by David Drake
Just like that was the only question Ortnahme wanted to ask.
Though it was sure-hell one of 'em, that was God's truth.
"Kid," the warrant leader said calmly, more or less. "What in the bloody hell do you think you're gonna do with that gun?"
From the way Simkins straightened,"more or less"wasn't as close to "calmly" as Ortnahme had thought.
"Sir!"the technician said."I'm gonna mount it on the bow. So I got something to shoot, ah . . . you know, the next time."
The kid glanced up at the blaring recorder. He was holding the tribarrel with no sign of how much the thing weighed. He wouldn't have been able to do that before Warrant Leader Ortnahme started running his balls off to teach him his job.
Ortnahme opened his mouth. He didn't know which part of the stupid idea to savage first.
Before he figured out what to say, Simkins volunteered, "Mister Ortnahme? I figured we'd use a section of engineer stake for a mount and weld it to the skirt. Ah, so we don't have to chance a weld on the iridium, you know?"
Like a bloody puppy, standin' there waggling his tail—and how in bloody hell had he got Sergeant Dill to agree to take a tribarrel off manifest?
"Kid," he said at last, "put that down and start buffing this channel for me, all right?"
"Yes, Mister Ortnahme."
The klaxon blurted, then cut off.
Ortnahme and every other Slammer in the compound froze. Nothing further happened. The Yokels must've been testing the system now that they'd moved it.
The bloody cursed fools.
"Sir,"the technician said with his face bent over the buzz of his own multi tool. "Can I put on some different music?"
"I like what I got on," Ortnahme grunted, spinning home first one, then the other of the bolts that locked the strip of explosive and steel pellets into its channel.
"Why, sir?" Simkins prodded unexpectedly. "The music, I mean?"
Ortnahme stared at his subordinate.Simkins continued to buff his way forward, as though cleaning the channel were the only thing on his mind.
"Because," Ortnahme said. He grimaced and flipped up the face shield of his helmet. "Because that was the kinda stuff they played in the bars on Esperanza, my first landfall with the Regiment. Because it reminds me of when I was young and stupid, kid. Like you."
He slid another of the strip charges from its insulated packing, then paused. "Look," he said, "this ain't our tank, Simkins."
"It's our tank till they send a crew to pick it up," the technician said over the whine of his brush. "It's our tank tonight, Mister Ortnahme."
The warrant leader sighed and fitted the strip into place. It bound slightly, but that was from the way the skirt had been torqued, not the job Simkins was doing on the channel.
"All right," Ortnahme said, "but we'll mount it solid so you swing the bow to aim it, all right? I don't want you screwing around with the grips when you oughta be holding the controls."
Simkins stopped what he was doing and turned. "Thank you, Mister Ortnahme!"he said,as though he'd just been offered the cherry of the most beautiful woman on the bloody planet.
"Yeah, sure,"the warrant leader said with his face averted. "Believe me,you're gonna do the work while I sit on my butt 'n watch."
Ortnahme set a bolt,then a second."Hey kid?"he said."How the hell did you get Tommy to go along with this cop?"
"I told him it was you blasted the Consie with the satchel charge when Tommy opened his warehouse door."
Ortnahme blinked. "Huh?" he said. "Somebody did that? It sure wasn't me."
"Tommy's got a case of real French brandy for you, sir," the technician said. He turned and grinned."And the tribarrel.Because I'm your driver, see? And he didn't want our asses swingin' in the breeze again like last night."
"Bloody hell,"the warrant leader muttered.He placed another bolt and started to grin himself.
"We won't use engineer stakes," he said. "I know where there's a section of 10cm fuel-truck hose sheathing. We'll cut and bend that . . . ."
"Thank you, Mister Ortnahme."
"And I guess we could put a pin through the pivot," Ortnahme went on. "So you could unlock the curst thing if, you know, we got bogged down again."
"Thank you, Mister Ortnahme!"
Cursed little puppy. But a smart one.
