"Sarge," said Holman on the intercom, "why aren't we just crossing the river instead of fooling with a damaged bridge? When I was in trucks, we'd see the line companies go right around us while we was backed up for a bridge. Down, splash, up the far bank and gone."
Now that the task force had moved into open country, Holman was doing a pretty good job of keeping station. You couldn't take somebody straight out of a transport company and expect them to drive blind and over broken terrain—with no more than forty hours of air-cushion experience to begin with.
If your life depended on it, though, that was just what you did expect.
"Combat cars have that much lift," Wager explained bitterly. "These mothers don't. Via! but I wish I was back in cars."
He was down in the turret, trying to get some sort of empathy with his screens and controls before the next time he needed them. He was okay on mine-clearing, now; he had the right reflexes.
But the next time, Tootsie Six wouldn't be ordering him to lay a mine-clearance charge, it'd be some other cursed thing. It'd be the butt of Hans Wager and the whole cursed task force when he didn't know what the hell to do.
"Look, Holman," he said, because lift was something he did understand, lift and tribarrels laying fire on the other mother before he corrected his aim at you. "We're in ground effect. The fans pressurize the air in the plenum chamber underneath. The ground's the bottom of the pressure chamber, right? And that keeps us floating."
"Right, but—"
Holman swore. The column was paralleling the uphill side of a wooded fenceline. She'd attempted to correct their tank's tendency to drift downslope, but the inertia of 170 steel and iridium tonnes had caught up with her again. One quadrant of Wager's main screen exploded in a confetti of splintered trees and fence posts.
"Bleedin' motherin' martyrs!" snarled the intercom as Holman's commo helmet dutifully transmitted to the most-recently accessed recipient.
Friction from the demolished fence and vegetation pulled the tank farther out of its intended line, despite the driver's increasingly violent efforts to swing them away. When the cumulative over-corrections swung the huge pendulum their way, the tank lurched upslope and grounded its right skirt with a shock that rattled Wager's head against the breech of the main gun.
Bloody amateur!
Like Hans Wager, tank commander.
Blood and martyrs.
"S'okay, Holman," Wager said aloud, more or less meaning it. "Any one you walk away from."
He'd finally cleared the mines at Happy Days, hadn't he?
"Look, the lift," he went on. "Without something pretty solid underneath, these panzers drop. Sink like stones. But combat cars, the ones you been watchin', they've got enough power for their weight they can use thrust to keep 'em up, not just ground effect."
Wager wriggled the helmet. It'd gotten twisted a little on his brow when he bounced a moment ago. Their tank was now sedately tracking the car ahead, as though the mess behind them had been somebody else's problem.
"Only thing is," Wager continued, "a couple of the cars, they're running' short a fan or two themselves by now. Talkin' to the guys on One-one while we laagered. Stuff that never happens when you're futzing around a firebase, you get twenty kays out on a route march and blooie."
"We're all systems green," Holman said. "Ah, sarge? I think I'm gettin' the hang of it, you know? But the weight, it still throws me."
"Yeah, well," Wager said, touching the joystick cautiously so as not to startle the other vehicles. The turret mechanism whined restively; Screen Two's swatch of rolling farmland, centered around the orange pipper, shifted slightly across the panorama of the main screen.
"Look, when we get to the crossing point, if we do, get across that cursed bridge fast, right?" he added. "It's about ready to fall in the river, see, from shelling? So put'cher foot on the throttle 'n keep it there."
"No, sarge."
"Huh?"
"Sarge, I'm sorry," Holman said, "but if we do that, we bring it down for sure. And us. Sarge, look, I'm, you know, I'm not great on tanks. But I took a lotta trucks over piddly bridges, right? We'll take it slow and especially no braking or acceleration. That'll work if anything does. I promise. Okay?"
She sounded nervous, telling a veteran he was wrong.
She sounded like she curst well thought she was right, though.
Via, maybe she was. Holman didn't have any line experience . . . but that didn't mean she didn't have any experience. They needed everything they could get right now, her and him and everybody else in Task Force Ranson. . . .
"They say she's a real space cadet," Wager said aloud. "Her crew does. Cap'n Ranson, I mean."
"Because she's a woman," Holman said flatly.
"Because she flakes out!" Wager snapped. "Because she goes right off into dreamland in the middle a' talking."
He looked at the disk of sky speeding past his open hatch. It didn't seem perceptibly brighter, but he could no longer make out the stars speckling its sweep.
"At least," said Holman with a touch more emotion than her previous comment, "Captain Ranson isn't so much of a flake that she'd go ahead with the mission without her tanks."
"Yeah," said Sergeant Hans Wager in resignation. "Without us."
Camp Progress stank of death: the effects of fire on scores of materials; rotting garbage that had been ignored among greater needs; and the varied effluvia each type of shell and cartridge left when it went off.
There was also the stench of the wastes which men voided as they died.
