Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 13

After I gave our no longer bored guard sentinel at the secure warehouse containing the BattleCar a hefty meloning, Miranda grabbed his fully loaded assault rifle and then kicked open the door in gleeful teenaged enthusiasm and began shooting anyone or anything moving inside. I kept her covered with a shield, but the gal was more than a bit reckless and had much too fun gunning the pair of interior guards and a half dozen or so unarmed maintenance workers. I did have to admit that she knew exactly what she was doing and her shots were nicely controlled bursts with nice chest shot patterns. Like a good kingpin of crime, daddy had taken his little girl to a gunnery range, early and often!

"All aboard!" She laughed and then gave a couple of mercy shots to the head of the poor mortally wounded gunnery officer who had been so helpful to us last night. Daddy had also taught her to never turn her back on a possible foe, even if you think he's dead. Soon they all were. I never heard a peep out the guards that were out in front of the main hanger. They never showed up so I assumed they had been a part of the mass 'burnination' closer to the main facility. Messy, but I told myself that they'd be all dead when the portals went Boom! later anyway.

"Wait! Not yet!" I shouted, as Miranda started to help the women into the grounded BattleCar. "We need a few things first... starting with a road map -- assume everyone would like to get back home! Everyone, scatter out and search for one. We don't have a clue where we are! Also more ammo for this beast! They come in green and white metal ammo cans that look just like this!" I said, showing the ladies one the metal cases that had been loaded earlier. I knew that there were no more power modules just sitting around, but there was a possibility of more silver ball ammo and we just might need it.

Also for good measure, I told Bel to search the corner office area where the officer's worked and to locate if possible a training manual and any and all serious technical diagrams and blueprints, and in a few minutes she shouted that she had found some. It ended up being two full file cabinets full of various classified documents she thought were related to this project and when everyone and everything was now loaded, there wasn't two square inches of free space left inside.

Miranda had found a local road map pinned up on a wall and had grabbed it for me, but some of the other ladies did find some more extra ammo and even with everyone working that took a few minutes to gather those and Bel's captured boxes of documents. Sean was getting audibly impatient. Yes, I know... a lot of real estate was going 'Boom!' in a few minutes and we needed to be gone already.

The idea of putting a pair of bullets into Probert's head and leaving his fat ass right here was looking better. I didn't need to power up the vehicle to know that we were now dangerously overloaded and overweight! But it couldn't be helped!

The BattleCar was built to seat just one, up at the front and below where the driver's seat was, with just a tiny bit of clear protected crystalline window to look out of. I guess that meant me, and I climbed in. Above me at 9 o'clock, 12 and 3 o'clock were the three gunnery stations that required the shooters to stand but they had some side defensive structure and a bubble shield around the big chaingun and a large oversized targeting helmet with an attached apron-like protective vest of heavy leather that seemed to be more or less bullet-resistant. From this machine's killing distance it would take a hell of a crack sniper to nail any of the gunners, let alone the well protected driver down in his internal pit.

I told Bel and Miranda to take the two side guns and we crammed in the five rescued ladies behind them next to the storage bins for the spare power modules and ammo. They wrapped up into a huddle surrounded by blankets and boxes of files and extra tin cases ammo. They were going to be cramped, but walking wasn't an alternative this time. I fired up the engines (with the help of a big friendly 'Start' button) and we were finally set to go.

"Miranda, let's have a little chin music please to take down that front door -- and anyone lurking behind it!"

She smiled and pressed the two red trigger buttons with her fingers and the door just about evaporated into molten shreds with three short six round bursts. She'd remembered everything she'd heard spoken last night and could handle now every part of the gunner's job... except lifting into the mounting bracket by herself the massively heavy chain gun. I'd had to help with the mounting, but she'd loaded and powering up her own weapon and then had enough time to setting up Bel's and give her some terse but helpful instructions.

"Just press one firing button to engage the laser guidance tracking light and then just follow the bouncing ball!" She laughed as I drove through the wreckage of the hanger door. "Keep the selector on 'Semi' and press both firing buttons once for a six-round burst, then repeat as necessary... and kept your fingers off that Full Auto' selector switch!"

