Stiff fingers fumbled for the stimpack, found it, and slapped the device against the back of his neck. It buzzed softly. That meant it was empty, so Raynor threw it away. Damn. All the places where Moller had stuck needles into his body hurt like hell.

The saber rolled up to a point about twenty feet away and came to a stop. Tychus climbed out, eyed the sky, and lit a cigar. Puffs of smoke trailed behind him as he made his way over to the hover-cycle. Raynor, who had just taken a long pull from a water bottle, gargled and swallowed. “We’re sitting ducks out here.”

“Yup,” Tychus acknowledged. “We sure as hell are. That’s why Vanderspool wants us to find a defensible spot and hole up.”

“What for?” Raynor demanded. “Why can’t they send some dropships to pick us up here?”

“There’s a shortage,” Tychus answered laconically. “That’s what Colonel Shit-for-brains claims anyway. We lost too many dropships last night and they have to bring some in from the north.”

“Well, that’s just wonderful,” Raynor responded. “I guess I’d better go find a hole for us to crawl into.”

“You do that,” Tychus said agreeably. “And Jim …”

“Yeah?”

“Find it soon. Most of our vehicles are running on fumes.”

Raynor swore, pulled a pair of goggles down over his eyes, and gunned the engines. The vulture fishtailed as it took off and raised a rooster tail as it sped west. Various rock formations could be seen in the distance, and Raynor was trying to figure out which one of them was closest when something caught his eye almost directly ahead. It was too symmetrical to be natural, yet so large he couldn’t believe it was man-made until he topped a rise, and the entire machine came into view.

It was roughly the size of a thirty-story office tower laid on its side. And, judging from the enormous tracks that were partially buried in the sand, the enormous device was a so-called “mineral stripper,” a mobile processor that could “eat” a fifty-foot-wide strip of ground as it crawled across the surface of a planet, extracting the minerals, and process them on board. Waste materials were fed out the back as trucks pulled up alongside to receive the ore and carry it away. The words RAFFIN BROTHERSMINING were printed along the stripper’s rusty flank in letters twenty feet tall.

Judging from the damage that could be seen, and all of the sand that had accumulated around the machine’s monstrous tracks, the processor had been bombed during the early stages of the wars and had been abandoned thereafter. Could they hide inside? And wait for help to arrive? Yes, there was plenty of metal to protect them, and the stripper was closer than the rock formations in the distance.

Raynor skidded to a stop, flicked a switch, and spoke into the mic. “Sierra-Nine to Sierra-Six… . Come to Daddy. I have it. Over.”

The reply wasn’t what he was expecting. “Hit the throttle, Nine… . You have an inbound Hellhound at three o’clock!”

Raynor was still in the process of absorbing the words as geysers of sand jumped into the air all around him and there was a sudden roar as the enemy fighter flashed overhead. Raynor gunned the engine and sent sand spewing in every direction as he took off. The vulture caught a large pocket of air as it passed over the top of a dune and pancaked in twenty feet beyond.

The impact nearly threw Raynor off the bike, but he managed to hang on as the hover-cycle began to regain its momentum, and the Hellhound circled back. The distance to the stripper had been halved by then—but Raynor knew that the pilot was going to get a second chance at him. So he cranked the handlebars to the left. That caused the vulture to turn in on the fighter and made the Kel-Morian’s target that much smaller.

Since the vehicles were rushing at each other at a combined speed of more than three hundred miles per hour, the pilot had only seconds in which to score a kill. Raynor looked up, saw laser bolts coming straight at him, and marveled at how pretty the lights were as they plowed parallel furrows through the sand. A slight turn to the right was enough to steer the bike between the incoming beams as the Hellhound roared overhead.

That was Raynor’s cue to execute a sharp turn to the right and make a run for the protection offered by the stripper. The rest of the convoy was halfway across the open area by that time, each vehicle throwing up its own plume of dust, as they raced toward safety. The only exceptions were the APCs, which sat side-by-side, roof-mounted double-barreled gauss cannons stuttering as they attempted to bring the Hellhound down.

Then a bus came too close to a low-lying rock formation, ran up onto the ledge, and flipped over! The vehicle skidded for fifty feet on its roof, wheels still spinning, before finally coming to a stop. POWs were just starting to crawl out through the windows when the Hellhound came back to strafe the wreckage. The bus burst into flames and a column of oily smoke boiled up into the sky as if to mark a funeral pyre.

It was a terrible loss, but one that gave the rest of the vehicles enough time to circle around both ends of the stripper and seek safety between the processor’s mighty treads. It was darker in there, and cooler too, as Tychus exited the saber to find Raynor waiting for him. “They know where we are now,” Raynor said grimly. “Ground units are probably en route. Let’s bring the APCs in to block both ends of this hulk.”

It was a good idea, and Tychus was about to say as much, when an accelerated spike hit. The explosion wasn’t that big by military standards, but sufficient to blow a huge divot out of the sand just inside the north entrance and cause Tychus to change his mind. “Get the POWs out of those vehicles!” he shouted. “See the stairs to either side? Take them up and put them at the very center of this thing. And do it yesterday!”

“Where the hell did that spike come from?” Raynor asked, as the rangers hurried to obey Tychus’s orders.

“I don’t know,” Tychus answered grimly, as his cigar waggled up and down. “But I’ll bet we’re gonna find out.”

Ottmar and his Snakeheads were sitting atop a low ridge that ran east to west across the plain. The mineral stripper was clear to see about a mile ahead. Thanks to information provided by the Hellhound pilot, not to mention the thick black smoke, the fugitives had been easy to locate.

Ottmar panned the battlefield with his field goggles. Eight combat four-wheeled light attack vehicles (LAVs) led the charge. In keeping with the Komando’s motto, “Move fast and strike hard,” each LAV was armed with a fixed gun and was large enough to carry two armored soldiers. The four-wheelers could travel at speeds up to sixty miles per hour over a reasonably flat surface. That made them perfect for scouting, quick raids, and rat hunts like this one.

Two sloths followed close behind. Repurposed to function as tanks, the sloths had once been huge earth movers to which large caliber cannons had been fitted in place of dozer blades, along with lighter slugthrowers for anti-personnel use. Metal plates had been welded all around the circumference of the machines and were angled wherever possible in order to deflect incoming projectiles.

The rest of the unit, including the command vehicle, the comm-truck, the supply hog, the fueler, and the men required to defend them were almost ten miles to the rear. Having lost their battle with the Hellhound, both of the captured APCs were burning. The fighter, which was running low on fuel, was on its way back to base.

As the tanks fired on the stripper, the resulting explosions were little more than tiny flashes of light against the machine’s vast gray bulk. “Snake-One to all units… . Save your ammo,” Ottmar ordered. “The Confeds are inside that monster by now. Over.”

That was when the driver of the LAV to Ottmar’s right jerked spastically and a distant crack was heard. Then, with a ponderous dignity, the Snakehead fell sideways onto the ground. A sniper had seen an open visor and taken his shot. The rats had teeth!