It was a familiar combination to Chief Lavel, but some of the newbies in his work crew still looked queasy.
A Consie had died of his wounds beneath the tarp covering the shells off-loaded from the self-propelled howitzer. It wasn't until the shells were needed that the body was found. The corpse's skin was as black as the cloth of the uniform which the gas-distended body stretched.
They'd get used to it. They'd better.
Lavel massaged the stump of his right arm with his remaining hand as he watched eight men cautiously lift a 200mm shell, then lower it with a clank onto the gurney. They paused, panting.
"Go on," he said, "One more and you've got the load."
"Via!" said Riddle angrily. There were bright chafe lines on both of the balding man's wrists. "We can rest a bloody—"
"Riddle!" Lavel snapped. "If you want to be wired up again, just say the word. Any word!"
Two of the work crew started to lower their clamp over the remaining shell in the upper of the two layers. The short, massive round was striped black and mauve. Ridges impressed in the casing showed where it would separate into three parts at a predetermined point in its trajectory.
"Not that one!" Lavel ordered sharply. "Nor the other with those markings. Just leave them and bring the—bring one of the blue-and-whites."
Firecracker rounds that would rain over four hundred anti-personnel bomblets apiece down on the target area. No good for smashing bunkers, but much of the Consies' hasty siegeworks around la Reole lacked overhead cover. The Consies'd die in their trenches like mice in a mincer when the firecracker rounds burst overhead . . .
Lavel stumped away from the crew, knowing that they could carry on well enough without him. He was more worried about the team bolting boosters onto the shells already loaded onto the hog. A trained crew could handle the job in a minute or less per shell, but the scuts left at Camp Progress when the task force pulled out. . . .
Scuts like Chief Lavel, a derelict who couldn't even assemble artillery rounds nowadays. A job he could do drunk in the dark a few years ago, back when he'd been a man.
But he had to admit, he felt alive for almost the first time since Gresham's counter-battery salvo got through the net of cyan bolts that should've swept it from the sky. It wasn't any part of Lavel's fault, but he'd paid the price.
That's how it was in war. You trusted other people and they trusted you . . . so when you screwed up—
—and Chief knew he'd screwed up lots of times in the past, you couldn't live and not transpose a range figure once—
—it was some other bastard got it in the neck.
Or the arm and leg. What goes around, comes around.
Lavel began whistling "St. James' Infirmary" between his teeth as he approached the self-propelled howitzer. His self-propelled howitzer for the next few hours.
Craige and Komar, transit drivers who hadn't been promoted to line units after a couple years service each, seemed to have finished their task. Six assembled rounds waited on the hog's loading tray.
Between each 200mm shell (color-coded as to type) and its olive-drab base charge was a white-painted booster. The booster contained beryllium-based fuel to give the round range sufficient to hit positions around la Reole.
Lavel checked each fastener while the two drivers waited uneasily.
"All right," he said at last, grudging them credit for the task he could no longer perform. "All right. They should be coming with the next load now."
He climbed the three steps into the gun compartment carefully. The enclosure smelled of oil and propellant residues. It smelled like home.
Lavel powered up, listening critically to the sound of each motor and relay as it came live. The bank of idiot lights above the targeting console had a streak of red and amber with a green expanse: the traversing mechanism failed regularly when the turret was rotated over fifteen degrees to either side.
Thank the Lord for that problem. Without it, the howitzer wouldn't 've been here in Camp Progress when it was needed.
Needed by Task Force Ranson. Needed by Chief Lavel.
He sat in the gun captain's chair, then twisted to look over his shoulder. "Are you clear?" he shouted to his helpers. "Keep clear!"
For choice, Lavel would have stuck his head out the door of the gun compartment to make sure Craige and Komar didn't have their hands on the heavy shells. That would mean picking up his crutch and levering himself from the chair again. . . .
Level touched the execute button to start the loading sequence.
The howitzer had arrived at Camp Progress with most of a basic load of ammunition still stowed in its hull. For serious use, the hog would have been fed from one or more ammunition haulers, connected to the loading ramp by conveyor belts.
No problem. The nineteen rounds available would be enough for this job.
Seventeen rounds. Two of the shells couldn't be used for this purpose. But seventeen was plenty.
The howitzer began to swallow its meal of ammunition, clanking and wobbling on its suspension. Warrant Leader Ortnahme had ordered the shells off-loaded and stored at a safe distance—from him—as soon as the hog arrived for maintenance. That quantity of high explosive worried most people.
Not Chief Lavel, who'd worked with it daily—until some other cannon-cocker got his range.
CLUNK. CLUNK. The first six rounds would go into the ready-use drum, from which the gun could cycle them in less than fifteen seconds.
CLUNK. CLUNK. Each round would be launched as an individually-targeted fire mission. The hog's computer chose from the ready-use drum the shell that most nearly matched the target parameters.
