Chapter Two
Hans Wager, his unlatched clamshell flapping against his torso, lifted himself onto the back deck of his tank and reached for the turret handhold.
He hated mortars, but the shriek of incoming didn't scare him as much as it should've. He was too worried about the bleeding cursed, huge whale of a tank he was suddenly in charge of in a firefight.
And Wager was pissed: at Personnel for transferring him from combat cars to tanks when they promoted him to sergeant; at himself, for accepting the promotion if the transfer came with it; and at his driver, a stupid newbie named Holman who'd only driven trucks during her previous six months in the regiment.
The tank was brand new. It didn't have a name. Wager'd been warned not to bother naming the vehicle, because as soon as they got the tank to D Company it'd be turned over to a senior crew while he and Holman were given some piece of knackered junk.
Wager grabbed the hatch—just in time, because the tank bucked as that dickhead Holman lifted her on her fans instead of just building pressure in the plenum chamber. "Set—" Wager shouted. The lower edge of his body armor caught on the hatch coaming and jolted the rest of the order out as a wheeze.
Curse this bloody machine that didn't have any bloody room for all its size!
The berm around the Yokel portion of Camp Progress was four meters high—good protection against incoming, but you couldn't shoot over it. They'd put up guard towers every hundred meters inside the berm to cover their barbed wire and minefields.
As Wager slid at last into his turret, he saw the nearest tower disintegrate in an orange flash that silhouetted the bodies of at least three Yokel soldiers.
Holman had switched on the turret displays as soon as she boarded the tank, so Wager had access to all the data he could possibly want. Panoramic views in the optical, enhanced optical, passive thermal, active infra-red, laser, millimetric radar, or sonic spectra. Magnified views in all the above spectra.
Three separate holographic screens, two of which could be split or quadded. Patching circuits that would display similar data fed from any other Slammer vehicle within about ten kays.
Full readouts through any of the displays on the status of the tank's ammunition, its fans, its powerplant, and all aspects of its circuitry.
Hans Wager didn't understand any of that cop. He'd only been assigned to this mother for eighteen hours.
His commo helmet pinged. "This is Tootsie six," said the crisp voice of Captain Ranson from the guard detachment. "Report status. Over."
Ranson didn't have a callsign for Wager's tank, so she was highlighting his blip on her multi-function display before sending.
Wager didn't have a callsign either.
"Roger, Tootsie six," he said. "Charlie Three-zero—" the C Company combat car he'd crewed for the past year as driver and wing gunner "—up and running. Over."
Holman'd got her altitude more or less under control, but the tank now hunched and sidled like a dog unused to a leash. Maybe Wager ought to trade places with Holman. He figured from his combat car experience that he could drive this beast, so at least one of the seats'd be filled by somebody who knew his job.
Wager reached for the seat lever and raised himself out of the cold electronic belly of the turret. He might not have learned to be a tank commander yet, but . . .
The night was bright and welcoming. Muzzle flashes erupted from the slim trees fringing the stream 400 meters to Wager's front. Short bursts without tracers. He set his visor for persistent display—prob'ly a way to do that with the main screens, too, but who the cop cared?—to hold the aiming point in his vision while he aligned the sights of the cupola tribarrel with them.
The first flash of another burst merged with the crackling impact of Wager's powergun. There wasn't a second shot from that Consie.
Wager walked his fire down the course of the stream, shattering slender tree trunks and igniting what had been lush grass an instant before the ravening cyan bolts released their energy. The tank still wasn't steady, but Wager'd shot on the move before. He knew his job.
A missile exploded, fuel and warhead together, gouging a chunk out of the creekbank where the tribarrel had found it before its crew could align it to fire.
Hans Wager's job was to kill people.
The helmeted Slammers' trooper—with twenty kilos of body armor plus a laden equipment belt gripped in his left arm—caught the handle near the top of the car's shield, put his right foot in the step cut into the flare of the plenum chamber skirt, and swung himself into the vehicle.
Suilin's skin was still prickling from the hideous, sky-devouring flash/crash! that had stunned him a moment before. He'd thought a bomb had gone off, but it was a tank shooting because it happened again. He'd pissed his pants, and that bothered him more than the way Fritzi was splashed across the front of his uniform.
