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.
Suilin thought he could hear again, but the bitter crack of his grenades was lost in the howl of an oncoming storm. The ground shook and made the blasted trees shiver.
The last round in Suilin’s clip flashed against the armor as vainly as the four ahead of it. The cannon’s sixty-millimeter bore gaped toward Flamethrower like the gates of Hell.
Before the gun could fire, the great, gray bow of Blue Three rode downhill onto the rebel tank, scattering treeboles like matchwood.
The clang of impact seemed almost as loud to Dick Suilin as that of the shells ripping Flamethrower moments before. The Slammers’ tank, ten times the weight of the Yokel vehicle, scarcely slowed as it slid its victim sideways across the scarred forest.