He was leaning back against the plastcrete, soaking the warmth up through his bare arms and the back of his close-shaven head when the commlink crackled in his inner ear.
"Boot, Grendel—heads up, incoming," Dax's tense voice whispered through the hiss of triple-layer encryption.
His eyes flashed open, the milk-white, pupil-free globes glowing in the bright, unfiltered sunshine. Dax was not the excitable sort; his tone immediately indicated that something had gone wrong.
The run hadn't really even started yet. Bootleg imagined that it would not, now, if something so serious had happened so soon. But he reminded himself not to presume too much, to react only to what came at him and nothing more. Still, his third-mind insisted on imagining a scenario in which he put down all of his arms—except for Vera, of course, for whom he would risk any sort of detection or intervention to save—and walked calmly off to a fall-back rendezvous, or perhaps one in which a brief, fighting withdrawal was made, a somewhat humiliating defeat, tempered only with the potential to count some coup on the way back out of town.
If he were honest with himself, Bootleg had to admit that he preferred the latter.
"Online," he replied into his throat mike, pulling up a quick status check on Vera in his cybereye display panel: loaded and locked, a hot AP round in the chamber, just how she liked it. He stood slowly, calmly, looking around only to find nothing obviously amiss in the vicinity of the intersection in which he and Grendel were staged outside the Aztlan Motors Denver compound.
"The Buffalo is on the move," Dax came back again, a background rustling and sounds of exertion in his voice telling Bootleg that he was running now. "We're taking it rolling, we're gonna exfil along your line, standby to cover."
"Copy," Bootleg said, and Grendel, standing across the intersection in the shade, echoed him and pulled his own rifle out clear of the duffel in which it had been resting.
"What the frag is this, then?" Grendel called out casually across the open pavement, his rich Irish brogue embracing the curse as if invented precisely to animate it.
Bootleg shrugged. Dax was back on the air now, this time his voice preceded by the chimes that indicated that he was speaking on a channel that went to not only Bootleg and Grendel but to the entire team.
"Flash! Flash, all calls, this is Big Chief, Buffalo is rolling, the cap team will take it at Missouri, we're gonna sandwich it with Pinto 1 and Pinto 2 and exfil along Trail, passing Water Hole and linking to the Big Dance. Our RV is Tango, I say again, our RV is now Tango. Eyeball team, you are to remain in position at the perimeter now, hold and engage any Paleface assets as they depart the Fort. Your mission is to slow or destroy the response force. Watering Hole will maintain a secondary roadblock, in place. Rider, get ready to rig."
"There ya' go," Boot called back across the street to Grendel, who looked unimpressed.
An Americar with two Japanese sararimen rolled slowly between them toward the intersection. The driver caught sight of Grendel's rifle and raised his eyebrows, but stopped at the intersection and made a calm right turn just as he had been signaling. Bootleg smiled. He loved Denver. If you got spotted just about anywhere in the Seattle Metroplex carrying a long rifle out openly in the street, you were looking at a rapidly upcoming appointment with an amped-up bunch of Lonestar's finest, backed by heavy HRT responders. Here, in Denver, you got a second glance, if that, and a certain prudent distance established around you and that was about all.
Since there was apparently action imminent, and since Grendel was being cavalier already with their cover, Boot went ahead and shucked Vera from her own protective duffle. He held her up and looked her over minutely, mindful of the need to suppress the surge of pride that rushed through him with the unveiling.
Seventy-five gleaming centimeters of Ares HVAR shone darkly in the bright midday Denver sun. She was a dull sheen of black, of course, to limit reflections, but all the same, Boot always kept her so cleanly polished that she seemed to glow even without directly reflecting the light.
"I'd assumed all the idolization of that fraggin' firearm had been a standard-issue psycho street-punk put-on designed to enhance your rep amongst the ill-educated," Grendel said, "but the pornographic nature with which you're starin' at it now has me genuinely worried, boyo."
"Don't worry," Bootleg said. "Vera will protect us."
The bridge was slightly arched and the broad sprawl of the city sloped away from them across the river, a dustpan emptying itself out onto the flat, empty Plains of the Sioux Nation, so they did not have a clear view of the massive Aztlan Motors facility or the surrounding streets. The massive stacks and upper stories rose in a silent haze, inert and ominous.
But sounds carried clearly up from the plain and the tires screeching, the crunch of metal and plastic, and the first crystal-sharp gunshots drifted over them easily as the runner's net came to life with tight, brief tactical messages.
"Into it now," Grendel commented.
The gunfire quickly reached a crescendo and then stopped abruptly. The voices on comms registered disbelief followed quickly with restrained glee.
"We got it, we got it!" came a fuzzy, undisciplined call that sounded to Boot like it was from Fraggle, one of the watchers… uncharacteristic of the breed, and doubly uncharacteristic of dwarves, she was a talker. Boot enjoyed their conversations but had reservations about her performance in the field, reservations which the unguarded broadcast only reinforced. But it was quickly sublimed into more business-like transmissions on the net.
"Haida, Haida, Haida, we have Buffalo," one of the sammies on the cap team called, confirming that the rig was in hand. Silence followed.