Two blocks from the commo room, Dick Suilin passed the body of a man in loose black garments. The face of the corpse was twisted in a look of ugly surprise. An old scar trailed up his cheek and across an eyebrow, but there was no sign of the injury that had killed him here.
The Slammers' TOC was almost two kilometers away. Suilin was already so exhausted that his ears buzzed except when he tried to concentrate on something. He decided to head for the infantry-detachment motor pool and try to promote a ride to the north end of the camp.
It occurred to the reporter that he hadn't seen any vehicles moving in the camp since the combat cars reformed and howled back to their regular berths. As he formed the thought, a light truck drove past and stopped beside the body.
A lieutenant and two soldiers wearing gloves, all of them looking morose, got out. Before they could act, a group of screaming dependents, six women and at least as many children, swept around the end of one of the damage buildings. They pushed the soldiers away, then surrounded the corpse and began kicking it.
Suilin paused to watch. The enlisted men glanced at one another, then toward the lieutenant, who seemed frozen. One of the men said, "Hey, we're
s'posed to take—"
A woman turned and spat in the soldier's face.
"Murdering Consie bastard! Murdering little Consie bastard!"
Two of the older children were stripping the trousers off the body. A six-year old boy ran up repeatedly, lashed out with his bare foot, and ran back. He never quite made contact with the corpse.
"Murdering Consie Bastard!"
The officer drew his pistol and fired in the air. The screaming stopped. One woman flung herself to the ground, covering a child with her body. The group backed away, staring at the man with the gun.
The officer aimed at the guerrilla's body and fired. Dust puffed from the shoulder of the black jacket.
The officer fired twice more, then blasted out the remainder of his ten-round magazine. The hard ground sprayed grit in all directions; one bullet ricocheted and spanged into a doorjamb, missing a child by centimeters at most.
The group of dependents edged away. Bullets had disfigured still further the face of the corpse.
"Well, get on with it!" the lieutenant screamed to his men. His voice sounded tinny from the muzzle blasts of his weapon.
The soldiers grimaced and grasped the body awkwardly in their gloved hands. A glove slipped as they swung the guerrilla onto the tailgate of the truck. The body hung, about to fall back.
The lieutenant grabbed a handful of the Consie's hair and held it until the enlisted men could get better grips and finish their task.
Suilin resumed walking toward the motor pool. He was living in a nightmare, and his ears buzzed like wasps . . . .
"Now, to split the screen,"said squat Joe Albers, Deathdealer's driver,"you gotta hold one control and switch the other one whatever way."
Hans Wager set his thumb on the left hold button and clicked the right-hand magnification control of the main screen to x4. The turret of the unnamed tank felt crowded with two men in it, although Wager himself was slim and Albers was stocky rather than big.
"Does it matter which control you hold?" asked Holman, peering down through the hatch.
"Naw, whichever you want," Albers said while Wager watched the magical transformations on his screen.
The left half of the main screen maintained its portion of a 360° panorama viewed by the light available in the human visual spectrum. Broad daylight, at the moment. The right portion of the screen had shrunk into a 90°° arc whose field of view was only half its original height.
Wager twisted the control dial,rotating the magnified se
ctor slowly around the tank's surroundings. Smoke still smoldered upward from a few places beyond the berm; here and there, sunlight glittered where the soil seared by powerguns had enough silicon to glaze.
The berth on the right side of the tank was empty. The combat car assigned there had bought it in the clearing operation. Buzzbombs. The close-in defense system hadn't worked or hadn't worked well enough, same difference. Albers said a couple of the crew were okay . . . .
Wager's field of view rolled across the Yokel area. The barracks nearest the Slammers were in good shape still; but by focusing down one of the streets and rolling the magnification through x16 to x64, he could see that at least a dozen buildings in a row had burned.
A few bolts from a powergun and those frame structures went up like torches . . . .
The best protection you had in a combat car wasn't armor or even your speed: it was the volume of fire you put on the other bastard and anywhere the other bastard might be hiding.
Tough luck for the Yokels who'd been burned out.Tougher luck,much tougher, for the Consies who'd tried to engage Hammer's Slammers.
