The Treasure of Lei Fong Wu

Chapter Sixty

RECONSTITUTED GAMMA TEAM -31:54

“Damn,” Mal swore appreciably under his breath as he saw the bay for the first time. It was dark and cavernous, about the size of . . . well, Serenity and twenty of her mates could fit into it with room left over to barbecue a hog and hold a village dance. It was big. And it was packed to the brim with all manner of mechanical death in the form of armored cavalry vehicles.

Mal was struck nearly speechless at the sight – there was just about everything here: Rollers, Hovers, Walkers, Flyers. Heavily armored tanks with two and three gun emplacements on their turrets. Gunskiffs and recon cars, APCs and AFVs, fast-attack vehicles and one-man, two-wheeled motorcycles with machine guns on the handlebars. There were support vehicles, too – command-and-control cars, communications stations, a mobile medical unit, and a big boxy thing that Mal strongly suspected was a field kitchen – but the vast majority of that vast bay was taken up by combat vehicles. Every kind of rolling nastiness that had ever tried to kill Mal during the war was represented, along with a few he hadn’t had the pleasure of being shot at by – yet.

After all, the day was still young.

As an infantryman, Mal had a deep respect and a loathing that bordered on the pathological when it came to armored vehicles. He had seen plenty of his men mowed down like bamboo by heavily armed armored hovercars on Boros, and he’d been on the wrong end of a heavy cavalry flanking movement at the siege of Du Khang – those terrible rollers just kept coming, no matter what the Browncoats had thrown at them. He still had nightmares about those evil machines. And of course Serenity Valley had become a graveyard studded with smoking hulks of metal that the purplebellies seemed to have in endless supply.

These vehicles were painted in a mottled Imperial yellow, and bore the insignia of the Empire in red, but they still made him nervous. Old habits die hard.

“You conjure so