Bootleg knew that there would be a blur of activity around the captured machine as the team shuffled to get the riggers onboard to take control of the systems and quickly suss out how to run the beast; others would take up posts in a hasty perimeter around the site while the riggers worked; Dax and Floss would at the same time be organizing them all into a hasty convoy, splitting the runners up among the several escorting vehicles to ensure the right balance of guns, tech, and magic to allow them to escape the city in one piece. But all that buzz would be face-to-face or via quick hand-signs, leaving the nets silent and unused. On the road near the bridge, nothing happened.
Some minutes later, long ones—Bootleg had long since ceased being surprised at how long it took for any metahuman endeavor to actually get under way, whether it was corporate security mobilizing to suppress a threat, or shadowrunners leaping to make good their escape—more gunfire echoed up from the plain.
"We got a response," Fraggle squeaked out again. "Paleface TAC team is attempting to exit the Fort, we're engaging."
"Copy," Dax replied instantly, as if he had been expecting it. "Buffalo is rolling, mount up, we're on Trail Two. Eyeball Lead, give us as much time as you can."
"Got it," replied the head of the watcher team, a man named Killeen. The gunfire was momentarily rebroadcast via his mike, becoming loud and immediate, curiously out of sync with the distant patter echoing slowly across the plain.
"Water Hole, comin' at ya'," Dax said.
"On it," Grendel replied. The Irishman shook himself and kicked the duffel bag away, then strode boldly forward across the cross street and into the dusty verge along the river next to the bridge. He glanced back at Bootleg, who hadn't yet moved. "How did you want to play it, then, big man?"
"The man said to block the road," Boot said. "So we block the road."
"You're a fine one for planning, you are," Grendel snorted.
"They didn't hire me to be a planner," Boot said. He glanced over at the Irishman for a moment. "You either, I guess."
"Fair enough. Mayhem it is, then!"
They both heard the roar of the jets at the same time and though they both knew it was most likely the rapidly exfiltrating stolen LAV and its escorts, both were wired tightly enough that they instinctively dropped into a target-diminishing crouch with weapons snapped-to and began to angle toward cover: Grendel toward an abandoned car in the scrub between the road and the river, Bootleg into a doorway of the building behind him.
The yellow and orange LAV came roaring across the bridge almost too fast to follow, even with cybernetic eyes, followed by the more familiar silhouettes of the runner vehicles that had been sharing the staging compound with the team for the past week or so. Boot caught a glimpse, barely, of a gleeful, spindly elvish girl with bright blue hair grinning out the window and making a rude gesture in his direction before the convoy was out of sight behind them, leaving only roiled dust clouds and the faint stench of over-heated hydrocarbons behind. Floss, offering her own version of moral support, he imagined. Good thing he didn't need moral support.
The gunfire in the distance was surging, wavering, sputtering. Over the commlink, Bootleg heard the terse, then desperate calls between the handful of watchers who had remained behind on the compound perimeter, under-equipped and entirely ill-suited to the task of bottling up the Aztechnology security response team that was mobilizing to pursue the purloined LAV. Bootleg had to suppress a physical need to move toward the sound of those guns. The stand at the Motors Compound called out for a man of his qualifications, not for a few bookish and unobtrusive surveillance specialists. But they had their part to play, and, he supposed, it was as well that they were so certain to fail; otherwise, he wouldn't have his own role still to fill.
"Water Hole, this is Eyeball Lead!" Killeen yelled wildly over the commlink, his CAS accent over-sampled and distorted with a static-tinged edge. "I've got two down, two down, we're falling back now! They're coming at you, two un…" The call cut off abruptly. A large plume of smoke erupted slowly skyward on the eastern horizon. Seconds later, the sharp crack of a large amount of high-order explosives rolled over them, heading west after the convoy.
"Frag," said Grendel.
Bootleg banged a fist against the side of his head.
"Two 'un' whats?" he fumed. "Unicorns? Unicycles? Universal gobshites?" He'd heard Grendel say "gobshite" for the first time when they had first met the week before and tried now to work it into conversation wherever possible as a way of making the Irishman feel more welcome to North American shores.
"Units, you choob," Grendel said. "Probably fraggin' Leopards."
"Nah," Bootleg scoffed. "That starts with 'Le' not 'un.'"
"I honestly can't say whether I'm more scared to be up against them, or with you," Grendel said. "We'd better get somethin' out on the bridge to slow 'em down, though, or they'll be right through here, fast as that LAV was."
It was a good point, Bootleg thought, and providence provided an immediate solution for them as an older Citroen Xhen crested the bridge coming toward them. The same thought occurred to both of them simultaneously and they rose from their crouches like marionettes drawn by the same strings. Boot stepped resolutely out into the street, Vera pointed directly at the Xhen's windshield, but Grendel, closer to the car, fired first: four shots into the engine compartment, the high-velocity rounds nicely cheesing some vital motive component or another, causing the already slowly moving vehicle to lurch to a stop just their side of the brow of the bridge.
