Both veterans had a vision of duty.
Dick Suilin had his memories.
When the armored vehicles prickled with cyan bolts, they reentered the reporter's universe. It had been very easy for Suilin to believe that the three of them in the back of Flamethrower were the only humans left in the strait bounds of existence. The darkness created that feeling; the darkness and the additional Wide-awake he'd accepted from Gale.
Perhaps what most divorced Suilin from that which had been reality less than two days before was the buzzing roar of the fans. Their vibration seemed to jelly both his mind and his marrow.
Since the driver slid his throttles to the top of their range, Flamethrower's skirt jolted repeatedly against the ground. Suilin found the impacts more bearable than the constant, enervating hum of the car at moderate speed.
Task Force Ranson swung raggedly at an angle to the left. Each armored vehicle followed a separate track, though the general line was on or parallel to the paved highway.
Suilin had ridden the la Reole/Bunduran road a hundred times in the past. It was easy to follow the road's course now with his eyes, because of the fires lit by powerguns all along its course. The truckers' cafe and fuel point at the top of the ridge, three kilometers from la Reole, was a crown of flames.
Flamethrower lurched over a ditch and sparked her skirts on the gravel shoulder. The driver straightened his big vehicle with port,then starboard sidethrusts. The motion rocked Suilin brutally but seemed to be expected by the veterans with him in the fighting compartment.
Gale shot over the stern, and Cooter's weapon coughed bursts so short it appeared to be clearing its triple throats.
A dozen civilians huddled in the ditch on Suilin's side of the car. All but one of them were pressed face-down in the soft earth. Their hands were clasped over the back of their heads as if to force themselves still lower.
The exception lay on her back. A powergun had decapitated her.
Suilin tried to scream, but his throat was too rigid to pass the sound.
"Shot!" crackled his headphones, but there was shooting everywhere. As armored vehicles disappeared over the brow of the ridge, all their weapons ripped the horizon in volleys.Cooter had explained that the Consie siegeworks were just across a shallow valley from where Task Force Ranson would regain the road.
A Consie wearing crossed bandoliers rolled upright in the ditch fifty meters ahead of Flamethrower. He aimed directly at Suilin.
Cooter saw the guerrilla, but the big lieutenant had been raking the right side of the road while Gale covered the rear. He shouted something and tried to turn his tribarrel.
Suilin's holographic sights were a perfect image of the Consie, whose face fixed in a snarl of hate and terror. The guerrilla's cheeks bunched and made his moustache twitch, as though he were trying to will his rifle to fire without pulling the trigger.
The muzzle flashes were red as heart's blood.
Flamethrower jolted over debris in the road. A bicycle flew skyward; the air was sharp with quicklime as bags of cement ruptured. Three bullets rang on the armor in front of Dick Suilin and ricocheted away in a blaze of sparks.
As the car settled again, Suilin's tribarrel lashed out: one bolt short, one bolt long . . . and between them, the guerrilla's hair and the tips of his moustache ablaze to frame what had been his face.
Flamethrower was past.
The sky overhead began to scream.
Hans Wager was strapped into his seat. He hated it, but at least the suspended cradle preserved him from the worst of the shocks.
The tank grounded on the near ditch; sparked its skirts across the pavement in red brilliance; and grounded sideways on the ramp of the drainage ditch across the road. Holman hadn't quite changed their direction of travel, though she'd pointed them the right way.
The stern skirts dragged a long gouge up the road as Holman accelerated with the bow high. The main screen showed a dazzling roostertail of sparks behind the nameless tank. Wager didn't care. He had too much on his own plate.
Deathdealer fired its main gun.
That was all right for Birdie Sparrow,an experienced tanker and riding the lead vehicle. Wager'd set the mechanical lock-out on his own 20cm weapon.
He didn't trust the electronic selector when there were this many friendly vehicles around. A bolt from the main gun would make as little of a combat car as it would of a church choir.
Hans Wager was determined that he'd make this cursed, bloody tank work for him. Nothing would ever convince him that a tank's sensors were really better than three sets of human eyeballs, sweeping the risks of a battlefield—
But there weren't three sets of eyeballs, just his own, so he had to make the hardware work.
The threat sensor flashed a Priority One carat onto the main screen. Wager couldn't tell what the target was in the laterally compressed panorama.The cupola gun, slaved to the threat sensor the way Albers explained it could be, was already rotating left. It swung the magnified gunnery display of Screen Two with it.
Two bodies and one body still living, a Consie huddling beside what had been a pair of civilian females. The guerrilla's rifle was slung across his back, forgotten in his panic. He was too close for the tribarrel to bear.
The tank's skirts swept a bicycle and sling-load of bricks from the road,flinging the debris ahead and aside of its hundred-and-seventy-tonne rush. Chips and brickdust pelted the Consie. He leaped up.
His chest exploded in cyan light and a cloud of steam which somersaulted the corpse a dozen meters from the ditch.
There'd been a major guardpost at the truckstop on the hill, but Deathdealer and the crossfire of the two leading combat cars had already ended any threat from that quarter. Fuel roared in an orange jet from the courtyard pump. The roof of the cafe had buried whoever was still inside when tribarrels cut the walls away.
"Shot,"said his commohelmet.The voice of whoever was acting as fire control was warning that friendly artillery would impact in five seconds.
Three bodies sprawled: a step, another step, and a final step, from the front door of the cafe.
Deathdealer dropped over the hill.Its main gun lighted the far valley.The nameless tank topped the ridgeline with a roar.Their speed and Holman's inexperience lofted the vehicle thirty centimeters into the air at the crest.
Hans Wager, bracing himself in his seat, toggled the main gun off safe.
The low ridge a kilometer away paralleled the Santine River and embraced the western half of la Reole. The Consies had used the road to bring up their heavy weapons and building materials for substantial bunkers.
Three shells, dull red with the friction of their passage through air, streaked down onto the enemy concentration. The earth quivered.