Chapter 15
Beth sat at the Communications Console, giving updates to Wave 2, while - purely from habit - she watched the monitors on the nearby Visual Scanner Console. She didn't need to see those monitors to know exactly what was going on, because she had Duplicates sitting at that console, and at 9 other consoles for various sensors. Through the mental link all someone's Duplicates shared with each-other and with their original, she knew all they knew, the moment they knew it. It made for great coordination.
She double-checked that she was addressing all of Wave 2, and spoke again. "Here they come. The two large groups of hostiles in busses behind you both just accelerated, just after you all passed Birch street. The road in front of you is still mostly clear, though three hostiles just showed up there too. Compared to the 200+ hostiles behind you, the three in front still sound like a better deal. All of them show up on our detectors as being dangerous, having hostile intent, and most of them have an affinity for hurting others. The ones behind you have lots of heavy weapons: - rocket-propelled grenades and explosives primarily. There aren't many explosives among the hostiles in front of you, which now includes a fourth and fifth person."
She heard the roar of 2 Me-163 Komets taking off, followed immediately by two more.
Abe-1 and 2, Bas-Oon, and Bas-Ket had been dismissed when their tanks got disabled, but re-Duplicated since then, to be ready to fly out and help if needed.
Beth continued calling in tactical information - such as the precise locations of enemy troops - to those who could use it, as it became available.
Then all of a sudden, the action started.
It started with several big concrete barriers suddenly moving in front of the lead tank.
A moment later, more concrete barriers moved behind the trailing tank.
At about the same time, two women in Valkyrie costumes exited buildings and suddenly grew to 30 feet tall.
The first was at the midpoint of the armored column, and the second was at the columns rear.
The first Valkyrie hurried up to the King Tiger, and crouched low next to it, like a football linebacker getting ready for the play to begin. She put both of her hands onto the side of the tank, then suddenly heaved, pushing with her legs and her arms together.
The huge tank tilted.
The side of the tank nearest the 30-foot Valkyrie raised.
She ignored bullets of all sizes hitting her - they did no damage to her - and continued to shove the King Tiger, which slowly tilted up, over, and onto its side.
Meanwhile, the second Valkyrie had been trying the same thing with the Tiger G at the rear of the column.
But she was having trouble.
She couldn't get her hands on the tank - they kept sliding off the tank's forcefield.
She tried several variations of her attack, but still couldn't get her hands onto the tank.
Not as many bullets and cannon shells were directed her way, since the other Valkyrie had shown up first and was much easier to hit - this one could and did keep the bulk of the Tiger tank between her and most of the column's guns.
And the bullets that should have hit her mostly missed, with some even stopping short - coasting to a stop in midair. The few that hit did little damage, and that seemed to heal very quickly.
Soon, she noted that the tank's force-field did not prevent it from contact with the ground, and she also saw that it's left track currently crossed over a manhole cover.
She punched the center of that manhole cover, crumpling it and dropping the bent metal down into the manhole beneath it.
The tank's track now crossed over an open manhole, which was no problem for the tank except that its forcefield stopped at ground-level., so did not cover the track which crossed over the manhole.
That opened up access for her to grab the track, which she did with both hands.
Then she heaved.
Abe-4, driving that tank, tried driving forward, to spoil her grip. But he could only go a couple feet: the packed vehicles of the column congested things too much to go further. The Valkyrie stayed with him, got her legs better positioned and heaved the tank onto its side.
By this time the first Valkyrie had smashed a couple combat robots together, squishing them into crumpled junk, then gone on to flip the three LAV-25's before her onto their sides.
A crazy man dressed all in white, with white hair, unnaturally white skin and even white eyes, holding a flamethrower had come out and tried to bake a combat robot to death, but had gone down - shot to ribbons - in seconds.
The First Valkyrie tried, and failed, and tried some more, to flip over the leading Tiger tank, but was foiled by its force-field.