The terrified driver, a pale elf wearing Fuchi livery, faded several hues paler when he saw Boot coming at him. The two runners didn't even have to ask the man to vacate the Xhen… the elf opened the door and bolted immediately.
"Handy," Bootleg remarked.
"Handier yet," Grendel said, nodding up toward the crest of the bridge, where another car was appearing.
"Is it rush hour?" Boot asked, confused. But Grendel was already sprinting up the road toward the new vehicle. This driver was more on the ball than the elf; when he noticed that the two men by the Xhen were heavily armed, he threw his Elektro into reverse and squealed quickly back down the other side from where he had come. Grendel got a quick shot off, and Boot was impressed when, seconds later, he heard a crash from the other side of the bridge.
"Nice shot, man," he complimented the other samurai as they ran up to the bridge crest.
But when they reached the top and looked down the other side, it became clear that Grendel had nothing to do with the crash; the panicked driver had simply reversed himself right into a third car that had been coming up behind him. Like the elf, he had decided his vehicle was no longer worth the trouble and had taken off running, already having put a fair distance between himself and the bridge. The other driver, an obese woman with fluorescent red hair, was screaming at him from beside her car.
"You'd best be after him, sister," Grendel said. "I think he's getting away."
Bootleg chortled, but the woman clearly didn't get the joke until Grendel held his rifle high and gestured to it, then to her. She chugged off after the man at a comedically slow pace.
"I'm thinking we're out of time to rearrange the obstacles," Grendel said, gesturing past the cars. In the distance, between them and the compound, a dust plume was rising and moving quickly toward them along the plain.
"They'll work," Boot said. He took three strides to the left and lay down on the pavement, settling Vera gently across the military crest of the roadway.
The Azzie response team wasn't subtle, but neither was it much of a response. Four cars packed with security guards, sirens wailing and lights flashing, roared up the road only to fishtail into a slow roll when they caught sight of the wreck just before the bridge. Their command and communications were clearly lacking; one stopped entirely, apparently in confusion, two nosed forward looking to find a path around the wrecked vehicles, and only one seemed to get the reality that they were all sitting in an ambush zone now, quickly throwing itself in reverse and backing around the side of a warehouse a block away.
The samurai opened up at the same time just as the fourth car started moving backward. Their assault rifles chattered eagerly and sent rounds spinning over the first three. The range was far—even the smartgun system could only work within the inherent limitations of the rifle ballistics, and the results were disappointing—a few clear hits but no indication of casualties, and the car quickly disappeared behind the warehouse, even as the shadowrunners lowered their aim point to the next furthest vehicle.
The results there were more satisfactory. The car was ventilated in short order, hopefully along with all the occupants, a static, easy target quickly disposed of.
The slow learners in the two lead vehicles had been given enough time to catch on by then. Both cars had stopped and all eight doors sprung open, the occupants bomb-bursting from them in various directions running for cover, presenting a considerably more difficult targeting environment. Bootleg only got one on his side before they found cover. Grendel appeared not to have killed any.
Vera needed re-loading; HVARs were voracious and Boot liked to keep her well-fed. He rolled onto his side and changed magazines. When he was finished and back on target, Grendel did likewise. The first few rounds of return fire were sailing over them, which spoke volumes for the quality of the opposition even though the amateur bumper car exhibition had provided a strong preview. Frontline corpsec often fired high, inexperienced and untrained in the art of the gunfight.
A burst of automatic fire joined the tinny pop of the pistols, and bullets whistled wildly overhead, spattered the pavement ahead of them, or whined off of the railings to either side.
"Somebody found his submachine gun, then," Grendel said, firing at the hapless guard with slow, single-shot precision.
Vera wasn't a single-shot kind of girl. Bootleg sent storms of fire at the brave corpsec trooper. Whether it was his doing or Grendel's, the Azzie didn't last long, collapsing like a free-standing pile of soyburger under the onslaught.
Grendel let loose a primal, ululating scream of joy. In the ensuing silence, Boot could hear wild cursing in Spanish from the other side of the bridge; but also, more sirens.
"No range to speak of on your girl then, is there?" Grendel inquired sociably. He was firing again as the Azzies exposed themselves fruitlessly trying to retrieve their fallen comrade. They'd more or less given up on the pistol fire. "Only there's more cars coming in, and they're swinging wide. This lot has put the good word out."
"Vera likes to get close," Bootleg affirmed. He glanced over the parapet of the bridge deck. There was at least one corpsec who wasn't behind anything more solid than his riddled car. Vera screeched and the Patrol One shook, dislodging the corpsec's body out the back. Grendel yelled again in triumph. He'd brought down another Azzie in the meantime.
The sirens cut out but from his height Boot could see the next group of vehicles splitting off in the distance, swinging to either side of the main road, no doubt looking for alternate routes across the river. It was a fool's errand. There were other bridges, of course, but Dax knew his business: they were either too far away or in territory controlled by other mega-corporations unfriendly to Aztechnology, or both. Negotiations would surely have already begun, but by the time the Azzies paid deeply for the privilege of securing another crossing, the shadowrunners would be long gone.
