by David Drake
Debris momentarily blanked the lower half of Ranson's visor. It cleared with a view of the settlement. The ground across the ridge dropped away more steeply than on the side facing Camp Progress, so the nearest of the one-and two-story houses were several hundred meters away where the terrain flattened.
Happy Days was a ghost town.
Deathdealer was proceeding at forty kph, fractionally slower than her speed a few moments before. Warmonger started to close the 200-meter separation, but Willens throttled back and swung to the left of the road as the combat car topped the rise. Ranson's left hand switched her visor off remote; her right was firm on the tribarrel's grip.
Happy Days hadn't been damaged in the previous night's fighting. The buildings crowded the stakes marking the twenty-meter right of way, but their walls didn't encroach—another regulation Banyussuf had enforced, with bulldozers when necessary.
Half the width was road surface which had been stabilized with a plasticizer, then pressure-treated. The lead tank slipped down the incline on the right shoulder behind a huge cloud of dust.
Nothing moved in the settlement.
A few of the structures were concrete prefabs, but most were built of laths covered with enameled metal. Uncut sheets already imprinted with the logos of soups or beers gleamed in an array more colorful than that of a race course. Behind the buildings themselves, fabric barriers enclosed yards in which further business could be conducted in the open air.
The lead tank was almost between the rows of buildings. Ranson's visor caught and highlighted movement of the barred window of a popular knocking-shop across the street and near the far end of the strip. She switched her display to thermal.
Stolley swung his tribarrel toward the motion.
"No!" June Ranson shouted.
The wing gunner's short burst snapped through the air like a single streak of cyan,past Deathdealer and into a white coruscance as the window's iron grillwork burned at the impacts.
A buzzbomb arced from the left and exploded in the middle of its trajectory as the tank's close-in defense system fired with a vicious crackling.
At least twenty automatic weapons volleyed orange tracers from Happy Days. The bullets ricocheted from Deathdealer and clanged like hammer blows on Warmonger's hull and gunshields.
"All Tootsie elements!" Ranson shouted. Willens had chopped his throttles; Warmonger's skirts tapped the soil. "Bandits! Blue One—"
But it was too late to order Blue One to lay a mine-clearing charge down the road. The great tank accelerated toward Happy Days in a spray of dust and pebbles, tribarrel and main gun blasting ahead of it.
"Hey, snake?" said DJ Bell from the main screen as bolts from a powergun cracked past Deathdealer. "Watch out for the Pussycat, okay?"
"Go 'way, DJ!" Birdie Sparrow shouted. "Albers! Goose it! Fast! Fast!"
The sound of bullets striking their thick armor was lost in the roar of the fans whose intakes suddenly tried to gulp more air than fluid flow would permit. The impacts quivered through Sparrow's boots on the floorplate like the ticks of a mechanical clock gone haywire.
Sparrow gripped a gunnery joystick in either hand. Most tankers used only one control, thumb-switching from main gun to tribarrel and back at need. He'd taught himself years ago to operate with both sticks live. You didn't get sniper's precision that way, but—
"Bandits!" cried the captain. "Blue One—"
Whatever she wanted would wait.
—when it was suppressing fire you needed, like now—
Whatever anybody else wanted could wait.
Using the trigger on the right joystick,Sparrow rapped a five-round burst from the tribarrel across a shop midway down the Strip on the left side. Sheet metal blew away from the wood beneath it, fluttering across the street as if trying to escape from the sudden blaze behind it.
The main screen was set on a horizontally compressed 360° panorama. Sparrow was used to the distortion. He caught the puff of a buzzbomb launch before his electronics highlighted the threat.
A defensive charge blasted from above Deathdealer's skirts. It made the hull ring as none of the hostile fire had managed.
Sparrow's tribarrel raked shopfronts further down the Strip in a long burst.The bolts flashed at an increasing separation because the tank was accelerating.
Deathdealer's turret rotated counterclockwise, independently of the automatic weapon in the cupola. The left pipper, the point-of-aim indicator for the main gun, slid backward across the facade of one of the settlement's sturdier buildings.
