The colored ambiance surrounding Hansen shivered like glass struck by a brick. Sunlight and the glare of energy weapons made the hillside quiver.
The dragonfly emerged at the edge of the unburned forest, half a klick north of where Hansen had inserted. The undergrowth was torn. Facing away from Hansen were six lizardmen.
The Lomeri were mounted in pairs on blocky, broad-frilled triceratops. The beasts were in line abreast with about fifty meters separating each from the next. Containers with black, gray, and bright shimmering copper finishes were slung to their flanks.
The modules carried defensive electronics—and fed the wrist-thick barrel of the energy weapon which protruded above each triceratops' own triple horns.
The nearest Lomeri had reached the low ground between the forest and the magnolia-covered hill. They were the reserve line. Five more pairs of their fellows, also on heavily-burdened ceratopsians, had blasted their way through the brush to the hilltop.
The dragonfly's force bubble was made for general protection, not combat. Its controls would not spin an opening automatically when Hansen fired out. Hansen shut the bubble down, trusting in the lighter personal screen projected from his breastplate. His left hand swept the dragonfly toward the middle triceratops.
Hansen's right hand held the pistol he'd drawn as naturally as he breathed. He opened fire.
The ceratopsians carried forcefield projectors powerful enough to provide all-round protection against bolts from Hansen's pistol. Because the Lomeri thought they had only one intruder to deal with, they had shifted their defensive arrays so that the frontal arc facing Ritter was nearly opaque even to the optical spectrum.
Hansen shot the nearest pair from behind. The second lizardman died before his brain registered the actinic dazzle which had killed his fellow mounted at the console on the rear saddle.
The triceratops trundled on. It was not disturbed by the fact one of its riders had fallen to the ground and the other was slumped over his control console with a hole in his flat skull.
The instrument crewmen of the flanking teams both noticed the spike on their screens as a second intruder entered their plane almost on top of them.
Hansen shot at both ceratopsians, flicking his pistol barrel from one side to the other like a conductor's baton. He aimed at the large copper modules containing the power supplies.
One unit collapsed silently when the white bolt punched through its center. The shell of light distorted by the forcefield vanished from in front of the triceratops. Hansen fired twice more to finish the screaming riders before they could clear their personal weapons.
He didn't have to worry about the crew of the other beast. The power supply exploded in a sun-bright flash which devoured the lizardmen as well as the rear half of their mount.
The dragonfly skimmed past the tail of the beast whose electronics were intact. "Control," Hansen shouted. "Stop!"
The dragonfly was inertialess; its rider was not. Hansen slammed forward against the locked control column, bruising his palm.
He jumped off and ran to the triceratops. The mounting ladder which hung from its saddle was designed for longer, narrower feet than Hansen's. He snatched at it with his free hand, then holstered his pistol to get a better grip with his right. The beast continued to walk forward.
The pistol's ceramic barrel was white hot. The holster was extruded from refractory material which withstood the heat, but the fabric of Hansen's coveralls began to melt.
A volley of explosive projectiles raked across the dragonfly, sending up spouts of dirt. The little vehicle disintegrated.
Hansen pulled himself into the forward lobe of the saddle and swung the pintle-mounted energy weapon.
The magnolia thicket burned sluggishly wherever the Lomeri had not blasted it away as their mounts advanced deliberately on Ritter. The underlying soil had a great deal of silica in it. In some places the lizardmen had melted the ground to cups of glass around which even the triceratops' horny feet had to detour.
The air stank. The basic odors were of smoke and ash, but those were underlain by the complex, sickening molecular by-products of explosives through which stabbed ozone and other ions.
One of the lizardmen stood on his saddle and fired at Hansen with a shoulder weapon while his fellow tried desperately to turn their beast so that the forward-mounted main gun would bear.
The force screen of Hansen's ceratopsian muted to gray the flash of bullets hitting it. Even the cracks of the bursting charges were pillowed into thumps.
Hansen centered the sights of his hijacked energy weapon on the flank of the shooter's mount. The trigger guard is meant for slender, scaly fingers, but that isn't a serious problem.
Hansen's weapon jetted a line of blue radiance for as long as he held the trigger back. The target's forcefield held for a millisecond, then overloaded. Both power supply modules vanished in a huge green fireball, leaving a crater where eight tonnes of flesh and equipment had been a moment before.
Hansen didn't know how to control his mount, but the rate at which the beast plodded forward was faster than a man would walk. He didn't bother asking his helmet AI for a vector on his companion. He could be quite sure that the lizardmen had already pointed the triceratops in the right direction.
Two of the leading Lomeri teams had disappeared over the hill before they realized they were under attack from the rear, but the other pair were an immediate danger. One lizardman fired his main gun before it could bear an Hansen.
The Lomeri's blast raked the swale twenty meters away into a hell of smoke and steam, making himself the human's next target. Hansen aimed and fired at the sphere of protection.
Because the Lomeri was shooting out, there was already a hole in the forcefield. Hansen's bolt licked across the weapon and both riders, crisping them.
