Ussmak cast down his eye turrets, but only for a perfunctory instant. No matter how important formalities were to the life of the Race, not getting killed counted for even more. And the more built-up the area got, the more danger the landcruiser faced and the smaller the chance he had to react to it.
A cloth whipped in the breeze above a half-burnt building: not the red, white, and blue stripes of France, but a white circle on a red background, with a twisty black symbol on the white. The Big Uglies used such flapping rags to tell one of their tiny empires from the next. Ussmak felt a certain amount of pride that the forces of the Race had at last penetrated into Deutschland.
Bullets rattled off the landcruiser’s flank and turret. The cupola up top closed with a clang. Ussmak hissed in relief: for the first time in a long while, he had himself a landcruiser commander whom he would have minded seeing dead.
“Driver halt,” Nejas ordered, and Ussmak obediently pressed on the brake pedal. “Gunner, turret bearing 030. That building with the banner above it, two rounds high explosive. The machine gun is in there somewhere.”
“Two rounds high explosive,” Skoob echoed. “It shall be done, superior sir.”
The landcruiser’s main armament spoke once, twice. Inside the hull, shielded by steel and ceramic, the reports were not especially loud, but the heavy armored fighting vehicle rocked back on its tracks after each one. Through his vision slits, Ussmak watched the building, already in ruins, fly to pieces; the flag on the makeshift staff was wiped away as if it had never existed.
“Forward, driver,” Nejas said in tones of satisfaction.
“Forward, superior sir,” Ussmak acknowledged, and stepped on the accelerator. No sooner had the landcruiser begun to roll, though, than more bullets pattered off its side and rear deck.
“Shall I give them another couple of rounds, superior sir?”
Skoob asked.
“No, the infantry will dig them out soon enough,” the landcruiser commander said. “Small-arms ammunition is still in good supply, but we’re low on shells, and we’ll need high-explosive as well as armor-piercing if we have to fight inside Mulhouse.” He didn’t sound happy at the prospect. Ussmak didn’t blame him: landcruisers were made for quick, slashing attacks to cut off and trap large bodies of the enemy, not to get bogged down battling for a city one street at a time. But taking cities with infantry alone used up males at an alarming rate, even with air strikes. Armor had to help.
A cloud of dust rose not far in front of the landcruiser, dirt and asphalt rose in a graceful fountain, then pattered down again, some of it onto Ussmak’s vision slits. He hit the cleaner button to clear them. Inside the landcruiser, he needed to worry about only a lucky hit from artillery-and if a round did pierce the vehicle, he’d probably be dead before he knew it.
Night was falling when they approached the built-up area Ussmak had seen ahead. Nejas said, “We have orders to halt outside of town. This shall be done, of course.” Again the commander sounded less than pleased. As if trying to convince himself, he went on, “However good our night-vision equipment may be, our commanders do not care to go in amongst the Big Uglies’ buildings in darkness. This is no doubt a wise precaution.”
Ussmak wondered. If you lost momentum, sometimes you had trouble getting it back again. He said, “Superior sir, just this once I wish our commanders would stick their tongues in the ginger jar.” Maybe he’d have a taste himself after everything was secured for the night. Nejas had searched the landcruiser for his little vial, but he’d never found it.
The commander said, “Just this once, maybe they should. I never thought I would hear myself say that, driver, but you may well be right.”
Several landcruisers bivouacked together, under the cover of some broad, leafy trees. Not for the first time, Ussmak marveled at the spectacular profusion of plants on Tosev 3-far more varieties than Home enjoyed, or Rabotev 2, or Halless 1. He wondered if all the water on this world had something to do with that it was the most obvious difference between the planets of the Empire and the Big Uglies’ homeworld.
Even with infantry sentries all around Nejas ordered his crewmales to stay in the landcruiser till they’d finished eating. Then he and Skoob took their blankets and went under the big armored hull to sleep, which gave them almost as much protection from the alert Deutsch snipers as staying inside the turret would have. Ussmak’s seat flattened out enough to let him stay inside the forward hull section through the night.
That night should have passed peacefully, but it didn’t. He jerked awake in alarm when the turret hatches clanged open. Fearing Big Ugly raiders, he grabbed for his personal weapon and crawled back through the hull to poke his head up through the bottom of the turret ring.
The silhouette above him unmistakably belonged to a male of the Race. “What’s going on?” Ussmak said indignantly. “I could have shot you as easy as not.”
“Don’t speak to me of shooting.” Nejas sounded furious. “For a tenth of a day’s pay, I’d turn the main armament of this landcruiser on what are lyingly called our supply services.”
“Give the order, superior sir,” Skoob said. The gunner had to be even more irate than his commander. “You wouldn’t need to pay me to make me obey. I’d do it for free, and gladly. No supply service would be better than the mishatched one we have in place-or no worse, anyhow, for as best I can tell, we have no supply service in place.”
“We expended a couple of rounds of high explosive against that machine-gun nest yesterday, if you’ll recall?” Nejas said. “And we used the usual amount of armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot rounds, too-you may have noticed we’ve been fighting lately.” He sounded as sardonic as Drefsab, the most cynical male Ussmak had ever met.
The driver caught the drift of the way things were going.” We didn’t get resupplied?” he asked.
“We got resupplied,” Skoob said. Again echoing his commander, he went on sarcastically, “In their infinite wisdom and generosity, the fleetlords of the supply service have deigned to dole out to us five magnificent new rounds, one of which is actually high explosive.”
“Aii.” Ussmak let out a hiss of pain. “They’ve shorted us before, but never anywhere near so badly. If they do that for another two or three days, we won’t have any ammunition left.”
“It’s all right,” Skoob said. “Before long, they’ll stop issuing hydrogen, too, so we won’t be going anywhere anyhow.”
That alarmed Ussmak all over again. Nejas said, “It’s not quite so bad. To make hydrogen, all they need is water and energy. If Tosev 3 has too much of anything, it’s water, and energy is cheap. But ammunition needs precision manufacture, too, and the Big Uglies who can do precision manufacture, or most of them, anyhow, aren’t on our side. So we’re short on landcruiser shells. They made it sound very logical when they explained it.”
“Superior sir, I don’t care about logic like that,” the gunner retorted. “I have a logic of my own: if I don’t get rounds for my gun, and if the Race doesn’t take over some of the places here that can turn out our rounds, we’ll lose-but how can we take them if we don’t have the ammunition to do it?”
“Believe me, I wasn’t supporting what the supply service males said, just setting it forth,” Nejas said. “As far as I’m concerned, they all come out of addled eggs. If we don’t have the ammunition to do the job now, it’s just going to be tougher later.”
The gunner grunted. “Right you are, superior sir. Let’s get what they gave us stowed-the Emperor knows we’ll need it tomorrow, even if the supply service hasn’t a clue.” One after another, the five new rounds clunked into place in the racks. “Go back to sleep, driver,” Nejas said when the job was done. “That’s what we’re going to do, anyhow.”
Ussmak did his best to go back to sleep, but found himself worrying instead. Skoob’s circular logic set his own head spinning. If the Race didn’t have the munitions to overcome the Big Uglies, how were they supposed to conquer Tosev 3? For that matter, how were they supposed to conquer Mulhouse? They could fight their way into the town, but what were they supposed to do when they had no more shells and supply services had none to bring forward?