For bunkers, an armor-piercing shell or delay-fused high explosive if no armor piercing was in the drum. So on down the line until, if nothing else were available, a paint-filled practice round blasted out of the tube.
CLUNK. The loading system refilled the ready-use drum automatically, until the on-board stowage was exhausted and the outside tray no longer received fresh rounds. Lavel could hear the second gurney-load squealing closer.
CLUNK.
The drum was loaded—six green lights on the console. He could check the shell-types by asking the system, but there was no need. He'd chosen the first six rounds to match the needs of his initial salvo.
A touch threw the target map up on the screen above the gunnery console. The drone's on-board computer had processed the data before dumping it.
Damage to buildings within la Reole—shell-burst patterns as well as holes—provided accurate information as to the type and bearing of the Consie weapons. When that data was superimposed on the raw new siege works, it was easy for an artificial intelligence to determine the location of the enemy's heavy weapons, the guns that were dangerous to an armored task force.
One more thing to check. "TOC," Lavel said to his commo helmet.
No response for ten seconds, thirty. . . . The first shell of the new batch clanged down on the loading ramp.
"Tech 2 Helibrun," a harried voice responded at last. "Go ahead, Yellow Six."
Yellow Six. Officer in command of Transit. Lavel's lips curled.
"I'm waiting for the patch to Tootsie Six," he said, more sharply than the delay warranted. "Why haven't I been connected?"
"The bl—" the commo tech began angrily. He continued after a pause to swallow. "Chief, the patch is in place. We don't have contact with the task force yet, is all. From the data we've got from Central, it'll be about an hour before they're on ground high enough that we can reach them from here."
Another pause; instead of an added, you cursed fool, simply, "We'll connect you when we do. Over."
Lavel swallowed his own anger. He was getting impatient; which was silly, since he'd waited more than seven years already. . . .
"Roger," he said. "Yellow Six out."
Another shell dropped onto the ramp. There would be plenty of time to load and prepare all seventeen rounds before the start of the fire mission.
Over an hour to kill, and to kill. . . .
The lower half of June Ranson's visor was a fairy procession of lanterns. They hung from tractor-drawn carts and bicycles laden with cargo.
"Action front!" Ranson warned. She was probably the only person in the unit who was trying to follow a remote viewpoint as well as keeping watch on her immediate surroundings.
The reflected cyan crackle from Deathdealer's stabilized tribarrel provided an even more effective warning.
The main road from the southwest into la Reole and its bridge across the Santine Estuary was studded with figures and crude vehicles. Hundreds of civilians, guided—guarded—by a few black-clad guerrillas, were lugging building materials uphill to the Consie siege lines.
The lead tank of Task Force Ranson had just snarled into view of them.
Sparrow's first burst must have come from the bellowing darkness so far as the trio of Consies, springing to their feet from a lantern-lit guardpost, were concerned. The guerrillas spun and died at the roadside while civilians gaped in amazement. Without light-enhanced optics, the tank cresting a plowed knoll 500 meters away was only sound and a flicker of lethal cyan.
Civilians flung down their bicycles and sought cover in the ditches beside the road. Bagged cement; hundred-kilo loads of reinforcing rods; sling-loads of brick—building materials necessary for a work of destruction—lay as ungainly lumps on the pavement.
The loads had been pushed for kilometers under the encouragement of armed Consies. Bicycle wheels spun lazily in the air.
A rifleman stood up on a tractor-drawn cart and fired in the general direction of Deathdealer. Sparrow's tribarrel spat bolts at a building on the ridgeline, setting off a fuel pump in a fireball.
Ranson, Janacek, and at least two gunners from car One-five, the left outrider, answered the rifleman simultaneously.
The Consie's head and torso disappeared with a blue stutter. The canned goods which filled the bed of the cart erupted in a cloud of steam. The tractor continued its plodding uphill progress. Its driver had jumped off and was running down the road, screaming and waving his arms in the air.
There were no trucks or buses visible in the convoy. The Consies must have commandeered ordinary transport for more critical purposes, using makeshifts to support the sluggish pace of siegework.
In the near distance to the east of Task Force Ranson, the glare of a powergun waked cyan echoes from high clouds. One of the weapons which the Consies had brought up to bombard la Reole—a pedestal-mounted powergun. The weapon was heavy enough to hole a tank or open a combat car like a can of sardines. . . .
"Booster!" Ranson shouted to her AI. "Fire mission Able. Break. Tootsie Three, call in Fire Mission Able directly—in clear—as soon as you raise Camp Progress. Break. All Tootsie elements, follow the road. They can't 've mined it if they're using it like this. Go! Go! Go!"
Warmonger bucked and scraped the turf before clearing a high spot. Willens had wicked up his throttles. Though he'd lifted the car for as much ground clearance as possible, Warmonger's present speed guaranteed a bumpy ride on anything short of a pool table.