The neon sign was unlighted, but Sparrow knew it well—a cat with a Cheshire grin, gesturing with a forepaw toward her lifted haunches.
That was where the buzzbomb had come from. Three more sparks spat in the darkness—light, lethal missiles, igniting in the whorehouse parlor—just as Sparrow's foot stroked the pedal trip for his 20cm cannon.
Deathdealer's screens blacked out the cyan flash. The displays were live again an instant later when dozens of ready missiles went off in a secondary explosion that blew the Pussycat's walls and roof into concrete confetti.
"Blue Three," the command channel was blatting, "move forward and—"
Albers brought Deathdealer into the settlement with gravity aiding his desperately accelerating fans. He was hugging the right side of the Strip, too close for a buzzbomb launched from that direction to harm. Anti-personnel mines banged harmlessly beneath them.
"—lay a clearing charge before anybody else proceeds!"
Across the roadway, shopfronts popped and sizzled under the fire of Sparrow's tribarrel and the more raking bolts of combat cars pausing just over the ridgeline as Tootsie Six had ordered.
Deathdealer brushed the front of the first shop. The building collapsed like a bomb going off.
The tank accelerated to eighty kph. Albers used his mass and the edge of his skirts like a router blade, ripping down the line of flimsy shops. The fragments scattered in the draft of his fans.
A Consie took two steps from a darkened tavern, knelt, and aimed his buzz-bomb down the throat of the oncoming tank.
Sparrow's foot twitched on the firing pedal. The main gun crashed out a bolt that turned a tailor's shop across the road into a fireball with a plasma core. The blast was twenty meters from the rocketeer, but the Consie flung away his weapon in surprise and tried to run.
A combat car nailed him, half a pace short of the doorway that would have provided concealment if not protection.
Sparrow had begun firing with his tribarrel at a ten o'clock angle. As Death-dealer raced toward the far end of the settlement, he panned the weapon counterclockwise and stuttered bursts low into shopfronts. Instants after the tribarrel raked a facade, his main gun converted the entire building into a self-devouring inferno.
Two controls, two pippers sliding across a compressed screen at varying rates. The few bullets that still spattered the hull were lost in the continuous rending impact of Albers' 170-tonne wrecking ball.
Choking gases from the cannon breech, garbled orders and warnings from the radio.
No sweat, none of it. Birdie Sparrow was in control, and they couldn't none of 'em touch him.
Another whorehouse flew apart at the touch of Deathdealer's skirt. A meter by three-meter strip of metal enameled with a hundred and fifty bright Lion Beer logos curled outward and slapped itself over the intake of #1 Starboard fan.
The sudden loss of flow dipped the skirt to the soil and slewed Deathdealer's bow before plenum-chamber pressure could balance the mass it carried. The stern swung outward, into the clang-clang impact of bolts from a combat car's tribarrel. Fist-sized chunks vaporized from iridium armor that had ignored Consie bullets.
Sparrow rocked in his turret's stinking haze, clinging grimly to the joysticks and bracing his legs as well. The standard way to clear a blocked duct was to reverse the fan. That'd ground Deathdealer for a moment, and with the inertia of their present speed behind that touchdown—
Albers may have chopped his #1
S throttle but he didn't reverse it—or try to straighten Deathdealer's course out of the hook into which contact had canted it. They hit the next building in line, bow-on at seventy kph—shattering panels of pre-stressed concrete and sweeping the fan duct clear in the avalanche of heavy debris.
Deathdealer bucked and pitched like a bull trying to pin a tiger to the jungle floor. The collision was almost as bad as the one for which Sparrow had prepared himself, but the tank never quite lost forward way. They staggered onward, cascading chunks of wall, curtains, and gambling tables.
The tank's AI threw up a red-lit warning on Screen Three. Deathdealer's ground-penetrating radar showed a thirty-centimeter tunnel drilled beneath the road's hard surface from the building they'd just demolished. The cavity was large enough to contain hundreds of kilos of explosive—
And it almost certainly did.
Without the blocked fan, Deathdealer would've been over the mine before the radar warning. Maybe past the mine before the Consie at the detonator could react—that was the advantage of speed and the shattering effect of heavy gunfire, the elements Sparrow'd been counting on to get them through.