One of the vehicles, curiously, did not take the safe routes to the flanks. Instead, it roared directly up the road toward them, apparently heedless to the cautionary tale told by its predecessors.
Bootleg's cybereyes caught its secret first.
"LAV," he said simply.
"Fragging hell," Grendel said. He stumbled up to his knees, tempting the closer guards to take their chances with pistol fire even at range. Boot didn't like to waste opportunities to kill people he didn't like, so he fired back, raising dust clouds around the Azzie positions. He couldn't see if he hit anything, but his attention was divided between the targets and Grendel, who was scrambling backward down the slight slope of the bridge.
"Where the frag are you going?" Boot said. "Get back here, you coward."
"You think your girl is good against a panzer?" Grendel yelled over his shoulder. "Just keep their bleeding heads down and wait there, you dipped-out 'borg!"
Bootleg recognized that he was not always the sharpest expert system in the frame and he'd made a decent career out of keeping his head down and doing what he was told by runners with more of a big picture aspect, but he wasn't sure that Grendel qualified as such. Nonetheless, there wasn't quite the raw edge of panic in the other runner's voice that he associated with genuine, full-on, French-style panicking retreat, so he turned his attention back to the closer targets and let Vera run a bit wild. This resulted in some screaming and a dramatic reduction in return fire, but the LAV was getting closer and Grendel's unwelcome imprecation was, unfortunately, not inaccurate: an HVAR wasn't going to dent an APC. Either the LAV would take him out with superior weaponry or just roll right over like he wasn't even there.
Just as the armored ground-effect vehicle was getting inside theoretical cannon range, Boot heard footsteps and scraping noises behind him. He turned and looked to see Grendel tramping breathlessly back up the bridge ramp, dragging his duffel bag with one hand behind him. Down among the Azzies, a macho, exuberant chorus of excited Hispanic cheering was breaking out, casualties apparently notwithstanding.
A heavy crack sounded overhead, followed shortly by a boom from down the road toward the APC. Boot had never been on the receiving end of cannon fire before. He noted they were still firing high.
Grendel flopped down in his old spot and began fumbling with the bag. At length he produced a gun-metal grey tube about one meter in length from the duffel and carelessly cast the bag aside.
"You've gotta be drekkin' me," Bootleg said. "That's chromatic, man. Where'd you get it?"
But instead of sharing accessory shopping tips, Grendel was doing something to the tube, and it extended itself by a another half-meter or so without seeming to telescope in any way… it was as if the metal just extruded a bit more of itself without becoming any thinner. Similarly, a rectangular bulge appeared on one side, which Grendel fitted to his right eye as he brought the tube up to his shoulder awkwardly.
"Cover fire, you brain potato!" he screamed suddenly, and Boot almost reflexively began firing downrange again. He'd reloaded Vera without even noticing in the interval.
His attention was primarily on the closer Azzie positions but in the background, looming, he could see the LAV approaching implacably, the cannon in its turret waving and ranging ominously.
There was an empty sort of thump, not very loud, from where Grendel lay. Boot flinched as a vaporous cloud rolled at him from that direction and was well-served by that instinct, as a golden candle lit just in front of him almost immediately and a wave of heat and noise rolled back at him, spraying him with gravel and dust picked up off the road. Another crack followed, distantly, and then the characteristically lower thunder of a secondary explosion incorporating both fuel and large-caliber high-explosive ammunition.
He cautiously poked his head back over the rise. The LAV was on its side, in a ditch, firmly grounded and burning brightly. He saw after some seconds that it was, in fact, in at least two pieces, loosely connected by a tendril of flash-melted metal. He looked over to find, to his surprise, that Grendel was up on one knee, the now-blackened tube poised on his shoulder casually. The other man seemed to be glaring at the Azzie guards. At least one was running around on fire off in the distance.
"Take that, you Frito-chomping greasers!" he screamed down the ramp at them. But Bootleg didn't think they probably heard him.
A spatter of concrete and snaps suddenly showered him from the left side. Reflexively, Boot rolled to the right, but he crashed jarringly into Grendel, who was at the same time coming in his direction from the other side. They needed no discussion to determine the next move… both scrambled hastily back down the bridge ramp and split to either side, as they had begun.
The Azzie flankers had found their way to covered positions along the other river bank, making life on the bridge deck untenable for the runners. Still, Boot thought it to be a winning scenario: in a Mexican standoff, the Mexicans were going to lose the longer they were stuck on the wrong side of the bridge with their precious LAV prototype disappearing at speed in the opposite direction. Presumably the contingent of guards on the opposite side of the bridge would be bullied at several points into attempting a frontal assault across the bridge deck itself, but that was just the sort of HVAR fodder that Vera loved. Boot had little doubt of his ability to hold them off indefinitely and with heavy casualties.
Boot found hard cover behind a pile of plastcrete building debris tumbled among the weeds and occupied himself for a couple minutes taking careful, leisurely pot-shots at similarly entrenched Azzies on the other bank. Neither party registered any hits but Boot liked a nice, relaxing round of target shooting as much as the next guy. He was warming to spending some fair chunk of the rest of his afternoon that way when his compadre rudely interrupted.
