There was a brief pause, as vid screen flicked along the visible length of the cliff, large sections hidden behind the preDark buildings. Only a few of them still had fires burning in their guts. The rest were cold and dark, many beginning to crumble from the combination of fresh air, fire damage and the acid rain. The preDark city was dying before his eyes. In a few days this would be only a hole in the ground filled with rubbish and bones.
“Negative. The perimeter is clear. Mil-sat relays inoperative for unknown reason.”
Try the end of the world, tin brain. “Well done,” the baron complimented. “Stay razor.”
There was a long pause. “Razor, sir?”
Fuck! “Stay…sharp and on alert,” Gaza said carefully, feeling a trickle of sweat flow down his face. Damn, he had to be more careful than that.
“Roger, order confirmed, sir. Alert status will be maintained at razor level.”
Unnerved, the baron arched an eyebrow at that but forced himself to say nothing. So it learned, eh? That was both good and bad. He was riding a wild mutie here, but there was no other way out of this hellhole but this behemoth.
Hunched in the gunner’s chair, Kathleen held her eyes closed tight, hands over both ears. She was clearly terrified by the sentient machine. Gaza sneered—well, too fucking bad. There were lots of sluts in the world to replace her, but only one behemoth. Yeah, good name.
“Alert, change of plans,” he decided. “We shall leave the area and begin digging efforts. But shoot anything you see. The…enemy has a lot of missiles and they must be stopped.”
“Confirmed.”
Setting the tank in motion, Gaza was first startled, then delighted at the smoothness of its ride. Somehow the machine adjusted itself to always stay level, even as it rolled over the preDark cars. On the side monitors, the machine was passing dozens of stores ripe for the looting. But that wasn’t pressing at the moment. There was a stash of MRE packs in the tank, enough for him and Kathleen for a few days. After that, he could get all he needed from the Trader. He knew that she had hidden depots across the Deathlands filled with fuel, food, rockets, everything. The tank was powered by some tech thing called a fusion reactor, so didn’t need any fuel, but the rest would come in handy as rewards for his new army of sec men.
As it cleared a squat monolithic structure, the western face of the cliff came into direct view and now the turret swung around and hummed again, a fireball instantly exploding on the rocks.
“Is this what we’re firing?” the baron asked, lifting a plastic cube in his hand.
“Confirmed,” the machine responded as the cannon hummed again, and then again.
The baron turned the object about so that it reflected the rainbow lights from the complex control boards. At first he had thought it was sort of paperweight or target marker. The thing was only a greenish cube about the size of his fist. There was no brass, no C-4, not anything that he recognized as dangerous.
“Explain how this works to my civilian wife,” the baron said, pronouncing the old words carefully and glancing at the woman cowering in the chair.
The machine started into a tech talk involving kinetic energy and caloric conversion that was far beyond his understanding of such things. But he slowly got the idea. Yeah, a strong man could hold a bullet in his hand and throw it at you with all of his strength and it wasn’t going to do anything. The bullet wasn’t dangerous; it was the speed of the lead. This thing took those cubes and fired them so nuking fast they hit like bombs.
“How many more in storage?” he demanded, placing the cube aside with some reverence.
“Four hundred nine.” The cannon hummed. “Four hundred eight.”
And the truck in the park was filled with thousands of them. Once he got out of this fucking city, there was nothing and nobody in the world that could stand before this monster war wag.
“Hit the new cliff lower so the rocks pull themselves down,” he directed. “Then hit the fresh fall high to widen the destruction. Gotta have a wide path for a wag…for a tank of this size.”