Except for the last cubicle, where Speed Riddle lay sprawled on a cot with a broad smile. The balding gunner had fouled himself thoroughly enough that waste was dripping from his pants’ leg onto the floor.
Riddle’s fingers held a drug phial. Two more empties lay beside his hand.
Cooter stared at the gunner for several seconds. Then he turned around and strode back down the aisle.
His helmet brushed the glowstrip. He punched upward with his knotted right fist, banging the flat fixture against the ceiling of steel plank and causing grit to drift down through the perforations from the sandbagged topcover.
“Coot!” Lavel called, stumping along behind him. “Hey Coot. Slow down.”
“Chief,” Cooter said without slowing or turning, “I want that bastard tied up until he can be delivered to Central. With wire. Barbed wire’d be fine. Somethin’ happens to me, you take care of the Court Martial, right?”
The end of Lavel’s long crutch shot across the doorway, blocking Cooter’s exit. “Wait a bloody minute!” Chief said.
Lavel was leaning against the right wall. The crutch was strapped to his stump, since he didn’t have a left hand with which to grip it. He lowered it, a slim wand of boron monocrystal, when Cooter turned at last to face him.
“Going to use one of the newbies in Riddle’s place?” he asked.
Cooter shook his head violently, as much to clear it as for a gesture. “Put the last one I could trust on One-five for a driver,” he said. “I’ll be better off watching that side myself than trusting some hick who’s still got both thumbs up his ass.”
“Take me, Cooter,” said Chief Lavel.
Cooter looked at his friend with a cold lack of passion. Chief was so tall that he also had to duck to clear the ceiling. His shoulders were massive. Lavel had been thin when he was a whole man, but the inertia of his years of injury gave him a grotesque pot belly.
“Please, Coot,” he said. “You won’t regret it.”
“I need you here, Chief,” Cooter said as he turned. “You take care of Riddle, you hear?”
“Coot?”
“Gotta go now,” Cooter muttered as he took both steps to the exterior with one stretch of his long, powerful legs.
The armored vehicles were snorting, running up the speed of their fans again; and, as Cooter strode toward Flamethrower, a tank fired its main gun skyward.
* * *
There were too bloody many vehicles in too little space, and the bloody drivers had too much on their minds.
A combat car was drifting toward Herman’s Whore. The lighter vehicle was already so close that Ortnahme had to crank down his display to read the number stenciled on its skirts. “Tootsie One-two!” he snarled. “You’re fouling—”
The tank lurched. For an instant, Ortnahme thought Simkins was trying to back away from the oncoming car. That wouldn’t work, because Herman’s Whore had rotated in place and her skirts were firmly against the berm.
“—us, you dickheaded—”
The man in the fighting compartment of Tootsie One-two turned, his face a ball of blank wonder as he stared at the tank looming above him. He was probably gabbling to his driver over the intercom, but there was no longer time to avoid the collision. The skirts of both vehicles were thick steel, but the combined mass would start seams for sure.
“—fool! Watch your—”
The bow of Herman’s Whore lifted slightly. Simkins had run up his fans and vectored them forward. The tank couldn’t slide backward because of the berm, so its bow skirts blasted a shrieking hurricane of air into the combat car.
Tootsie One-two, Flamethrower, pitched as though it had just dropped into a gully. The trooper in the fighting compartment bounced off the coaming before he could brace himself on the grips of two of the tribarrels.
Why in blazes was there only one man in the back of Flamethrower when the task force was set to move out?
The combat car slid two meters under the thrust of the tank’s fans before Shorty Rogers dumped his own ground effect and sparked to a halt on bits of gravel in the soil.