by David Drake
The water of Upper Creek flared beneath Warmonger in a veil. The spray was iridescent where daggers of sunlight stabbed it through the low canopy. The two cars closely following Warmonger were hidden by the spray and the creek's wide loops.
Upper Creek drained the area south of Sugar Knob. The trees here had been cropped about ten years before so that their cellulose could be converted by bacteria to crude protein for animal feed. The second-growth trees that replaced the original forest were densely packed and had thin boles.They provided good cover, but they weren't obstacles for vehicles of the power and weight of combat cars.
Yokel tanks would find the conditions passable also, even if they left the trails worn by animals and the local populace.
"We can't go anywhere," Blue Three's driver whined. "We—"
Warmonger's artificial intelligence threw a print sidebar on the holographic condenser lens.
"—only got two cars left and they're shot t' bloody hell.We're right at the little store, where the road crosses the crik."
Willens,following the course Ranson and the AI set for him,nosed Warmonger against the north bank of the creek. The black, root-laced soil rose only a meter above the black, peat-rich water. The car snorted, then mounted to firm ground through a bending wall of saplings.
The distance between barren Chin Peng Rise and the thin trees of Sugar Knob was about a kilometer and a half. Ranson's western element followed a winding three-kay course to stay low and unnoticed while encircling the Yokels' expected deployment area. Cooter and the two-car eastern element had an even longer track to follow to their hide . . . but the Yokel tanks seemed to be giving them the time they needed.
Willens advanced twenty meters further, to give room to One-five and One-one behind him, then settled with his fans on idle.
Task Force Ranson didn't want to stumble into contact before they knew where all their targets were.
Blue Three's sensors had greater range and precision by an order of magnitude than those crammed into the combat cars, but the cars could process the data passed to them by the larger vehicle. The sidebar on Ranson's multi-function display listed call signs, isolated in the cross-talk overheard by the superb electronics of the tank pretending to be in Kawana while it waited behind Chin Peng Rise north of the tiny hamlet.
There were twenty-five individual call signs. The AI broke them down as three companies each consisting of three platoons—but no more than four tanks in any platoon (five would have been full strength). Some platoons were postulated from a single call sign.
Not all the Yokel tanks would be indulging in the loose chatter that laid them out for Task Force Ranson like a roast for the carving; but most of them would, most of them were surely identified. The red cross-hatching that overlay the relief map in the main field of the display was the AI's best estimate thus far of the armored battalion's dispositions.
Blue Three was the frame of the trap and the bait within it; but the five combat cars of west and east elements were the spring-loaded jaws that would snap the rat's neck.
And this rat, Yokel or Consie, was lying. It was clear that the leading elements of First of the 4th were already deploying onto the southern slope of Sugar Knob, half a kilometer from the store and shanties of Kawana rather than the ten kays their commander claimed.
In the next few seconds, the commander of the armored battalion would decide whether he wanted to meet allied mercenaries—or light the fuse that would certainly detonate in a battle more destructive than any a citizen of Prosperity could imagine. He was being tested . . . .
The two sharp green beads of Lieutenant Cooter's element settled into position.
She heard a whisper in the southern sky. Incoming.
"All right, Holman, move us hull-down," Hans Wager ordered as his driver whined, "They're shooting at us! They're shooting at us!" over the Allied Common Channel and the scream of the incoming salvo wrote its own exclamation point in four crashing impacts on the valley below.
The nameless tank lifted, scraped, and hopped forward—up and out of its stand-by hide to a position so near the crest of Chin Peng Rise that the turret and sensor arrays had a clear sight across Kawana to the slumping mass of Sugar Knob beyond.
The hamlet had never been prepossessing. It was less so now that the ill-aimed Consie salvo had shaken down several shacks. Raider Camp Creek roiled with the muddy aftermath of the shell that had landed on it, and the footbridge paralleling the ford had collapsed into the turbid current.
Men and women in the sugarbush fields dropped their tools to run for their homes. The sandy rows in which the bushes were planted would've given better protection than the board walls of the shanties.
