by David Drake
Ned raised his eyes. A tank, streaming stripped branches and pushing a mound of loam ahead of its bow skirts, shuddered its way through a belt of flowering dogwoods a kilometer away.
Ned reached to key his helmet, remembered that the radio didn’t work, and checked the load of the 2-cm powergun that he’d ignored since Raff handed it to him. Ned was alive again, fully functional.
“Behind the building, fast!” Yazov shouted through the integral mike. “Tank coming!”‘
The firetruck fishtailed wildly. Westerbeke had failed to react quickly enough, and one of the others in the cab forced the steering wheel over against the driver’s grip.
The second 20-cm bolt clipped the nearest of the four free-standing columns across the temple facade. If Westerbeke had made the hard left turn as ordered, at least half the bolt’s energy would have centerpunched the vehicle instead of blasting a cavity in a wall of brick and climbing vines nearly a kilometer beyond the intended target.
The column, concrete beneath a marble finish, exploded violently. Head-sized fragments broke the shaft of the next pillar over and hammered the building’s front wall. Concussion and flying stone knocked down all those standing on the porch. Calcium in the concrete blazed with a fierce white light.
The pediment lifted with the initial shock. It settled back, cracked, and fell on the twitching bodies beneath. Seeing Telarians killing their own people didn’t make Ned feel better about the things he’d done; but it reminded him that this was war, and war had its own logic.
The firetruck pulled down the back of the knoll on which the temple stood—at least a temple in appearance, whatever the Doormanns were using the structure for in present reality. Westerbeke had slowed to sixty kilometers per hour to maneuver: the full tank of water made the vehicle top-heavy as well as sluggish.
Ned bailed off the tailboard, reflexively executing a landing fall, and rolled upright again. Heartbeats after Ned left the firetruck, Raff, Paetz, and Yazov jumped away from it also.
The vehicle continued on, accelerating slowly out of its S-curve. Westerbeke kept the temple and the knoll itself between him and the hunting tank. The truck climbed a triple terrace of flowering shrubs and disappeared for the moment through an arched gateway.
An air-cushion tank was capable of twice the firetruck’s best speed empty, and the half-track’s path cross-country was unmistakable. The tank would destroy the truck and everyone aboard it—Lissea included—if somebody didn’t stop the tank first.
That was what Ned Slade was here for. Somewhat to his surprise he found he was heading a team. He’d jumped at the side of the building, out of the tankers’ line of sight only if he stayed low. The other three mercs scrambled toward him from the rear of the temple.
Ned waved them down. He stood, presenting his powergun and screened only by the mass of the temple beside him.
The tank had covered half the intervening distance. The driver didn’t have enough field experience to handle the huge vehicle properly off-road, where the surface was less resistant than paving to highly pressurized air. He should have tilted his fan nacelles closer to vertical to keep a finger’s breadth between the ground and the lower edge of his skirts. As it was, the tank plowed a shallow trench across the carefully tended soil.
The tank wasn’t alone. Four air-cushion jeeps, similar to those the Swift carried, flanked the bigger vehicle. Each jeep mounted a tribarrel on a central pintle.
One of the gunners saw Ned and opened fire. His 2-cm bolts formed a quivering rope that smashed the side of the building like a wrecker’s ball, several meters above their intended target.
Ned shot the gunner, shot his driver, and shot the driver of the other near-side jeep. Then he ducked and ran as though he’d just lighted the fuse of a demolition charge.
Which, in a manner of speaking, he had. The tank turret rotated as the two jeeps described complementary arcs and collided in a spray of plastic and bodies. The gunner of the second vehicle, the only crewman Ned hadn’t killed, landed like a sack of flour thirty meters from the wreck.
The tank fired. Tribarrel bolts had punched holes in the temple wall, even though the weapon was firing at a slant. The charge of the 20-cm main gun blew the whole side of the building in. Because the concrete had no resilience, the enormous heat-shock shattered it. Refractory materials sublimed instantly to gas. The concussion threw Ned flat and sprayed him with gravel-sized bits of wall.
