The Tank Lords(44)

The second truck was a civilian unit with a mountain landscape painted on the passenger door and MASALLAH in big metalized letters across the radiator. Other than that, it was the same as the first: a stake-bed with twelve rubber tires and about sixty bloody Consies in back.

MASALLAH. God help us. They'd need God's help when the tribarrels started slicing into 'em.

The third truck came abreast with its gearbox moaning. Yokel maintenance was piss-poor, at least from what Ortnahme'd seen of it. Guess it didn't matter, not if they were handing over their hardware to the Consies.

Nobody in the trucks looked up, though they were within fifty meters of Task Force Ranson. Half the distance was vertical . . . which was a problem in itself for Ortnahme, since the guns in the turret and cupola of Herman's Whore couldn't depress as low as the pintle-mounted weapons of the combat cars.

"Tootsie, this is Blue One," said the radio. "Vehicles approaching the bridge from the west, too."

"Bloody marvelous," somebody muttered on the general push. It might have been the warrant leader himself.

"Roger, Blue One," replied Ranson coolly. "They're stopping, so it shouldn't affect us. Six out."

The gunnery pipper didn't bear on the trucks when they were directly below Herman's Whore. Life being what it bloody was, that's where Ortnahme's target would be when the balloon went up.

"Simkins," the warrant leader said, "when I give the word, get us over the edge. Got that? Not even a bloody eyeblink later."

"Yessir," agreed the intercom. "Ah, sir . . . ?"

Ortnahme grimaced. The fourth truck was below them. "Go ahead."

"Sir, won't the guards be even more alerted if we start shooting before we cross the bridge? Than if we'd gone sooner, I mean?"

"Yeah," Ortnahme said, stating the bloody obvious, but this wasn't the time to tear a strip off the kid. "But we don't want a Consie battalion waiting for us on the other side, do we? It's the hand we got, kid, so we play it."

"Yessir," Simkins agreed. "I just wondered."

From his voice, that's all it was.

Maybe Simkins hadn't figured out that one real likely response from an altered guard detachment would be to blow the bloody bridge—maybe with most of Task Force Ranson learning to fly a hundred meters above the Padma River.

The fifth truck, Yokel Army again, grunted and snarled its way onto Screen Two. Ortnahme's pipper quivered across the canvas top, bloody useless unless the Consies all died of fright when the main gun ripped over their heads, but he still had a view of the troops. There was something funny about this lot. They were wearing armbands, and their uniforms—

"All Tootsie elements—"

"Simkins, go!" the warrant leader shouted.

Herman's Whore lurched sideways and down. Startled faces glanced upward in the magnified display, warned at last but only a microsecond before the command push added, "Fire!"

The pure, heart-wrenching blue of powerguns firing saturated the roadcut. Ortnahme's foot took up the slack in the gun pedal as his tank slid—and the orange pipper slid down onto one of the mouths screaming in the back of the fifth truck.

The 20cm bolt merged with a white and orange explosion. The whole truck was a fireball. Heated by the plasma, the steel chassis blazed with even greater venom than the contents of the fuel tanks and the flesh of the soldiers at the point of impact.

Ortnahme switched to his tribarrel as the tank rushed down the slope, its fans driving into a sea of flame.

Not that it mattered, but the troops in the truck he'd just destroyed weren't wearing black uniforms.

Three blazing figures lurched out of the inferno. Ortnahme shot them down, more as an act of mercy than of war.

They were in camouflaged National Army fatigues with black armbands, and they were carrying National Army assault rifles.

Not that it mattered.



"Fire!" June Ranson heard her voice say. Her visor opaqued, shutting out the double microsecond dazzles of Deathdealer's main gun firing almost on top of her, but the momentary blindness didn't matter. The battle was taking place within a holographic screen while Ranson watched it from above.

Her tribarrel scissored bolts across those of Stolley's weapon, turning fist-sized chunks of the leading truck into meter-diameter flashes colored by material that vaporized and burned: rubber/metal/wood across the truck; cloth/flesh/munitions as the muzzles lifted into the bed.

Metals burned with a gorgeous intensity of color, white and red and green.

The target exploded into a lake of fire that screamed. Willens kept Warmonger as high on her fans as he could as the combat car entered the roadcut at a barely-controlled slide and cranked hard right to follow Deathdealer up the bridge approach.