Suilin grabbed the handle the way the soldier had. The metal's buzzing vibration startled him; but it was the fans, of course, not a short circuit to electrocute him. He put his foot on the step and jumped as he'd seen the soldier do. He had to get over the side of the armor which would protect him once he was there.
His chest banged the hard iridium, knocking the breath out of him. His left hand scrabbled for purchase, but he didn't have enough strength to—
The trooper Suilin had followed to the combat car leaned over and grabbed the reporter's shoulder. He jerked Suilin aboard with an ease that proved it was as much a knack as pure strength—
But the fellow was strong, and Dick Suilin was out of shape for this work. He didn't belong here, and now he was going to die in this fire-struck night. . . .
"Take the left gun!" shouted the trooper as he slapped the armor closed over his chest. He lowered his helmet visor and added in a muffled voice, "I got the right!"
A trio of sharp, white blasts raked the National Army area. Something overflew the camp from south to north with an accelerating roar that dwarfed even the blasts of the tank gun. It was visible only as the dull glow of a heated surface.
Suilin picked himself up from the ice chest and stacked boxes which halved the space available within the fighting compartment. One man was already bent over the bow gun, ripping the night in short bursts. Suilin's guide seized the grips of the right-hand weapon and doubled the car's weight of fire.
Two of the guard towers were burning. Exploding flares and ammunition sent sparkles of color through the smoky orange flames. The fighting platforms were armored, but the towers were constructed of wood. Suilin had known that—but he hadn't considered until now what the construction technique would mean in a battle.
There wasn't supposed to be a battle, here in the South.
Suilin bent close to the third tribarrel, hoping he could make some sense of it. He'd had militia training like every other male in the country over the age of sixteen, but Prosperity's National Army wasn't equipped with powerguns.
He took the double grips in his hands, that much was obvious. The weapon rotated easily, though the surprising mass of the barrels gave Suilin's tentative swings more inertia than he'd intended.
When his thumbs pressed the trigger button between the grips, nothing happened. The tribarrel had a switch or safety somewhere, and in the dark Suilin wasn't going to be able to overcome his ignorance.
The gun in a tank's cupola snapped a stream of cyan fire south at a flat angle. There was a huge flash and a separate flaring red streak in the sky above the National Army positions. Two other missiles detonated on the ground as three of the earlier salvo had done.
The mercenaries claimed they could shoot shells and missiles out of the air. Suilin hadn't believed that was more than advertising puffery, but he'd just seen it happen. The Slammers' vehicles couldn't protect the National Army positions, but missiles aimed high enough to threaten the mercenaries' own end of Camp Progress were being gutted by computer-aimed powerguns.
The back of Suilin's mind shivered to realize that just now he really didn't care what happened to his fellow citizens, so long as those Consie missiles couldn't land on him.
The tribarrel was useless—the reporter knew he was useless with it—but a short-barreled grenade launcher and bandolier lay across the ice chest beside him. He snatched it up and found the simple mechanical safety with his left thumb.
Suilin had never been any good with a rifle, but his shotgun had brought down its share of birds at the estates of family friends. In militia training he'd taken to grenade launchers like a child to milk.
A bullet passed close enough to crack in Suilin's left ear. He didn't have any idea where the round came from, but both the other men in the fighting compartment swung their tribarrels and began hosing a swale only a hundred meters from the berm. So. . . .
Suilin lifted his grenade launcher and fired. He didn't bother with the sights, just judged the angle of the barrel. The chook! of the shot was a little sharper than he'd expected; the Slammers used lighter projectiles with a higher velocity than the weapons he'd trained on.
They used a more potent bursting charge, too. The grenade's yellow flash, fifty meters beyond Suilin's point of aim, looked like an artillery piece firing.
He lowered the muzzle slightly and squeezed off. This time the projectile burst just where he wanted it, in the swale whose lips were lighted by the tribarrel's crackling bolts.
Suilin didn't see the figure leap from concealment until the powerguns clawed the Consie dazzlingly apart.
"That's right!" his guide screamed from the right-hand gun. "Flush the bastards for us!"
The grenade launcher's recoil woke a familiar warmth from the reporter's shoulder. He swung his weapon slightly and walked three shots down the hidden length of the swale. The last was away before the first was cratering the darkened turf.
