Chapter 37
TrainWreck patted himself on the back - literally. His battlesuit allowed him the flexibility to do so, though the cramped fighting compartment within his tank still made it a little difficult.
They say that opportunity comes to those who are prepared, and it definitely seemed to be true.
He had prepared, by building these tanks.
And then opportunity had come.
The Slaughterhouse Nine had come to attack the stupid battleship out in the bay.
Their mere reputation had apparently driven the Empire gang out of town - fleeing for someplace safer. And it seemed like the PRT and Protectorate had done likewise, since they hadn't shown up for the fight either.
TrainWreck and his gang had holed-up with their new armored vehicles just in case The Nine came after them, but it hadn't been needed. The stupid battleship had actually killed The Nine, and then left in a hurry,as if they couldn't face another such fight.
On their way out, they'd apparently sent some parting shots to flatten PRT and Protectorate headquarters, as well as some other places in town.
All of that had given TrainWreck the golden opportunity he'd wanted - the whole town was his for the taking.
He'd summoned his guys - that was a whole lot easier now that, under his leadership, they were generally staying sober more and getting high less.
Then he'd outlined the plan, they'd manned the tanks, and driven out to conquer the city.
They'd swept through the former Empire territory with no opposition at all.
After pausing to cover the Empire's gang tags with their own, the Merchants had then driven down into former ABB territory. That had gone the same way - with no opposition,
They'd had all the fight knocked out of them by that previous group of tanks, and then they'd lost their leader Lung, so it was no surprise they didn't fight now.
.
But while the Merchants were finishing tagging their new territory, some reports had come in saying that there was some opposition near the flattened PRT headquarters.
TrainWreck had assigned three tanks, including himself, to go help the Merchants that were already there and being attacked.
But if his gang members had one thing in common, it was a lack of self-control. They were feeling invincible in their tanks, and also due to the success they'd had so far. Plus, they were curious.
So everybody showed up, though not all at once.
The first Merchant tank to arrive at the nearly-flattened PRT headquarters had cheerfully driven right into what remained of the building and proceeded to flatten the rest of it under their tracks.
They had been engaged in that, and not paying enough attention, when some opposition arrived, in the form of a couple of capes.
Miss Militia, a Protectorate cape whose power was to create, temporarily, any mass-produced handheld weapon, came out of the tangled pile of wrecked cars that had been thrown by explosions to the edge of a parking lot, saw the tank making the former PRT headquarters even flatter, and attacked it.
She created a Bazooka, and fired it at the nearby tank.
Her 90mm recoilless round flew across the bare part of the parking lot, crossed the street and a small lawn, went over some of the former headquarters' flattened rubble, and impacted the tank squarely in the side, near the front.
It was a HEAT round, and it detonated as it should.
But, in this case, that was a problem.
The jets of hot fast gas generated by HEAT rounds work best if detonated at a certain, short, distance from the target.
So most HEAT rounds have either proximity sensors to set them off at that range, or simple probes at the front, such that when the probe hits, the warhead detonates.
And this fact leads to a way to diminish, or even defeat, the effect of the shaped-charge HEAT warhead: by tricking it into going off at the wrong distance from the target.
The US Army had a complicated system of metal slats on their Stryker vehicles, which was designed for that purpose - to impair or neutralize such warheads by setting them off early.
TrainWreck had used the junky version of that.
His tanks all had cages of chicken-wire around them. It was cheap. It was easy. It wasn't 100% reliable. But it was also far from 0% reliable.
So Miss Militia's bazooka round hit the chicken wire suspended a foot or so out in front of the tank's armor, and detonated there.
The hot jet of gasses still pierced some armor, but, having further to go, pierced less of it.
So the tank survived that hit.
The hot gasses penetrated the outer armor layer, which, for this tank, was overlapping man-hole covers somewhat resembling a fish's scales.
It also penetrated the next layer of armor underneath that. This second layer was made of tiled sections of strips of steel-belted tires. The rubber in those boiled under the hot gasses, causing both another stream of gas - boiled rubber - to somewhat disrupt the first, and also causing the outer layer to move a bit in response to the expanding cloud of rubber. That movement of the outer layer caused some of the stream of hot gasses to no longer align with the hole already burned through that layer, and have to burn new holes. And doing so used up energy, of which it only had so much.
