"Watch it," warned Cooter, ducking beneath the level of his gunshield. Part of Dick Suilin's mind understood, but he continued to stand upright and stare.
The dawn sky was filthy with rags of black smoke, tiny moth-holes streaming back in the wind when bomblets exploded. That was nothing, and the crackle of two tank tribarrels still firing as the remaining anti-personnel cloud impacted on the far ridge was little more.
Deathdealer was devouring itself.
The submunition's location, as well as its attitude and range in respect to Deathdealer, were determined by a computer more sophisticated than anything indigenously built on Prosperity. The computer's last act was to trigger the explosion that shattered it in an orange fireball high above the tank.
The blast spewed out a projectile that rode the shockwave, molten with the energy that forged and compressed it. It struck Deathdealer at a ninety degree angle where the tank's armor was thinnest, over the rear turtleback covering the powerplant.
Hammer's anti-tank artillery rounds were designed to defeat the armor of the most powerful tanks in the human universe. This one performed exactly as intended, punching its self-forging fragment through the iridium armor and rupturing the integrity of the fusion bottle that powered the huge vehicle's systems.
Plasma vented skyward in a stream as intensely white as the heart of a star. It etched and ate away the edges of the hole without rupturing the unpierced portion of the armor. The internal bulkheads gave way.
Plasma jetted from the driver's hatch an instant before the cupola blew open. Stored ammunition flashed from underdeck compartments. It stained the blaze cyan and vaporized the joint between hull and skirts.
The glowing husk of what had been Deathdealer settled to the ground. Where the hull overlay portions of the skirt, the thick steel plates melted from the iridium armor's greater residual heat.
The entire event was over in three seconds. It would be days before the hull had cooled to the temperature of the surrounding air.
The thunderclap, air rushing to fill the partial vacuum of the plasma's track, rocked the thirty-tonne combat cars. Suilin's breastplate rapped the grips of his tribarrel.
Across the river, Consie positions danced in the light of hundreds of bomblets. They looked by contrast as harmless as rain on a field of poppies.
"All units," said Suilin's helmet. "Remount and move on. We've got a job to do. Six out."
Another combat car slid between Deathdealer and the figure of the tank's driver. He'd been running away from his doomed vehicle until the initial blast knocked him down. He rose to his feet slowly and climbed aboard the car whose bulk shielded him both from glowing metal and remembrance of what had just happened/almost happened.
Flamethrower rotated on its axis so that all three tribarrels could cover stretches of the bunker line the task force had just penetrated.
"We're the rear guard," Cooter said. "Watch for movement."
The lieutenant triggered a short burst at a figure who stumbled along the ridgeline—certainly harmless since he'd crawled from a shattered bunker; probably unaware even when the two cyan bolts cut him down.
Suilin thought he saw a target. He squinted. It was a tendril of smoke, not a person.
He wasn't sure he would have fired anyway.
Other cars were advancing toward the town, but it took some moments for the crews of the surviving tanks to reboard. One of the tanks jolted forward taking Deathdealer's former place at the head of the column.
The fat maintenance officer who captained Herman's Whore was still climbing into the cupola of the other giant vehicle. His belt holster flapped loosely against his thigh.
"Here," said Gale, handing Suilin an open beer.
Cooter was already drinking deeply from a bottle. He fired a short burst with his left hand, snapping whorls in the vapor above the ridge.
The Consie siege lines were gray with blasted earth and the smoke of a thousand fires. There must have been survivors from the artillery and the pounding, bunker-ripping fury of the powerguns, but they were no longer a danger to Task Force Ranson.
Suilin's beer was cold and so welcome to his parched throat that he'd drunk half of it down before he realized that it tasted—
Tasted like transmission fluid. Tasted worse than the plastic residues of the empty cases flung from his tribarrel. He stared at the bottle in amazement.
Flamethrower spun cautiously again and fell in behind Herman's Whore. Cooter dropped his bottle over the side of the vehicle. He began talking on the radio, but Suilin's numbed ears heard only the laconic rhythm of the words.
Gale broke a ration bar in half and gave part to the reporter. Suilin bit into it, feeling like a fool with the food in one hand and a horribly-spoiled beer in the other. He thought about throwing the bottle away, but he was afraid the veteran would think he was spurning his hospitality.
The ration bar tasted decayed.
Gale, munching stolidly, saw the reporter's eyes widen and said, "Aw, don't worry. It always tastes like that."
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, grimy with recondensed vapors given off when his tribarrel fired. "It's the Wide-awakes, you know." He fished more of the cones from the pouch beside the cooler, distributing two of them to Cooter and Suilin.
