The tribarrel in the cupola ofWarrior,the tank guarding the northwest quadrant of Hill 541 North, snarled in automatic air-defense mode. The four Slammers in Lieutenant Lindgren's bunker froze.
Sergeant Samuel "Slick" Des Grieux,Warrior's commander, winced. He was twenty-one standard years old, and a hardened veteran of two years in Hammer's Slammers. He kneaded his broad, powerful hands together to control his anger at being half a kay away from where he ought to have been: aboard his vehicle and fighting.
The incoming shell thudded harmlessly, detonated in the air.
Sergeant Broglie had counted out the time between the tribarrel's burst and the explosion. "Three seconds," he murmured.
The shell had been a safe kilometer away when it went off. The howl of its passage to an intersection withWarrior's bolts echoed faintly through the night.
"Every five minutes," said Hawes, the fourth man in the bunker and by far the greenest. This was the first time Hawes had been under prolonged bombardment. The way he twitched every time a gun fired indicated how little he liked the experience. "I wish they'd—"
Lieutenant Lindgren's tank,Queen City,fired a five-round burst. Cyan light shuddered through the bunker's dog leg entrance.A pair of shells,probably fired from the Republican batteries on Hill 661 to the northeast, crumped well short of their target.
"Via, Lieutenant!"Des Grieux said in a desperate voice. He stared at his hands, because he was afraid of what he might blurt if he looked straight at the young officer."Look,I oughta be back onWarrior.Anything you gotta say, you can say over the commo, it's secure. And—"
He couldn't help it. His face came up. His voice grew as hard as his cold blue eyes, and he continued. "Besides, we're not here to talk. We oughta be kicking
ass. That's what we're here for."
"We're here—" Lindgren began.
"We're the Federals' artillery defense,Slick,"Broglie said,smiling at Des Grieux. Broglie didn't shout,but his voice flattened the lieutenant's words anyway."Andtheir backbone. We're doing our job, so no sweat, hey?"
"Our job . . ." said Des Grieux softly.Warriorfired three short bursts, blasting a salvo inbound from the Republicans on Hill 504. Des Grieux ignored the sound and its implications. " . . . is to fight. Not to hide in holes. Hey, Luke?"
Broglie was four centimeters shorter than Des Grieux and about that much broader across the shoulders. He wasn't afraid of Des Grieux . . . which interested Des Grieux because it was unusual, though it didn't bother him in the least.
Des Grieux wasn't afraid of anyone or anything.
"We're here to see that Hill 541 North holds out till the relieving force arrives," said Lindgren.
He'd taken Broglie's interruption as a chance to get his emotions under control. The lieutenant was almost as nervous as Hawes, but he was a Slammers officer and determined to act like one. "The AAD in the vehicles does that as well as we could sitting in the turrets, Slick," he continued, "and unit meetings are important to remind us that we're a platoon, not four separate tanks stuck off in West Bumfuck."
"North Bumfuck fiver-four-one,"Broglie chuckled.Broglie's face held its quizzical smile, but the low sound of his laughter was drowned by incoming shells and the tanks' response to them. This was a sustained pounding from all three Republican gun positions: Hills 504 and 661 to the north, and Hill 541 South, ten kilometers southeast of the Federal base.
The Reps fired thirty or forty shells in less than a minute. Under the tribarrels' lash, the explosions merged into a drumming roar—punctuated by the sharpcrashof the round that got through.
The bunker rocked. Dust drifted down from the sandbagged roof. Hawes rubbed his hollow eyes and pretended not to have heard the blast.
The sound of the salvoes died away. One of the Federal garrison screamed nearby. Des Grieux wasn't sure whether the man was wounded or simply broken by the constant hammering. The unanswered shelling got to him, too; but it made him want to go out and kill, not hide in a bunker and scream.
"Lieutenant," Des Grieux said in the same measured, deadly voice as before. "We oughta go out and nail the bastards.That'show we can save these Federal pussies."
"The relieving force—"Lindgren said.
"The relieving force hasn't gotten here in three weeks, so they aren't exactly burning up the road, now, are they?" Des Grieux said. "Look—"
"They'll get here," said Broglie. "They've got Major Howes and three of our companies with 'em, so they'll get here.And we'll wait it out, because that's what Colonel Hammer ordered us to do."
Lindgren opened his mouth to speak, but he closed it again and let the tank commanders argue the question. Des Grieux didn't even pretend to care what a newbie lieutenant thought. As for Broglie—
Sergeant Lucas Broglie was more polite, and Broglie appreciated the value of Lindgren's education from the Military Academy of Nieuw Friesland.But Broglie didn't much care what a newbie lieutenant thought, either.
"I didn't say we ought to bug out," Des Grieux said. His eyes were as open and empty as a cannon's bore. "I said we couldwinthis instead of sitting on our butts."
Open and empty and deadly . . . .
"Four tanks can't take on twenty thousand Reps," Broglie said. His smile was an equivalent of Des Grieux's blank stare: the way Broglie's face formed itself when the mind beneath was under stress.
He swept an arc with his thumb.The bunker was too strait to allow him to make a full-arm gesture. "That's what they got out there. Twenty thousand of them."
The ground shook from another shell that got through the tribarrels' defensive web. Des Grieux was so concentrated on Broglie that his mind had tuned out the ripping bursts that normally would have focused him utterly.
"It's not just us 'n them,"Des Grieux said. Lindgren and Hawes, sitting on ammunition boxes on opposite sides of the bunker, swivelled their heads from one veteran to the other like spectators at a tennis match. "There's five, six thousand Federals on this crap pile with us, and they can't like it much better than I do."
"They're not—" Lieutenant Lindgren began. Cyan light flickered through the bunker entrance. A Republican sniper, not one of the Slammers' weapons. The Reps had a few powerguns, and Hill 661 was high enough that a marksman could slant his bolts into the Federal position.
Thesnap!of the bolt impacting made Lindgren twitch. Des Grieux's lips drew back in a snarl, because if he'd been in his tank he justmighthave put paid to the bastard.
"Not line soldiers," the lieutenant concluded in an artificially calm tone.
"They'd fight if they had somebody to lead them," Des Grieux said. "Via ,anything's better'n being wrapped up here and used for Rep target practice."
"They've got a leader,"Broglie replied, "and it's General Wycherly,not us.For what he's worth."
Des Grieux grimaced as though he'd been kicked. Even Hawes snorted.
"I don't believe you appreciate the constraints that General Wycherly operates under," Lindgren said in a thin voice.
Lindgren knew how little his authority was worth to the veterans. That, as well as a real awareness of the Federal commander's difficulties, injected a note of anger into his tone."He's outnumbered three or four to one,"he went on."Ten to one, if you count just the real combat troops under his command. But he's holding his position as ordered. And that's just what we're going to help him do."
"We're pieces of a puzzle,Slick,"said Broglie.Here laxed enough to rub his lips, massaging them out of the rictus into which the discussion had cramped them. "Wycherly's job is to keep from getting overrun; our job's to help him; and our people with the relieving force 're going to kick the cop outa the Reps if we just hold 'em a few days more."
Another incoming shell detonated a kilometer short of Hill 541 North.The Republicans knew they couldn't do serious physical damage so long as the position was guarded by the Slammers' tanks . . . but they knew as well the psychological effect the constant probing fire had on the defenders.
For an instant Broglie's hard smile was back. "Or not a puzzle," he added. "A gun. Every part has to do the right job, or the gun doesn't work."
"Okay, we had our unit meeting," Des Grieux said. He squeezed his hands together so fiercely that his fingers were dark with trapped blood between the first and second joints. "Now can I get back to my tank where I can maybe do some good?"
"The AAD does everything that can be done, Sergeant," Lindgren said."That's what we need now. That and discipline."
Des Grieux stood up, though he had to bend forward to clear the bunker's low ceiling."Having the computer fire my guns,"he said with icy clarity, "is like jacking off. With respect."
Lindgren grimaced. "All right," he said. "You're all dismissed."
In an attempt to soften the previous exchange,he added,"There shouldn't be more than a few days of this."
But Des Grieux, ignoring the incoming fire, was already out of the bunker.
A howitzer fired from the center of the Federal position. The night outside the bunker glowed with the bottle-shaped yellow flash. There were fifteen tubes in the Federal batteries, but they were short of ammunition and rarely fired.
When they did, they invariably brought down a storm of Republican counterfire.
Des Grieux continued to walk steadily in the direction ofWarrior; his tank, his home.
Not his reason for existence, though. Des Grieux existed to rip the enemy up one side and down the other. To do that he could useWarrior, or the pistol in his holster, or his teeth; whatever was available. Lieutenant Lindgren was robbing Des Grieux of his reason for existence . . . .
He heard the scream of the shell—one round, from the northwest. He waited for the sky-tearing sound ofWarrior's tribarrel firing a short burst of cyan plasma, copper nuclei stripped of their electron shells and ravening downrange to detonate or vaporize the shell.
Warriordidn't fire.
The Reps had launched a ground-hugging missile from the lower altitude of Hill 504.Warriorand the other Slammers' tanks couldn't engage the round because they were dug in behind the bunker line encircling the Federal positions. The incoming missile would not rise into the line-of-sight range of the powerguns until—
There was a scarlet streak from the horizon like a vector marker in the dark bowl of the sky. A titanic crash turned the sky orange and knocked Des Grieux down. Sandy red dust sucked up and rolled over, forming a doughnut that expanded across the barren hilltop.
Des Grieux got to his feet and resumed walking. The bastards couldn't make him run, and they couldn't make him bend over against the sleet of shell fragments which would rip him anyway—running or walking, cowering or standing upright like a man.
The Republicans fired a dozen ordinary rounds. Tank tribarrels splashed each of the shells a fraction of a second after they arched into view. The powerguns' snarling dazzle linked the Federal base for an instant to orange fireballs which faded into rags of smoke. There were no more ground-huggers.
An ordinary shell was no more complex than a hand grenade. Ground-hugging missiles required sophisticated electronics and a fairly complex propulsion system. There weren't many of them in the Rep stockpiles.
Ground-huggers would be as useless as ballistic projectilesifLindgren used his platoon the way tanks should be used, as weapons that sought out the enemy instead of cowering turret-down in defilade.
Blood and Martyrs!What a way to fight a war.
The top of Hill 541 North was a barren moonscape. The bunkers were improvised by the troops themselves with shovels and sandbags. A month ago, the position had been merely the supply point for a string of Federal outposts. No one expected a siege.
But when the Republicans swept down in force, the outposts scrambled into their common center, 541N. Troops dug furiously as soon as they realized that there was no further retreat until Route 7 to the south was cleared from the outside.
IfRoute 7 was cleared. Task Force Howes, named for the CO of the Slammers 2nd Battalion, had promised a link-up within three days.
Every day for the past two weeks.
A sniper on Hill 661, twelve kilometers away, fired his powergun. The bolt snapped fifty meters from Des Grieux, fusing the sandy soil into a disk of glass which shattered instantly as it cooled.
Kuykendall,Warrior's driver, should be in the tank turret. If Des Grieux had been manning the guns, the sniper would have had a hot time of it . . . but Des Grieux was walking back from a dickheaded meeting, and Kuykendall wasn't going to disobey orders to leave the tribarrel on Automatic Air Defense and not, under any circumstances, to fire the 20cm main gun since ammunition was scarce.
The garrison of Hill 541N, the Slammers included, had the supplies they started the siege with. Ground routes were blocked. Aerial resupply would be suicide because of the Rep air-defense arsenal on the encircling hills.
The sniper fired again. The bolt hit even farther away, but he was probably aiming at Des Grieux anyhow. Nothing else moved on this side of the encampment except swirls of wind-blown sand.
A shell fragment the size of a man's palm stuck up from the ground. It winked jaggedly in the blue light of the bolt.
Warriorwas within a hundred meters. Des Grieux continued to walk deliberately.
The hilltop's soil blurred all the vehicles and installations into identical dinginess. The dirt was a red without life, the hue of old blood that had dried and flaked to powder.
The sniper gave up.A gunon541Scougheda shell which Broglie'sHoney Girlblew from the sky a moment later.
Every five minutes; but not regularly, and twice the Reps had banged out more than a thousand rounds in a day, some of which inevitably got through . . . .
"That you, Slick?" Kuykendall called from theWarrior's cupola.
"Yeah, of course it's me," Des Grieux replied. He stepped onto a sandbag lip, then hopped down toWarrior's back deck. His boots clanked.
The tanks were dug in along sloping ramps. Soil from the trenches filled sandbag walls rising above the vehicles' cupolas. Lieutenant Lindgren was afraid that powerguns from 661—and the Reps had multi-barreled calliopes to provide artillery defense—would rake the Slammers' tanks if the latter were visible.
Des Grieux figured the answer tothatthreat was to kick the Reps the hell off Hill 661. By now, though, he'd learned that the other Slammers were just going to sigh and look away when he made a suggestion that didn't involve waiting for somebody else to do the fighting.
Kuykendall slid down from the cupola into the fighting compartment. She was a petite woman, black-haired and a good enough driver. To Des Grieux, Kuykendall was a low-key irritation that he had to work around, like a burr in the mechanism that controlled his turret's rotation.
A driver was a necessary evil, because Des Grieux couldn't guide his tank and fight at the same time. Kuykendall took orders, but she had a personality of her own. She wasn't a mere extension of Des Grieux's will, and that made her more of a problem than someone blander though less competent would have been.
Nothing he couldn't work around, though. Therewasnothing Des Grieux couldn't work around, if his superiors just gave him the chance to do his job. "Anything new?" Kuykendall asked.
Des Grieux stood on his seat so that he could look out over the sandbags toward Hill 661."What'd you think?"he said.He switched the visual display on his helmet visor to infrared and cranked up the magnification.
The sniper had gone home. Nothing but ripples in the atmosphere and the cooler blue of trees transpiring water they sucked somehow from this Lord-blasted landscape.
Des Grieux climbed out of the hatch again. He shoved a sandbag off the top layer.The bastard would be back, and when he was . . .
He pushed away another sandbag.The bags were woven from a coarse synthetic that smelled like burning tar when it rubbed.
"We're not supposed to do that,"Kuykendall said from the cupola."A lucky shot could put the tribarrel out of action. That'd hurt us a lot worse than a hundred dead grunts does the Reps."
"They don't have a hundred powerguns," Des Grieux said without turning around. He pushed at the second-layer sandbag he'd uncovered but that layer was laid as headers. The bags to right and left resisted the friction on their long sides."Anyway,it's worth something to me to give a few of those cocky bastards their lunch."
Hawes'Susie Qripped the sky. Des Grieux dropped into a crouch, then rose again with a feeling of embarrassment. He knew that Kuykendall had seen him jump.
It wasn't flinching. IfWarrior's AAD sensed incoming from Hill 661, Des Grieux would either duck instantly—or have his head shot off by the tribarrel of his own tank. The fire-direction computer didn't care if there was a man in the way when it needed to do its job.
Des Grieux liked the computer's attitude.
He lifted and pushed, raising his triceps into stark ridges. Des Grieux was thin and from a distance looked frail. Close up, no one noticed anything but his eyes; and there was no weakness in them.
The sandbag slid away. The slot inWarrior's protection gave Des Grieux a keyhole through which to rake Hill 661 with his tribarrel. He got back into the turret. Kuykendall dropped out of the way without further comment.
"You know . . ." Des Grieux said as he viewed the enemy positions in the tribarrel's holographic sight.Warrior's sensors were several orders of magnitude better than those of the tankers' unaided helmets."The Reps aren't much better at this than these Federal pussies we gotta nursemaid."
"How d'ye mean?" Kuykendall asked.
Her voice came over the intercom channel. She'd slipped back into the driver's compartment.Most drivers found the internal hatch too tight for use in anything less than a full buttoned-up emergency.
"They've got calliopes up there,"Des Grieux explained as he scanned the bleak silence of Hill 661. The Republican positions were in defilade. Easy enough to arrange from their greater height.
"If it was me,"Des Grieux continued,"I'd pick my time and roll'er up to direct fire positions. They'd kick the cop outa this place."
"They're not going to bet 3cm calliopes against tank main guns, Sarge," Kuykendall said carefully.
"They would if they had any balls,"Des Grieux said.His voice was coldly judgmental, stating the only truth there was. He showed no anger toward those who were too stupid to see it. "Dug in like we are, they could blow away the cupolas and our sensor arrays before we even got the main guns to bear. A calliope's no joke, kid."
He laughed harshly. "Wish they'd try, though. I can hip-shoot a main gun if I have to."
"There's talk they're going to try t' overrun us before Task Force Howes relieves us," Kuykendall said with the guarded nonchalance she always assumed when talking to the tank commander.
Des Grieux's two years in the Slammers made him a veteran,but he was scarcely one of the longest-serving members of the regiment. His drive, his skill with weapons, and the phenomenal ruthlessness with which he accomplished any task set him gave Des Grieux a reputation beyond simple seniority.
"There's talk," Des Grieux said coldly.Nothing moved on Hill 661."There's been talk. There's been talk Howes is going to get his thumbs out of his butt and relieve us, too."
The tribarrel roused, swung, and ignited the sky with a four-round burst of plasma.A shell from Hill 504 broke apart without detonating.The largest piece of casing was still a white glow when it tumbled out of sight in the valley below.
The sky flickered to the south as well, but at such a distance that the sounds faded to a low rumble. Task Force Howes still slugged it out with the Republicans who defended Route 7. Maybe they were going to get here within seventy-two hours. And maybe Hell was going to freeze over.
Des Grieux scanned Hill 661, and nothing moved.
The only thing Des Grieux knew in the instant he snapped awake from a sound sleep was that it was time to earn his pay.
Kuykendall looked down into the fighting compartment from the commander's seat. "Sarge?" she said. "I—" and broke off when she realized Des Grieux was already alert.
"Get up front 'n drive," Des Grieux ordered curtly. "It's happening."
"It's maybe nothing," the driver said, but she knew Des Grieux. As Kuykendall spoke, she swung her legs out of the cupola. Hopping from the cupola and past the main gun was the fastest way to the driver's hatch in the bow. The tank commander blocked the internal passage anyway as he climbed up to his seat.
The Automatic Air Defense plate onWarrior's control panel switched from yellow, standby, to red. The tribarrel rotated and fired. Des Grieux flicked the plate with his boot toe as he went past, disconnecting the computer-controlled defensive fire. He neededWarrior's weapons under his personal direction now that things were real.
When the siege began, Lieutenant Lindgren ordered that one member of each two-man tank crew be on watch in the cupola at every moment. What the tankers did off-duty, and where they slept, was their own business.
Most of the off-duty troops slept beneath their vehicles, entering the plenum chamber through the access plate in the steel skirts. The chambers were roomy and better protection than anything cobbled together by shovels and sandbags could be. The only problem was the awareness before sleep came that the tank above you weighed 170 tonnes . . . but tankers tended not to be people who thought in those terms.
Lindgren insisted on a bunker next to his vehicle. He was sure that he would go mad if his whole existence, on duty and off, was bounded by the steel and iridium shell of his tank.
Des Grieux went the other way around. He slept in the fighting compartment while his driver kept watch in the cupola above. The deck was steel pressed with grip rosettes. He couldn't stretch out. His meter-ninety of height had to twist between the three-screen control console and the armored tube which fed ammunition to the autoloading 20cm main gun.
Nobody called the fighting compartment a comfortable place to sleep; but then, nobody called Des Grieux sane, either.
A storm of Republican artillery fire screamed toward Hill 541N. Some of the shells would have gotten through even if Des Grieux had leftWarriorin the defensive net. That was somebody else's problem. The Reps didn't have terminally guided munitions that would target the Slammers' tanks, so a shell that hitWarriorwas the result of random chance.
You had to take chances in war; and anyway,Warrioroughta shrug off anything but a heavy-caliber armor-piercing round with no more than superficial damage.
Kuykendall switched her fans on and brought them up to speed fast with their blades cutting the airstream at minimum angle.Warriortrembled with what Des Grieux anthropomorphized as eagerness, transferring his own emotions to the mindless machine he commanded.
A Slammers' tank was a slope-sided iridium hull whose turret, smooth to avoid shot traps, held a 20cm powergun. The three-barreled automatic weapon in the cupola could operate independently or be locked to the same point of aim as the main gun. Eight intake ducts pierced the upper surface of the hull, feeding air down to drive fans in armored nacelles below.
At rest, the tanks sat on their steel skirts. When the vehicles were under way, they floated on a cushion of air pressurized by the fans.At full throttle,the power required to drive a tank was enormous, and the fusion bottle which provided that power filled the rear third of the hull.
The tanks were hideously expensive. Their electronics were so complex and sensitive that at least a small portion of every tank's suite was deadlined at any one time. The hulls and running gear were rugged, but the vehicles' own size and weight imposed stresses which required constant maintenance.
When they worked, and to the extent they worked, the Slammers' tanks were the most effective weapons in the human universe. AsWarriorwas about to prove to two divisions of Republican infantry . . . .
"Back her out!" Des Grieux ordered. If he'd thought about it, he would have sounded a general alarm because heknewthis was a major attack,but he had other things on his mind besides worrying about people he wasn't planning to kill.
"Booster," Des Grieux said, switching on the artificial intelligence which controlled the tank's systems. "Enemy activity, one kay, now!"
Warriorshuddered as Kuykendall increased the fan bite. Sandy soil mushroomed from the trench walls and upward as the hull lifted and air leaked beneathWarrior's skirts. Des Grieux's direct vision blurred in a gritty curtain, but the data his AI assembled from remote sensors was sharp and clear in the upper half of his helmet visor.
The ground fell away from the top of Hill 541 North in a 1:3 slope, and the tank positions were set well back from the edge of the defenses. Even whenWarriorbacked from her trench, Des Grieux would not be able to see the wire and minefields which the garrison had laid at mid-slope to stop an enemy assault.
Ideally, the tanks would have access to the Slammers' own remote sensors. Conditions were rarely ideal, and on Hill 541N they never even came close. Still, the Federals had emplaced almost a hundred seismic and acoustic sensors before the Republicans tightened the siege. Most of the sensors were in the wire, but they'd dropped a few in the swales surrounding the bill, a kilometer or so out from the hilltop.
Acoustic sensors gathered the sound of voices and equipment, while seismic probes noted the vibration feet and vehicles made in the soil. The information, flawed by the sensors' relative lack of sophistication and the haphazard way the units were emplaced, was transmitted to the hilltop for processing.
Des Grieux didn't know what the Feds did with the raw data, butWarrior's AI turned it into a clear image of a major Republican attack.
There were two thrusts, directed against the east and the northwest quadrants of the Federal positions. The slope at those angles was slightly steeper than it was to the south, but the surface fell in a series of shallow steps that formed dead zones, out of the fire from hilltop bunkers.
A siren near the Federal command post wound up. Its wail was almost lost in the shriek of incoming.
The Reps had ten or a dozen shells in the air at any one time. The three tanks still working air defense slashed arcs across the sky. Powerguns detonated much of the incoming during its fifteen-second flight time, but every minute or so a round got through.
Most of the hits raised geysers of sand from the hilltop. Only occasionally did a bunker collapse or a shellburst scythe down troops running toward fighting positions in the forward trenches, but even misses shook the defenders' morale.
Booster thought the attack on the northwest quadrant was being made by a battalion of infantry, roughly 500 troops, behind a screen of sappers no more than a hundredstrong.The eastern thrust was of comparable size,but even so it seemed a ludicrously small force to throw against a garrison of over 5,000 men.
That was only the initial assault; a larger force would get in its own way during the confusion of a night attack.Booster showed several additional battalions and a dozen light armored vehicles waiting in reserve among the yellow-brown scrub of the valleys where streams would run in the wet season.
As soon as the leading elements seized a segment of the outer bunker line in a classic infiltration assault, the Republican support troops would advance in good order and sweep across the hilltop. There was no way in hell that the Federal infantry, demoralized by weeks of unanswerable shelling, was going to stop the attack.
They didn't have to. Not while Des Grieux was here.
"Clear visor," Des Grieux said. He'd seen what the sensors gave him, and he didn't need the display anymore. He tugged the crash bar, dropping his seat into the fighting compartment and buttoning the hatch shut above him.
Warrior's three holographic screens cast their glow across conduits and the breech of the squat main gun.
"Driver, advance along marked vector."
Default on the left-hand screen was a topographic display. Des Grieux drew his finger across it in a curving arc, down from the hilltop in a roughly northwestward direction. The AI would echo the display in Kuykendall's compartment. A trackway, not precisely a road but good enough for the Rep vehicles and sure ashellgood enough forWarrior, wound north from the swale in the direction of the Republican firebase on Hill 504.
"Gun it!" Des Grieux snarled. "Keep your foot on the throttle, bitch!"
It didn't occur to him that there was another way to give the order. All Des Grieux knew was thatWarriorhad to move as he desired, and the commander's will alone was not enough to direct the vehicle.
Kuykendall touchedWarriorto the ground, rubbing off some of the backing inertia against the sand. She rotated the attitude control of the drive fans,angling the nacelles so that they thrustWarriorforward as well as lifting it again onto the air cushion.
The huge tank slid toward the edge of the encampment in front of a curling billow of dust. Size made the vehicle seem to accelerate slowly.
"Oyster Leader to Oyster Two," said Lieutenant Lindgren over the platoon's commo channel. "Hold your position. Break. Oyster four—" Hawes "—move up to support Oyster Two. Over."
The note ofWarrior's fans changed. Massive inertia would keep the vehicle gliding forward for a hundred meters, but the sound meant Kuykendall was obeying the platoon leader's orders.
"Driver!" Des Grieux shouted. "Roll it!Now!" Kuykendall adjusted her nacelles obediently.Warriorslid on momentum between a pair of bunkers as the fans swung to resume their forward thrust.
The Federal positions were dugouts covered by transportation pallets supported by a single layer of sandbags. Three or four additional sandbag layers supplied overhead protection, though a direct hit would crumple the strongest of them. The firing slits were so low that muzzle blasts kicked up sand to shroud the red flashes of their machine guns.
Warrior's sensors fed the main screen with a light-enhanced 120° arc to the front. The tank's AI added in a stereoscopic factor to aid depth perception which the human brain ordinarily supplied in part from variations in light intensity.
The screen provided Des Grieux with a clear window onto the Republican attack. A two-man buzzbomb team rose into firing position at the inner edge of the wire. Instead of launching their unguided rockets into the nearest bunkers, they had waited for the tank they expected.
Des Grieux expected them also.He stunned the night with a bolt fromWarrior's main gun.