That much came toWager's eyes from the direct view of his main screen.Screen Three displayed the data his chuckling AI processed, a schematic vision of the terrain behind Sugar Knob and the unseen Yokel tanks showing themselves to Wager's sensors.
A sidebar on the main screen noted an incoming second salvo, ten rounds but very ragged—even for Yokel artillery.
The Yokel vehicles were diesel-powered, so Wager's tank couldn't locate them precisely from sparkcoil emissions; but their diesels had injector motors whose RF output could be pinpointed by the Slammers' sensors.
Without the added shielding of Chin Peng Rise to block Blue Three, the crosshatched blur south of Sugar Knob on Screen Three began to coalesce into bright red beads: Yokel tanks, located to within a few meters.
Their disposition explained why the second salvo was so scattered. The Consies were using the 130mm howitzers on ten of their tanks to supplement regular artillery firing from the vicinity of Kohang.
For indirect fire,these tanks were concentrated in a tight arc along Upper Creek. They'd run their bows up on the north bank in order to get more elevation for their howitzers than their turret mechanisms would permit.
The tank shells scattered around Kawana, detonating with white flashes and the hollow whoomps characteristic of shape-charge anti-tank warheads. Sand spewed in great harmless fountains.
The store where the unpaved road forded the creek flung its walls sideways at a direct hit. Half a body arced into the water and sank.
"Six, this is Blue Three!" Wager shouted. "Am I clear to shoot?"
Then, though Ranson could see it herself as easily as Wager could if the crazy bitch saw anything, "Six, there's ten tanks a kilometer south of the Knob, just off the road, but the rest of the bastards are moving onto the crest!"
The Yokels were moving into direct-fire positions covering Kawana . . . and which covered the tank on Chin Peng Rise with no more cover than the fuzz on a baby's ass.
The saplings on Sugar Knob shifted with the weight of black masses behind them, the dark-camouflaged bows of Consie tanks.
Two, three; seven tanks highlighted by Wager's AI. Their high-velocity 60mm cannons quested toward Kawana like the feelers of loathsome crustaceans. There were men in black uniforms riding on each turret.
If Wager fired, the plasma jolt from his powergun would blind and deafen the sensors on which the combat cars depended.
One of the long-barreled cannon suddenly lifted and turned. The tank commander had seen the gray gleam of the real enemy lurking behind Chin Peng Rise.
Red location beads were still appearing on Screen Three,the same view that was being remoted to the combat car AIs, but surely Ranson had enough data to—
"Tootsie Six!" Hans Wager cried, "Can you clear us?"
"Sarge, I'm backing—" Holman said.
"All Tootsie units," said the voice of Captain Ranson. "Take 'em."
The muzzle flash was a bright yellow blaze against the dark camouflage. The tungsten-carbide shot rang like a struck cymbal on the turret of Wager's nameless tank.
"Willens," said June Ranson, converting the holographic map on her display into a reality more concrete than the stems of young trees around her, "steer one-twenty degrees. West element, conform to my movements."
"Why we doin' this?" Stolley
shouted, grabbing the captain's left arm and tugging to turn her.
Off to the left, only slightly muffled by intervening vegetation, the flat cracks of high-velocity guns sounded from the crest of Sugar Knob.
Ranson slipped her arm from the wing gunner's grip. "Thirty seconds to contact," her voice said.
Warmonger's artificial intelligence had given her a vector marker. Her eyes were on it, waiting for the vertical red line to merge with a target in her gunsights.
Stolley cursed and put his hands back on the grips of his tribarrel.
The gunfire from Sugar Knob doubled in intensity. Warmonger and the two cars accompanying it were headed away from the knob on a slanting course. As Warmonger switched direction, the AI fed another target vector to each gunner's helmet.
A wrist-thick sapling flicked Ranson's tribarrel to the side. Her hands realigned the weapon with the vector. They acted by reflex, unaided by the higher centers of her brain which slid beads of light in a glowing three-dimensional gameboard.