"Frag! Frag! Boot, left flank, left flank!" Grendel was screaming. "They're flanking us… LAV across the river!"
Boot looked calmly to his left, his blank eyes surveying the gulch which the bridge crossed. The languid, muddy carpet of the Platte filled most of it, bordered with sagebrush and crumbling dirt banks with the occasional scrubby tree thrown in for color.
But three hundred meters north, there was a more gradual slope leading from the street down to the river. An orange and gold ground-effect LAV was nosing firmly, but cautiously down and dipping its snout into the river. White spray flew up ahead and to both side of the skirts as it settled down on the water.
"Use the rocket," Boot said, turning to look quizzically at his compatriot. It had worked like crackerjack before.
"It's a fraggin' one-off, you bleeder," Grendel yelled back. "There's no more ammo!"
That was a disappointment, Bootleg felt. If you paid a premium for a rocket launcher, what fun was it if you only got one launch out of it? That was barely enough to get the rocketing party even warmed up.
"Frag this for a game o' soldiers!" Grendel yelled. "We held the damn bridge long enough, let's go!"
Boot calmly stepped forward onto the bridge so that the concrete rail put him in defilade from the LAV wallowing through the river toward him. The closest place it could climb out again was adjacent to the bridge, so it would be right in their teeth when it got out of the water. He crouched so the slight arch of the bridge itself provided cover against the Azzies swarming along the opposite ramp.
"Go, then," he said into his commlink. "I've got it."
"Jesus Frag, you psychotic breeder! The LAVs are long gone, we're gonna get left here if we don't book it soon anyway! I'm not signing up for suicide for no bloody good reason!"
Boot realized suddenly that the slope of the bridge ramp made the base, on either side, a natural grenade trap. Even a mediocre lob over the middle of the bridge would result in the grenade rolling down the slope and stopping to explode in the dip where the bridge met the regular roadway along the other side. He was standing in that trap now. The only way out of it was either back along the street, or forward further up the slope of the bridge.
He moved forward in a crouch.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" screamed Grendel. "Boot… Boot, man, get back here!" A rattle of fire from Grendel's FN-HAR punctuated the sentence; Boot's ears tracked the rounds crossing the river toward the Azzies, and then damped out the cacophony of return fire. It sounded like there were a lot more of them over there now.
He spun briefly and gave Grendel a grin and a thumb's up, to show he'd heard and approved of the outgoing fire. Grendel, wide-eyed and hopping mad, grimaced back and made a spinning circle adjacent to his temple with his off-hand.
"You're bloody barking, mate," the Irishman said with a note of finality in his tone. "I'm for Tango." Another rattle of fire followed, and then silence, for which Bootleg was grateful. The constant prattle had been starting to harsh his Zen.
The LAV on his left was going to be a problem, though. He'd never really gone up against armor before, just the usual sneaking around LAV patrols in odd, dark places. He'd heard Papa say that their view wasn't great unless they deployed drones, and he didn't see any drones here; probably dissuaded by the high-caliber fire he and Grendel had been putting out.
But he also knew that most LAVs weren't hardened as much on top as on the sides and front. And the one crawling through the river now both probably could not see him and was showing him its roof like it was a fragging billboard.
Boot squirmed over to the edge of the bridge and peeked through the railing. He could see the LAV just fine, about mid-stream and advancing slowly across the languid current, leaving spray and roiled water behind.
Better yet, he didn't seem to be exposed to the Azzie forces on the opposite bank. He didn't have any time to lose, though; with Grendel gone, he'd have to make quite a fuss on his own to convince the Azzies the bridge was still held in force. He angled Vera awkwardly to fire down through the railing without exposing her tender muzzle. Boot took aim at the most fragile bit of kit he could see on the top of the LAV turret, a goggly looking thing that was probably some visual sensor or other, and let her rip.
The sensor array jerked and sparked satisfactorily and bent in the middle and went all dangly. Boot was shifting his focus slightly to another sensor panel when, to his disbelief, a hatch opened in the top of the vehicle! A helmeted head poked out, looking in the direction of the damaged sensor stalk.
It was unbelievably good fortune and Boot didn't allow his disbelief to prevent a quick reaction. He keyed in on the top of the helmet and let Vera go again. The drab ceramic globe shattered and sprouted a dozen holes and then dropped from view, leaving only the open hatch in view. Boot's left hand had already let go of Vera and was mining his fatigue pants pocket for a grenade. He thought he remembered that was where the incendiaries had gone that morning.
But he didn't bother to look when he finally fished one out, because the LAV was still moving and getting closer. He left Vera on the ground and stood up. This was going to be the dangerous part, in full view of the Azzies on the opposite shore still. But he'd never thrown a perfect spiral from the prone position before and figured he probably couldn't do so now.
Fire snapped close around him as he sprung to his feet but he had already keyed the grenade and hauled back to launch it. He figured he'd get hit but hoped it wouldn't be until he let loose the grenade… it would probably throw off his aim. Boot had played a lot of Urban Brawl in his misguided youth. He'd been a Heavy, and a fair passer in his day. Muscle replacement and enhanced cybervision couldn't have hurt that old dormant skill set.