Des Grieux used his central display for gunnery. It had two orange pippers, a 2cm ring and a 1cm dot for the main gun and tribarrel respectively. The sensor array mounted aroundWarrior's cupola gave Des Grieux the direction in which to swing his weapon. As soon as his tank rose into a hull-down position that cleared the 20cm powergun, he toggled the foot-trip.
Because the tribarrel was mounted higher, Des Grieux could have killed the Reps a moment sooner with the automatic weapon; but he wanted the enemy's first awareness ofWarriorto be the cataclysmic blast of the tank's main gun.
The cyan bolt struck one of the Rep team squarely and converted his body into a ball of vapor so hot that its glowing shockwave flung the other victim's torso and limbs away in separate trajectories. The secondary explosion of the anti-tank warheads was lost in the plasma charge's flashcrash.
Honking through its intakes,Warriorthundered down on the Republican attack.
Guns in dozens of Federal bunkers fired white tracers toward the perimeter of mines and wire. Heavy automatic weapons among the Republican support battalions answered with chains of glowing red balls.
The Federal artillerymen in the center of Hill 541 North began slamming out their remaining ammunition in the reasonable view that unless this attack was stopped, there was no need for conservation. Because of their hilltop location, the guns could not bear on the sappers. To reach even the Republican support troops, they had to lob their shells in high, inaccurate arcs. The pair of calliopes on Hill 661 burst many of the Federal rounds at the top of their trajectory.
Instead of becoming involved in firefights, the Rep sappers did an excellent job of pathclearing for the main assault force. A few of the sappers fell, but their uniforms of light-absorbent fabric made them difficult targets even now that Federal starshells popped to throw wavering illumination over the scene.
A miniature rocket dragged its train of explosive across the perimeter defenses. The line exploded with a yellow flash and a sound like a door slamming. Sand and wire flew to either side. Overpressure set off a dozen anti-personnel mines to speckle the night.
There were already a dozen similar gaps in the perimeter. An infiltration team had wormed through the defenses before the alarm went off.one of its members hurled a satchel charge into a bunker, collapsing it with a flash and a roar.
Warriordrove into the wire. Bullets, some of them fired from the Federal bunkers, pinged harmlessly on the iridium armor. A buzzbomb trailing sparks and white smoke snarled toward the tank's right flank. Five meters out,the automatic defense system along the top edge ofWarrior's skirts banged. Its spray of steel pellets ripped the buzzbomb and set off the warhead prematurely.
The tank rang like a bell when its defensive array fired, but the hollowwhoompof the shaped-charge warhead was lost in the battle's general clamor. Shards of buzzbomb casing knocked down a sapper. He thrashed through several spasms before he lay still.
Warriorpassed the Federal minefield in a series of sprouting explosions and the spang of fragments which ricocheted from the skirts. The pressure of air within the tank's plenum chamber was high enough to detonate mines rigged to blow off a man's foot. They clanged harmlessly as a tocsin of the huge vehicle's passage.
The tank's bow slope snagged loops of concertina wire which stretched and writhed until it broke. Republican troops threw themselves down to avoid the unexpected whips of hooked steel. Men shouted curses,although the gapWarriortore in the perimeter defenses was broad enough to pass a battalion in columns of sixteen.
Des Grieux ignored the sappers.They could cause confusion within the bunker line, but they were no threat to the ultimate existence of the Federal base. The assault battalion, and still more the thousands of Republican troops waiting in reserve, were another matter.
Warriorhad two dual-capable gunnery joysticks.Most tank commanders used only one, selecting tribarrel or main gun with the thumbswitch. Des Grieux shot with both hands.
He'd pointed the main gun 30° to starboard in order to blast the team of tank killers. Now his left hand swung the cupola tribarrel a few degrees to port. He didn't change either setting again for the moment. Not even Des Grieux's degree of skill permitted him to aim two separate sights from a gun platform travelling at fifty kph and still accelerating.
But he could fire them, alternately or together, wheneverWarrior's forward motion slid the pippers over targets.
The tribarrel caught a squad moving up at a trot to exploit pathways the sappers had torn. The Republicans were so startled by the bellowing monster that they forgot to throw themselves down.
Three survivors turned and fired their rifles vainly as the tank roared past fifty meters away. The rest of the squad were dead, with the exception of the lieutenant leading them. He stood, shrilling insane parodies of signals on his whistle.
The tribarrel had blown off both his arms.
Des Grieux's right thumb fired the main gun at another ragged line of Republican infantry. The 20cm bolt gouged the earth ten meters short, but its energy sprayed the sandy soil across the troops as a shower of molten glass. One of the victims continued to pirouette in agony until white tracers from a Federal machine gun tore most of his chest away.
Fires lighted by the cyan bolts flared across the arid landscape.
Hawes inSusie Qtried to follow. His tribarrel slashed out a long burst. Sappers jumped and ran. Two of them stumbled into mines and upended in sprays of soil.
Susie Qeased forward at a walking pace. Hawes' driver was proceeding cautiously under circumstances where speed was the only hope of survival. Halfway to the wire, a buzzbomb passed in front of the tank. It was so badly aimed that the automatic defense system didn't trip.
Susie Qbraked and began to turn. Hawes sprayed the slope wildly with his tribarrel. A stray bolt blew a trench acrossWarrior's back deck.
A Rep sapper ran towardSusie Q's blind side with a satchel charge in his hands. The automatic defense system blasted him when he was five yards away, but two more buzzbombs arced over his crumpled body.
The section of the ADS which had killed the sapper was out of service until its strip charge could be replaced. The rockets hit, one in the hull and the other in the center ofSusie Q's turret. Iridium reflected the warheads' white glare.
The tank grounded violently. The thick skirt crumpled as it bulldozed a ripple of soil.Susie Q's status entry onWarrior's right-hand display winked from solid blue to cross-hatched, indicating that an electrical fault had depowered several major systems.
Des Grieux ignored the readout. He had a battle to win.
Under other circumstances,Des Grieux would have turned to port or starboard to sweep up one flank of the assault wave, but the Republican reserves were too strong. Turning broadside to their fire was a quick way to die.Winning—surviving—required him to keep the enemy off balance.
Warriorbucked over the irregular slope, but the guns were stabilized in both elevation and traverse. Des Grieux lowered the hollow pipper onto the swale half a kilometer away, where the Republican supports sheltered.
Several of the armored cars there raked the tank with their automatic cannon. Explosive bullets whanged loudly on the iridium.
Des Grieux setWarrior's turret to rotate at one degree per second and stepped on the foot-trip. The main gun began to fire as quickly as the system could reload itself. Cyan hell broke loose among the packed reserves.
The energy liberated by a single 20cm bolt was so great that dry brush several meters away from each impact burst into flames. Infantrymen leaped to their feet, colliding in wild panic as they tried to escape the sudden fires.
An armored car took a direct hit. Its diesel fuel boomed outward in a huge fireball which engulfed the vehicles to either side. Crewmen baled out of one of the cars before it exploded. Their clothes were alight, and they collapsed a few steps from their vehicle.
The other car spouted plumes of multi-colored smoke. Marking grenades had ignited inside the turret hatch, broiling the commander as he tried to climb past them. Ammunition cooked off in a flurry of sparks and red tracers.
WhileWarrior's main gun cycled its twenty-round ready magazine into part of the Republican reserves, Des Grieux aimed his tribarrel at specific targets to port. The tank's speed was seventy kph and still accelerating. When the bow slid over the slope's natural terracing, it spilled air from the plenum chamber. Each time,Warrior's 170 tonnes slammed onto the skirts with the inevitability of night following day.
Though the tribarrel was stabilized, the crew was not. The impacts jounced Des Grieux against his seat restraints and blurred his vision.
It didn't matter. Under these circumstances, Des Grieux scarcely needed the sights. Heknewwhen the pipper covered a clot of infantry or an armored car reversing violently to escape what the crew suddenly realized was a kill zone.
Two-cm bolts lacked the authority ofWarrior's main gun, but Des Grieux's short bursts cut with surgical precision. Men flew apart in cyan flashes. The thin steel hulls of armored cars blazed white for an instant before the fuel and ammunition inside caught fire as well.Secondary explosions lit the night as tribarrel bolts detonated cases of rocket and mortar warheads.
Warrior's drive fans howled triumphantly.
Behind the rampaging tank, Rep incoming flashed and thundered onto Hill 541 North. Only one tribarrel from the Federal encampment still engaged the shells.
Federal artillery continued to fire. A "friendly" round plunged down at a 70° angle and blew a ten-meter hole less than a tank's length ahead ofWarrior.Kuykendall fought her controls, but the tank's speed was too high to dodge the obstacle completely.Warriorlurched heavily and rammed some of the crater's lip back to bury the swirling vapors of high explosive.
A score of Rep infantry lay flat with their hands pressing down their helmets as if to drive themselves deeper into the gritty soil.Warriorplowed through them. The tank's skirt was now here more than a centimeter off the ground.The victims smeared unnoticed beneath the tank's weight.
Warriorboomed 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 withinWarrior'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 inWarrior'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 whenWarriorripped 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 andWarrior'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:Warriordidn'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 includingWarrior.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 battalionsWarriorhad 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 eventuallywouldpenetrate heavy armor; cannon lowered to slam their heavy shells directly into the belly platesWarriorexposed 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 betweenWarriorand 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,Warriorwould 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,Warriorcould 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 norWarrior'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,Warriorwould 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 whereWarriorhad 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 withinWarrior'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 robbedWarrior'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.
Warriorproceeded 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 instead 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, everythingas ordered, and who was just about as good a gunner as Slick Des Grieux.
Just aboutmeantsecond 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 expectingWarriorto hit them from behind. The Republicans thought of tanks as guns and armor; but tanks meant mobility, too, and Des Grieuxknewevery way a tank could crush an enemy.
Reflected muzzle blasts silvered the plume of dust behindWarrior.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.
Warriorthrust 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 brakeWarrior'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 timeWarriorreached 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 ofWarrior'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 asWarriorcrested 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 fromWarrior's plenum chamber. The tank grounded hard, dangerously hard, but the skirts managed to stand the impact. Power returned toWarrior'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 itwasall 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 weredesignedfor 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.Warriorwallowed 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 overWarriorlike 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 completed the final stage of his plan. TwiceWarrior'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 onWarrior'sback deck. The projectile was unfuzed . It didn't explode.
OnlyWarriorand 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 pushedWarriorsideways 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.Warriorwas 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.Warriornow 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.
Though the main screen was in high-magnification mode, the right-hand display—normally the commo screen, but De Grieux had shut off external commo—retained a 120° panorama ofWarrior's surroundings. Images shifted as the tank reversed through the ruin its guns had created. Air spilling beneath the skirts stirred the flames and made their ragged tips bow in obeisance.
A Rep with the green tabs of a Central Command officer on his epaulets knelt with his hands folded in prayer. He did not look up asWarriorslid toward him, though vented air made his short-sleeved khaki uniform shudder.
Des Grieux touched his left joystick. The Rep was already too close toWarriorfor the tribarrel to bear; and anyway . . .
And anyway, one spaced-out man was scarcely worth a bolt.
Warriorhowled past the Rep officer. A crosswind rocked the tank minusculy from Kuykendall's intended line, so that the side skirt drifted within five meters of the man.
Sensors fired a section of the automatic defense system. Pellets blew the Republican backward, as loose-limbed as a rag doll.
Kuykendall ground the skirts to bring the tank to a safe halt at the edge of the mesa.Warriorlay across a zigzag trench, empty save for a sprawled corpse. The drive fans could stabilize a tank in still air, but shockwaves and currents rushing to feed flames whipped the top of Hill 661.
Des Grieux depressed the muzzle of his main gun slightly. OnWarrior's gunnery screen, the hollow pipper slid over a high-resolution view of Republican positions on Hill 504.
The mesa on whichWarriorrested was 150 meters higher than the irregular hillock on which the Reps had placed their western firebase.The twelve kilometers separating the two peaks meant nothing to the tank's powerguns.
On Hill 504, a pair of bombardment rockets leapt from their launching tubes toward the Federal encampment. The holographic image was silent, but Des Grieux had been the target of too many similar rounds not to imagine the snarling roar of their passage. He centered his ring sight on the munitions truck bringing another twenty-four rounds to the launchers—
And toed the foot-trip.
Warriorrocked with the trained lightning of its main gun. The display blanked in a cataclysm: pure blue plasma; metal burning white hot; and red as tonnes of warheads and solid rocket fuel exploded simultaneously. The truck and everything within a hundred meters of it vanished.
Des Grieux shifted his sights to what he thought was the Republican command post. He was smiling.
He fired. Sandbags blew outward as shards of glass. There were explosives of some sort within the bunker, because a moment after the rubble settled, a secondary explosion blew the site into a crater.
Concussion from the first blast had stunned or killed the crew of the single calliope on Hill 504. The weapon was probably unserviceable, but Des Grieux's third bolt vaporized it anyway.
"I told you bastards . . ." the tanker muttered in a voice that would have frightened anyone who heard him.
Dust and smoke billowed out in a huge doughnut from where the truckload of rockets had been. The air-suspended particles masked the remaining positions on Hill 504. Guns and bunker sites vanished into the haze like ships sinking at anchor. The main screen provided a detailed vision of whorls and color variations within the general blur.
"Booster,"Des Grieux said. "Feed me targets."Warrior's turret was supported by superconducting magnetic bearings powered by the same fusion plant that drove the fans. The mechanism purred and adjusted two degrees to starboard, under control of the artificial intelligence recalling the terrain before it was concealed. The hollow pipper remained centered on the gunnery screen, but haze appeared to shift around it.
The circle pulsed. Des Grieux fired the 20cmgun.Even as the tank recoiled from the bolt's release, the AI rotated the weapon toward the next unseen victim.
"Booster!" Des Grieux snarled. His throat was raw with gunnery fumes and the human waste products of tension coursing through his system. "Showme the bloody—"
The pipper quivered again. Des Grieux fired by reflex. A flash and a mushroom of black smoke penetrated the gray curtain. "Targets!"
The main gun depressed minutely. To Des Grieux's amazement, a howitzer on Hill 504 banged a further shell toward the Federal positions.Warrior's AI obediently supplied the image of the weapon to Des Grieux's display as it steadied beneath the orange circle.
A bubble of gaseous metal sent the howitzer barrel thirty meters into the air.
With only one calliope to protect them, the Reps on 504 had dug in somewhat better than their fellows on Hill 661.Despite that,there was still a suicidal amount of ready ammunition stacked around the fast-firing guns. The tank's data banks fed each dump to the gunnery screen.
Des Grieux continued to fire. The haze over the target area darkened, stirred occasionally by sullen red flames. A red 0 replaced the green numeral 1 on the lower right corner of the screen. The interior of the fighting compartment stank like the depths of Hell.
"I told you bastards . . ."Des Grieux repeated, though his throat was so swollen that he had to force the words out. "And I told that bastard Lindgren."
"Sarge?" Kuykendall said.
Des Grieux threw the charging lever to refill the ready magazine. Just as well if he didn't use the main gun until the bore was relined; but the status report gave it ten percent of its original thickness, a safe enough margin for a few bolts, and you did what you had to do . . . .
"Yeah," he said aloud. "Get us somewhere outa the way. In the morning we'll rejoin. Somebody."
Kuykendall adjusted the fans so that they bit into the air instead of slicing through it with minimum disruption. She'd kept the power up whileWarriorwas grounded. In an emergency, they could hop off the mesa with no more than a quick change of blade angle.
The smoke-shrouded ruin of Hill 661 was unlikely to spawn emergencies, but in the four hours remaining till dawn some Rep officer might muster a tank-killer team.No point in making trouble for yourself.There were hundreds of kilometers of arid scrub which would hideWarrioruntil the situation sorted itself out.
And there were no longer any targets aroundhereworthy ofWarrior's guns. Of that, Des Grieux was quite certain.
Kuykendall elected to slide directly over the edge of the mesa instead of returning to the logistics route by which they had attacked. The immediate slope was severe, almost 1:3, but there were no dangerous obstacles and the terrain flattened within a hundred meters.
There were bound to be scores of Rep soldiers on the road, some of them seeking revenge. A large number might fly into a lethal panic if they sawWarrior's gray bow loom through the darkness. A smoother ride to concealment wasn't worth the risk.
"Sarge?" asked Kuykendall. "What's going on back at 541 North?"
"How the hell would I know?" Des Grieux snarled. But he could know, if he wanted to. He reached to reconnect the commo buss . . . and withdrew his hand. He could adjust a screen, and he started to do that—manually,because his throat hurt as if he'd been swallowing battery acid.
Instead of carrying through with the motion, Des Grieux lifted the crash bar to open the hatch and raise his seat to cupola level. The breeze smelled so clean that it made him dizzy.
Kuykendall eased the tank toward the low ground west of Hill 661.With a swale to shelter them, they could drive north a couple kays and avoid the stragglers from the Republican disaster.
For it had been a disaster. The Federal artillery on Hill 541N was in action again, lobbing shells toward the Rep staging areas. Fighting still went on within the encampment, but an increasing volume of fire raked the eastern slope up which the Reps had carried their initial assault objectives.
The weapons which picked over the remnants of the Republican attacks were machine guns firing white tracers, standard Federal issue; and at least a dozen tribarreled powerguns. A platoon of Slammers' combat cars had entered the Federal encampment and was helping the defenders mop up. The relief force had finally arrived.
"In the morning . . ." Des Grieux muttered. He was as tired as he'd ever been in his life.
And he knew that he and his tank had just won a battle single-handedly.
Warriorproceeded slowly up the eastern slope of Hill 541 North. The brush had burned to blackened spikes. Ash swirled over the ground, disintegrating into a faint shimmer in the air.
Given the amount of damage to the landscape, there were surprisingly few bodies; but there were some.They sprawled,looking too small for their uniforms; and the flies had found them.
Half an hour before dawn,Des Grieux announced in clear, on both regimental and Federal frequencies, thatWarriorwas re-entering the encampment. The AI continued to transmit that message at short intervals, and Kuykendall held the big vehicle to a walking pace to appear as unthreatening as possible.
There was still a risk that somebody would open fire in panic. The tank was buttoned up against that possibility.
It was easier when everybody around you was an enemy. Then it was just a matter of who was quicker on the trigger. Des Grieux never minded playingthatgame.
"Alpha One-six to Oyster Two commander," said a cold, bored voice in Des Grieux's helmet."Dismount and report to the CP as soon as you're through the minefields. Over."
"Oyster Two to One-six,"Des Grieux replied. Alpha One-six was the call sign of Major Joachim Steuben, Colonel Hammer's bodyguard. Steuben had no business being here, "Roger, as soon as we've parked the tank. Over."
"Alpha One-six to Oyster Two commander," the cold voice said. "I'll provide your driver with ground guides for parking, Sergeant. I suggest that this time, you obey orders. One-six out."
Des Grieux swallowed. He wasn't afraid of Steuben, exactly; any more than he was afraid of a spider. But he didn't like spiders either.
"Driver," he said aloud. "Pull up when you get through the minefield. Somebody'll tell you where they wantWarriorparked."
"You bet," said Kuykendall in a distant voice.
Federal troops drew back at the tank's approach. They'd been examining what remained of the perimeter defenses, and dragging bodies cautiously from the wire. There were thousands of unexploded mines scattered across the slope.
Nobody wanted to be the last casualty of a successful battle.
Successful because of what Des Grieux had done. Something about the Feds seemed odd.After a moment, Des Grieux realized that it was their uniforms. The fabric was green—not clean, exactly, but not completely stained by the sandy red soil of Hill 541 North either. These were troops from the relieving force.
A few men of the original garrison watched from the bunker line. It was funny to see that many troops in the open sunlight; not scuttling, not cowering from snipers and shellfire.
The bunkers were ruins. Sappers had grenaded them during the assault.When the Federals counterattacked, Reps sheltered in the captured positions until tribarrels and point-blank shellfire blew them out. The roofs had collapsed. Wisps of smoke still curled from among the ruptured sandbags.
A Slammers' combat car—unnamed, with fender number 116—squatted in an overwatch position on the bunker line. The three tribarrels were manned, covering the troops in the wire. Bullet scars dented the side of the fighting compartment. A bright swatch of Spray Seal covered the left wing gunner's shoulder.
A figure was painted on the car's bow slope, just in front of the driver's hatch: a realistically drawn white mouse with pink eyes, nose, and tail.
The White Mice—the troops of Alpha Company, Hammer's Regiment—weren't ordinary line soldiers.
Nobody ever said they couldn't fight but they, under their CO, Major Steuben, acted as Hammer's field police and in other internal security operations.
A dozen anti-personnel mines went off underWarrior's skirts as the tank slid through the perimeter defenses. Kuykendall tried to follow a track Rep sappers blew the night before, butWarrioroverhung the cleared area on both sides.
The surface-scattered mines were harmless, except to a man who stepped on one. Even so, after the thirdbang!one of the Feds watching from the bunker line put his hands over his face and began to cry uncontrollably.
Three troopers wearing Slammers khaki and commo helmets waited at the defensive perimeter. One of them was a woman. They carried submachine-guns in patrol slings that kept the muzzles forward and the grips close to their gunhands.
They'd been sitting on the hillside when Des Grieux first noticed them. They stood asWarriorapproached.
"Driver," Des Grieux said, "you can pull up here."
"I figured to,"Kuykendall replied without emotion. Dust puffed forward, then drifted downhill as she shifted nacelles to brakeWarrior's slow pace.
Des Grieux climbed from the turret and poised for a moment on the back deck. The artillery shell that bounced fromWarrioron Hill 661 had dished in a patch of plating a meter wide. Number seven intake grating ought to be replaced as well . . . .
Des Grieux hopped to the ground. One of the White Mice sat onWarrior's bow slope and gestured directions to the driver. The tank accelerated toward the encampment.
"Come on, Sunshine,"said the female trooper. Her features were blank behind her reflective visor. "The Man wants to see you."
She jerked her thumb uphill.
Des Grieux fell in between the White Mice. His legs were unsteady. He hadn't wanted to eat anything with his throat feeling as though it had been reamed with a steel-bore brush.
"Am I under arrest?" he demanded.
"Major Steuben didn't say anything about that," the male escort replied. He chuckled.
"Naw,"added the woman."Hejust saidthat if you give us any crap,we should shoot you. And save him the trouble."
"Then we all know where we stand," said Des Grieux. Soreness and aches dissolved in his body's resumed production of adrenaline.
The encampment on Hill 541 North had always been a wasteland, so Des Grieux didn't expect to notice a change now.
He was wrong. It was much worse, and the forty-odd bodies laid in rows in their zipped-up sleeping bags were only part of it.
The smell overlaid the scene. Explosives had peculiar odors. They blended uneasily with ozone and high-temperature fusion products formed when bolts from the powerguns hit.
The main component of the stench was death. Bunkers had been blown closed, but the rubble of timber and sandbags didn't form a tight seal over the shredded flesh within. The morning sun was already hot. In a week or two, a lot of wives and parents were going to receive a coffin sealed over seventy kilos of sand.
That wasn't Des Grieux's problem,though; and without him, there would have been plenty more corpses swelling in Federal uniforms.
General Wycherly's command post had taken a direct hit from a heavy shell.A high-sided truck with multiple antennas parked beside the smoldering wreckage. Federal troops in clean uniforms stepped briskly in and out of the vehicle.
The real authorities on 541N wore Slammers khaki. Major Joachim Steuben was short, slim, and so fine-featured that he looked like a girl in a perfectly-tailored uniform among Sergeant Broglie and several Alpha Company officers. They looked up as Des Grieux approached.
Steuben's command group stood under a tarpaulin slung between a combat car and Lieutenant Lindgren's tank. The roof of Lindgren's bunker was broken-backed from the fighting, but his tank looked all right at first glance.
At a second look—
"Via!"Des Grieux said. "What happened toQueen City?"
There were telltale soot stains all around the tank's deck, and the turret rested slightly askew on its ring.Queen Citywas a corpse, as sure as any of the staringeyed Reps out there in the wire.
The female escort sniffed."Its luck ran out.Took as hell down the open hatch. All they gotta do now is jack up what's left and slide a new tank underneath."
"Dunno how anybody can ride those fat bastards," the other escort muttered. "They maneuver like blind whales."
"Glad you could rejoin us, Sergeant," Major Steuben said. He gave the data terminal in his left hand to a lieutenant beside him. His voice was lilting and as pretty as Steuben's appearance, but it cut through any thought Des Grieux had of snarling a response to the combat-car crewman beside him.
"Sir," Des Grieux muttered. The Slammers didn't salute. Salutes in a war zone targeted officers for possible snipers.
"Would you like to explain your actions during the battle last night, Sergeant?" the major asked.
Steuben stood arms akimbo. His pose accentuated the crisp tuck of his waist. The fall of the slim right hand almost concealed the pistol riding in a cut-out holster high on Steuben's right hip.
The pistol was engraved and inlaid with metal lozenges in a variety of colors. In all respects but its heavy 1cm bore, it looked as surely a girl's weapon as its owner looked like a girl.
Joachim Steuben's eyes focused on Des Grieux. There was not a trace of compassion in the eyes or the soul beneath them. Any weapon in Steuben's hands was Death.
"I was winning a battle,"Des Grieux said as his eyes mirrored Steuben's blank, brown glare."Sir. Since the relieving force was still sitting on its hands after three weeks."
Broglie slid his body between Des Grieux and the major. Broglie was fast, but Steuben's pistol was socketed in Broglie's ear before the tanker's motion was half complete.
"I think Sergeant Des Grieux and I can continue our discussion better without you in the way, Mister Broglie," Steuben said. He didn't move his eyes from Des Grieux.
The White Mice hadn't bothered to remove the pistol from the holster on Des Grieux's equipment belt. Now Des Grieux knew why.Nobody could be that fast . . . .
"Sir,"Broglie rasped through a throat gone dry."Warriordid destroy both the Rep firebases. That's what took the pressure off here at the end."
Broglie stepped back to where he'd been standing.
He looked straight ahead, not at either Des Grieux or the major.
"You've named your tankWarrior, Sergeant?" Steuben said. "Amusing. But right at the moment I'm not so much interested in what you did as I am in why you disobeyed orders to do it."
He reholstered his gorgeous handgun with a motion as precise and delicate as that of a bird preening its feathers.
"You got some people killed, you know," the major added. His voice sounded cheerful, or at least amused."Your lieutenant and his driver, because nobody was dealing with the shells from Hill 504."
He smiled coquettishly at Des Grieux. "I won't blame you for the other one. Hawes, was it?"
"Hawes, sir," Broglie muttered.
