by David Drake
Warrior boomed out of the swale and proceeded up the curving track toward Hill 504.
The main gun had emptied its ready magazine. Despite the air conditioning, the air within Warrior's fighting compartment was hot and bitter with the gray haze trembling from the thick 20cm disks which littered the turret basket. The disks were the plastic matrices that had held active atoms of the powergun charge in precise alignment. Despite the blast of liquid nitrogen that cleared the bore after each shot, the empties contained enormous residual heat.
Des Grieux jerked the charging lever, refilling the ready magazine from reserve storage deep in Warrior's hull. The swale was blazing havoc behind them. Silhouetted against the glare of burning brush, fuel, and ammunition, Republican troops scattered like chickens from a fox.
Ten kilometers ahead of the tank, the horizon quivered with the muzzle flashes of Republican artillery.
"Now we'll get those bastards on 504!" Des Grieux shouted—
And knew, even as he roared his triumph, that if he tried to smash his way into the Republican firebase, he would die as surely and as vainly as the Rep reserves had died when Warrior ripped through the center of them
So long as Des Grieux was in the middle of a firefight, his brain had disconnected the stream of orders and messages rattling over the commo net. Now the volume of angry sound overwhelmed him: "Oyster Two, report! Break! Oyster four, are you—"
The voice was Broglie's rather than that of Lieutenant Lindgren. The Lord himself had nothing to say just now that Des Grieux had time to hear.Des Grieux switched off the commo at the main console.
"Booster," he ordered the artificial intelligence, "enemy defenses in marked area."
Des Grieux's right index finger drew a rough circle bounded by Hill 504 and Warrior's present position on the topographic display. "Best esti—"
An all-terrain truck snorted into view on the main screen. Des Grieux twisted his left joystick violently but he couldn't swing the tribarrel to bear in the moment before the tank rushed by in a spray of sand. The truck's crew jumped from both sides of the cab, leaving their vehicle to careen through the night unattended. "—mate!"
Booster had very little hard data, but the AI didn't waste time as a human intelligence officer might have done in decrying the accuracy of the assessment it was about to provide.The computer's best estimate was the same as Des Grieux's own: Warrior didn't have a snowball's chance in Hell of reaching the firebase.
Only one of Hill 504's flanks,the west/southwest octave,had a slope suitable for heavy equipment—including ammunition vans and artillery prime movers, and assuredly including Warrior. There were at this moment—best estimate—anywhere from five hundred to a thousand Rep soldiers scattered along the route the tank would have to traverse.
The Reps were artillerymen, headquarters guards, and stragglers, not the crack battalions Warrior had gutted in her charge out of the Federal lines—
But these troops were prepared. The exploding chaos had warned them. They would fire from cover: rifle bullets to peck out sensors; buzzbombs whose shaped-charge warheads could and eventually would penetrate heavy armor; cannon lowered to slam their heavy shells directly into the belly plates Warrior exposed as the tank lurched to the top of Hill 504 by the only possible access . . . .
"Driver,"Des Grieux ordered.His fingertip traced as a vagearc across the topo screen at ninety degrees to the initial course. "Follow the marked route."
"Sir, there's no road!" Kuykendall shrilled.
Even on the trail flattened by the feet of Republican assault battalions, the tank proceeded in a worm of sparks and dust as its skirts dragged. Booster's augmented night vision gave the driver an image almost as good as daytime view would have been, but nothing could be sufficient to provide a smooth ride at sixty-five kph over unimproved wilderness.
"Screw the bloody road!" ordered Des Grieux. "Move!"
They couldn't go forward, but they couldn't go back, either. The survivors of the Republican attack were between Warrior and whatever safety the Federal bunker line could provide. If the tank turned and tried to make an uphill run through that gauntlet, satchel charges would rip vents in the skirts. Crippled, Warrior would be a stationary target for buzzbombs and artillery fire.
Des Grieux couldn't give the Reps time to set up. So long as the tank kept moving, it was safe. With her fusion powerplant and drive fans rated at 12,000 hours between major overhauls, Warrior could cruise all the way around the planet, dodging enemies.