Either the tank gunner was uncertain about what lurked in the eruption of dust and blazing lime, or he was rapt in a sudden orgy of destruction. The tank fired twice more into the temple, blasting inner partition walls and the furnishings into self-immolating fireballs. Trusses slipped because their support pillars were broken. The main roof tumbled in as the porch had done moments before. A jet of flame-shot smoke spurted from the wreckage.
Ned crawled blindly on his hands and knees, wheezing and trying to blink away the grit covering his eyeballs. His damaged helmet was gone, and the nose filters probably wouldn’t have worked anyway.
Hands grabbed and held him as other hands expertly tied a moistened kerchief across his nose and mouth. “I had to get us better cover,” Ned gasped when he could speak.
Raff held him; Yazov had provided the field-expedient filter. The dust cloud spread as it settled onto the rubble, covering an increasing area with its white pall. “Paetz,” Ned ordered, “take out the jeeps. The rest of you aim low, punch holes in the skirts. It can’t move if the plenum chamber can’t hold air.”
He clambered onto a slab of concrete, looking for a firing position in the shifting wreckage. “Come on, out of sight! And don’t shoot at the tank till I give the signal—they’ll pull off if they figure what we’re doing. Come on!”
Josie Paetz ran out at an angle from the collapsed building. A tribarrel chased the motion. Suspended dust flashed and scattered the concentrated packets of plasma well above the mercenary.
Paetz chose his point, ducked, and then rose again, firing when the two maneuvering jeeps crossed in line with him, three hundred meters away. Both vehicles spun out of control.
The jeep crews were in body armor. The burst of submachine-gun fire—it was only eight or nine rounds all told—wasn’t enough to guarantee lethality with hits on armored torsos, so Josie aimed at faceshields. Although the haze of dust combed the bolts and reduced their effect, all four of the targets were dead before the careening vehicles flung them out.
Paetz ran back, hurling himself toward cover. The tank began to swing wide of the crumpled building, keeping two hundred meters clear. The main gun fired again, shocking the ruins like a boot kicking an ash pile.
Larger fragments sprayed outward; finely divided dust whoomped up into another mushroom. Ned fell sideways. Broken concrete slid, pinning his right boot. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see.
He flipped the sling over his head so his weapon hung crosswise on his chest, clearing both hands to tug at the weight holding his foot. The individual chunks were small enough, head-sized or thereabouts; but the jagged corners caught at one another like puzzle pieces. Some of them were still joined by twists of finger-thick reinforcing rod.
The main gun fired. The impact lifted Ned free and flung him in a stunning somersault down again on the bed of rubble.
By accident or design, the tank gunner was doing precisely the correct thing. So long as he continued to fire into the wrecked building, there was no chance that the mercenaries lairing there would be able to disable the tank. Disruption from the 20-cm bolts kept the team from aiming accurately, and there was a high likelihood that the huge impacts would kill them all despite the excellent cover the concrete provided.
The tank cruised parallel with what had been the long side of the temple. The turret was rotated ninety degrees from its midline carriage position, so the fat, stubby muzzle overhung the swell of the plenum chamber.
A line of cyan flashes licked across the tank’s bow slope. Someone was shooting at the vehicle from straight ah
ead.
Ned unslung his weapon and leaned against a tilted slab to steady his aim. His vision danced cyan and its orange reciprocal, and his lungs felt as though he was trying to breathe the contents of a heated sandbag.
Herne Lordling stood in the track of the firetruck across the topmost of the three terraces. He turned his submachine gun sideways, loaded a fresh magazine, and emptied the weapon again in a single dazzling burst toward the Telarian tank.
There was absolutely nothing useful the light charges could do to the massively armored tank—
But they could draw the attention of the tank’s crew, and they did so. The turret gimballed around to bear on the new target. Ned fired, Raff and Yazov fired, Josie Paetz fired—his submachine gun wasn’t going to help any more than Herne’s but it didn’t matter; this was no time to save ammo.
The skirts surrounding the tank’s plenum chamber were steel—thick but not as resistant to powergun bolts as the iridium armor of the hull. Ned and Yazov planted five bolts each along the swelling curve, blowing divots of white blazing steel and leaving holes you could stick your fist through.
