by David Drake
The dispositions made sense, though. The action was likely to be hottest right outside the camp. Sparrow's reflexes made him the best choice to handle it. Wager wasn't familiar with his new hardware, but he was a combat trooper who could be trusted to keep their exposed flank clear.
The middle slot of the sweep was a tank cobbled into action by the maintenance detachment. The lord only knew what they'd be good for.
The Red team's six combat cars had formed across the detachment area and were starting toward the bubbling inferno of the Yokel positions. As they did so, Sparrow's Deathdealer eeled over the berm with only two puffs where the skirts dug in and kicked dirt high enough for it to go through the fan intakes.
Even the blower from maintenance had made the jump without a serious problem. While Wager and his truckdriver—
Holman had the fans howling on full power.A lurching clack vibrated through Charlie Three-zero's fabric as the driver rammed all eight pitch controls to maximum lift.
"Via!" Wager screamed over the intercom. "Give her a little for—"
Their hundred and seventy tonnes rose—bouncing on thrust instead of using the cushion effect of air under pressure in the plenum chamber. The tank teetered like a plate spinning on a broomhandle.
"—ward!"
The stern curtsied as Holman finally tilted two of her fan nacelles to direct their thrust to the rear. Charlie Three-zero slid forward, then hopped up as the skirts gouged the top of the berm like a cookie cutter in soft dough.
The tank sailed off the front of the berm and dropped like the iridium anvil she was as soon as her skirts lost their temporary ground effect.They hit squarely, ramming the steel skirts ten centimeters into the ground and racking Wager front and back against the coaming.
Somehow Holman managed to keep a semblance of control. The tank's bow slewed right—and Charlie Three-zero roared off counterclockwise, in pursuit of the other two members of their platoon.
They continued to bounce every ten meters or so. Their skirts grounded, rose till there was more than a hand's breadth clearance beneath the skirts—and spilled pressure in another hop.
But they were back in the war.
The reason Warrant Leader Ortnahme fired into the rockpile 300 meters to their front was that the overgrown mound—a dump for plowed-up stones before the government took over the area from Camp Progress—was a likely hiding place for Consie troops.
The reason Ortnahme fired the main gun instead of the tribarrel was that he'd never had an excuse to do that before in his twenty-three years as a soldier.
His screens damped automatically to keep from being overloaded, but the blue flash was reflected onto Ortnahme through the open hatch as Herman's Whore bucked with the recoil.
The rockpile blew apart in gobbets of molten quartz and blazing vegetation. There was no sign of Consies.
Via! but it felt good!
Simkins was keeping them a hundred meters outside Sparrow's Deathdealer, the way the acting platoon leader had ordered. Simkins had moved his share of tanks in the course of maintenance work, but before now, he'd never had to drive one as fast as twenty kph. He was doing a good job, but—
"Simkins!" he ordered. " Don't jink around them bloody bushes like they was the landscaping at headquarters. Just drive over 'em!"
But the kid was doing fine. The Lord only knew where the third tank with its newbie crew had gotten to.
The air above the Yokels' high berm crackled with hints of cyan, the way invisible lightning backlighted clouds during a summer storm. The Red team was finding somebody to mix with.
The tanks might as well be practicing night driving techniques. The Consies that'd hit this end of the encampment must all be dead or runnin' as fast as they could to save their miserable—
WHANG!
Herman's Whore slewed to the right and grounded, then began staggering crabwise with the left side of her skirts scraping. They'd been hit, hard, but there wasn't any trace of the shot in the screens whose sensors should've reported the event even if they hadn't warned of it.
"Sir, I've lost plenum chamber pressure," Simkins said, a triumph of the obvious that even a bloody civilian with a bloody rutabaga for a brain wouldn't've bothered to—
"Did the access door blow open again?" Simkins continued.
Blood and Martyrs. Of course.
"Lord, kid, I'm sorry," the warrant leader blurted, apologizing for what he hadn't said—and for the fact he hadn't been thinking. "Put 'er down and I'll take care of it."
