Thirteen
Hydraulic whine faded, inside the turret of the Kodiak I commanded, as the hovertank slipped laterally along the Tassin Desert dune crest.
My company commander’s voice crackled in my helmet earpiece. ‘‘For the third time, Red Three, do you copy? Parker!’’
‘‘Copy, Red One.’’ I eyed the thermal display on the tank commander’s screen in front of me, and stared at the green-enhanced Tassini encampment in the midnight darkness below. ‘‘I’m looking at Position Victor, sir. But it’s no tank park. Just family flappers.’’ Fifty nomad tents, flap sides rolled up to take advantage of the desert’s night breeze, had been pitched around a rude stone water well.
‘‘No mech?’’
I shook my head, invisibly to my captain, as I spoke. ‘‘No fuel trucks, no soft rollers, nothing but hobbled wobbleheads grazing.’’
The captain paused, then he whispered across the eight miles that separated my five-tank platoon from him and the rest of our company. ‘‘You sure?’’
‘‘We got the hatches open, and we’re upwind, skipper.’’ Of the three indigenous planetary faunas that Legion Heavy Brigade VI had encountered during my tour, the Brigade Webzine’s ask-atanker poll voted Bren’s dinosaurids foulest-smelling. And the wobbleheads that the Tassini rode won ‘‘foulest of the foul.’’
The captain came back. ‘‘Well, over here we finally got the purple people eaters in our sights.’’
The plan of this raid had been for a softside vehicle convoy to drive along a Tassini controlled road, to make a demonstration that would bait the Tassini tank unit in our area of operations away from their support base. There, the captain and our company’s other two tank platoons would ambush and destroy them. Yes, the big, bad Legion was reduced to sneaking up on rag-tag rebels.
Theoretically, Kodiaks were a century ahead of the rebels’ black market crawlers. So the brass allocated a single brigade to this war, figuring that even one Kodiak per five rebel crawler tanks would be overkill.
But we had no air support, with which the Kodiak was optimized to interface in combined-arms operations. The dune topography limited line-of-sight engagements to a thousand yards or less, which cancelled the Kodiak’s main gun range advantage. A hovertank’s over-water mobility advantage was worthless in the desert, and the Kodiak’s speed was slashed by engine breathing problems unique to the Tassin desert.
Also, Tassini tankers didn’t cower like escaped slaves and amechanical nomads, as the brass expected. The Tassini fought so hard and so well that we called them the purple people eaters.
The captain presumably had visual on the Tassini crawlers, approaching the ambush kill zone, as he spoke to me. Meantime, my platoon had looped in behind the Tassini tanks, to destroy their logistic support. The captain understood his operation, and he understood what he was seeing. But he wasn’t understanding what I was seeing.
What I was seeing through the thermal wasn’t a tank park emptied out of tanks. There were no fuel trucks, no spares vans, no sentries. It was a movable tent cluster occupied by sleeping noncombatant nomads.
Below me, something moved. I leaned forward toward the display again and watched, then I radioed, ‘‘Red One, I’m watching a little kid who just wandered out from one tent in his nightshirt. He’s taking a leak against some rocks.’’
‘‘Sergeant, you’re brevet Third Platoon commander because Haren let a Tassini kid like that get too close, with a satchel charge under his nightshirt.’’
I sighed. The captain liked Lieutenant. Haren. We all had.
The captain asked, ‘‘No bunkers? No hard-shell vehicles?’’
The hardest things in that encampment were fired clay milk jugs. ‘‘Uh, no, sir.’’
‘‘Then load flechette, and stand by.’’
I swallowed. One 145-mm anti-personnel flechette round from a Kodiak’s main gun distributed razor microdarts in an expanding, conical pattern. The pattern spread at this range insured that, within the tent cluster, no object larger in circumference than a child’s fist would remain unpenetrated. Five tanks, one round each, to assure overkill. Three seconds after the order to fire, those tents would be confetti on the breeze. Every living thing within that encampment larger than a sand flea would be dead, or hemorrhaging life faster than pee splashing rocks.
I toggled to platoon net. ‘‘Red Group, this is Red Three. Load flechette. Then form up, on line with visual on the target, and stand by.’’
I looked away from the thermal’s eyepiece, across at my gunner, who faced me in the turret, separated from me by the recoil path of the main gun breech and its autoload ramp. As assistant tank commander, he had heard my exchange over the Command Net. Beneath his helmet visor his eyes were wide.
‘‘Parker?’’ In the mud yard of the warehouse on Dead End, Kit
Born poked my shoulder.
I blinked, then turned and faced her.
She said, ‘‘to answer your question, Parker, no, it wasn’t your friend’s caste line that surprised me. What surprised me is that a man brave enough to engage hovertanks with crawlers, like horse cavalry against panzers, would have anything to do with a merc like you.’’
I’ve never considered slugging a woman before, but when I looked down at my right hand, it had balled into a fist.
Then another Sixer, this one a fresh-washed hired car, with a climate-sealed cabin, bounced into the yard.
Kit and I turned as it stopped, and Kit’s new boss, who was already mine, stepped out into the mud. Cutler wore a designer’s flap-pocketed idea of battle dress uniform, and a bush hat with one side pinned up. Behind him, his driver unloaded matched luggage. We already had a warehouse full of crap that we didn’t need, so it hardly bothered me that Cutler was going to dress for dinner in the jungle.
Cutler tugged one booted foot out of the mud, turned his boot sole up to examine it, then turned his frown on Kit. ‘‘Right now, how many obstacles stand between us and a live grezzen?’’
She ticked items off on her fingers as she spoke. ‘‘A hundred miles of bad road. One river ford. Lots of lesser monsters. That’s three.’’ She raised her thumb. ‘‘Four would be if you suffer an outbreak of common sense.’’
He sniffed, ignored her, and faced me while he pointed at the Abrams. ‘‘How about the equipment?’’
‘‘The C-lift trailer’s got to be loaded. Fuel bladders, spares, all three ammunition lockers, Sleeper, repair ’bot. Then we run the checklists on the Abrams, remount the auxiliary guns, and we’ll be good to go. We could finish tonight, but three days would make better sense. Unless we need any of that other stuff.’’ I pointed at the equipment mountain.
He pointed at us. ‘‘The other stuff doesn’t concern you. We leave in the morning, then. Also, none of you leave here in the meantime. Nobody phones or texts anyone.’’
I did a mental eye roll. Radio silence? For a hunting trip? Really? I spread my palms. ‘‘Who would we call? Sir.’’
Kit stood, arms crossed, brow wrinkled.
Cutler motioned to the hire’s driver to carry the luggage into the warehouse, and watched while the man waddled, until he passed out of earshot. Then Cutler stared at Kit and me. ‘‘I’ll explain when you need to know.’’