"For the driver," Albers said with a nod up toward Holman's intent face, "it's pretty much the same as a combat car."
"The weight's not the bloody same," Holman said.
"Sure,you gotta watch yer inertia,"the veteran driver agreed, "but you do the same things. You get used to it."
He looked back over at Wager. The right half-screen was now projecting a magnified slice of what appeared at one-to-one on the left.
On the opposite side of the encampment, a couple of the permanent maintenance staff worked beside another tank. The junior tech looked on while his boss, a swag-bellied warrant three, settled a length of pipe in the jig of a laser saw.
"Turret side, though," Albers went on, "you gotta be careful. About half what you know from cars, that's the wrong thing in the turret of a panzer."
"I don't like not having two more pair of eyes watchin' my back," Wager muttered as his visuals swam around the circumference of the motionless tank.
"The screens'll watch for you," Albers said gently.
He touched a key without pressing it. "You lock one of 'em onto alert at all times. The AI in here, it's like a thousand helmet systems all at once. It's faster, it catches more, it's better at throwing out the garbage that just looks like it's a bandit."
The hatches of the Tactical Operations Center, a command car without drive fans, were open, but from this angle Wager couldn't see inside. The backs of two Slammers, peering within from the rear ramp, proved there was a full house—a troop meeting going on. What you'd expect after a contact like last night's.
"Not like having tribarrels pointing three ways, though," Holman said. Dead right, even though she'd never crewed a combat vehicle before.
Albers looked up at her."If you want,"he said,"you can slave either of the guns to the threat monitor. It'll swing 'em as soon as it pops the alert."
Deathdealer,Albers' own tank,was parked next to the TOC.A tarpaulin slanted from the top of the skirts to the ground,sheltering the man beneath."Via,"Wager muttered. "He's racked out now?"
Birdie Sparrow's right hand was visible beneath the edge of the tarp. It was twitching.Albers looked at the magnified screen,then laid his fingers over Eager on the dial and rolled the image away.
"Birdie's all right," the veteran driver said."He takes a little getting used to, is all. And the past couple months, you know, he's been a little, you know . . . loose."
"That's why they sent you back here with the blower instead of using some newbies for transit?" Holman asked.
Bent over this way, Holman had to keep brushing back the sandy brown curls that fell across her eyes. Her hair was longer than Wager had thought, and the strands appeared remarkably fine.
"Yeah, something like that, I guess," Albers admitted. "Look, Birdie's great when it drops in the pot like last night. Only . . . since his buddy DJ got zapped, he don't sleep good, is all."
"Newbies like us,"Wager said bitterly. Not new to war, not him at least; but new to this kind of war.
"I can see this gear can do everything but tuck me goodnight. But I'm bloody sure that I won't remember what to do the first time I need to. And that's liable to be my ass." He glanced upward. "Our ass."
Holman flashed him a tight smile.
"Yeah,well,"Albers agreed."Simulators help, but on-the-job training's the only game there's ever gonna be for some things."
Albers rubbed his scalp,grimacing in no particular direction. "You know,"he went on, "you can take care a' most stuff if you know what button to push. But some things, curst if I know where the button is."
It seemed to Hans Wager that Albers' eyes were searching for the spot on the main screen where his tank commander lay shivering beneath a sunlit tarp.
When Dick Suilin was twenty meters from the motor pool, a jeep exploded within the wire-fenced enclosure. The back of the vehicle lurched upward. The contents of its fuel tank sprayed in all directions, then whoomped into a fireball that rose on the heat of its own combustion.
No one was in the jeep when it blew up, but soldiers throughout the area scattered, bawling warnings.
A few men simply cowered and screamed. One of them continued screaming minutes after the explosion.
Suilin resumed walking toward the entrance.
The combined motor pool held well over three hundred trucks, from jeeps to articulated flatbeds for hauling heavy equipment. The only gate in and out of Camp Progress was visible a block away. A pair of bunkers, massive structures with three-meter walls of layered sandbags and steel planking, guarded the highway where it passed through the wire, minefields, and berm.