This effect is known, and is why a layer of rubber is sometimes used in composite armors. TrainWreck had chanced to hear of that, and, having plenty of tires available in the junk sources he was using, had used it liberally.
Under the rubber armor layer was a layer of concrete, before the final layer of steel - made from the walls of dumpsters - in this tank's armor. Neither of those were damaged.
The tank immediately started turning towards Miss Militia, but unfortunately, it's crew didn't coordinate. It's hull started turning right, giving it's turret further to go as it traversed left to face the target.
So it was that neither the turret-mounted weapons, nor the hull-mounted machinegun were able to fire at Miss Militia before she took a second shot.
And help also arrived for her before her second shot.
The Ward Vista, whose power was to warp space and twist it as she liked, arrived in company with the Protectorate cape Triumph, in his lion-themed costume.
His power was sonic manipulation.
That wasn't very powerful, and so wasn't always useful, but in this case he and Vista made it so.
Vista warped space, so Triumph could take one step from where they both stood in the former parking lot, near the tangled pile of wrecked cars, and end up only 20feet away from the tank.
Then Triumph blasted the tank with a cone of sound, which tore off all the loosely-attached things: mainly the chicken-wire.
Some of the chicken-wire got stuck under the small turret housing a laser and a heat-ray, mounted atop the tank's main turret.
Then, as that turret tried to move and aim, the chicken-wire got jammed in really good. The laser turret finally ground to a complete halt, still pointed slightly upward and to the left - not towards any threat.
That being as much as Triumph could do, he then stepped back next to Vista and Miss Militia, both because he didn't want to catch any shrapnel from Miss Militia's next shot, and because there was plenty of cover there among the car wreckage, if needed.
Her bazooka having failed to penetrate the first time, Miss Militia had dismissed it and created a Javelin antitank missile.
It had a tandem warhead designed to defeat reactive armor.
It roared as it fired, and the missile streaked from her to the tank.
She got a good hit on the tank's lower front plate, and the two warheads went off in a sequence so quick they seemed like one long detonation. Nevertheless, the first warhead, though it penetrated only partway through, still prepared the way for the second warhead, which penetrated further. Between the two warheads, they penetrating the tanks' armor and destroyed the transmission underneath, rendering the tank immobile.
The tank fired back at the same time, and Vista went on the defensive, warping space to make the machinegun bullets and main gun round swerve off to their left, towards the beach.
While the tank was focused on Miss Militia's group, KidWin swooped in on his hoverboard, flying tandem with Clockblocker.
Both were Wards serving in the local PRT. KidWin was a Tinker with a battlesuit and hoverboard. Clockblocker could freeze time on things he touched, though unfortunately the effect lasted a variable amount of time neither under his control nor predictable.
KidWin flew his hoverboard up next to the tank's rear, and shot it with his Spark Pistol, sending something that looked like a cross between a laser and a lightning bolt into the armor plate there, and melting a little of that, for no real damage.
Clockblocker, on the back of the hoverboard, leaned over and touched the tank, freezing it in time.
Those two stayed next to the tank, so they could freeze it again and again as necessary until some more permanent solution could be arranged.
Then the capes started discussing how to get the tankers out of the tank so they could be arrested.
While they were doing that, a Merchant dune buggy armed with 2 racks of simple rockets arrived at the far side of the small park across from the parking lot.
The rocket buggy was the first of the other Merchant vehicles to arrive in answer to the radio call about opposition. It would not be the last.
Upon arrival, the rocket buggy wasted no time in firing half a dozen rockets from it's left-hand pod of rockets at Miss Militias group, and two more from it's right-hand pod towards KidWin and Clockblocker.
Vista, still with a defensive focus, warped space near her group such that the three-inch wide missiles went astray, off towards the beach again.
The two missiles directed towards Clockblocker and KidWin, standing near the tank, each hit, with one going slightly to the tank's rear and one hitting solidly on the tank's side.
The side hit probably would not have penetrated the tank's thick armor, but that question went unanswered, since the tank was currently frozen in time again. So it took no damage.
But some shrapnel from the other rocket hit the two Wards.
Each received several small cuts and punctures from the shrapnel. They wasted no time in flying away on the hoverboard to seek medical aid.
