by David Drake
Des Grieux ignored the artillery because he didn't have any choice. He'd ignited alleight of the supplytruck's low-side tires with the initial burst. When the debris of the shellbursts cleared, the vehicle was toppling sideways. Its cargo compartment was full of wounded troops who screamed as they went over.
Twenty or thirty shells landed within a dozen seconds.A few of the Thunderbolt gun crews had switched to armor piercing, but none of those rounds scored a direct hit on the tank. A heavy shell burst on H271's rock-covered back deck. The shock made all the displays quiver. The air of the fighting compartment filled with dust shaken from every minute crevice.
Screen #1 showed the Legion tank destroyer's orange symbol entering the Notch from the south side. The heavy vehicle had collided with several Thunderbolt Division APCs in its haste to reach a position from which it could fire at the Slammers' tank.
Des Grieux slapped the plate that set his tribarrel on Automatic Air Defense. He said in a sharp,clear voice,"Booster,sort incoming from the southeast first," as his foot poised on the firing pedal for the main gun.
The 20cm weapon was already aligned. The eighty-times magnified tube of the tank destroyer's gun slid into the hollow circle on Screen #2. More shells burst near H271, but not very near, and the tribarrel was already snarling skyward at the anti-tank rounds which the Legion battery hurled.
The tank destroyer's glacis plate filled Des Grieux's display. He rocked forward on the foot-trip. The saturated blue streak punched through the mantle of the 15cm weapon before the Legion gunner could find his target.
The tank destroyer's ready magazine painted the Notch cyan. Then the reserve ammunition storage went off and lifted the vehicle's armored carapace a meter in the air before dropping it back to the ground.
The iridium shell glowed white. Nothing else remained of the tank destroyer or its crew.
Des Grieux laughed with mad glee. "Have to do better 'n that, Broglie!" he shouted as he slid his aiming point down the slope. He fired every time the hollow pipper covered an undamaged vehicle.
There were seventeen 20cm rounds remaining in H271's ready magazine. Each bolt turned a lightly armored truck or APC into a fireball that bulged steel plates like the skin of a balloon. The last two half-tracks Des Grieux hit had already been abandoned by their crews.
Artillery fire slackened, though Des Grieux's tribarrel snarled uninterruptedly skyward. A delay-fused armor-piercing shell struck short of H271 and punched five meters through the hard soil before going off. The explosion lifted the tank a hand's breadth despite the mass of rock overburden, but the vehicle sustained no damage.
Screen#1showed a killing zone south of the Escarpment,where fleeing troops bunched and the Slammers maneuvered to cut them apart. Because the powerguns were deadly at any range so long as they had a sight line, every knob of ground Hammer's troops took cut a further swath through far-distant enemy positions.
When the Legion and Thunderbolt artillery directed its fire toward Des Grieux, the cupola guns of the tanks were freed to kill. The process of collapse accelerated as tanks and combat cars took the howitzer batteries themselves under direct fire.
Des Grieux waited. H271's fighting compartment was a stinking furnace. Empties from the rapidly fired main gun loosed a gray haze into the atmosphere faster than the air conditioning could absorb it. The tank chuckled mechanically as it replenished the ready magazine from storage compartments deep in its armored core.
Fuel fires lighted the slope all the way to the Notch. Hashemite, Sincanmo, and Thunderbolt vehicles—all wrecked and burning. Flames wove a dance of victory over a landscape in which nothing else moved.
Hundreds of terrified soldiers were still alive in the wasteland. The survivors remained motionless. Incoming artillery fire had ceased, giving Des Grieux back the use of his tribarrel. He used it and H271's night vision equipment to probe at whim wherever a head raised.
Des Grieux waited as he watched Broglie's two tank destroyers.
They were no longer the rear guard for the Central Sector refugees. The tank destroyers moved up to the Notch at a deliberate pace which never exposed them to the guns of the panzers south of the Knifeblade Escarpment. Always a cunning bastard, Broglie . . . .
Ammunition in a supply truck near the bottom of the slope cooked off. The blast raised a mushroom-shaped cloud as high as the top of the Escarpment. Two kilometers away, H271 shook.
