Target Rich Environment

by Larry Correia

  From her vantage point on the ground, she noticed that one of Sid’s lost sticks of dynamite had wound up wedged between Bubble’s teeth . . .

  It was up to her. Everyone else was pretty preoccupied with not getting smacked around. Bubba was dragging the unconscious Sid away from the flashing tentacles. With the ropes broke or harpoons knocked free, Bubbles was getting away, and he was dragging Skirmish with him!

  Still sitting on the sand, Hannah crossed her legs, braced her elbows across her knees, took a deep breath, and steadied her heavy rifle.

  Bubbles was rolling wildly. The red stick was a small target and it was getting farther away by the second. She’d made a lot of trick shots in her life. The last time she’d screwed one up had left a man disfigured and the spectators traumatized. Only Skirmish McKillington was about to get drowned or ate if she didn’t do something about it, and she actually cared about her companions in the company, which was rare, because frankly, people annoyed her.

  As nervous as she was though, she aimed—trying not think about how this was like Bob’s lips all over again—and fired.

  The slug detonated the stick of dynamite. The resulting blast tossed gallons of blood into the air.

  Once all of the red droplets had gotten done falling out of the sky, and she had managed to blink the liquid out of her eyes, it was clear Bubbles wasn’t moving, just a big lump lying in the shallows, with a big leaky hole through the side of its head. But Skirmish certainly was moving! In fact the man was swimming for his life. At first, she thought that she had managed to kill the monster, but it must have twitched or something, because Bubba yelled at everybody to lay fire into it until they were sure it was dead.

  Half a minute of continuous gunfire later, Bubba Shackleford finally shouted for everyone to stop, because now they were just having fun and wasting money.

  The injuries to our company were relatively minor, consisting mostly of contusions, concussions, and near drownings, and the sea monster had grown far too heavy to transport, so we removed its damaged head to present as evidence of a contract fulfilled. We left the body and tentacles for the buzzards. We were later informed that the head was taken to the nearby Agricultural College of Utah for study, but was later seized by deputy marshals.

  With Bubbles’ reign of terror lifted, the good folk in the surrounding towns threw a party in our honor. There was a night of dancing and celebration. I received a very distasteful proposal from a local boy, and was so taken by surprise and offense that I immediately broke his nose with the butt of my revolver.

  However, even during the merriment I could tell that Mr. Shackleford was eager to move onto the next challenge, because there’s always another town and another monster. And if no contract presented itself, I could tell that the idea a haunted traveling circus secretly up to no good somewhere within the borders of our nation gnawed at Mr. Shackleford.

  Even before the party started he had already sent a telegram to our Scholar asking for directions to this nefarious Dr. Swan. For Mr. Shackleford is a man of action, not given to hesitation, so early the next morning our company set out on our next adventure.

  And thus ended another contract for Bubba Shackleford’s Professional Monster Killers.

  IN THE INTRO to Bubba Shackleford’s Professional Monster Killers I mentioned the character of Hannah Stone was created by Hinkley. That’s because Hannah was her character during a Deadlands weird west role playing game. (On a related note, Mortimer “Skirmish” McKillington is my son’s character, and you’ll probably meet my other daughter’s character in a future Bubba Shackleford story). Hannah, the antisocial trick shooter was a perfect fit when I was writing the first Bubba story so I borrowed her.

  Afterwards, though, my daughter said she would enjoy trying to write a story from Hannah’s perspective. It was really fun for me to team up with one of my kids. My daughter normally writes under a pen name that she has currently forbidden me from revealing. I can respect that.

  THE LOSING SIDE

  This story originally appeared in the Onward Drake anthology, in October 2015, edited by Mark L. Van Name, and published by Baen Books. It was a collection of stories inspired by David Drake.

  When I was approached about this one, I had a geeky fan boy moment. I think Dave Drake is amazing, so I jumped at the chance to write something Drake inspired. However, my favorite thing of his is Hammer’s Slammers, and he doesn’t let just anybody play in that world. I figured it was worth a shot. I did my homework, reread a bunch of Hammer’s Slammers stories, and pitched an idea from the perspective of the poor suckers who had to fight against those badasses. I was honored that he let me write this.

