The tanks might as well be practicing night driving techniques. The Consies that’d hit this end of the encampment must all be dead or runnin’ as fast as they could to save their miserable—
WHANG!
Herman’s Whore slewed to the right and grounded, then began staggering crabwise with the left side of her skirts scraping. They’d been hit, hard, but there wasn’t any trace of the shot in the screens whose sensors should’ve reported the event even if they hadn’t warned of it.
“Sir, I’ve lost plenum chamber pressure,” Simkins said, a triumph of the obvious that even a bloody civilian with a bloody rutabaga for a brain wouldn’t’ve bothered to—
“Did the access door blow open again?” Simkins continued.
Blood and Martyrs. Of course.
“Lord, kid, I’m sorry,” the warrant leader blurted, apologizing for what he hadn’t said—and for the fact he hadn’t been thinking. “Put ‘er down and I’ll take care of it.”
The tank settled. Ortnahme raised his seat to the top of its run, then prepared to step out through the hatch. Down in the hull, the sensor console pinged a warning.
Ortnahme couldn’t see the screens from this angle, and he didn’t have a commo helmet to relay the data to him in the cupola.
He didn’t need the electronic sensors. His eyes and the sky-glow from the ongoing destruction of Camp Progress showed him a Consie running toward Herman’s Whore with an armload of something that wasn’t roses.
“Simkins!” the warrant leader screamed, hoping his voice would carry either to the driver or the intercom pick-up in the hull. “Go! Go! Go!”
The muscles beneath Ortnahme’s fat bunched as he swung the tribarrel. The gun tracked as smoothly as wet ice, but it was glacially slow as well.
Ortnahme’s thumbs clamped on the trigger, lashing out a stream of bolts. The Consie flopped down. None of the bolts had cracked through the air closer than a meter above his head. The bastard was too close for the cupola gun to hit him.
Which the Consie figured out just as quick as Ortnahme did. The guerrilla picked himself up and shambled toward the tank again, holding out what was certainly a magnetic mine. It would detonate a few seconds after he clamped it onto the Whore’s steel skirts.
Ortnahme fired again. His bolts lit the camouflaged lid of the hole in which the Consie had hidden—twenty meters from where the target was now.
There was a simple answer to this sort of problem: the close-in defense system built into each of Hammer’s combat vehicles, ready to blast steel shot into oncoming missiles or men who’d gotten too close to be handled by the tribarrel.
Trouble was, Ortnahme was a very competent and experienced mechanic. He’d dismantled the defense system before he started the rebuild. If he hadn’t, he’d’ve risked killing himself and fifty other people if his pliers slipped and sent a current surge down the wrong circuit. He’d been going to reconnect the system in the morning, when the work was done. . . .
The intake roar of the fans resumed three Consie steps before the tank began moving, but finally Herman’s Whore staggered forward again. They were a great pair for a race—the tank crippled, and the man bent over by the weight of the mine he carried. A novelty act for clowns. . . .
Down in the hull the commo was babbling something—orders, warnings; Simkins wondering what the cop his superior thought he was up to. Ortnahme didn’t dare leave the cupola to answer—or call for help. As soon as they drew enough ahead of the Consie, he’d blast the bastard and then fix the access plate so they could move properly again.
The trouble with that plan was that Herman’s Whore had started circling. The tank moved about as fast as the man on foot, but the Consie was cutting the chord of the arc and in a few seconds—
The warrant leader lifted himself from the hatch and let himself slide down the smooth curve of the turret. He fumbled in his cargo pocket. Going in this direction, his age and fat didn’t matter. . . .
The Consie staggered forward, bent over his charge, in a triumph of will over exhaustion. He must have been blowing like a whale, but the sound wasn’t audible over the suction of the tank’s eight fans.