Meanwhile the second Valkyrie flipped over the three LAV's in the rear half of the column on her way to smash up more combat robots.
The truck let out the 4 GP robots it was carrying, then appeared to put up a forcefield around itself.
In fact, that was an illusion, put up by Ron-9 in the King Tiger, who had discovered that, even with the tank on its side, he could still do illusions using the console he still thought of as an entertainment center.
At the same time, other parts of the battle were occurring nearby.
The group of 22 General Purpose Robots trailing well behind the main armored column suddenly found themselves encased in a large dense bank of fog, which visually obscured everything completely.
The GP robots had no trouble with it though, since each had both radar and infrared sensors. They raised their machine-pistols, plus a couple laser pistols, in preparation for the expected attack.
And that attack came, fast and furious.
A wolf made all of metal spikes and blades - previously identified as the cape known as Hookwolf, when they'd captured him earlier that morning - rushed out of cover and rammed itself into a robot, knocking it down.
Hookwolf tried shredding the robot with his claws and other blades, yet only gave it superficial scratches. The robot's armor was harder than the blades and claws.
Hookwolf himself was hit by several bullets that achieved nothing more than chipping some of his blades.
At the same time, an inky blob of darkness, sprouting various blades and insect-like, spiky, legs, yet no arms or apparent sensory apparatus, charged out with amazing speed and agility and also tried stabbing and slashing a few robots as it passed them. It, too, left shallow gouges and scratches yet no real damage.
It tried breathing fire at another robot, yet did no damage there either.
Then it generated and maintained a column of flame encasing one robot at the edge of the group, while the speedy blade-blob busied itself knocking down other robots.
Many shots were taken at the insect-legged blob, but it was so speedy and agile that few bullets hit, and few of those seemed to have much effect.
Simultaneous with the attack of Hookwolf and the blade-blob, came a third figure attacking the robots in the fog.
It was a lithe girl with a blond buzz-cut, heavily scarred including a big scar across the throat, and wearing a metal cage as a mask.
Dinah, watching in the command center, immediately identified her as the cape called Cricket, then apologized that she'd never seen the blade-blob before and suggested they call it the boogeyman.
The boogeyman was amazingly fast and agile, but by comparison to Cricket, was slow and awkward.
Many shots were taken at Cricket, including the two lasers, yet she dodged them all while acrobatically moving from robot to robot, placing bombs between their shoulder blades.
Hookwolf had placed a bomb too, which it had carried in its mouth. That freed his mouth to bite, and he did so, breaking his teeth off on a GP robots leg armor.
Hookwolf had then busied himself knocking down robots and creating pandemonium and confusion, to make it easier for Cricket to work.
He had just discovered the tactic of doing a full-power leap into one robot so as to knock it into a second robot, with the result of both falling and getting somewhat dented, when, suddenly, he left.
So did Cricket and the boogeyman, though, as they ran, the robot held in the column of flame exploded as the spare ammunition and grenades in its leg compartments 'cooked off'.
They were resistant to fire, but not immune.
One second later, it was clear why they had disengaged - the bombs they had placed all exploded.
One of the ten bombs placed by Cricket had fallen off - having failed to get a good grip on the ash-covered survivor of a previous flamethrower attack.
It's shaped-charge warhead happened to orient itself downwards, so, when it exploded, gouged a deep, thin, hole through the pavement. The remaining explosion knocked the robot down, but did no real damage.
Cricket's other 9 bombs, and Hookwolf's one, had destroyed one robot each.
The eleven remaining robots, receiving orders called in from the battleship, stood and arranged themselves, while stowing their machine-pistols in the compartment for it on the right leg and taking out their alternate pistols from the left-leg compartments.
These alternate pistols were "grandpa specials" - lasers, particle beams, plasma guns, and disintegrators.
They had just finished when their 3 attackers returned, carrying more bombs.