For the moment, Des Grieux just wanted to get out of the immediate kill zone.
Kuykendall tilted the nacelles closer to vertical. Their attitude reduced the forward thrust,but it also increased the skirts' clearance by a centimeter or two. That was necessary insurance against a quartz outcrop tearing a hole in the skirts.
Trees twenty meters tall grew in the swales, where the water table was highest. Vegetation on the slopes and ridges was limited to low, spike-leafed bushes. Kuykendall rode the slopes, where the brush was less of a problem but the tank wasn't outlined against the sky. Des Grieux didn't have to think about what Kuykendall was doing, which made her the best kind of driver . . . .
A tank running at full power was conspicuous under almost any circumstances, but the middle of a major battle was one of the exceptions. Neither Des Grieux's instincts nor Warrior's sensor array caught any sign of close-in enemies.
By slanting northeast, Des Grieux put them in the dead ground between the axes of the Republican attack.He was well behind the immediately engaged forces and off the supply routes leading from the two northern firebases. If he ordered Kuykendall to turn due north now, Warrior would in ten minutes be in position to circle Hill 661 and then head south to link up with the relieving force.
It didn't occur to Des Grieux that they could run from the battle. He just needed a little time.
The night raved and roared. Brushfires flung sparks above the ridgelines where Warrior had gutted the right pincer of the attack.Ammunition cooked off when flames reached the bandoliers of the dead and screaming wounded.
Bullets and case fragments sang among the surviving Reps. Men shot back in panic, killing their fellows and drawing return fire from across the flame curtains.
The hollow chunking sound within Warrior's guts stopped with a final clang. The green numeral 20 appeared on the lower right-hand corner of Des Grieux's main screen, the display he was using for gunnery. His ready magazine was full again. He could pulse the night with another salvo of 20cm bolts.
Soon.
When Des Grieux blasted the Rep supports with rapid fire, he'd robbed Warrior's main gun of half the lifespan it would have had if the weapon were fired with time for the bore to cool between shots. If he cut loose with a similar burst, again there was a real chance the eroded barrel would fail, perhaps venting into the fighting compartment with catastrophic results.
That possibility had no effect on Des Grieux's plans for the next ten minutes. He would do what he had to do; and by God! His tools, human and otherwise, had better be up to the job.
The sky in the direction of Hill 661 quivered white with the almost-constant muzzle flashes. Shells, friction-heated to a red glow by the end of their arc into the Federal encampment,then flashed orange.Artillery rockets moved too slowly for the atmosphere to light their course, but the Reps put flare pots in the rockets' tails so that the gunners could correct their aim.
"Sarge?" said Kuykendall tightly. "Where we going?"
Des Grieux's index finger drew a circle on the topographic display.
"Oh, lord . . ." the driver whispered.
But she didn't slow or deviate from the course Des Grieux had set her.
Warrior proceeded at approximately forty kph; a little faster on downslopes, a little slower when the drive fans had to fight gravity, as they did most of the time now. That was fast running over rough, unfamiliar terrain. The tank's night-vision devices were excellent, but they couldn't see that the opposite side of a ridge dropped off in
stead of sloping, or the tank-sized gully beyond the bend in a swale.
Kuykendall was getting them to the objective surely, and that was soon enough for Des Grieux. Whether or not it would be in time for the Federals on Hill 541 North was somebody else's problem.
The Republicans' right-flank assault was in disarray,probably terminal disarray, but the units committed to the east slope of the Federal position were proceeding more or less as planned. At least one of the Slammers' tanks survived, because the night flared with three cyan blasts spaced a chronometer second apart.
Probably Broglie, who cut his turds to length. Everything perfect, everything as ordered, and who was just about as good a gunner as Slick Des Grieux.
Just about meant second best.
Shells crashed down unhindered on 541N. Some of them certainly fell among the Rep assault forces because the attack was succeeding. Federal guns slammed out rapid fire with the muzzles lowered, slashing the Reps with canister at point-blank range. A huge explosion rocked the hilltop as an ammo dump went off, struck by incoming or detonated by the defenders as the Reps overran it.