The triceratops squealed and lurched up on its hind legs alone. The top ten centimeters of its frill burned off in a razor-sharp line, but the beast was essentially uninjured. When its forefeet hit the ground again, it galloped away at racehorse speed.
The remaining driver had spun his mount to three-quarters frontal by the time Hansen rotated his weapon on target. The rear-seat crewman remained at the controls of his defensive electronics instead of jumping up to fire useless shots with his personal weapon at Hansen's full-density forcefield.
Hansen triggered a long burst anyway, lighting up the opposing armor just in case a portal opened as the lizardmen tried to shoot out. The forcefield remained solid. It pulsed across the spectrum, easily reradiating the energy Hansen's weapon poured into it.
The hostile ceratopsian now faced Hansen squarely. It strode forward. At any moment, one or both of the other Lomeri teams would trot back over the hill. Hansen would have to stop shooting or be caught in a crossfire while there was an aperture in his own forcefield.
Hansen lowered the muzzle of his weapon and blew a trench in the soil beneath the forefeet of his opponent's mount.
The triceratops lunged knee-deep in a pit of bubbling glass.
The beast screamed like the earth splitting. It threw itself backward and lifted its front legs into the air. Hansen ripped the triceratops' uncovered belly, killing the animal instantly before cutting upward into the module which controlled the forcefield.
When the protective hemisphere vanished, the Lomeri riders leaped from the saddle in opposite directions. Hansen's stream of blue fire turned them both to ash in midair.
The world around Hansen had slowed, but his body could not keep up with the kaleidoscopic impressions filling his mind. His triceratops continued to stride uphill, unconcerned by nearby bolts and burning flesh.
Hansen drew a slim-bladed knife from his boot and rammed it through the trigger guard of the pintle-mounted weapon, jamming the weapon to fire continuously. Then he jumped from the saddle and ran for the hilltop at an angle diverging from that of the triceratops. As he moved, he unslung his shoulder weapon.
The hillside was a smoldering, ash-strewn waste. It was hard to remember that this had been an expanse of magnolia flowers and the exuberant life which buzzed around them. Sparks stung Hansen's bare skin and melted speckles into his coveralls. The corpse of a saddled dinosaur lay on its side with one stiffening leg in the air. It was a carnosaur of some sort, not a ceratopsian like those the present Lomeri rode. Ritter had been busy.
A laden triceratops strode over the hilltop ten meters from Hansen. The lizardmen riding the beast were concentrating on the animal Hansen had hijacked, then abandoned. The Lomeri force screen was a narrow wedge, dark as a moon in eclipse, facing what they thought to be the threat.
Hansen shot from the flank and killed both crewmen with a single bolt. He continued to run.
Horns sounded from the forest. Another troop of lizardmen was arriving.
The hill's farther slope had not been stripped by energy weapons, though the crew Hansen just killed had blackened a tunnel through the gorgeous foliage. A knob of higher ground to the left protected Hansen from the surviving Lomeri fire team.
That was also the direction toward Ritter, according to Hansen's AI.
A projectile weapon fired nearby. It was either semiautomatic or set to cycle very slowly. Despite the muffling vegetation, the muzzle blasts seemed sharper than those of Lomeri carbines, and Hansen was sure the impacts had the characteristic cr-crack! of the engineer's duplex rounds.
A triceratops blundered through the brush just in front of Hansen. He had to jump aside to avoid its hooves. The force screen was a hemisphere of smoky crystal shadowed by the animal's beak and black-tipped horns.
Hansen poised with his weapon aimed up at a 45° angle, waiting for the discontinuity behind which he could hope to penetrate the lizardmen's front-focused protection.
If the lizardmen didn't fire first, through an aperture they could form by pointing a gun.
One of the Lomeri lay slumped over his console. Most of his skull was missing. His fellow had fallen out of the saddle. They had turned away from Ritter to meet the sudden threat of Hansen's arrival, but the engineer was not a toothless victim. . . .
"Ritter!" Hansen bellowed. "It's me! Don't shoot!"
He wondered if the engineer could hear after firing his high-powered rifle repeatedly. If Ritter shot at any movement, Hansen's personal forcefield might block the impact, but the damage Ritter had done was convincing proof of the effectiveness of his duplex ammunition.
"Ritter, I'm—" Hansen shouted and almost fired by reflex into the figure that loomed in front of him. A squat troll of a man, singed and blackened except where perspiration had runneled paths through the soot—
But a man. Ritter was alive.
Hansen threw down his weapon and stretched out his hand to touch the engineer. A lizardman mounted on a ceratosaurus crashed through the thicket five meters to Hansen's left. The creature's carbine was already aimed.
Ritter turned and brought up his own weapon.
"No!" Hansen screamed.
He was too late. The crack! of the engineer's shot merged with the devouring radiance of the Lomeri bolt which streamed through the hole in Ritter's force screen.
Hansen threw his arms around his friend and hurtled out of the plane with him. In the cold radiance of the Matrix, he could not hear the engineer screaming.
But black wings hovered nearby, a Searcher whom North had sent to carry away the soul of a dying hero.