Speed was life now. These terrified civilians and their sleepy guards had nothing to do with the mission of Task Force Ranson, but a single lucky slug could cause an irreplaceable casualty. Colonel Hammer was playing this game with table stakes. . . .
In the roar of wind and gunfire, Ranson hadn't been able to hear the chirp of her AI transmitting.
If it had transmitted. If the electronics of a combat car jolting along at speed were good enough to bounce a transmission a thousand kays north from a meteor track. If Fire Central would relay the message to Camp Progress in time. If the hog at Camp Progress . . .
Two men shot at Warmonger from the ditch across the road.
Ranson fired back. Bolts ripped from the rotating muzzles of her powergun and vanished from her sight. It wasn't until the lower half of her visor blacked momentarily and the upper half quivered with cyan reflections that she realized that she'd been aiming at the remote image from Deathdealer.
Part of June Ranson's mind wondered what her bolts had hit, might have hit. The part in physical control continued to squeeze the butterfly trigger of her powergun and watch the cyan light vanish in the divided darkness of her mind. . . .
The night ahead of Dick Suilin was lit spitefully by the fire of the other armored vehicles. He clung to the coaming of Flamethrower's fighting compartment with his left hand; his right rested on the grip of his tribarrel, but his thumb was curled under his fingers as if to prevent it from touching the trigger.
There were no signs of Consies shooting back, but a farm tractor had collapsed into a fuel fire that reminded Suilin of the bus after his bolts raked it.
Oh dear Lord. Oh dear Lord.
Gale was lighting his quarter with short bursts. So far as the reporter could tell, the veteran's bolts were a matter of excitement rather than a response to real targets. Lieutenant Cooter gripped the armor with both hands and shouted so loudly into his helmet microphone that Suilin could hear the sounds though not the words.
Both veterans had a vision of duty.
Dick Suilin had his memories.
When the armored vehicles prickled with cyan bolts, they re-entered the reporter's universe. It had been very easy for Suilin to believe that the three of them in the back of Flamethrower were the only humans left in the strait bounds of existence. The darkness created that feeling; the darkness and the additional Wide-awake he'd accepted from Gale.
Perhaps what most divorced Suilin from that which had been reality less than two days before was the buzzing roar of the fans. Their vibration seemed to jelly both his mind and his marrow.
Since the driver slid his throttles to the top of their range, Flamethrower's skirt jolted repeatedly against the ground. Suilin found the impacts more bearable than the constant, enervating hum of the car at moderate speed.
Task Force Ranson swung raggedly at an angle to the left. Each armored vehicle followed a separate track, though the general line was on or parallel to the paved highway.
Suilin had ridden the la Reole/Bunduran road a hundred times in the past. It was easy to follow the road's course now with his eyes, because of the fires lit by powerguns all along its course. The truckers' cafe and fuel point at the top of the ridge, three kilometers from la Reole, was a crown of flames.
Flamethrower lurched over a ditch and sparked her skirts on the gravel shoulder. The driver straightened his big vehicle with port, then starboard sidethrusts. The motion rocked Suilin brutally but seemed to be expected by the veterans with him in the fighting compartment.
Gale shot over the stern, and Cooter's weapon coughed bursts so short it appeared to be clearing its triple throats.
A dozen civilians huddled in the ditch on Suilin's side of the car. All but one of them were pressed face-down in the soft earth. Their hands were clasped over the back of their heads as if to force themselves still lower.
The exception lay on her back. A powergun had decapitated her.
Suilin tried to scream, but his throat was too rigid to pass the sound.
"Shot!" crackled his headphones, but there was shooting everywhere. As armored vehicles disappeared over the brow of the ridge, all their weapons ripped the horizon in volleys. Cooter had explained that the Consie siegeworks were just across a shallow valley from where Task Force Ranson would regain the road.
A Consie wearing crossed bandoliers rolled upright in the ditch fifty meters ahead of Flamethrower. He aimed directly at Suilin.
Cooter saw the guerrilla, but the big lieutenant had been raking the right side of the road while Gale covered the rear. He shouted something and tried to turn his tribarrel.
Suilin's holographic sights were a perfect image of the Consie, whose face fixed in a snarl of hate and terror. The guerrilla's cheeks bunched and made his moustache twitch, as though he were trying to will his rifle to fire without pulling the trigger.
The muzzle flashes were red as heart's blood.
Flamethrower jolted over debris in the road. A bicycle flew skyward; the air was sharp with quicklime as bags of cement ruptured. Three bullets rang on the armor in front of Dick Suilin and ricocheted away in a blaze of sparks.
As the car settled again, Suilin's tribarrel lashed out: one bolt short, one bolt long . . . and between them, the guerrilla's hair and the tips of his moustache ablaze to frame what had been his face.
Flamethrower was past.
The sky overhead began to scream.
Hans Wager was strapped into his seat. He hated it, but at least the suspended cradle preserved him from the worst of the shocks.