The battle was going to be over very soon. The Thunderbolt Division's horrendous butcher's bill gave its commander a legitimate excuse for surrendering whether his Hashemite employers did so or not. The bodies heaped on both sides of the Notch would ransom the lives of their fellows.
It occurred to Des Grieux that he could probably drive H271 away, now. Incoming shells had done a day's work for excavating equipment in freeing the tank from his deliberate rockfall.
There wasn't anyplace else in the universe that Des Grieux wanted to be.
Screen #1 showed the tank destroyers pausing just south of the Notch. A 15cm bolt stabbed across the intervening kilometers and vaporized a portion of the mesa's rim. Sonic echoes of the plasma discharge rumbled across the plain below.
Des Grieux blinked, then understood. When the Slammers in Task Force Kuykendall moved out, they'd abandoned the sensor pack they'd placed on the butte. H271 wasn't connected to the pack, but Broglie didn't know that.
And trust that clever bastard not to miss a point before he made his move!
Des Grieux chuckled through a throat burned dry by ozone and the other poisons he breathed. His hands rested lightly on the two joysticks. The pippers were already locked together, solid in circle, where they needed to be.
The left-hand tank destroyer backed, then began to accelerate toward the Notch at high speed. The other Legion vehicle moved forward also, but at a relative crawl.
The right-hand tank destroyer had made the one-shot kill on the tiny sensor pack two kilometers away.
It happened the way Des Grieux knew it would happen. The tank destroyer rushing through the left side of the Notch braked so abruptly that its skirts rubbed off a shower of sparks against the smooth rock. The other tank destroyer, Broglie's own vehicle, continued to accelerate. It burst into clear sight while H271's gunner was supposed to be concentrating on the target ten meters to the side.
But it was Des Grieux below, and Des Grieux's pippers filled with the mass of iridium that slid into the sight picture. His tribarrel and main gun fired in unison at the massive target.
The interior of H271 turned cyan, then white, and finally red with heat like a hammer. The shockwave was not a sound but a blow that slammed Des Grieux down in his seat.
The cupola was gone. Warning lights glowed across Des Grieux's console. Screen #3 switched automatically to a damage-assessment schematic. The tribarrel had vaporized, but the main gun was undamaged and the turret rotated normally the few mills required to bring the hollow pipper onto its remaining target.
Luke Broglie was very good. He'd fired a fraction of a second early, but he must have known that he wouldn't get the additional instant he needed to center his sight squarely on the tank turret.
He must have known that he was meeting Slick Des Grieux for the last time.
Broglie's vehicle was a white glow at the edge of the Notch. The other crew should have bailed out of their tank destroyer and waited for the Hashemite surrender, but they tried to finish the job at which their colonel had failed.
Three 15cmbolts cut the night, two shots before the tank destroyer had a sight picture and the last round thirty meters wide of H271. Des Grieux penetrated the tank destroyer's thick glacis plate with his first bolt, then sent a second round through the hole to vaporize the wreckage in a pyre of its own munitions.
They should have known it was impossible to do what Luke Broglie couldn't manage. Nobody was as good as Broglie . . . except Slick Des Grieux.
Des Grieux could see both north and south of the Knifeblade Escarpment from where he sat on top of the b
urned-out tank destroyer. Smudgy fires still burned over the sloping plain where the Slammers' artillery and sharp-shooting powerguns had slashed the Hashemite center into retreat, then chaos.
Clots of surrendered enemies waited to be interned. Thunderbolt Division personnel rested under tarpaulins attached to their vehicles and a stake or two driven into the soil. The defeated mercenaries were not exactly lounging: there were many wounded among them, and every survivor from the punished battalions knew at least one friend who hadn't been so lucky.
But they would be exchanged back to their own command within hours or days. A mercenary's war ended when the fighting stopped.
The Hashemite survivors were another matter. They huddled in separate groups. Many of their trucks had been disabled by the rain of anti-personnel bomblets which the armor of the mercenary half-tracks had shrugged off. The Hashemites' personal weapons were piled ostentatiously at a slight distance from each gathering.