The tank settled. Ortnahme raised his seat to the top of its run, then prepared to step out through the hatch. Down in the hull, the sensor console pinged a warning.
Ortnahme couldn't see the screens from this angle, and he didn't have a commo helmet to relay the data to him in the cupola.
He didn't need the electronic sensors. His eyes and the sky-glow from the ongoing destruction of Camp Progress showed him a Consie running toward Herman's Whore with an armload of something that wasn't roses.
"Simkins!" the warrant leader screamed, hoping his voice would carry either to the driver or the intercom pickup in the hull. "Go! Go! Go!"
The muscles beneath Ortnahme's fat bunched as he swung the tribarrel. The gun tracked as smoothly as wet ice, but it was glacially slow as well.
Ortnahme's thumbs clamped on the trigger, lashing out a stream of bolts. The Consie flopped down.None of the bolts had cracked through the air closer than a meter above his head. The bastard was too close for the cupola gun to hit him.
Which the Consie figured out just as quick as Ortnahme did. The guerrilla picked himself up and shambled toward the tank again, holding out what was certainly a magnetic mine. It would detonate a few seconds after he clamped it onto the Whore's steel skirts.
Ortnahme fired again. His bolts lit the camouflaged lid of the hole in which the Consie had hidden—twenty meters from where the target was now.
There was a simple answer to this sort of problem: the close-in defense system built into each of Hammer's combat vehicles, ready to blast steel shot into oncoming missiles or men who'd gotten too close to be handled by the tribarrel.
Trouble was, Ortnahme was a very competent and experienced mechanic. He'd dismantled the defense system before he started the rebuild. If he hadn't, he'd've risked killing himself and fifty other people if his pliers slipped and sent a current surge down the wrong circuit. He'd been going to reconnect the system in the morning, when the work was done . . . .
The intake roar of the fans resumed three Consie steps before the tank began moving, but finally Herman's Whore staggered forward again. They were a great pair for a race—the tank crippled, and the man bent over by the weight of the mine he carried. A novelty act for clowns . . . .
Down in the hull the commo was babbling something—orders, warnings; Simkins wondering what the cop his superior thought he was up to. Ortnahme didn't dare leave the cupola to answer—or call for help. As soon as they drew enough ahead of the Consie, he'd blast the bastard and then fix the access plate so they could move properly again.
The trouble with that plan was that Herman's Whore had started circling. The tank moved about as fast as the man on foot, but the Consie was cutting the chord of the arc and in a few seconds—
The warrant leader lifted himself from the hatch and let himself slide down the smooth curve of the turret. He fumbled in his cargo pocket. Going in this direction, his age and fat didn't matter . . . .
The Consie staggered forward, bent over his charge, in a triumph of will over exhaustion.He must have been blowing like a whale,but the sound wasn't audible over the suction of the tank's eight fans.
Ortnahme launched himself from the tank and crushed the guerrilla to the ground. Bones snapped, caught between the warrant leader's mass and the mine casing.
Ortnahme didn't take any chances.He hammered until the grip of the multitool thumped slimy dirt instead of the Consie's head.
Herman's Whore was circling back. Ortnahme tried to stand
, then sat heavily. He waved his left arm.
By the time Simkins pulled up beside him, the warrant leader would be ready to get up and weld that cursed access cover in place.
Until then, he'd figured he'd just sit and catch his breath.
Terrain is one thing on a contour map, where a dip of three meters in a hundred is dead flat, and another thing on the ground, where it's enough difference to hide an object the size of a tank.
Which is just what it seemed to have done to call sign Tootsie Four, the maintenance section's vehicle, so far as Hans Wager could tell from his own cupola.
It wasn't Holman's fault.
What with the late start, they'd had to drive like a bat outa Hell to get into position. It would've taken the Lord and all his martyrs to save 'em if they'd stumbled into the Consies while Wager was barely able to hang on, much less shoot.
But since they caught up, she'd been keeping Charlie Three-zero about 300 meters outboard of Sparrow's blower, just like orders. Only thing was, there was supposed to be another tank between them.
