Even as Ryan started moving again, Jak expended ammo as if it was limitless. The majority of the shells missed the tank entirely. Then there was a small explosion of glass.
J.B. dropped his jaw. “It worked!”
“Hallelujah!” Doc cried, releasing his hold on the Vulcan.
“Scram!” Jak snapped.
No additional encouragement was needed. Ryan hit the gas and Leviathan rolled away, building speed slowly, but steadily.
“Twenty-one!” Mildred shouted, kicking a hot shell casing away from a can of fuel. If they weren’t careful, this bucket would blow up like the Hindenburg.
Ryan sent them wildly over the landscape, but nothing detonated. A rainbow-colored searchlight stabbed for a second, illuminating a sand dune in pearlescent beauty, then winked out.
“You smashed the focusing lens.”
“Yep,” Jak drawled proudly, patting the cannon.
“Was a thousand-to-one shot.” J.B. laughed, tilting his hat. “But he did it in under a hundred.”
“However,” Ryan said, playing with the choke and gas pedal, urging the machine to go faster, “the bastard thing is still after us.”
“So?” Dean queried. “What’s it going to do? Ram us?”
“Mebbe,” Ryan said, smashing through a thicket of dried brown bushes. Damnation, they were leaving the desert. “And two hundred tons of anything hitting us is still the last train west.”
“It Does not matter if the stone hits the pitcher, or the pitcher hits the stone,” Doc said, brandishing his cane. “Either way it is bad for the pitcher.”
Rainbow lights poured in through the slots of the rear doors, casting multihued shadows on the interior walls.
“We’re faster,” Dean offered, squatting low. “It’ll never catch up.”
“Till we run out of fuel,” Dix said. Sitting on the floor, he removed his glasses to rub his face, then replaced them and frowned. “We got a lot, but it’s nuke-powered. Been operating for two centuries. Who knows for how much longer it can keep coming?”
“And coming,” Jak added. His hand reached out for the Vulcan and dropped away. There was nothing they had, no weapon, blaster or bomb, that could smash the Ranger. It was predark state of the art, and Leviathan was only a skydark Frankenstein, cobbled together from a hundred smaller machines.
“Yeah, we’re not free yet,” Ryan agreed. “But we’re still alive and kicking. Hey, Mildred!”
Belted in, the physician turned, looking out the starboard machine blasterport. “What?”
He jerked his head. “Check Krysty. She’s been out for much too long.”
Unbuckling, Mildred started wading through the jumble of boxes and cartons covering the floor. The stocky woman had to crawl over the ammo bin for the front 75 mm recoilless before she could reach the redhead. Hands touched the alabaster face, then checked vital signs. “She’s okay,” the physician announced. “Just fainted. Pulse is strong, breathing regularly, pupils dilated.”
Ryan said nothing, but the relief was obvious in his face.
Gently, Mildred dragged the unconscious woman out of the front gunner’s chair and buckled her into a vacant passenger seat. Then she clambered into the front and belted herself in place.
“The 75 mm is loaded and ready,” she stated, then leaned forward scowling. “Aw hell, look at that!”
Bounding and bucking over the uneven ground, the tank unexpectedly increased in speed as the ride went smooth, their fifteen tires humming softly in unison under the floorboards.
“Fireblast,” Ryan spit. “Flat land to the horizon. We can go faster, but so Does it.”
“Head for those weird gray mountains,” J.B. suggested, a hand to the side of his face blocking the colored lights streaming in from the blasterports. Damn that thing’s accuracy! “Mebbe we can go places it can’t.”
“We’re smaller and more nimble,” Mildred agreed, working the breech mechanism to fire the recoilless. It might be pointing in the wrong direction at present, but a person never knew when that might change.
“Mebbe we can find a bridge it’s too big to go across,” Dean added. “Or a narrow tunnel”
“Cave,” Jak stated, brushing the white hair from his face. His ruby-red eyes stared directly at the reflected laser lights coming in through the chinks of their battered hull. Each spot would have to be repaired later. If they lived.
“Got a better idea,” Ryan said, hunching his shoulders. “We’re heading for that rad pit.”