Meanwhile, Miss Militia had created a 7 barreled .30 caliber GE MiniGun, with a backpack full of ammo, which was far more lethal than what was usually allowed.
She used it to spray 3000+ rounds per minute at the rocket-buggy's unmanned parts: the tires, engine, and especially the rocket-pods, while trusting in the obviously bullet-proof glass covering the crew compartment to keep her attack non-lethal as the regulations required.
Bullets hit all over the buggy and bits flew off of it everywhere, like it was plywood being chewed up by a chainsaw. In moments, all that was left looked like Swiss-cheese, plus a crew compartment which, though speckled and spider-webbed with cracks from a few hits, was still intact.
But this had given the tank enough time for Clockblocker's effect to wear off.
It fired its machineguns at Vista, who sent the bullets off through twisted space as before.
Triumph tried a focused sound lance at the tank. This hit, but the overlapping man-hole cover scales were undamaged - they barely even jiggled in response.
Then the Protectorate capes Assault and Battery arrived.
Assault could manipulate kinetic energy on himself or on things he touched. He was using that as he arrived, with each running step being faster than the last.
Battery's power had to spend a few seconds charging up, and then gave her super-speed, some super-strength, and some ability to generate electromagnetic effects.
Assault rammed the tank, while he'd been running nearly 50 miles per hour, then he manipulated the resulting kinetic energy and redirected it, so none of it affected him and all of it went into the tank. The resultant impact sounded like a giant had hit the tank with a sledgehammer, and it put a significant dent into one of the manhole covers serving as armor.
Battery tried gripping a man-hole cover and tearing it off, to no avail. It was fastened on too tightly to move when she yanked on it with her hands.
So next she yanked on it with her electromagnetic power, and it came off, revealing, through a small gap between the other manhole-cover scales, a patch of steel-belted tire armor.
The tank's cupola machinegun fired at her, and she dodged, while the tank's hull-mounted machinegun and its co-axial machinegun both continued to fire at, and suppress, Miss Militia's group.
While Vista was warping space in front of them for their defense, they couldn't really attack to their front either, since any such attacks would also go askew due to the warping.
The tank's main gun adjusted to fire just to Miss Militia's right, apparently hoping to hit a wrecked car there and detonate, to try getting her, Vista and Triumph with shrapnel from the blast to their side.
But Assault saw that and moved quickly, placing himself in front of the main gun as it fired.
The shell hit him in the chest, and he redirected all that kinetic energy into a punch at the tank's main front armor plate, which caved in 8 inches deep around his punch, leaving a deep dent after he withdrew his hand.
The shell which the tank had just fired, landed at Assault's feet, and, not knowing how it was fused or whether it would still explode, he and Battery fled before it could go off.
Then Dauntless - another Protectorate cape - and a second Merchant tank arrived about the same time.
Dauntless used his Arc Lance to shoot lightning at the new tank. This hit and melted a small spot on it's front armor plate, but did not penetrate the thick steel outer layer, which was made of car axles - the rod-like parts of them - layered and laid side-by-side like the logs in an old-timey wooden fort in Indian country, though it was not roof-less like those forts, so really was more like a log-cabin.
The new tank fired back at Dauntless, hitting him with machinegun fire and a heat-ray, making his shield flare with light and energy as it protected him from most of the attack, then failed.
With a couple bullet-holes in him and a bad burn on his leg, Dauntless flew away again, using his speedy flying boots to get him to safety where he could get medical attention.
Armsmaster then roared in from a side-street on his special motorcycle. When he got in-between the new tank and Vista's group, he leapt dramatically off the motorcycle, leaving it to coast to a halt a few feet beyond him and lean on its automatic kick-stand.
Then he took as stern and imposing a stance as he could, extended one hand palm-forward, and yelled, at a battlesuit- enhanced 120 decibels, "Stop, in the name of the law!"
The new tank responded by shooting his motorcycle with it's plasma gun.
The super-hot ball of plasma melted through almost half the motorcycle before causing the fuel and volatile chemicals therein to explode dramatically.
The explosion flung Armsmaster towards Vista's group.