An empty clip ejected from the weapon after the fifth round. Both tribarrels fired. There was a disemboweled scream as Dick Suilin reached for the bandolier, groping for more ammunition. . . .
* * *
The turret hatch clanged above Birdie Sparrow; he wasn't shivering any more. Albers, his driver, hadn't boarded yet, so Birdie brought Deathdealer up himself by touching the main switch. The displays lighted softly on auxiliary power while the fusion bottle built pressure.
Deathdealer's hull deadened most sounds, but mortar fragments rang on her skirts like sleet on a window. "Booster, Screen Three," Birdie said, ordering the tank's artificial intelligence to bring up Screen Three, which he habitually used for non-optical sensor inputs.
The tracks of mortar shells were glowing holographic arcs, red for the first salvo and orange for the second. Birdie computed a vector and overlaid it on his main screen at the same time he fed the data to fire control. The turret began to rotate on its frictionless magnetic bearings; the breech of the main gun raised a few centimeters as the muzzle dipped onto its aiming point.
Deathdealer grunted as her fans took a first bite of air. Albers had boarded, so they were fully combat ready.
Light enhancement on the main screen showed the shell tracks arcing from a copse 1800 meters from the berm at a deflection of forty-three degrees east of true north. The orange pipper on Screen Two, the gunnery display, was centered on that point.
The Consies might be in a gully hidden by the trees, and there was a limit to the amount of dirt and rock even a 20cm powergun could excavate, but—
Birdie rocked his foot switch, sending two rounds from his main gun crashing downrange.
Deathdealer shook. The amount of copper plasma being expelled was only a few grams, but when even that slight mass was accelerated to light speed, its recoil force shifted the tank's 170 tonnes. Spent casings ejected onto the turret floor, overwhelming the air conditioning with the stench of hot matrix.
The copse exploded in a ball of fire and live steam. A tree leaped thirty meters skyward, driven by the gout of energy that had shattered the bole at root level.
Birdie chuckled and coughed in the atmosphere of reeking plastic. The mortar crew might not've bought it this time, but they bloody sure weren't going to call attention to themselves for a while. DJ'd have appreciated that.
The main screen highlighted movement in blue: two figures hunched with the weight of the burden they carried between them toward the berm.
Birdie's left thumb rocked the gun control from main to coax while his right hand expertly teased the joystick to bring the pipper onto his targets. They went to ground just as his foot was tensing on the gunswitch, disappearing into a minute dip that meant the difference between life and death.
Birdie started to switch back to the main gun and do the job by brute force, but—
Y' know it's gonna happen, DJ had said in his dream. Birdie waited, ten seconds, twenty. . . .
The Consies popped up from cover, their figures slightly blurred by phosphor delays in the enhanced hologram. Birdie's foot pressed down the rest of the way. A drive motor whirred as the cupola tribarrel thumped out its five-round burst. Cyan impacts flung the targets to left and right as parts of their bodies vaporized explosively.
Death had waited; thirty seconds for that pair, years for other men. But Death didn't forget.
Birdie was safe. He was inside the heaviest piece of land-based armor in the human universe.
Three artillery rockets hit in the near distance. A fourth rumbled overhead, shaking Deathdealer and Birdie's vision of safety. Those were definitely big enough to hurt anything in their impact zone.
Even a tank.
The reflexes of five years' combat, including a year as platoon sergeant, took over. Birdie kept one eye on the panoramic main screen while his hands punched data out of his third display.
The other tanks in the encampment were powered up. The tribarrel couldn't override it without codes he didn't have. The third tank, an H Company repair job named Herman's Whore, didn't respond when he pinged it, and a remote hook-up indicated nobody was in the turret.
From his own command console, Birdie rotated the Whore's tribarrel to the south and slaved it to air defense. Until somebody overrode his command, the gun would engage any airborne targets her sensors offered her.
That left Birdie to get back to immediate business. An alarm pinged to warn him that a laser rangefinder painted Deathdealer's armor. The gunnery computer was already rotating the turret, while a pulsing red highlight arrowed the source: an anti-tank missile launcher twelve hundred meters away, protected only by night and distance.
Which meant unprotected.
Deathdealer's close-in defense system would detonate the missile at a distance with a sleet of barrel-shaped steel pellets, but the Consies needed to learn that you didn't target Colonel Hammer's tanks.