That wasn't necessarily going to help. Sincanmo irregulars were doing the heavy work of interning prisoners: searching, sorting, and gathering them into coffles of two hundred or so to be transferred to holding camps. The Slammers overseeing the process wouldn't permit the Sincanmos to shoot their indig prisoners here in public.
What happened when converted cargo vans filled with Hashemites were driven ten kays or so into the desert was anybody's guess.
A gun jeep whined its way up the south face of the Escarpment. Victorious troops and prisoners watched the vehicle's progress. The jeep's driver regarded them only as obstacles, and the passenger seated on the other side of the pintle-mounted tribarrel paid them no attention at all.
Des Grieux rolled bits of ivory between the ball of his thumb and his left hand. He turned his face toward the north, where H271 sat in the far distance with a combat car and a heavy-lift vehicle from the Slammers' maintenance battalion in attendance.
Des Grieux wasn't interested in the attempts to dig out H271, but he was unwilling to watch the jeep. Funny about it being a jeep. He'd expected at least a combat car; and Joachim Steuben present, not some faceless driver who wasn't even one of the White Mice.
The slope looked much steeper going down than it had when Des Grieux was on the plain two kilometers away. By contrast, the tilted strata on the south side of the Escarpment rose very gently, though they were as sure a barrier as the north edge that provided the name Knifeblade. There wasn't any way down from the Escarpment, except through the Notch.
And no way down at all, when Slick Des Grieux waited below with a tank and the unshakeable determination to kill everyone who faced him.
They'd rigged a bucket on the maintenance vehicle's shearlegs. A dozen Hashemite prisoners shoveled rock from H271's back deck into the bucket.
Des Grieux snorted. He could have broken the tank free in minutes. If he'd had to,if there were someplace he needed to be with a tank.While there was fighting going on, nothing mattered except a weapon; and the Regiment's panzers were the greatest weapons that had ever existed.
When the fighting was over, nothing mattered at all.
The sun had risen high enough to punish, and the tank destroyer's armor was a massive heat sink, retaining some of the fury which had devoured the vehicle. Nothing remained within the iridium shell except the fusion bottle,which hadn't ruptured when the tank destroyer's ammunition gang-fired.
The jeep was getting close. The angry sound of its fans changed every time the light vehicle had to jump or circle a large piece of debris. H271's main gun had seen to it that vehicle parts covered much of the surface of the Notch.
The heavy-lift vehicle had arrived at dawn with several hundred Sincanmos and a platoon of F Company combat cars—not Kuykendall; Des Grieux didn't know where Kuykendall had gone. Des Grieux turned H271 over to the maintenance crew and, for want of anything better to do, wandered into the gully where the blocking force had waited.
A 4x4 with two bombardment rockets in their launching cage was still parked beside H271's initial location. The Sincanmo crew sprawled nearby, riddled by shrapnel too fine to be visible under normal lighting. One of them lay across a lute with a hemispherical sound chamber.
Des Grieux lifted the driver out of his seat and laid him on the ground with the blood-speckled side of his face down. The truck was operable. Des Grieux drove it up the steep slope to the Notch, shifting to compound low every time he had to skirt another burned-out vehicle or windrow of bodies.
Troopers in the combat cars watched the tanker, but they didn't interfere.
The gun jeep stopped. Its fans whirred at a deepening note as they lost power. Des Grieux heard boots hit the soil. He turned, but Colonel Hammer had already gripped a handrail to haul himself up onto the tank destroyer.
"Feeling proud of yourself, Des Grieux?" the colonel asked grimly.
Hammer wore a cap instead of a commo helmet. There was a line of Spray Seal across his forehead, just above the pepper-and-salt eyebrows, where a helmet would have cut him if it were struck hard. His eyes were bloodshot and very cold.
"Not particularly," Des Grieux said. He wasn't feeling anything at all.
The driver was just a driver, a Charlie Company infantryman. He'd unclipped his carbine from the dash and pointed it vaguely in Des Grieux's direction, but he wasn't one of Joachim Steuben's field police.