Sparrow was covering a double arc, with his tribarrel swung left and his main gun offset to the right. It was the main gun that fired, kicking a scoop load of fused earth skyward in fiery sparkles.
Wager didn't see what the platoon leader'd shot at, but three figures jumped to their feet near the point of impact. Wager tumbled them to the ground again as blazing corpses with a burst from his tribarrel.
They were doing okay. Wager was doing okay. His facial muscles were locked in a tight rictus, and he took his fingers momentarily from the tribarrel's grips to massage the numbness out of them.
His driver was doing all right too,now that it was just a matter of moving ahead at moderate speed. Deathdealer was travelling at about twenty kph, and Holman had been holding Charlie Three-zero to the same speed since they caught up with the rest of the platoon.
Because Sparrow's tank was on the inside of the pivot, it was slowly drawing ahead of them. Wager felt the hull vibration change as Holman fiddled with her
power and tilt controls, but the tank's inertia took much longer to adjust.
The fan note built into a shriek.
Wager scanned the night, wishing he had the eyes of two wing gunners to help the way he would on a combat car. Having the main gun was all well and good, but he figured the firepower of another pair of tribarrels—
Via! What did Holman think they were doing? Running a race?
—would more than make up for a twenty centimeter punch in this kind of war.
"Holman!" he snarled into his intercom. "Slow us bloody—"
Charlie Three-zero's mass had absorbed all the power inputs and was now rocketing through the night at twice her previous speed. Way too fast in the dark for anything but paved roads. Rocks clanged on the skirts as the tank crested a knoll—
And plunged down the other side, almost as steep as the berm they'd crashed off minutes before.
"— down! "
The ravine was full of Consies,jumping aside or flattening as Charlie Three-zero hurtled toward them under no more control than a 170-tonne roundshot.
Wager's bruised body knew exactly how the impact would feel, but reflex kept that from affecting anything he did. Charlie Three-zero hit, bounced. Wager's left hand flipped the protective cage away from the control on the tribarrel's mount—the same place it was on a combat car. He rammed the miniature joystick straight in, firing the entire close-in defense system in a single white flash from the top of the skirts.
Guerrillas flew apart in shreds.
The door of a bunker gaped open in the opposite side of the gully. Holman had been trying to raise Charlie Three-zero's bow to slow their forward motion. As the tank hopped forward, the bow did lift enough for the skirts to scrape the rise instead of slamming into it the way they had when trying to get out of Camp Progress.
"Bring us—" Wager ordered as he rotated his tribarrel to bear on the Consies behind them, some squirming in their death throes but others rising again to point weapons.
—around, he meant to say, but Holman reversed her fans and sucked the tank squarely down where she'd just hit. The unexpected impact rammed Wager's spine against his seat. His tribarrel was aimed upward.
"You dickheaded fool!" he screamed over the intercom as he lowered his weapon and the tank started to lift in place.
A Consie threw a grenade. It bounced off the hull and exploded in the air. Wager felt the hot flick of shrapnel beneath the cheekpiece of his helmet, but the grenadier himself flopped backward with most of his chest gone.
The tribarrel splattered the air, then walked its long burst across several of the guerrillas still moving.
Holman slammed the tank down again. They hit with a crunch, followed by a second shudder as the ground collapsed over the Consie bunker.
Holman rocked her fans. Dust and quartz pebbles flew back, covering the corpses in the gully like dirt spurned by a cat over its dung.
"Sergeant?" called the voice in Wager's intercom. "Sergeant? Want to make another pass?"
Wager was trying to catch his breath. "Negative, Holman," he managed to say. "Just bring us level with Deathdealer again.
"Holman," he added a moment later. "You did just fine."
Their position in line was second from the left, but Dick Suilin glimpsed the remaining combat car on his side only at intersections—and that rarely.
Its powerguns lit the parallel street in a constant reminder of its lethal presence. A burst quivering like a single blue flash showed Suilin a hump on what should have been the straight slope of a barracks roofline across the next intersection.