He pretended it was a Brawl ball and chucked the grenade. It didn't have the heft or feel of a regulation Brawl ball, but it was enough. He dropped prone again instantly but didn't take his eye off the grenade as it spiraled through the air over the mud-brown river and dropped neatly into the open hatch of the LAV, just as it was beginning to mount the near-bank.
A puff of thick smoke out the hatch made him worry initially that he'd accidentally grabbed a smoke grenade, but the rush of flame that chased the smoke out of the way an instant later reassured him that it was, after all, an incendiary. The LAV sped up immediately, taking the bank far too fast and at the wrong angle. Flame shot out of vents and popped other hatches open as the vehicle reared up, slid sideways, and finally rolled over back into the river with a roar and a cloud of steam. The fans blasted uselessly in mid-air as it plunged beneath the surface. Geysers of muddy water blew skyward, showering back over the bridge and landing in great muddy gouts on the dusty shore.
There were a few seconds of quiet and then a great burst of fire came from the far shore as furious Azzie security teams spent their futile rage at him.
It was important now to keep moving around, but the forces on either flank would pretty much restrict the available area to the bridge ramp now, at least until he decided to try to leave. Boot hadn't quite figured out how that part might happen yet, but he was a pretty easy-going fella, and wasn't worried about meeting the challenge when it arrived. The challenge now was to prevent the Azzies from mounting a main-force assault across the river and dislodging him. He could keep the ones on the opposite shore at bay indefinitely with occasional bursts of fire, no matter how far down the flanks they went. Their only real route across now was the bridge itself. And incompetent though they were, there were enough of them on the scene now that he couldn't handle them if they all rushed up at once.
He picked Vera up in one hand again and crawled up to the crest of the bridge. He didn't dare put his head over now. He had a fragmentary grenade out, and he keyed it low and tossed it over, hoping it would explode before it got down in the trap. He couldn't tell exactly where it went off, but there were yells from the other side, so it had the desired effect: told him they were coming, and slowed a couple of them down some, probably.
But he couldn't wait for a consolidated wave of them to appear in his lap suddenly. He needed a way to fire safely at a slightly greater range than between himself and the crest. And in that moment, the Xhen still sat askew very nearly at the crest of the bridge, its top just visible from where Boot lay.
He'd always found it better not to think things through overmuch during a run so he was on his feet and sprinting over the crest, right toward the Azzies, before he'd really considered all the implications. If he had done, he'd probably never have tried it. But as he skidded to the ground again next to the Xhen, somewhat surprised to find himself there, he reasoned that if he had surprised himself, then he had probably really surprised the Azzies.
He popped up into a crouch and fired through the windows at the closest splashes of orange and gold that he could see through the wavy, crazed glass. A fusillade of return fire set the Xhen to rocking. He set Vera down gently on the pavement beside him.
Still crouched, Boot slid both hands beneath the low-slung Xhen. His cheek came to rest against the carbon-fiber door panel, pleasantly warmed by the high-altitude sun. His fingers curled underneath the frame grid and he began to lift.
The Xhen wasn't one of those modern, lightweight marvels that Detroit was turning out these days. There was some real heft to it, which was exactly what made it ideal for his purposes, but also made it a stone-cold bitch to lift for any fewer than three strong men.
He had real reason to believe that he was every bit the equal to three strong men. Though he prided himself on not being one of those pussy-wipes that grunted out the pain while lifting, a small noise of some sort escaped his lips as he heaved the car up off the ground. His leg jacks whined in protest and he felt that powerful burn that kicked in when his muscle implants were working overtime. Pebbles popped and skittered out from beneath his boots as he took the weight. Ponderously, the Xhen tipped up onto its right side, the task becoming easier as the mass of the beast started to work for him as he passed eighty degrees of inclination or so. It nearly got away from him, rocking two or three times as it dropped onto its right side, but he grabbed out at the now-exposed grid on the underside and steadied it, even as he heard rounds smacking into the roof on the other side.
Boot bent down and picked up Vera again. He shook her gently to dislodge any free-riding dirt that may have come up with her from the pavement and then popped the magazine out and switched to her optional belt feed. He held her grip firmly in his right hand and got a couple loops of ammunition loosely in his left, then shuffled around to the front of the car, where the engine block would provide the greatest coverage (and, incidentally, the greatest distance from the fuel tank at the rear). Cautiously, he inched to the outside, covering the slowly broadening arc until he caught his first glimpse of a golden uniform coming up the sidewalk with its own rifle extended and the gaping, flushed battle-face of the newly initiated.
Boot gently squeezed the trigger and let his smartgun-link do the talking. Empty casings ran out the right side of Vera's bolt and cascaded down into the body of the Xhen. The Azzie soldier fell forward; not so fast that Boot did not get a good look at the googles he wore, or the wire attaching them to the man's own rifle. So, they had smartgun links too! It made sense, he figured, save 'em a bundle on marksmanship training, and they weren't implanted, like his, so you could just wipe 'em off and hand 'em over to the next piece of cannon fodder after the first one got slotted.