The main gun fired. Everything within a meter of where Herne Lordling stood dissolved in a flash of blue so saturated it could have cut diamond.
Raff’s first magazine of rockets had HE warheads. They left sooty black scars across the skirts, denting but not piercing the steel. The Racontid reloaded faster than Ned or Yazov. The next four rockets were tungsten penetrators that sparkled through the skirts, with at least a chance of clipping fan nacelles within the plenum chamber, besides.
The cushion of air which should have floated the tank’s height roared out through the holes in the skirts. The tank dug its port side still deeper in the soil and sodded to a halt. Its turret rotated toward the ruins again with the deliberation its great mass demanded.
Ned got up and ran, bandolier flapping and his heavy shoulder weapon held out at arm’s length like an acrobat’s balance bar. The team had disabled the tank, but they couldn’t destroy it. There was nothing to stay around for except certain death from the battering the tank gun would give the ruined temple.
The building had been eight or nine meters across, though in collapse the fragments slumped over a wider area. Paetz and Yazov dodged around the rear of the pile and threw themselves down.
Raff had chosen a firing position on the far side of the ruin to begin with. The Racontid vanished to safety in a clumsy jump. His arms and legs flailed like those of a cat flung from a high window.
Ned stepped to a heap on the fractured roof from which to push off in a similar leap. He might break something when he landed six or eight meters away, might even knock himself silly, but the turret was turning and—
The mound was powder over a grid of reinforcing rods. Ned’s right leg shot through a rectangular gap. The rods clamped him just above the knee. If they’d caught him just a little lower, inertia would have torn all the ligaments away from the joint. As it was, the pain was agonizing—and the thumb-thick rods held him as firmly as a bear trap.
Ned looked over his shoulder. The tank’s 20-cm gun steadied in perfect line with his torso. In the far distance, motion in the corner of Ned’s eye marked a second Telarian tank following the furrow dragged by the first. Cyan light so bright it was palpable engulfed the disabled tank.
The massively armored bow slope burst inward from the jet of plasma. Everything within the fighting compartment ionized instantly; ready charges for the main gun and the cupola tribarrel added their portion to the ravening destruction. The fusion bottle ruptured and the turret, a 60-tonne iridium casting, spun into the air like a flipped coin.
For a moment, Ned could neither see nor hear because of the blast. He had closed his eyes instinctively when the muzzle yawned to spew his own death, but eyelids could only filter, not bar, the cyan intensity. The shockwave of metal subliming in the energy flux made the air ring like a god’s struck anvil. It lifted the turf in a series of ripples spreading from the point of impact on the tank’s bow.
The anti-starship weapon from the gun tower on the eastern horizon fired again. The second Telarian tank exploded. This time the hull shattered. The vehicle’s dense iridium flanks flew outward, crumpling like foil in a flame.
Deke and Toll Warson had removed the lockouts from the fire-control computers, thus turning the captured gun tower into a support base for the teams within the Doormann estate. They’d taken their bloody time about it, but close only counts in horseshoes—
And hand grenades.
Ned began to laugh, humor or hysteria, he really didn’t care. “Hey!” he croaked, “somebody get me out of here! Hey, can anybody hear—”
Yazov’s boots thumped on the rubble. Raff had flung the big man halfway up the pile as if he were a sandbag. Yazov scrambled closer, detaching the cutting bar from his belt. His nephew followed him in a similar high-angle trajectory.
Yazov thumbed the bar’s trigger to test the tool. The blade hummed eagerly. “Some of them laughed when they saw all the gear I was carrying,” he remarked smugly. “ ‘He’ll need a jeep, he can’t walk with all that cop,’ they said.”
“I’m glad you’ve got it,” Ned remarked. The veteran sounded perfectly normal: too normal. He wondered just how well Yazov was doing inside.
He wondered how well he was doing inside. He’d be all right so long as he kept everything on the surface, though.
“You bet you’re glad,” Yazov said. He chose a point, set the bar against it, and cut through the mild steel rods with a shriek and a shower of red sparks. “You can’t have too much gear when it drops in the pot. You know that, don’t you, Slade?”
