by David Drake
Task Force Ranson swung raggedly at an angle to the left. Each armored vehicle followed a separate track, though the general line was on or parallel to the paved highway.
Suilin had ridden the la Reole/Bunduran road a hundred times in the past. It was easy to follow the road's course now with his eyes, because of the fires lit by powerguns all along its course. The truckers' cafe and fuel point at the top of the ridge, three kilometers from la Reole, was a crown of flames.
Flamethrower lurched over a ditch and sparked her skirts on the gravel shoulder. The driver straightened his big vehicle with port,then starboard sidethrusts. The motion rocked Suilin brutally but seemed to be expected by the veterans with him in the fighting compartment.
Gale shot over the stern, and Cooter's weapon coughed bursts so short it appeared to be clearing its triple throats.
A dozen civilians huddled in the ditch on Suilin's side of the car. All but one of them were pressed face-down in the soft earth. Their hands were clasped over the back of their heads as if to force themselves still lower.
The exception lay on her back. A powergun had decapitated her.
Suilin tried to scream, but his throat was too rigid to pass the sound.
" Shot! " crackled his headphones, but there was shooting everywhere. As armored vehicles disappeared over the brow of the ridge, all their weapons ripped the horizon in volleys.Cooter had explained that the Consie siegeworks were just across a shallow valley from where Task Force Ranson would regain the road.
A Consie wearing crossed bandoliers rolled upright in the ditch fifty meters ahead of Flamethrower. He aimed directly at Suilin.
Cooter saw the guerrilla, but the big lieutenant had been raking the right side of the road while Gale covered the rear. He shouted something and tried to turn his tribarrel.
Suilin's holographic sights were a perfect image of the Consie, whose face fixed in a snarl of hate and terror. The guerrilla's cheeks bunched and made his moustache twitch, as though he were trying to will his rifle to fire without pulling the trigger.
The muzzle flashes were red as heart's blood.
Flamethrower jolted over debris in the road. A bicycle flew skyward; the air was sharp with quicklime as bags of cement ruptured. Three bullets rang on the armor in front of Dick Suilin and ricocheted away in a blaze of sparks.
As the car settled again, Suilin's tribarrel lashed out: one bolt short, one bolt long . . . and between them, the guerrilla's hair and the tips of his moustache ablaze to frame what had been his face.
Flamethrower was past.
The sky overhead began to scream.
Hans Wager was strapped into his seat. He hated it, but at least the suspended cradle preserved him from the worst of the shocks.
The tank grounded on the near ditch; sparked its skirts across the pavement in red brilliance; and grounded sideways on the ramp of the drainage ditch across the road. Holman hadn't quite changed their direction of travel, though she'd pointed them the right way.
The stern skirts dragged a long gouge up the road as Holman accelerated with the bow high. The main screen showed a dazzling roostertail of sparks behind the nameless tank. Wager didn't care. He had too much on his own plate.
Deathdealer fired its main gun.
That was all right for Birdie Sparrow,an experienced tanker and riding the lead vehicle. Wager'd set the mechanical lock-out on his own 20cm weapon.
He didn't trust the electronic selector when there were this many friendly vehicles around. A bolt from the main gun would make as little of a combat car as it would of a church choir.
Hans Wager was determined that he'd make this cursed, bloody tank work for him. Nothing would ever convince him that a tank's sensors were really better than three sets of human eyeballs, sweeping the risks of a battlefield—
But there weren't three sets of eyeballs, just his own, so he had to make the hardware work.
The threat sensor flashed a Priority One carat onto the main screen. Wager couldn't tell what the target was in the laterally compressed panorama.The cupola gun, slaved to the threat sensor the way Albers explained it could be, was already rotating left. It swung the magnified gunnery display of Screen Two with it.
Two bodies and one body still living, a Consie huddling beside what had been a pair of civilian females. The guerrilla's rifle was slung across his back, forgotten in his panic. He was too close for the tribarrel to bear.