"Since Hawes was stupid enough to leave his position also," Steuben went on. "And I don't care a great deal about Federal casualties, except as they affect the Regiment's contractual obligations."
The pause was deadly.
"Which, since wehavewon the battle for them, shouldn't be a problem."
"Sir," Des Grieux said, "they were wide open. It was the one chance we were going to have to pay the Reps back for the three weeks we sat and took it."
Major Steuben turned his head slowly and surveyed the battered Federal encampment. His tongue wenttsk, tsk, tskagainst his teeth.
Warriorwas parked alongside Broglie'sHoney Girlin the center of the hill.Warrior's bow skirts had cracked as well as bending inward when 170 tonnes slammed down on them. Kuykendall had earned her pay, keeping the tank moving steadily despite the damage.
Des Grieux's gaze followed the major's.Honey Girlhad been hit by at least three buzzbombs on this side. None of the sun-hot jets seemed to have penetrated the armor. Broglie had been in the thick of it, with the only functional tank remaining when the Reps blew their way through the bunker line . . . .
The Federal gun emplacements were nearby. The Fed gunners had easily been the best of the local troops. They'd hauled three howitzers up from the gun pits to meet the Republican assault with canister and short-fused high explosive.
That hadn't been enough.Buzzbombs and grenades had disabled the howitzers, and a long line of bodies lay beside the damaged hardware.
"You know, Sergeant?" Steuben resumed unexpectedly. "Colonel Hammer found the relief force's progress a bit leisurely for his taste also. So he sent me to take command . . . and a platoon of Alpha Company, you know. To encourage the others."
He giggled. It was a terrible sound, like gas bubbling through the throat of a distended corpse.
"We were about to take Hill 541 South," Steuben continued. "In twenty-four hours we would have relieved the position here with minimal casualties. The Reps knew that, so they made a desperation assault . . . which couldn't possibly have succeeded against a bunker line backed up by four of our tanks."
Joachim's eyes looked blankly through Des Grieux.
"That's why," the delicate little man said softly, "I really think I ought to kill you now, before you cause other trouble."
"Sir," said Broglie. "Slick cleared our left flank. That had to be done."
Major Steuben's eyes focused again, this time on Broglie. "Did it?" the major said."Not from outside the prepared defenses, I think.And certainly not against orders from a superior officer, who was—"
The cold stare again at Des Grieux. No more emotion in the eyes than there would be in the muzzle of the pistol which might appear with magical speed in Joachim's hand.
"Who was, as I say," the major continued, "passing onmyorders."
"But . . ." Des Grieux whispered. "Iwon."
"No," Steuben said in a crisply businesslike voice. Moods seemed to drift over the dapper officer's mind like clouds across the sun."You ran, Sergeant.I had to make an emergency night advance with the only troops I could fully trust—"
He smiled with cold affection at the nearest of his White Mice.
"In order to prevent Hill 541 North from being overrun.And even then I would have failed, were it not for the actions of Mister Broglie."
"Broglie?" Des Grieux blurted in amazement.
"Oh, yes,"Joachim said."Oh, yes, Mister Broglie. He took charge here after the Federal CP was knocked out and Mister Lindgren was killed. He putSusie Q's driver back into the turret of the damaged tank and used that to stabilize the left flank. Then he led the counterattack which held the Reps on the right flank until my platoon arrived to finish the business."
"I don't like night actions when local forces are involved, Sergeant," he added inafrigid voice."It's dangerous because of theconfusion.If my orders had been obeyed, there would have been no confusion."
Steuben glanced at Broglie. He smiled, much as he had done when he looked at his White Mice. "I'm particularly impressed by the way you controlled the commo net alone while fighting your vehicle, Mister Broglie," he said. "The locals might well have panicked when they lost normal communications along with their command post."
Broglie licked his lips. "It was okay," he said. "Booster did most of it. And it had to be done.Icouldn't stop the bastards alone."
"Wait a minute,"Des Grieux said. "Wait a bloody minute!Iwasn't just sitting on my hands, you know. I was fighting!"
"Yes, Sergeant," Major Steuben said. "You were fighting like a fool, and it appears that you're still a fool. Which doesn't surprise me."
He smiled at Broglie."The colonel will have to approve your field promotion to lieutenant,Mister Broglie,"he said,"but I don't foresee any problems. Of course, you'll have a badly understrength platoon until replacements arrive."
Des Grieux swung a fist at Broglie. The White Mice had read the signs correctly. The male escort was already holding Des Grieux's right arm. The woman on the other side bent the tanker's left wrist back and up with the skill of long practice.
Joachim set the muzzle of his pistol against Des Grieux's right eye. The motion was so swift that the cold iridium circle touched the eyeball before reflex could blink the lid closed.
Des Grieux jerked his head back, but the pistol followed. Its touch was as light as that of a butterfly's wing.
"Via,sir," Broglie gasped. "Don't.Slick's the best tank commander in the regiment."
Steuben giggled again. "If you insist, Mister Broglie," he said. "After all, you won the battle for us here."
He holstered the pistol. A warrior's frustrated tears rushed out to fill Des Grieux's eyes . . . .
Xingha was the staging area for the troops on the Western Wing: a battalion of the Slammers and more than ten thousand of the local Han troops the mercenaries were supporting.
The city's dockyard district had a way to go before it adapted to the influx of soldiers,but it was doing its manful, womanly, childish, and indeed bestial—best to accommodate the sudden need. Soon the entertainment facilities would reach the universal standard to which war sinks those who support the fighters; in all places, in every time.
Sergeant Samuel Des Grieux had seen the pattern occur often during his seven years in the Slammers. He could describe the progression as easily as an ecologist charts the process by which lakes become marshes, then forests.
Des Grieux didn't care one way or the other. He drank what passed for beer; listened to a pair of Oriental women keen,"Oh where ha you been, Laird Randall, me son?"(Hammers Slammers came to the Han contract from seven months of civil war among the Scottish colonists of New Aberdeen); and wondered when he'd have a chance to swing his tank into action. It'd been a long time since he had a tank to command . . . .
"Hey,is there anybody here from Golf Company?"asked a trooper,obviouslya veteran but wearing new-issue khaki. His hair was in a triple ponytail, according to whim or the custom of some planet unfamiliar to Des Grieux. The fellow was moving from one table to the next in the crowded cantina. Just now, he was with a group of H Company tankers next to Des Grieux, bending low and shouting to be heard over the music and general racket.
"Hey, lookit that," said Pesco, Des Grieux's new driver. He pointed to the flat, rear-projection screen in the corner opposite the singers."That's Captain Broglie, isn't he? What's he doing on local video?"
"Who bloody cares?" Des Grieux said. He finished his beer and refilled his glass from the pitcher.
If you tried, you could hear Broglie's voice—though not that of the Han interviewer—over the ambient noise. Despite himself, Des Grieux found himself listening.
"Hey,Johnnie,"chirped a woman in a reddress as shedraped her arm around Des Grieux's shoulders. She squeezed her obviously padded bosom to his cheek.
She was possibly fourteen, probably younger. "Buy me a drink?"
"Out,"said Des Grieux,stiff-arming the girl into the back of a ma at the next table. Des Grieux stared at the video screen, getting cues from Broglie's lips to aid as he fitted together the shards of speech.
"No, on the contrary, the Hindis make very respectable troops," Broglie said. "And as for Baffin's Legion, they're one of the best units for hire. I don't mean the Legion's in our class, of course . . . ."
A fault in the video screen—or the transmission medium—gave the picture a green cast. It made Broglie look like a three-week-old corpse. Des Grieux's lips drew back in a smile.
Pesco followed the tank commander's stare. "You served under him before, didn't you?" he asked Des Grieux. "Captain Broglie, I mean. What's he like?"
Des Grieux slashed his hand across the air in brusque dismissal. "I never served under him,"he said."When he took over the platoon I was in,I transferred to . . . infantry, Delta Company. And then combat cars, India and Golf."
" . . . Baffin's tank destroyers are first class," Broglie's leprous image continued. "Very dangerous equipment."
"Yeah, but look,"Pesco objected."With him, under him, it don't matter.What's he like, Broglie? Does he know his stuff, or is he gonna get somebody killed?"
Near where the singers warbled,"Mother, make my bed soon . . ." a dozen troopers had wedged two of the round tables together and were buying drinks for Sergeant Kuykendall. Des Grieux had heard his former driver'd gotten a twelve-month appointment to the Military Academy on Nieuw Friesland, with a lieutenancy in the Slammers waiting when she completed the course.
He supposed that was okay. Kuykendall had combat experience, so she'd be at least a cunt-hair better than green sods who'd never been on the wrong end of a gun muzzle.
Of course, she didn't have the experience Des Grieux himself did . . . .
"For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain would lie down,"the singers chirped through fixed smiles.
"Slick?" Pesco pressed. "Sarge? What about the new CO?"
Des Grieux shrugged."Broglie?" he said."He's a bloody good shot,I'll tell you that. Not real fast—not as fast as I am. But when he presses the tit, he nails what he's going after."
"Either of you guys from Golf?" asked the veteran in new fatigues. "I just got back from leave and I'm lookin' for my cousin, Tip Rasidi."
"We're Hotel Company, buddy," Pesco said. "Tanks. Why don't you try the Adjutant?"
"Because the bloody Adjutant lost half his bloody records in the transit," the stranger snapped, "and the orderly sergeant tells me to bugger off until he's got his bloody office sorted out. So I figure I'll check around till I find what's happened to Tip."
The stranger scraped his way over to the next table, rocking Pesco forward in his chair. The driver grimaced sourly.
"I don't know if the Hindis are brave or not," said Captain Broglie's image. "I suppose they're like everybody else, some braver than others. What I do know is that their troops are highly disciplined, andthatcauses me some concern."
"C'mon, what about him, then?" Pesco said. "Broglie."
"He'll do what he's told,"Des Grieux said, staring at the video screen. His voice was clear, but it came from far away. "He's smart and he's got balls, I'll give him that. But he'd rather kiss the ass of whoever's giving orders than get out and fight. He coulda been really something, but instead . . ."
Sergeant Kuykendall got up from her table. She was wearing a red headband with lettering stitched in black. The others at the table shouted,"Speech! Speech!" as Kuykendall tried to say something.
"Yeah, but what's Broglie gonna be like as an officer?" Pesco demanded. "He just transferred to Hotel, you know. He'd been on the staff."
"Sure, courage is important," Broglie said on the screen. Though his words were mild enough, his tone harshly dismissed the interviewer's question. "But in modern warfare discipline is absolutely crucial. The Hindi regulars are quite well-disciplined, and I fear that's going to make up for some deficiencies in their equipment. As for Baffin's Legion—"
Kuykendall broke away from her companions. She came toward Des Grieux, stepping between tables with the care of someone who knows how much she's drunk. The letters on her headband read "SIR!"
"—they're first rate in equipmentandunit discipline. The war on the Western Wing isn't going to be a walkover."
"Kid," said Des Grieux in a voice that grated up from deep within his soul, "I'll give you the first and last rule about officers. The more they keep outa your way and let you get on with the fighting, the better they are. And when things really drop in the pot, they're always too busy to get in your way. Don't worry about them."
" . . . from Golf Company?" trailed the stranger's voice through a fissure in the ambient noise.
Sergeant Kuykendall bent over the table. "Hello, Slick," she said in measured tones."I'm glad to see you're back in tanks.I always thought you belonged with the panzers."
Des Grieux shrugged. He was still looking at the screen, though the interview had been replaced by a stern-faced plea to buy War Stamps and support the national effort.
"Tanks,"Des Grieux said,"combat cars . . . I ran a jeep gun once.It don't really matter."
Pesco looked up at Kuykendall. "Hey, Sarge," he said to her. "Congrats on the appointment. Want a beer?"
"Just wanted to say hi to Slick," she said. "Me and him served with Captain Broglie way back to the dawn of time, y' know."
"Hey,"Pesco said,his expression brightening."You know Broglie,then?Looks to me he's gota lot of guts,telling'em like it is on the video when they must a been figuring on a puff piece, is all. Likely to piss off Hammer, don't you think?"
Kuykendall glanced at the screen, though it now showed only a desk and a newsreader who mumbled unintelligibly. "Oh," she said, "I don't know. I guess the colonel's smart enough to know that telling the truth now that the contract's signed isn't going to do any harm. May help things if we run into real trouble; and we might, Baffin's outfit's plenty bloody good."
She looked at Pesco, then Des Grieux, and back to Pesco. There were minute crow's feet around Kuykendall's eyes where the skin had been smooth when she drove for Des Grieux. "But Broglie's got guts, you bet."
Des Grieux shoved his chair backward. "If guts is what it takes to toady t' the brass, he's got 'em, you bet," he snarled as he rose.
He turned. "Hey, buddy!" he shouted. "You looking for Tip Rasidi?"
Voices stilled,though clattering glass,the video screen,and the singers' recorded background music continued at a high level.
The stranger straightened to face the summons.Des Grieux said,"Rasidi drove for me on Aberdeen.We took a main-gun hit and burnt out.There wasn't enough of Tip to ship home in a matchbox."
The stranger continued to stand. His expression did not change, but his eyes glazed over.
The girl in the red dress sat at the table where Des Grieux had pushed her, wedged in between a pair of female troopers. Des Grieux gripped the girl by the shoulder and lifted her. "Come on," he snarled. "We're going upstairs."
One of the seated troopers might have objected, but she saw Des Grieux's face and remained silent.
The girl's face was resigned. She knew what was coming, but by now she was used to it.
"The tow and the halter,"sang the entertainers,"for to hang on yon tree . . . ."
The gravel highway steepened by a couple degrees before the switchback. The Han driving the four-axle troop transport just ahead of Des Grieux's tank opened his exhaust cut-outs to coax more power from the diesel.
As the unmuffled exhaust rattled, several of the troops on the truck bed stuck their weapons in the air and opened fire. A jolt threw one of the Han soldiers backward. His backpack laser slashed a brilliant line across the truck's canvas awning.
The lieutenant in command of the troops leaned from the cab and shouted angrily at his men, but they were laughing too hard to take much notice. Somebody tossed an empty bottle over the side in enough of a forward direction that the officer disappeared back within the cab.
The awnings moldered to either side of the lon,blackened rent, but the treated fabric would not sustain a fire by itself.
The truck ground through the switchback, spewing gravel. Both forward axles were steerable. The vehicle was a solid piece of equipment, well designed and manufactured. The local forces in this contract were a cursed sight better equipped than most of those you saw. Mostly the off-planet mercenaries stood out from the indig troops like diamonds on a bed of mud.
Both sets of locals, these Han and their Hindi rivals . . . .
"Booster," Des Grieux muttered as he sat in the cupola of his tank. "Hindi combat vehicles, schematics. Slow crawl. Out."
He manually set his commo helmet to echo the artificial intelligence's feed onto the left side of the visor. Des Grieux's cold right eye continued to scan the line of the convoy and the terraces that they had passed farther down the valley.
A soldier tossed another empty bottle from the truck ahead. Because the truck was higher and the road had reversed direction at the switchback, the brown glazed ceramics hattered on the turret directly below Des Grieux.A line of heads turned from the truck's rail, shouting apologies and amused warnings to the soldier farther within the vehicle who'd thrown the bottle without looking first.
Des Grieux squeezed his tribarrel's grips, overriding its present Automatic Air Defense setting. He slid the holographic sight picture across the startled Han faces, which disappeared as the men flung themselves flat onto the truck bed.
Pesco shifted his four rear nacelles and pivoted the tank around its bow,following the switchback. They swung in behind the truck again. Des Grieux released the grips and let the tribarrel shift back to its normal search attitude: muzzles forward, at a 45° elevation.
Des Grieux had only been joking. Had he been serious, he'd have put the first round into the fuel tank beneath the truck's cab. Only then would he rake his bolts along the men screaming as they tried to jump from the inferno of blazing kerosene. He'd done that often enough before.
The artificial intelligence rotated three-dimensional images of Hindi armor onto the left side of the visor in obedience to Des Grieux's command. The schematic of a tank as flat as a floor tile lifted to display the balloon tires, four per axle, which supported its weight. In particularly marshy spots—and the rice paddies on both sides of the border area were muddy ponds for most of the year—the tires could be covered with one-piece tracks to lower the ground pressure still further.
The tank did not have a rotating turret. Its long, slim gun was mounted along the vehicle's centerline.The weapon used combustion-augmented plasma to drive armor-piercing shots at velocities of several thousand meters per second.
Comparable Han vehicles mounted lasers in small turrets. Neither technology was quite as effective as the powerguns of the Slammers—and Baffin's Legion; but they would serve lethally, even against armor as thick as that of Des Grieux's tank.
The AI began to display a Hindi armored personnel carrier, also running on large tires behind a thin shield of armor. Des Grieux switched his helmet to direct vision. The images continued to flicker unwatched on the left-hand screen below in the fighting compartment. Adrenaline from the bottle incident left the mercenary too restless to pretend interest in mere holograms.
There were hundreds of vehicles behind Des Grieux's tank. The convoy snaked down and across the valley floor for as far as he could see without increasing his visor's magnification. Most of the column was of Han manufacture: laser vehicles, troop transports, maintenance vans. Huge, articulated supply trucks with powerplants at both ends of the load;they'dbe bitches to get up these ridges separating the fertile valleys.
Des Grieux didn't care about the logistics vehicles, whether indigenous or the Slammers' own. His business was with things that shot, things that fought. If he had a weapon, the form it took didn't matter.A tank like the one he commanded now was best; but if Des Grieux had been an infantryman with nothing but a semiautomatic powergun, he'd have faced a tank and not worried about the disparity in equipment. So long as he had a chance to fight . . . .
The convoy contained a Han mechanized brigade, the Black Banner Guards: the main indig striking force on the Western Wing. The tanks of Hammer's H Company were spread at intervals along the order of march to provide air and artillery defense.
Out of sight of the convoy, two companies of combat cars and another of infantry screened the force's front and flanks. Hammer's air-cushion vehicles were much more nimble on the boggy lowlands than the wheeled and track-laying equivalents with which the indigs made do.
No doubt the locals would rather have built their ownACVs,but the technology of miniaturized fusion powerplants was beyond the manufacturing capacity of any but the most sophisticated handful of human worlds. Without individual fusion bottles, air-cushion vehicles lacked the range and weight of weapons and armor necessary for frontline combat units.
So they hired specialists, the Han and Hindis both. If one side in a conflict mortgaged its future to hire off-planet talent, the other side either matched the ante—or forfeited that future.
The rice on the terraces had a bluish tinge that Des Grieux didn't remember having seen before, though he'd fought on half a dozen rice-growing worlds over the years . . . .
His eyes narrowed. An air-cushion jeep sped up the road from the back of the column. It passed trucks every time the graded surface widened and gunned directly up-slope at switchbacks to cut corners. Des Grieux thought he recognized the squat figure in the passenger seat.
He looked deliberately away.
Des Grieux's tank was nearing the last switchback before the crest. The vehicle ahead began to blat through open exhaust pipes again, though its engine note didn't change. Han trucks used hydraulic torque converters instead of geared transmissions, so their diesels always stayed within the powerband. Lousy troops, but good equipment . . . .
Des Grieux imagined the jeep passing his tank—spinning a little in the high-pressure air vented beneath the tank's skirts—sliding under the wheels of the Han truck and then, asCaptainBroglie screamed,being reduced to a millimeter's thick streak as the tank overran the wreckage despite all Pesco did to avoid the obstacle.
Des Grieux caught himself. He was shaking. He didn't know what his face looked like, but he suddenly realized that the soldiers in the truck ahead had ducked for cover again.
The truck turned hard left and dropped down the other side of the ridge. Brakelights glowed. The disadvantage of a torque coverter was that it didn't permit compression braking . . . .
From the crest, Des Grieux could see three more ridgelines furrowing the horizon to the west. The last was in Hindi territory. Three centuries ago, this planet had been named Friendship and colonized by the Pan-Asian Cooperative Settlement Authority. The organizers' plans had worked out about as well as most notions that depended on the Brotherhood of Man.
More business for Hammer's Slammers. More chances for Slick Des Grieux to do what he did better than anybody else . . . .
Pesco pivoted the tank, changing its attitude to follow the road before sliding off the crest. As the huge vehicle paused, the jeep came up along the port side. Des Grieux expected the jeep to pass them. Instead, the passenger—Broglie, as Des Grieux had known from the first glimpse—gripped the mounting handholds welded to the tank's skirts and pulled himself aboard.
The jeep dropped back. For a moment, Des Grieux could see nothing of his new company commander except shoulders and the top of his head as Broglie found the steps behind their spring-loaded coverplates. If he slipped now—
Broglie lifted himself onto the tank's deck. Unless Pesco was using a panoramic display—which he shouldn't be,not when the road ahead was more than enough to occupy anybody driving a vehicle of the tank's bulk—he didn't know what was going on behind him. The driver would have kittens when he learned, since at least half the blame would land on him if something went wrong.
Des Grieux would have taken his share of the trouble willingly, just to see the red smear wherethathuman being had been ground into the gravel.
Broglie braced one foot on a turret foothold and leaned toward the cupola. "Hello, Slick," he said. He shouted to be heard over the rush of air into the fan intakes."Since we're going to be working together again,I figured I'd come and chat with you. Without going through the commo net and whoever might be listening in."
Des Grieux looked at his new company commander. The skin of Broglie's face was red. Des Grieux remembered that the other man never seemed to tan, just weathered. He looked older, too; but Via, they all did.
"I didn't know you were going to be here when I took the transfer to Hotel," Des Grieux blurted.He hadn't planned to say that; hadn'tplannedto say anything, but the words came out when he looked into Broglie's eyes and remembered how much he hated the man.
"Figured that," said Broglie, nodding. He looked toward the horizon, then added,"You belong in tanks,Slick.They're the greatest force multiplier there is. A man who can use weapons like you ought to have the best weapons."
It wasn't flattery; just cold truth, the way Des Grieux had admitted that Broglie was a dead shot. It occurred to Des Grieux that his personal feelings about Brogue were mutual and always had been.
He said nothing aloud. If the company commander had come to talk, the company commander could talk.
"What's your tank's name, Slick?" Broglie asked.
Des Grieux shrugged. "I didn't name her," he said. "The guy I replaced did. I don't care cop about her name."
"That's not what I asked," Broglie said. "Sergeant."
"Right," said Des Grieux. His eyes were straight ahead, toward the horizon in which the far wall of the valley rose. "The name'sGangbuster. Gangbuster II, since you care so much. Sir."
"Glad to be back in tanks?" Broglie asked. His voice was neutral, but it left no doubt that he expected answers, whether or not Des Grieux saw any point in giving them.
"Any place is fine," Des Grieux said, turning abruptly toward Broglie again. "Just so long as they let me do my job."
The anger in Des Grieux's tone surprised even him. He added more mildly, "Yeah, sure, I like tanks. And if you mean it's been five years—don't worry about it. I haven't forgotten where the controls are."
"I don't worry about you knowing how to handle any bloody weapon there is, Slick," Broglie said. They stared into one another's eyes, guarded but under control. "I might worry about the way you took orders, though."
Des Grieux swallowed. A billow of dust rose aroundGangbuster's bow skirts and drifted back as Pesco slowed to avoid running over the truck ahead.
Des Grieux let the grit settle behind them before he said,"Nobody has to worry aboutmedoing my job, Captain."
"A soldier's job is to obey orders, Slick," Broglie said flatly. "The time when heroes put on their armor and went off to single combat, that ended four thousand years ago. D'ye understand me?"
Des Grieux fumbled within the hatch and brought up his water bottle. The refrigerated liquid washed dust from his mouth but left the sour taste of bile. He stared at the horizon. It rotated sideways as Pesco negotiated a switchback.
"Do you understand me, Slick?" Captain Broglie repeated.
"I understand," Des Grieux said.
"I'm glad to hear it," Broglie said.
Des Grieux felt the company commander step away from the turret and signal to the driver of his jeep. All Des Grieux could see was the red throb of the veins behind his own eyes.
Ten kilometers to the west, the Han and Hindi outpost lines slashed at one another in a crackling barely audible through the darkness.
"These are the calculated enemy positions,"said Captain Broglie. The portable projector spread a holographic panorama in red for Broglie and the three tank commanders of H Company, 2nd Platoon.
Ghosts of the coherent light glowed on the walls of the tent. The polarizing fabric gave the Slammers within privacy but allowed them to see and hear the world outside.
"And here's Baffin's Legion," Broglie continued.
A set of orange symbols appeared to the left, map west, of the red images. The Legion, a combined-arms force of battalion strength, made a relatively minor showing on the map, but none of the Slammers were deceived. Almost any mercenary unit was better than almost any local force; and Baffin's Legion was better than almost any other mercenaries. Almost.
"Remember,"Broglie warned,"Baffin can move just as fast as we can. In fifteen minutes, he could be driving straight through the friendly lines."
A battery of the Slammers' rocket howitzers was attached to the Strike Force. The hogs chose this moment to send a single round apiece into the night. The white glare of their simultaneous muzzle flashes vanished as suddenly as it occurred, but after image from the shells' sustainer motors flickered purple and yellow across the retinas of anyone without eye protection who had been looking in the direction of those brilliant streaks.
"Are they shelling Morobad?" asked Platoon Sergeant Peres.Peres had been in command of 2nd Platoon ever since the former platoon leader vanished in an explosion on New Aberdeen that left a fifty-foot crater where his tank had been. She gestured toward the built-up area just west of the major canal that the map displayed. Morobad was the only community in the region that was more than mud houses and a central street.
Hundreds of Han soldiers started shooting as though the artillery signalled a major attack. Small arms, crew-served weapons, and even the soul-searing throb of heavy lasers ripped out from the perimeter. Flashes and the dull glow of self-sustaining brushfires marked the innocent targets downrange.
"Stupid bastards," Des Grieux muttered, his tone too flat to be sneering. "If they're shooting at anything, it's their own people."
"You got that right, Slick," Broglie agreed as he stared for a moment through the pervious walls of the tent. His face was bleak; not angry, but as determined as a storm cloud.
Han officers sped toward the sources of gunfire on three-wheeled scooters, crying orders and blowing oddly tuned whistles. Some of the shooting came from well within the camp.
A rifle bullet zinged through the air close enough to the Slammers' tent that the fabric echoed the ballistic crack. Medrassi, the veteran commander ofDar es Salaam—House of Peace—swore and hunched his head lower on his narrow shoulders.
"What we oughta do,"Des Grieux said coldly,"is leave these dumb clucks here and handle the job ourself. That way there's only half the people around likely t' shoot us."