While that had been going on, two Me-163 Komet rocket-planes, piloted by Abe Duplicates, dove on busses full of heavily-armed gang members, which the other two Komets, piloted by Bas-Oon and Bas-Ket, were designating with targeting lasers.
Rocket pods fired, and the two leading busses exploded, hit by four rockets each.
Then the Basil Duplicates in the trailing Komets fired their 30mm auto-cannons into the trailing 2 busses. The two hits on one bus and three on the other, from high-explosive shells ripped those busses to shreds.
The 30mm each had about 3/4 as much explosive as a hand-grenade, though much more shrapnel since the shell weighs about half again as much as the grenade.
So even the bus that only took 2 hits still got thoroughly shredded by shrapnel.
Then the Komets, swooped around for another pass.
Meanwhile, back at the armored column, Menja - for so Dinah had identified the first Valkyrie, due to the second one having a sword slung at her hip - was still struggling to over-turn the lead tank.
Since it's force-field had been the problem - preventing her from getting a grip on the tank - she had resorted to picking up a concrete k-rail barrier, and swinging it like a baseball-bat at the tank, to try to do enough damage to make the force-field drop.
On impact with the tank's force-field, the k-rail shattered.
So Menja picked up another one and tried again, with the same result.
She and the tank had been jockeying for position in the limited space available to them, each constantly trying to move to gain some advantage.
It looked a little like two elephants dancing with each-other, but both doing different styles of dance.
Over the course of their dance, the tank had had a few brief opportunities to shoot her. It had hit her with it's machine-gun, it's laser and particle-beam, it's hull-mounted disintegrator, and even it's main gun. None of them had hurt the Valkyrie at all, though the main gun had briefly knocked her off her feet.
The three-quarters scale GP robot, Floyd, which had been sitting on the driver's hatch of the lead tank, had shot at the Valkyrie, and even stabbed her with it's sword, also to no effect. So it moved off towards the other threats attacking the column.
The tank had also been taking shots at the concrete barriers keeping the armored column trapped. It had hit them a few times, and shoved others out of the way. Yet it had been to no avail: more barriers kept moving into the way.
In the middle of the column, the flamethrower-operator in all white had gotten up again, tried to burn a combat robot, and been shot by it. Some of the 20mm rounds that hit him went through and hit his flamethrower's fuel tank too, setting it off like a napalm bomb.
The flames washed over that man, 2 nearby combat robots, and 2 LAV-25's, but did insignificant damage due to their short duration before they burned out.
The bulk of one of the LAV-25's protected the truck from the wash of flames, or it would have burned away.
At the same time, the Valkyrie Fenja had smashed 2 more combat robots.
She was reaching for another combat robot when the Tiger tank at the rear of the column lifted briefly into the air, righted itself, then lowered back down onto it's tracks.
The Telekinesis Console in the battleship had gotten into the action, under Captain Basil's careful hands.
The tank immediately fired all it had at Fenja. The machine-gun bullets got close, then veered off due to the intense winds defending the Valkyrie. They hit a nearby LAV, doing it no damage.
The main gun shell flew straight at the Valkyrie, then also got caught by super-powerful winds which made it miss.
The laser and particle beam, both switched from automatic anti-missile mode to manual instead, both hit the giantess. She was immensely resistant to damage, yet they still scored deep cuts into her hand and arm.
Her regeneration started healing the cuts right away, yet they still impeded her performance for now.
Then the King Tiger also got lifted and set back on its tracks by the ship's telekinesis.
It, too, wasted no time shooting at the nearby Fenja.
As with the other tank, the winds defending her made the bullets and main gun shell both miss.
The laser and particle beam carved lines across her.
But the real drama came from the hull-mounted disintegrator, which got a brief opportunity to fire while the tank was in the air rotating.
The disintegrator beam hit Fenja on the upper leg, removing a chunk of it and dropping her to the ground.
