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“Briefings don’t know the half of it, superior sir,” Ussmak said. Vivid inside his head were flames and explosions and unremitting fear, fear that had come flooding back at that impact against the turret and now receded only slowly.
The landcruiser column rolled on. Every now and again, bullets from the bushes struck sparks off armor plate, but the column did not slow. Ussmak kept driving buttoned up. He felt half blind, but didn’t care to have one of those rounds clip off the top of his head.
“Why don’t they keep those pests from harassing us?” Nejas asked after yet another band of Tosevites sprayed the column with gunfire. “This is our territory; if we can’t keep raiders from slipping in, we might as well not have conquered it.”
“Superior sir, the trouble is that almost all the Tosevites hereabouts favor the raiders and shelter them, and we have an impossible time trying to figure out who really lives in the farms and villages and who doesn’t. Identity cards help, but they aren’t enough. This is their planet, after all; they know it better than we can hope to.”
“It was simpler down in Africa,” the landcruiser commander said mournfully. “The Big Uglies there had no weapons that could hurt a landcruiser, and did what they were told once we made a few examples of those who disobeyed.”
“We tried that here, too, I’ve heard,” Ussmak said. “This was before I arrived. The trouble was, the Big Uglies had been making examples of one another yet fighting just the same. They ignored the examples we made, the same way they’d ignored their own.”
“Mad,” Skoob said. Ussmak didn’t contradict him.
The landcruisers began passing old battlefields, some still showing the scars of fires set by shot-up landcruisers. The hulks of destroyed Deutsch armored fighting vehicles still sprawled in death. Some of them were the angular little machines Ussmak had encountered on the plains of the SSSR, but others were the big new ones that could endanger a landcruiser of the Race if well handled-and the Deutsche handled them well.
Nejas said, “Those are impressive looking hulks, aren’t they? Even holograms don’t do them justice. When I first saw one, I wondered why our males hadn’t salvaged it; I needed a moment to realize the Big Uglies had made it. I apologize for wondering about some of the things you said, Ussmak. Now I believe you.”
Ussmak didn’t answer, but felt a burst of pleasure more subtle than the jolt he got from ginger, and perhaps more satisfying as well. It had been too long since a superior acknowledged that the Race’s obligations ran down as well as up. His last pair of landcruiser commanders had taken him for granted, as if he were just a component of the machine he drove. Not even being a ginger buddy with Hessef had changed that. No wonder he’d felt isolated, alone, hardly part of the Race at all. Now… it was almost as if he’d come out of the eggshell anew.
Smoke rose from the woods up ahead. An artillery shell burst off to one side of the road: the helicopters hadn’t routed the Deutsche, then. Ussmak had hoped he’d be going in to mop up. He hadn’t really believed it, but he’d hoped.
A cannon belched fire and smoke from behind some bushes. Wham! Ussmak felt as if he’d been kicked in the muzzle. But the landcruiser’s heavy glacis plate kept the Tosevite shell from penetrating. Without being ordered, Ussmak swung the vehicle in the direction from which the round had come. “I almost fouled my seat,” he said. “If the Big Uglies had waited till we passed and shot at the side of our hull-”
Nejas took the time to give him one word: “Yes.” Then the landcruiser commander snapped an order to Skoob: “Gunner!” A moment later another single-word command followed: “Sabot!”
Skoob put the automatic loader through its paces. A round of armor-piercing discarding sabot ammunition clattered into the breech of the gun, which closed with a solid thunk. “Up!” the gunner reported.
“Landcruiser, front!” Nejas said, noting the target for Skoob.
“Identified,” Skoob answered: he had it in his thermal sight.
“Fire!”
“On the way,” Skoob said. The report of the landcruiser cannon was less than thunderous inside the hull, but the massive vehicle rocked back from the recoil and a sheet of flame billowed across Ussmak’s vision slits. Again the driver knew pleasure almost as intense as ginger gave: this was how a crew was supposed to work together. He hadn’t known anything like it since Votal got killed. He’d forgotten how satisfying it could be.