If there were one on that side, there was certainly one on the other, but as fast as the thought came to him, it was still too slow. Even has he turned to engage, a flash of gold and a splash of yellow outlined the guard shooting at him as he came around the back corner of the Xhen. Boot felt the round thud into his chest and Vera yank off-target slightly as he returned fire. He missed but he knew it before he had fired. He slammed himself left, into the bottom frame of the car, and saw the guard fire wide as well. Boot's next shot was true: the guard slipped and staggered back around to the other side of the vehicle.
There was no time to assess what damage the shot had done. His damage compensator had kicked in and he was feeling no pain. What was important was that his arms still moved, he was breathing, and his capacity appeared undiminished in the near term.
He made full use of what he had to unsling another grenade and pitch it up in the air over the other side of the car. As designed, it exploded there in mid-air, showering the top of the car and the opposing ramp with fragments. More yells. Boot brought Vera up and around the front bumper and fired blind, taking returns from the guards still occupying the flanks on the opposite bank. He ignored them and dodged back to do the same on the south side of the car. Then he flipped another grenade over, this one an incendiary, since he was out of frags. He found himself momentarily hashed off at Grendel. The other samurai had been annoying and loud but he had a good stock of ammunition and ordnance with him. Boot might have found that beneficial to tap into right about now.
There followed an apparently interminable period during which Boot tried to surprise the Azzies by ducking out around the vehicle in unexpected moments and at unfavorable angles, and in which they attempted to return the favor, in between showering him with grenades of their own (which they appeared to have in nearly limitless supply) and shouting various Spanish imprecations which, annoyingly, he was unable to understand. Boot had imagined that he had previously sampled all the various ways in which his chosen profession could be godsawful boring, but this was the first opportunity he had had to be bored in the middle of an actual firefight.
But there were many of them and only one of him, and he was slowly finding his avenues of unexpected retaliation dominated by fires from the other side of the bridge and the opposite shore. Someone powerful had arrived, an organizing force he could sense in the opposition, and it seemed like only a matter of time before they goaded the security teams into making a full-on frontal rush across the pavement, an assault against which he had no real defense. Or, worse, unleashed a mage on him.
What he did have, still, was the Xhen propped up in front of him. At the moment, and to his faint surprise, it had still not burst into flames, though it was smoldering inside from various grenade and tracer rounds.
Then it came to him: bursting into flames was exactly what he needed of it! He just needed to ensure it did so while next to the Azzies, and not himself. And he had just the tool for the job. Boot reached down into his apparently bottomless fatigue pants pocket and produced a magnetic grenade. Floss had laughed at him when he'd stowed it there that morning.
"Boot, you're like a gods-damned evil Boy Scout," she said.
They didn't have Boy Scouts in the Barrens, but then, there hadn't been that many little old ladies trying to cross the street, either. Anyway, he'd bought the damned thing a year ago almost and was still looking for a good place to use it. The Xhen was as good as any, he figured.
He slapped the magnetic grenade onto the frame next to the exposed fuel tank and keyed it for a thirty second count. If he took much longer than that to get clear of it he was probably dead anyway, he reasoned. Without thinking too much about it, he reached out and shook it once to reassure himself the device was secure—it was the little things that got you, he knew, having seen more than one acquaintance prematurely terminate their career with careless application of high explosives—and simultaneously depressed the two opposing switches to make it live.
Boot stood and grabbed onto the rear bumper and leaned back on it. The car began to pivot on its side, the front spinning slowly toward the Azzie side of the bridge. The incessant fire from that direction wavered and slacked off. They could tell he was up to something but couldn't be sure what, and the curiosity appeared to have got the better of their suppression discipline.
That was fine with Bootleg. He was going to be exposed enough as it was, if he lived long enough to finish what he had in mind.
When the car was about a quarter turned, the shooters on the left flank started to get a glimpse of him and rounds smacked into the bottom of the car, uncomfortably close to both himself and the fuel tank. Having expected this eventuality, Boot shifted quickly to the right. He stood atop the bridge in full view of the Azzies on the right flank and probably even some on the other end of the bridge, but their evident surprise at this sudden exposure awarded him several seconds of relatively light incoming fire. He grasped the moment, and the trunk lid of the Xhen, and gave a mighty, hydraulic-assisted shove.
The car dropped back down onto all four wheels quickly and Boot went to the ground as bullets started flying rapidly again, chewing into the body and roof of the vehicle.
He'd been hit two or three times as he stood, despite the slacking of fire and the limited accuracy of his opposition. He could feel blood soaking through his clothes and running down his arms. He hoped Vera wasn't getting too much on her. But he still wasn't feeling anything particularly bad and there was work to do. He turned his attention back to the Xhen.
The tires, crucially, had been protected by their previous orientation toward his side of the bridge, and remained inflate. The Azzies continued to fire higher rather than lower.
Boot scrambled on his belly around to the rear bumper again, then sat up with his back against it. He shoved yet again with his now-protesting hydraulic jacks. One foot skidded briefly and he looked down to see that he was standing in a puddle of hydraulic fluid; a trail of the pink stuff ran down the outside of his pant leg. He shifted his feet slightly to drier ground and pushed again.
