Janacek’s tribarrel was on target first. Half the burst exploded bits of intervening vegetation uselessly, but the remaining bolts sawed the Consie’s legs off at the knee before hammering the sloped side of the turret.
The outer facing of the armor burned; its ceramic core spalled inward, through the metallic backing. It filled the turret like the contents of a shotgun loaded with broken glass. Smoke puffed from the hatches.
The tank continued to grind its way forward for another thirty seconds while Janacek fired into the hull without effect. The target disintegrated with a shattering roar.
Ranson’s multi-function display indicated that both the remaining blowers in her element were within fifty meters of Warmonger, but she couldn’t see any sign of them.
She couldn’t feel them. They were real only as beads of light; and the red beads of hostile tanks were no longer where Blue Three had plotted them before the Yokels began to retreat. . . .
A tank ground through the screening foliage like a snorting rhinoceros, bow on with its cannon lowered. June Ranson willed a burst through the muzzles of her tribarrel. . . .
Cyan bolts slashed and ripped at glowing steel.
Stolley swung forward. His bolts intersected and merged with the captain’s. The cannon’s slim barrel lifted without firing and hurled itself away from the crater bubbling in the gun mantle.
“No!” Ranson screamed at her left wing gunner. “Watch your own—”
Another Yokel tank appeared to the left, its gun questing.
“—side!”
Leaves lifted away from the cannon’s flashing muzzle. The blasts merged with the high-explosive charges of the shells which burst on Warmonger’s side.
The combat car slewed to a halt. The holographic display went dead; Ranson’s tribarrel swung dully without its usual power assist.
For the first time in—months?—June Ranson truly saw the world around her.
The Yokel tank was within ten meters. It fired another three-round burst—shot this time. The rounds punched through the fighting compartment in sparkling richness and ignited the ammunition in Janacek’s tribarrel.
The gunner bellowed in pain as he staggered back. Ranson grabbed the bigger man and carried him with her over the side of the doomed vehicle. Leaf mould provided a thin cushion over the stony forest soil, but Warmonger’s bulk was between them and the next hammering blasts.
“Stolley,” Janacek whispered. “Where’s Stolley and Willens?”
June Ranson looked over her shoulder. Dunnage slung to Warmonger’s sides was ablaze. The thin, dangerous haze of electrical fires spurted out of the fan intakes and the holes shots had ripped in the hull. Where Janacek’s tribarrel had been, there was a glowing cavity in the iridium armor.
Willens had jumped from his hatch and collapsed. There was no sign of Stolley.
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.