The tank grounded on the near ditch; sparked its skirts across the pavement in red brilliance; and grounded sideways on the ramp of the drainage ditch across the road. Holman hadn't quite changed their direction of travel, though she'd pointed them the right way.
The stern skirts dragged a long gouge up the road as Holman accelerated with the bow high. The main screen showed a dazzling roostertail of sparks behind the nameless tank. Wager didn't care. He had too much on his own plate.
Deathdealer fired its main gun.
That was all right for Birdie Sparrow, an experienced tanker and riding the lead vehicle. Wager'd set the mechanical lock-out on his own 20cm weapon.
He didn't trust the electronic selector when there were this many friendly vehicles around. A bolt from the main gun would make as little of a combat car as it would of a church choir.
Hans Wager was determined that he'd make this cursed, bloody tank work for him. Nothing would ever convince him that a tank's sensors were really better than three sets of human eyeballs, sweeping the risks of a battlefield—
But there weren't three sets of eyeballs, just his own, so he had to make the hardware work.
The threat sensor flashed a Priority One carat onto the main screen. Wager couldn't tell what the target was in the laterally-compressed panorama. The cupola gun, slaved to the threat sensor the way Albers explained it could be, was already rotating left. It swung the magnified gunnery display of Screen Two with it.
Two bodies and one body still living, a Consie huddling beside what had been a pair of civilian females. The guerrilla's rifle was slung across his back, forgotten in his panic. He was too close for the tribarrel to bear.
The tank's skirts swept a bicycle and sling-load of bricks from the road, flinging the debris ahead and aside of its hundred-and-seventy-tonne rush. Chips and brickdust pelted the Consie. He leaped up.
His chest exploded in cyan light and a cloud of steam which somersaulted the corpse a dozen meters from the ditch.
There'd been a major guardpost at the truckstop on the hill, but Deathdealer and the crossfire of the two leading combat cars had already ended any threat from that quarter. Fuel roared in an orange jet from the courtyard pump. The roof of the cafe had buried whoever was still inside when tribarrels cut the walls away.
"Shot," said his commo helmet. The voice of whoever was acting as fire control was warning that friendly artillery would impact in five seconds.
Three bodies sprawled: a step, another step, and a final step, from the front door of the cafe.
Deathdealer dropped over the hill. Its main gun lighted the far valley. The nameless tank topped the ridgeline with a roar. Their speed and Holman's inexperience lofted the vehicle thirty centimeters into the air at the crest.
Hans Wager, bracing himself in his seat, toggled the main gun off Safe.
The low ridge a kilometer away paralleled the Santine River and embraced the western half of la Reole. The Consies had used the road to bring up their heavy weapons and building materials for substantial bunkers.
Three shells, dull red with the friction of their passage through air, streaked down onto the enemy concentration. The earth quivered.
The initial results were unremarkable. A knoll shifted, settled; a hundred meters south of that knoll, dust rose in a spout like that of a whale venting its lungs; a further hundred meters south, black smoke puffed—not from the hilltop but well beneath the crest where raw dirt marked the mouth of a recently-excavated tunnel.
The knoll erupted, then settled again into a cavity that could have held a tank.
Blue light fused and ignited dust as a store of powergun ammunition devoured itself and the weapon it was meant to feed.
The tunnel belched orange flame; sucked in its breath and blazed forth again. The second time, the edge of the shock wave propelled a human figure.
Three more shells streaked the sky. One of them hit well to the south. The others were aimed at targets across the estuary.
Deathdealer raked the far ridge with both main gun and tribarrel. The combat cars shot up sandbag-covered supply dumps on both sides of the road. Most of the armed Consies would be in bunkers, but any figure seen now was fair game for as many guns as could bear on it.
Long before they topped the ridge, Wager had known what his own target would be.
A mortar firing at night illuminates a thirty-meter hemisphere with its skyward flash. There'd been such a flash, needlessly highlighted by the tank's electronics, before the Consies realized they were being taken in the rear.
Wager hated mortars. Their shells angled in too high to be dealt with by the close-in defense system, and a direct hit would probably penetrate the splinter shield of a combat car.
Now a mortar and its crew were in the center of Wager's gunnery screen.
Normally the greatest danger to a mortar was counterfire from another mortar. A shell's slow, arching trajectory was easy for radar to track, and the most rudimentary of ballistic computers could figure a reciprocal. The guerrillas here had been smart: they'd mounted their tube on the back of a cyclo, a three-wheeled mini-truck of the sort the civilians on Prosperity used for everything from taxis to hauling farm produce into town.
At the bottom of the slope, work crews had cleared a path connecting several firing positions. The cyclo had just trundled into a revetment. Shell cartons scattered outside the position 200 meters up the track showed where the crew had fired the previous half-dozen rounds.