Cyan streaks quivered over the horizon to the west. The light wasn't impressive until you remembered it came from ten kilometers away. Shells burst in puffs of distant orange.
Broglie lifted his thumb toward the western horizon."I think that's what they were after, Perry," he said to Sergeant Peres. "Just checking on how far forward Baffin's artillery defenses were."
"Calliopes?" Medrassi asked.
Firing from the Han positions slackened. In the relative silence, Des Grieux heard thepop-pop-popof shells, half a minute after powergun bolts had detonated them.
"Baffin uses twin-barrel 3cmrigs,"Broglie explained."They're really light antitank guns converted to artillery defense. He's got about eight of them. They're slow firing, but they pack enough punch that a single bolt can do the job."
He smiled starkly. "And they still retain their anti-tank function, of course."
Des Grieux spit on the ground.
"The reason that we're not going to leave our brave allies parked here out of the way, Slick,"Broglie continued,"is that we're going to need all the help we can get. Indigenous forces may include an entire armored brigade. The Hindis are tough opponents in their own right—don't judge them by the Han we're saddled with.And Baffin's Legion by itself would be a pretty respectable opponent—even for a Slammers' battalion combat team."
"Great," Peres said, kneading savagely at the scar on the back of her left hand. "Let's do it the other way, then. We keep the hell outa the way while our indig buddies mix it with Baffin and get all this wild shooting outa their system."
"What we're going to do," Broglie said, taking charge of the discussion again, "is turn a sow's ear into a . . . nice synthetic purse, let's say. Second Platoon is going to do that."
He looked at his subordinates. "And I am, because I'm going to be with you tomorrow."
The holographic display responded to Broglie's gestures. Blue arrows labeled as units of the Black Banner Guards wedged their way across the map toward the Hindi lines. Four gray dots, individual Slammers tanks, advanced beyond the arrows like pearls on a velvet tray.
"The terrain is pretty much what we've seen in each of the valleys we crossed on the Han side of the boundary," Broglie said. "Dikes between one and two meters high. Some of them broad enough to carry a tank butdon'tcount on it. Mostly the dikes are planted with hedges that give good cover, and Hindi troops are dug into the mud of the banks. At least Hindi troops—Baffin may be stiffening them."
"Morobad's not the same," Medrassi said through the hedge of his dark, gnarled fingers. "Fighting in a city's not the same as nothing. 'Cept maybe fighting in Hell."
"Don't worry," said Broglie dismissively. "Nobody's going anywhere near that far."
He looked at his tank commanders."What the Strike Force is going to do,guys," he said. "You, me, and the Black Banner Guards . . . is move up—" blue arrows came in contact with the red symbols"—hit 'em—" the arrows flattened "—and retreat in good order, Lord willing and we all do our jobs."
"We'll doourjobs," Sergeant Peres grunted, "but where the hell's the rest of H Company?"
She raised her eyes from the horrid fascination of the holographic display, where blue symbols retreated eastward across terrain markers and red bars formed into arrows to pursue. "Where thehellis the rest of the battalion, Echo, Foxtrot, and Golf?"
The blue arrows on the display had attacked ahead of the gray tank symbols. As the Han forces began to pull back, the tanks provided the bearing surface on which the advancing Hindis ground in an increasingly desperate attempt to reach their planetary enemies.
"Fair question," Broglie said, but he didn't cue the holographic display. Symbolic events proceeded at their own pace.
Outside the Slammers' shelter, a multi-barreled machine gun broke the near silence by firing skyward. Loops of mauve tracers rose until the marking mixture burned out two thousand meters above the camp. Han officers went off again in their furious charade of authority.
Des Grieux sneered at the lethal fireworks on the other side of the one-way fabric. The bullets would be invisible when they fell; but they were going to fall, in or bloody close to the Han lines. Broglie was a fool if he thoughtthislot was going to do the Slammers' fighting for them.
Red arrows forced their way forward over holographic rice paddies. The counterattack spread sideways as Han symbols accelerated their retreat. The gray pearls of the four tanks shifted back more quickly under threat of being overrun on both flanks. Orange arrows joined the red when the computer model estimated that Baffin would commit his far-more-mobile forces to exploit the Hindi victory.
"The rest of our people are here," Broglie said as lines and bars of gray light sprang into place to the north,south,and east of the enemy salient. "Waiting in low-observables mode until Baffin's got too much on his plate to worry about fine tuning his sensor data. Waiting to slam the door."
On either flank of the red-and-orange thrust was a four-tank platoon from H Company and a full company of combat cars. Gray arrows curving eastward indicated combat cars racing across rice paddies in columns of muddy froth, moving to rake the choke point just east of Morobad where enemy vehicles bunched as reinforcements collided with units attempting a panicked retreat.
The dug-in infantry of the Slammers' Echo Company blocked the Hindi eastward advance.On the holographic display, blue Han symbols halted their retreat, then moved again to attack their trapped opponents in concert with Hammer's infantry and the tanks of 2nd Platoon.
The display still showed 2nd to have four vehicles. Everybody in the shelter knew that rear-guard actions always meant casualties—and didn't always mean survivors.
Medrassi grunted into his hands.
"The hogs'll provide maximum effort when the time comes," Broglie said. "The locals have about thirty self-propelled guns, also, but their fire direction may leave something to be desired."
"It's not," Peres said, "going t' be a lot of fun. Until the rest of our people come in."
"The battle depends on 2nd Platoon," Broglie said flatly. "You're all highly experienced, and mostly your drivers are as well. Slick, how do you feel about your driver, Pesco? He's the new man."
Des Grieux shrugged. "He'll do," he said. Des Grieux was looking at nothing in particular through the side of the tent.
Broglie stared at Des Grieux for a moment without expression. Then he resumed, "Colonel Hammer put Major Chesney in command of this operation, but it's not going to work unless 2nd does its job. That's why I'm here with you. We've got to convince the Hindis—and particularly Baffin—that the attack is real and being heavily supported by the Slammers. After the locals pull back—"
He looked grimly at the display, though its image—enemy forces trapped in a pocket while artillery hammered them into surrender—was cheerful enough for Pollyanna.
"After the Han pull back," the captain continued softly, "it's up to us to keep the planned withdrawal from turning into a genuine rout. Echo can't hold by itself if Baffin's Legion slams into them full tilt . . . and if that happens—"
Broglie smiled the hard, accepting smile of a professional describing events which would occur literally over his own dead body.
"—then Baffin can choose which of our separated flanking forces he swallows up first, can't he?"
A Han laser slashed the empty darkness from the perimeter.
"Bloody marvelous,"Peres murmured."But I suppose if they knew what they was doing, they wouldn't need us t' do it for them."
Medrassi laughed. "Dream on," he said.
"Do you all understand our mission, then?" Broglie asked. "Sergeant Peres?"
"Yes sir," Peres said with a nod.
"Sergeant Medrassi?"
"Yeah, sure. I been in worse."
"Slick?"
Des Grieux stared at the wall of the shelter. His mind was bright with the rich, soul-devouring glare of a tank's main gun.
"Sergeant Des Grieux," Broglie said. His voice was no louder than it had been a moment before,but it cut like an edge of glass."Do you understand the operation we will carry out tomorrow?"
Des Grieux looked at his commanding officer. "Chesney never came up with anything this cute," he said mildly. "This one was your baby? Sir."
"I had some input in the planning, that's right," Broglie said tonelessly. "Do you understand the operation, Slick?"
"I understand that it makes a real pretty picture, Cap'n Broglie," Des Grieux replied. "Tomorrow we'll see how it looks on the ground, won't we?"
Outside the shelter, machine gun fire etched the sky in pointless response.
The Han armored personnel carrier was supposed to be amphibious, but it paused for almost thirty seconds on the first dike. The wheels of the front two axles spun in the air; those of the rear pair churned in a suspension of mud and water with the lubricating properties of motor oil.
A Hindi anti-tank gun ripped the APC with a 50mmosmium penetrator. Half of the carrier's rear-mounted engine blew through the roof of the tilted vehicle with acrashmuch louder than the Mach 4 ballistic crack of the shot.
The driver hopped out of the forward hatch and fell down on the dike. His legs continued to piston as though he were running instead of thrashing in mud. Side-hatches opened a fraction of a second later and a handful of unhurt infantrymen flopped clear as well.
Inertia kept the APC's front wheels rotating for some seconds.A rainbow slick of diesel fuel covered the rice paddy behind the vehicle. It did not ignite.
Des Grieux smiled like a shark from his overwatch position on the first terrace east of the floodplain. He traversed his main gun a half degree. The Hindi antitank gun was a towed piece with optical sights. It had no electronic signature to give it away, andGangbuster II's magnetic anomaly detector was far too coarse a tool to provide targeting information at a range of nearly a kilometer.
When the weapon fired, though—
Des Grieux stroked his foot-trip and converted the anti-tank gun into a ball of saturated cyan light.
Han vehicles hosed the landscape with their weapons. Bullets from APC turrets and the secondary armament of laser-vehicles flashed as bright explosions among the foliage growing on dikes and made the mud bubble.
High-powered lasers raised clouds of steam wherever their pale beams struck, but they were not very effective. The lasers were line-of-sight weapons like the Slammers' powerguns. The gunners could hit nothing but the next hedge over while the firing vehicles sheltered behind dikes themselves.
The entire Han advance stopped when the Hindis fired their first gun.
Des Grieux had a standard 2cm Slammers carbine clipped to the side of his seat. Over his head,Gangbuster's tribarrel pumped short bursts into the heavens in automatic air-defense mode. The sky, still a pale violet color in the west, was decorated with an appliquéé of shell tracks and the bolts of powerguns which detonated the incoming.
Both sides' artillery fired furiously. Neither party had any success in breaking through the webs of opposing defenses, but there was no question of takingGangbuster IIout of AAD. The infantry carbine and the tank's main gun were the only means of slaughter under Des Grieux's personal control.
"Blue Two,"Captain Broglie's voice ordered."On command, advance one dike. Remaining elements look sharp."
Blue Two,Dar es Salaam, was on the southern edge of the advance, half a kilometer fromGangbuster II.Broglie's command tank,Honey Girl, was a similar distance to starboard of Des Grieux; and Blue One, Peres, backstopped the Han right flank a full kilometer north ofGangbuster II.The causeway carrying the main road to Morobad was the axis of the Strike Force advance.
The dikes turned the floodplain into a series of ribbons, each about a hundred meters wide. By advancing one at a time from their overwatch positions behind the Black Banner Guards, maybe the Slammers' tanks could get the Han force moving again . . . .
Though if instead the four tanks burst straight ahead in a hell-for-leather dash, they'd open up the Hindi lines like so many bullets through a can of beans.
"Blue Two,go."
Medrassi's tank lurched forward at maximum acceleration. The driver—Des Grieux didn't know his name;hername, maybe—had backed thirty meters in the terraced paddy to give himself a run before they hit the dike.
Water and bright green rice shoots, hand-planted only days before, spewed to either side as the fans compressed a cushion of air dense enough to float 170 tonnes. For a moment,Dar es Salaam's track through the field was a barren expanse of wet clay; then muddy water slopped back to cover the sudden waste.
The tank didn't lift quite high enough to clear the dike, but the driver didn't intend to. The belly plates were the vehicle's thinnest armor. Hindi gunners, much less the Legion mercenaries, could penetrate even a Slammers' tank if it waved too much of its underside in the direction of the enemy.
Dar es Salaam's bow skirts rammed the top layer of the bank ahead of the tank. Fleshy-branched native osiers flailed desperately as they fell with the dike in which they had grown.
Honey Girlfired its main gun. Des Grieux didn't see Broglie's target but therewasa target, because the bolt detonated an anti-tank gun's 400-liter bottle of liquid propellant in a huge yellow flash. The barrel of the Hindi weapon flew toward the Han lines. The bodies of the gun crew shed parts all around the hemispherical blast.
Des Grieux didn't have a target. That bastard Broglie was good, Lord knew.
A pair of Han laser-vehicles resumed the planned advance; or tried to, they'd bogged in the muck when they stopped. Spinning wheels threw brown undulations to either side but contributed nothing to the forward effort. The Han vehicles were supposed to be all-terrain,but they lacked the supplementary treads the Hindi tanks used. The paddies might have been too much for the balloon tires even if the heavy vehicles had kept moving.
Four APCs grunted into motion—drawn byDar es Salaamand encouraged by the deadly 20cm powerguns on the mercenary tanks. The carriers found the going difficult also, but their lower ground pressure made them more mobile than the laser-vehicles were.
Thirty or more of the APCs joined the initial quartet. The advance, one or two vehicles revving into motion at a time, looked like individual drivers and officers making their own decisions irrespective of orders from above—but it had the effect of a planned leapfrog assault.
"Blue One," Broglie ordered. "On command, advance one dike. Remaining elements look sharp." Only buzzbombs and a few light crew-served weapons replied to the empty storm of Han fire. The Hindis kept their heads down and picked their targets.
Bullet impacts glittered on the glacis plate of an APC driving parallel to the causeway. The commander had been conning his vehicle with his head out of the cupola hatch. He ducked down immediately. The driver must have ducked also, even though he was using his periscopes. The APC ran halfway up the side of the causeway and overturned.
"Blue One,go!"
As Peres' driver kickedDixie Dykeforward, Des Grieux's gunnery screen marked a target with a white carat. The barrel of a Hindi gun was rotating to bear when Peres' tank exposed its belly. Excellent camouflage concealed the motion from even the Slammers' high-resolution optics, but the magnetic anomaly detector noticed the shift against the previous electromagnetic background.
Gangbuster II's turret traversed four degrees to starboard on its magnetic gimbals. The cupola tribarrel snarled up at incoming artillery fire,but the only sound within the fighting compartments was the whine of the turret drive motors and the whistling intake of Des Grieux's breath as he prepared to kill a . . . .
The target vanished in the blue-white glare ofHoney Girl's bolt. Broglie had beaten Des Grieux to the shot again, andfuckthat the target was inHoney Girl's primary fire zone.
"Blue Three,"Broglie ordered with his usual insouciant calm."On command, advance two, I repeat two, dikes. Remaining elements, look sharp."
"Driver," Des Grieux ordered, "you heard the bastard."
Medrassi fired, but he didn't have a bloody target for a main-gun bolt, therewasn'tone. A section of dike flash-baked and blew outward as ceramic shards, but Via! what did a couple Hindi infantry matter?
Des Grieux ordered, "Booster, echo main screen, left side of visor, out," and pulled up hard on the seat-control lever. The seat rose. Des Grieux's head slid out of the hatch just as the cupola rotated around him and the tribarrel spat three rounds into the western sky with an acrid stench from the ejected empties.
"Blue Three,go!"
"Goose it, driver!"Des Grieux said as he unclipped the shoulder weapon from his seat and feltGangbuster IIrise beneath him on the thrust of its eight drive fans to mount the dike.
The Han advance was proceeding in reasonable fashion, though at least a score of APCs hung back at the start point. Several laser-vehicles were moving also. The inaction of the rest was more likely the bog than cowardice, though cowardice was never an unreasonable guess when unblooded troops ran into their first firefight.
One laser-vehicle balanced on top of a dike. The fore and aft axles spun their tires in the air, while the grip of the central wheels was too poor to move them off the slick surface. Hindi skirmishers lobbed their buzzbombs at long range toward the teetering vehicle, but the anti-tank guns contemptuously ignored it to wait for a real threat.
To wait for the Slammers' tanks.
Des Grieux's eyes were four meters above the ground surface, higher than the tank's own sensors, whenGangbuster IIhumped itself over the dike. Through the clear half of his visor Des Grieux saw the movement, the glint of the plasma generator trunnion-mounted to an anti-tank gun, as it swung beneath its overhead protection.
The little joystick in the cupola was meant as a manual control for the defense array, but it was multi-function at need—and Des Grieux needed it. He rotated and depressed the main gun with his left hand asGangbuster IIstarted her fierce rush down the reverse side of the dike and the Hindi weapon traversed for the kill.
The pipper on the left side of Des Grieux's visor merged in a stereo image with the view of his right eye. He thumbed the firing tit with a fierce joy, knowing thatnobodyelse was that good.
But Slick Des Grieux was. As the tank bellied down into the spray of her fans, a yellow fireball lifted across the distant fields. A direct hit, snap-shooting and on the move, but Des Grieux was the best!
Broglie fired also, from the other side of the empty road to Morobad. He must've got something also, because a secondary explosion followed the bolt, but the Hindis—strictly locals, no sign at all of the Legion—weren't done yet. A hypervelocity shotspangedfromGangbuster's turret. Kinetic energy became heat with a flash almost as bright as that of a plasma bolt, rocking Des Grieux backward.
He turned toward the shot, pointing his short-barreled shoulder weapon as though it were a heavy pistol. The tank bottomed on the paddy, then bounced upward nearly a meter as water rushed in to fill the cavity, sealing the plenum chamber to maximum efficiency.
The Hindi weapon was dug in low; it had fired through a carefully cut aisle. Now the gunners waited to shoot again, hoping for more of a target than Des Grieux's helmeted head bobbing over the planted dikes between them. None of the three Slammers' tanks providing the base of fire could bear on the anti-tank gun even now that it had exposed itself by firing.Gangbuster II's main gun was masked by the vegetation, also, but Des Grieux's personal weapon spat three times on successive bounces as the tank porpoised forward. The gun's frontal camouflage flashed and burned when a 2cm bolt flicked it. Han officers, guided by the powergun, sent a dozen ropes of tracer arcing toward the Hindi weapon from the cupolas of their APCs. Hindi gunners splashed away from the beaten zone, hampered by the mud and raked by the hail of explosive bullets.
Thepeepeepeepin Des Grieux's earphones warned him to attend to the miniature carat on his visor: Threat Level I, a laser rangefinder paintingGangbuster IIfrom the hedge bordering the causeway. No way to tell what weapon the rangefinder served, but somebody thought it could kill a Slammers' tank . . . .
Des Grieux rotated the turret with the joystick, thrusting hard as though his muscles rather than the geartrain were turning the massive weight of iridium. "Driver, hard right!" he screamed, because the traversing mechanism wasn't going to slew the main gun fast enough by itself.
And maybe nothing was going to slew the main gun fast enough.
Des Grieux shot twice with the carbine in his right hand. His bolts splashed near the bottom of the hedge. One round blew glassy fragments of mud in the air; the other carbonized a gap the size of a pie plate at the edge of the interwoven stems of native shrub.
The laser emitter itself was two meters high in the foliage, but that was only a bead connected to the observer's hiding place by a coaxial optical fiber. The observer was probablycloseto the emitter, though; and if the weapon itself was close to the observer, it would simply pop up and make parallax corrections.
Soldiers liked things simple.
Pesco was trying to obey Des Grieux's order, butGangbuster IIhad enormous forward momentum and there was the dike they were approaching to consider, also.A sheet of spray lifted to the tank's port side as the driver dumped air beneath the left skirt. The edge of the right skirt dipped and cut yellow bottom clay to stain the roostertail sluicing back on that side.
Gangbuster IIstarted to lift for the dike. That was almost certainly the Hindi aiming point, but Des Grieux had the sight picture he wanted, heneeded—
Des Grieux tripped the main gun.Five meters of mud and vegetation exploded as the 20cm bolt slanted across the base of the hedge.
The jolt of sun-hot plasma certainly blinded the laser pickup. It probably incinerated the observer as well: no mud burrow could withstand the impact of a tank's main gun.
The causeway was gouged as if a giant shark had taken a bite out of it. The soil steamed. Fragments of hedge blazed and volleyed orange sparks for twenty meters from where the bolt hit.
The weapon the observer controlled, a rack of four hypervelocity rockets dug into the edge of the causeway ten meters west of the rangefinder,was not damaged by the bolt. The observer's dying reflex must have closed the firing circuit.
Asection of causeway collapsed from the rockets' back blast.Gangbuster II's automatic defense system fired too late to matter. The sleet of steel pellets disrupted the razor-sharp smoke trails, but the projectiles themselves were already past.
The exhaust tracks fanned out slightly from the launcher. One of the four rockets missedGangbuster's turret by little more than the patina on the iridium surface. The sound of their passage was a single, brittlec-c-crack!
BecauseGangbuster IIwas turning in the last instant before the missiles fired—and because the main gun had blasted the observer into stripped atoms and steam before he could correct for the course change—the tank was undamaged, and Des Grieux was still alive to do what he did best.
It was time to do that now, whatever Broglie's orders said.
"Driver, steer for the road!" Des Grieux ordered. "Highball! We're goanna gut 'em like fish, all the way t' the town!"
"Via, we can't do that!" Pesco blurted.Gangbuster IIdropped off the dike in a flurry of dirt, water, and vegetation diced by the fans. "Cap'n Broglie said—"
Des Grieux craned his body forward and aimed his carbine. He fired, dazzling the direct vision sensors built into the driver's hatch coaming. The bolt vaporized a tubful of water ahead ofGangbuster IIand sent cyan quivers through a semicircle of the paddy.
"Drive, you son of a bitch!" Des Grieux shouted.
Pesco resumed steering to starboard, increasing the slantGangbuster IIhad taken to bring the 20cmgun to bear.The gap that bolt had blown in the causeway's border steadied across the tank's bow slope.
A dozen Hindi machine guns in the dikes and causeway rang bullets offGang-buster II's armor. One round snapped the air close enough to Des Grieux's face to fluff his moustache. It reminded him that he was still head and shoulders out of the cupola.
He shoved down the crash bar and dumped himself back into the fighting compartment. The hatch clanged above him, shutting out the sound of bullets andGangbuster II's own tribarrel plucking incoming artillery from the air.
Des Grieux slapped the AAD plate to put the tribarrel under his personal control again.
All three of the tanks in overwatch fired within split seconds of one another. A column of flame and smoke mounted far to the north, suggesting fuel tanks rather than munitions were burning.
Of course, the victim might have been one of the Han vehicles.
The topographic display onGangbuster II's left-hand screen showed friendly units against a pattern of fields and hedges. The entire Han line was in motion, spurred by the mercenaries' leapfrog advance and the Han's own amateur enthusiasm for war.
They'd learn. At least, the survivors would learn.
"General push," Des Grieux said, directing the tank's artificial intelligence to route the following message so that everyone in the Strike Force—locals as well as mercenaries—could receive it. "All units, follow me to Morobad!"
His hand reached into the breaker box and disconnectedGangbuster IIfrom incoming communications.
* * *
The flooded rice paddies slowed the tank considerably. One hundred seventy tonnes were too much for even the eight powerful drive fans to lift directly. The vehicle floated on a cushion of air, but that high-pressure air required solid support, also.
The water and thin mud of the paddies spewed from the plenum chamber.Gangbuster IIrode on the clay undersurface—but the liquid still created drag on the outside of the skirts as the tank drove through it. To make the speed Des Grieux knew it needed to survive,Gangbuster IIhad to have a smooth, hard surface beneath her skirts.
The causeway was such an obvious deathtrap that none of the Han vehicles had even attempted it—but the locals didn't have vehicles with the speed and armor of a Slammers tank.
And anyway, they didn't have Des Grieux's awareness of how important it was to keep the enemy off balance by punching fast as well as often.
Des Grieux latched the 2cm carbine back against his seat. The barrel, glowing from the half magazine the veteran had fired through it, softened the patch of cushion it touched. The stench intertwined with that oozing from the main gun empties on the floor of the turret basket.
Gangbuster IIwas now leading the Han advance instead of supporting it. Three Hindi soldiers got up and ran, left to right, across a dike two hundred meters west of the tank. All were bent over, their bodies tiger-striped by foliage. The trailing pair carried a long object between diem, a machine gun or rocket launcher.
Maybe the Hindis thought they were getting into a better position from which to fire atGangbuster II.Des Grieux's tribarrel,histribarrel again, sawed the men down in a tangle of flailing limbs and blue-white flashes.
Des Grieux didn't need to worry about indirect fire anymore,because the Hindi artillery wouldn't fire into friendly lines . . . and besides,Gangbuster IIwas moving too fast to be threatened by any but the most sophisticated terminally guided munitions. The locals didn't have anything of that quality in their arsenals.
Baffin's Legiondidhave tank-killing rounds that were up to the job. Still, the cargo shells which held two or three self-forging fragments—shaped by the very blasts that hurled them against the most vulnerable spots in a tank's armor—were expensive,even for mercenary units commanding Baffin's payscale,or Hammer's.
For the moment, the guns on both sides were flinging cheap rounds of HE Common at one another, knowing that counterfire would detonate the shells harmlessly in the air no matter what they were.
It'd take minutes—tens of seconds, at least—for Legion gunners to get terminally guided munitions up the spout. That would be plenty of time for the charge Des Grieux led to blast out the core of enemy resistance.
"Hang on!" Pesco cried as though Des Grieux couldn't see for himself thatGangbuster IIwas about to surge up onto the causeway.
A Hindi soldier stood transfixed, halfway out of a spider hole in the hedge on the other side of the road. His rifle was pointed forward, but he was too terrified to sight down it toward the tank's huge, terrible bow. Des Grieux cranked the tribarrel with his right joystick.
Gangbuster IIrose in a slurp of mud as dark and fluid as chocolate cake dough. The Hindi disappeared, not into his hole but by jumping toward the paddies north of the causeway. A Han gunner, lucky or exceptionally skillful, caught the Hindi in mid-leap. A splotch of blood hung in the air for some seconds after the corpse hit the water.
An anti-tank shot struck the rear ofGangbuster II's turret. The bustle rack tore away in a scatter of the tankers' personal belongings, many of them a fire.Impact of the dense penetrator on comparably dense armor heated both incandescent, enveloping the clothes and paraphernalia in a haze of gaseous osmium and iridium.
The projectile had only a minuscule direct effect on the inertia ofGangbuster's 170 tonnes, but the shock made Pesco's hand twitch on the control column. The tank lurched sideways. The lights in the fighting compartment darkened and stayed out,but the screens only flickered as the AI routed power through pathways undamaged when the jolting impact severed a number of conduits.
The second shot blew through the northern hedge a half-second later. Pesco was fighting for control. The projectile hit, but only a glancing blow this time. The shot ricocheted from high on the rear hull, leaving a crease a half-meter long glowing in the back deck.
Des Grieux spun the tribarrel because the cupola responded more quickly than the massive turret forging, but he didn't have a clear target—and the anti-tank gunner didn't need one.
Powergun bolts would dump all their energy on the first solid object they touched. It was pointless trying to shoot at a target well to the other side of dense vegetation. Heavy osmium shot, driven by a jolt of plasma generated in a chamber filled with liquid propellant, carried through the hedge with no significant degradation of its speed or stability.