Des Grieux hadn't bothered to cancel his earlier command: Booster, enemy defenses in marked area. When his fingertip circled Hill 661 to direct Kuykendall, the artificial intelligence tabulated that target as well.
Twenty artillery pieces, ranging from 2cm to a single stub-barreled 30cm howitzer which flung 400-kilogram shells at fifteen-minute intervals.
At least a dozen rails to launch 20cm bombardment rockets.
A pair of calliopes,powerguns with eight2cm barrels fixed on a carriage.They were designed to sweep artillery shells out of the sky, but their high-intensity charges could chew through the bow slope of a tank in less than a minute.
Approximately a thousand men: gunners, command staff, and a company or two of infantry for close-in security in case Federals sortied from their camp in a kamikaze attack.
All of them packed onto a quarter-kilometer mesa, and not a soul expecting Warrior to hit them from behind. The Republicans thought of tanks as guns and armor; but tanks meant mobility, too, and Des Grieux knew every way a tank could crush an enemy.
Reflected muzzle blasts silvered the plume of dust behind Warrior. The onrushing tank would be obvious to anyone in the firebase who looked north—
But the show was southwest among the Federal positions, where the artillerymen dropped their shells and toward which the infantry detachment stared—imagining a fight at knifepoint, and thinking of how much better off they were than their fellows in the assault waves.
Warrior thrust through a band of stunted brush and at a flat angle onto a stabilized road, the logistics route serving the Republican firebase.
"S—" Kuykendall said.
"Yes!" Des Grieux shouted. "Goose it!" Kuykendall had started to adjust her nacelles even before she spoke, but vectored thrust wasn't sufficient to steer the tank onto a road twenty meters wide at the present speed. She deliberately let the skirts drop, using mechanical friction to brake Warrior's violent side-slipping as the bow came around.
The tank tilted noticeably into the berm, its skirt plowed up on the high side of the turn. Rep engineers had treated the road surface with a plasticizer that cushioned the shock and even damped the blaze of sparks that Des Grieux had learned to expect when steel rubbed stone with the inertia of 170 tonnes behind it.
Kuykendall got her vehicle under control, adjusted fan bite and nacelle angle, and began accelerating up the 10° slope to the target. By the time Warrior reached the end of the straight, half-kilometer run, they were travelling at seventy kph.
Two Republican ammunition vans were parked just over the lip of Hill 661. There wasn't room for a tank to go between them.
Kuykendall went through anyway. The five-tonne vehicles flew in opposite directions. The ruptured fuel tank of one hurled a spray of blazing kerosene out at a 30° tangent to the tank's course.
The sound of impact would have been enormous, were it not lost in the greater crash of Warrior's guns.
The tank's data banks stored the image of bolts from the calliopes. Booster gave Des Grieux a precise vector to where the weapons had been every time they fired. The Republican commander could have ordered the calliopes to move since Federal incoming disappeared as a threat, but that was a chance Des Grieux had to take.
He squeezed both tits as Warrior crested the mesa, firing along the preadjusted angles.
The night went cyan, then orange and cyan.
The calliopes were still in their calculated positions. The tribarrel raked the sheet-metal chassis of one. Ready ammunition ignited into a five-meter globe of plasma bright enough to burn out the retinas of anyone looking in the wrong direction without protective lenses.
There was a vehicle parked between the second calliope and the onrushing tank. It was the ammunition hauler feeding a battery of 15cm howitzers. It exploded with a blast so violent that the tank's bow lifted and Des Grieux slammed back in his seat. Shells and burning debris flew in all directions, setting off a second vehicle hundreds of meters away.
The shockwave spilled the air cushion from Warrior's plenum chamber. The tank grounded hard, dangerously hard, but the skirts managed to stand the impact. Power returned to Warrior's screens after a brief flicker, but the topographic display faded to amber monochrome which blurred the fine detail.
"S'okay . . ." Des Grieux wheezed, because the seat restraints had bruised him over the ribs when they kept him from pulping himself against the main screen. And it was all right, because the guns were all right and the controls were in his hands.