Birdie Sparrow thumbed the gunswitch, preparing to teach the Consies a main-gun lesson.
Henk Ortnahme, panting as he mounted the turret of Herman's Whore, didn't notice the cupola tribarrel was slewed until the bloody thing ripped out a bloody burst that almost blew his bloody head off.
The plasma discharge prickled his scalp and made the narrow fringe that was all the hair he had stand out like a ruff.
Ortnahme ducked blindly, banging his chin on the turret. He couldn't see a bloody thing except winking afterimages of the bolts, and he was too stunned to be angry.
The southern sky flashed and bled as one warhead detonated vainly and another missile's fuel painted the night instead of driving its payload down into the Slammers' positions. Sure, somebody'd slaved the cupola gun to air defense, and that was fine with Ortnahme.
Seeing as he'd managed to survive learning about it.
He mounted the cupola quickly and lowered himself into the turret, hoping the cursed gun wouldn't cut loose again just now. The hatch was a tight fit, but it didn't have sharp edges like the access port.
The port had torn Ortnahme's coveralls so he looked like he'd been wrestling a tiger. Then the bloody coverplate—warped by the mine that deadlined the tank to begin with—hadn't wanted to bolt back in place.
But Ortnahme was in the turret now, and Herman's Whore was ready to slide.
The radio was squawking on the command channel. Ortnahme'd left the hatch open, and between the racket of gunfire and incoming—most of that well to the south by now—the warrant leader couldn't hear what was being said. If he'd known he was in for a deal like this, he'd've brought the commo helmet stashed in his quarters against the chance that someday he'd get back out in the field. . . .
For now he rolled the volume control up to full and blasted himself with, "—DO YOU HAVE A CREW? O—"
Ortnahme dumped some of the volume.
"—ver."
"Roger, Tootsie Six," the warrant leader reported. "Herman's Whore is combat ready. Over."
He sat down, the first chance he'd had to do that since sun-up, and leaped to his feet again as the multitool he'd stowed in his cargo pocket clanged against the frame of the seat. Blood and martyrs!
Ortnahme was itching for a chance to shoot something, but he'd spent too long with the fan and the coverplate. There weren't any targets left on his displays, and he suspected that most of the bolts still hissing across the berm were fired by kids who didn't have the sense God gave a goose.
The Consies had hit in a rush, figuring to sweep over the encampment by sheer speed and numbers. You couldn't do that against the firepower the Slammers put out.
The rest of Camp Progress, though . . .
"Tootsie Six to all Red and Blue personnel," Junebug Ranson continued. "The Yokels report that bandits have penetrated their positions. Red units will form line abreast and sweep south through the encampments. Mobile Blue units—"
The three tanks. Ortnahme's tank, by the Lord's blood!
"—will cross the berm, form on the TOC, and sweep counterclockwise from that point to interdict bandit reinforcements. Deathdealer has command."
Sergeant Sparrow. Tall, dark, and as jumpy as a pithed frog. Usually Ortnahme got crewmen to help him when he pulled major maintenance on their vehicles, but he'd given Sparrow a wide berth. That boy was four-plus crazy.
"Remaining Blue elements," Ranson concluded, "hold what you got, boys. We got to take care of this now, but we'll be back. Tootsie Six over."
Remaining Blue elements. The maintenance and logistics people, the medic and the light-duty personnel. The people who were crouched now in bunkers with their sidearms and their prayers, hoping that when the armored vehicles shifted front, the Consies wouldn't be able to mount another attack on the Slammer positions.
"Deathdealer, roger."
"Charlie Three-zero, roger."
"Herman's Whore, roger," Ortnahme reported. He didn't much like being under the command of Birdie Sparrow, a flake who was technically his junior; but Sparrow was a flake because of years of line service, and it wasn't a point that the warrant leader would even think of mentioning after it all settled down again.
Assuming.
He switched to intercom. "You heard the lady, Simkins," he said. "Lift us over the bloody berm!"
And as the fan note built from idle into a full-throated roar, Ortnahme went back to looking for targets.
The combat car drove a plume of dust from the berm as it started to back and swing. The man who'd been firing the forward tribarrel turned so that Dick Suilin could see the crucifix gilded onto the plastron of his body armor. He flipped up his visor and said, "Who the cop're you?"