  It was also a good excuse to play a whole bunch of World of Tanks for research. Yeah . . . Research. That’s the ticket.

  Despite the narrative to the contrary, my father was a good man. During the revolution the royalists called him the Butcher of Bangoran. General Vaerst was our spokesman, our inspiration, and their scapegoat. At the end of the war, the royalists dragged him out of the palace, stripped him naked, beat him, and then executed him with a ceremonial sword on the steps. They left his body to rot there for a week as an example.

  I don’t know who the royalists’ god is, but my father was their devil.

  In reality, he was just another husband and a father, no different than the tens of thousands of others who died during the revolution. He was a man who loved his planet, but who’d been pushed too far and took a stand against tyranny. It turned out that he was really good at it. I don’t think Dad ever thought his words would start a revolution.

  The last time I saw him was the night before my company shipped out for West Moravia. At that point, we’d been fighting for two years. Dad was worn out, but the people were sick of those slaving royalist bastards and had risen up, so we were winning, and that kept him going. As we sat in his command bunker, listening to the shelling of Vakaga City above us, eating a last meal of ration bars, we talked about everything. About friends and family lost, but about how it would be worth it so that my children—his grandchildren—could grow up with freedom for the first time in our planet’s history.

  That was when he got the report that the royalists had somehow borrowed enough money to hire off-world mercenaries. At the time, I didn’t understand why Dad looked so stricken.

  “What’s wrong?” I’d asked. “We’re winning. We’ve got them on the ropes. Once we take the west, they’ll fold.”

  He had gotten up and begun pacing. You have to understand, my father only paced when things were really bad. “I told the council we needed to lock them in, get them on contract, but those cheap do-nothings wouldn’t listen to me. Now it’s too late. We should have hired them when we had the chance.”

  “But what difference are some mercenaries going to make?”

  “They’re Hammer’s Slammers, son. They’ll make all the difference.”

  The explosion from the 20cm main tank gun obliterated half the apartment complex around us.

  “Back up!” I shouted at the driver, but Cainho knew his shit, and we were already heading into the subterranean parking level before the Slammers’ tank could get off another shot. The flash from the blast had momentarily fuzzed out our tank’s scanners, but we’d gotten a peek, that’s all that mattered. The spotted target’s position would be relayed to everyone else, and hopefully something they threw at it wouldn’t just bounce off that monster.

  “Shogun Six, this is Phantom One. Heavy in the open,” I called in as our Lynx sped through the empty garage. I brought up the map, and tapped out a path for Cainho to follow. “We’re moving to Isen Street.”

  “Roger, Phantom. Engaging the heavy. Proceed to Isen.”

  Not that I wouldn’t have kept going anyway. If my little scout tank waited long enough to get orders confirmed, we were dead. If one of our scout tanks was doing anything other than running or hiding, it was dead. We’d learned that the hard way.

  As we bounced up the ramp and out int
o the street, the sensor package showed clear both ways, but half a second later I got a warning ping. Movement on the left, just a flash of iridium armor through holes punched in a concrete wall. Combat car. “Pig at nine.” Its gunners hadn’t seen us yet, or we’d be eating cyan bolts. I tagged a new path through the wreckage of what looked to have been a tractor dealership. The Lynx was the fastest armored vehicle on the battlefield, and in Cainho’s skilled hands, it was a nimble little beast. He got us behind another wall and the flaming remains of some piece of industrial equipment and we hid.

  “Shogun Six, this is Phantom One. Just spotted a pig at the end of Isen.”

  “Got it, Phantom. Tagged.”

  We waited. I could only pray that the nearby building fires were screwing up their thermal.

  I could hear our gunner above me. Blanchard was breathing heavy as he tracked the combat car. Our 60mm autocannon hadn’t had much luck penetrating even their smaller vehicles, especially not from the front. On the other hand, their tribarrels would rip right through any part of our Lynx like it was made out of paper. Come on . . .