The combat robots joined in, using a couple more lasers to try to keep damaging Fenja faster than she could regenerate.
The ship's telekinesis then grabbed Menja, raised her 30 feet into the air, and held her there.
The 30 foot tall Valkyrie kicked and wiggled, trying to get free, but could not reach or touch anything but air.
Her great strength, denied a grip on anything, availed her nothing.
She struggled, but was helpless.
The man in all white - who Dinah had identified as the cape Alabaster - got back up, despite having been immolated a few seconds before, and hurried into a nearby building.
He tossed out a couple explosive charges in the direction of two nearby combat robots.
One fell short and and exploded on impact with the pavement, to little effect. The blast and shrapnel were not enough to damage the robots or vehicles.
The other hit a robot, and exploded, shattering its left weapon-pod.
A moment later, Alabaster, with a new flamethrower, left the building. He happened to see 2 Me-163 Komets fly overhead, and flew up after them.
Floyd the small GP robot got to Fenja and started trying to scalp her with his sword.
Fenja, under relentless assault by lasers and particle beams, as well as laying on the ground unable to stand due to the damage to her leg, grabbed the nearest LAV-25, shoved it so it moved in-between her and the tanks firing at her, then crawled off into an alley and disengaged.
Meanwhile, some of Menja's teammates were trying to help her.
Rune first lifted a k-rail to within Menja's reach, but that didn't help and Menja ended up throwing it at the Tiger tank. It shattered upon impact with the force-field. The force of her throw should have exerted an equal and opposite reaction on her and started her moving slowly towards a nearby building.
But the telekinesis from the ship easily held her in place instead.
The same was true when Stormtiger used intense wind to try to move Menja to a better position - the force he exerted was not as strong as the telekinetic force, so she stayed still.
Then Captain Basil got an idea.
He was tired of having to spend his time and attention keeping one foe out of action.
He'd just been informed that Lung was beginning to get up again after the last time they'd shot him.
And he remembered the saying "Happy is the man who has two problems, since often he can use the one to solve the other".
So he used the Telekinesis Console to move Menja, first up another hundred feet just in case, then west a few blocks.
Then he dropped her right on top of Lung. That started the two of them fighting each-other immediately.
Back at the armored column, Rune had fled from the building she'd used as cover, when it started to collapse from all the collateral damage it had taken..
She moved fast, using one large slab of concrete as a flying carpet and another as a shield from all the attacks the armored column aimed at her. During the few moments they had clear shots at her, they whittled the multi-ton slab of concrete down to less than a tenth its original size.
Stormtiger was the last member of Valkyrie group to break off the action.
On the rooftop where he'd been observing from hiding, he had pulled back a bit, so as to remain concealed. Then he stood and prepared to fly away, in a direction that would keep the building between him and the armored column.
But as he did so, he saw two Komet rocket-planes coming around for another pass at the busses.
He roared defiance as he unslung his Schmeisser Mp-40 submachinegun. He aimed it well in front of the rocket planes, pulled the trigger and held it down until his magazine was empty.
He then put in a fresh magazine and flew off after the planes, still making sure to keep the bulk of the building between him and the tanks below..
But as his bullets had left, he was using his super-power - control over winds - to steer them towards impact with their targets.
His wind-control reached far enough to sense the planes, but not far enough to affect them directly.
But he had sufficient range to steer the bullets while they were still nearby. And due to his sensitivity to air movements, he had an instinctive feel for how they should be steered.
What, for most people, would have been an impossible shot, was, for Stormtiger, fairly easy. His winds were strong enough to push bullets away, so they were also strong enough to push them into the way of the speeding planes.
And so, of the 32 rounds he fired, twenty-seven 9mm parabellum bullets actually hit the speeding rocket-planes.
One immediately exploded - rockets can be quite touchy like that, when certain parts get damaged.
The other started wobbling, obviously hard to control now.