The tank's skirts swept a bicycle and sling-load of bricks from the road,flinging the debris ahead and aside of its hundred-and-seventy-tonne rush. Chips and brickdust pelted the Consie. He leaped up.
His chest exploded in cyan light and a cloud of steam which somersaulted the corpse a dozen meters from the ditch.
There'd been a major guardpost at the truckstop on the hill, but Deathdealer and the crossfire of the two leading combat cars had already ended any threat from that quarter. Fuel roared in an orange jet from the courtyard pump. The roof of the cafe had buried whoever was still inside when tribarrels cut the walls away.
" Shot ,"said his commohelmet.The voice of whoever was acting as fire control was warning that friendly artillery would impact in five seconds.
Three bodies sprawled: a step, another step, and a final step, from the front door of the cafe.
Deathdealer dropped over the hill.Its main gun lighted the far valley.The nameless tank topped the ridgeline with a roar.Their speed and Holman's inexperience lofted the vehicle thirty centimeters into the air at the crest.
Hans Wager, bracing himself in his seat, toggled the main gun off safe.
The low ridge a kilometer away paralleled the Santine River and embraced the western half of la Reole. The Consies had used the road to bring up their heavy weapons and building materials for substantial bunkers.
Three shells, dull red with the friction of their passage through air, streaked down onto the enemy concentration. The earth quivered.
The initial results were unremarkable.A knoll shifted,settled; a hundred meters south of that knoll, dust rose in a spout like that of a whale venting its lungs; a further hundred meters south, black smoke puffed—not from the hilltop but well beneath the crest where raw dirt marked the mouth of a recently excavated tunnel.
The knoll erupted, then settled again into a cavity that could have held a tank.
Blue light fused and ignited dust as a store of powergun ammunition devoured itself and the weapon it was meant to feed.
The tunnel belched orange flame; sucked in its breath and blazed forth again. The second time, the edge of the shock wave propelled a human figure.
Three more shells streaked the sky. One of them hit well to the south. The others were aimed at targets across the estuary.
Deathdealer raked the far ridge with both main gun and tribarrel. The combat cars shot up sandbag-covered supply dumps on both sides of the road. Most of the armed Consies would be in bunkers, but any figure seen now was fair game for as many guns as could bear on it.
Long before they topped the ridge, Wager had known what his own target would be.
A mortar firing at night illuminates a thirty-meter hemisphere with its skyward flash. There'd been such a flash, needlessly highlighted by the tank's electronics, before the Consies realized they were being taken in the rear.
Wager hated mortars. Their shells angled in too high to be dealt with by the close-in defense system, and a direct hit would probably penetrate the splinter shield of a combat car.
Now a mortar and its crew were in the center of Wager's gunnery screen.
Normally the greatest danger to a mortar was counterfire from another mortar. A shell's slow, arching trajectory was easy for radar to track, and the most rudimentary of ballistic computers could figure a reciprocal. The guerrillas here had been smart: they'd mounted their tube on the back of a cyclo, a three-wheeled mini-truck of the sort the civilians on Prosperity used for everything from taxis to hauling farm produce into town.
At the bottom of the slope, work crews had c
leared a path connecting several firing positions. The cyclo had just trundled into a revetment. Shell cartons scattered outside the position 200 meters up the track showed where the crew had fired the previous half-dozen rounds.
The Consie mortarmen were turned to stare with amazement at the commotion behind them. The sparkling impact as Wager's tank landed, half on the pavement and half off, scattered the crew a few paces, but the tanker's shot was in time . . . .
The center of the cyclo vanished: Wager had used his main gun. The 20cm bolt was so intense that the explosion of cases of mortar ammo followed as an anticlimax.
Several of the mortar shells were filled with white phosphorous. None of the crewmen had run far enough to be clear of the smoky tendrils whose hearts would blaze all the way through the victims on which they landed.
The nameless tank swept past flaming heaps of food, bedding, and material. Ammunition burned in harmless corkscrews through the sky and an occasional ping on the armor.
