Chapter 78
Jeffrey: “The conscience of a blackened street”
Even in the cooling air of early winter, it was hot inside the tank. “How did they ever stand this?” Jeffrey asked one of the men with him, as he mopped sweat off his brow. It was a good thing they'd started out long before dawn.
“I heard they used to have something to cool the air inside,” one of them said, raising his voice to carry over the sounds of the engine and treads coming down the open hatch. “They called it 'air conditioning'. There's a couple of buttons on the controls for it.”
“Well, make it work then. What are you waiting for?”
“Freon.”
“What?”
“Something called 'Freon' that the system needs to cool down the air,” the man explained. “But it must have dried up a long time ago. We're not even sure what it was, but the manuals tell where to pour it in, so it must have been a liquid. Anyway, we haven't got any, so the best we can do is leave the hatch open.”
“This is crazy! How can we expect to fight in something like this? You'll drop of heatstroke before we even get to Rado.”
“Well, sir,” the man responded, after a pause, “we ain't going to Rado today, are we? Just some little town out in the middle of nowhere for practice. They tell me by the time we do get to Rado we might be wanting to run the heater instead.”
He did not know what to say about that.
The 'tank' was one of the strangest things he had ever seen. Built of thick metal, it must weigh tons. He still had a little trouble believing that even the motors of the Ancients could move the thing. But they did. It had wheels, like a cart or coach, but instead of rolling on the ground, they were inside a kind of metal cloth that came down in front of the vehicle for them to roll on, as if it were laying its own road down as it went, and rolling it up in the back after passing over it.
The whole thing had seemed ridiculously complicated to him, until he'd seen it go over rocks and wreckage strewn in the road. Instead of butting up against a boulder, as a wagon wheel would, the 'treads' let the tank tilt up and climb over it. The tanks (they had found eight of the monsters in the sealed armory in Abilene) were very hard to stop. Each carried a movable cannon on top; if a wall came in their way, they could blast through it and roll over the fragments.
For today, they'd only had enough fuel to power up two of the weapons. His tank was following the one carrying Brutus.
When they'd first climbed inside the thing and started it up, he'd been a little startled by all of the lights that came on. Tiny lit buttons, dials and indicators glowed to life like eyes, as if they had resurrected some ancient dragon. The engineer had explained it to him. Apparently a reservoir of energy called a battery was needed to make the fuel begin exploding inside the engine. For this, they had reassembled some batteries stored in the depot, following the old manuals. They'd opened cannisters of acid and poured it into the plastic casings, letting it react with metal plates to build up voltage, then loaded the batteries into the tanks.
Jeffrey didn't like any of this. Are we going to be pouring acid all day? He had asked. No, he was reassured. Once the engines were started, they would generate electricity to keep the batteries recharged, changing the lead and zinc sulfate and water back into metal and acid. And also, apparently, generating power for the internal lights, the controls, and a motor that swiveled the big gun of the tank when they needed to aim it.
Used to seeing cannons fired, Jeffrey had not seen the need to turn the gun. Couldn't they just point it straight ahead, and steer the tank to point the gun at fortifications when needed?
“What if someone came up behind you, or on one side of you,” the engineers had pointed out. “The electricity is easy enough for the tank to generate and store, but the fuel is precious. One of the best things about these weapons is you don't need to hitch up a team of horses to turn them around if horses ride past you. You just swivel the gun and keep shooting. And you can keep turning the gun to follow them, like you would with a crossbow.”
“I thought the great thing about them is that they move faster than horses,” Jeffrey had retorted. “You can just move the treads in opposite directions and turn the tank that way.”
“Oh, they can outrun horses on straight paths, no problem,” the engineer had agreed. “But horses are lighter and more agile. And like I said, fuel is precious. You'll be using the gas to get there, but unless the Rado people are really troublesome, most of the time you'll be firing while stationary.”
“Troublesome against these?” Jeffrey shook his head. “If they have any sense at all they'll surrender the first time we use these things. No arrows can get inside this. From what I read in the manual and old books, one or two of these things could wipe out a whole army of horsemen by itself.”
“You're right about that,” the engineer said. “Now if we were fighting them in July, the crew would be baked inside this like riding in an oven, without the air conditioning. In that case it might be a different fight altogether. But it'll be December, and your only problem with a long battle would be running out of gas if you did too much moving. These things drink a lot of fuel.”
“Are we going to have enough? I don't want to get stuck somewhere waiting for Rado men to come with sledgehammers and bash their way inside.”
The engineer spat out the end of a cigar and lit another one. “Don't worry about that, sir,” he advised. We got a tanker truck that can follow you and refuel you on the spot, if need be. They've got the refinery tunning flat out now, cracking gas for us. You'll have all the gas you need, and then some.” He gazed northwards, as if he could see the mountains of Rado from Abilene, which of course he couldn't. “Those Rado people have their mountains and mines. They can dig out gold to hire troops and buy uniforms. But this is Texas. We are the motherload of oil. We'll still be pumping oil and making gas for tanks when your great-grandson is running the show.”
Remembering the man's words, now, he tried to present more confidence than he felt. I'm sitting in a metal monster, he thought, that only keeps going because inside it something keeps exploding.
Pathspace Page 78
