For a moment, Kris just gawked at the tanks.
The gawking was returned; the tankers looked just as surprised as she was. Some were out of their vehicles, a few lounged on the ground. Others sat or stood on their behemoth.
For a long moment, no one gave an order.
“Turn right. Turn right,” Megan shouted from the front seat. Her computer shouted the same in Iteeche.
After an eternity of hesitation, the driver did, then gunned the limo.
“Zig zag!” Kris shouted. Nelly translated just as loud.
The driver began to whip the steering wheel right, then a few seconds later left.
One of the tanks must have been more alert than the others. The turret turned out of train, its long barrel depressed. It fired.
A huge hole appeared in the pavement to the left of Kris’s rig. They would have been there if her driver hadn’t zigged right a second earlier.
Behind Kris, her Marines went into action. Those in rented and dilapidated trucks cut the canvas covering off the truck beds. Others got windows down and leaned out of them with grenade launchers at the ready.
“Pop smoke,” Kris ordered. Major Puller passed the order along before Kris finished saying it. The soft wompf of grenades being fired was music to Kris’s ears.
Some grenades were wisely aimed short. They hit the deck, exploded and began to fill the boulevard with clouds of many colored smokes. Other grenades were lobbed further out, closer to the tanks. Others grenadiers shot flares at the deck. They slid along the street, hissing and sparking. A few were aimed high and popped parachute flares into the air above them which sent showers of many colored sparks cascading down.
The hostile tanks disappeared behind the swirling smoke. The flares made thermal vision worthless.
“Get us out of here,” Kris ordered. “Nelly, get us some eyes in the sky.”
“I’m peeling them off the sedan chairs. Good thing I provided you with a communications relay station in each one.”
Kris didn’t bother asking Ron if nano scouts were allowed in the Imperial Precincts and moments later a vision from above was forming in her head.
“Megan, you getting this?”
“I got it. Go right,” the lieutenant ordered the driver.
A few blocks ahead of them, a trio of vehicles suddenly coalesced into a road block.
“Left now and step on it,” Megan ordered.
Kris worked to get a handle on her situation. Behind her, the beanstalk rose high. Around her, buildings of silver and glass shot up into twisting spires. Most were surrounded by broad promenades and wide boulevards. Other streets showed many-storied buildings of red brick with narrow roads between them.
As more trucks roared into the streets, many showing weapons at the window or top gunner’s position. Quite a few of them were not on Kris’s side. The smaller two- and three-wheeled scooters she’d seen before scurried off to disappear down the ramps into the basement of the closest high rise.
When elephants dance and stomp, mice best run and hide.
“We’re under observation from those tall buildings,” Jack concluded. “We need more smoke and we need it out farther.”
“Major Puller, do your Marines have Iteeche translators?”
“About half of them.”
“Ron, I want to pair some of your Marines or household troops with some of my Marine grenadiers to lay down a serious fog blanket.”
“Some of our troops can fire smoke grenades too.”
“Here’s what I want to do.”
A minute later, trucks loaded with US and Imperial Marines peeled off to the left even as the main convoy took a hard right. The detachments disappeared into several basement garages.
Quickly, a wave of small scooters rolled out of those high rises. Since the driver usually owned the scooter, a civilian Iteeche drove. A human and an Iteeche trooper rode behind him, rifles and grenade launchers at the ready.
While the main convoy zigged and zagged, the scooters headed in every possible direction, popping smoke and sending up flares.
Beside Kris, Jack shook his head. “I don’t think they’re going to be able to see us, honey, but our sky spies aren’t all that effective, either. You’ve created a game of Blind Man’s Bluff.”
“So I have, Dear, but they’re the ones with the big, honking, long guns. Our anti-tank grenades are short-ranged and can likely only damage one of them. Take out a road wheel, maybe, but not a turret. No, I like a game where everybody’s blind and I can bluff to my heart’s content.”
While Kris still had eyes in the sky, she dogged across one wide boulevard and disappeared into a wren of older, shorter buildings that half overhung the street.
“Nelly, pick six routes out of the smoke that will take us to the Imperial Precincts and get scooters out smoking those streets. Have them put some automatic weapons fire into the air.”
“Not that close to the Imperial Presence,” Ron snapped.
“Okay, fire into the deck. Low power, but make noise.”
“I’ve sent the orders.”
“Now, Nelly, find us a seventh route.”
“You humans are so sneaky,” Nelly muttered, but a seventh route appeared in Kris’s head.
“Send it to Megan, Nelly. Lieutenant, feel free to zig and zag, but head us there.”
The map in Kris’s head showed the streets with a fine grid laid over it. Within each grid square, scooters made noise, laid down smoke, and popped flares. There were occasional clashes when a scooter rounded a corner and discovered a tank sharing the street with it a thousand meters away. Most of the time, the scooter skedaddled before things got lethal.
A tank and a gun truck crossed paths; the US Marines in the gun truck were only too happy to let the tank have the street. The tank, however, decided to hunt down the offending gun truck.
Bad call.
When the human Marines discovered someone was stupid enough to consider them game, they turned the tables on the tank.
As soon as the gun truck rounded the next corner and was out of the tank’s line of sight, the US and Iteeche Marines bailed out and sent the mounts on their way with their best wishes. The Marines of both flavor then went to ground in and around the crumbling buildings.
When the tank rounded the corner in hot pursuit of the fleeing gun truck, the Marines showered it with short ranged rockets that could hardly put a dent in the tank’s main armor.
Its road wheels and tracks were a different matter.
The tank ran right off its shattered tracks and ended up like a beached whale, rapidly going nowhere.
It wasn’t over that quickly. The tank had two machine guns in the turret, one forward, one aft. The turret continued to whirl around, spraying fire at anything that moved.
The Marines smoked it bad, then cautiously approached it, settling in beside it, well out of reach of the machine guns and waiting for the chatter of the guns to calm down.
Once peace and quiet broke out, the Marines offered the tank crews two choices: they could come out nicely, or the Marines could ignite the engine compartment and burn the tank.
Kris watched the battle develop out of the corner of her eye. She was not at all surprised when the abashed tankers climbed out. She was even less surprised when the US Marines suggested that all of them, tankers and both flavors of Marines, adjourn to the nearest bar.
Kris dismissed their departure with a shrug. They’d earned their brew.
She, however, had a date with the Emperor and time was running out.
Her convoy was zigging and zagging its way laterally across the map, heading for another boulevard that would take her in the back gate. She had scouts out to smoke her path and protect her from observation, but not so far that she couldn’t get a good view of what was on the roads ahead of her. She was doing a pretty good job; they were now on streets where traffic still moved. The look of dismay on drivers as the armed convoy gunned through them told Kris a lot about what life must normally be like in the capitol.
They were picking up speed, shooting down a boulevard, heading for a turn-off.
Four honking big tanks in hostile colors rolled up the ramp from a garage under two buildings on opposite sides of the street and not a thousand meters from Kris’s limo.
“Get out of here,” Kris yelled.
“I can’t,” Meg shouted back. “No streets.
“Go cross country. Everyone, lay smoke.”
Smoke grenades were popping everywhere, but the tanks already had them in their sights.
The pavement ahead of Kris’s limo exploded. The driver tried to avoid it, but the passenger side of the rig went into the gaping hole in the road. The limo listed, but then hit the other side of the hole and flipped over, tail over nose.
Thank God I didn’t bring the kids, was Kris’s last thought.