The sliding barrier was still in place across the road. When the Consies came over the berm, they took the bunkers from behind. Satchel charges through the open doors set off the munitions within, and the blasts lifted the roofs.
The bunkers had collapsed. The craters were still smoldering.
One of the long sheds within the motor pool had been hit by an artillery rocket. The blast folded back its metal roof in both directions. Grenades and automatic weapons had raked and ignited some of the trucks parked in neat rows, but there were still many undamaged vehicles.
A three-tonne truck blew up. The driver jumped out of the cab and collapsed. Diesel from the ruptured fuel tank gushed around him in an iridescent pool. Nobody moved to help, though other soldiers stared in dazed expectation.
Two officers were arguing at the entrance while a number of enlisted men looked on. A lieutenant wearing the green collar tabs of Maintenance & Supply said in a voice that wavered between reasonableness and frustration, "But Major Schaydin, it isn't safe to take any of the vehicles yet. The Consies have booby—"
"God curse you for a fool!" screamed the major. His summer dress uniform was in striking contrast to the lieutenant's fatigues, but a nearby explosion had ripped away most of the right trouser legand blackened the rest."You can't deny me! I'm the head of the Intelligence Staff! My orders supersede any you may have received. Any orders at all!"
Schaydin carried a pair of white gloves, thrust jauntily through his left epaulet. His hat hadn't survived the events of the evening.
"Sir,"the lieutenant pleaded,"this isn't orders,it isn't safe. The Consies booby-trapped a bunch of the vehicles during the attack, time delays and pressure switches, and they—"
"You bastards!" Schaydin screamed. "D' you want to find yourselves playing pick-up-sticks with your butt cheeks?"
He stalked past the lieutenant, brushing elbows as though he really didn't see the other man.
A sergeant moved as though to block Schaydin. The lieutenant shook his head in angry frustration.He, his men,and Suilin watched the major jump into a jeep, start it, and drive past them in a spray of dust.
"I need a jeep and driver," Suilin said, enunciating carefully. "To carry me to the Slammers' TOC." He deliberately didn't identify himself.
The lieutenant didn't
answer. He was staring after Major Schaydin.
Instead of following the road, the intelligence officer pulled hard left and drove toward the berm. The jeep's engine lugged for a moment before its torque converter caught up with the demand. The vehicle began to climb, spurning gravel behind it.
"He'd do better," said the lieutenant, "if he at least tried it at a slant."
"Does he figure just to drive through the minefields?" asked one of the enlisted men.
"The Consies blew paths all the cop through the mines," said a sergeant. "If he's lucky, he'll be okay."
The jeep lurched over the top of the berm to disappear in a rush and a snarl. There was no immediate explosion.
"Takes more 'n luck to get through the Consies themselfs,"said the first soldier. "Wherever he thinks he's going. Bloody officers."
"I don't need an argument," said Dick Suilin quietly.
"Then take the bloody jeep!" snapped the lieutenant. He pointed to a row of vehicles."Them we've checked, more or less,for pressure mines in the suspension housings and limpets on the gas tanks. They must've had half a dozen sappers working the place over while their buddies shot up the HQ."
"No guarantees what went into the tanks," offered the sergeant. "Nothin' for that but waiting—and I'd as soon not wait on it. You want to see the mercs so bad, why don't you walk?"
Suilin looked at him. "If it's time," the reporter said, "it's time."
The nearest vehicle was a light truck rather than a jeep. He sat in the driver's seat, feeling the springs sway beneath him. No explosion, no flame. Suilin felt as though he were manipulating a marionette the size and shape of the man he had been.
He pressed the starter tit on the dash panel. A flywheel whirred for a moment before the engine fired normally.
Suilin set the selector to Forward and pressed the throttle. No explosion, no flame.
As he drove out of the motor pool, Suilin heard the sergeant saying, " . . . no insignia and them eyes—he's from an Insertion Patrol Group. Just wish them and the Consies'd fight their war and leave us normal people alone . . . ."
