The Tank Lords(79)

Ranson rose in a crouch. Her legs felt wobbly. She must have hit them against the coaming as she leaped out of the fighting compartment. She staggered back toward Warmonger.

Shots rang against the armor. A chip of white-hot tungsten ripped through both sides to scorch her thighs.

She tried to call Stolley, but her voice was a croak inaudible even to her over the roar of the flames in Warmonger's belly.

The handgrips on the armor were hot enough to sear layers from her hands as she climbed back into the fighting compartment.

Stolley lay crumpled against the bulkhead. He was still breathing, because she could see bubbles forming in the blood on his lips. She gripped his shoulders and lifted, twisting her body.

The synthetic fabric of her trousers was being burned into her flesh as she balanced. Janacek crawled toward them, though what help he could be . . .

Because her back was turned, June Ranson didn't see the tank's cannon rock back and forth as it fired, aiming low into Warmonger's hull. She felt the impacts of armor-piercing shot ringing on iridium—

But only for an instant, because this burst fractured the car's fusion bottle.



Dick Suilin was looking over his shoulder toward the bow of Flamethrower when the center of his visor blacked. Through the corners of his eyes, the reporter saw foliage withering all around him in the heat of the plasma flare. His hands and the part of his neck not shielded by visor or breastplate prickled painfully.

The gout of stripped atoms lasted only a fraction of a second. Warmonger's hull, empty as the shell of a fossil tortoise, continued to blaze white.

The Yokel tank, its cannon nodding for further prey, squealed past the wreckage.

Suilin's tribarrel was still pointed to cover the car's rear quadrant. Cooter's burst splashed upwards from the tank's glacis plate, blasting collops from the sheath and ceramic core.

Before the tribarrel could penetrate the armor at its point of greatest thickness, the tank's 60mm gun cracked out a three-round clip. Dick Suilin's world went red with a crash that struck him like a falling anvil.

The impact knocked him forward. He couldn't hear anything. The fighting compartment was brighter, because cannon shells had blown away the splinter shield overhead. The sun streamed down past the bare poles of plasma-withered trees.

The ready light over his tribarrel's trigger no longer glowed green. Suilin rotated the switch the way Gale had demonstrated a lifetime earlier. The metal felt cool on his fingertips.

The cannon's muzzle began to recoil behind a soundless yellow flash. Warmonger shuddered as Suilin's thumbs pressed his butterfly trigger. Cyan bolts roiled the bottle-shaped flare of unburned powder, then carved the mantlet before the 60mm gun could cycle to battery and fire again.

Steel blazed, sucked inward, and blew apart like a bomb as the tank's ready ammunition detonated.

Suilin's tribarrel stopped firing. His thumbs were still locked on the trigger. A stream of congealed plastic drooled out of the ejection port. The molten cases had built up until they jammed the system.

The hull of the vehicle Dick Suilin had destroyed was burning brightly. Another tank crawled around it. The Consie on the second tank's turret was mouthing orders down the open hatch.

The long cannon swung toward Flamethrower.

Lieutenant Cooter rose to his hands and knees on the floor of the fighting compartment. His helmet was gone. There was a streak of blood across the sweat-darkened blond of his hair. He shook himself like a bear surrounded by dogs.

Gale sprawled, halfway out of the fighting compartment. A high-explosive round had struck him between the shoulderblades. It was a tribute to the trooper's ceramic body armor that one arm was still attached to what remained of his torso.

Suilin unslung his grenade launcher, aimed at the tank thirty meters away, and squeezed off. He couldn't hear his weapon fire, but the butt thumped satisfyingly on his shoulder. His eye followed the missile on its flat arc to the face of the tank's swivelling turret.

The grenades were dual purpose. Their cases were made of wire notched to fragment, but they were wrapped around a miniature shaped charge that could piece light armor.

Armor lighter than the frontal protection of a tank. The guerrilla flung his arms up and toppled, his chest clawed to ruins by shrapnel, but the turret face was only pitted.

The tank moved forward as it had to do so that as the turret rotated, the long gun would clear the burning wreckage of the sister vehicle.

Cooter dragged his body upright. He was still on his knees. The big man gripped the hull to either side of his tribarrel, blocking Suilin from any chance of using that weapon.

No time anyway. The reporter's grenades burst on the turret, white sparks that gouged the armor but didn't penetrate, couldn't penetrate.

Two hits, three—not a hand's breadth apart, remarkable rapid-fire shooting as the turret swung.