Rather than diving, as it had been about to, towards the gang members scattered around near the shattered remnants of their burning busses nearby, the plane flew more or less straight and level, while the pilot tried to re-master the suddenly-unruly aircraft.
The wobbling plane briefly passed over the remaining GP robots just as the Wolf group launched their next attack on them.
All 3 Empire capes rushed out at once, entering, from different directions, the fog surrounding the robots.
But the GP robots were getting constant updates on their orders, and on the situation generally, from the sensor operators on the battleship, so they were ready for the attack when it came.
Five robots coordinated their fire together to try to hit the cape they were calling the bogeyman - the dark blob festooned with blades and insect-like legs. One fired directly at the monstrous thing, and one each fired at the 4 places it was most likely to dodge to.
It did dodge - adroitly and with with great speed - out of one dangerous spot and right into another. A laser - set to continuous beam rather than pulse, so it would be more likely to hit, though at the cost of doing less damage - hit the monster and scored a deep cut into its inky black form, chopping off a couple blades while it was at it.
The damage slowed the monster, but did not stop it.
Five more robots concentrated the fire of their energy guns on Cricket in a similar way, yet she dodged successfully anyway.
The fog itself seemed to twitch when the robots fired.
Hookwolf was fast, agile, and resistant to damage, but he wasn't super-fast like the other two. And the fog wasn't giving him any concealment from the robots' radar and infrared sensors.
The eleventh and last robot shot Hookwolf dead-center with a plasma gun. The super-hot plasma burned right through the center of Hookwolf, from one end to the other, destroying the flesh in the center of the metal body as it passed.
Hookwolf fell dead.
Cricket moved adroitly among the robots, placing bombs.
Six robots coordinated their fire at her, yet missed.
The Bogeyman moved up and created a column of fire around a robot, then tried knocking down other robots.
But the damage it had taken slowed the monster somewhat, and the second attempt by those 5 coordinating robots got a solid hit from a particle beam, cutting the monster in half. The two halves fell in different directions, and neither moved again.
The robots reloaded, while Cricket placed the rest of her bombs.
Cricket began to disengage, having placed all her bombs and not wanting to be in the blast zone.
But all eleven robots fired at her, and at every place she could possibly dodge to.
Cricket really exerted herself in her attempt to dodge, and mostly succeeded.
A disintegrator, set on wide beam, caught just her right leg in its beam.
On wide beam, the disintegrator had a much smaller effect over a much wider area, so it only took off the flesh down to the bone.
That would have been enough by itself, but the jolt of lightning accompanying the effect sealed the deal.
Cricket fell hard, and before she had time to bounce, follow-up shots finished her off.
As they fired their various energy weapons, the fog twitched, again. It had been twitching with every volley they fired, harder each time.
With the fourth volley - the one that finished Cricket - the fog had twitched quite violently, spasming as if strong winds were blowing it in various directions at once.
And when the lightning discharged from the final disintegration blasts, that seemed to be too much for the fog. It collapsed, and swirled into the center of the cloud, coalescing into a man in a mask. He had cuts and burns all over him, and looked like he'd been in a bad motorcycle accident.
He took a deep breath, shook himself like a wet dog, concentrated, and turned back into a cloud of fog, though a small one this time.
He wasted no time flowing down into a nearby sewer drain to escape.
Meanwhile, the robots hurried to try to remove the bombs from each-others' shoulder blades.
They were in the middle of that when the bombs went off, destroying four of the remaining eleven robots.
The seven robots reloaded and turned to face the group of regular gang members who would be arriving shortly from where their busses had been shot up.
As they stood in the middle of the street, ready for the next attack, a tumbleweed blew across the road before them, and each robot acquired a western hat and serape.
"Sorry," Ron-9's voice came over the radio, "I couldn't help myself. It reminded me of a western, with a big gunfight about to happen. I thought of the Magnificent Seven and had to add the tumbleweed, and hats and stuff."
