The gallery, when the jeep emerged onto it, was empty except for
casualties, a few still alive. The side of the airboat was caved in;
the lifter-load of ammunition had gone up with the bomb. He moved the
jeep to the right of the shaft and waited for the vehicles behind him,
suffering a brief indecision.
_Never divide your force in the presence of the enemy._
There had been generals who had done that and gotten away with it, but
they'd had names like Foxx Travis and Robert E. Lee and
Napoleon--Napoleon; that was who'd made that crack about omelets!
They'd known what they were doing. He was playing this battle by ear.
There was a lot of shouting ahead to the right. That meant live
pirates, a deplorable situation which ought to be corrected at once.
The communication screen was noisy, now; his father had gotten to the
top gallery with the three gun cutters, and was meeting resistance. He
formed his column, his jeep and one of the lorries in front, the scows
next, and the second lorry behind, and started around the gallery
counterclockwise, the snoopers and the three remaining bomb-robots
ahead. They began running into resistance almost at once.
Bullets spatted on the armor glass in front of him, spalling it and
blotching it with metal until he found that he could steer better by
the show-back of his view-pickup. He used that until the pickup was
shot out. Then his father began wanting to know, from the
communication screen, what was going on and where he was. A bomb or
something went off directly under the jeep, bouncing it almost to the
ceiling; he found that it was impossible to lift it again after it
settled to the floor of the gallery, and they all piled out to fight
on foot. Sommers and his gang from the number one lorry were also
afoot; their vehicle had been disabled. He saw them lifting wounded
into one of the scows.
They blew up the light-service robot to clear a nest of pirates who
had taken cover ahead of them. They sent the robo-janitor up a side
passage and exploded it in a missile-launching position on the outside
of the mountain; that produced a tremendous explosion. They began
running out of cartridges, and had to stop and glean more from enemy
casualties. They expended their last bomb-robot, the restaurant
server, to break up another pirate resistance point.
At length he found himself, with Sylvie and her father and one of the
Home Guardsmen from Sommers' lorry, lying behind an aircar somebody
had knocked out with a bazooka, with two dead pirates for company and
a dozen distressingly live ones ahead behind an improvised barricade.
Behind, there was frantic firing; the rear-guard seemed to have run
into trouble, probably from some gang that had come down from the
upper level. He wondered what his father was doing with the gunboats;
since abandoning the jeep, he had lost his only means of contact.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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