fell without really thinking about what he was doing. He dived with his burden into the waiting APC.
"Go!" Methie yelled, keeping count from the turret as 3-3 reboarded. The coil gun put another twenty rounds into the bar ceiling. The burst must have severed a major beam because a quarter of the roof twisted and sagged with a tortured moan.
The APC lifted. The side panels were still lowered. Abbado saw movement—an aircar with a pulsing red light closing fast from the west.
"Goose it, Horgen!" he said. "The Shore Police's woke up!"
There was a bang from above him. Abbado thought for an instant that the SPs were shooting; then he saw a spark curving in the direction of the cops' flashing party hat. "What the fuck was that?" he demanded.
Methie looked down from the cupola. "We got two anti-emitter missiles with the bus," he said. "I figured this was a good time to use one."
The red light spun like a flipped coin and vanished from the sky. Abbado didn't see the flash of an explosion. He felt the future opening before him like a black cone: a complete absence of experience, stretching on forever.
"You blew up a carload of cops?" Caldwell said. "Ah, they'll shoot us for that."
She didn't sound excited. They were all too flat after the operation to be excited.
Horgen kept the APC low so it would be harder to track if anybody was trying. They were flying fast enough to keep ahead of the dust they raised. The compound was still a few minutes out.
"Hey, I'm an expert, remember?" Methie said. "I tuned it to home on the RF signals from their front fan, not the radio in the cab. I didn't even arm the warhead! They just had an engine failure."
Glasebrook laughed in a deep rumble.
"They may still have broke their necks when they went down, you know," Abbado said.
"Hey, they took that risk when they got out of bed in the morning," Methie replied.
Abbado'd been sitting on the floor. Now he swung down a seat from the central spine.
"Somebody pass me a beer, will you?" Horgen called from the cockpit. "You got the beer, right?"
"You bet your ass," Glasebrook said with deep satisfaction. He pulled one of the dispensers apart and began tossing cans to the other strikers.
Abbado looked out into the night and sipped his beer. There wasn't a lot to see as the APC roared across a darkened waste of stone and lichen.
There'd be hell to pay in a couple hours, Abbado knew from experience. But for the moment, he was home.