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wished she could. But if the guerrilla gunners concentrated on her, then there was at least a chance Angel would succeed.
    The light cannon shifted aim toward Margulies. It had a three-round charger, so the tracers snapped out in trios. They left tight gray helices in the air, like the tailings of a metal drill.
    Angel ran toward the road train’s open cab. The machine gun pursued him, bullets flickering against the chassis and treads a half-step behind. The cargo boxes breathed blowtorch flames from every shell hole.
    An explosive bullet buried itself in the rim of loose dirt beneath Margulies and detonated. The shock threw her back as though she’d been hit by a medicine ball. She lay at the bottom of the crater, wheezing and blinking at the sky for a moment before she resumed crawling upward.
    When Margulies regained the crater lip, the only combat car she could see had been hit in the skirts by a shoulder-launched rocket. Air gushing through the jagged hole in the plenum chamber slowed the vehicle’s motions to those of a half-crushed cockroach, but the tribarrels were still in action.
    The two-segment road train staggered across the cleared ground like a drunken streetwalker. When one bogie or another found a soft spot the gigantic vehicle lurched, but each time inertia dragged it from the potential bog.
    Angel was steering toward the guerrillas’ automatic cannon.
    Three buzzbombs like the one that had disabled the combat car burst on the road train’s bow. The shaped-charge warheads went off with hollow thocks, like the sound of boards being slapped together. The cannon, the machine gun, and at least a dozen guerrilla riflemen were firing at the vehicle.
    Ricochets and explosive shells danced across the cab like a fireworks display. The protective windows were starred white, the armor was holed in a hundred places, and gray smoke or coolant trailed back from the power plant to mix with the flames shooting from the cargo boxes.
    The cab door opened fifty meters from the treeline. Angel somersaulted from the vehicle. He splashed into a muddy trench gouged by a main-gun bolt in the earlier ambush. He didn’t move. A machine gun had hosed the side of the cab as the Frisian left it.
    A guerrilla stood up in plain view to aim her buzzbomb at the road train. Smoke spurted from the back of the launcher as a rocket motor lobbed the missile into a near-side bogie. The warhead’s pearly flash enveloped the running gear for an instant. The track broke, shedding links behind it and pulling the vehicle slightly to the left as it continued to trundle onward.
    A single cyan bolt winked past the guerrilla’s face. She dropped her useless rocket launcher and unslung the automatic rifle from her back. Angel’s second pistol shot hit her in the chest. She spun as she fell to the ground.
    The road train kept up a walking pace as its battered bow crunched through the stunted trees. A guerrilla leaped desperately for the cab, caught his sandal in metal torn by gunfire, and toppled screaming beneath the second set of bogies. It wouldn’t have made much difference if he’d set his feet properly, because an instant later the munitions in the second segment exploded.
    The first charge bulged the sides of the cargo box. Margulies ducked in time, before the shock wave compressed the mass of burning propellants and detonated them. A blast hugely greater than that of the guerrilla mine flattened vegetation in a hundred-meter radius and sent tonnes of excavated soil skyward on an orange fireball.
    The surface waggled, flipping Margulies like a pancake. She hit the ground again and bounced onto her back, stunned but no more severely injured than the mine had left her. Dirt rained down for tens of seconds.
    All the shooting from the left side of the roadway ceased. A guerrilla, stark naked and bleeding from nose and ears, ran out of the trees. A tribarrel on the combat car roaring forward from the rear of the convoy cut the man in half.
    The