Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [23]
Again without any spoken command, Jackson and Rodale spread farther apart until they had a good forty meters between them. Slowing to a walk, bent almost double, the officer hoisted his weapon and moved forward like a stalking hunter, which he very much was. Turning to his partner, Jackson played a hunch and signaled for the M76. Rodale dropped the G15 to let it dangle from its sling and pulled the heavy rocket launcher from his back, then slipped up to the top of the rise.
There! A flash of movement crested the horizon of the hill, and Jackson dropped flat. Raising his head very slightly, he made out something like a moving dome. It was probably a turret, he deduced, since he couldn’t see the lower portion of the vehicle, and it was easing toward him. He cracked off a shot and saw the flash of a tracer mark a trajectory until the slug bounced off the dome.
Immediately he was moving to the side, away from his firing position. Something flashed, a bright streak even in the sunlight, and he saw several impacts as the high-velocity round skidded along the crest of the ridge without exploding. It passed a dozen meters to Jackson’s side, and he crept forward again to get a visual on the shooter.
He saw a rocket flash from Rodale’s launcher, eerily soundless in the near vacuum of the Martian atmosphere. The missile flew upward, following the curve of the hill’s crest as its guidance system homed in. Something flashed from the moving dome, and the missile exploded a hundred meters short of its target. Damn. The enemy had a pretty sophisticated antimissile defense!
The strange vehicle continued to advance, and now Jackson and Rodale, playing their parts in the delicate choreography the lieutenant had laid out in advance, fell back. The second target zoomed closer, moving quickly, the domed turret spinning. From the side he saw a small, short barrel extending from the dome. He couldn’t see low enough to tell if it moved on wheels, tracks, or some kind of hover machinery, but it was a hell of a lot zippier than any Terran tank. Jackson kept up the fire from his own gun, and Rodale popped up from cover just long enough to launch another rocket. That streaking missile, too, was intercepted by some kind of energy-weapon defense, detonating before it struck the target.
Remembering the round that had skidded across the ridge, Jackson understood that the enemy had two different weapons, either of which would easily perforate a soft target like a SEALS in a space suit. In another minute both vehicles came into view, zooming over the crest of the low hill. The energy weapon flashed again, a yellow bolt sizzling too damned close for comfort. Against that bizarre silence, it was almost possible to imagine that it was harmless—like the beam of a flashlight—but Jackson knew better and rolled to the side across the rusty ground as another searing bolt of energy puffed into the rocky terrain where he had just been lying.
But the two men had done their job. The enemy vehicles continued to race forward, both turrets swiveling, weapons seeking to train on the elusive shooters. Rolling behind a fortuitously located rock, Jackson raised his head just enough to study the targets. They were small, barely large enough to hold a single adult, he estimated. Now he could see that they moved on tracks, like tanks, and had low, flat silhouettes that would make them difficult to hit.
A difficult target, to be sure, but not an impossible one. The first sign Jackson got that LaRue had drawn a bead came when the round from the rail gun spit into one of the tracked vehicles from the right flank. The molten copper went right through the turret as it followed the uranium penetrator—the alien tank was not very heavily armored, apparently—and the miniature tank immediately stopped rolling. There was a spurt of fire as something incinerated very quickly, but the flames immediately died out in the oxygen-poor environment. The hull remained glowing