In a display of excellent control, Vista dropped her defensive space-warp just for a moment, allowing Armsmaster to pass by them and land just a few feet beyond. Then she resumed warping space again in time to block more incoming machinegun bullets.
Arms master's armor had saved his life, absorbing much of the blast, and stopping most of the shrapnel. But he was still out of the fight and in need of medical attention.
Miss Militia missed the opportunity to fire while Armsmaster was flying by.
So instead she leaned around the edge of Vista's defensive space-warp, which was still protecting them all from the continual stream of machinegun bullets from the other tank. Once past the edge, Miss Militia fired a Javelin missile at the new tank.
The missile streaked towards the target, but was almost immediately shot down by the laser in the little turret atop the tank's big turret. This had already been pointing in the right direction in anticipation that the lady holding the anti-tank missile launcher may use it.
Then the new tank rotated it's smooth steel turret just a little, and fired it's main gun at Miss Militia.
Vista scrambled to make her warp wide enough to defend against both that, and the continued machinegun fire still coming from both tanks, but she managed it.
Despite the big differences in hull armor on the two tanks, their turrets looked identical.
TrainWreck had started making turrets from scrounged junk, like the tank hulls, but PyroTechnical had vetoed that, as making it too hard to fit the guns.
So the turrets got standardized.
Pyrotechnical melted some engine blocks from junked cars and trucks, and poured the metal from them into a mold shaped more or less like a soup bowl, to 'cast' the turrets.
He did the same for each tank.
On top of each turret, were two smaller 'cupola turrets', looking almost like Mickey Mouse ears. These housed one or two guns each, including, at minimum, a .50 caliber machinegun and a laser. They were 'remotely operable', meaning crew inside the turret could aim and fire them from within the tank, without opening any hatches.
Pyrotechnical also gave each tank the same machineguns and 120mm main gun - the same ones that the USA army had most recently used in their own, M1 Abrams tanks, since ammunition was available for those.
But having perfectly identical, more or less professional looking turrets, on tanks which, otherwise, each looked 'hand-crafted' from junk, was incongruous.
While Miss Militia, Vista, and Triumph, and Armsmaster beyond them, all sheltered, behind Vista's warped space, from the storm of bullets directed at them, Assault and Battery returned to the fray.
They emerged from behind the far edge of the piles of wrecked cars in the parking lot - well away from Vista so there were no bullets for them to dodge. Then they each ran, at super-speeds, up to the second tank.
Battery leaped up, as if to vault herself clear over the tank, but reached down as she passed, grabbed the barrels of the laser gun and the heat-ray gun, and bent them each by 90 degrees.
Assault did much the same thing to the plasma gun and the .50 caliber machinegun, both in the other small turret atop the tank's main turret.
This left it armed with only the hull-mounted machinegun, the co-axial machinegun - both .30 caliber - and the main 120mm cannon.
After that, they each landed next to the tank, and beat upon it.
Battery hit the drive wheel on the tank's tracks, denting it before she had to flee to recharge.
On her way to safety, she grabbed Armsmaster by the ankles of his battlesuit and dragged him away to get medical attention.
Assault jumped in front of the hull-mounted .30 caliber machinegun, absorbing several hits from it and redirecting the energy into an attack, wherein he reached out and grabbed the machinegun barrel and bent it in half.
That barrel promptly burst, as the next bullet trying to leave it, hit the bend and expended all its energy there, bursting the barrel open wide.
Some kinetic energy from that hit Assault too, which he absorbed and used to move quickly towards the first tank.
While he was on his way there, a third tank arrived.
It's armor looked a bit like the segmented armor Roman Legionnaires used to wear. It was made of the springy metal strips called leaf springs which are used in the suspensions of cars.
As the third tank was aiming at Assault, a fourth, very shiny, tank arrived as well.
It's armor was made of mostly-flattened car bumpers, laid edge to edge and side to side, in layers. These former bumpers were all Chromed, and reflected light very well. Since the bumpers had been imperfectly flattened, there were plenty of little facets reflecting light every which-way. The effect was almost like a disco-ball.
The third tank fired and hit Assault, who absorbed the kinetic energy and used the energy to dodge away from the shell now lying at his feet, which was still full of explosives and could go off at any time, as far as he knew.
