Bradley saw that the man was more edgy here than he had been with his team. Nobody had done anything like this within living memory. Not in the civilized world, anyway.
“Got to be sure we can back out of this if it gets too hot,” Dexter went on.
Bradley liked Dexter’s no-nonsense scowl. “How did you learn how to fight?”
Dexter looked surprised. “Hobby of mine. Studied the great Roman campaigns in Africa.”
“They used ambushes a lot?”
“Sometimes. Of course, after Sygnius of Albion invented the steam-driven machine gun, well sir, then the Romans could dictate terms to any tribes that gave them trouble.” Dexter squinted at him. “You study history, kid?”
“I’m Bradley, sir. My parents don’t let me read about battles very much. They’re always saying we’ve gotten beyond that.”
“Yeah, that Universal Peace Church, right?”
“Yessir. They say—”
“That stuff’s fine for people. Mechs, they’re different.”
“Different how?”
Dexter sucked on his teeth, peering down the road. “Not human. Fair game.”
“Think they’ll be hard to beat?”
Dexter grinned. “We’re programmed for this by a couple million years of evolution. They been around half a century.”
“Since 1800? I thought we’d always had mechs.”
“Geez, kids never know any history.”
“Well, sir, I know all the big things, like the dates of American secession from the Empire, and the Imperial ban on weapons like the ones you’ve got here, and how—”
“Dates aren’t history, son. They’re just numbers. What’s it matter when we finally got out from under the Romans? Bunch of lily-livers, they were. ‘Peace Empire’—contradiction in terms, kid. Though the way the 3D pumps you kids full of crap, not even allowin’ any war shows or anything, except for prettified pussy historicals, no wonder you don’t know which end of a gun does the business.”
This seemed unfair to Bradley but he could see Dexter wasn’t the kind of man he had known, so he shut up. Fair game? What did that mean? A fair game was where everybody enjoyed it and had a chance to win.
Maybe the world wasn’t as simple as he had thought. There was something funny and tingly about the air here, a crackling that made his skin jump, his nerves strum.
Angel came back and lay beside them, wheezing, lugging a heavy contraption with tripod legs they had just assembled.
Nelson was downslope, cradling his rifle. He arranged the tripod and lifted onto it a big array of cylinders and dark, brushed-steel sliding parts unlike anything Bradley had ever seen. Sweating, Nelson stuck a long, curved clip into all this freshly made metal and worked the clacking mechanism. Nelson smiled, looking pleased at the way the parts slid easily.
Bradley was trying to figure out what all the various weapons did when he heard something coming fast down the road. He looked back along the snaky black line that came around the far hills and saw a big shape flitting among the ash trees.
It was an open-topped hauler filled with copper-jacketed mechs. They looked like factory hands packed like gleaming eggs in a carton.
Dexter talked into his hushmike and pointed toward three chalk-white stones set up by the road as aiming markers. The hauler came racing through the crossroads and plunged up the straight section of the road in front of Bradley. The grade increased here so they would slow as they passed the stones.
Bradley realized they had no way of knowing what the mechs were doing there, not for sure, and then he forgot that as a pulse-quickening sensation coursed through him. Dexter beside him looked like a cat that knows he has a canary stashed somewhere and can go sink his teeth into it any time he likes.
When the hauler reached the marker stones Angel opened fire. The sound was louder than anything Bradley had ever heard and his first reaction was to bury his face in the grass. When he looked up the hauler was slewing across the road and then it hit the ditch and rolled.
The coppery mechs in the back flew out in slow motion. Most just smacked into the grass and lay still. The hauler thumped solidly and stopped rolling. A few of the factory mechs got up and tried to get behind the hauler, maybe thinking that the rifle fire was only from Angel, but then the party from across the road opened up and the mechs pitched forward into the ditch and did not move. Then there was quiet in the little valley. Bradley could hear the hauler’s engine still humming with electric energy and then some internal override cut in and it whined into silence.
“I hit that hauler square in the command dome, you see that?” Angel said loudly.
Bradley hadn’t seen it but he said, “Yes ma’am, right.”
Dexter said, “Try for that every time. Saves ammo if we don’t have to shoot every one of them.”
Nelson called up the slope, “Those’re factory mechs, they look like Es and Fs, they’re pretty heavy-built.”
Angel nodded, grinning. “Easier just to slam ’em into that ditch.”
Dexter didn’t hear this as he spoke into his hushmike next to Bradley. “Myron, you guys get them off the road. Use those power-override keys and make them walk themselves into that place where the gully runs down into the stream. Tell ’em to jump right in the water.”
“What about the hauler?” Bradley asked, and then was surprised at his own boldness.
Dexter frowned a moment. “The next batch, they’ll think we hit it from the air. There was plenty of that yesterday to the west.”
“I didn’t see any of our planes today,” Bradley said.
“We lost some. Rest are grounded because some mechs started to catch on just about sunset. They knocked three of our guys right out of the sky. Mechs won’t know that, though. They’ll figure it’s like yesterday and that hauler was just unlucky.” Dexter smiled and checked his own rifle, which he had not fired.
“I’ll go help them,” Bradley said, starting to get up.
“No; we only got so many of those keys. The guys know how to use ’em. You watch the road.”
“But I’d like to—”
“Shut up,” Dexter said in a way that was casual and yet was not.
Bradley used his pocket binoculars to study the road. The morning heat sent ripples climbing up from the valley floor and he was not sure at first that he saw true movement several kilometers away and then he was. Dexter alerted the others and there was a mad scramble to get the mechs out of sight.
They were dead, really, but the humans could access their power reserves and make them roll down the road on their wheels and treads and then jounce down the gully and pitch into the stream. Bradley could hear laughter as the team across the road watched the mechs splash into the brown water. Some shorted out and started flailing their arms and rotors around, comic imitations of humans swimming. That lasted only a few seconds and then they sank like the rest.
Nelson came running back up the hill, carrying on his back a long tube. “Here’s that launcher you wanted. Rensink, he didn’t look too happy to let go of it.”
Dexter stood and looked down the road with his own binoculars. “Leave it here. We got higher elevation than Rensink.”
Dexter took the steel tube, which looked to Bradley exactly like the telescopes he and his friends used to study the sky. Tentatively Bradley said, “If you’re not going to use that rifle, uh, sir, I’d…”
Dexter grinned. “You want in, right?”
“Well, yes, I thought that since you’re—”
“Sure. Here. Clip goes like this,” he demonstrated, “you hold it so, sight along that notch. I machined that so I know it’s good. We had to learn a whole lot of old-timey craft to make these things.”