And their armor. Even a mine that big . . . .
"All Mike—T-tootsie elements," Sparrow warned. "The road's mined! Mines!"
He'd frozen the gunnery controls as he waited for the collision. Now, while Albers muscled the tank clear of the wreckage and started to build speed again, Sparrow put both pippers on the building across the road from them. He vaporized it with a long burst and three 20cm rounds, just in case the command detonator was there rather than in the shattered gambling den.
It might have a pressure or magnetic detonator. Speed wouldn't 've helped Deathdealer then, if luck hadn't slewed them off the road at the right moment.
"Can't touch us!" Birdie Sparrow muttered as he fired back over the tank's left rear skirts. "Can't touch us!"
"Not this time, snake," said DJ Bell as bitter gases writhed through the turret.
If he'd bothered to look behind him, Hans Wager could've seen that the tail end of the column had yet to pass the gates of Camp Progress.
Just over the ridge, all hell was breaking loose.
Wager's instinctive reaction was the same as always when things really dropped in the pot: to hunker down behind his tribarrel and hope there were panzers close enough to lend a hand.
It gave him a queasy feeling to realize that this time, he was the tank element and it was for him, Blue Three, that the CO was calling.
"—move forward and lay a clearing charge!"
Something big enough to light the whole sky orange blew up behind the ridge. Pray the Lord it was Consies eating some of their own ordnance rather than a mine going off beneath a blower.
The lead tank and Tootsie Six had both dropped over the ridgeline. One-five any One-one pulled forward.The first car slid to the right in a gush of gray-white ash colored blue by gunfire while the other accelerated directly up the road.
Blue Three shuddered as her driver poured the coal to her. Through inexperience, Holman swung her fan nacelles rearward too swiftly. Their skirts scraped a shower of sparks for several meters along the pavement.
Wager found his seat control, not instinctively but fast enough. He dropped from cupola level while the tank plowed stabilized gravel with a sound like mountains screaming.
Tracers stitched the main screen and across the sky overhead, momentary flickers through the open hatch.
One-five vanished behind the crest. One-one swung to the right and stopped abruptly with a flare of her skirts, still silhouetted on the ridgeline. Blue Three was wallowing toward the same patch of landscape under full power.
Wager shouted a curse, but Holman had their mount under control. The nameless tank pivoted left like a wheeled vehicle whose back end had broken away, avoiding the combat car. They could see now that One-one had pulled up to keep from overrunning Tootsie Six.
Blue Three began to slide at a slight sideways angle down the ridge they'd just topped. The three cars ahead of them were firing wildly into the smoke and flying debris of the settlement.
Sparrow's Blue One had just smashed a building. It pulled clear with the motion of an elephant shrugging during a dust bath.
"All Mike—T-tootsie elements," came a voice that a mask on the main screen would identify (if Wager wondered) as Blue One, used to his old call sign."Mines! Mines!"
"Blue Three!" snarled Captain Ranson. "Lay the bloody charge! Now!"
If the bitch wanted to trade jobs, she could take this cursed panzer and all its cursed hardware! She could take it and shove it up her ass!
It wasn't that Hans Wager had never used a mine-clearing charge before. On a combat car, though, they were special equipment bolted to the bow skirts and fired manually. All the tanks were fitted with integral units, controlled by the AI. So . . . .
"Booster," Wager ordered crisply. "Clearance charge."
The gun fight pipper on Screen Two dimmed to half its previous orange brilliance. armed appeared in the upper left corner of the screen, above range to target and length of footprint.
Magenta tracks, narrowed toward the top by foreshortening, overlay the image of the settlement toward which Blue Three was slipping with the slow grace of a beer stein on a polished bar.
Instead of aligning with the pavement, the aiming tracks skewed across the right half of the Strip.
"Holman!" Wager screamed. "Straighten up! Straighten the fuck out! With the road!"
Sparrow's Deathdealer had reached the end of the built-up Strip.The turret was rotated back at a 220° angle to the tank's course. Its main gun fired, a blacked-out streak on Blue Three's screens and a dazzle of cyan radiance through her open hatch.