This brought him into line with the fourth tank's main gun, and that also shot him, with a similar effect: the 120mm projectile fell at Assault's feet as he absorbed it's energy.
Though this proved to be more energy than he could really control, so some energy expended itself randomly and he was shoved backwards twenty feet.
Then streams of machinegun bullets started hitting Assault.
He was still fully charged and couldn't really control the additional kinetic energy. So, while he could stop the bullets and make them fall to his feet harmlessly, his control currently went no further than that. Consequently, he was himself shoved around the battlefield, unable to direct the energy that was beyond his control limit, and, in fact, getting his wits temporarily scrambled by trying..
Each .30 caliber machinegun bullet that hit him shoved him about a foot in a random direction.
And each .50 caliber machinegun bullet hitting him shoved him about 3 feet in a random direction.
Then a 5th Merchant tank arrived.
This one had car transmission casings - flattened, laid side to side and edge-to edge, and layered - as the basis for its armor.
It immediately joined the game of shooting Assault to watch him 'pinball' wildly around the battlefield, out of control and effectively their helpless toy.
The tanks seemed to enjoy that so much, that fire at Miss Militia, Vista, and Triumph slackened somewhat, though not enough for it to be safe for Vista to drop her defensive space-warping effect.
It was also unsafe for any of the three to lean around the edge of the warping effect to fire back. So they hunkered down and awaited opportunity.
A sixth Merchant tank arrived - this one a 'heavy assault' variant, with extra-thick armor. That armor was made of car engine cylinder-heads, which had been laid like bricks in the bottom of a large mold. Then molten spring steel - acquired by melting the springs from the seats from many cars - had been poured into the mold, filling in the gaps between, and the cavities within, the cylinder-heads.
The resulting armor plate was quite thick and heavy, so the tank moved slowly.
It too joined in shooting mainly Assault, with just one of it's machineguns adding to the fire concentrating on Vista's group to keep them suppressed.
The tanks seemed to be trying to make a sport of who could move Assault most, and also trying to control where they moved him.
So they didn't use - not yet anyway - lasers, heat rays, or plasma guns on him, since that would end it and spoil the fun.
Some of those weapons got fired at Vista, but they did just as the guns did, and, a couple feet in front of her, where she had warped space, they all took a sharp left turn and went towards the beach.
Just moments later, the rest of the Merchants' tanks arrived and joined in.
Vista, Triumph, and Miss Militia had begun slowly edging backwards, towards the tangled pile of wrecked cars lying at the edge of the parking lot, where the explosion that had wrecked PRT headquarters had thrown them.
This pile represented concealment, some cover, and a possible way to disengage.
Then Velocity appeared next to Miss Militia, whispering in her ear.
He was a Protectorate cape whose power was super-speed, but who got weaker the faster he moved. At his fastest, he could run to Boston - an hour south for most people - and back in seconds, but could not even pick up a Kleenex tissue, limiting his potential effectiveness dramatically.
But he could still scout, and had done so.
The news he brought made Miss Militia's face blanch white, and she ordered a withdrawal.
That group hurried their edging towards the pile of cars.
Velocity started running around the battle scene to attract the attention of the tanks.
He circled a few times around the first tank - the one with a shot-up transmission, sitting immobile in the large expanse of nearly-flat rubble that was the former PRT headquarters.
Then he went across the street, through the park, and started winding in and around the tanks which had pulled up from various side-streets and generally stopped in the streets running along the edges of the park.
These tanks formed an arc along the west and north sides of the big open space. The parking lot was to the south, and the beach to the east.
Velocity was playing a dangerous game, by trying to run slow enough to give the tanks a hope of hitting him, so they'd try, yet fast enough to not actually get hit.
Some tanks did try to hit him, with the result that some machinegunned each-other by accident.
The machineguns did no harm to the other tanks, but they added to the distraction, especially as crews started telling each-other to knock it off and that they'd better not to try that with the main gun.
In aggregate, the distractions were enough.
Vista, Miss Militia, and Triumph got behind a pile of parked cars and out of sight, moved rapidly to one side, then Vista changed how she was warping space so they could all, with a couple steps, end up a few blocks away, in relative safety.
Then Vista changed her effect again, this time allowing Battery, charged up and as super-fast as she could be, to show up next to Assault so fast it was almost like teleporting, then carry him away just as fast.
