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“Tosevite landcruisers!” Telerep said. “Looks like you were right, commander.”
“I see them,” Votal answered. Ussmak still didn’t, being down low in the hull rather than up in the turret. That didn’t matter. Votal told him what to do: “Steer 22, Ussmak.”
Ussmak started turning from north to west. Yes, there they were. Being big and clumsy themselves, the Tosevites built big and clumsy, though these landcruisers didn’t have a bad ballistic shape compared to some others the crews had been briefed about. At least their turret armor sloped… not that that would help them now.
“Gu
“Sabot!” Telerep repeated. The automatic loader cranked a round into the breech of the ca
“Landcruiser-front!” That meant Votal had the target Tosevite in his sights.
“Identified.” Telerep saw it, too. Over Ussmak’s head, the gun tube swung slightly as it moved toward the enemy’s center of mass.
“Fire!”
Through his periscopes, Ussmak saw flame leap from the muzzle of the gun. Armor shielded him from the roar of the report. Recoil made the landcruiser seem to hesitate for an instant. The aluminum sabots fell away from the tungsten penetrator arrow. Ussmak did not see that, of course. A heartbeat later, he did see the turret leap off a Tosevite landcruiser. “Hit!” he yelled, along with Votal and Telerep.
Another Tosevite was killed, this one in a pyrotechnic display of exploding ammunition. The Big Uglies lost whatever formation they were trying to keep. Some of them stopped, as they had to if they hoped to fire accurately. Their eggs are broken now, Ussmak thought with cold glee. They were easy enough to kill on the move. Stopped… “Landcruiser-front!” Votal said.
“Identified,” Telerep answered.
As the automatic loader clattered into action, a Tosevite landcruiser spat fire. Ussmak’s jaw opened in a laugh. Another one down, he thought, and wondered which of the other landcruisers in his unit had scored the kill. Then-wham! Something smote the glacis plate like a kick in the teeth.
“Ussmak!” Votal said. “You all right?”
“Y-yes,” the driver answered, still more than a little shaken. “Didn’t penetrate, the Emperor be praised.” Or I’d be splashed all over the inside of the compartment, he added to himself. The Big Uglies were doing their best to fight back. Their best, fortunately for Ussmak, was not good enough.
He must have been too stu
When most of the Tosevite landcruisers were dead, some of the survivors turned tailstump and started to run. Ussmak laughed again. They couldn’t outrun ca
A fu
Ussmak’s belly went strange and empty, as if he’d suddenly been dropped into free-fall. “How could they?” he demanded of the gu
“Sniper, or I miss my guess,” Telerep said. “They can’t meet us in honest battle, so they lie in wait instead.”
“We’ll make them pay,” Ussmak said fiercely. “The past Emperors have learned Votal’s name. He is with them now.”
“Of course he is,” the gu
Ussmak drove. When he’d stepped into the starship and slung his gear down beside his cold sleep coffin he’d expected the Race to overrun Tosev 3 without losing a male. It wasn’t turning out to be so simple, not with the Big Uglies knowing more than anyone had suspected they did. But they didn’t know enough. The Race could still drive them as easily as Ussmak drove his landcruiser.
A pi
The driver obediently turned due west. Another pi
Telerep cut him down with machine-gun fire. Ussmak ran over the carcass, smashing it into the grass and dirt. His jaws opened wide. Votal was avenged. The landcruiser formation rolled on across the steppe.
Even the smallest noise or flicker of motion in the sky drew Heinrich Jager’s complete and concerned-he was too stubborn to admit to a word like fearful-attention. This time, it was just a li
He had three tanks left, three tanks and a combat group of infantry. “Combat group” was the Wehrmacht way of describing odds and ends of military meat pressed together in the hope of turning out a sausage. Sometimes it even worked-but when it did, the sausage went right back into the meat grinder again.
Another motion across the sky turned out to be another bird. Jager shook his head. He could feel how jumpy he was getting. But the Lizards’ aircraft didn’t have to be right overhead to kill. The company had learned that, too, to its sorrow.
He managed something halfway between a laugh and a cough, leaned down into the turret. “I wonder if the Ivans felt this naked after we smashed so many of their planes on the ground last year,” he said.
“If they did, they hid it damned well,” his gu
“So do we-I hope,” Jager said.
A squad of infantry was posted on a swell of ground a few hundred meters in front of the tanks. One of the foot soldiers turned and waved urgently. The signal meant only one thing-Lizard panzers, heading across the steppe. Jager’s testicles tried to crawl up into his belly. Schultz looked up at him. The gu
“For the Fatherland,” Jager echoed. Given that the alternative was bailing out of his tank and trying to foot it across the Ukraine through Lizards and partisans both, fighting for the Fatherland looked like the best bet he had. He leaned down into the turret, called to Dieter Schmidt: “To the prepared position.”
The Panzer III slowly rumbled forward. So did the other two survivors of the tank company. In slots dug into the reverse slope of the rise, they exposed only the tops of their turrets to the enemy. Jager stood up in the cupola, peered ahead with field glasses. He took even fewer chances than he had against the Russians. Shrubs tied to his leather headgear broke up his outline; he used his free hand to shield the binoculars so no sun reflected off their lenses.
Sure enough, there were the Lizards, eight or ten tanks’ worth, with more vehicles scurrying along behind to support them. Jager recognized the ones with small turrets as troop carriers, on the order of the German SdKfz 251 but far more dangerous-they could fight his panzers on largely even terms. And the Lizards’ tanks…
“You know what’s the fu