There wasn’t time to sort ’em out, to separate the immediate dangers from the targets that might catch on in the next few seconds or minute. Hans Wager had to kill them all—
If he had time before they killed him.
Wager let the turret rotate at its own speed, coursing the further crest. He aimed with the cupola gun rather than the electronic pipper. During his years in combat cars, he’d gotten into the habit of hosing a tribarrel onto its target.
When things really drop in the pot, habit’s the best straw to snatch.
Ignoring the shots that hit Blue Three and the shots that blasted grab-loads of dirt from the barren crest around them, Wager stroked his foot-trip again—
A tank exploded.
Again.
Too soon. The twenty-centimeter bolt ignited a swathe of forest beside the Yokel vehicle, but the tank’s terrified crew was already bailing out. Wager’s tribarrel spun their lifeless bodies into the blazing vegetation as his turret continued to traverse.
A huge pall of smoke leaped skyward from somewhere south of Sugar Knob. It mushroomed when the pillar of heated air could no longer support the mass of dirt, scrap metal, and pureed flesh it contained.
The ground-shock of the explosion rolled across Kawana in a ripple of dust.
Something hit Blue Three. Three-quarters of Wager’s gunnery screen went black for a moment. He rocked forward on his foot-trip. The main gun fired, shocking the sunlight and filling the turret with another blast of foul gases from the spent case.
The screen brightened again, though the display was noticeably fuzzier. Another of the tanks on Sugar Knob had become a fireball.
The Yokels were running, backing out of the firing positions on the hillcrest that made them targets for Wager’s main gun. He didn’t know how the combat cars were doing, but there were columns of smoke from behind the knob where his own fire couldn’t reach.
The cars’d have their work cut out for them, playing hide ‘n seek with the surviving Yokels in thick cover. At point-blank range, the first shot was likely to be the last of the engagement and the tanks’ thick frontal armor would be a factor.
A target backed in a gout of black diesel exhaust as Wager’s sight picture slid over it. He tripped his main gun anyway, knowing that he’d hit nothing but foliage. His turret continued to traverse, left to right.
The Yokel tank snarled forward again, through the trees the twenty-centimeter bolt had vainly withered. That sonuvabitch hadn’t run, he’d just ducked back to shoot safe—
In the fraction of a second it took Hans Wager to realize that this target had to be hit, that he had to reverse the smooth motion of his turret, yellow light flashed three times from the muzzle of the Yokel’s cannon.
Hot metal splashed Wager and the interior of the turret. The cupola blew off above him. The tribarrel’s ammunition ripped a pencil of cyan upward as it burned in the loading tube.
The gunnery screen was dead, and the central half of the main screen pulsated with random phosphorescence. Motors whined as the turret began tracking counterclockwise across the landscape Wager could no longer see.
“Blue Three, this is Tootsie Six—”
Thousand one, thousand two—
“—we had to bypass the east-flank hostiles. Cross the valley and help us soonest.”
Wager trod his foot-trip. The gunnery screen cleared—somewhat—just in time to display the Yokel tank disintegrating with an explosion so violent that it snuffed the burning vegetation around the vehicle.
“Roger, Tootsie Six,” Hans Wager responded. “Holman, move us—”
But Holman was already feeding power to her fans. You didn’t have to tell her what her job was, not that one. . . .
Four more artillery shells burst in black plumes across the sandy furrows which Blue Three had to cross. The remains of Blue Three’s cupola glowed white, and there was no hatch to button down over the man in the turret.
Hans Wager’s throat burned from the gases which filled his compartment.
He didn’t much care about that, either.
“Willens, bring us—” June Ranson began, breaking off as she saw the Yokel tank.
It was crashing through the woods twenty meters to Warmonger’s right, on an opposite and almost parallel course. The 60mm cannon was pointed straight ahead, but the black-clad guerrilla riding on the turret screamed something down the gunner’s open hatch as he unlimbered his automatic rifle.