Wager heard the fan note rise as his driver adjusted nacelles #1S and #2S and boosted their speed. The nameless tank seemed to hesitate, but its attitude didn't change.
"Range,"Wager called to his artificialintelligence.They were about a hundred meters from the nearest buildings. Since they were still moving forward maybe he ought to—
Whang!
Wager looked up in amazement. The bullet that had flattened itself against the cupola's open hatch dropped onto his cheek. It was hotter than hell.
"Sonuvabitch!" Wager shouted.
"Blue Two," ordered the radio, "move into position and lay down a clearance charge!"
"Sergeant," begged Holman over the intercom channel, "do you want me to stop us or—"
She'd straightened 'em out all right, for about a millisecond before the counterclockwise rotation began to swing the tank's bow out of alignment again in the opposite direction. The aiming tracks marched across the screen with stately precision.
The volume of fire from the combat cars slackened because Wager's tank blocked their aim. Another bullet rang against the hatch; this one ricocheted glowing into the darkness. Bloody good thing Wager wasn't manning the cupola tribarrel himself just now . . . .
"Fire!" Wager ordered his AI.
He didn't know what the default setting was. He just knew he wasn't going to wait in his slowly revolving tank and get it right some time next week.
Blue Three chugged, a sound much like that of a mortar firing nearby. The charge, a net of explosive filaments deploying behind a sparkling trio of rocket drivers, arched from a bow compartment.
As soon as the unit fired, the computed aiming tracks transformed themselves into a holographic overlay of the charge being laid—the gossamer threads would otherwise have been invisible.
The net wobbled outward for several seconds,shuddering in the flame-spawned air currents. It settled, covering 500 meters of pavement, the road's left shoulder, and the fronts of most of the buildings on the left side.
Muzzle flashes continued to wink from the stricken ruins of Happy Days.
The charge detonated with a white flash as sudden as that of lightning. Dust and ash spread in a dense pall that was opaque in the thermal spectrum as well as to normal optics.
Hundre
ds of small mines popped and spattered gravel. The explosive-filled cavity whose image, remoted from Deathdealer and frozen for reference on Wager's Screen Three, didn't go off.
Fuckin' A.
Hans Wager shifted Screen Two to millimetric radar and gripped his gunnery control."Holman,drive on,"he ordered, aware as he spoke that Blue Three was already accelerating.
Holman hadn't waited to be told. She knew as sure as Wager did that if the big mine went off, it was better that a tank take the shock than the lesser mass
of a combat car.
Better for everybody except maybe the tank's crew.
Wager triggered the main gun and coaxially locked tribarrel simultaneously, throwing echoing swirls onto his display as the dense atmosphere warped even the radar patterns.
"Tootsie Six," he said as he felt the tank beneath him build to a lumbering gallop. "This is Blue Three. We're going through."
Flamethrower cleared the rise. The settlement was a scene from Brueghel's Hell, and Dick Suilin was being plunged into the heart of it.
Cooter looked back over his shoulder at the reporter. His voice in Suilin's earphones said, "Watch the stern, turtle. Don't worry about the bow—we'll go through on Ortnahme's coattails."
Gale, the veteran trooper, had already shifted his position behind the right wing gun so that he was facing backward at 120° to the combat car's direction of travel. Suilin obediently tried to do the same, but he found that stacked ammo boxes and the large cooler made it difficult for him to stand. By folding one knee on the cooler, he managed to aim at the proper angle, but he wasn't sure he'd be able to hit anything if a target appeared.
Flamethrower was gathering speed. They'd crawled up the slope, matching their speed to that of the tank ahead of them. That vehicle in turn was trying not to overrun the combat cars pausing at the hillcrest.
The first series of the loud shocks occurred before Suilin's car was properly beyond the bermof Camp Progress. After that,the hidden fighting settled down to the vicious sizzle of powerguns. Each bolt sounded like sodium dropping into water in blazing kilogram packets.
When Flamethrower topped the ridgeline, offset to the left of the last tank in Task Force Ranson, Suilin saw the remains of Happy Days.