More shells from Camp Progress howled overhead and detonated, six of them almost simultaneously this time. A curtain of white fire cloaked the siege lines as hundreds of anti-personnel bomblets combed crevices to lick Consie blood.
The leading vehicles, Deathdealer and two combat cars,had slowed deliberately to let the salvo land. Holman matched her tank's attitude to the slope and drew ahead with the inertia she'd built on the downgrade. She spun the nameless tank with unexpected delicacy around the shell crater gaping at the hillcrest.
The artillery had flung dozens of bodies and bodyparts out of eviscerated bunkers. Holman slowed to a crawl so that Wager could pick his targets on the reverse slope.
Men in black uniforms were climbing or crawling from trenches which shells had turned into abattoirs. Wager ignored them. His AI highlighted the firing slits of bunkers which the shells had spared.
Every time his pipper settled, his foot trod out another 20cm bolt.
Jets of plasma from powerguns travelled in a straight line and liberated all their energy on the first solid object they touched. Wager's bolts couldn't penetrate the earth the way armor-piercing projectiles did—but their cyan touch could shake apart hillsides in sprays of volcanic glass.
The interior of a bunker when a megajoule of plasma spurted through the opening was indescribable Hell.
Deathdealer pulled over the crest a hundred meters to the left of Wager's tank. Its main gun spat bolts at the pace of a woodpecker hammering. Sparrow's experience permitted him to fire in a smooth motion, again and again, without any pause greater than that of his turret rotating to bear on the next target.
La Reole sprawled half a kilometer away. The nearest buildings had been shattered by shellfire and the first flush of hand-to-hand fighting before the Consies retreated to lick their wounds and blast the Yokel garrison into submission.
Smoke lifted from a dozen points within the town. A saffron hint of dawn gaped on hundreds of holes in the tile roofs.
An amphibious landing vehicle pulled down from the protection of a courtyard in the town and opened fire with its machine gun. Consies emerging from a shell-ravaged bunker stumbled and fell. Wager remembered the Yokels had a Marine Training Unit here at la Reole . . . .
The tank's turret was thick with fumes.Wager breathed through filters,though he didn't remember them clamping down across his mouth and nose.
He stamped on the firing pedal. The gun wheezed instead of firing: he'd shot off the entire thirty-round basic load, and the tank had to cycle more main gun ammunition from storage deep in the hull.
There weren't any worthwhile targets anyway. Every slit that might have concealed a cannon or powergun was a glowing crater. Streaks of turf smoldered where bolts had ripped them.
Deathdealer was advancing again. The muzzle of its main gun glowed white.
"Sarge, should I . . .?" Wager's intercom demanded.
"Go, go!" he snapped back. "And Via! be careful with the bridge!"
He hoped the Yokels would have sense enough not to shoot at them. For the moment, that seemed like the worst danger.
Three more shells from Camp Progress screamed overhead.
The howitzer still rocked with the sky-tearing echoes of its twelfth round. Chief Lavel was laughing. Only when he turned and met Craige's horrified eyes did he realize that he wasn't alone in the crew compartment.
Craige massaged her ears with her palms."Ah,"she said."The guys wanta know, you know . . . are we dismissed now?"
Drives moaned as the gun mechanism filled its ready-use drum with the remaining shells in storage. Lavel put his palm against an armored side-panel to feel every nuance of the movement. It was like being reborn . . . .
"Not yet," he said. "When the last salvo's away, we'll police up the area."
The crew compartment was spacious enough to hold a full eight-man crew under armor when the howitzer was changing position. The 200mm shells and their rocket charges were heavy, and no amount of hardware could obviate the need for humans during some stages of the preparation process.
The actual firing sequence required only one man to pick the targets. The howitzer's AI and electromechanical drives did the rest.
It didn't even require a whole man. A ruin like Chief Lavel was sufficient.
He glanced at the panoramic screen mounted on the slanted armor above the gun mantlet. A light breeze had dissipated much of the smoke from the sustainer charges. They burned out in the first seven seconds after ignition. High in the heavens, streaking south were dense white trails where the ramjet boosters cut in.
