The soldiers grimaced and grasped the body awkwardly in their gloved hands. A glove slipped as they swung the guerrilla onto the tailgate of the truck. The body hung, about to fall back.
The lieutenant grabbed a handful of the Consie’s hair and held it until the enlisted men could get better grips and finish their task.
Suilin resumed walking toward the motor pool. He was living in a nightmare, and his ears buzzed like wasps. . . .
“Now, to split the screen,” said squat Joe Albers, Deathdealer’s driver, “you gotta hold one control and switch the other one whatever way.”
Hans Wager set his thumb on the left HOLD button and clicked the right-hand magnification control of the main screen to x4. The turret of the unnamed tank felt crowded with two men in it, although Wager himself was slim and Albers was stocky rather than big.
“Does it matter which control you hold?” asked Holman, peering down through the hatch.
“Naw, whichever you want,” Albers said while Wager watched the magical transformations of his screen.
The left half of the main screen maintained its portion of a 360° panorama viewed by the light available in the human visual spectrum. Broad daylight, at the moment. The right portion of the screen had shrunk into a 90° arc whose field of view was only half its original height.
Wager twisted the control dial, rotating the magnified sector slowly around the tank’s surroundings. Smoke still smoldered upward from a few places beyond the berm; here and there, sunlight glittered where the soil seared by powerguns had enough silicon to glaze.
The berth on the right side of the tank was empty. The combat car assigned there had bought it in the clearing operation. Buzzbombs. The close-in defense system hadn’t worked or hadn’t worked well enough, same difference. Albers said a couple of the crew were okay. . . .
Wager’s field of view rolled across the Yokel area. The barracks nearest the Slammers were in good shape still; but by focusing down one of the streets and rolling the magnification through x16 to x64, he could see that at least a dozen buildings in a row had burned.
A few bolts from a powergun and those frame structures went up like torches. . . .
The best protection you had in a combat car wasn’t armor or even your speed: it was the volume of fire you put on the other bastard and anywhere the other bastard might be hiding.
Tough luck for the Yokels who’d been burned out. Tougher luck, much tougher, for the Consies who’d tried to engage Hammer’s Slammers.
“For the driver,” Albers said with a nod up toward Holman’s intent face, “it’s pretty much the same as a combat car.”
“The weight’s not the bloody same,” Holman said.
“Sure, you gotta watch yer inertia,” the veteran driver agreed, “but you do the same things. You get used to it.”
He looked back over at Wager. The right half-screen was now projecting a magnified slice of what appeared at one-to-one on the left.
On the opposite side of the encampment, a couple of the permanent maintenance staff worked beside another tank. The junior tech looked on while his boss, a swag-bellied warrant three, settled a length of pipe in the jig of a laser saw.
“Turret side, though,” Albers went on, “you gotta be careful. About half what you know from cars, that’s the wrong thing in the turret of a panzer.”
“I don’t like not having two more pair of eyes watchin’ my back,” Wager muttered as his visuals swam around the circumference of the motionless tank.
“The screens’ll watch for you,” Albers said gently.
He touched a key without pressing it. “You lock one of ’em onto alert at all times. The AI in here, it’s like a thousand helmet systems all at once. It’s faster, it catches more, it’s better at throwing out the garbage that just looks like it’s a bandit.”
The hatches of the Tactical Operations Center, a command car without drive fans, were open, but from this angle Wager couldn’t see inside. The backs of two Slammers, peering within from the rear ramp, proved there was a full house—a troop meeting going on. What you’d expect after a contact like last night’s.