Des Grieux had left his grenade launcher behind in H271. He was unarmed.
"They're trying to find Colonel Broglie,"Hammer said."The Legion command council is, and I am."
"Then you're in luck," Des Grieux said.
He opened his left hand. Bones had burned to lime in the glare of the tank destroyer's ammunition, but teeth were more refractory. Des Grieux had found three of them when he sifted the ashes within the tank destroyer's hull through his fingers.
Hammer pursed his lips and stared at the tanker."You're sure?" he said.Then, "Yeah, you would be."
"Nobody else was that good, Colonel," Des Grieux said softly. His eyes were focused somewhere out beyond the moons' orbits.
Hammer refused to look down into Des Grieux's palm after the first brief glance. "You're out of here, you know," he snapped. "Out of the Slammers for good, and off-planet fast if you know what's good for you. I told Joachim I'd handle this my own way, but that's not the kind of instruction you can count on him obeying."
"Right," Des Grieux said without emotion. He closed his hand again and resumed rubbing the teeth against his palm. "I'll do that."
"I ought to let Joachim finish you, you know?" Hammer said. There was an edge in his voice, but also wonder at the tanker's flat affect."You're too dangerous to leave alive, but I guess I owe something to a twelve-year veteran."
"I won't be joining another outfit, Colonel,"Des Grieux said; a statement,not a plea for the mercy Hammer had already granted. "Not much point in it now."
Alois Hammer touched his tongue to his lips in order to have time to process what he had just heard. "You know, Des Grieux?" he said mildly. "I really don't know why I don't have you shot."
Des Grieux looked directly at his commanding officer again. "Because we're the same, Colonel," he said. "You and me. Because there's nothing but war for either of us."
Hammer's face went white,then flushed except for the pink splotch of Spray Seal on his forehead. "You're a bloody fool, Des Grieux," he rasped, "and a bloody liar. I wanted to end this—" he gestured at the blackened wreckage of vehicles staggering all the way to the bottom of the slope "—by a quiet capitulation, not a bloodbath. Not like this!"
"You've got your way, Colonel," Des Grieux said. "I've got mine. Had mine. But it's all the same in the end."
He smiled, but there was only the memory of emotion behind his straight, yellowed teeth. "You haven't learned that yet. Have fun. Because when it's over, there isn't anything left."
Colonel Hammer pressed the Spray Seal with the back of his left hand,not quite rubbing it. He slid from the iridium carapace of the tank destroyer. "Come on, Des Grieux," he said. "I'll see that
you get aboard a ship alive. You'll have your pension and discharge bonus."
Des Grieux followed the shorter man. The tanker walked stiffly, as though he were an infant still learning gross motor skills.
At the jeep, Hammer turned and said savagely,"AndVia! Will you please throw those curst teeth away?"
Des Grieux slipped the calcined fragments into his breast pocket. "I need them," he said. "To remind me that I was the best.
"Some day," he added, "you'll know just what I mean, Colonel."
His smile was terrible to behold.
Combat Cars in the Desert
THE DAY OF GLORY
The locals had turned down the music from the sound truck while the bigwigs from the capital were talking to the crowd, but it was still playing. "I heard that song before," Trooper Lahti said, frowning. "But that was back on Icky Nose, two years ago. Three!"
"Right,"said Platoon Sergeant Buntz,wishing he'd checked the fit of his dress uniform before he put it on for this bloody rally. He'd gained weight during the month he'd been on medical profile for tearing up his leg. "You hear it a lot at this kinda deal. La Marseillaise. It goes all the way back to Earth."
This time it was just brass instruments, but Buntz' memory could fill in, "Arise, children of the fatherland! The day of glory has arrived . . . ." Though some places they changed the words a bit.
"Look at the heroes you'll be joining!" boomed the amplified voice of the blonde woman gesturing from the waist-high platform. She stood with other folks in uniform or dress clothes on what Buntz guessed in peacetime was the judges' stand at the county fair. "When you come back in a few months after crushing the rebels, the cowards who stayed behind will look at you the way you look at our allies, Hammer's Slammers!"