The Consie mortarmen were turned to stare with amazement at the commotion behind them. The sparkling impact as Wager's tank landed, half on the pavement and half off, scattered the crew a few paces, but the tanker's shot was in time. . . .
The center of the cyclo vanished: Wager had used his main gun. The 20cm bolt was so intense that the explosion of cases of mortar ammo followed as an anticlimax.
Several of the mortar shells were filled with white phosphorous. None of the crewmen had run far enough to be clear of the smoky tendrils whose hearts would blaze all the way through the victims on which they landed.
The nameless tank swept past flaming heaps of food, bedding, and material. Ammunition burned in harmless corkscrews through the sky and an occasional ping on the armor.
More shells from Camp Progress howled overhead and detonated, six of them almost simultaneously this time. A curtain of white fire cloaked the siegelines as hundreds of anti-personnel bomblets combed crevices to lick Consie blood.
The leading vehicles, Deathdealer and two combat cars, had slowed deliberately to let the salvo land. Holman matched her tank's attitude to the slope and drew ahead with the inertia she'd built on the downgrade. She spun the nameless tank with unexpected delicacy around the shell crater gaping at the hillcrest.
The artillery had flung dozens of bodies and bodyparts out of eviscerated bunkers. Holman slowed to a crawl so that Wager could pick his targets on the reverse slope.
Men in black uniforms were climbing or crawling from trenches which shells had turned into abattoirs. Wager ignored them. His AI highlighted the firing slits of bunkers which the shells had spared.
Every time his pipper settled, his foot trod out another 20cm bolt.
Jets of plasma from powerguns traveled in a straight line and liberated all their energy on the first solid object they touched. Wager's bolts couldn't penetrate the earth the way armor-piercing projectiles did—but their cyan touch could shake apart hillsides in sprays of volcanic glass.
The interior of a bunker when a megajoule of plasma spurted through the opening was indescribable Hell.
Deathdealer pulled over the crest a hundred meters to the left of Wager's tank. Its main gun spat bolts at the pace of a woodpecker hammering. Sparrow's experience permitted him to fire in a smooth motion, again and again, without any pause greater than that of his turret rotating to bear on the next target.
La Reole sprawled half a kilometer away. The nearest buildings had been shattered by shellfire and the first flush of hand-to-hand fighting before the Consies retreated to lick their wounds and blast the Yokel garrison into submission.
Smoke lifted from a dozen points within the town. A saffron hint of dawn gaped on hundreds of holes in the tile roofs.
An amphibious landing vehicle pulled down from the protection of a courtyard in the town and opened fire with its machinegun. Consies emerging from a shell-ravaged bunker stumbled and fell. Wager remembered the Yokels had a Marine Training Unit here at la Reole. . . .
The tank's turret was thick with fumes. Wager breathed through filters, though he didn't remember them clamping down across his mouth and nose.
He stamped on the firing pedal. The gun wheezed instead of firing: he'd shot off the entire thirty-round basic load, and the tank had to cycle more main gun ammunition from storage deep in the hull.
There weren't any worthwhile targets anyway. Every slit that might have concealed a cannon or powergun was a glowing crater. Streaks of turf smoldered where bolts had ripped them.
Deathdealer was advancing again. The muzzle of its main gun glowed white.
"Sarge, should I . . . ?" Wager's intercom demanded.
"Go, go!" he snapped back. "And Via! be careful with the bridge!"
He hoped the Yokels would have sense enough not to shoot at them. For the moment, that seemed like the worst danger.
Three more shells from Camp Progress screamed overhead.
The howitzer still rocked with the sky-tearing echoes of its twelfth round. Chief Lavel was laughing. Only when he turned and met Craige's horrified eyes did he realize that he wasn't alone in the crew compartment.
Craige massaged her ears with her palms. "Ah," she said. "The guys wanta know, you know . . . are we dismissed now?"
Drives moaned as the gun mechanism filled its ready-use drum with the remaining shells in storage. Lavel put his palm against an armored side-panel to feel every nuance of the movement. It was like being reborn. . . .
"Not yet," he said. "When the last salvo's away, we'll police up the area."
The crew compartment was spacious enough to hold a full eight-man crew under armor when the howitzer was changing position. The 200mm shells and their rocket charges were heavy, and no amount of hardware could obviate the need for humans during some stages of the preparation process.
The actual firing sequence required only one man to pick the targets. The howitzer's AI and electromechanical drives did the rest.
It didn't even require a whole man. A ruin like Chief Lavel was sufficient.
He glanced at the panoramic screen mounted on the slanted armor above the gun mantlet. A light breeze had dissipated much of the smoke from the sustainer charges. They burned out in the first seven seconds after ignition. High in the heavens, streaking south were dense white trails where the ramjet boosters cut in.
The beryllium fuel was energetic—but its residues were intensely hygroscopic and left clouds thick enough to be tracked on radar.