Gangbuster IIhesitated while Pesco swung the bow to port, following the causeway, and coarsened the fan pitch to regain the speed lost in climbing the embankment. The tank was almost stationary for the moment.
Hindi soldiers rose from spiderholes in the hedge and raised buzzbomb launchers. One of the rocketeers was a hundred meters ahead ofGangbuster II; the other was an equal distance behind, his position already enveloped by the Han advance.
Des Grieux's tribarrel was aimed directly to starboard, and even the main gun was twenty degrees wide of the man in front. The tanker's right hand strained against the joystick anyway. The Hindis fired simultaneously.
The third shot from the anti-tank gun punched in the starboard side of the tank's plenum chamber and exited to port in a white blaze of burning steel. Each hole was approximately the size of a human fist.Air roared out whileGangbuster IIrang like a struck gong. The fan nacelles were undamaged, and the designers had overbuilt pressurization capacity enough to accept a certain amount of damage without losing speed or maneuverability.
The rocket from the man in the rear hit the hedge midway between launcher and the huge intended target. The buzzbomb's pop-out fins caught in the interlaced branches; the warhead did not go off.
The other buzzbomb was aimed well enough as to line, but the Hindi soldier flinched upward as he squeezed the ignition trigger. The rocket sailed overGang-buster IIin a flat arc and exploded in the dirt at the feet of the other Hindi. The body turned legless somersaults before flopping onto the causeway again.
Des Grieux and Broglie fired their 20cm guns together. The Hindi rocketeer and thirty meters of hedge behind him blazed asGangbuster II's bolt raked along it. Through the sudden gap, Des Grieux saw the cyan-hearted fireball into which Broglie's perfect shot converted the Hindi gun that had targeted the tank on the causeway.
"Go, driver!" Des Grieux shouted hoarsely, but Pesco didn't need the order. Either he understood that their survival lay in speed, or blind panic so possessed him that he had no mind for anything but accelerating down the hedged three-kilometer aisle.
The Black Banner Guards were charging at brigade strength. It was a bloody shambles. The Hindis might have run when they saw the snouts of hundreds of armored personnel carriers bellowing toward them—
But they hadn't. More than a score of anti-tank guns unmasked and began firing, now that the contest was clearly a slugging match and not a game of cat-and-mouse.It took less than a second to purge the chamber of a Hindi gun,inject another projectile and ten liters of liquid propellant, and convert a tungsten wire into plasma in the center of the fluid.
Each shot was sufficiently powerful to lance through four APCs together if they chanced to be lined up the wrong way. Broglie, Peres, and Medrassi ripped away at the luxuriance of targets as fast as they could, but the paddies were already littered with torn and blazing Han vehicles.
The heavy anti-tank weapons were only part of the problem. Hindi teams of three to six men crouched in holes dug into the sides of the dikes, then rose to volley buzzbombs into the oncoming vehicles at point-blank range. Some of the rockets missed, but the hollowwhoomp!of a single warhead was enough to disable any but the luckiest APC.
For those targets which the first volley missed, additional buzzbombs followed within seconds.
The jet of fire from a shaped charge would rupture fuel cells behind an APC's thin armor. Diesel fuel atomized an instant before it burst into flame. Hindi machine gunners then shot the Han crews to dog-meat as they tried to abandon their burning vehicles.
Des Grieuxknewthat green locals always broke if you charged them. His mind hadn't fully metabolized the fact that these Hindis might not be particularly accurate with their weapons, but they sure asbloodweren't running anywhere.
As for the Han, who'd already lost at least a quarter of their strength in an unanswered turkey shoot . . . well,Des Grieux had problems of his own."Booster!" he said. "Clear vision!"
The images echoed onto the left side of his visor fromGangbuster II's central screen vanished, leaving the screen itself sharp and at full size. Normally Des Grieux would have touched a finger to his helmet's mechanical controls, but this wasn't normal and both his hands were on the gunnery joysticks.
Gangbuster IIwas so broad that the tank's side skirtsbrushedone, then the other, hedge bordering the causeway. Morobad was a distant haze at the end of an aisle as straight as peasants with stakes and string could draw it. Des Grieux's right hand stroked the main gun counterclockwise to center its hollow pipper on the community. He didn't need or dare to increase the display's magnification to give him actual images.
A Hindi soldier aimed a buzzbomb out of the left-hand hedge. The man's mottled green uniform was so new that the creases were still sharp. His dark face was as fixed and calm as a wooden idol's.
Gangbuster II's sensors noted a human within five meters. They tripped the automatic defense system attached to a groove encircling the tank just above the skirts. A 50x 150mm strip of high explosive fired, blowing its covering of steel polygons into the Hindi like the blast of a huge shotgun.
The Hindi and his rocket launcher, both riddled by shrapnel, hurtled backward. Leaves and branches stripped from the hedge danced in the air, hiding the carnage.
A second rocketeer leaned out of the hedge three steps beyond the first. The ADS didn't fire because the cell that bore on the new target had just been expended on his comrade. The Hindi launched his buzzbomb from so close that the standoff probe almost touched the tank's hull.
The distance was too short for the buzzbomb's fuse to arm. The missile struckGangbuster II's gun mantle and ricocheted upward instead of exploding. A bent fin made the buzzbomb twist in crazy corkscrews.
Nowanother explosive/shrapnel cell aligned. The automatic defense system went off, shredding the rocketeer's torso. Useless, except as revenge for the way the Hindi had made Des Grieux's heart skip a beat in terror—
But revenge had its uses.
Des Grieux put one, then another 20cm bolt into Morobad without bothering to choose specific targets—if there were any. All he was trying to do for the moment was shake up the town. Some of the Legion's anti-artillery weapons were emplaced in Morobad. If the other side kept its collective head,Gangbuster IIwas going to get a hot reception.
Deafening, dazzling bolts from a tank's main gun pretty well guaranteed that nobody in the impact zone would be thinking coolly.
That was all right, and Des Grieux's tank was all right so far, seventy kph and accelerating.Gangbuster IIpressed a broad hollow down the causeway. The surface of dirt and rice-straw matting rippled up to either side under the tank's 170 tonnes, even though the weight was distributed as widely as possible by the air cushion.
The Han brigade that Des Grieux had led to attack was well and truly fucked.
Smoke bubbled from burning vehicles, veiling and clearing the paddies like successive sweeps of a bullfighters cape.Some APCs had been abandoned undamaged. Their crews cowered behind dikes while Hindi buzzbomb teams launched missile after missile at the vehicles.
The rocketeers weren't particularly skillful: buzzbombs were reasonably accurate to a kilometer, but bits were a toss-up for most of the Hindis at anything over 100 meters. Determination and plenty of reloads made up for deficiencies in skill.
Han gunfire was totally ineffective. The officer manning the cupola machine gun also had his vehicle itself to command. As the extent of the disaster became clear, finding a way to safety overwhelmed any desire to place fire on the Hindis concealed by earth and foliage.
The infantry in the APC cargo compartments had individual gunports, but the Lord himself couldn't have hit a target while looking through a view slit and shooting from the port beneath it. The APCs bucked and slipped on the slimy terrain. In the compartments, men jostled one another and breathed the hot, poisonous reek of powder smoke and fear. Their bullets and laser beams either vanished into the landscape or glanced from the sideplates of friendly vehicles.
Des Grieux hadn't a prayer of a target either. He was trapped within the strait confines of the hedges for the two minutes it would takeGangbuster IIto travel the length of the causeway.
His tribarrel raked the margins of the road, bursts to the right and left a hundred meters ahead of the tank's bluff bow. Stems popped like gunfire as they burned. That might keep a few heads down, but it wasn't a sufficient use for the most powerful unit on the battlefield.
Des Grieux could order his driver into the paddies again, but off the road the tank would wallow like a pig. This time there would be Hindi rocketeers launching buzzbombs from all four sides. Des Grieux no longer thought the local enemy would panic because it was a shark they had in the barrel to shoot at.
By contrast, the remaining Slammers' tanks were having a field day with the targets Des Grieux and the Han had flushed for them. Tribarrels stabbed across a kilometer of paddies to splash cyan death across Hindis focused on nearby APCs. Straw-wrapped packets of buzzbombs exploded, three and four at a time, to blow gaps in the dikes.
The left-hand situation display inGangbuster's fighting compartment suddenly lighted with over a hundred red carats. The tanks of a Hindi armored brigade, lying hidden on the east side of the canal which formed the eastern boundary of Morobad, had been given the order to advance. When the drivers lighted their gas turbine powerplants,Gangbuster's sensors noted the electronic activity and located the targets crawling up onto prepared firing steps.
Morobad was less than a kilometer away. Hindi tanks maneuvered on both sides of the causeway to bring the guns fixed along the centerline of their hulls in line withGangbuster II.The Hindi vehicles mounted combustion-augmented plasma weapons, like the anti-tank guns but more powerful because a tank chassis permitted a larger plasma generator than that practical on a piece of towed artillery.
Des Grieux's situation display showed the condition clearly. The visuals on his gunnery screen were the same as they'd been for the past minute and a half: unbroken hedgerows which would stop bolts from his powerguns as surely as thirty centimeters of iridium could.
A Hindi shotcrackedleft-to-right across the road, a tank's length behindGangbuster II.Somebody'd gotten a little previous with his gunswitch, but the tank that had fired was still backing one track to slew its weapon across the Slammers' vehicle.
Des Grieux traversed his main gun, panning the target, and rocked the foot-trip twice. Instinct and the situation display at the corner of his eye guided him: the orange circle on the gunnery screen showed only foliage.
The first bolt flash-fired the wall of hedge. The second jet of cyan plasma crashed through the gap and made a direct hit on the Hindi tank.
The roiling orange fireball rose a hundred meters. The column of smoke an instant later mounted ten times as high before flattening into an anvil shape which dribbled trash back onto the paddies. The compression wave of the explosion flattened an expanding circle of new-planted rice. Rarefaction following the initial shock jerked the seedlings upright again.
A tank on the north side of the causeway slammed a shot intoGangbuster II's bow. A hundred kilos of iridium armor and #2 fannacelle turned into white-hot vapor which seared leaves on which it cooled.
Pesco shouted and briefly lost control of his vehicle. The tank's enormous inertia resisted turning and kept the skirts on the road despite a nasty shimmy because of the drop in fan pressure forward.
Des Grieux tried to traverse his main gun to bear on the new danger, but the turret had seventy-five degrees to swing clockwise after its systems braked the momentum of the opposite rotation. He wasn't going to make it in the half-second before the next Hindi shot transfixedGangbuster II's relatively thin side armor—
But he didn't have to, because Captain Broglie's command tank nailed the Hindi vehicle. Plates of massive steel armor flew in all directions even though the bolt failed to detonate the target's munitions.
Score one for Broglie,the bastard; and if he'd brought the rest of the platoon along with Des Grieux, maybeGangbuster IIwouldn't be swinging in the breeze right now.
Hindi tanks were firing all along the line. They ignoredGangbuster IIbecause the tanks destroyed to the immediate north and south of the causeway blocked the aim of their fellows.
The Hindi CAP guns were useless except against armored vehicles—their solid projectiles had no area effect whatever. Against armor, they were neither quite as effective shot for shot, nor quite as quick-firing as the Slammers' 20cm guns.
They were effective enough, though, and there was a bloody swarm of them.
Broglie and his two overwatching companions hit half a dozen of the Hindi vehicles, destroying them instantly even though most of the cyan bolts struck the thickest part of the targets' frontal armor. Then the surviving Hindis got the range and volleyed their replies.
A shot hit the cupola above Broglie. Ammo burned in the feed tube ofHoney Girl's tribarrel. A blue-white finger poked skyward, momentarily dimming the rising sun. Des Grieux's display cross-hatchedDixie Dykeas well, indicating the north-flank tank had been damaged as Peres raked Hindi lines with both main gun and tribarrel. All three units jerked backward to turret-down positions as quickly as their drivers could cant their fans.
"Driver!" Des Grieux said asGangbuster II, its front skirts dragging sparks from the stone road surface,crossed the canal bridge."Turn us and we'll hit the bastards from behind. Booster, gimme a fucking city map!"
The cheap buildings of Morobad's canal district were ablaze. Some of the walls were plastered wattle-and-daub; other builders had hung painted sheetiron on scantlings of flimsy wood.Neither method could resist the two main-gunrounds Des Grieux snapped toward the town whenGangbuster IIstarted its rush. The bolts had the effect of flares dropped into a tinder box.
The tank drove into a curtain of flame at ninety kph. There was something in the way,a wrecked vehicle or the corner of a building.Gangbuster's skirts shunted it aside with no more commotion than the clang the automatic defense system made when it went off.
The tank's AI obediently replaced the topographic display on the left screen with a map of Morobad fromGangbuster II's data banks.The streets were narrow and twisting, even the thoroughfare leading west from the causeway.
Two hundred meters from the canal was a market square bordered by religious and governmental buildings. That would give Pesco room to turn. WhenGangbuster IIroared out of the city again and took the turretless Hindi tanks in the rear, it'd be all she wrote.
The air cleared at street level.Gangbuster IIscraped the brick facade of a three-story tenement which started to collapse on them. At least a score of Hindi soldiers opened fire with automatic weapons. Bullets ricocheted from the sloped iridium armor, scything down the shooters and their fellows. Cells of the automatic defense system fired, louder and more lethal still.
Haze closed in momentarily, but a telltale in the fighting compartment informed Des Grieux that Pesco had already switched to sonic imaging instead of using the electro-optical spectrum to drive.Gangbuster IIswept into the market square, pulling whorls of smoke into the clear, sunlit air.
A six-tube battery of 170mm howitzers was set up in the square. Empty obturator disks and unneeded booster charges in white silk littered the cobblestones behind the weapons. The crews were desperately cranking their muzzles down to fire point-blank atGangbuster II.Hindi infantry cut loose with small arms from all windows facing the square and from the triple tile overhangs of the large temple behind the walled courtyard to the south.
As Des Grieux squeezed both firing tits,a hundred-kilogram shell hit the turret. The round was a thin-cased HE, what the crew happened to have up the spout when they got warning of the tank's approach. The red flash destroyed thirty percent ofGangbuster II's forward sensors and rocked the tank severely, but the hatches were sealed and the massive turret armor was never even threatened.
"Driv—" Des Grieux started to say as his hazy screens showed him Hindi gunners doubling up, flying apart, burning in puffs of vaporized steel as the powergun sights slid across the battery.
A legless Hindi battery captain jerked the lanyard of his last howitzer. The shell was a capped armor-piercing round. Even so, the round would not have penetratedGangbuster II's frontal armor if it had struck squarely. Instead, it hit Pesco's closed hatch edge-on and spalled the backing plate down through the driver's helmet and skull.
Pesco convulsed at the controls ofGangbuster II.The tank skidded across the square, swapping ends several times. The courtyard wall braked but did not stop the careening vehicle. Des Grieux shouted curses, but words had no effect on the tank or its dead driver.
Gangbuster IIslid bow-first into the stone-built temple. Blocks and tiles from the multiple roofs cascaded onto the tank and over the courtyard beyond.
AllGangbuster II's systems crashed at the massive overload.
Des Grieux knew nothing about that. Despite his shock harness, his head slammed sideways into the map display so that he shut down an instant before his tank did.
Existence was a pulsing red blur until Des Grieux opened his eyes. The pulsing continued every time his heart beat, but now he could see real light: the tiny yellow beads ofGangbuster II's standby illumination system.
The air in the fighting compartment was hot and foul. When the power went off, so did the air conditioning. The expended 20cm casings on the floor continued to radiate heat and complex gases.
Des Grieux reached for the reset switch to bringGangbuster II's systems alive again. Movement brought blinding pain. The tank's shock harness had retracted when movement stopped, but the straps left tracks in the form of bruises and cracked ribs where they had gripped Des Grieux to prevent worse.
His mouth tasted of blood, and there seemed to be a layer of ground glass between his eyes and their lids.
"Blood and martyrs,"Des Grieux whispered.The taste in his mouth came from his tongue, which had swollen to twice its normal size because he had bitten it.
When the world ceased throbbing and his stomach settled again, Des Grieux finished his movement to the reset switch. Pain just meant you were alive. If you were alive, you could do for the bastard who'd doneyou.
The snarl of powerguns dimly penetrated to the tank's interior. Neither of the indig forces had powerguns of their own. Either the Slammers had entered Morobad, or Baffin had committed his Legion to exploit the ratfuck the Black Banner Guards had made when they tried to followGangbuster II's lead.
Des Grieux knew which alternativehe'dput his money on.
Gangbuster IIcame to life crisply and fast. That was better than the man in her fighting compartment had managed.
"Booster," Des Grieux said. His injured tongue slurred his words. "Order of Battle on Number One."
Screen #1, the left-hand unit, came up with the map of Morobad Des Grieux had ordered onto it before the crash and shutdown.The new overlay showed Des Grieux just what he'd bloody expected, the orange symbols of Legion vehicles streaming through the town and fanning out when they crossed the canal.
This was no feint or stiffening force. Baffin was committing his entire battalion-strength command to end the war here on the Western Wing.
"Like bloody hell . . ." Des Grieux muttered. "Driver! Report!"
Nothing. "Pesco?"
Nothing. Des Grieux would have to crawl forward and see what the hell was going on; but first he checked the condition of his tank.
Gangbuster IIwas fully operable. The tank was down one fan and had five fist-sized holes in her skirts. Des Grieux had no recollection of several of those hits. Both guns were all right, and sixty percent of the massively redundant sensor suite checked out as well.
The only problem was that, according to the echo-ranging apparatus, the tank was covered by several meters of variegated rubble: bricks, tiles, wooden beams, and the bodies of Hindi soldiers who'd been shooting from the temple roofs up to the momentGangbuster IIbrought the building's facade down on itself. All the visual displays were blank because the pickups were buried.
Of course,if the Slammers' vehicle hadn't been so completely concealed,Baffin's troops would have finished Des Grieux off by reflex. Veteran mercenaries were generally men who'd survived by never trusting a corpse until they'd put in a bayonet of their own.
A four-ship platoon of Baffin's tank destroyers slid eastward across the map of Morobad. They were air-cushion vehicles mounting 15cm power guns behind frontal armor almost as thick as that of the Slammers' tanks.The main guns were in centerline mountings like those of the Hindi tanks—turrets were relatively heavy, and an air-cushion vehicle could rotate easily in comparison to wheeled or track-laying armor.
Companies of infantry preceded and followed the tank destroyers in four air-cushion carriers apiece. Baffin carried his infantry in large, lightly armored vehicles; Hammer mounted his men on one-man skimmers with their heavy weapons on air-cushion jeeps. Either method worked well with good troops; and both oftheseunits were very good indeed.
Gangbuster IIshone brightly on Des Grieux's display as a cross-hatched blue symbol, but the Legion troops advancing through Morobad showed no sign of awareness. Their screens would be tuned to the Han/Slammers defenses kilometers to the east . . . if there were any Han troops left to thicken the line of cursing Slammers infantry and the survivors of 2nd Platoon.
Not all the Legion equipment in the square outside the collapsed temple was moving. Des Grieux's #1 display marked four of Baffin's 3cm twin guns, half the Legion's anti-artillery defenses, with neat orange symbols. The weapons were emplaced to either side of the thoroughfare.Support troops had hastily bulldozed the wreckage of the Hindi battery out of the way.
Ideally, artillery-defense guns should have a clear view to the horizon on all sides. In practice, crews preferred to set up in defilade where they were safe from hostile direct-fire weapons.Even so,the buildings surrounding the market square reduced the defended area to what seemed at first an unusually narrow cone.
Three command vehicles, armored air-cushion vans filled with communications gear, were parked back-to-back in a trefoil at the northwest corner of the square.Thatwas what the 3cm guns were protecting: Baffin in his advanced command post.
Des Grieux's muscles began to tremble with reaction. He no longer felt the pain in his ribs; fresh adrenaline smoothed the knotted veins flowing to his brain. Baffin himself, a hundred and fifty meters fromGangbuster II's main gun . . . .
"Pesco, you lazy bastard!" Des Grieux snarled, but he'd already given up on raising a response from his driver. He climbed out of his seat and slid between the hull and the frame of the turret basket.
Thick 20cm disks littered the deck, the empty matrixes that had aligned the copper atoms which the powerguns released as plasma. One disk blocked the small hatch separating the fighting compartment from the driver's compartment. Des Grieux tossed the empty angrily behind him. The polyurethane was hot and still tacky; it clung to his fingertips.
As soon as he opened the hatch, the smell told Des Grieux that his driver was dead. Pesco had voided his bowels when the fragment sliced off the upper half of his skull. The liters of blood his heart pumped before the autonomic nervous system shut down had already begun to rot in the warm compartment.
Des Grieux swore.The hatch—the part of it that hadn't decapitated Pesco—was jammed beyond opening by anything short of rear-echelon maintenance. He didn't know what thebloodyhell he was going to do with the driver's body.
He released the seat latch so that the back flopped down. The remaining contents of Pesco's cranial cavity slopped over Des Grieux's hands. He rotated the seat forty-five degrees to its stop, then tilted the corpse sideways out onto the forward deck of the compartment. There it blocked the foot pedals, but Des Grieux wouldn't be able to use those anyway.
Des Grieux leaned over the bloody seat, set the blade angles at zero incidence, and switched on the drive fans. All the necessary controls were on the column; the duplicate nacelle-attitude controls on the foot pedals permitted a driver to do four things simultaneously in an emergency—
ButGangbuster IIdidn't have a driver anymore.
Seven green lights and a red one marked the fan status screen beneath the main driving display, but that was only half the story. Des Grieux knew the intake ducts were blocked as surely asGangbuster II's hatches. That didn't matter at the moment, but it would as soon as he rotated the pitch control and the fans started to suck wind.
No choice. Des Grieux could only hope that vibration as the nacelles drew against the rubble above them would help to clear the vehicle. Because that was what he needed to do first.
Des Grieux breathed deeply. He didn't really notice the smell; other things could get in his way, but not that. He adjusted the nacelle angle to a balance between lift and thrust. He hoped he had the mixture right, but whatever he came up with would have to do.
Des Grieux had been a lousy driver; he was far too heavy-handed, forcing the controls the way he forced himself.
For this particular job, a heavy hand was the only choice.
The fans hummed, running at full speed though the throttles were at their idle setting. With the pitch at zero, the leading edges of the blades knifed the air with minimal resistance.Gangbuster IIbegan to resonate with a bell-note deeper than usual because the hull didn't hang free in the air.
Des Grieux sucked in another breath. His right hand drew the linked throttles full on, while his left thumb adjusted the pitch to sixty degrees. The tank wheezed and bucked like a choking lion. Des Grieux scrambled backward out of the hatch.
The empties jounced on the floor with the violence ofGangbuster II's attempts to draw air through choked intakes. Des Grieux threw himself into his seat and grasped the gunnery joysticks. The orange pippers glowed against a background of uniform gray because the visual pickups were shrouded.
Des Grieux twisted the left joystick.Metal screeched as the turret began to swing clockwise against its weight of rubble. Hot insulation tinged the atmosphere of the fighting compartment as the turret drive motors overloaded.
Des Grieux twisted the control in the opposite direction. The turret reversed a few centimeters. There was a squalling crash as the mass of overburden shifted and slid away fromGangbuster II's turret and deck. The tank bobbed like a diver surfacing through a sea of rubble.
The fan blades bit the air for which they had been starving. Uncontrolled,Gangbuster IIlurched backward at an accelerating pace.
Des Grieux shouted with glee as he rotated his turret and cupola controls again. Now he had a sight picture and targets.
Gangbuster IIhad hit the temple facade nose on. Now it backed through the hole it had torn in the wall, bucking over and plowing through tiles and masonry from the building's upper stories.
The Hindis were using the temple's forecourt as a field hospital for casualties from Des Grieux's initial attack.Medics and the wounded who could move under their own power ran or crawled fromGangbuster II's bellowing reappearance.
Des Grieux ignored them. The gap his tank had smashed in the courtyard wall showed a tone edge of his gunnery screen,and a pair of Legion3cm carriages were visible through it. The Legion guns were firing upward at a 40° angle, snapping incoming shells from the air as soon as they notched the horizon.
The tribarrel's solid sight indicator covered the Legion weapons an instant before the main gun swung on target. Brilliant cyan bolts raked the Legion crews and the receivers of their guns. A pannier of ammunition exploded with a flash like that of a miniature nova. It destroyed everything within a five-meter sphere, pavement included.
Gangbuster IIslewed across the courtyard in a scraping, sparking curve. The tank wasn't going to follow the track by which it had plunged in from the market square. The gap in the courtyard wall foreshortened into solidity as the damaged skirts slid the tank toward a point twenty meters west of its initial entry. The screams of wounded men in the vehicle's path were lost in the howl of steel on stone.
Des Grieux took his right hand from the joystick long enough to close the commo breaker. "Blue Three to Big Dog One-niner!" he shouted hoarsely to battalion fire control. "Get some arty on top of us! Get us—"
Gangbuster IIstruck the courtyard wall for the second time. The shock threw Des Grieux forward into his harness.Redoubled pain shrank objects momentarily to pinhead size in his vision, but he did not black out.
The tank's iridium hull armor smashed through the brickwork, but the impact stripped off the already-damaged skirts. Momentum droveGangbuster IIpartway into the market square. The vehicle halted there because half the plenum chamber was gone.
"—some firecracker rounds!"Des Grieux gasped to artillery control, demanding anti-personnel shells as his hands worked his joysticks.
Two of the 3cm pieces were undamaged. The crew of the gun nearest the ammunition blast was dead or writhing shrivelled on the pavement, but the gunners of the fourth piece were cranking down their twin muzzles to bear on the unexpected threat.
A bolt fromGangbuster II's main gun struck the shield just below the stubby barrels of the artillery-defense weapon. The gun seemed to suck in, then flash outward as a ball of sunbright vapor.
A loader had turned to run when she saw death pointing downGangbuster II's 20cm bore. Gaseous metal enveloped all of the Legion soldier but her outflung hand. When the glowing ball condensed and vanished, the hand remained like a wax dummy on a framework of carbonized sticks.
Des Grieux's tribarrel raked the Legion command group. The plating of the vehicles' boxy sides was thick enough to turn about half the 2cm bolts—but at this short range,onlyhalf.
Gangbuster II's main gun continued to rotate on target. One of the three vans already sparkled with electrical shorts, while another puffed black smoke from the holes the powergun had blown across its flank.