The reporter fired; the empty clip ejected with the choonk of his weapon.
Before Suilin's grenade had completed its low-velocity arc toward its target, the figure fired back with a stream of tracers that looked the size of bright orange baseballs. They sailed lazily out of the flickering muzzle flashes, then snapped past the reporter with dazzling speed.
The splinter shield above Suilin rang,and impacts sparkled on the iridium side armor. How could the Consie have missed—the reporter thought.
A tremendous blow knocked him backward.
His grenade detonated on the end wall of the building, a meter below the machine-gunner. Cooter, screaming curses or orders to their driver, squeezed his trigger button. Cyan fire ripped from both the weapon he gripped and the left wing gun, slaved to follow the point gun's controls.
Suilin didn't hurt, but he couldn't feel anything between his neck and his waistband.He tried to say,"I'm all right,"to reassure himself,but he found there was no air in his lungs and he couldn't breathe. There were glowing dimples in the splinter shield where the machine-gun had hammered it.
I'm dead , he thought. It should have bothered him more than it did.
His grenade had missed the Consie. Tracers sprayed harmlessly skyward as the fellow jumped back while keeping a death grip on his trigger.
Cooter's powerguns lit and shattered roof tiles as they sawed toward, then through, their target. The machine-gun's ammunition drum blew up with a yellow flash.
Suilin's hands hurt like hell. "Via!" he screamed. A flash of flaming agony wrapped his chest and released it as suddenly, leaving behind an ache many times worse than what he remembered from the time he broke his arm.
Both the mercenaries,faceless in their visored helmets,were bending over him. "Where you hit?" Cooter demanded as Otski lifted the reporter's right forearm and said, "Via! But it's just fragments, it's okay."
Cooter's big index finger prodded Suilin in the chest. "Yeah," he said. "No penetration." He tugged at something.
Suilin felt a cold, prickling sensation over his left nipple. "What 've you—" he said, but the Slammers had turned back to their guns.
The car must have paused while they checked him. Now it surged forward faster than before.
They swept by the barracks. Cooter's long double burst had turned it into a torch.
Suilin lay on h
is back. He looked down at himself. There was a charred circle as big as a soup dish in the fabric cover of his clamshell. In the center of that was a thumb-sized crater in the armor itself.
The pockmark in the ceramic plate had a metallic sheen, and there were highlights of glittering metal in the blood covering the backs of both Suilin's hands. When the bullet hit the clamshell armor and broke up, fragments splashed forward and clawed the reporter's bare hands.
He rose, pushing himself up with his arms. For a moment, his hands burned and there were ice picks in his neck and lower back.
Coolness spreading outward from his chest washed over the pain. There were colored tabs on the breast of the armor. Suilin had thought they were decorations, but the one Cooter had pulled was obviously releasing medication into Suilin's system.
Thank the Lord for that.
He picked up the grenade launcher and reloaded it. Shock, drugs, and the tiny bits of metal that winked when he moved his fingers made him clumsy, but he did it.
Like working against a deadline. Your editor didn't care why you hadn't filed on time; so you worked when you were hung over, when you had flu . . . .
When your father died before you had had time to clear things up with him. When your wife left you because you didn't care about her, only your cursed stories.
Dick Suilin raised his eyes and his ready weapon just as both the combat car and the immediate universe opened up with a breathtaking inferno of fire.
They'd reached the Headquarters of Camp Progress.
It was a three-story building at the southern end of the encampment. Nothing separated the pagoda-roofed structure from the berm except the camp's peripheral road. The berm here, like the hundred-meter square in front of the building, had been sodded and was manicured daily.
There were bodies sprawled on the grass. Suilin didn't have time to look at them,because lights flared in several ground-floor windows as Consies launched buzzbombs and ducked back.
The grenade launcher's dull report was lost in the blurred crackling of the three tribarrels, but the reporter knew he'd gotten his round away as fast as the veterans had theirs.