“You bet,” Ned agreed. When the powered blade howled through a second joint, he felt some of the pressure release. He still wasn’t free.
Josie Paetz stood beside his uncle, changing the barrel of his submachine gun. He was smiling, all the way through. His face was more terrifying than the bore of a 20-cm powergun.
Yazov made a third careful cut. “There,” he said, offering Ned his shoulder for a brace.
“I’ll lift him,” said Raff, who had climbed the ruin normally. The left side of the Racontid’s body was blackened where a nearby bolt had singed the normally golden pelt.
The stench of burned hair clung to Raff, but he seemed to be in good shape regardless. His gentle strength raised Ned like a chain hoist, vertically, with none of the torquing that could shear and tear.
Ned checked his powergun. It had a full magazine. He must have reloaded after firing the second clip into the tank’s skirts, but he couldn’t imagine when or how he’d done it. “Let’s get going,” he said aloud.
His right leg hurt like hell, but it supported him. Raff nonetheless kept an unobtrusive grip on Ned’s equipment belt as they descended the pile of debris.
“Cutting bars are great when you have to get in close, too,” Yazov said conversationally. “You ever do that, Slade?”
“Yeah,” Ned said. “Once. Lissea shot him off me.”
They headed along the path the firetruck had torn across the grounds. The swale at the base of the terraces would have been boggy, but the landscape architects had run perforated tiles under the turf to a catch basin disguised in the base of a sundial.
“Well, keep it in mind,” Yazov said. “Beats hell out of a gun butt. Though a sharp entrenching tool, that can work pretty well too.”
Yazov sounded nonchalant, but he looked to the other side as the team skirted the crater of vitrified soil the main gun bolt had punched where Herne Lordling briefly stood. “You know,” he added, “I never liked that bastard. I still don’t. It’s a hell of a thing. I still don’t like him.”
“I don’t think it had much to do with liking,” Ned said, wishing that his eyes didn’t blur like this. “It was a matter of doing his job. Like we all did.”
A smoothly resilient path led through the brick archway. The truck must have followed it, though they couldn’t see the tread marks. For the momen
t, the gun tower that was their destination was out of sight also.
A klaxon moaned. The precise location was lost in the bordering shrubs, but it was close and getting closer.
The team melted into ambush position: Paetz and Yazov beneath flowering branches to the left, Raff in a similar position on the right, and Ned behind the end support of a stone bench set along the path for strollers. It wasn’t good concealment, but it would protect his torso against even a 2-cm bolt . . .
Yazov jumped up and ran into the center of the pathway. “Wait!” he cried, waving back to Ned who didn’t have a commo helmet. “Wait! She’s coming through!”
A three-wheeler skidded around the hedge-hidden corner twenty meters beyond the team. The metal tires chirped as Lissea braked hard to keep from hitting Yazov. She brought the little vehicle to a chattering halt just short of the veteran and raised her faceshield.
Ned stumbled as he ran to the three-wheeler because he couldn’t see for tears. “You’re all right?” he said.
“You’re all right?” Lissea echoed. “You’re all right?”
“Ma’am, you’re out on this alone?” Yazov said doubtfully, checking the vehicle’s tribarrel, still locked in its traveling position.
“It’s what I could find after the truck bogged,” Lissea said. “The fighting’s over. Lucas is in charge. He’s called a ceasefire with a general amnesty, and I’ve accepted.”
“That’s good,” Ned said. “He’s smart, Lucas is, but that’s good too.” Then he added, “I’m glad I didn’t kill him.”
“Come on,” Lissea said. “Everybody climb on. This will hold us if we’re careful.”
“It’s an overload,” Raff said doubtfully.
“Worse things have happened today,” Ned said as he settled himself on the pillion. He put his left arm around Lissea’s waist; the arm that didn’t hold his well-used powergun.
Ned stood with his hands on his hip bones, staring north from the roof-level banquet hall of the Acme. At the large table placed in the center of the room for the discussions, Lissea and Lucas Doormann worked out the final wording of their agreement with a civilian lawyer each in support. Both lawyers were female.
