“Staff Sergeant Roberts!” the lecturer called out with his hand on the vehicle’s armored hide. Stephie nodded. “You wanta take her for a spin?”
Her troops looked at her with grins on their faces. “Not really,” she replied, and everyone laughed.
“Well, orders are to give all the officers and noncoms a turn at the wheel,” the guy said, “in case the crew is taken out.”
When Stephie shrugged and hesitated, there was more laughter. She turned and pointed out the people who found the situation most amusing and said, “All of you, mount up.”
“That’s not really necessary,” their lecturer advised.
Stephie ignored the man. “I said mount up,” she repeated, and the ten designated riflemen scrambled through the open doors at the vehicle’s rear. Stephie handed her rifle to one of her people, climbed atop the sloping armored glacis at the front, and dropped her feet through the open hatch into the rain-soaked cockpit. From standing on her seat, she sank into the contours of the high-tech compartment, sliding her feet forward and searching for the pedals. But her boots found no controls.
The driver leaned inside from above, temporarily blotting out the sky and sheltering her from the rain. “Try not to get mud everywhere,” he cautioned, wiping the glowing screens arrayed in a semicircle before her with a rag.
All the controls were wet. “I’m not going to get electrocuted by this shit, am I?” she asked.
“No,” he replied. “It’s waterproof. I just don’t want it gettin’ muddy, that’s all.”
He walked her through the simple controls. Two levers — one for each hand — rose from the armrests on either side. One five-inch-high and thirty-inch-wide screen ran across the front of the cockpit at eye level. “Push forward on both levers the same amount and you go straight. Pull back the same amount and you go straight in reverse. Push forward or back different amounts and you turn. Push one lever forward and pull the other back and you turn in place.”
“Got it,” Stephie said.
He leaned in and pressed a button that Stephie never would have found amid the others on the form-fitting console before her, and the engine rumbled to life. “All right,” he said, pointing at two buttons just above her right shoulder. “Hatch open. Hatch closed. Have at it.”
He withdrew, and the rain poured in. Stephie hit the button above her shoulder with the red down arrow, and the hatch closed and squeaked with its tight fit. The heater automatically turned on, and she felt the warm, wonderful gust. There were no ports from which she could peer, but the thin, wide screen was a televised approximation. The driver’s position was totally encased in armor except to the rear, where if she had wanted to she could just barely squeeze through to the troop compartment from which came her troops’ excited chatter.
“You ready back there?” Stephie called out.
“Are we there yet?” someone replied to peels of juvenile laughter.
“I gotta go potty!” a woman complained jokingly to still more amusement.
The screen before Stephie was empty. The open road was clear. She pushed forward on the levers till they hit the stops. Her helmet slammed back into the armored bulkhead. There were screams from behind her. She could feel the acceleration in her stomach. At first, the forty-ton giant swerved from one side of the two-lane, east-bound highway to the other. By the time she got the two levers equalized and the vehicle straight, they were doing forty-five miles per hour.
The troops behind her were shouting at her to be careful. One woman stuck her face into the small passageway and began to scream at her to slow down. Stephie pulled back on the right lever, throwing the vehicle into a turn. With a gut wrenching drop they descended into the median between the east- and west-bound lanes. More screams erupted from her passengers, and Stephie’s jaw was jammed to her chest as they ascended the far shoulder of the interstate.
For a moment, they were airborne. It couldn’t have been more than a few inches high, and the suspension cushioned their return to earth with amazing softness, but the moment of free flight in the massive beast was enough to bring pleas of mercy from the rebellious load in back.
She did slow, but not in time to straighten up on the west-bound lane, as she had intended. They descended over the far shoulder at almost thirty miles per hour, and she thought better of trying to turn on the down slope.
Screams of men and women rose above the whining turbine as they plummeted down the far bank. Stephie’s heart jumped when she saw the barbed wire fence, but in a flash they were through it. It hadn’t even made a sound that was audible to her inside the armored cocoon. Nor did the brush and small trees that she bowled over while trying to avoid the larger, thicker pines.
“Please!” came the cries from the rear.
The armored vehicle began to slow as they reached the foot of a tall, treeless hillock. That pissed Stephie off, so she jammed both levers forward again to the stops. The whine of the turbines kept rising like jet engines for a few seconds after they had received their “full power” command. The number on the speedometer at first held steady at “30,” but then it began to fall.
Stephie noticed that all her weight was on her back, but the top of the hill that filled her wide screen seemed attainable. The vehicle’s metal tracks began to slip every so often. Each half-second loss of traction brought still more evidence of terror from the helpless lot in back, and raised the first traces of true fright in Stephie. But even more terrifying to her was the speed, which had fallen to “15” despite the shrill tone of the maxed-out engine.
Graphs popped open on incomprehensible screens. Bars rose through green, through amber, and into the red. “Caution!” flashed insistently on several displays. A pleasant female voice like on an aircraft flight deck just before a tragedy began calmly reciting a litany of dangers. “Engine temperature warning. Hydraulic pressure warning. Oil pressure warning. Vehicle attitude warning. Traction warning.”
Come on! Stephie urged silently as the speed dropped below “10.” The crest of the hill was only a couple of dozen meters away. Just a few more seconds, she thought as she felt her weight shift ever higher up her back in time with the falling speed.
“For the love of God!” screamed someone behind her just as they pulled over the lip of the hill going four miles per hour. Stephie eased off the levers, which returned to the neutral position and brought the vehicle to a stop. The engine dropped to idle. The screens went from glaring red to soothing green. The voice of her computer copilot fell silent and satisfied.
Stephie looked back over her shoulder into the troop compartment. Everyone was slowly climbing off the pile of humanity at the closed double doors at the rear. With a grin on her face, Stephie said, “I guess I forgot the ‘Fasten-Seat-Belts’ sign!”
“There aren’t any fucking seat belts!” came one woman’s shout.
“Must be an oversight,” Stephie noted, returning her eyes to her screen. There was a farmhouse across a dale a half a kilometer away, but she wasn’t certain about the terrain in between. They’d been assured that no mines had yet been laid between the interstate and the surrounding skyline on which Stephie’s vehicle now sat, but she knew nothing about the defenses further out.
She pushed her left lever forward, and pulled her right lever rearward. The mere hint of movement and slight rise of engine noise brought instant terror from behind her, although all Stephie did was pivot the vehicle in its tracks. “Knock it off!” she commanded as the hilltop paraded across the wide screen. When Stephie saw the highway below, she released the levers and the vehicle stopped turning. Responsive, Stephie marveled.