"I'm, ah—" the reporter said.
His ears rang. Afterimages like magnified algae rods filled his eyes as his retinas tried to redress the chemical imbalances burned into them by the glaring powerguns.
He waggled the smoking muzzle of the grenade launcher.
That must have been the right response. The man with the crucifix looked at the trooper who'd guided Suilin to the vehicle and said, "Where the cop's Speed, Otski?"
The wing gunner grimaced and said, "Well, Cooter, ah—his buddy in Logistics got in, you know, this morning."
"Bloody buggered fool!" Cooter shouted. He'd looked a big man even when he hunched over his tribarrel; straightening in rage made him a giant. "Tonight he's stoned?"
"Cut him some slack, Cooter," Otski said, looking aside rather than meeting the bigger soldier's eyes. "This ain't the Strip, you know."
Suilin rubbed his forehead. The Strip. The no-man's-land surrounding the Terran Government enclaves in the north.
"Tonight it's the bleeding Strip!" Cooter snapped.
Cooter's helmet spoke something that was only a tinny rattle to Suilin. "Tootsie Three, roger," the big man said. Otski nodded.
A multiple explosion hammered the center of the camp. Munitions hurled themselves in sparkling tracks from a bubble of orange flame.
"Blood 'n martyrs," Cooter muttered as angry light bathed his weary face.
He lifted a suit of hard armor from the floor of the fighting compartment. "Here," he said to Suilin, "put this on. Wish I could give you a helmet, but that dickhead Speed's got it with him."
Their combat car was sidling across the packed earth, keeping its bow southward—toward the flames and the continued shooting. The car passed close to where Fritzi Dole lay. The photographer's clothing swelled in the draft blasting from beneath the plenum chamber.
Dust whipped and eddied. The other combat cars were maneuvering also, forming a line. Here at the narrow end of the encampment, the separations between vehicles were only about ten meters apiece.
"The gun work?" Cooter demanded, patting the breech of the tribarrel as Suilin put on the unfamiliar armor. The clamshell seemed to weigh more than its actual twenty kilos; it was chafing over his left collarbone even before he got it latched.
"Huh?" the reporter grunted. "I think—I mean, I don't—"
Making a bad guess now meant someone might die rather than just a libel suit.
Meant Dick Suilin might die.
"Oh, right," Cooter said easily. He poked with a big finger at where the gun's receiver was gimballed onto its pedestal. A green light glowed just above the trigger button. "No sweat, turtle. I'll just slave it to mine. You just keep bombin' 'em like you been doing."
The helmet buzzed again. "Tootsie Three, roger," Cooter repeated. He tapped the side of his helmet and ordered, "Move out, Shorty, but keep it to a walk, right?"
Cooter and Otski bent over their weapons. When the big trooper waggled his handgrips, the left tribarrel rocked in parallel with his own.
"What are we doing?" Suilin asked, swaying as the combat car moved forward. The big vehicle had the smooth, unpleasant motion of butter melting as a grill heats.
The reporter pulled another loaded clip from the bandolier to have it ready. He squinted toward the barracks ahead of them, silhouetted in orange light.
"Huh?" said Cooter. His face was a blank behind his lowered visor as he looked over his shoulder in surprise.
"We're gonna clear your Consie buddies outta Camp Progress," Otski said with a feral grin in his voice.
"Yeah, right, you don't have a commo," Cooter said/apologized. "Look, anybody you see in a black uniform, zap him. Anybody shoots at us, zap him. Fast."
"Anything bleedin' moves," said Otski, "you zap it. Any mistake you gotta make, make it in favor of our ass, right?"
Suilin nodded tightly. There was a howl and whump! behind them. For a moment he thought the noise was a shell, but it was only one of the huge tanks lifting its mass over the berm.
A combat car on the right flank fired down one of the neat boulevards which served the National Army's portion of the camp.
"Hey, turtle?" the right wing gunner said. "You got a name?"
"Dick," Suilin said. He'd lifted the grenade launcher to his shoulder twice already, then lowered it because he felt like a fool to be aiming at no target. The noise around him was hideous.
"Don't worry, Dick," Otski said. "We'll tell yer girl you was brave."