It was just about as easy as that! My brave women had themselves a blast, figurative and literally, and between the pair of them they carved up anything that even remotely looked like trouble in our path. Oh yes, very definitely... a single accurate burst of super-heated magical silver plasma could and did carve up a Deseret battle tank just like a cooked chicken!

Heading out to the main gate, Miranda had to jump up and shout (with her gunner's helmet armor set taken off) and was just about ready to get out and climb up the hill after Janice, when our sleeping beauty at last appeared, wrapped up like the rest of the women in her blanket, came running down the hill to join us. While we waited, Bel had to stitch up a convoy of infantry carriers that had arrived hot on our trail chasing us and she turned the lot into burning scrap in just a couple of bursts.

Those chain guns were absolutely lethal! My Emperor was going to make me a Knight for retrieving these alone!

One more body added to the enhanced combat load was just about too much. Janice said that the levitation field holding the BattleCar up off of the ground wasn't much higher than about six inches. From what I expected, it should have been at least a foot or more. Going over uneven ground (even slowly) now was probably not a good idea. This was going to really limit our options... and the massively extra passenger weight was going to also drain the power modules even faster than a regular simulated combat mission.

I needed to think and decide where we were going, but first I stopped to let the ladies shoot up the main security gate to the Fort. Miranda gave Janice a quick gunnery explanation and let her take over the left side gun so she could move now to the main central one, just over my head. The grown women and highly-trained government agents didn't quibble. The young lady could out-shoot either of them! Anything she aimed at was instantly toast, on the first burst. Both Bel and Janice usually needed two or three bursts to nail their target, and like I suspected, the crystalline gun barrels started to glow after a couple of bursts in a row!

Stopping for a map check outside of the main gates, I let the ladies do some target practice and let each rip through a hundred silver rounds or so and then conduct a practice battlefield condition ammo reloading. Even Miranda needed to try the pneumatic tube disconnect/reconnect operation twice to make sure she'd do everything right in a panic. We still had lots of ammo, at least 90% of our combat load by my quick calculation... and I was pretty sure we were going to need every bit of it before we'd be anyplace safe!

***************

Discovering that we were just about as far west in Wyoming as we could get, I turned the BattleCar east, down the two lane unpaved highway 80 and floored it. Miranda swept the road ahead of us clear but we had to crash over the remains of a few burning trucks in our path. We had just passed Rock Springs when Sean gave me a sudden warning to find some cover fast. Just ahead of us was a small highway overpass and I'd just crossed it and turned a bit to the south behind the earthen sidewalls when the entire sky lit up on fire behind us. The shock wave that arrived about fifteen seconds later would have flattened us or knocked us upside down at the very least, but for now we didn't have to worry about any more pursuit from behind us... there was pretty much nothing there! That Fort was now just a smoking hole in a ground... a really big hole!

No one at the earthquake ravaged ruins of the religious center at Rock Springs wanted to deal with us or probably even knew we'd passed them by on the highway. That facility wasn't going to ready for business as usual for very long time either. But another five minutes later the vehicle began to significantly slow down and in another five minutes we were at a dead stop on the highway. One full power module drained in less than fifteen minutes. I'd really hoped we could manage twenty, but the gals had been keeping their trigger fingers busy that for a big chunk of that first ArcCell.

We did manage almost twenty minutes of power life for the second cell, but Miranda didn't have much to shoot at in front of us and no one yet was in pursuit behind us yet. Overloaded as we were, 40 miles an hour seemed to be our best speed, not the fifty to sixty mph I had expected from the notes I'd briefly read in the driver's training manual.

Any thoughts of evading pursuit by traveling overland were laughable. Even on the relatively smooth highway our over-burdened vehicle had issues. The weight balance wasn't good either and at any speed higher than thirty-five the front end started to ride up and the back end down, screwing up my view of the road ahead and the road handling , of which this huge pig had almost none even at a crawl, got dangerously worse. My steering was quite unfavorably compared to that of a drunken sailor on shore leave. I had to focus on staying right in the middle of the lanes to avoid bouncing back and forth off of the road. The nose lifting and body-frame bouncing and gyrating wasn't going to help Miranda's aim in a critical situation, like when a combat helicopter flew towards us and started to dive towards us for a strafing run.