As that was happening, something started coming around a corner a mile to the north, turning left to head south on the big north-south street that ran right up to the site of the former PRT headquarters.
Velocity, now the only cape remaining on the battlefield, decided it was time to leave, and did so.
Though he did so in a whimsical way - first he ran north a mile and touched, like in a 'tag-team' wrestling match, a monstrously large wall of steel that had not been there a minute ago.
One of the small turrets on its underside rotated to get Velocity in its sights, but was too slow.
He sped off to go regroup with the other capes.
For a moment, the guns of all the Merchant tanks fell silent, since they had no targets.
That's what allowed them to finally hear the ridiculously loud clanking and rumbling coming from the steel monster a mile to their north.
It was a tank - a few recognized it as a Ratte - almost 50 feet wide and about 40 feet tall, with a huge turret holding three massive guns in it.
And that turret was rotating to point at the group of 30 Merchant tanks clustered near the ruins of the PRT building.
-0-0-0-
TrainWreck had almost had a 'brown alert' - a bowel-control failure - when he saw the massive wall of steel festooned with guns pulling onto the road a mile north of them.
But he was game - he had 30 tanks here, and three more rocket-launching buggies a few blocks away. He had a strong group, with the stuff armies had depended upon - tanks and rocket launchers. Surely that would be more effective than amazingly huge tanks, or people would have been building those instead of regular tanks, right?
His radio crackled to life in a broadcast directed to all his vehicles. TrainWreck's new lieutenant, a man named Joe who used to teach history, and who they all called Professor, spoke up saying, "there's no need to fear that big ugly anachronism guys, it's just one of Hitler's 'white elephant' projects that some unthinking fan-boy has actually gone and built. It's called a Ratte, and Hitler's ministers canceled it after he approved it, and they did so because it is all kinds of a bad idea. Most people thought it would never move an inch. Apparently that's been fixed, but it is still so heavy that experts agree that it will batter itself to death just in driving along, and will probably crack in half as soon as it hits a bump in the road. It's size is its weakness. It's too heavy to do pretty much anything and too slow to get anywhere on it's own, assuming it doesn't break down in trying."
TrainWreck wasn't sure about that last part. He knew the trick the cops used, of timing how long it took a car to move from one telephone-pole to the next, to calculate it's speed. And that told him the Ratte was moving about 35mph.
The professor continued, "The Ratte has no need for all that size. It's guns are much bigger than needed, and missiles work better anyway. It is too big to get any real protection from it's armor, what with all that vast surface area to cover. It has to have significant weak-points. If they'd built it in WWII, airplanes would have turned it into scrap in a day, and they still can, and missiles can as well. And everything carries missiles anymore. It is vulnerable to pretty-much everything: a sitting duck."
Someone else in the gang agreed, and a few more cheered.
"Well," thought TrainWreck, "we haven't got missiles on our tanks, but the 3 rocket buggies do and can be ready to fire pretty quickly. Let's test it and find out."
He gave orders and his tanks and buggies started moving.
All 30 tanks were rotating their hulls and turrets to face the oncoming Ratte.
Some got rotated earlier than others. They went ahead and fired as soon as they could.
Three 120mm shells from tank main guns hit the front armor on the Ratte and bounced off, not even leaving a dent in the thick armor.
Then two plasma guns fired and hit it too. The plasma dissipated some, and spread out some more, over the mile it had to fly to the target.
So when it impacted the Ratte's armor, the plasma still vaporized some of that armor. But instead of a narrow, deep hole, it vaporized an area about 4 feet in diameter and maybe half a foot deep.
That partial success cheered the Merchants. They continued, as fast as they could, their preparations to fire some more. Some tanks had to reload after having fired at that cape, others had to aim.
A heat ray was the next fastest to get aimed and fired. It hit the Ratte in the middle of it's main frontal armor plate and stayed on that spot, cooking it as best it could until it ran out of charge.
But that didn't even make the metal hot enough to glow, much less melt it or damage it.
Some over-enthusiastic machinegunners fired their weapons at the Ratte, but they bounced off harmlessly.
A 120mm gun fired. It hit a section of armor protecting the tracks, and knocked that plate askew.
