As the tank was lying upside down, that meant the snout of its main blastcannon was buried in the sand. It would be very dangerous to fire it: it might blow back into the interior of the tank cabin. But that is exactly what Lombar Hisst was going to do. Sometimes, belatedly, after a battle, tank ammunition went off from shorts or interior fires. It was not all that unusual for a battlefield to show delayed detonations: indeed, they were inevitable, like death throes. Drops of molten metal dripping into fuel packs could suddenly ignite whole cartridge packs; even fallen blastrifles could go off: it was dangerous to walk around a battlefield even hours after the last shot was fired in anger. Seasoned soldiers knew this: Lombar was counting on their initial lack of surprise. It was quite a gymnastic feat for a man his size to lash himself into the driver's seat upside down. He used the corpse available to make a cushion against the ceiling which was now the floor. He broke one of the arms to act as a brace against his shoulder. He got his own butt, upside down, into the seat and fastened the straps, cinching them tighter and tighter until he hung suspended. Then he pushed the corpse aside. He put his hands on the firing trips. He took a long, shuddering breath. It was now or never: in the next minute he would either be blown to pieces or he would rule Voltar without question. He set the blastcannon for automatic repeating fire. It would now roar at two thousand blasts a minute, each one capable of knocking down a building. He pressed the trip.
BLOHW-OW-OW-OW-OW!
He was still alive. It hadn't flashed back. The whole tank on recoil bucked into the air! Hastily, hard put to keep his hands on the controls, Lombar started the tank engines. He began to guide the tank off, flying it upside down. BLOHW-OW-OW-OW-OW! roared the blastcannon. To any observer it would look like the tripped weapon's recoil was driving the tank into the air, out of control. Rebels bent on mop-up stared. Some of them even laughed to see the monster kicking itself upward. There was even something sexual about it. Lombar kept flying it upside down, even made it rock from side to side. Ten feet, fifty feet, a hundred feet he rose. Only then did some officer see there was something odd about that flight. It should have turned over and gone crashing back to the ground. It didn't! "FIRE!" roared a rebel captain. "FIRE AT THAT TANK!" Blastrifles began to roar. But a blastrifle could do little against a tank built to withstand a warship's cannon. Lombar flipped the tank upright and held the throttles still. The tank jolted under the impact of shots. Lombar Hisst, in a crazy surge of glee, flipped on the tank's loudspeaker system and bellowed into the mike, the sound of his voice racketing across the wreck-strewn parade ground: "You idiots! You just overlooked Lombar Hisst, the Emperor of Voltar! I'll laugh in the faces of your corpses when you try to crack the gates of Palace City!" He let out an insane shout. "COME AND GET ME!" He shoved the throttles wide open. Accelerating swiftly up to the speed of sound and then passing it to obtain five times that velocity, he shot the flying tank southwest, scorching above the desert. Shots tried to follow. Warships tried to dive. Only seven minutes later, such was his speed of travel, shouting ahead on radio to identify himself to the outer Apparatus bunkers, Lombar Hisst boomed the tank through the Palace City gates, jumping thirteen minutes into the future. He braked so hard it made the drives smoke. He settled the tank down in front of the steps of the Imperial Palace. He sat there laughing. There was no doubt whatever in his mind that he would win this war. The Apparatus General Staff appeared at the top of the ornate circular staircase. "Long Live His Majesty, Lombar the Magnificent!" they cried. They knelt. Lombar cast the driver's corpse aside and climbed out. He was grinning but he was imperial. For the first time, he was certain. He would remain Emperor! He could not lose. Palace City, in 125,000 years, had never been breached. He and his title were completely safe. The rebel forces would be caught in a box and crushed like insects. All Voltar was at his mercy. And he had none whatever to give them. Only slaughter and drugs. He marched grandly up the curving stairs to his kneeling generals. How wonderful it was to be a real Emperor! "Rise, you (bleepards)," he said. "We've got to get an Imperial reception ready. The bill of fare will be rebel blood."