Her solution to the Yokel attack had been as simple and risky as Task Force Ranson's lack of resources required. She was using Slammers' electronics and speed to accomplish what their present gunpower and armor could not.
So, Candidate Ranson. You've decided to divide your force before attacking a superior concentration. Rather like Colonel Custer's plan at the Little Big Horn, wouldn't you say?
But there was no choice. The Yokels would deploy along the ridge. Only by hitting them simultaneously from behind on both flanks could her combat cars roll up six or seven times their number of hostile tanks.
So, Candidate; you're confident that the opposing commander won't keep a reserve? If he does, it's your force—forces, I should say—that will be outflanked.
The Yokels hadn't held back a reserve . . . but the ten tanks lobbing shells over the knob from a kilometer to the rear would act as a reserve—if they weren't eliminated first.
Guns fired from Sugar Knob a kilometer away, guns on the Yokel left flank that Ranson had decided to bypass only thirty seconds before—
Warmonger burst into a clearing gray with powdersmoke and dust kicked up by the ten stubby howitzers firing at high angles.
The Yokel tanks had their engines forward and their turrets mounted well back, over the fourth pair of roadwheels. With their hulls raised fifteen degrees by the stream bank, the vehicles bucked dangerously every time they fired their heavy weapons. The water of Upper Creek slapped between the recoiling tanks and its gravel bed.
The tanks were parked in the creek to either side of the road. Less than a three-meter hull width separated each vehicle from its neighbors. While the turret crews fed their guns, the tank drivers stood on both ends of the line of vehicles, mixing with a dozen guerrillas in black uniforms.
The dismounted men covered their ears with their palms and opened their mouths to equalize pressure from the muzzle blasts.When the three combat cars slid from the forest, their hands dropped but their mouths continued to gape like the jaws of gaffed fish.
Men spun and fell, shedding body parts, as Ranson's tribarrel lashed them. The group on the east side of the lined-up tanks had time to shout and run a few steps before Warmonger raced down Upper Creek as though the gravel bed were a highway, giving Ranson and Stolley shots at them also.
The Yokel tanks couldn't react fast enough to be an immediate danger, but a single Consie rifleman could clear Warmonger's fighting compartment.
Could have. When the last black-clad guerrilla flopped at the edge of the treeline, Willens spun Warmonger in a cataclysm of spray and the three tribarrels blazed into the backs on the renegade tanks.
One-one and One-five had followed Warmonger into the stream, but they hadn't had to worry about the dismounted enemy. Two of the left-side tanks were already wrapped in sooty orange palls of burning diesel fuel. The turret blew off a third as main gun ammunition detonated in the hull.
Ranson centered her projection sight on a tank's back deck, just behind the turret ring.The target's slope gave her a perfect shot. Cyan bolts streamed through the holographic image of her sight, splashing huge craters in thin armor designed only to stop shell splinters.
In gunnery simulators, the screaming tank crew didn't try to abandon their vehicle a second or two after it was too late. Ranson's bolts punched into the interior of the tank. A blast of foul white smoke erupted from the turret hatches and the cavity ripped by the tribarrel.
The tank commander and the naked torso of his gunner flew several meters in the air. The tank began to burn sluggishly.
June Ranson's hands swung for another target, but there were no targets remaining here.
The tanks' thickest armor was frontal. Striking from above and behind, the tribarrels ripped them as easily as so many cans of sardines.
Cans of barbecued pork. The gunnery simulators didn't provide the odor of close action, either.
All the ammunition on a Yokel tank detonated simultaneously, pushing aside the nearest vehicles and flinging the turret roof fifty meters in the air in a column of smoke.
"Willens, steer three hundred degrees," Ranson heard/said. "West element, form on me."
Her eyes sought the multi-function display, while part of her mind wondered why she couldn't blend with Cooter's vehicles when she wanted to know their progress . . . .
Dick Suilin's ribs slammed hard against the edge of the fighting compartment as Flamethrower grounded heavily on its mad rush through the scrub forest. The reporter swore and wondered whether he'd be pissing blood in the morning, despite the clamshell armor that protected his kidney from the worst of the shock.