Perched nearly at the top of the low rise of the bridge, the car began moving almost immediately. Boot gave it one last good shove. He used the push to spring himself off in the opposite direction, back down to the sweet, safe pavement of his side of the bridge, but not before being hit twice more, this time in the leg and bottom of one foot, the latter of which stung something fierce. He started rolling, leaving behind all his gear but Vera, protecting her by taking the pavement on his forearms at each rotation. It would have been faster to crouch and run, but something was wrong with the leg that had taken the hit… leg jack jammed or out of fluid or something, he thought. It didn't hurt that much but something wasn't working right and he doubted he could move at all without standing up completely.
The car exploded while he was still thinking about the leg. He was sheltered from it entirely on his side of the bridge, but he could see the orange fireball and black smoke rising from the far ramp, and pieces of metal started to rain back down on him after a few moments.
But that was about it, he thought. Vera was down to her last twenty rounds, hardly a burp for an HVAR, and he had a little peashooter Taurus that was probably still secured to one hip—he hadn't really looked recently—but that wouldn't help much to stop a horde of pissed-off Azzies coming up over the ramp to avenge their dead.
A wail of turbines and screeching tires from his side of the bridge told him that moment had come.
He rolled over onto his stomach, grasping the Taurus, which was a little more wieldy than Vera for close-in work. But what he saw wasn't an Aztechnology patrol car, but instead a familiar Mustang, with a familiar face glaring at him out the passenger window.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Get the frag off the damned bridge, Bootleg!" Grendel yelled out the window. Bootleg was touched. Grendel wasn't usually all that thoughtful.
"Damned if I'm not trying'," he confessed. But he probably hadn't spoken loudly enough to crest the cacophony that was still coming from the other side of the bridge: crackling small arms fire, the slightly less sharp sound of burning rounds cooking off, quite a lot of vituperative yelling, and some hellish screaming of the sort you tended to hear when folks were afire and not yet unconscious.
The door to the Mustang gulled open and Grendel was sprinting out across the bridge ramp toward him, followed by some additional yelling, this from Ryder, the rigger.
"Gods-damn you, Grendel, get back in the fragging car! We got no time for this shit, they're closing fast!"
"Cork it before I light you up too, you bleak beggar," Grendel yelled back as he reached Bootleg and latched onto the big samurai's collar. "And you!" he yelled at Boot. "Daft bugger, get on your bleeding feet or I swear I'll leave you here so's they can burn you."
With such encouragement, Bootleg did find his feet, noting that he had been correct about the left legjack being jammed. Grendel noticed as well and got under his left shoulder and shoved while simultaneously kicking at Boot's left leg with his own right foot, and the two of them did an odd and quick sort of Prussian potato-sack march back to the Mustang. Ryder had the door open and was sitting up in his own window, looking over the roof of the car with an assault rifle covering the bridge and opposing bank, but they were apparently still in defilade and he didn't fire for lack of targets.
Grendel put some back into his last push and shoved Bootleg into the rear passenger compartment of the Mustang, as far as he would go, but a few feet of lower leg still stuck out. Another shove was enough to make Boot's eyes cross with pain, to no measurable effect. Ryder lit off with the rifle overhead, sending spent shell casings cascading down the rear window overhead.
"Get in! Get in, Grendel, Gods-dammit! Get in now!" Ryder yelled in between bursts. Such was his haste—and it was no doubt accelerated by return fire that Boot heard and felt ticking into the Mustang's frame—that he abandoned the Colt atop the car and slid down inside while still commanding max acceleration. The Mustang, no limp-dicked piece of machinery even before their crew of grease monkeys had gotten under the hood and souped it up, laid down a smoking patch and took off north along the river road. Boot found it fortunate that, among their other ministrations, the riggers had replaced the cushioned seats standard in the back of the Mustang with sturdy mesh, lest he find himself smothered by the G-forces and what he could only imagine must have been Grendel's weight crushing down on him from above.
There followed some few minutes of roaring engine noises punctuated with troublesome creaking and groaning from the vehicle's suspension, and quite a lot of torturous tire screeching. Gunfire followed them and Grendel and Ryder had apparently entered into a creative profanity competition of sorts, which they had not invited Bootleg to join, but neither of them troubled to fire back. Eventually, both the cursing and other noises diminished and only the low rumble of the engine and hum of tires on pavement filled the car.
"Did we win?" Boot ventured.
"Well, we're not dead, if that's what you mean," Grendel said, looking down at him. "Though I may reserve judgement, in your case, depending on how much of that's blood and how much is hydraulic fluid."
"No bleeding in my ride!" Ryder yelled back at them. "We're almost at the RV. You can damn well hold it until then."
Bootleg thought about this for a moment.
"What about the hydraulic fluid?" he asked.
Grendel fumed for a moment.
"I gotta case in the trunk," he said finally. "We'll top you up at the next stop."
With that reassurance in his ears and the regular growling of the tires on good Sioux pavement, Bootleg clasped Vera tightly and drifted off to sleep.