He went silent again, as the LAV-25 next to his tank rose into the air, righted itself, and got set back down.
Captain Boz, on the ship's Telekinesis Console, could only lift one thing with it at a time, and was finally finishing up the task of putting all the vehicles of the armored column right-way-up, so it could get moving again.
Ron-9 paid attention to his tank's sensors as they got moving again. But he still spared some attention for maintaining his old west effects on the 7 robots.
Above the 7 robots, the two remaining Komet rocket-planes - the wobbly one had been impossible to control well enough to use its weapons, so had been dismissed - dove on the crowd of gang toughs approaching the GP robots.
They were so focused on that dive, and their targets, that they failed to notice the liftoff, below them, of a crazy man, wearing a flamethrower and all-white costume.
Alabaster had been unable to catch the Komets, so had positioned himself to be able to intercept them on their next pass.
He rose before the planes, flying as fast as he could, straight up and into the path the planes would take.
He bathed the lead plane in flames from his flamethrower, then, a fraction of a second later, rammed right into the following plane, which exploded violently. The parts of its wreckage, with what was left of Alabaster embedded in it, continued in a shallow dive for almost a mile before being dismissed, just before it would have crashed into an abandoned house.
Abe-1, flying the flaming Komet, launched all his rockets towards the gang toughs, then dismissed the flaming plane, and opened his parachute.
He felt like continuing the fight.
As Abe-1 descended, he looked for a likely spot - one where he would have at least some shelter and seclusion in order to land successfully without being shot to ribbons in the process, yet still be close enough to opponents that he could engage them before they moved elsewhere and potentially left him behind.
Several small groups of gang toughs in the area - all moving towards the fight with the last few GP robots - saw him descending and shot in his direction.
He saw a likely spot - the roof of a 4 story apartment building - and guided his chute towards that.
By landing there, no gang members would be able to tell whether he had landed on the far side of the building from them or not, and certainly none would be standing right next to him as he got out of his parachute. All of that would buy him some time.
Having worked as a skydiving instructor for years in the Virgin Islands, his skill at it had become pretty well refined.
So he had no trouble landing safely on the roof, dodging a couple vent pipes and a skylight as he did so.
He shucked his chute, kicked open the door to the stairs, and descended them as rapidly as he could, having seen, while descending, an opportunity that he did not want to miss - a small group of gang toughs about to pass by the front of the building.
As he exited the stairwell and headed towards the open front door, Abe-1 saw the small crowd of heavily-armed gang members passing by.
He tossed a grenade through the open front door and into the midst of the crowd, then dove for cover, and shielded his eyes and ears.
"This is why we do not bunch-up in combat situations," he whispered, repeating one of the lessons his marine drill instructors had often emphasized.
He had tossed a flash-bang grenade, since it was less likely to cause the gang's other explosives to detonate in sympathetic explosions.
It exploded and Abe-1 was up and out the door in a flash, .45 caliber pistol in hand.
Five gang members were stumbling around outside, still temporarily blinded and disoriented.
Abe didn't wait for them to recover and try to kill him, as some idiots sometimes did in movies.
His sense of morality did not include such ideas as a fight not being fair unless you let the enemy shoot first. Nor did it include the idea that you had to pretend that groups of obviously hostile armed men already fighting against your side, yet not actively shooting at the moment, deserved a warning from you so they could resume shooting.
These gang members were part of an ambush on Abe's group. The ambushers had started shooting first, when they could have simply stood aside and let Abe's group pass. And these gang members were running to join the fight.
If that were not enough, they had also shot towards Abe's parachute as he descended.
In most movies, Abe knew, the main character would still take a "that was then, this is now" attitude and take some action the movie script writers considered "fighting fair" such as putting away his gun and taking out a knife to fight an enemy armed only with a knife.
Marine Boot Camp had spent a lot of time and effort working to train such stupid attitudes out of new recruits.