The beryllium fuel was energetic—but its residues were intensely hygroscopic and left clouds thick enough to be tracked on radar.
The residues were lethal at extreme dilution as well . . . but the boosters ignited at high altitude, and it wasn't Alois Hammer's planet.
Besides, Via! this was a war, wasn't it? There was always collateral damage in war.
"Ah . . ." said Craige. "Sir? When are you going to shoot off the rest?"
"When I get the bloody update from the task force, aren't I?" Lavel snarled. He patted the console. "It's thirty-three seconds to splash from here. We don't fire the last five rounds till we see what still needs to be hit and where the bloody friendlies are!"
The console in front of Lavel began to click and whine. He had a voice link to the task force, but the electronically sensed information, passed from one AI to another, was faster by an order of magnitude.
It was also less subject to distortion, even when, as now, it had to be transmitted over VHF radio.
Besides, the crews of Task Force Ranson had plenty to occupy them without spotting for the guns.
The new data swept all the previous highlights from the targeting overlay. Green splotches marked changes in relief caused by shellbursts and secondary explosions. Denser pinheads of the same hue showed where bolts from the 20cm powerguns of tanks had glazed the terrain, sealing firing positions whether or not the bunkers themselves were destroyed.
No worthy targets remained on the west side of the Santine.
Lavel's light pen touched a bunker on the near bank of the estuary anyway. It had been built to hold a heavy gun, though the AI was sure nothing was emplaced in it yet. That accomplished, Lavel checked the eastern arc of the siege lines.
The east side was lightly held, because most of the Consie forces across the Santine were concentrated on Kohang. The Marine Unit in la Reole could probably have broken out—but in doing so, they would have had to surrender the town and the crucial crossing point. Somebody—somebody with more brains and courage than any of the Yokels at Camp Progress—had decided to hold instead of running.
Lavel had two high-explosive shells, one target solid, and a firecracker round remaining. He chose three east-side bunkers for the HE and the solid. The solid was intended to test the air-defense system of friendly units, but its hundred and eighty kilos weren't going to do anybody it landed on any good. He set his firecracker round to detonate overhead ten seconds after the ot
hers splashed.
The console chittered, then glowed green.
Green for ready. Probably the last time Chief Lavel would ever see that message.
He sighed and slapped execute.
The door to the crew compartment was open.Craige wasn't wearing a commo helmet, but she got her hands to her ears at the chunk! of the ignition charge expelling the first round from the tube.
The seven-second ROAR-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R! of the sustainer motor shook the world.
The remaining four rounds blasted out at one-a-second intervals like beads on a rosary of thunder.Their back blasts shoved the howitzer down on its suspension and raised huge doughnuts of dust from the surrounding soil.
All done. The fire mission, and the last shred of meaning in Chief Lavel's life.
There was still a green light on the ready-use indicator.
"Booster!" Lavel snapped. "Shell status!"
"One practice ready," said the console in a feminine voice. "Zero rounds in storage."
Lavel turned, rising from his seat with a face like a skull. "You!" he said to Craige. "How many rounds did you load this last time?"
"What?" said Craige. "How . . .? Six, six like you told us. Isn't that—"
" You stupid bastards! " Lavel screamed as his hand groped with the patch to Task Force Ranson,changing it from digital to voice."Those last two shells were anti-tank rounds with seeker heads! You killed 'em all!"
All the displays of Herman's Whore pulsed red with an Emergency Authenticator Signal. A voice Ortnahme didn't recognize bellowed, "Task Force! Shoot down the friendly incoming! Tank Killer rounds! Ditch your tanks! Ditch!"
Ortnahme pushed the Air Defense selector. It was already uncaged. He'd been willing to take the chance of bumping it by accident so long as he knew it would be that many seconds quicker to activate when he might need it.
Like now.
"Simkins," he said, surprised at his own calm, "cut your fans and ditch. Soonest!"
His calm wasn't so surprising after all. There'd been emergencies before.