The word was out on us now, but Miranda's aim was better and maybe the pilot didn't live long quite enough to report us. She walked six rounds of magical plasma right through the bird on the first burst and it exploded right in the air ahead and to the side of us just about instantly. Five minutes later and still at least ten miles out of Rawlins we stopped to change out ArcCels and Miranda topped off her ammo can to its full load of one thousand. She burned through about half of that carving us a path through Rawlins, where a decently sized military police task force was waiting in ambush for us. We shot better and faster, and with way more oomph and my three ladies all acquitted themselves in battle nicely!

Half of the town was a burning wreck after we shot our way through the ambush, and the treated frame of my waddling pig was barely scratched. The crystalline windscreens and bubble shields in front of the chain gun mounts stopped every small arm weapon fired. Even a pair of hand-held rockets didn't do more than scratch the paint of the BattleCar's composite armor when they hit. Everyone had some minor scratches from flying shrapnel, but nothing bled more than a Band-Aid couldn't cover, and the first-aid kit was nicely stocked for our minimal needs.

Getting through Fort Steele depleted our supplies considerably more.

Fort Steele seemed to be the main rear area supply base for the region, about thirty miles west behind Elk River, which was the rear reserve area for this part of the front, and something like another sixty miles from where highway 80 crossed the main combat zone, which was apparently somewhere near Laramie. At this rate, we weren't going to make it to American lines, burning through ArcCells in heavy combat operations far faster than we had budgeted to use our limited replacements.

The battle at Fort Steele got so hot that I had to retreat twice to try and find alternate routes around the town to reach the river. This was pointless as there was only the one bridge along the main highway and any more cross country-travel was virtually impossible for our waddling overladen pig!

Just shooting our way through the town, like we did at Fort Rawlins, would have been suicide. It was time to think with our heads a bit more and take advantages of our superior weaponry. In the end, we just crawled up around the flanks of the town to rejoin the road just at the bridge over the river. We had superior range and firepower and with binoculars Bel would spot targets for Janice and Miranda to take out at long range. In typical courageous but stupid heroic style, some dimwit armor commander ordered his brigade of light tanks to attack us right out in the open across a level grassy field with no protective cover, and only slightly supported by infantry. Miranda turned the field into a smoking abattoir and the tanks became melted smoking coffins from which none escaped. The wind at our faces carried the smell of burning flesh strongly as we passed through the field of slaughter and removed any thoughts of hunger that I might have had.

With a sharp flanking power turn I put the accelerator pedal to the metal and we crossed the bridge without further difficulty... mostly, except for stopping three quarters of the way across to stop to change out yet another power module. We now just had two left, and we'd need at least three more to make now it to safety, assuming we didn't have another major firefight. I had an idea, but I'd need some downtime to try it out, and so about ten miles down the highway I pulled off onto a dirt farm road surrounded by trees that seemed to lead down to a small lake. This close to the front, I didn't expect to find anyone at home, and we did even spot a lone wandering cow.

This was all territory captured relatively recently by Deseret in the last year or two. Even on a quiet front, they can't help but slowly pickup fresh ground every month or two. Their US opponent was just not up to the job of even slowing those bastards down!

Parked inside an abandoned barn at about mid-day, we shut everything down and took a long cautious look around us, and didn't see anything particularly of interest. No residents (long hauled off deeper into Deseret for their new life as slaves) and not even any reserve soldiers out scavenging. Always a favorite military occupation in safe captured zones, but the pickings here were lean. The tired women made an exhaustive search of the abandoned farmhouse, and even the next two closest neighbors but didn't find anything worth scrounging. No food and definitely no overlooked weapons. We were still all on our own.