Ahead lay the yellow mist that was Palace City. Jettero Heller, clad again in the red general's uniform just in case he got shot down, flew the tug at twenty-five hundred feet above the desert floor. He was flying backwards. Between him and Palace City was what he was pushing. The sun was on his right and he did not think that they could see him. Their beams would also be very cluttered by what he had in grip. The traction motors were singing. Their throttles were barely cracked open. If he put too much clamp on his "tow"-a tow, even though he was backing up with it-he would choke the things to death. The only view he had was on his screens. They were shimmering and glittering but he could see the images. He marvelled now at how the Apparatus had built up the defense perimeter outside that yellow mist. Burrowed into the sand were shellproof bunkers, three rows deep, three rings. He magnified his image and examined them. Artillery and more artillery, infantry galore, he recognized the posts that meant electronic barricades that killed if you sought to go through them. If those three rings surrounded even an ordinary fortress one would play the devil with trying to take it. The yellow mist was something else. Even without the outer defenses, no assault could penetrate it. The time factor was its safeguard. A shell fired at it in present time would explode in time that was already past and do nothing. Furthermore, except at the gates, the whole thing was covered now with an electronic net, powered by the black hole in the mountain. This net shrouded warped space and any shell or tank or ship that tried to dive through it would be devoured both by time and energy. It had only one point of weakness-where the vortex of the captive black hole curved inward at the back of the mountain in which the black hole was embedded. Only an engineer would know of that, but it could hardly be called a closely guarded secret: you couldn't shell the city through it because the mountain was in the way. If an enemy tried to slide a ship through it, the ship would have to be so small the assaulting force would be a nothing. It would also have to clamber over such gigantic rocks and boulders that only a suicide squad could get in. He had used it once before when he brought the Emperor out. As very few people knew of it, he doubted it had been safeguarded. He was watching his screens. Yes! he was getting an audience. Despite the shimmering nature of his picture, he was getting a much enlarged view of some Apparatus defense-perimeter officers. They were standing on a bunker rim, looking toward him with glasses. And well they might, for what Heller was pushing, at the range of ten miles still, might very well be mistaken for the dust of a rebel force approaching. But it wasn't rebels: they were probably still embarking at Camp Endurance and when they came, it would be from the sky. Only Heller was engaged on this attack. On his screen he could see the glasses of the Apparatus commanders flashing. They were wavirig signals to get men into trenches and on the ledges of artillery. Slowly, Heller, still flying backwards, pushed his strange load. Then, when the range was less than five miles, he saw the officers begin to wave down and cancel their orders. For now they recognized what was creeping up on them. Wind devils! Heller was hard put to keep them twirling. They seldom if ever got this close to Palace City. They were the spinning result of temperature differences between the burning desert floor and a common icy wind that blew a mile above the surface. They picked up the violent green of copper sands, the glistening yellow of feldspar and the orange scarlet of alloys of iron, and made colorful, writhing columns, from three to eight thousand feet tall, that danced like Demon chorus lines. Only by jockeying his tractor beams from right to left and imbalancing them could Heller keep them spinning. It required considerable attention and deftness on the towing throttles. But they were a common sight, even if awe-inspiring, to anyone who had to live around or in or flew over the Great Desert. They had lots of power in them. One of the reasons it was almost impossible to cross the Great Desert is that a man on foot could be sucked up and hurled a mile into the air. On some other planet they might have been called tornados or twisters. Heller had once seen a whole house, incautiously built by some unwary prospector, sent a mile in the air here in the Great Desert. The Apparatus officers on the parapets might be newcomers or green. But then Heller was heartened. On his screen he saw a gray-headed lieutenant racing along to the different officer groups, yelling. Heller couldn't see him very well because his view beams were going through the wind devils that he pushed, and he certainly couldn't hear, but from the frantic wavings of the man's arms and the response he was getting, he had no doubt as to what it was. The waving signals took on the character of panic. There was a sudden boil of men along the trenches. Floods of gunners were racing down from the artillery. One and all they were diving into bunkers, going underground fast to escape being thrown a mile into the air. Heller, jockeying tractor-beam throttles and flying now on a curving course, began very neatly to place the wind devils around the yellow mist in a circle, a hungry, obscene chorus line of glittering colors shrieking out a mocking song of doom. Guns were torn from their mountings, bunker covers were ripped loose, beam screen antennas became junk, electronic posts were bodily sundered out of the sand, and at one underground entrance, where there had been a jam-up, Apparatus soldiers were seized. All of it went hurling high, high, high into the air! Wherever the bottom of one of these twisters touched, there was instant disaster! The bases of them whipped about like snakes, eating holes wherever they went. They were funnels of chaos, devouring everything with an appetite that fed only the green and dusty sky high overhead. It didn't disturb Palace City itself. But it was certainly making a mess out of the three rings of the defense perimeters. There was plenty of artillery potential-plenty of men left down there. Heller was not trying to win this war with wind devils. He was only creating a diversion. He flexed his fingers: he had almost blistered them with the friction of jockeying the traction throttles. He flew off now to the north and went about his business. He was going to begin the real reason he had come here by himself.