Another 120mm gun shot at the same spot on the armor covering the tracks, hit it, penetrated and did damage.
A big wheel rolled free, some damaged track links came loose, and the set of tracks they belonged to stopped moving.
Then the whole Ratte stopped moving.
Over his radio, TrainWreck could hear his other tank crews cheering.
-0-0-0-
Kaiser was frustrated with how long it had taken his main turret to rotate onto target. He hadn't let the lesser guns have the glory of firing first - no, that must go to the big guns, at least for this, the first combat between a Ratte and lesser tanks.
He was impatient to start shooting back, but also wanted maximum accuracy, so he'd ordered the tank to halt.
They could fire on the move, but when doing so, their accuracy really suffered.
His tank had begun to slow, and then the annoying fleas out there had gotten two lucky hits in a row on his track-guards, knocking off the drive wheel and throwing the track.
How frustrating!
He could still drive without it, but there was no need - the targets were only a mile away, and that was well within range.
And Kaiser could easily grow a new drive-wheel in place, as well as new track-links to replace the damaged ones.
He might even be able to do it without leaving the tank - if they got a camera onto the damage so he could see what he was doing.
So repairs would be very quick.
But it irked him tremendously that history would record 'first blood' to the other side.
He resolved to make the rest of the battle as dramatic as he could, in his favor.
Then he swore in frustration, as he remembered his guns were all loaded with HE - High Explosive - rounds, since he'd not expected to find any targets worthy of AP, or Armor Piercing, shells.
He could either delay more, to unload the HE and then reload with AP, or he could use the fastest way to unload - fire the HE.
Of course he would fire, even though the enemy tanks were likely to survive any hits. But he'd make the most of it, and fire at their tracks, to immobilize them.
He grumbled that he should have known enemy tanks were present, so he could be prepared for them. That's what the UAV's were for - scouting.
Well, either he didn't have enough of them, or didn't have them doing the right scouting patterns. He'd have an underling look into that.
Now his tank had stopped driving forwards, also ceased the rocking motion from having stopped moving, and his primary and secondary turrets were on-target.
It was time to fire.
Kaiser checked the right monitor, liked what he saw, and pressed the firing button.
His right-most 11-inch gun fired. The 697 pound HE shell flew at 2900 feet per second, traveling almost a mile to the target in 1.8 seconds, impacted the tracks on the right side of a Merchant tank, and blew up violently.
Bits of track links, idler wheels, and road wheels flew out like shrapnel, doing light damage to a few other tanks they impacted.
The tank he'd shot flipped up onto it's side, and it was clear that the side that had been hit - the side now on top - had been 'stove-in' pretty well, with a wide deep dent and some crumpling around that.
Kaiser was satisfied and grinned a cruel grin.
While watching his shot play out until the end, Kaiser had ignored the other shots his super-tank had been firing.
Now he checked up on them.
He noted one 11-inch shell had barely missed a tank's front plate, landing on the ground a foot in front of the tank and blowing up there instead.
Yet that had worked out, since the massive explosion had partly gone to the underside of the tank, and had flipped it over onto its back, disabling it.
The third main gun had hit a tank's side, in-between the components of the track, and had actually penetrated the armor there, exploding inside the tank. That tank's sides bulged out, throwing out some pieces of its armor as shrapnel, and it's turret flew off, landing on the grass nearby.
Then it's ammunition started burning and exploding.
That was quite satisfying.
His two 150mm secondary guns, had only gotten one hit between them. That 100 pound shell had thoroughly wrecked a tank's tracks.
The miss hit a mailbox and turned it into a fountain of burning confetti.
Both front 88mm guns, and one of the rear ones - which were mounted a bit higher than the front ones so they could shoot forwards - were able to bear on the targets and had also fired.
All three 22.9 pound shells had hit and destroyed sets of tank tracks.
Lastly, he got to try his own personal gun - the BEC launcher.
An underling had already lined it up on a target for him, saving him time.
He verified he was indeed aimed at some heavy armor on the front of a tank - the better to test things with - and fired.
The 'pop' of the rifle firing was so puny, compared to the roar of the big guns, that Kaiser wasn't quite sure whether he had heard it, or imagined it.
He probably did imagine a small screeching sound from his target as the BEC bullet hit.