He chuckled, then lighted the wide street ahead of them with a burst from his tribarrel.
"You must send the 4th Armored Brigade to relieve us!" Colonel Banyussuf was ordering his superiors in Kohang. Since June Ranson's radio was picking up the call down in the short-range two-meter push, there was about zip possibility that anybody 300 kilometers away could hear the Yokel commander's panicked voice.
Two men in full uniform poked their rifles gingerly southward, around the corner of a barracks. Light reflected from their polished leather and brightly-nickeled Military Police gorgets. The MPs stared in open-mouthed amazement as the combat car slid past them.
"About zip" was still a better chance than that District Command in Kohang would do anything about Banyussuf's problems.
Trouble here meant there was big trouble everywhere on Prosperity. District Command wasn't going to send the armored brigade based on the coast near Kohang haring off into the sticks to relieve Banyussuf.
"Watch it," Willens, their driver, warned.
Warmonger slid into an intersection. A crowd of thirty or so women and children screamed and ran a step or two away from them, then screamed again and flattened as another car crossed at the next intersection east. Dependents of senior non-coms, looking for a place to hide. . . .
Ranson wouldn't have minded having a Yokel armored brigade for support, but it'd take too long to reach here. Her team could do the job by themselves.
"Two o'clock!" she warned. Movement on the second floor of a barracks, across the wide boulevard that acted as a parade square every morning for the Yokels.
The left corner of her visor flashed the tiny red numeral 2. Her helmet's microprocessor had gathered all its sensor inputs and determined that the target was of Threat Level 2.
Cold meat under most circumstances, but in Camp Progress there were thousands of National Army personnel who looked the same as the Consies to scanners. With her visor on thermal, Ranson couldn't tell whether the figure wore black or a green-on-green mottled Yokel uni—
The figure raised its gun. 2 blinked to 1 in Ranson's visor, then vanished—
Because a dead man doesn't have any threat level at all. Ranson's burst converged with Janacek's; the upper front of the barracks flew apart as the powerguns ignited it.
Willens slewed the car left. Somebody leaned out of a window of the same barracks and fired—missed even the combat car except for one bullet ricocheting from the dirt street to whang on the skirts.
Ranson killed the shooter, letting Warmonger's forward motion walk the flashing cyan cores of her burst down the line of barracks windows. Janacek was raking the lower story, and as they came abreast of the building, the One-five blower to Warmonger's right laid on a crossfire from two of its tribarrels.
A single bolt from the other car sizzled through gaps already blown in the structure and hit the barracks on the other side of the street. The cyan track missed Ranson by little enough that the earphones in her helmet screamed piercingly with harmonics from the energy release.
She noticed it the way she'd notice a reflection in a shop window. Everything around her seemed to be reflected or hidden behind sheets of thick glass. Nothing touched her. Her skin felt warm, the way it did when she was on the verge of going to sleep.
A tank's main gun flashed beyond the berm. Ranson would've liked the weight of the panzers with her to push the Consies out, but their 20cm cannon were too destructive to use within a position crammed with friendly troops and their dependents. If things got hot enough that the combat cars needed a bail-out—
She'd give the orders she had to give and worry about the consequences later. But for now . . .
A group of armed men ran from a cross street into the next intersection. Some of them were still looking back over their shoulders when Warmonger's three tribarrels lashed them with converging streams of fire.
Figures whirled and disintegrated individually for a moment before a bloom of white light—a satchel charge, a buzzbomb's warhead; perhaps just a bandolier strung with grenades—enveloped the group. The shockwave slammed bodies and body fragments in every direction.
Ranson was sure they'd been wearing black uniforms. Pretty sure.
"—must help me!" whimpered the radio. "They have captured the lower floor of my headquarters!"
She hand-keyed the microphone and said, "Progress Command, this is Slammers' Command. Help's on the way, but be bloody sure your own people don't shoot at us. Out."
Or else, her mind added, but she didn't want that threat on record. Anyway, even the Yokels were smart enough to know what happened when somebody shot at the Slammers. . . .
"Tootsie Six to Red elements," Ranson heard herself ordering. "Keep moving even if you're taking fire. Don't let 'em get their balance or they'll chop us."
Her voice was echoing to her down corridors of glass.