Just then a patter of splats hit the hull of the tank, the noise softened by the dense triple armor. Then the rain arrived full force, sheets crashing over the machine, but even the mighty thunder was baffled down to a mere murmur.
Nervously, Gaza and Kathleen watched the floor and walls for any sign of a leak, but the interior of the war wag stayed dry, and there wasn’t the slightest trace of the rotten egg stink of the deadly rain. Then Gaza frowned as he realized that even the smell of the preburner fuel was gone. There had to be some sort of automatic venting.
Sitting in the commander’s chair, Gaza ran his hands across the shiny console, thinking of what he could do with only one such machine and wishing with all of his might that the tank was still operational.
“Power,” he whispered softly, thinking of the empire he could build with just one such machine.
“Order received,” the flat voice said from nowhere. “Switching from standby status to primary power.”
His chest pounding in fear, Gaza tried to breathe as the interior lights slowly grew in strength until giving a smooth white light. Then the baron laughed in delight. The nuking thing was still functioning, with some sort of preDark comp running the controls. Blind norad be praised, this was the find of a lifetime!
“Please, identify,” a flat voice rumbled.
Fuck that, Gaza snorted angrily, he took orders from nobody, especially machines. “No, you identify!” he snapped. “And be quick about it!”
A blinding fan of thin green light came out of the console and played across the baron, stopping at the cluster of decorations pinned to the shirt taken from the deader in the first APC at the head of the convoy.
“Working,” the voice intoned. “Acknowledged. Ident confirmed, Lieutenant Colonel Anderson. What are your orders, sir?”
Trying to hide his excitement, Gaza glanced at the colorful collection of rainbow colored plastic squares in three neat rows. He had taken the stuff just because it looked pretty. But they had to have been symbols of some sort, the deader in the APC a chief sec man in his day. Now this dumbass machine thought Gaza was the long gone person simply because of the clothing? Excellent.
“We’re in the middle of a nuking chem storm,” the baron started, then cursed himself for a feeb. He had to speak old talk.
“Correction,” he said slowly. “There is an…NBC storm outside. Seal the fuc…seal every vent and make sure none of that dreck…poison gets inside.”
There was a short pause.
“Acknowledged,” the voice said, and suddenly from every direction there sounded slams and hisses. A moment later, clean smelling dry air started blowing from the vents set under the control boards.
Approaching her husband, Kathleen tugged on his sleeve and made a gesture at the roof, urging him to leave. With a snarl, Gaza shoved her away and she fell to the floor. Tears on her face, the scared woman begged him to leave, but he just swiveled the chair away to face the winking array of controls spanning the incredibly complex instrument board.
“Tell me about yourself,” Gaza ordered, reclining in the seat. “And start with the weapons.”
OUTSIDE, THE DEADLY RAIN was starting to extinguish the rampaging fires. The exposed corpses on the sidewalks quickly began to dissolve under the deluge.
Louder than cannons, the thunder rumbled once more, lightning flashing down to strike a radio tower and starting a fresh fire that the rain soon drenched.
Across the metropolis, the muties sought cover from the storm, only to find countless small fires raging deep within the buildings where the rain could never reach. Bloody violence filled the city as the mindless creatures fought one another in bestial fury over the bodies, adding more corpses to the city of death. But that was only a harbinger of the slaughter to come.
IN WAR WAG ONE, windshield wipers worked steadily to keep the front glass clear of the rain. Humming and shaking, the patched air conditioner was working full power and the atmosphere inside the war wag was almost clear of the rotten egg stink of the deadly downpour.