Flamethrower slid through a curtain of reeds. Two meters from the muzzle of Suilin’s tribarrel, that close, was a tank with its hatches open, bogged in a swale. The soil was so damp that water gleamed in the ruts the treads had squeezed before being choked to a halt.
Right where the AI’s vector had said it would be.
Suilin clamped his trigger so convulsively that he forgot for a moment that he was pointing a weapon. Two bolts splashed on the turret face, cyan and white, blazing steel, before several following rounds exploded stems and flattened further swathes in the reeds with blasts of steam and flying cellulose.
Flamethrower grunted past the tank’s bow at the speed of a running horse. The reporter pivoted to follow the target with his gun, ignoring the way he thrust himself against the sidearmor just as the impact had done moments before.
His sights steadied where a ball mantlet joined the tank’s slim cannon to the turret face. Panning like a photographer with a moving subject, Suilin kept the muzzles aligned as they spat cyan hell to within millimeters, bolt by bolt.
Suilin would have kept shooting, but the cannon barrel sagged and a sharp explosion lifted the turret a hand’s breadth so that bright flame could flash momentarily all around the ring.
He didn’t notice until they were past that there’d been a second tank on the other side of the swale, and that several men in National Army uniforms had been stringing tow cables between the vehicles. The second tank was burning fiercely. The crewmen were sprawled in the arc they’d managed to run before Gale’s tribarrel searched them down.
Suilin thought the men were wearing black armbands, but he no longer really cared.
Dick Suilin heard the CRACK-CRACK-CRACK of automatic cannons upslope, the same timbre as machineguns firing but louder, much louder, despite the vegetation.
Shorty Rogers was running the valley south of Sugar Knob at a hellbent pace for the conditions. Warmonger cut to the right, bypassing some of the unseen tanks whose gunfire betrayed their presence.
Maybe the course was deliberate. Maybe Daisy Belle would take care of the other tanks. . . .
Suilin saw tank tracks slanting toward the crest an instant before he saw the tank itself, backing the way it had come. There was a guerrilla on the turret, hammering at the closed hatch. The Consie shouted something inaudible.
Suilin fired, aiming at the Consie rather than the tank. He missed both; his bolts sailed high to shatter trees on the crest.
That didn’t matter. Cooter’s helmet had given him the same target. The lieutenant’s tribarrel focused on the hull where flowing script read Queen of the South. Paint blazed an instant before the armor collapsed and a fuel tank ruptured in a belch of flame.
Beyond Queen of the South, backing also, was a command vehicle with a high enclosed cab instead of a turret. Suilin caught only a glimpse of the vehicle before Gale’s tribarrel punched through the thin vertical armor of the cab.
The rear door opened. Nothing came out except an arm flopping in its black sleeve.
They had almost reached the top of the knob. If Daisy Belle fired at them, the bolts would hit on Gale’s side; but if Flamethrower was closing with the three cars in Captain Ranson’s elements—
Dick Suilin aimed downhill because the glowing line directed him that way, but the artificial intelligence was using data now minutes old. The Consie tank was above them, backing around in the slender trees. It swung the long gun in its turret to cover the threat that bellowed toward it in a drumbeat of secondary explosions.
Suilin tried to point at the unexpected target. Cooter was firing as he swung his own weapon, but that tribarrel didn’t bear either and the lash of cyan bolts across treeboles did nothing to disconcert the hostile gunner.
The cannon steadied on Flamethrower’s hull.
A twenty-centimeter bolt from Blue Three across the valley struck, and the whole stern of the light tank blew skyward.
The Yokel tank’s shot was a white streak in the sky as it ricocheted from the face of Blue Three’s turret.