Downrange, no hole appeared in his target, but it suddenly got covered in frost and it's engine compartment burst all its seams, as if it suddenly had way too much of something inside it, which had to get out.
There must have been other fluids in there which froze, since the tiny bullet could only expand so much as it ceased being a BEC.
The seams just popped open an inch or two, with ice sticking a little way out of the new gaps.
And that was it.
But that tank stopped moving, it's turrets, large and small, stopped rotating, and exhaust stopped coming from the vents over the engine compartment in its rear, though, briefly, Kaiser could have sworn he saw puffs of ice-crystals and snowflakes come from the engine vents.
The BEC had apparently penetrated almost the whole length of the tank, from front to the engine compartment in the back.
That tank showed no signs that its engine or crew still functioned at all..
Kaiser grinned again.
Then he gave the order to launch the rockets.
They needed to stagger their launches, so nearby rockets did not interfere with each-other. So he'd waited to fire them until his big guns were reloading.
His 11-inch guns were excellent in that regard - firing every 17 seconds, which was six times as fast as the firing rate of the British battleship which Scharnhorst had fought in WWII.
His 150mm guns could reload faster still, and fired every 7.5 seconds.
And this time, he was making sure to reload with AP, or Armor Piercing, rounds.
He looked forward to seeing how they would perform.
-0-0-0-
TrainWreck thought maybe he'd gone deaf, despite being inside an intact tank and wearing a noise-canceling headset.
It had been that loud, when the enemy shells had gone off.
Then his ears started ringing and he knew that his deafness was temporary.
He started assessing how many tanks he'd lost, and what condition the rest were in.
And he started trying to think of what to say to keep morale up - to keep his guys fighting despite losing... it looked like 3 tanks, plus some damaged.
Then the enemy started firing rockets from a series of rails atop their main turret. Two rockets at a time fired from each of the four levels, spacing out the launch so the rockets would not disrupt each-other's flights.
TrainWreck's antimissile laser had been set to automatic. And it turned out not to have been the only one.
Several lasers fired.
Some hit rockets.
TrainWreck had been feeling the pinch in his pocket-book about the time he'd bought the lasers, and had not opted for the best computer-controlled aiming. Instead he'd gotten very minimal computers - Raspberry Pi's they'd said - and it showed now in how few hits his side got.
But they still got some hits.
Three of the rockets that got hit fell apart in mid-flight.
Two more had the sides of their rocket-motors burned through, resulting in a "vector-addition" as the new hole in the side acted as a new sideways rocket nozzle for the burning rocket fuel trying to escape there.
Those two flew violently askew, before exploding.
Four more simply exploded in flight.
Seven got through, and blew up all around the Merchant tanks, damaging some.
And one happy little rocket - as TrainWreck liked to think of it - blew up right by the launch-rails.
The Ratte had launched 16 of 48 rockets before that one blew up. So when it blew up, it took it's 31 remaining neighbors with it.
The top of the Ratte was covered in smoke and fire, as explosion after explosion blasted it and burning rocket fuel sprayed all over.
TrainWreck's beleaguered men cheered as the explosions and fire continued.
And they continued shooting the Ratte, partly out of spite, and partly in case it was not dead from its own rocket explosions.
They started by firing two more plasma guns, each gouging out large chunks of Ratte armor where they hit, and demonstrating themselves to be, so far at least, the most effective weapon the Merchant tanks had.
Not every Merchant tank had a plasma gun - only about two-thirds of them did. But TrainWreck was really glad now that he'd gotten that many of the expensive things. It was proving to be money well-spent.
And they kept firing - mostly their main guns and plasma guns, though some kept trying heat-rays aimed at various parts of the Ratte to probe for vulnerable points.
They couldn't assess the results of every shot, since there was so much smoke swirling around their target.
But TrainWreck saw at least one 120mm shell hit a spot previously weakened by, first one plasma hit, then a second. Even that 120mm shell, hitting a spot doubly weakened by plasma, didn't penetrate the Ratte's armor, though it did make a dent in the thin armor remaining there.
He wasn't sure whether to take hope from that, or not.
But what did give TrainWreck hope is that the Ratte just sat there, idle and apparently not doing anything - except maybe burning - while his tanks threw all they had at it.