  It was hot. Beneath my armor, I was drenched with sweat. My sinuses were filled with the stink of carbon and blood. I was so tired it took a moment to remember where the rotting blood stink had come from. That’s right. It was the same reason there was a hole in the driver’s compartment I could see a beam of daylight through, and why we’d just picked up a replacement driver. In the heat of the moment, I’d already called Cainho by the wrong name a couple of times, but Haarde was dead . . . What . . . Two days? Three? They’d bled together. I couldn’t remember.

  “Keep moving, asshole,” Cainho begged. “Nothing to see here.”

  Like their big tanks, the Slammers’ combat cars were hover vehicles. I imagine they had to be really loud inside, floating on top of all those powerful fans. Our Lynx ran on rubberized tracks and had a small thorium reactor, so it was actually a pretty quiet ride. The combat cars had more human eyes manning guns all the way around, but their sensor suites didn’t seem as good as the heavies, and not nearly as good as ours.

  The one thing my home planet was good at was tech, much of it designed by my family’s company. Moravia was great at designing sensor suites, which meant we got fantastic recordings of us getting our asses handed to us by the mercs with the heavier armor and bigger guns.

  The combat car flashed past the holes and sped down the street in the opposite direction.

  We could all hear the rumbling thunder of artillery through our thin armor. They were dropping shells on the tank. Red dots rained down my display, but one by one they flashed out of existence as the tank picked the shells out of the sky with its 20cm air defense system. Cyan bolts flew upward and explosions ripped across the air.

  Something get through. Something . . .

  The last red dot disappeared.

  “Blood and martyrs,” Blanchard snarled from the turret. The gunner’s targeting displays had told him the same story. “Can’t anything hurt these fuckers?”

  “I heard a guy in the 6th rushed one with a satchel charge and tossed it under the fans,” Cainho said as he maneuvered the Lynx around wrecked cars and rubble. “Blew it all to hell.”

  “Wishful thinking. They’ve got a point defense system for infantry too,” I told my crew. “If that story’s true, it’s only because that tank was broken. A combat car, maybe.”

  The symbol of the tank disappeared from my map. The AI could no longer tell with certainty where it had gone. It could make logical predictions, but the mercenaries had figured that out first day, and were being annoyingly unpredictable. They were clever like that.

  “Shit,” Blanchard said. A missing tank meant they were going to make us go looking for it again.

  “Phantoms.” They didn’t bother with our full call sign, because Phantom Two through Six were gone, all lost over the last twenty furious hours. It turns out when a soft little scout got hit with a Hellbore there wasn’t much left. “This is Shogun Six. We need eyes on that tank.”

  “Keep your pants on, asshole.” That wasn’t for the command channel. That frustrated muttering was for my personal gratification. Shogun Six was twenty klicks from this slaughter. The AI might not know where that tank had gone, but my gut knew. It was waiting to pop us. The sensors on their big tanks were ridiculously good. I needed to look at the terrain models of this disintegrating city and figure out how to approach without getting our asses vaporized.

  “3rd Armored is approaching the east end of the park. They need to know where that heavy is.”

  The interior of the Lynx was tight. My compartment was worse. A lot of scout tank commanders liked to get their heads out of the cupola, thinking that made them more aware of their surroundings, and their visor would keep them up with the computer’s feeds, but that was a trick. That was them lying to themselves. The sensor suite provided too much information, and most commanders found it overwhelming being bombarded by that much info for long. I’d been so plugged in and fried by the last few days of fighting, that I had the opposite problem. I was scared to unplug.

  “There. You see the path, Cainho?”

  “Got it, Vaerst.” The new driver was excellent. He should be. Like me, he’d been fighting royalists since half the army had said enough with this tyrannical bullshit and the first shots were fired at Bangoran. He’d been an experienced tank commander himself up until a few days ago, when he’d had to bail out after his vehicle had been set ablaze by a tribarrel. The rest of his crew hadn’t made it out. “You know, third is only running some cobbled-together surplus.”

