“Put this on,” Worzer ordered, handing Rob a dusty, bulbous helmet like the others wore. “Brought a battle suit for you, too,” he said, kicking the jointed armor leaning against the back of the compartment, “but it’d no more fit you than it would Leon there.”
The black laughed. “Gonna be tight back here till the kid or me gets zapped.”
“Move ‘er out,” Worzer ordered. The words came through unsuspected earphones in Rob’s helmet, although the sergeant had simply spoken, without visibly activating a pickup.
The car vibrated as the fans revved, then lifted with scarcely a jerk. From behind came the squeals and chirrups of the flirts as the trailer rocked over the irregularities in the field.
Worzer looked hard at the starship’s open crew portal as they hissed past it. “Funny what folks go an’ do,” he said to no one in particular. “Via, wonder what I’ll be in another ten years.”
“Pet food, likely,” joked the driver, taking part in the conversation although physically separated from the other crewmen.
“Shut up, Jake,” repeated the blower captain. “And you can hold it up here, we’re out far enough.”
The combat car obediently settled on the edge of the stabilized area. The port itself had capacity for two ships at a time; the region it served did not. Though with the high cost of animal transport many manufactures could be star-hopped to Curwin’s back country more cheaply than they could be carried from the planet’s own more urbanized areas, the only available exchange was raw agricultural produce—again limited to the immediate locality by the archaic transport. Its fans purring below audibility, the armored vehicle rested on an empty area of no significance to the region—unless the central government should choose to land another regiment of mercenaries on it.
“Look,” the sergeant said, his deep-set eyes catching Rob’s, “we’ll pass you on to the firebase when we take the other three flirts in next week. They got a training section there. We got six cars in this patrol, that’s not enough margin to fool with training a newbie. But neither’s it enough to keep somebody useless underfoot for a week, so we’ll give you some basics. Not so you can wise-ass when you get to training section, just so you don’t get somebody killed it if drops in the pot. Clear?”
“Yessir.” Rob broke his eyes away, then realized how foolish he must look staring at his own clasped hands. He looked back at Worzer.
“Just so it’s understood,” the sergeant said with a nod. “Leon, show him how the gun works.”
The big black rotated his weapon so that the muzzle faced forward and the right side was toward Rob and the interior of the car. The mechanism itself was encased in dull-enameled steel ornamented with knobs and levers of unguessable intent. The barrels were stubby iridium cylinders with smooth, 2 cm bores. Leon touched one of the buttons, then threw a lever back. The plate to which the barrels were attached rotated 120 degrees around their common axis, and a thick disk of plastic popped out into the gunner’s hand.
“When the bottom barrel’s ready to fire, the next one clockwise is loading one a these”—Leon held up the 2 cm disk—”and the other barrel, the one that’s just fired, blows out the empty.”
“There’s a liquid nitrogen ejector,” Worzer put in. “Cools the bore same time it kicks out the empty.”
“She feeds up through the mount,” the big soldier went on, his index finger tracing the path of the energized disks from the closed hopper bulging in the sidewall, through the ball joint and into the weapon’s receiver. “If you try to fire and she don’t, check this.” The columnar finger indicated but did not move the stud it had first pressed on the side of the gun. “That’s the safety. She still doesn’t fire, pull this”—he clacked the lever, rotating the barrel cluster around one-third turn and catching the loaded round that flew out. “Maybe there was a dud round. She still don’t go, just get down outa the way. We start telling you about second-order malfunctions and you won’t remember where the trigger is.”