In the morning. He made a high-pitched sound somewhere between laughter and madness.
He'd fallen sideways because the only thing that he had to hang onto were the grips of his tribarrel. That was pointed over the left side, at ninety degrees to the combat car's direction of motion. The reporter swung back and forth as his weapon pivoted.
The blazing red-orange hairline on his visor demanded Suilin cover the left side. He horsed his gun in the proper direction again, wincing at the pain in his side, and tried to find a target in the whipping foliage.
There was no doubt where Flamethrower's artificial intelligence wanted him to aim, though the rational part of the reporter's mind wondered why. They had—they were supposed to have—enveloped the enemy's right wing, so the first targets would be on the right side of Flamethrower . . . .
He supposed Daisy Belle was somewhere behind them. He supposed the other vehicles of the task force were somewhere also. He hadn't seen much of them . . . .
Dick Suilin supposed a lot of things; but all he knew was that his side hurt, his hands hurt from their grip on the automatic weapon,and that he really should've pissed in the minute while they waited for the go signal.
Flamethrower slid through a curtain of reeds. Two meters from the muzzle of Suilin's tribarrel, that close, was a tank with its hatches open, bogged in a swale. The soil was so damp that water gleamed in the ruts the treads had squeezed before being choked to a halt.
Right where the AI's vector had said it would be.
Suilin clamped his trigger so convulsively that he forgot for a moment that he was pointing a weapon. Two bolts splashed on the turret face, cyan and white, blazing steel, before several following rounds exploded stems and flattened further swathes in the reeds with blasts of steam and flying cellulose.
Flamethrower grunted past the tank's bow at the speed of a running horse. The reporter pivoted to follow the target with his gun, ignoring the way he thrust himself against the side armor just as the impact had done moments before.
His sights steadied where a ball mantlet joined the tank's slim cannon to the turret face. Panning like a photographer with a moving subject, Suilin kept the muzzles aligned as they spat cyan hell to within millimeters, bolt by bolt.
Suilin would have kept shooting, but the cannon barrel sagged and a sharp explosion lifted the turret a hand's breadth so that bright
flame could flash momentarily all around the ring.
He didn't notice until they were past that there'd been a second tank on the other side of the swale, and that several men in National Army uniforms had been stringing tow cables between the vehicles. The second tank was burning fiercely. The crewmen were sprawled in the arc they'd managed to run before Gale's tribarrel searched them down.
Suilin thought the men were wearing black armbands, but he no longer really cared.
Dick Suilin heard the CRACK-CRACK-CRACK of automatic cannons upslope, the same timbre as machine guns firing but louder, much louder, despite the vegetation.
Shorty Rogers was running the valley south of Sugar Knob at a hellbent pace for the conditions. Warmonger cut to the right, bypassing some of the unseen tanks whose gunfire betrayed their presence.
Maybe the course was deliberate. Maybe Daisy Belle would take care of the other tanks . . . .
Suilin saw tank tracks slanting toward the crest an instant before he saw the tank itself, backing the way it had come. There was a guerrilla on the turret, hammering at the closed hatch. The Consie shouted something inaudible.
Suilin fired, aiming at the Consie rather than the tank. He missed both; his bolts sailed high to shatter trees on the crest.
That didn't matter. Cooter's helmet had given him the same target. The lieutenant's tribarrel focused on the hull where flowing script read Queen of the South. Paint blazed an instant before the armor collapsed and a fuel tank ruptured in a belch of flame.
Beyond Queen of the South, backing also, was a command vehicle with a high enclosed cab instead of a turret. Suilin caught only a glimpse of the vehicle before Gale's tribarrel punched through the thin vertical armor of the cab.
The rear door opened. Nothing came out except an arm flopping in its black sleeve.
They had almost reached the top of the knob. If Daisy Belle fired at them, the bolts would hit on Gale's side; but if Flamethrower was closing with the three cars in Captain Ranson's elements—
