United States or Ecuador ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Dad kept on jotting down figures of men and 50-mm guns and vehicles and auto weapons we had available. He was still doing it when the fire alarm started. The moaner went on for thirty seconds, like a banshee mourning its nearest and dearest. It was everywhere, Main City Level and the four levels below.
There was a sound of cheering from the intercom. Tom asked if I wanted to fire another clip. I told him I thought I had the hang of it now, and screwed a swab onto the ramrod and opened the breech to clean the gun. Joe Kivelson grinned at me when I went up to the conning tower. "That wasn't bad, Walt," he said. "You never manned a 50-mm before, did you?"
Think you could hit anything with a 50-mm?" Tom asked. "I know you're pretty sharp with a pistol or a chopper, but a cannon's different." "I could try. If you want to heave over an empty packing case or something, I could waste a few rounds seeing if I could come anywhere close to it." "We'll do that," he said.
A 50-mm will go six or eight feet into him before it explodes, and it'll explode among his heart and lungs and things. If it goes straight along his body, it'll open him up and make the cutting-up easier, and it won't spoil much wax. That's where I always shoot." "Suppose I get a broadside shot?" "Why, then put your shell right under the flukes at the end of the tail.
Down to the left, there was a commotion and people were getting out of the way as a dozen men come pushing through, towing a contragravity skid with a 50-mm ship's gun on it. I began not liking the looks of things, and Glenn Murell, who had come up from his nap below, was liking it even less. He'd come to Fenris to buy tallow-wax, not to fight a civil war. I didn't want any of that stuff, either.
I saw Murell looking curiously at the square cases, marked TERRAN FEDERATION ARMED FORCES, and 50-MM, MK. 608, ANTIVEHICLE AND ANTIPERSONNEL, 25 ROUNDS, and OVERAGE. PRACTICE ONLY. NOT TO BE ISSUED FOR SERVICE, and INSPECTED AND CONDEMNED. The hunters bought that stuff through the Co-op. It cost half as much as new ammo, but that didn't help them any. The difference stopped with Steve Ravick.
Might furnish a still-shot illustration for somebody's History of Fenris in a century or so. Broadway was empty until we came to the gateway to the spaceport area. There was a single medium combat car there, on contragravity halfway to the ceiling, with a pair of 50-mm guns and a rocket launcher pointed at us, and under it, on the roadway, a solitary man in an olive-green uniform stood.
She was a typical hunter-ship, a hundred feet long by thirty abeam, with a squat conning tower amidships, and turrets for 50-mm guns and launchers for harpoon rockets fore and aft. The only thing open about her was the air-and-water lock under the conning tower. Julio, who was piloting the car, set it down on the top of the aft gun turret.
Or he might have built up some kind of immunity, with antibodies that were themselves harmful if he didn't have alcohol to neutralize them. The fugitive from what I couldn't bring myself to call justice proved to know just a little, but not much, more about engines than I did. That meant that Tom would still have to take Al Devis's place, and I'd have to take his with the after 50-mm.
It is dangerously close to stored 50-mm cannon ammunition, and it is directly under the pulpwood lumber plant, on the Third Level Down, and if the fire spreads up to that, it will endanger some of the growing vats at the carniculture plant on the Second Level Down. I repeat, this is a tallow-wax fire. Do not use water or chemical extinguishers."
Word Of The Day