The Tank Lords(75)

The tanks were parked in the creek to either side of the road. Less than a three-meter hull width separated each vehicle from its neighbors. While the turret crews fed their guns, the tank drivers stood on both ends of the line of vehicles, mixing with a dozen guerrillas in black uniforms.

The dismounted men covered their ears with their palms and opened their mouths to equalize pressure from the muzzle blasts. When the three combat cars slid from the forest, their hands dropped but their mouths continued to gape like the jaws of gaffed fish.

Men spun and fell, shedding body parts, as Ranson's tribarrel lashed them. The group on the east side of the lined-up tanks had time to shout and run a few steps before Warmonger raced down Upper Creek as though the gravel bed were a highway, giving Ranson and Stolley shots at them also.

The Yokel tanks couldn't react fast enough to be an immediate danger, but a single Consie rifleman could clear Warmonger's fighting compartment.

Could have. When the last black-clad guerrilla flopped at the edge of the treeline, Willens spun Warmonger in a cataclysm of spray and the three tribarrels blazed into the backs on the renegade tanks.

One-one and One-five had followed Warmonger into the stream, but they hadn't had to worry about the dismounted enemy. Two of the left-side tanks were already wrapped in sooty orange palls of burning diesel fuel. The turret blew off a third as main gun ammunition detonated in the hull.

Ranson centered her projection sight on a tank's back deck, just behind the turret ring. The target's slope gave her a perfect shot. Cyan bolts streamed through the holographic image of her sight, splashing huge craters in thin armor designed only to stop shell splinters.

In gunnery simulators, the screaming tank crew didn't try to abandon their vehicle a second or two after it was too late. Ranson's bolts punched into the interior of the tank. A blast of foul white smoke erupted from the turret hatches and the cavity ripped by the tribarrel.

The tank commander and the naked torso of his gunner flew several meters in the air. The tank began to burn sluggishly.

June Ranson's hands swung for another target, but there were no targets remaining here.

The tanks' thickest armor was frontal. Striking from above and behind, the tribarrels ripped them as easily as so many cans of sardines.

Cans of barbecued pork. The gunnery simulators didn't provide the odor of close action, either.

All the ammunition on a Yokel tank detonated simultaneously, pushing aside the nearest vehicles and flinging the turret roof fifty meters in the air in a column of smoke.

"Willens, steer three hundred degrees," Ranson heard/said. "West element, form on me."

Her eyes sought the multi-function display, while part of her mind wondered why she couldn't blend with Cooter's vehicles when she wanted to know their progress. . . .



Dick Suilin's ribs slammed hard against the edge of the fighting compartment as Flamethrower grounded heavily on its mad rush through the scrub forest. The reporter swore and wondered whether he'd be pissing blood in the morning, despite the clamshell armor that protected his kidney from the worst of the shock.

In the morning. He made a high-pitched sound somewhere between laughter and madness.

He'd fallen sideways because the only thing that he had to hang onto were the grips of his tribarrel. That was pointed over the left side, at ninety degrees to the combat car's direction of motion. The reporter swung back and forth as his weapon pivoted.

The blazing red-orange hairline on his visor demanded Suilin cover the left side. He horsed his gun in the proper direction again, wincing at the pain in his side, and tried to find a target in the whipping foliage.

There was no doubt where Flamethrower's artificial intelligence wanted him to aim, though the rational part of the reporter's mind wondered why. They had—they were supposed to have—enveloped the enemy's right wing, so the first targets would be on the right side of Flamethrower. . . .

He supposed Daisy Belle was somewhere behind them. He supposed the other vehicles of the task force were somewhere also. He hadn't seen much of them. . . .

Dick Suilin supposed a lot of things; but all he knew was that his side hurt, his hands hurt from their grip on the automatic weapon, and that he really should've pissed in the minute while they waited for the go signal.

Flamethrower slid through a curtain of reeds. Two meters from the muzzle of Suilin's tribarrel, that close, was a tank with its hatches open, bogged in a swale. The soil was so damp that water gleamed in the ruts the treads had squeezed before being choked to a halt.

Right where the AI's vector had said it would be.

Suilin clamped his trigger so convulsively that he forgot for a moment that he was pointing a weapon. Two bolts splashed on the turret face, cyan and white, blazing steel, before several following rounds exploded stems and flattened further swathes in the reeds with blasts of steam and flying cellulose.