The residues were lethal at extreme dilution as well . . . but the boosters ignited at high altitude, and it wasn't Alois Hammer's planet.
Besides, Via! this was a war, wasn't it? There was always collateral damage in war.
"Ah . . ." said Craige. "Sir? When are you going to shoot off the rest?"
"When I get the bloody update from the task force, aren't I?" Lavel snarled. He patted the console. "It's thirty-three seconds to splash from here. We don't fire the last five rounds till we see what still needs to be hit and where the bloody friendlies are!"
The console in front of Lavel began to click and whine. He had a voice link to the task force, but the electronically-sensed information, passed from one AI to another, was faster by an order of magnitude.
It was also less subject to distortion, even when, as now, it had to be transmitted over VHF radio.
Besides, the crews of Task Force Ranson had plenty to occupy them without spotting for the guns.
The new data swept all the previous highlights from the targeting overlay. Green splotches marked changes in relief caused by shell-bursts and secondary explosions. Denser pinheads of the same hue showed where bolts from the 20cm powerguns of tanks had glazed the terrain, sealing firing positions whether or not the bunkers themselves were destroyed.
No worthy targets remained on the west side of the Santine.
Lavel's light pen touched a bunker on the near bank of the estuary anyway. It had been built to hold a heavy gun, though the AI was sure nothing was emplaced in it yet. That accomplished, Lavel checked the eastern arc of the siege lines.
The east side was lightly held, because most of the Consie forces across the Santine were concentrated on Kohang. The Marine unit in la Reole could probably have broken out—but in doing so, they would have had to surrender the town and the crucial crossing point. Somebody—somebody with more brains and courage than any of the Yokels at Camp Progress—had decided to hold instead of running.
Lavel had two high-explosive shells, one target solid, and a firecracker round remaining. He chose three east-side bunkers for the HE and the solid. The solid was intended to test the air-defense system of friendly units, but its hundred and eighty kilos weren't going to do anybody it landed on any good. He set his firecracker round to detonate overhead ten seconds after the others splashed.
The console chittered, then glowed green.
Green for ready. Probably the last time Chief Lavel would ever see that message.
He sighed and slapped execute.
The door to the crew compartment was open. Craige wasn't wearing a commo helmet, but she got her hands to her ears at the chunk! of the ignition charge expelling the first round from the tube.
The seven-second ROAR-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R! of the sustainer motor shook the world.
The remaining four rounds blasted out at one-a-second intervals like beads on a rosary of thunder. Their backblasts shoved the howitzer down on its suspension and raised huge doughnuts of dust from the surrounding soil.
All done. The fire mission, and the last shred of meaning in Chief Lavel's life.
There was still a green light on the ready-use indicator.
"Booster!" Lavel snapped. "Shell status!"
"One practice ready," said the console in a feminine voice. "Zero rounds in storage."
Lavel turned, rising from his seat with a face like a skull. "You!" he said to Craige. "How many rounds did you load this last time?"
"What?" said Craige. "How . . . ? Six, six like you told us. Isn't that—"
"You stupid bastards!" Lavel screamed as his hand groped with the patch to Task Force Ranson, changing it from digital to voice. "Those last two shells were anti-tank rounds with seeker heads! You killed 'em all!"
All the displays of Herman's Whore pulsed red with an Emergency Authenticator Signal. A voice Ortnahme didn't recognize bellowed, "Task Force! Shoot down the friendly incoming! Tank Killer rounds! Ditch your tanks! Ditch!"
Ortnahme pushed the air defense selector. It was already uncaged. He'd been willing to take the chance of bumping it by accident so long as he knew it would be that many seconds quicker to activate when he might need it.
Like now.
"Simkins," he said, surprised at his own calm, "cut your fans and ditch. Soonest!"
His calm wasn't so surprising after all. There'd been emergencies before.
There'd been the time a jack began to sink—thin concrete over a bed of rubble had counterfeited a solid base. Thirty tonnes of combat car settling toward a technician. The technician was dead, absolutely, if he did anything except block the low side of the car with the fan nacelle he'd been preparing to fit.
Ortnahme had said, "Kid, slide the fan under the skirt now!"—calmly—while he reached under the high side of the car. The technician obeyed as though he'd practiced the movement—
And for the moment that the sturdy nacelle supported the car's weight, Warrant Leader Ortnahme had gripped Tech 2 Simkins by the ankle and jerked him out of the deathtrap.
The kid was all thumbs when it came to powertools, but he took orders for a treat. Herman's Whore stuttered for a moment as the inertia of the air in her intake ducts drove the fans. The big blower grounded hard and skidded a twenty-meter trench in the soil as she came to rest.
Ortnahme's seat was raising him, not as fast as a younger, slimmer man could've jumped for the hatch without power assist—but Henk Ortnahme wasn't bloody young and slim.
He squeezed his torso out of the cupola hatch. The tribarrel was rotating on its Scarf ring, the muzzles lifting skyward in response to the air defense program.