"Blue Leader to Blue Three," Captain Broglie cried across the crackling, all-band static of powergun discharges. "Abandon your vehicle immediately! Anti-tank rounds are incoming on your location!"
"Screw you, Broglie!" Des Grieux screamed as his main gun slammed a bolt into the central command track, the one that was bow-on with its thicker frontal armor towardGangbuster II's tribarrel. The 20cm bolt blew out the vehicle's back and sides with a piston of vaporized metal which had been the glacis plate a microsecond earlier.
The Legion tank destroyer entering the square from the west snapped a bolt from its 15cm powergun intoGangbuster II's turret. The tank rocked backward under the impact.
Des Grieux slammed into the seat. The screens and regular lighting went out, but the inner face of the turret armor glowed a sulphurous yellow.
Heat clawed at the skin of Des Grieux's face and hands. He started to draw in a breath. The air was fire, but he had to breathe anyway.
Gangbuster II's nacelles stopped bucking in the stripped plenum chamber when the power shut off. Now the tank shuddered with heat stresses.
Des Grieux punched the reset switch. A conduit across the turret burst with a green flash. The holographic displays quivered to life, then went blank.
A salvo of shells landed near enough to rock the tank with theircrump crump crump-CRUMP! They were HE Common, not anti-tank. The rounds had been in flight before the battery commander knew there was a hole blasted in the Legion's artillery defenses.
The seat controls were electrical; nothing happened when Des Grieux tugged the bar. He reached up—his ribs hurt almost as much as his lungs did—and slid the cupola hatch open manually.
Buildings around the market square were burning. Smoke mingled with ozone from the powerguns, organic residues from propellants and explosives, and the varied stench of bodies ripped open as they died.
It was like a bath in cool water compared to the interior of the tank.
The iridium barrel ofGangbuster II's main gun was shorter by eighty centimeters. That was what saved Des Grieux's life. At this range, the tank destroyer's bolt would have penetrated if it had struck the turret face directly.
The stick of shells that just landed had closed the boulevard entering the square from the west. The tank destroyer that hitGangbuster IIwriggled free of collapsed masonry fifty meters away. The vehicle was essentially undamaged, though shrapnel had pecked highlights from its light-absorbent camouflage paint, and the cupola machine gun hung askew.
Bodies, and the wreckage of equipment too twisted for its original shape to be discerned, littered the pavement of the square.
Des Grieux set the tribarrel's control to thermal self-powered operation. It wouldn't function well, but it was better than nothing.
The manual traverse wheel refused to turn; the 15cm bolt had welded the cupola ring to the turret. The elevating wheel spun, though, lowering the triple muzzles as the tank destroyer's own forward motion slid it into Des Grieux's sight picture.
Cargo shells popped open high in the heavens. Des Grieux ignored the warning. He squeezed the butterfly triggers to rip the tank destroyer's skirts. Bolts which might not have penetrated the vehicle's heavy iridium hull armor tore fist-sized holes in the steel.
Des Grieux got off a dozen rounds before his tribarrel jammed. They were enough for the job. The tank destroyer vented its air cushion through the gaps in the plenum chamber and grounded with a squealing crash.
Des Grieux bailed out ofGangbuster II, carrying his carbine. He slid down the turret and hit the pavement on his feet, but his legs were too weak to support him. He sprawled on his face.
The anti-tank submunition, one of three drifting down from the cargo shell by parachute, went off a hundred meters in the air. Thewhack!of the blast knocked Des Grieux flat as he started to get up. The supersonic penetrator which the explosion forged from a billet of depleted uranium had already punched through the thin upper hull ofGangbuster II.
Ammunition and everything else flammable within the tankwhuffedout in a glare that seemed to shine through the armor. The fusion bottle did not fail. The turret settled again with a clang, askew on its ring.
Secondary explosions to the east and further west within Morobad marked other effects of the salvo, but none of the submunitions had targeted the disabled tank destroyer. Des Grieux sat up and crossed his legs to provide a stable firing position. He wasn't ready to stand, not quite yet. Heat from his tank's glowing hull washed across his back.
What sounded like screaming was probably steam escaping from a ruptured boiler. Humans couldn't scream that loud. Des Grieux knew.
He pointed his carbine.
The tank destroyer's forward hatch opened. The driver started to get out. Des Grieux shot him in the face. The body fell backward. Its feet were still within the hatch, but the arms flailed for a time.
The hull side-hatch—the tank destroyer had no turret—opened a crack. Des Grieux covered the movement. Cloth—it wasn't white, just a gray uniform jacket, but the meaning was clear—fluttered from the opening.
"We've surrendered!" a woman called from inside. "Don't shoot!"
"Come on out, then," Des Grieux ordered. His voice was a croak. He wasn't sure the vehicle crew could hear him, but a woman wearing lieutenant's insignia extended her head and shoulders from the hatch.
Her face was expressionless. When she saw that Des Grieux did not fire, she climbed clear of the tank destroyer. A male commo tech followed her. If they had sidearms, they'd left them within the vehicle.
"We've all surrendered," she repeated.
"Baffin's surrendered?" Des Grieux asked. He had trouble hearing. He wanted to order his prisoners closer, but he couldn't stand up and he didn't want them looking down at him.
"Via, Colonel Baffin wasthere,"the lieutenant said, gesturing toward the three command vehicles.
The center unit that Des Grieux hit with his main gun was little more than bulged sidewalk above the running gear.
She shook her head to clear it of memories. "The Legion's surrendered, that's what I mean," she said.
"We must've lost ten percent of our equipment from that one salvo of artillery. No point in just getting wasted by shells. There'll be other battles . . . ."
The lieutenant's voice trailed off as she considered the implications of her own words. The commo tech stared at her in cow-eyed incomprehension.
Des Grieux leaned against a slope of shattered brick. The corners were sharp.
That was good. Perhaps their jagged touch would prevent him from passing out before friendly troops arrived to collect his prisoners.
Regimental HQ was three command cars backed against a previously undamaged two-story school building. Flat cables snaked out of the vehicles, through windows and along corridors.
The combination wasn't perfect. Still, it provided Hammer's staff with their own data banks and secure commo, while permitting them some elbow room in the inevitable chaos at the end of a war—and a contract.
"Yeah, what is it?" demanded the orderly sergeant. The lobby was marked off by a low bamboo barrier. Three Han clerks sat at desks in the bullpen area, while the orderly sergeant relaxed at the rear in the splendor of his computer console. Behind the staff was a closed door marked headmaster in Hindi script and adjutant/hammer's regiment in stenciled red.
Des Grieux withdrew the hand which he'd stretched toward the throat of the Han clerk. "I'm looking for my bloody unit," he said, "and this bloody wog—"
"C'mon,c'monback,"the orderly sergeant demanded with a wave of his hand. "Been partying pretty hard?"
Des Grieux brushed a bamboo post and knocked it down as he stepped into the bullpen. The local clerks jabbered and righted the barrier.
"Wasn't a party," Des Grieux muttered. "I been in a POW camp the past week."
The orderly sergeant blinked."AHanPOW camp,"Des Grieux amplified."Our good wog buddies here—" he kicked out at the chair of the nearest clerk; the boot missed, and Des Grieux almost overbalanced "—picked me up when they swept Morobad. Baffin's troops got paroled out within twenty-four hours, butIgot stuck with the Hindi prisoners 'cause nobody knew I was there."
The orderly sergeant's name tag read Hechinger. His nose wrinkled as Des Grieux approached. The Han diet of the POW camp differed enough from what the Hindi prisoners were used to that it gave most of them the runs. Latrine facilities within the camp were wherever you wanted to squat.
"Well, why didn't you tell them you were a friendly?" Hechinger asked in puzzlement.
Des Grieux's hands trembled with anger. "Have you ever tried to tell a woganything?" he whispered. "Without a gun stuck down their throat when you say it?"
He got a grip on himself and added, more calmly, "And don't ask me for my ID bracelet. One of the guards lifted that first thing. Thought the computer key was an emerald, I guess."
Hechinger sighed. "Mary, key data," he ordered the artificial intelligence in his console. "Name?"
"Des Grieux, Samuel, Sergeant-Commander," the tanker said. "H Company, 2nd Platoon, Platoon Sergeant Peres commanding. Shewascommanding, anyhow. She may've bought it last week."
The console hummed and projected data. Des Grieux, standing at the back of the unit, could see the holograms only as refractions in the air.
"One of our trucks was going by and I shouted to the driver," Des Grieux muttered, glaring at the clerks. The three of them hunched over their desks, pretending to be busy. "He didn't know me, but he knew I wasn't a wog. I could've been there forever."
"Well,"said the orderly sergeant,"three days longer and you'd sure've been finding your own transport back to the Regiment. We're pulling out. Got a contract on Plessy. Seems the off-planet workers there're getting uppity and think they oughta have a share in the shipyard profits."
"Anyplace," Des Grieux said. "Just so long as I've got a gun and a target."
"Well, we got a bit of a problem here, trooper," Hechinger said as he frowned at his display. "Des Grieux, Sergeant-Commander, is listed as dead."
"I'm not bloodydead," Des Grieux snarled. "Blood'n Martyrs, ask Sergeant Peres."
"Lieutenant Peres, as she'll be when she comes off medical leave," the orderly sergeant said, "isn't a lotta help right now either. And if you're going to ask about—" he squinted at the characters on his display "—Sergeant-Commander Medrassi, he bought the farm."
Hechinger smirked. "Like you did, y'see? Look, don't worry, we'll—"
"Look, I just want to get back to my unit," Des Grieux said, hearing his voice rise and letting it. "Is Broglie around?Hebloody knows me. I just saved his ass—again!"
The orderly sergeant glanced over his shoulder. "Captain Broglie we might be able to round up for you, trooper," he said carefully. He nodded back toward the Adjutant's office.
"Anyhow,"Hechinger continued,"he was captain when he went in there. Don't be real surprised if he comes out with major's pips on his collar, though."
"Thatbastard . . ." Des Grieux whispered.
"Captain Broglie's very much the fair-haired boy just now, you know, buddy," Hechinger continued in his careful voice. "He stopped near a brigade of Hindi armor with one tank platoon. It was kitty-bar-the-door, all the way back to Xingha, if it hadn't been for him."
The office door opened. Sergeant Hechinger straightened at his console, face forward.
Des Grieux looked up expecting to see either the Adjutant or Broglie—
And met the eyes of Major Joachim Steuben, as cold and hard as beads of chert. Hammer's bodyguard looked as stiffly furious as Des Grieux had ever seen a man who was still under control.
Des Grieux didn't think that Steuben would recognize him. It had been years since the last time they were face to face. There was crinkled skin around the corners of the major's eyes, though his was still a pretty-boy's face if you didn't look closely; and Des Grieux just now looked like a scarecrow . . . .
Joachim was more than just a sociopathic killer, though the Lord knew he wasthat.He looked at the tanker and said, "Well, well, Des Grieux.Seeking our own level, are we?"
The way Joachim shot his hip could have been an affectation . . . but it also shifted the butt of his pistol a further centimeter clear of the tailored blouse of his uniform. Des Grieux met his eyes. Anyway, there was no place to run.
"Well, I understand your decision, Luke," said Colonel Hammer as he came out of the Adjutant's office with his hand on the arm of the much larger Broglie. The moonfaced Adjutant followed them, nodding to everything Hammer said. "But believe me, I regret it. Remember you've always got a bunk here if you change your mind."
Broglie wore no rank insignia at all.
Hechinger had to saysomethingto avoid becoming part of the interchange between Steuben and Des Grieux. Nobody in his right mind—except maybe the colonel—wanted to be part of Joachim's interchanges, even as a spectator.
"Okay,Des Grieux,"he said in a voice just above a whisper. "I'll cut you some temporary orders so's you can get chow and some kit."
Broglie heard the name. He glanced at Des Grieux. His face blanked and he said, in precisely neutral tones, "Hello, Slick. I didn't think you'd make it back from that one."
"Oh, you ought to show more warmth thanthat, Mister Broglie," Joachim drawled.He didn't look at Broglie and Hammer behind him."After all,without Sergeant Des Grieux here to create that monumental screw-up, you wouldn't have been such a hero for straightening things out. Would you, now?"
"What d'ye mean screw-up?" Des Grieux said,knowingthat Steuben was looking for an excuse to kill something. "I'mthe one who blew the guts outa Baffin's Legion!"
"That's the man?" Hammer said, speaking to Broglie.
The colonel's eyes were gray. They had none of the undifferentiated hatred for the world that glared from Major Steuben's, but they were just as hard as the bodyguard's when they flicked over Des Grieux.
"Yes sir," Broglie murmured. "Joachim—Major Steuben? I'm not taking the job the Legion offered me out of any disrespect for the colonel. If you like, I'll promise that the Legion won't take any contracts against the Slammers so long as I'm in charge."
Joachim turned as delicately as a marionette whose feet dangle above the ground. "Oh, my . . ." he said, letting his left hand dangle on a theatrically limp wrist. "And a traitor's promise issovaluable!"
"I'm not—" said Broglie.
"Joachim!" said the colonel, stepping in front of Steuben—and between Steuben and Broglie, though that might have been an accident, if you believed Colonel Alois Hammer did things by accident."Go to the club and have a drink. I'll join you there in half an hour."
Steuben grimaced as though he'd been kicked in the stomach. "Sir," he said. "I'm . . ."
"Go on,"Hammer said gently,putting his hand on the shoulder of the dapper killer. "I'll meet you soonest. No problem, all right?"
"Sir," Steuben said, nodding agreement. He straightened and strode out of the headquarters building. He looked like a perfect band-box soldier, except for his eyes . . . .
"And as for you, Luke," Hammer said as he faced around to Broglie again, "I won't have you talking nonsense. Your first duty is to your own troops. You'll take any bloody contract that meets your unit's terms and conditions . . . and I assure you, I'll do the same."
"Look,sir,"Broglie said. He wouldn't meet Colonel Hammer's eyes."I wouldn't feel right—"
"I said,"Hammer snapped,"put a sock in it! Or stay with me—the Lord knows I'm going to have to replace Chesney anyway, after the lash-up he made when the wheels came off at Morobad."
Des Grieux was dizzy. The world had disconnected itself from him. He was surrounded by glassy surfaces which only seemed to speak and move in the semblance of people he had once known. "Major Chesney—" Broglie began.
"Major Chesney had to be told twice,"Hammer said,"first by you and then byme,a thousand kays away with 3d Operational Battalion, to set his flanking tank platoons to cover artillery defense forthecenter.You shouldn't have had to hold Chesney's hand while you were organizing Han troops into a real defense."
Broglie smiled. "Their laser-vehicles were mostly bogged," he said, "so they couldn't run. I just made sure they knew I'd shoot 'em faster than the Hindis could if theytriedto run."
"Whatever works," said Hammer with an expression as cold as the hatred in Joachim's eyes a moment before.
The expression softened. "Listen to me, Luke,"Hammer went on. "People are going to hire mercenaries so long as they're convinced mercenaries are a good investment. Having the Legion in first-rate hands like yours is good for all of us in this business. I'll miss you, but I gain from this, too."
Broglie stiffened. "Thank you, sir," he said.
"Listen!" Des Grieux shouted. "I'm the one who broke them for you! I killed Baffin."
"Oh, you killed a lot of people, Des Grieux," Colonel Hammer said in a deceptively mild voice. "And way too many of them were mine."
"Sir," said Broglie. "The disorganization in the Legion's rear really was Slick's doing. We pieced it together in post-battle analysis, and—"
"Saved about ten minutes, didn't it, Broglie?" the colonel said. "Before the flanking units closed on Morobad?"
Broglie smiled again, thinly. "That was ten minutes I was real glad to have, sir," he said.
Hammer stared up and down at Des Grieux. The colonel's expression did not change. "So, you think he's a good soldier, do you?" he asked softly.
"I think," said Broglie, "that . . . if he'd learn to obey orders, he'd be the best soldier I've ever seen."
"Fine, Mister Broglie," Hammer said. "I'll tell you what . . . ."
He continued to look at Des Grieux as if daring the tanker to move or speak again.Major Steuben was gone,but the White Mice at the outer doorway watched the discussion with their hands on the grips of their submachine guns.
"I'll let you have him, then," Hammer continued. "For Broglie's Legion."
Broglie grimaced and turned away. "No," he muttered. "Sorry, that wouldn't work out."
Hammer nodded crisply."Hareway,"he said to the Adjutant, "have Des Grieux here put in the lockup until we lift. Then demote him to trooper and put him to driving trucks for a while.Ifhe cares to stay in the Slammers, as I rather hope he will not."
The lobby had a terrazzo floor. Hammer's boot-heels clacked on it as he strode off, arm and arm with Broglie. Their figures shrank in Des Grieux's eyesight, and he barely heard the orderly sergeant shout, "Watch it! He's fainting!"
The Slammers' lockup was a sixty-meter shipping container. The paired outer leaves were open, and the single inner door had been replaced by a grate. The facility was baking hot when the white sun of Meridienne cast its harsh shadows across the landscape. At night, when the clear air cooled enough to condense out the dew on which most of the local vegetation depended, the lockup became a shivering misery.
If the conditions in the lockup hadn't been naturally so wretched, Colonel Hammer would have used technology to make them worse. A comfortable detention facility would be counterproductive.
"Rise'nshine,trooper,"called the jailor,a veteran of twenty-five named Daniels. "They want you there yesterday, like always."
Daniels' two prosthetic feet worked perfectly well—so long as they were daily retimed to match his neural outputs. He had the choice of moving to a high-technology world where the necessary electronics were available, or staying with the Slammers in a menial capacity. Since Daniels' only saleable skill—firing a tribarrel from a moving jeep—had no civilian application, he became one of the Regiment's jailors.
"Nobody's waiting for me," said Slick Des Grieux, lying on his back with his knees raised. He didn't open his eyes. "Nobody cares if I'm alive or dead. Not even me."
"C'mon," Daniels insisted as he inserted his microchip key in the lock. "Get moving or they'll be onmyback."
He clashed the grate as best he could. It was formed of beryllium alloy, while the container itself had been extruded from high-density polymers. The combination made a tinny/dull rattle, not particularly arousing.
Des Grieux got to his feet with a smooth grace which belied his previous inertia. There was a 3cm pressure cut above his right temple, covered now with Spray Seal. His pale hair was cut so short that there had been no need to shave the injured portion before repairing it.
"What's going on, then?" Des Grieux asked. His tongue quivered against his lips as the first wisps of adrenaline began to dry his mouth.There was going to be action . . . .
"Sounds like it really dropped in the pot," said Daniels as he swung the grate outward. "Dunno how.Ithought it was gonna be a walkover this time."
He nodded Des Grieux toward the climate-controlled container that he used for an office."Iwonder,"Daniel sadded wistfully,"if it's bad enough they're gonna put support staff in the line . . .?"
Des Grieux couldn't figure why he was getting out of the lockup five days early. The Hashemite Brotherhood controlled the northern half of Meridienne's single continent and claimed the whole of it. They'd been raiding into territory of the Sincanmo Federation to the south—pinpricks, but destructive ones. Unchecked vandalism had destabilized governments and economic systems more firmly based than anything the Sincanmos could claim.
In order to prevent the Sincanmos from carrying the fighting north, the Hashemites had hired off-planet mercenaries, the Thunderbolt Division, to guard their territory and deter the Sincanmos from escalating to all-out war with local forces. The situation had gone on for one and a half standard years, with the Hashemites chuckling over their cleverness.
The Thunderbolt Division was a good choice for the Hashemite purposes. It was a large organization which could be distributed in battalion-sized packets to stiffen local forces of enthusiastic irregulars; and the Thunderbolt Division was cheap, an absolute necessity. Meridienne was not a wealthy planet, and the Hashemites expected their "confrontation" to continue for five or more years before the Sincanmo Federation collapsed.
The Thunderbolt Division was cheap because it wasn't much good. Its equipment was low-tech, little better than what Meridienne's indigenous forces had bought for themselves. The mercenaries' main benefit to their employers was their experience. Theywerefull-time, professional soldiers, not amateurs getting on-the-job training in their first war.
Then the Sincanmos met the threat head on: they hired Hammer's Slammers and prepared to smash every sign of organization in the northern half of the continent in a matter of weeks.
Des Grieux didn't see any reason the Sincanmo plan wouldn't work. Neither did Captain Garnaud, the commanding officer of Delta Company.
Normally line troops expected to serve disciplinary sentences after the fighting was over.In this case, Garnaud had decreed immediate active time for Des Grieux. D Company didn't need the veteran against the present threat, and Garnaud correctly believed that missing the possibility of seven days' action was a more effective punishment for Slick Des Grieux than a year's down-time restriction.
But now he was getting out early . . . .
Des Grieux followed Daniels into the close quarters of the jailor's office. The communications display was live with the angry holographic image of a senior lieutenant in battledress.
The face was a surprise.The officer was Katrina Grimsrud, the executive officer of H Company,rather than one of D Company's personnel."Where the bloody hell have you been?" she snarled as soon as the jailor moved into pickup range of the display's cameras.
Daniels sat down at the desk crammed into the half of the container which didn't hold his bed and living quarters. His artificial feet splayed awkwardly at the sudden movement; they needed tuning or perhaps replacement.
"Sorry, sir," he muttered as he manipulated switches. His equipment was old and ill-mated, cast-offs from several different departments. Junk gravitated to this use on its way to the scrap pile. "Had to get the prisoner."
He adjusted the retinal camera. "Okay, Des Grieux," he said. "Look into this."
Des Grieux leaned his forehead against the padded frame."What's going on?" he demanded.
Light flashed as the unit recorded his retinal pattern and matched it with the file in Central Records. Daniels' printer whined, rolling out hard copy. Des Grieux straightened, blinking as much from confusion as from the brief glare.
"Listen, Des Grieux," Lieutenant Grimsrud said. "We don't want any of your cop in this company. If you get cute, you're out. D'ye understand? Not busted, not in lockup: out!"
"I'm notinHotel Company," Des Grieux snapped. He was confused. Besides, the adrenaline sparked by a chance of action had made him ready—as usual to fight anybody or anything, including a circle saw.
"You are now, Sarge," Daniels said as he handed Des Grieux the hard copy.
"Get over to the depotsoonest,"Grimsrud ordered as Des Grieux stared at his orders. "Jailor, you've got transport, don't you? Carry him. We've got a replacement tank there with a newbie crew. Des Grieux's to take over as commander; the assigned commander'll drive."
Des Grieux frowned.He was transferred from Delta to Hotel, all right. It didn't matter a curse one way or the other; they were both tank companies.
Only . . . transfers didn't occur at finger-snap speed—but they did this time, with the facsimile signature of Colonel Hammer himself releasing Sergeant-Commander Samuel Des Grieux (retinal prints attached) from detention and transferring him to H Company.
"Look, sir," Daniels said, "it's not my job to dr—"
"It's bloody well your job if youdon'tget him to the depot ASAP, buddy!" Lieutenant Grimsrud said. "I can't spare the time or the man to send a driver back. D'ye understand?"
Des Grieux folded the orders into the right cargo pocket of his uniform."I don't understand,"he said to the holographic image."Why such a flap over the Thunderbolt Division? We could put truck drivers in line and walk all over them."
"Too right," Grimsrud said forcefully. "Seems the towel-heads figured that out for themselves in time to hire Broglie's Legion. Colonel Hammer wants all the veterans he's got in line—and with you, that gives my 3d Platoon one, I say againone, trooper with more than two years in the Regiment. Get your ass over to our deployment areasoonest."
Lieutenant Grimsrud cut the connection.Des Grieux stared in the direction of blank air no longer excited by coherent light. His whole body was trembling.
"Don't sound like she's lookin' for excuses," Daniels grumbled as he got to his feet. "C'mon, Sarge, it's ten keys to the depot from here."
Des Grieux whistled tunelessly as he followed the jailor to an air-cushion jeep as battered as the equipment in Daniels' office. His kit was still in D Company. He didn't care. He didn't care about anything at all, except for the chance fate offered him.
Daniels started the jeep. At least one drive fan badly needed balancing. "Hey, Sarge?" he said. "I never asked you—what was the fight about? The one that landed you here?"
"Some bastard called me a name," Des Grieux said. He braced himself against the tubular seat frame worn through the upholstery. The jeep lurched into motion.
Des Grieux's eyes were closed.His face looked like the blade of a hatchet."He called me 'Pops,'" Des Grieux said. Memory of the incident pitched his voice an octave higher than normal. "So I hit him."
Daniels looked at the tanker, then frowned and looked away.
"Thirty-two standard years don't make me an old man," Slick Des Grieux added in an icy whisper.
A starship tested its maneuvering jets on the landing pad beside the depot's perimeter defenses. The high screech was so loud that the air seemed to ripple. Though the lips of Warrant Leader Farrell, the depot superintendent, continued to move for several seconds, Des Grieux hadn't the faintest notion of what the man was saying.
Des Grieux didn't much care,either.There was only one tank among the depot's lesser vehicles and stacked shipping containers.He stepped past Farrell and tested the spring-loaded cover of a step with his fingertip. It gave stiffly.
"Right," said Farrell. He held Des Grieux's transfer orders and, on a separate flimsy, the instructions which Central had downloaded directly to the depot. "Ah, here's the, ah, the previous crew."
Two troopers stood beside the depot superintendent. Both were young, but the taller, dark-haired one had a wary look in his eyes. The other man was blond, pale, and soft-seeming despite the obvious muscle bulging his khaki uniform.
Des Grieux gave them a cursory glance, then returned his attention to the important item: the vehicle he was about to command.
The tank was straight out of the factory in Hamburg on Terra. Farrell's crew would have—should have done the initial checks, but the bearings would be stiff and the electronics weren't burned in yet.
The tank didn't have a name, just a skirt number in red paint: H271.
"Trooper Wartburg will move to driver," Farrell said. The dark-haired man acknowledged the statement by raising his chin a centimeter. "Trooper Flowers here was going to drive, but he'll go back to Logistics till we get another vehicle in."
Des Grieux climbed deliberately onto the deck of H271.The bustle rack behind the turret held personal gear in a pair of reused ammunition containers.
"You got any experience, Wartburg?" Des Grieux asked without looking back toward the men on the ground.
"Year and a half," the dark-haired man said. "Wing gunner on a combat car, then I drove for a while. This was going to be my first command."
Wartburg's tone was carefully precise.If he was disappointed to be kicked back to driver at the last instant, he kept the fact out of his voice.
Des Grieux slid the cupola hatch closed and open, ignoring the others again.
"One question, Sarge," Wartburg called. The irritation he had hidden before was now obvious."Grimsrud told us a veteran'd be taking over the tank,but she didn't say who. You got a name?"