***************

I used the next hours fairly productively and put my years of Arc-Tec experience to a good use and took a lot of trial and error, mostly error, but I found a way to slowly manually infuse magical energy into the ArcCell. Since I was still quite filled with stolen magical energy that I hadn't had the need to fully expend, it took me only about two hours to sort of fill up one of the drained matrix batteries. That would give us maybe another fifteen minutes on the road, so I'd have to do this at least twice more... and I did, after a delightful interruption.

The women had a lot of splattered blood to wash off, a good bit of it their own, and after the fruitless search parties had returned, it was now time for some more serious cleanup and bandaging. Sitting on a big rock near the lake, concentrating on slowly charging an ArcCell, I got to watch eight naked women all splashing about in the cold water. Heck, there would have been ice on the surface probably less than a month ago. Still, women will endure nearly anything to get clean. I knew I was in trouble when Miranda, Bel and Janice all huddled up to conspire and give me some pointed looks. I knew what was coming and dealt with it with grace and forbearance.

Damn that water was cold! In a few moments, the ladies had my scorched rags that only slightly resembled my old suit off and soon I was exacting my own revenge by splashing them with icy cold water. This also make made sure that three rather nice sets of extremely cold and rock-hard nipples stayed that way!

There was one rather embarrassing moment when Bel and Janice had to laughingly explain the concept of male 'shrinkage' to a confused Miranda who was wondering why I was now so much 'smaller' than I had been before. This lead to an additional complicated explanation of exactly 'why and how' had this rather intimate knowledge in the first place that sent all of the ladies into fits of laughter. We really played much too long and the shadows of the too-short day were catching up with us.

No one wanted to drive through friendly (or unfriendly) territory in the dark and risk getting shot up, so we agreed to just stay here for the night. Being about five miles off of the main highway, our nastier friends would be looking for us elsewhere. To avoid copters with night vision we planned to stay invisible in the barn all night.

Now freezing cold and with wet clothes to boot, I decided I'd had enough and borrowed a towel so that I could sit and get back to fixing our problems with a drained ArcCell in both hands. The women were scouting around in the fading light once more for something we could use for food, but didn't find jack. Really, there was no place I'd seen where we could have stocked up on some groceries. We were going to be cold and hungry... two things a woman never wants to be! Sorry, fires were strictly out as well. We had to stay hidden, silent and in the dark tonight.

***************

I charged up another ArcCell before bed and asked the gals to wake me up when they thought it was an hour or so before sunrise so I could do one more. Miranda still had her wristwatch, so she agreed to take the last guard duty and wake me up at about 5 a.m.

Another pair of women however, woke me up first at around midnight when their cold naked bodies pressed up against my own cold nude self inside my blanket on a stack of hay to cuddle up and keep warm.

"Go back to sleep!" Janice whispered in my ear on one side of me while Bel curled up on the other side, sandwiching me. "I'm too fucking cold to even think about playing around and we're all way too tired and this certainly isn't the time or place. So hush and don't wake up everyone else or we'll take our frozen cold tits elsewhere." I remained good, and they both stayed... and we all almost got almost warm enough to enjoy some decent sleep. Almost.

Miranda woke me at the dot of five and gave me the teenaged glare of death that I'd been snuggled up against by two soft pairs of female breasts, of which none were hers! She was more than a little annoyed and jealous, but I convinced her that nothing had happened. She was very good at truth-reading, and she eventually left me alone to dress in my cold and still slightly damp clothes and then concentrate at transferring energy into another drained ArcCell as quickly as I dared. Too fast -- poof! I had destroyed two of them yesterday before I found the right pace and rate of maximum flow.

Morning came and I finished my last efforts on charging the cell and thought I'd done a decent job on the four new charged replacements that would hold up long enough to get us the rest of the way home. This ought to give us energy enough now for at least two hours or so of travel time and at least one moderately complicated battle. We still needed to bull-rush our way through Deseret's reserve area and then shoot our way through the front lines. I really wanted just one more additional cell charged up, but with the sun coming over the hills our enemies would be again hot on our trail. We couldn't afford to let them build up enough forces to block us before the US lines.