  In other words, they were as doomed as everyone else they’d thrown against these merciless bastards.

  “Third is driving Pumas. Our 60mm barely scratches the paint. We have to get real lucky to do any damage, but those have 120mm guns. A good shot might punch one of those land whales,” Blanchard said hopefully.

  “Yeah . . . Well, let’s find them a target.”

  Who were we kidding? The Slammer tanks were 170-ton iridium wrecking balls with guns that could shoot down satellites. Dad hadn’t been kidding. They were running the most advanced armored vehicles in history. Even their light combat cars weighed nearly twice what our Lynx did.

  The kingdom’s hardware was obsolete garbage in comparison. Our software was good. Our systems were good. Our soldiers were tough. But, hell, I might as well say we had truth and justice on our side too, since it turned out that all meant jack and shit when the bolts began to fly.

  While Cainho moved us to the next hiding place, I expanded out the map until I could see the entire Moravian coast. That was one of the dangers of being too plugged in, too aware. Curiosity.

  We were getting crushed.

  “The Slammers are really that good?”

  “They’re the best,” Dad said. “Alois Hammer has put together one of the most successful fighting outfits in human history. No bullshit, no politics, no ass-kissing. They don’t play games, they don’t have to make anybody happy. They agree to a mission, sign a contract, then they fill it. They’re very good at that. Maybe the best there’s ever been. And sadly for us, they’ve landed in the west.”

  “They can’t be that good.” Oh, how naïve I’d been back then. I’d seen some combat by that point, so I thought I knew a thing or two about war. My brothers were fighting for liberty, for our families, and for each other. I couldn’t comprehend someone fighting just for money. “Only honorless scum would fight for anyone as evil as King Soboth!”

  But Dad was wise, and he just shook his head sadly. “It isn’t about good or evil to them. Hammer doesn’t give a damn about Soboth beyond the fact the man is willing to mortgage a planet to save his crown. They only care about completing the mission and getting paid. Most of their trigger pullers won’t even bother to read the briefings to learn what each side believes in, just which color uniform they’re supposed to shoot. They’ve done it on plenty of other worlds, and they’ll do it again somewhere else when they�
��re done here.”

  “Not if we beat them.”

  Dad just laughed.

  I watched the displays in horror as 3rd Armored was ripped to pieces.

  The old Pumas crashed through the trees of Grand Park, big guns booming. The Slammers’ tanks were moving across the grass, far too fast, and every time one of those 20cm Hellbores went off in a blinding flash, another one of our tanks turned into an expanding ball of plasma. The combat cars were darting about, using the terrain, popping over rises to rip off bursts from their tribarrels. They were concentrating on our infantry. Rockets and small arms fire were lancing out from the surrounding buildings’ windows, but the tribarrels responded and ripped those facades into concrete dust.

  “Shogun Six, this is Phantom. Targets are marked.”

  But there was no response, just dead air. I pulled back the screens. Shogun was gone, icon blinking red. The artillery battery was overrun. I didn’t even know where those attackers had come from. No time to think about it. We were on our own.

  A warning pinged, but Cainho’s instincts had kicked in even before the AI had decided we were in danger and our Lynx was already scooting backward down the hill. A combat car was flying across the lake in a huge spray. Water exploded into steam as molten bolts lashed out and tore apart the rocks we’d been hiding behind. Flaming gravel clanged against our armor. That’s about all it was good for.

  There was nobody left to spot for. That fucking combat car had been chasing us all morning, and it was used to us running away. It would be expecting more of the same. As Cainho reversed us through the manicured flowerbeds, crushing carved topiary beneath our treads, I flagged a new course for him. “Come around the bottom of the hill.” Using the terrain, we could stay low until the last second. “Blanchard, shoot that pig in the ass.”

  The Lynx hit the bottom and turned on a dime. The combat car would be climbing the hill. The AI told me that it was unlikely the pig would silhouette itself on that hill, even for a second, but I knew the AI was wrong. We’d been an annoyance. They wanted us dead, and they would figure if they risked climbing, they could get a few shots at us while we scurried for cover.