And, just as ginger brought a burst of ecstasy as it shot from the tongue to the brain, so teamwork also had its reward: fire and black smoke boiled up behind the bushes as the Deutsch landcruiser that had tried to impede the progress of the Race paid the price for its temerity. The turret machine gun chattered, mowing down the Big Uglies who’d bailed out of their wrecked vehicle.
“Ahead, driver,” Nejas said.
“It shall be done, superior sir,” Ussmak said. Along with part of the column of landcruisers, he pushed the machine forward down the road past the ambush the Big Uglies had hoped to set. The rest of the Race’s armor went after the Deutsche who’d tried to waylay them. The fight was savage, but didn’t last long. When they weren’t caught by surprise in disadvantageous positions, the Race’s landcruisers remained far superior to those of the foe. They methodically pounded the Deutsche till no more Deutsche were left to pound, then rejoined the rear of the advancing column.
“These Big Uglies are better than any Tosevites I’ve seen before,” Nejas said, “but they don’t seem to be anything we can’t handle.”
Ussmak wondered about that. Had his previous crew, their wits cooked on ginger and their tactics and even their commands full of drug-induced sloppiness, really been so inept? He had trouble believing it, but here was an ambush that would have thrown them into fits, brushed away like any minor annoyance.
On the highway, black smoke rose from burning trucks that formed a barricade across the paved surface. The landcruisers in front of Ussmak’s peeled off to the grassy verge to the left to bypass the obstacle. Ussmak was about to swing his handlebar controller to follow them when dirt fountained up under one and it slewed sideways to a stop.
He. hit the brakes, hard. “Mines!” he shouted.
Concealed Deutsch landcruisers and guns opened up on the crippled vehicle. No armor could take that pounding for long. Blue flames spurted from the engine compartment as a hydrogen line began to burn. Then the landcruiser went up in a ball of fire.
Big Ugly males with satchel charges burst from cover to attack the vehicles that had stopped. Machine guns cut down most of them, but a couple managed to fling the explosives either under the rear of a turret or through an open cupola hatch. The roars from those explosions shook Ussmak even inside his armored eggshell.
“Driver, I apologize,” Nejas said. But then, a moment later, he was all business again: “Gunner… Sabot!” The cannon spoke, and killed a Big Ugly landcruiser. Nejas gave his attention back to Ussmak. “Driver, there’s a narrow space of ground on the right between the road and the trees. Take it-if we can get by, we’ll put ourselves in the Tosevites’ rear.”
“Superior sir, that space is probably mined, too,” Ussmak said.
“I know,” Nejas answered calmly. “The gain we win by passing is worth the risk. Steer as close to the burning vehicles as you can without making our own paint catch fire.”
“It shall be done.” Ussmak tramped down hard on the accelerator. The sooner the passage was over, the sooner his scales would stop itching with anticipation of the blast that would put his landcruiser out of commission. With a hiss of relief loud as an air brake, he was through and back on the road again. Big Uglies turned a machine gun on his landcruiser. He let his mouth fall open in scornful laughter that wouldn’t do them any good. Nor did it; from the turret, the coaxial machine gun scythed down the Tosevites.
“Keep advancing,” Nejas said urgently. “We have more landcruisers behind us, and mechanized infantry combat vehicles as well, If we can deploy in the Big Uglies’ rear, we ruin their whole pos
ition.”
Ussmak stepped on it again. The landcruiser bounded ahead. Speed, sometimes, was as important a weapon as a cannon. He spied a Deutsch landcruiser barreling through the undergrowth, trying to find a place from which to block the onslaught of the Race’s armor.
“Gunner!.. Sabot!” Nejas shouted-he’d seen it, too. But before Skoob could acknowledge the order and crank the round into the cannon, a streak of fire off to one side took the Big Ugly vehicle, in the engine compartment. Red and yellow flames shot up from it, setting the bushes afire.
“Superior, sir, I think the infantry’s dismounted from their carriers,” Ussmak said. “That was an antilandcruiser rocket.”
“You’re right,” Nejas said, and then, “Steer right, away from the road.” Ussmak obeyed, and caught sight of another Tosevite landcruiser. Nejas gave orders to Skoob, the cannon barked, the landcruiser jerked with the recoil… and the Deutsch machine brewed up.