Buttoned up, the tank was a sealed system whose thick armor protected the crew from the blast's worst effects. The Reps, even those in bunkers, were less fortunate. The calliope which Des Grieux missed lay on its side fifty meters from its original location. Strips of flesh and uniforms, the remains of its crew, swathed the breech mechanisms.
"Booster," Des Grieux said, "mark movement," and his tribarrel swept the firebase.
The Republicans' guns were dug into shallow emplacements. Incoming wasn't the problem for them that it had been for the Federals, pecked at constantly from three directions.
The gunners on Hill 541 North hadn't had enough ammunition to try to overwhelm the Rep defenses. Besides, calliopes were designed for the job of slapping shells out of the sky. In that one specialized role, they performed far better than tank tribarrels.
Previous freedom from danger left the Republican guns hopelessly exposed now that a threat appeared, but Des Grieux had more important targets than mere masses of steel aimed in the wrong direction. There were men.
The AI marked moving objects white against a background of gray shades on the gunnery screen. Warrior wallowed forward again, not fully under control because both Kuykendall and the skirts had taken a severe shock. Des Grieux used that motion and his cupola's high-speed rotation to slide the solid pipper across the display. Every time the orange bead covered white, his thumb stroked the firing tit.
The calliopes had been the primary danger. Their multiple bolts could cripple the tank if their crews were good enough—and only a fool bets that an unknown opponent doesn't know his job.
With the calliopes out of the way, the remaining threat came from the men who could swarm over Warrior like driver ants bringing down a leopard. The things that still moved on Hill 661 were men, stumbling in confusion and the shock of the massive secondary explosions.
Des Grieux's cyan bolts ripped across them and flung bodies down with their uniforms afire.Artillerymen fleeing toward cover, officers popping out of bunkers to take charge of the situation, would-be rescuers running to drag friends out of the exploding cataclysm—
All moving, all targets, all dead before anyone on the mesa realized that there was a Slammers' tank in their midst, meting out destruction with the contemptuous ease of a weasel in a hen coop
Des Grieux didn't use his main gun; he didn't want to take time to replenish the ready magazine before he com
pleted the final stage of his plan. Twice Warrior's automatic defense system burped a sleet of steel balls into Reps who ran in the wrong direction, but there was no resistance.
Mobility, surprise,and overwhelming firepower. One tank, with a commander who knew that you didn't win battles by crouching in a hole while the other bastard shoots at you . . . .
A 20cm shell arced from an ammo dump. It clanged like the wrath of God on Warrior's back deck. The projectile was unfuzed . It didn't explode.
Only Warrior and the flames now moved on top of Hill 661. Normally the Republican crews bunkered their ammunition supply carefully, but rapid fire in support of the attack meant ready rounds were stacked on flat ground or held in soft-skinned vehicles. A third munitions store went up, a bunker or a vehicle, you couldn't tell after the fireball mushroomed skyward.
The shockwave pushed Warrior sideways into a sandbagged command post. The walls collapsed at the impact. An arm stuck out of the doorway, but the tribarrel had severed the limb from the body moments before.
The tank steadied. Des Grieux pumped deliberate bursts into a pair of vans. One held 30cm ammunition, the other was packed with bombardment rockets. A white flash sent shells tumbling skyward and down. Rockets skittered across the mesa.
"Booster," said Des Grieux. "Topo blowup of six-six-one. Break. Driver—"
A large-scale plan of the mesa filled the left-hand display. Warrior was a blue dot, wandering across a ruin of wrecked equipment and demolished bunkers.
"—put us there—" Des Grieux stabbed a point on the southwestern margin of the mesa. He had to reach across his body to do so, because his left hand was welded to the tribarrels controls "—and hold. Break. Booster—"
Kuykendall swung the tank. Warrior now rode nose down by a few degrees. The bow skirts were too crumpled to seal at the normal attitude.
"—give me maximum magnification on the main screen."
Debris from previous explosions still flapped above Hill 661 like bat-winged Death. A fuel store ignited. The pillar of flame expanded in slow motion by comparison with the previous ammunition fires.