"Des Grieux," the veteran said. The tribarrel rotated on its ring, even with the power off. That was good, and a little surprising in a tank that hadn't yet been broken in. "Slick Des Grieux. You just do what I tell you and we'll get along fine."
Wartburg laughed brittlely. "The bloody hell I will," he said as he hopped up to the tank's deck himself.
Des Grieux turned in surprise.His eyes were flatand wide open.All he was sure of was that he'd need to pay more attention than he wanted to his new driver.
Wartburg said nothing further. He reached into the bustle rack and pulled out one of the cases, then tossed it to the ground.
The container crashed down and bounced before it fell flat. Flowers jumped to avoid it. The dense plastic was designed to protect 3,000 disks of 2cm ammunition against anything short of a direct from another powergun. It withstood the abuse, and its hinged lid remained latched.
"What d'ye think you're doing?" Des Grieux demanded.
Wartburg threw down the other container. "I think I'm not doin'anybloodything with you, Des Grieux," he said. He jumped to the ground.
"Wait a minute, Trooper!" said the outraged depot superintendent. "You've got your orders!"
He waggled the flimsies in his hand at Wartburg, though in fact neither of the documents directly mentioned that trooper.
Trooper Flowers looked from Wartburg to Des Grieux to Farrell—and back. His mouth was slightly open.
"Look,Warrant Leader,"Wartburg said to Farrell. "Iheardabout this bastard. Noway I'm riding with him.Noway.You want me to resign from the Regiment, you got it. You wanna throw me in the lockup, that's your business."
He turned and glared at the man still on the deck of H271. "But I don't ride with Slick Des Grieux. If I ever get that hot to die, I'll eat my gun!"
"Screw you, buddy," Des Grieux said softly. He looked at the depot superintendent. "Okay, Mister Farrell, you get me a driver. That's your job. If you can't do that, then I'll drive and fight this mother both, if that's what it takes."
The three men on the ground began speaking to one another simultaneously in rasping, nervous voices. Des Grieux lowered himself through the cupola hatch.
H271's fighting compartment had the faintly medicinal odor of solvents still seeping from recently extruded plastics. Des Grieux touched control buttons, checking them for feel and placement. There were always production-line variations, even when two vehicles were ostensibly of the same model.
He heard the clunk of boot toes on the steps formed into H271's armor. Somebody was boarding the vehicle.
Des Grieux threw the main power switch. Gauges and displays hummed to life. There was a line of distortion across Screen #3, but it faded after ten seconds or so. A tinge of ozone suggested arcing somewhere, probably in a microswitch. It would either clear itself or fail completely in the next hundred hours.
A hundred hours was a lifetime for a tank on the same planet as Colonel Luke Broglie . . . .
A head shadowed the light of the open hatch. Des Grieux looked up, into the face of Trooper Flowers.
"Sarge?" Flowers said. "Ah, I'm gonna drive for you. If that's all right?"
"Yeah, that's fine," said Des Grieux without expression. He turned to his displays again.
"Only, I've just drove trucks before, y'see," Flowers added.
"I don't care if you rolled hoops," Des Grieux said. "Get in and let's get moving."
"Ah—I'll get my gear," said Flowers. "I off loaded when they said I was back in Logistics."
"Booster," said Des Grieux, keying H271's artificial intelligence. "Course data on Screen One."
He watched the left-hand screen. He wasn't sure that the depot had gotten around to loading the course information into the tank's memory, but the route and topography came up properly. Des Grieux thought there was a momentary hesitation in the AI's response, but that might have been his own impatience.
The deck clanked as Flowers jumped directly to the ground in his haste. The way things were going, the kid probably slipped 'n broke his neck . . . .
The course to Base Camp Two and H Company was a blue line curving across three hundred kilometers of arid terrain. No roads, but no problems either. Gullies cut by the rare cloudbursts could be skirted or crossed.
Des Grieux spread his hands, closed his eyes, and rested his forehead against the cool surface of the main screen. Everything about H271 was smooth and cold. The tank functioned, but it didn't have a soul.
He shivered. He could remember when he had enough hair that it wasn't bare scalp that touched the hologram display when he leaned forward like this.
Tank H271 was the right vehicle for Slick Des Grieux.
In the gully beside H271,twenty or so Sincanmo troops sang around a campfire to the music of strings and a double flute. There'd been drums, too. Lieutenant Kuykendall threatened to send a tank through the group if the drummer didn't toss his instrument into the fireimmediately.
That was one order from the commander of Task Force Kuykendall that Des Grieux would have cheerfully obeyed. Not that he had anything against this particular group of indigs.
There were thirty or forty other campfires scattered among the gullies like opals on a multistrand necklace. With luck, the force's camouflage film concealed the firelight from the hostile outpost two kilometers away on the Notch. Silencing the drums, whose low-frequency beat carried forever in the cool desert air, was as much of a compromise as Kuykendall thought she could enforce.
The Sincanmos were a militia organized by extended families. Each family owned four to six vehicles which they armed with whatever the individuals fancied and could afford. Medium-powered lasers; post-mounted missile systems, both guided and hypervelocity; automatic weapons; even a few mortars, each of a different caliber . . . .
Logistics would have been a nightmare—if the Sincanmo Federation hadhada formal logistics system. On the credit side, each band was highly motivated, extremely mobile, and packed a tremendous amount of firepower for its size.
The families made decisions by conclave. They took orders from their own Federation rather more often than they ignored those orders; but as for an off-planet mercenary—and afemale—Kuykendall's authority depended on her own platoon of combat cars and the four H Company tanks attached to her for this operation.
Des Grieux chewed a ration bar in the cupola of his tank.The Sincanmos made their fire by soaking a bucket of sand in motor fuel and lighting it. The flames were low and red and quivered with frustrated anger, much like Des Grieux's thoughts. There was going to be a battle very soon. In days, maybe hours.
But not here. If Colonel Hammer had expected significant enemy forces to cross the Knifeblade Escarpment through the Notch, he wouldn't have sent Hotel Company's 3d Platoon with the blocking force. The platoon had been virtually reconstituted after a tough time on Mainstream during the previous contract. In a few years, some of these bloody newbies would be halfway decent soldiers. The ones who survived that long.
"Booster," Des Grieux muttered. "Ninety degree pan, half visor."
H271's artificial intelligence obediently threw a high-angle view of the terrain which Task Force Kuykendall guarded, onto the left side of Des Grieux's visor. The nameless sandstone butte behind the blocking force was useless as a defensive position in itself, because the only way for military equipment to get up or down its sheer faces was by crane. The mass of rock would confuse the enemy's passive sensors—at least the sensors of the Thunderbolt Division; Broglie's hardware certainly had the discrimination to pick out tanks, combat cars, and the Sincanmo 4x4s, even though the vehicles were defiladed and backed by a 500-meter curtain of stone.
The butte also provided a useful pole on which to hang the Slammers' remote sensors, transmitting their multispectral information down jam-free, undetectable fiber-optic cables. Des Grieux at ground level had as good a vantage point as that of the Hashemite outpost in the Notch; and because the image fed to the tanker's helmet was light enhanced and computer sharpened, Des Grieuxsawinfinitely more.
Not that there was any bloody thing to see. Gullies cut by the infrequent downpours meandered across the plain. They were shallow as well as direction-less, because the land didn't really drain. Rain sluiced from the buttes and the Escarpment flooded the whole landscaper—and evaporated.
Winds had scoured away the topsoils to redeposit them thousands of kilometers away as loess. The clay substrates which remained were virtually impervious to water.
Seen from Des Grieux's high angle, the gullies were dark smears of gray-green vegetation against the lighter yellow-gray soil. Low shrubs with hard, waxy leaves grew every few meters along the gully floors, where they were protected from wind and sustained by the memory of moisture. The plants were scarcely noticeable at ground level, but they were the plain's only feature.
The butte was a dark mass at Des Grieux's back. In front of him, two kilometers to the south, was the Knifeblade Escarpment: a sheer wall of sandstone for a hundred kays east and west, except for the Notch carved by meltwater from a retreating glacier thirty millions of years in the past. A one in five slope led from the Notch to the plain below. It was barely negotiable by vehicles; but itwasnegotiable.
South of the Escarpment, the Hashemites and their mercenaries faced the Sincanmo main force—and Hammer's Slammers. Task Force Kuykendall was emplaced to prevent the enemy from skirting the Knifeblade to the north and falling on the Slammers' flank and rear.
The Hashemites themselves would never think of that maneuver; the Thunderbolt Division could not possibly carry out such a plan in the time available. But Broglie was smart enough, and his troops were good enough . . . if he were willing to split his already outgunned force.
Alois Hammer wasn't willing to bet that Broglie wouldn't do what Hammer himself would do if the situation were desperate enough.
But neither did Hammerexpecta real fight north of the Escarpment. All odds were that Task Force Kuykendall, two platoons of armor and 600-800 Sincanmo irregulars, would wait in bored silence while their fellows chewed on Hashemites until the Brotherhood surrendered unconditionally.
Thunder rumbled far beyond the distant horizon. In this climate, a storm was less likely than the Lord coming down to appoint Slick Des Grieux as master of the universe.
No, it was artillery promising imminent action. For other people.
The most recent bite of ration bar was a leaden mass in Des Grieux's mouth. He spat it into the darkness, then tossed the remainder of the bar away, also.
"Booster," he said. "Close-up of the Notch."
A view of flamelit rock replaced the panorama before the last syllable was out of the tanker's mouth. The Hashemites were as feckless and unconcerned as their planetary enemies; and unlike the Sincanmos, the Hashemites didn't have the Slammers' logistics personnel to dispense an acre of camouflage film which would conceal equipment, personnel, and campfires from—hostile eyes.
Of course, the Hashemites didn't think there were any hostile eyes. They had stationed an outpost here to prevent the Sincanmos from using the Notch as a back door for attack, but the force was a nominal one of a few hundred indig troops with no leavening of mercenaries. The real defenses were the centrally controlled mines placed in an arc as much as a kilometer north of the Notch.
The outpost hadn't seen Task Force Kuykendall move into position in the dark hours this morning. In a few hours or days, when the main battle ground to a conclusion, they wouldstillbe ignorant of the enemy watching them from the north.
The troops of the outpost probably thanked their Lord that they were safely out of the action . . . and they were.
Des Grieux swore softly.
The outpost had a pair of heavy weapons, truck-mounted railguns capable of pecking a hole in tank armor in twenty seconds or so. Des Grieux wouldn'tgivethem twenty seconds, of course, but while he dealt with the railguns, the remainder of the Hashemites would loose a barrage of missiles at H271. And then there were the mines to cross . . . .
If the platoon's oilier three tanks were good for anything—if one of the crews was good for anything—it'd be possible to pick through the minefields with clearance charges, sonics, and ground-penetrating radar. Trustingthislot of newbies to provide covering fire would be like trusting another trooper with your girl and your bottle for the evening.
Kuykendall's platoon was of veterans, but she had orders to keep a low profile unless the enemy sallied out. Kuykendall took orders real good. She'd do fine with Colonel Bloody Broglie . . . .
Hashemites drank and played a game with dice and markers around fuel-oil campfires on the Notch. The sensor pack high on the mesa gave Des Grieux a beautiful view of the enemy, but they were beyond the line of-sight range of his guns.
A salvo of artillery ricocheting from the sandstone walls would grind the towel-heads to hamburger, but the shells would first have to get through the artillery defenses south of the Escarpment. Des Grieux remembered being told the first thing Broglie had done after taking command was to fit every armored vehicle in the Legion with a tribarrel capable of automatic artillery defense.
Guns muttered far to the south. When Des Grieux listened very carefully, he could distinguish the hiss-crackreports of big-bore powerguns. Tanks and tank destroyers were beginning to mix it—twenty kilometers away.
Des Grieux shivered and cursed; and after a time, he began to pray to a personal God of Battles . . . .
"Sir?"said Trooper Flowers from the narrow duct joining his station to H271's fighting compartment. The driver's shoulders were a tight fit in the passage."I'm ready to take my watch, sir. Do you want me in the cupola, or . . .?"
Des Grieux adjusted a vernier control on Screen #1, dimming the topographic display fractionally."I'm not'sir,'"he said. He didn't bother to look toward Flowers through the cut-out sides of the turret basket."AndI'llworry about keeping watch till I tell you different."
He returned his attention to Screen #3 on the right side of the fighting compartment. It was live but blank in pearly lustrousness; Des Grieux was missing a necessary link in the feed he wanted to arrange.
"Ah, S-sergeant?" the driver said. The only light in the fighting compartment was scatter from the holographic screens. Flowers' face appeared to be slightly flushed. "Sergeant Des Grieux? What do you want me to do?"
On the right—astern—edge of the topo screen, a company of Slammers infantry supported by combat cars moved up the range of broken hills held by the Thunderbolt Division. The advance seemed slow, particularly because the map scale was shrunk to encompass a ten-kilometer battle area; but it was as certain and regular as a gear train.
If navigational data passed to the map display, then therehadto be a route for—
"Sir?" said Flowers.
"Go play with yourself!" Des Grieux snarled. He glared angrily at his driver.
As Des Grieux's mind refocused to deal with the interruption, the answer to the main problem flashed before him.The information he wanted wasn't passing on the command channels he'd been tapping out of the Regiment's rear echelon back in Sanga: it was in the machine-to-machine data links, untouched by human consciousness . . . .
"Right," Des Grieux said mildly. "Look, just stick close to the tank, okay, kid? Do anything you please."
Flowers ducked away, surprised at the tank commanders sudden change of temper. His boots scuffled hollowly as he backed through the internal hatch to the driver's compartment.
"Booster,"Des Grieux ordered the tank's artificial intelligence, "switch to Utility Feed One and synthesize on Screen Three."
The opalescent ready status on the right-hand screen dissolved into multicolored garbage. Whatever data was coming through UF1 didn't lend itself to visual presentation.
"Via!" Des Grieux snarled."Utility Feed Two."He heard boots on H271's hull, but he ignored them because Screen #3 was abruptly live with what appeared to be a live-action view through the gunnery screen of another tank. The orange circle of the main-gun pipper steadied on a slab of rock kilometers away. There was no visible target—
Until the point of aim disintegrated in a gout of white-hot glass under the impact of the 20cm powergun of another tank. The ledge cracked from heat shock. Half of it slid away to the left in a single piece, while the remainder crumbled into gravel.
Iridium armor gleamed beneath the pipper. Des Grieux's boot trod reflexively on his foot-trip, but the safety interlock still disengaged his guns.
The real gunner, kilometers away, was only a fraction of a second slower. The image blurred with the recoil of the sending tank's main gun, and the target—a Legion tank destroyer—erupted at the heart of the cyan bolt.
"Sergeant Des Grieux?" said a voice from the open cupola hatch. "I'm just checking how all my people are—good Lord!"
Des Grieux looked up. Lieutenant Carbury, 3d Platoon's commanding officer and almost as new to the business of war as Des Grieux's driver, stared at the images of Screen #3.
"What on earth is that?" Carbury begged/demanded as he turned to scramble backward into the fighting compartment of H271. "Is it happening now?"
"More or less," the veteran replied, deliberately vague. He pretended to ignore the lieutenant's intrusion by concentrating on the screen.His AI had switched the image feed to that from a gun camera on a combat car. Mortar rounds flashed in a series of white pulses from behind the hillcrest a hundred meters away.
The images were not full-spectrum transmissions. Each vehicle's artificial intelligence broadcast its positional and sensory data to the command vehicle of the unit to which it was attached. Part of the command vehicle's communications suite was responsible for routing necessary information—including sensory data stripped to digital shorthand to the central data banks at the Slammers' rear-area logistical headquarters.
The route was likely to be long and poor, because communications satellites were the first casualties of war. Here on Meridienne, the Regiment depended on a chain of laser transponders strung butte to butte along the line of march. When sandstorms disrupted the chain of coherent light, commo techs made do with signals bounced from whichever of Meridienne's moons were in a suitable location.
The signals did get through to the rear, though.
Des Grieux had set his tank's artificial intelligence to enter Central through Task Force Kuykendall's own long data link. The AI sorted out gunnery feeds, then synthesized the minimal squibs of information into three-dimensional holograms.
On Screen #3, fuel blazed from a vehicle struck by the probing mortar shells. A moment later a light truck accelerated up the forward slope of the next hill beyond. A dozen Hashemite irregulars clung to the truck. Their long robes flapped with the speed of their flight.
Des Grieux expected the camera through which he watched to record a stream of cyan bolts ripping the vehicle. Nothing happened. The Hashemite truck ducked over the crest to more distant cover again.
Three half-tracked APCs of the Thunderbolt Division grunted up the forward slope, following the Hashemite vehicle. Their steel-cleated treads sparked wildly on the stony surface.
The tribarrel through which Des Grieux watched and those of the combat car's two wing gunners poured a converging fire into the center APC. It exploded, flinging out the fiery bodies of Thunderbolt infantrymen. The rest of the combat car platoon concentrated on the other two carriers. Their thin armor collapsed with similar results.
Slammers infantry on one-man skimmers slid forward to consolidate the new position just as Des Grieux's AI cut to a new viewpoint.
"How do youdothat?" asked Lieutenant Carbury as he stared at the vivid scenes.
The platoon leader was as slim as Des Grieux and considerably shorter, but the fighting compartment of a line tank had not been designed for two-person occupancy. Des Grieux could have provided a little more room by folding his seat against the bulkhead, but he pointedly failed to do so.
"Prob'ly the same way they showed you at the Academy,"Des Grieux said.They didn't teach cadets how to use a tank's artificial intelligence to break into Central, but Via! they were fully compatible systems."Sir."
The sound of real gunfire whispered through the night.
"Wow," said Carbury. He was sucking in his belly so that he could lean toward Screen #3 without pressing the veteran's shoulder. "Exactly what is it that's happening, Sergeant? They, ah, they aren't updating me very regularly."
Des Grieux rotated his chair counterclockwise. The back squeezed Carbury against the turret basket until the lieutenant managed to slip aside.
"It's all right there," Des Grieux said, pointing toward the map display on Screen #1."He's got Broglie held on the left—"orange symbols toward the western edge of the display "—but that's just sniping,nowaythey're gonna push Broglie out of ground that rugged."
He gathered spit in his mouth, then swallowed it. "The bastard's good," the veteran muttered to himself. "I give him that."
"Right," said Carbury firmly in a conscious attempt to assert himself. Strategywasa major part of the syllabus of the Frisian Military Academy."So instead he's putting pressure on the right flank where the terrain's easier—"
Not a lot easier, but at least the hills didn't channel tanks and combat cars into a handful of choke points.
"—and there's only the Thunderbolt Division to worry about." Carbury frowned. "Besides the Hashemites themselves, of course."
"Youworry about the towel-heads," Des Grieux said acidly. He glared at the long arc of yellow symbols marking elements of the Thunderbolt Division.
Though the enemy's eastern flank was anchored on hills rising to join the Knifeblade Escarpment well beyond the limits of the display, the center of the long line stretched across terrain similar to that in which Task Force Kuykendall waited. Gullies; scattered shrubs; hard, windswept ground that rolled more gently than a calm sea.
Perfect country for a headlong armored assault.
"That'swhat he ought to do," Des Grieux said, more to himself than to the intruding officer. He formed three fingers of his left hand into a pitchfork and stabbed them upward past the line of yellow symbols.
On Screen #3 at the corner of his eye, an image flashed into a cyan dazzle as another main-gun bolt struck home.
"Umm," said Carbury judiciously. "It's not really that simple, Sergeant." His manicured index finger bobbed toward the left, then the right edge of the display. "They'd be enfiladed by fire from the Legion, and even the Thunderbolts have anti-tank weapons. You wouldn't want to do that."
Des Grieux turned and stared up at the lieutenant. "Try me," he said. The tone was unemotional, but Carbury's head jerked back from the impact of the veteran's eyes.
Screen #3 showed a distant landscape through the sights of a combat-car tribarrel. The image expanded suddenly as the gunner dialed up times forty magnification. The target was a—
Des Grieux's attention clicked instantly to the display. Freed from the veteran's glare, Carbury blinked and focused on the distant scene also.
The target was a Thunderbolt calliope, shooting upward from a pit that protected the eight-barreled weapon while it knocked incoming artillery shells from the air. The high ground which the combat car had gained gave its tribarrels a slanting view down at the calliope four kilometers away.
The line-straight bolts from a powergun cared nothing for distance, so long as no solid object intervened. A five-round burst from the viewpoint tribarrel raked the gun pit, reducing half the joined barrels and the crew to ions.
That would have been enough, but the calliope was in action when the bolts struck it. One of the weapon's own high-intensity 3cm rounds discharged in a barrel which the Slammers' fire had already welded shut.
A blue-white explosion blew open the multiple breeches. That was only the momentary prelude to the simultaneous detonation of the contents of an ammunition drum. Plasma scooped out the sides of the gun pit and reflected pitilessly from rockfaces several kilometers away.
As if an echo, three more of the Thunderbolt Division's protective calliopes exploded with equal fury.
The Slammers' toehold on the eastern hills wasn't the overture to further slogging advances on the same flank: it was a vantage point from which to destroy at long range the artillery defenses of the entire hostile center.
"GoodLord," Lieutenant Carbury gasped. He leaned forward in amazement for a closer view. Des Grieux shoved Carbury back with as little conscious volition.
H271's artificial intelligence switched its viewpoint to that of a jeep-mounted infantry tribarrel.Six red streaks fanned through the sky above the narrow wedge of vision, a full salvo from a battery of the Slammers' rocket artillery.
Powerguns fired from the hills to the west.Some of Broglie's defensive weapons had retargeted abruptly to help close the sudden gap in the center of the line. That was dangerous, though, since Hammer's other two batteries continued to pound the flanks of the enemy position.
Broglie's powerguns detonated two of the incoming shells into bright flashes and smears of ugly smoke. The help was too little, too late: the other four firecracker rounds popped open at preset altitudes and strewed their deadly cargo widely over the Thunderbolt lines.
For the moments that the anti-personnel bomblets took to fall, nothing seemed to happen. Then white light like burning magnesium erupted over four square kilometers. Hair-fine lengths of glass shrapnel sawed in all directions. The coverage was thin, but the blasts carved apart anyone within a meter of an individual bomblet.
Lieutenant Carbury jumped for the hatch, aiming his right boot at the back of the tank commander's seat but using Des Grieux's shoulder as a step instead. "Remote that feed to my tanknow, Sergeant!"the lieutenant shouted as he pulled himself out of H271's cupola.
Des Grieux ignored Carbury and keyed his intercom.Flowers had better be wearing his commo helmet."Driver!" the veteran snarled. "Get your ass aboard!"
On Screen #3, another salvo of anti-personnel shells howled down onto the Thunderbolt Division's reeling battalions.
Powerguns snapped and blasted at a succession of targets on H271's right-hand screen. For the past several minutes, the real excitement, even for Des Grieux, was on the map display on the other side of the fighting compartment.
The Hashemites and their mercenary allies were getting their clocks cleaned.
The AI's interpretation of data from the battle area cross-hatched all the units of the Thunderbolt Division which were still on the plain. A few minutes of hammering with firecracker rounds had reduced the units by twenty percent of their strength from casualties—
And to something closer to zero combat efficiency because of their total collapse of morale. The battle wasn't over yet, but it was over forthosemen and women. They retreated northward in disorder, some of them on foot without even their personal weapons. Their only thought was to escape the killing zone of artillery and long-range sniping from the Slammers' powerguns.
Half of the Thunderbolt Division remained as an effective fighting force on the high ground to the east—the original left-flank battalions and the troops which had retreated to their protection under fire. Even those units were demoralized, but they would hold against anything except an all-out attack from the Slammers.
If the mercenary commander surrendered now, while his position was tenable and his employers were still fighting, the Thunderbolt Division would forfeit the performance bond it had posted with the Bonding Authority on Terra. That would end the division as an employable force—and shoot the career of its commander in the nape of the neck.
H271 quivered as its fans spun at idle. The tank was ready to go at a touch on the throttle and pitch controls."Sarge?"Flowers asked over the intercom channel. "Are we gonna move out soon?"
"Kid," Des Grieux said as he watched holographic dots crawling across holographic terrain, "when I want to hear your voice, I'll tell you."
If he hadn't been so concentrated on the display, he would have snarled the words.
The Thunderbolt Division's employers weren't exactly fighting, but neither had they surrendered. The Hashemite Brotherhood was no more of a monolith than were their Sincanmo enemies; and Hashemite troops were concentrated on the plains, where their mobility seemed an advantage. Des Grieux suspected that the Hashemiteswouldhave surrendered by now if they'd had enough organization left to manage it.
Broglie's armored elements on what had been the Hashemite right flank, now cut off from friendly forces by the collapse of the center, formed a defensive hedgehog among the sandstone boulders. The terrain gave them an advantage that would translate into prohibitive casualties for anybody trying to drive them out—even the panzers of Colonel Hammer's tank companies. Broglie's Legion wasn't going anywhere.
But Broglie himself had.
Within thirty seconds of the time artillery defense had collapsed in the center of the Hashemite line, four tank destroyers sped from the Legion's strong point to reinforce the Thunderbolt infantry. There was no time to redeploy vehicles already in the line, and Broglie had no proper reserve. These tank destroyers were the Legion's Headquarters/Headquarters Platoon.
The move was as desperate as the situation itself. Des Grieux wasn't surprised to learn Broglie had figured the only possible way out of Colonel Hammer's trap, but it was amazing to see that Broglie had the balls to put himself on the line that way. Des Grieux figured that Broglie obeyed orders because he was too chicken not to . . . .
By using gullies and the rolling terrain,three of the low-slung vehicles managed to get into position. The single loss was a tank destroyer that paused to spike a combat car five kilometers away on the Slammers' right flank. A moment later, the Legion vehicle vanished under the impact of five nearly simultaneous 20cm bolts from Slammers' tanks.
Tribarrels on the roofs of the three surviving tank destroyers ripped effectively at incoming artillery, detonating the cargo shells before they strewed their bomblets over the landscape. The tank destroyers' 15cm main guns were a threat nothing, not even a bow-on tank, could afford to ignore. The leap-frog advance of Slammers' units toward the gap in the enemy center slowed to a lethal game of hide-and-seek.
But it was still too little, too late. The Hashemite and Thunderbolt Division troops were broken and streaming northward. All the tank destroyers could do was act as a rear guard, like Horatius and his two companions.
There was no bridge on their line of retreat, but the only practical route down from the Knifeblade Escarpment was through the Notch. Task Force Kuykendall and tank H271 had that passage sealed, as clever-assColonelLuke Broglie would learn within the next half hour.
