Since it is not proper for reporters to loot on the job, I had gotten
outside in my jeep early and was going ahead, swinging my camera back
to get the parade behind me. 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.
I knew him; Lieutenant Ranjit Singh, Captain Courtland's
second-in-command. He was a Sikh. Instead of a steel helmet, he wore a
striped turban, and he had a black beard that made Joe Kivelson's
blond one look like Tom Kivelson's chin-fuzz. On his belt, along with
his pistol, he wore the little kirpan, the dagger all Sikhs carry. He
also carried a belt radio, and as we approached he lifted the phone to
his mouth and a loudspeaker on the combat car threw his voice at us:
"All right, that's far enough, now. The first vehicle that comes
within a hundred yards of this gate will be shot down."
One man, and one combat car, against five thousand, with twenty-odd
guns and close to a hundred machine guns. He'd last about as long as a
pint of trade gin at a Sheshan funeral. The only thing was, before he
and the crew of the combat car were killed, they'd wipe out about ten
or fifteen of our vehicles and a couple of hundred men, and they would
be the men and vehicles in the lead.
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