Blood and martyrs! It was going to—
The powergun fired. Ortnahme couldn't help but flinch away. Swearing, bracing himself on the coaming, he tried to lever himself out of the hatch as half-melted plastic burned the back of his hands and clung to his shirtsleeves.
He stuck. His pistol holster was caught on the smoke grenades he'd slung from a wire where he could reach them easily when he was riding with the hatch open.
Blood and martyrs.
The northern sky went livid with cyan bolts and the white winking explosions they woke in the predawn haze. Herman's Whore and the other tanks were firing preset three-round bursts—not one burst but dozens, on and on.
The incoming shells had been cargo rounds. They had burst, spilling their sheafs of submunitions.
There were hundreds of blips, saturating the armored vehicles' ability to respond. Given time, the tribarrels could eliminate every target.
There wouldn't be that much time.
Simkins rolled to the ground, pushed clear by the tank's own iridium flank as its skirts plowed the sod. He stared up at the warrant leader in amazement.
Ortnahme sucked in his chest, settled onto the seat cushion to get a centimeter's greater clearance, and rose in a convulsive motion like a whale broaching. His knees rapped the coaming, but he would've chewed his legs bloody off if that was what it took to get away now.
Hundreds of targets. A firecracker round, anti-personnel and surely targeted on the opposite side of the river. Harmless except for the way the half-kilo bomblets screened the three much heavier segments of an anti-tank—
Ortnahme bounced from the skirt of Herman's Whore and somersaulted to the ground. His body armor kept him from breaking anything when he hit on his back, but his breath wheezed out in an animal gasp.
Two brighter, bigger explosions winked in the detonating mist above him.
The third anti-tank submunition triggered itself. It was an orange flash and a streak of white, molten metal reaching for Deathdealer like a mounting pin for a doomed butterfly.
It took Birdie Sparrow just under three seconds to absorb the warning and slap the air defense button. The worst things you hear for heartbeats before you understand, because the mind refuses to understand.
The tribarrel slewed at a rate of 100°/second, so even the near one-eighty it turned to bear on the threat from the sky behind was complete in less than two seconds more.
Four and a half seconds, call it. Deathdealer was firing skyward scarcely a half second after small charges burst the cases of both cargo shells and spilled their submunitions in overwhelming profusion.
It wasn't the first time that the distance between life and death had been measured in a fraction of a second.
Albers cut the fans and swung Deathdealer sideways on residual energy so that they grounded broadside on, carving the sod like a snowplow and halting them with a haste that lifted the tank's off-side skirts a meter in the air.
Sparrow's seat cradled him in the smoky, stinking turret of his tank. Screen Two showed a cloud of debris that jumped around the pipper like snow in a crystal paperweight.
A red light winked in a sidebar of the main screen, indicating that Deathdealer's integrity had been breached: the driver's hatch was open. In the panoramic display Albers, horizontally compressed by the hologram, was abandoning the vehicle.
"Better ditch too, Birdie," said the horribly-ruined corpse of DJ Bell. "This is when it's happening."
"Booster!" Sparrow screamed to his AI. "Air defense! Sort by size, largest first!"
If it'd been two anti-tank rounds, no sweat. The handful of submunitions in each cargo shell would've been blasted in a few seconds, long before they reached their own lethal range and detonated.
"Hey, there's still time." DJ's face was changing; but this time his features knitted, healed, instead of splashing slowly outward in a mist of blood and bone and brains. "Not a lot, but there's time. You just gotta leave, Birdie."
A pair of firecracker rounds, that was fine too. Their tiny bomblets wouldn't more than etch Deathdealer's dense iridium armor when they went off. Hard lines for the combat cars, but that was somebody else's problem . . . and anyway, none of the bomblets were going to land within a kilometer of the task force.
The heavy anti-tank submunitions weren't aimed at this side of the river either. If the shell had been of ordinary construction, it would've impacted on a bunker somewhere far distant from the friendly tanks.
But the submunitions had seeker heads. As they spun lazily from the casing that bore them to the target area, sophisticated imaging systems fed data to their on-board computers.
A bunker would've done if no target higher in the computers' priorities offered.
A combat car would've done very well.
But if the imaging system located a tank, then it was with electronic glee that the computer deployed vanes to brake and guide the submunition toward that prime target.
Too little time.
Birdie Sparrow slammed the side of his fist into the buckle to disengage himself from the seat restraints. A fireball lighted the gunnery screen as Deathdealer's reprogrammed tribarrel detonated a larger target than the anti-personnel bomblets to which the law of averages had aimed it.
"Birdie, quick," DJ pleaded. His face was almost whole again.
Sparrow sank back onto his seat as the screen flared again. "No," he whispered. "No. Not out there."
DJ Bell smiled at his friend and extended a hand. "Welcome home, snake," he said.
There was a white flash.