When you're in a life-and-death fight, you fight. And you fight as hard, as fast and as ferociously as you can.
There was no better example of that than bayonet training.
Recruits usually started out half-hearted: gingerly and tentatively poking the bayonet towards the target dummy, as if to say "look what a threat I can be to you - don't make me actually hurt you".
Pathetic.
Such behavior would get you killed in combat.
By the time the drill sergeants were done with them, bayonet practice went something like this:
The recruit, yelling as ferociously as he could - which could unnerve the enemy and at the same time bolster your own courage - would charge full speed right into the dummy, bayonet-point first. He'd do it with no hesitation and holding nothing back, using the full speed of the charge plus all his strength to jam the bayonet in as deep as he could. Then he'd tear out the bayonet and follow-up with a full-strength slash and butt-stroke combination, then run to do the same to the next dummy.
Speed and ferocity were how you made sure the hurt ended up on the enemy rather than on you.
And Abe-1 attacked now with all the ferocity he'd been trained with, rather than stupidly holding back or taking time to brag or threaten.
Nothing in any morality he knew of required Abe to be stupid, so he went ahead and shot the stunned gang members.
He shot methodically, taking just enough time to be sure of his shots, putting one target down, then moving to the next.
When he was done, he loaded a fresh magazine, and used it to make sure they wouldn't get back up.
Then he quickly grabbed a couple grenades off a dead ganger, pulled the pins, and tossed them into the alleys on either side of the building he had come out of.
He'd seen other groups headed this way, and they'd be most likely to use those alleys to get here, if they were looking for him.
The groups probably wouldn't be here yet, but the grenades explosions would still get any who might be out ahead, and possibly wound a couple others. The explosions would also be noticeable, and make the gangers cautious - eager to avoid walking into another such explosion.
All of that gave Abe time.
He quickly searched for more grenades, finding them and some other stuff.
He tossed two more grenades into the same two alleys, and quickly shrugged into a backpack.
Taking a couple more things, he ran across the street to the south, then around a building, to break line-of sight with any pursuers.
The gang would expect him to head towards safety - the east, where his ship was known to be. So he would head south for at least a mile, to throw off any pursuit.
Mobility was another key to staying alive. You did not stay where the enemy knew you were, unless you wanted to be outflanked.
He could have stayed and fought, but he wouldn't have been able to do much more against the numbers he'd have faced.
And he'd found a reason not to fight.
There were two panzerfausts in the backpack he'd grabbed. He had always wanted a panzerfaust.
He'd also picked up a Sturmpistole - what the Germans had called a flare pistol modified with the sights to aim the grenades it could launch - loaded with a Panzerwurfkörper 42, or PWK42 antitank grenade. He'd like to try that out too.
After jogging two blocks - moving mostly between buildings and down alleys, to make it harder to spot him - he paused a moment to get himself more in order and get at least one hand free.
He quickly put on a hat with gang colors, so he'd blend in better.
And he draped the jacket he'd picked up - also in gang colors - over his shoulders, not coincidentally covering the ends of the two panzerfausts protruding from the backpack.
Then he holstered his .45, shoved the other pistol he'd acquired - an IMI Desert Eagle in .44 magnum - into his belt, and took off jogging again.
The Sturmpistole was still in one hand, since he had no holster for it and didn't want to take the time to take the backpack off and put it in.
Besides, running with it in-hand would likely discourage people from messing with him.
He considered running with a pistol held in each hand, like jogging weights, but decided he'd rather have one hand free.
Then he set out at a maintainable jog, while griping to himself that there had been no rifle among the gangers.
Rifles were for serious fighting.
As one of his drill instructors had said "a pistol is what you use to fight your way to your rifle."
He hadn't had room for a rifle in the plane's cockpit, but had still brought a pistol and a couple grenades, just in case, even though he hadn't been expecting that kind of a fight.
Without thinking about it, he sang an old Marine marching cadence while jogging.