Des Grieux began to chuckle hoarsely as he watched beads ooze across a background of coherent light. The sound that came from his throat blended well with the increasingly loud mutter of gunfire from south of the Escarpment.
"Shellfish Six to all Oyster and Clam elements," Des Grieux's helmet said.
Des Grieux had ignored the chatter which broke out among the Slammers' vehicles—the combat cars were code named Oyster; the tanks were Clam—as soon as Carbury gave the alarm. He couldn't ignore this summons, because it was the commander of Shellfish—Task Force Kuykendall—speaking over a unit priority channel.
"All blower captains to me at Golf Six-five ASAP. Acknowledge. Over."
This was no bloody time to have all the senior people standing around in a gully, listening to some bitch with lieutenant's pips on her collar!
There were blips of static on Des Grieux's headset. Several commanders used the automatic response set on their consoles instead of replying—protesting—in person.
"Clam Six to Shellfish Six . . ." said Lieutenant Carbury nervously. The tank-platoon commander was not only beneath Kuykendall in the chain of command, he was well aware that she was a ten-year veteran of the Slammers while he had yet to see action. "Suggest we link our vehicles for a virtual council, sir. Over."
"Negative,"Kuykendall snapped."I need to make a point to our employers and allies, here, Clam Six, and they're not in the holographic environment."
She paused,then added in a coldly neutral voice."Break.This means you,too, Slick. Don't push your luck. Shellfish Six out."
Des Grieux cursed under his breath. After a moment, he slid his seat upward and climbed out of the tank. He'd grabbed a grenade launcher and a bandolier of ammunition at the depot; he carried them in his left hand.
He didn't acknowledge the summons.
Occasional flashes to the south threw the Knifeblade Escarpment into hazy relief, like a cloud bank lighted by a distant storm. Sometimes the wind sounded like human cries.
The gullies at the base of the butte twisted Task Force Kuykendall's position like the guts of a worm. Two combat cars and a tank were placed between H271 and Kuykendall's vehicle,Firewalker, in the rough center of the line. The gaps between the Slammers' units were filled by indigs in family battlegroups.
The restive Sincanmos had let their campfires burn down. The way through the gullies was marked by metal buckets glowing from residual heat. Men in bright, loose garments fingered their personal weapons and watched Des Grieux as he trudged past.
There was a group of fifty or more armed troops—all men except for Kuykendall and one of the tank commanders, and overwhelmingly indigs—gathered atFirewalkerwhen Des Grieux arrived. Kuykendall had switched on the car's running lights with deep yellow filters in place to preserve the night vision of those illuminated.
"Glad you could make it, Slick," Kuykendall said. She perched on cargo slung to the side of her combat car. It was hard to make out Kuykendall's words over the burble of Sincanmo conversation because she spoke without electronic amplification. "I want all of you to hear what I just informed Chief Diabate."
The name of the senior Sincanmo leader in the task force brought a partial hush. Men turned to look at Diabate, white-bearded and more hawk-faced than most of his fellows. He wore a robe printed in an intricate pattern of black/russet/white, over which were slung a 2cm powergun and three silver-mounted knives in a sash.
"Colonel Hammer has ordered us back ten kays," Kuykendall continued. Two crewmen stood atFirewalker's wing tribarrels, but the weapons were aimed toward the Notch. The air of the gathering was amazement, not violence. "So we're moving out in half an hour."
"Don't be bloody crazy!"Des Grieux shouted over the indig babble."You saw what's happening south of the wall."
He pointed the barrel of his grenade launcher toward the Escarpment. The bandolier swung heavily in the same hand."Inside an hour,there'll beten thousand people trying t' get through the Notch, andwe'rehere t' shut the door in their face?"
Sincanmo elders shook their guns in the air and cried approval.
Kuykendall's sharp features pinched tighter. She muttered an order toFirewalker's AI, then—regardless of the Hashemites in the Notch—blared through the combat car's external speakers, "Listento me, gentlemen!"
Her voice echoed like angry thunder from the face of the butte. Shouting men blinked and looked at her.
"The colonelwantsthem to run away instead of fighting like cornered rats," Kuykendall went on, speaking normally but continuing to use amplification. "He wants a surrender, not a bloodbath."
"But—" Chief Diabate protested.
"What the colonel orders," Kuykendall said firmly, "I carry out. And I'm in charge of this task force, by order of your own council."
"We know the Hashemites!"Diabate said.This time, Kuykendall let him speak. "If they throw away their guns and flee now, they will find more guns later. Only if we kill them all can we be sure of peace. This is the time to kill them!"
"I've got my orders,"Kuykendall said curtly, "and you've got yours.Slammers elements, saddle up. We move out in twenty . . . seven minutes."
Khaki-uniformed mercenaries turned away,shrugging at the slings and holsters of their personal weapons. Des Grieux did not move for a moment.
"I wanted you to see," Kuykendall continued to the shocked Sincanmo elders. "Thisisn't a tribal council, this is war andI'min charge. If you refuse to obey my orders,you'rein breach of the contract, not me and Colonel Hammer."
Sincanmos shouted in anger and surprise. Des Grieux strode away from the crowd, muttering commands through his commo helmet to the artificial intelligence in H271. The AI obediently projected a view of the terrain still closer to the base of the mesa onto the left side of Des Grieux's visor.
Flowers waited with his torso out of the driver's hatch."What's the word,Sarge?" he called as Des Grieux stepped around the back of a Sincanmo truck mounted with a cage launcher and a quartet of forty-kilo bombardment rockets.
"We're moving," Des Grieux said. He lifted himself to the deck of his tank. "There's a low spot twenty meters from the base of the butte. I'll give directions on your screen. Park us there."
He clambered up the turret side and thrust his legs through the hatch.
"Ah, Sarge?" Flowers called worriedly. His curved armor hid him from Des Grieux. "Should I take down the cammie film?"
Des Grieux switched to intercom. Screen #1 now showed the terrain in the immediate vicinity of H271. The site Des Grieux had picked was within two hundred meters of the tank's present location.
"It'll bloody come down when you bloody drive through it, won't it?" Des Grieux snarled. He slashed his finger across the topo map, marking the intended route with a glowing line that echoed on the driver's display. "Do it!"
The microns-thick camouflage film was strung,then jolted with high-frequency electricity which caused it to take an optical set in the pattern and colors of the ground underneath it. The film was polarized to pass light impinging on the upper surfaces but to block it from below. The covering was permeable to air as well, though it did impede ventilation somewhat.
H271's fans snorted at increased power, sucking the thin membrane against its stretchers. Sincanmo troops moved closer to their own vehicles, eyeing the 170-tonne tank with concern.
Flowers rotated H271 carefully in its own length, then drove slowly up the back slope of the gully. The nearest twenty-meter length of camouflage film bowed, then flew apart when the stresses exceeded its limits. Gritty soil puffed from beneath the tank's skirts.
"Clam Four, this is Clam Six," said Lieutenant Carbury over the 3d Platoon push. "What's going on there? Over."
Des Grieux closed the cupola hatch above him.This was going to be very tricky. Not placing the shot—he could do that at ten kays—but determining where the shot had tobeplaced.
H271 lurched as Flowers drove it down into a washout directly at the base of the mesa.Des Grieux let the tank settle as he searched the sandstone face through his gunnery screen.
"This where you want us, Sarge?" Flowers asked.
"Clam Four, this is Shellfish Six. Report! Over."
"Right," said Des Grieux over the intercom. "Shut her down. Is your hatch closed?"
The intake howl dimmed into the sighing note of fans winding down. Iridium clanged forward as Flowers slammed his hatch.
"Yes sir," he said.
Des Grieux fired his main gun. Cyan light filled the world.
The rockface cracked with a sound like the planetary mantle splitting. The shattered cliff slumped forward in chunks ranging in size from several tons to microscopic beads of glass. H271 rang and shuddered as the wave of rubble swept across it, sliding up against the turret.
"Clam Four to Clam Six," Des Grieux said. He didn't try to keep his voice free of the satisfaction he felt at the perfect execution of his plan. "I've had an accidental discharge of my main gun. No injuries, but I'm afraid my tank can't be moved without mebbe a day's work by heavy equipment. Over."
"Slick," said Lieutenant Kuykendall, "you stupid son of a bitch."
She must have expected something like this, because she didn't bother raising her voice.
Kuykendall's right wing gunner worked over the Notch with his tribarrel asFirewalkeridled at the base of the butte.
When H271 lighted the night with its main gun, the Hashemites guarding the Notch came to panicked alertness. During the ten minutes since, combat cars fired short bursts to keep enemy heads down while the Slammers pulled out.
This thirty-second slashing was different. The gunner's needless expenditure of ammunition was a way to let out his frustration—at what Des Grieux had done, or at the fact that the rest of the Slammers were running while Des Grieux and the indigs stayed to fight.
The troopers of Task Force Kuykendall were professional soldiers. If they'd been afraid of a fight, they would have found some other line of work.
Kuykendall squeezed the gunner's biceps, just beneath the shoulder flare of his body armor. The trooper's thumbs came off the butterfly trigger. The weapon's barrel-set continued to rotate for several seconds to aid in cooling.The white-hot iridium muzzles glowed a circle around their common axis.
Trooper Flowers lifted himself intoFirewalker's fighting compartment. His personal gear—in a dufflebag; Flowers was too junior to have snagged large-capacity ammo cans to hold his belongings—was slung to the vehicle's side. Combat cars made room for extra personnel more easily than Carbury's remaining tanks could.
Des Grieux braced his feet against the cupola coaming and used his leg muscles to shove at a block of sandstone the size of his torso. Thrust overcame friction. The slab slid across a layer of gravel, then toppled onto H271's back deck.
The upper surfaces were clear enough now that Des Grieux could rotate the turret.
Lieutenant Carbury'sPaper Dollwas an old tank, frequently repaired. An earlier commander had painted kill rings on the stubby barrel of the main gun. Holographic screens within the fighting compartment illuminated Carbury from below. His fresh, youthful face was out of place peering from the veteran vehicle.
"Sergeant Des Grieux," the lieutenant said. His voice was pitched too high for the tone of command he wished to project. "You're acting like a fool by staying here, and you're disobeying my direct orders."
Carbury spoke directly across the twenty meters between himself and tank H271 instead of using his commo helmet. Thehooshof lift fans idling almost washed his voice away. In another few seconds, minutes at most, Des Grieux would be alone with fate.
The veteran brushed his palms against the front of his jumpsuit. He had to be careful not to rub his hands raw while moving rocks. He'd need delicate control soon, with the opening range at two kays.
"Sorry,sir,"he called."I figure the accident's my fault.It's my duty to stay with the tank since I'm the one who disabled it."
A combat car spat at the Notch. The Sincanmos, still under their camouflage film, were keeping as quiet as cats in ambush while the two platoons of armored vehicles maneuvered out of the gullies.
The Sincanmos didn't take orders real well, but they were willing to do whatever was required for a chance to kill. Des Grieux felt a momentary sympathy for the indigs, knowing what was about to happen.
But Via! if they hadn't been a bunch of stupid wogs, they'd have known, too.
They weren't his problem.
"Clam Six," said Lieutenant Kuykendall remotely, "this is Shellfish Six." She used radio, a frequency limited to the Slammers within the task force. "Are all your elements ready to move? Over."
Carbury stiffened and touched the frequency key on the side of his commo helmet. "Clam Six to Six," he said. "Yes sir, all ready. Over."
Instead of giving the order, Kuykendall turned to look at Des Grieux. She raised the polarized shield of her visor. "Goodbye, Slick," she called across the curtain of disturbed air. "I don't guess I'll be seeing you again."
Des Grieux stared at the woman who had been his driver a decade before. They were twenty meters apart, but she still flinched minutely at his expression.
Des Grieux smiled. "Don't count on that, Lieutenant-sir," he said.
Kuykendall slapped her visor down and spoke a curt order. Fan notes changed, the more lightly loaded rotors of the combat cars rising in pitch faster than those of the tanks.
Moving in unison with a tank in the lead, the Slammers of Task Force Kuykendall howled off into the night. Their powerguns, main guns as well as tribarrels, lashed the Notch in an unmistakable farewell gesture. The sharpcrackof the bolts and the dazzling actinics reflected back and forth between the Escarpment and the sheer face of the mesa.
For Des Grieux, the huge vehicles had a beauty like that of nothing else in existence. They skated lightly over the soil, gathering speed in imperceptible increments. Occasionally a skirt touched down and sparked, steel against shards of quartz. Then they were gone around the mesa, leaving the sharpness of ozone and the ghost-track of ionized air dissipating where a main gun had fired at the Hashemites.
Des Grieux felt a sudden emptiness; but it was too late now to change, and anyway, it didn't matter. He slid down into H271 and tried his gunnery controls again. Added weight resisted the turret motors briefly, but this time it was only gravel and smaller particles which could rearrange themselves easily.
The sight picture on H271's main screen rotated: off the blank wall of the butte and across open desert, to the Notch that marred the otherwise smooth profile of the Knifeblade Escarpment. Des Grieux raised the magnification. Plus twenty; plus forty, and he could see movement as Hashemites crawled forward, over rocks split and glazed by blue-white bolts, to see why the punishing fire had ceased; plus eighty—
A Hashemite wearing a turban and a dark blue jellaba swept the night with the image-intensifying sight of his back-pack missile.
He found nothing. Des Grieux stared at the Hashemite's bearded face until the man put down his sight and called his fellows forward. His optics were crude compared to those of H271, and the Hashemite didn't know where to look.
Des Grieux smiled grimly and shut down all his tank's systems. From now until he slammed home the main switch again, Des Grieux would wait in a silent iridium coffin.
It wasn't his turn. Yet. He raised his head through the cupola hatch and watched.
Because of the patient silence the Sincanmos had maintained, Des Grieux expected the next stage to occur in about half an hour. In fact, it was less than five minutes after the Slammers' armored vehicles had noisily departed the scene before one of the outposts switched the minefield controls to Self-destruct.Nearly a thousand charges went off simultaneously, any one of them able to destroy a 4x4 or cripple a tank.
An all-wheel drive truck laden with towel-heads lurched over the lip of the Notch and started for the plains below.
The locals on both sides were irregulars, but the Sincanmos in ambush had something concrete to await. All the Hashemite guards knew was that a disaster had occurred south of the Escarpment, and that they had themselves been released from a danger unguessed until the Slammers drove off through the night.Theysaw no reason to hold position, whatever their orders might be.
Three more trucks followed the first—a family battle group, organized like those of the Sincanmos. One of the vehicles towed a railgun on a four-wheeled carriage. The slope was a steep twenty percent. The railgun threatened to swing ahead every time the towing vehicle braked, but the last truck in the group held the weapons barrel with a drag line to prevent upset.
The Sincanmos did not react.
A dozen more trucks grunted into sight. H271's sensors could have placed and identified the vehicles while they were still hidden behind the lip of rock, but it didn't matter one way or the other to Des Grieux. Better to keep still, concealed even from sensors far more sophisticated than those available to the indigs.
More trucks. They poured out of the Notch, three and four abreast, as many as the narrow opening would accept. Forty, sixty—still more. The entire outpost was fleeing at its best speed.
The Hashemites must have argued violently. Should they go or stay? Was the blocking force really gone, or did it lurk on the other side of the butte, waiting to swing back into sight spewing blue fire?
But somebody was bound to run; and when that group seemed on the verge of successful escape, the others would follow as surely as day follows night.
There would be no day for most of this group of Hashemites. When their leading vehicles reached the bottom of the slope, the Sincanmos opened up with a devastating volley.
The two-kilometer range was too great for sidearms to be generally effective, though Des Grieux saw a bolt from a semiautomatic powergun—perhaps Chief Diabate's personal weapon—light up a truck cab. The vehicle went out of control and rolled sideways. Upholstery and the driver's garments were afire even before ammunition and fuel caught.
Mostly the ambush was work for the crew-served weapons. For the Sincanmo gunners, it was practice with live pop-up targets. Dozens of automatic cannon punched tracers into and through soft-skinned vehicles, leaving flames and torn flesh behind them. Mortars fired, mixing high explosive and incendiary bombs. Truck-mounted lasers cycled with low-frequency growls, igniting paint, tires, and cloth before sliding across the rock to new targets.
A pair of perfectly aimed bombardment rockets landed within the Notch itself, causing fires and secondary explosions among the tail end of the line of would-be escapees. The smooth, inclined surface of the Escarpment provided no concealment, no hope. Hashemites stood or ran, but they died in either case.
Des Grieux smiled like a sickle blade and pulled the hatch closed above him. He continued to watch through the vision blocks of the cupola.
Truckloads of Sincanmo troops drove up out of their concealment, heading for the loot and the writhing wounded scattered helplessly on the slope.
Have fun while you can, wogs,Des Grieux thought.Because you won't see the morning either.
Thirty-seven minutes after Chief Diabate sprang his ambush, Sincanmo troops in the Notch began firing southward. The shooters were the bands who'd penetrated farthest in their quest for loot and throats to cut. Other bright-robed irregulars were picking over the bodies and vehicles scattered along the slope. When the guns sounded, they looked up and began to jabber among themselves in search of a consensus.
Des Grieux watched through his vision blocks and waited. H271's fighting compartment was warm and muggy with the environmental system shut down, but a cold sweat of anticipation beaded the tanker's upper lip.
Half—apparently the junior half—of each Sincanmo battle group waited under camouflage film in the gullies to provide a base of fire for the looters. The Sincanmos were not so much undisciplined as self-willed, and they had a great deal of experience in hit-and-run guerrilla warfare.
The appearance of a well-prepared defense was deceptive, though. The heavy weapons that were effective at a two-kilometer range had expended much of their ammunition in the first engagement; and besides, the irregulars were about to find themselves out of their depth.
They were facing the first of the retreating Thunderbolt Division troops. The Thunderbolts weren't much; but they were professionals, and this lot had Luke Broglie with them . . . .
At first the Sincanmos in the Notch fired small arms at their unseen targets; automatic rifles pecked the night with short bursts. Then somebody got an abandoned Hashemite railgun working. The Notch lighted in quick pulses, the corona discharge from the weapon's generator. Thecrack crack crackof hyper-velocity slugs echoed viciously.
A blue-white dazzle outlined the rock surfaces of the Notch. A Legion tank destroyer kilometers away had put a 15cm bolt into the center of the captured outpost. Two seconds later the sound reached Des Grieux's ears, the glass-breakingcrashas rock shattered under unendurable heat stresses.
Three Sincanmo survivors scampered down the Escarpment. One man's robe smoldered and left a fine trail of smoke behind him. The men were on foot, because their trucks fed the orange-red flames lighting the Notch behind them.
The Sincanmo irregulars had gotten their first lesson. A siren on Chief Diabate's 8x8 armored car, halfway up the slope, wound slowly from a groan to a wail. Exhaust blatted through open pipes as the indigs leaped aboard their vehicles and started the engines.
The first salvo howled from the Thunderbolt Division's makeshift redoubt to the southeast. The shells burst with bright orange flashes in the empty plains, causing no casualties. The Sincanmos were either in the gullies well north of the impact area or still on the slope, where the height of the Knifeblade Escarpment provided a wall against shells on simple ballistic trajectories.
Indig vehicles grunted downslope as members of their crews threw themselves aboard.Another four-tube salvo of high explosives truck near where the previous rounds had landed. One shell simply dug itself into the hard soil without going off. Casing fragments rang against the side of a truck, but none of the vehicles slowed or swerved.
The camouflage film fluttered as indigs in the gullies packed their belongings. The trucks were both cargo haulers and weapons platforms for the battlegroups. When the Sincanmos expected action, they cached non-essentials—food, water, tents, and bedding—beside the vehicles, then tossed them aboard again when it was time to leave.
Another round streaked across the Escarpment from the southwest. The Sincanmos ignored the shell because it didn't come within a kilometer of the ground at any point in its trajectory.
Broglie's Legion had a single six-gun battery, very well equipped as to weapons (self-propelled 210mm rocket howitzers) and the selection of shells those hogs launched. The battery's first response to the new threat was a reconnaissance round which provided real-time images through a laser link to Battery Fire Control.
Had Des Grieux powered up H271, his tribarrel in Automatic Air Defense mode could have slapped the spy shell down as soon as it sailed over the Escarpment. It was no part of the veteran's plan to give the tank's presence away so soon, however.
At least thirty guns from the Thunderbolt Division opened fire according to target data passed them by the Legion's fire control. Spurts of black smoke with orange hearts leaped like poplars among the Sincanmo positions, shredding camouflage film that had not deceived the Legion's recce package.
A truck blew up. Men were screaming. Vehicles racing back from the slope to load cached necessities skidded uncertainly as their crews wondered whether or not to drive into the shellbursts ahead of them.
The Legion's howitzers ripped out a perfect Battery Three, three shells per gun launched within a total of ten seconds. They were firecracker rounds. The casings popped high in the air, loosing approximately 7,500 bomblets to drift down on the Sincanmo forces.
For the most part, the Sincanmo looters under Chief Diabate didn't know what hit them. A blanket of white fire fell over the vehicles which milled across the plain for fear of Thunderbolt shells. Thousands of bomblets exploded with a ripping sound that seemed to go on forever.
For those in the broad impact zone, itwasforever. Smoke and dust lifted over the soil when the explosive light ceased. A dozen Sincanmo vehicles were ablaze; more crashed and ignited in the following seconds. Only a handful of trucks were under conscious control, though run-while-flat tires let many of the vehicles careen across the landscape with their crews flayed to the bone by glass-filament shrapnel.
Fuel and munitions exploded as the Thunderbolt Division continued to pound the gully positions.A pair of heavy caliber shells landed near H271, but they were overs—no cause for concern. The indigs dying all across the plain provided a perfect stalking horse for the tank in ambush.
Chief Diabate's armored car—the only vehicle in the Sincanmo force with real armor—had come through the barrage unscathed. It wallowed toward the eastern flank of the butte with its siren summoning survivors from the gullies to follow it to safety. Sincanmo 4x4s lurched through the remnants of the camouflage film, abandoning their cached supplies to the needs of the moment.
Sparks and rock fragments sprang up before and beside the armored car. Diabate's driver swerved, but not far enough: a second three-round burst punched through the car's thin armor. A yellow flash lifted the turret, but the vehicle continued to roll on inertia until a larger explosion blew the remainder of the car and crew into pieces no larger than a man's hand.
Leading elements of the Thunderbolt Division had reached the Notch. One of them was a fire-support vehicle, a burst-capable 90mm gun on a half-tracked chassis. The gun continued to fire, switching from solid shot to high explosive as it picked its targets among the fleeing Sincanmo trucks. Other mercenary vehicles, primarily armored personnel carriers with additional troops riding on their roofs, crawled through the Notch and descended the slope littered by the bodies of indigs locked in the embrace of death.
It was getting to be time. Des Grieux closed his main power switch.
H271's screens came alive and bathed the fighting compartment with their light. Des Grieux lifted his commo helmet, ran his fingers through his close-cropped hair, and lowered the helmet again. He took the twin joysticks of the gunnery controls in his hands.
"Booster,"Des Grieux said to the tank's artificial intelligence. "On Screen One, gimme vehicles on a four-kay by one strip aligned with the main gun."
The topographic map of the main battle area flicked out and returned as a narrow holographic slice centered on the Notch. The APCs and other vehicles already north of the Knifeblade Escarpment were sharp symbols that crawled down the holographic slope toward—unbeknownst to themselves—H271 waiting at the bottom of the display.
The symbols of vehicles on the other side of the sandstone wall were hollow, indicating the AI had to extrapolate from untrustworthy data. The electronics, pumps, and even ignition systems of Thunderbolt and Hashemite trucks had individual radio-frequency spectrum signatures which H271's sensor suite could read. Precise location and assignment was impossible at a four-kilometer range beyond an intervening mass of sandstone, however.
One vehicle was marked with orange precision: the Legion tank destroyer which had huffed itself to within five hundred meters of the Notch. The tank destroyer's tribarrel licked skyward frequently to keep shells from decimating the retreating forces. The lines of cyan fire, transposed onto the terrain map in the tank's data base, provided H271 with a precise location for the oncoming vehicle. The other two tank destroyers were at the very top of the display, where they acted as rear guard against the Slammers.
They would come in good time. As for the closest of the three—it would have been nice to take out the tank destroyer with the first bolt, the round that unmasked H271, but that wasn't necessary. Waiting for the Legion vehicle to rise into range would mean sparing some of the half-tracks that drove off the slope and disappeared into swales concealed from the tank.
Des Grieux didn't intend to spare anything that moved this night.
The gunnery screen shrank in scale as it incorporated both orange pippers, the solid dot that marked the tribarrels target—the leading APC, covered by the flowing robes of a score of Hashemites riding on top of it—and the main gun's hollow circle, centered at the turret/hill junction on the fire-support vehicle which still, from its vantage point in the Notch, covered the retreat.
Des Grieux fired both weapons together.
It took a dozen rounds from the tribarrel before the carrier blew up. By then, the screaming Hashemite riders were torches flopping over the rocks.
The main gun's 20cm bolt vaporized several square meters of the fire-support vehicle's armor. Ammunition the Thunderbolts hadn't expended on Sincanmo targets were sufficient to blow a passing APC against the far wall of the Notch; the crumpled wreckage then slid forward, down the slope, shedding parts and flames.
Nothing remained of the fire-support vehicle except its axles and wheels, stripped of their tires.
Des Grieux left his main gun pointed as it was. He worked the tribarrel up the line of easy targets against the slanted rock, giving each half-track the number of cyan bolts required to detonate its fuel, its on-board ammunition, or both. Secondary explosions leaped onto the slope like the footprints of a fire giant.
Nothing more came through the Notch after the 20cm bolt ripped it, but Screen #1 showed the Legion tank destroyer accelerating at its best speed to reach a firing position.
Des Grieux's face was terrible in its joy.
So long as H271 was shut down and covered by broken rock, it was virtually undetectable. When Des Grieux opened fire, anybody but a blind man could call artillery in on the tank's position. A number of Thunderbolt Division personnel survived long enough to do just that.
Four HE shells landed between ten and fifty meters of H271 as Des Grieux walked 2cm bolts across an open-topped supply truck with armored sides. His sight picture vanished for a moment in the spouting explosions. A fifth round struck in a scatter of gravel well up the side of the mesa. It brought down a minor rockslide, but no significant chunks landed near the tank.
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 destroyerhada 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 burned-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.Hecould 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-planetfastif 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 bloodyliar.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.