Suilin dropped the cone into a sidepocket. He forced himself to drink the rest of his beer. It was horrible, as horrible as everything else in this bleeding dawn.
He nodded back toward Deathdealer, still as bright as the filament of an incandescent lightbulb. "Is it always like . . . ? Is it always like that?"
"Naw, that time, they got the fusion bottle, y'know?" Gale said, gazing at the hulk with only casual interest.
Internal pressures lifted Deathdealer's turret off its ring. It slid a meter down the rear slope before welding itself onto the armor at a skew angle. "S' always differ'nt, I'd say."
"Except for the guys who buy it," Cooter offered, looking backward also. "Maybe it's the same for them."
Suilin bit another piece from the chalk-textured, vile-flavored ration bar.
"I'll let you know," he heard his voice say.
"Blue Two," said Captain June Ranson, watching white light from Deathdealer quiver on the inner face of her gunshield, "this is Tootsie Six. You're acting head of Blue Section. Six out."
"Roger, Tootsie."
Sergeant Wager's nameless tank, now the first unit in Task Force Ranson, was picking its way through rubble and shell craters at the entrance to la Reole. It had been a new vehicle at the start of this ratfuck. Now it dragged lengths of barbed wire—and a fencepost—and its skirts were battered worse than those of Herman's Whore.
The tank's newbie driver swung wide to pull around a pile of bricks and roof tiles. Too wide. The wall opposite collapsed in a gout of brick dust driven by the tank's fans. Uniformed Yokels, looking very young indeed, scurried out of the ruin, clutching a machinegun and boxes of ammunition.
Warmonger slid into the choking cloud. Filters clapped themselves over Ranson's nose. Janacek swore. Ranson hoped Willens had switched to sonic imaging before the dust blinded him.
Dust enfolded her in a soft blur. Static charges kept her visor clear, but the air a millimeter beyond the plastic was as opaque as the silicon heart of a computer.
Sparrow was dead, vaporized; out of play. But his driver had survived, and she could transfer him to Blue Three. Take over from the inexperienced driver—or perhaps for Sergeant Wager, also inexperienced with panzers but an asset to the understrength crew of One-six.
Mix and match. What is your decision on this point, Candidate Ranson . . . ?
Something jogged her arm. She could see again.
The tracked landing vehicle had backed into a cross-street again, making way for the lead tank. The dust was far behind Warmonger. The third car in line was stirring it back to life.
A helmeted major in fatigues the color of mustard greens—a Yokel Marine—waved toward them with a swagger stick while he shouted into a hand communicator.
"Booster, match frequencies," Ranson ordered.
She saw through the corners of her eyes that Stolley and Janacek were exchanging glances. How long had her eyes been staring blankly before Stolley's touch brought her back to the physical universe?
". . . onsider yourselves under my command as the ranking National officer in the sector!" the headphones ordered Ranson as her AI found the frequency on which the major was broadcasting. "Halt your vehicles now until I can provide ground guides and reform my defensive perimeter."
"Local officer," Ranson said, trusting her transmitter to overwhelm the hand-held unit even if the Yokel were still keying it, "this is Captain Ranson, Hammer's Regiment. That's a negative. We're just passing through."
The Yokel major was out of sight behind Warmonger. A ridiculous little man with creased trousers even now, and a coating of dust on his waxed boots and moustache.
A little man who'd held la Reole with a battalion of recruits against an attack much heavier than that which crumpled three thousand Yokels at Camp Progress. Maybe not so ridiculous after all. . . .
"Local officer," Ranson continued, "I think you'll find resistance this side has pretty well collapsed. We'll finish off anything we find across the river. Slammers out."
La Reole had been an attractive community of two- and three-story buildings of stuccoed brick. Lower floors were given over to shops and restaurants for bridge traffic. Shattered glass from display windows now jeweled the pavement, even where shellfire had spared the remainder of the structures.
The highway kinked into a roundabout decorated with a statue, now headless; and kinked again as it proceeded to the bridge approaches. The buildings on either side of the dogleg had been reduced to rubble. The Consie gunners hadn't been able to get a clear shot at the bridge with their direct-fire weapons or to spot the shells their mortars and howitzers lobbed toward the span.
"No! No! No!" shouted the major, his voice buzzy and attenuated by interference from drive fans. "You're needed here! I order you to stop—and anyway, you can't cross the bridge, it's too weak. Do you hear me! Halt!"
Another landing vehicle sheltered in a walled forecourt with its diesel idling. The gunner lifted his helmet to scratch his bald scalp, then saluted Ranson. He was at least twice the age of any of the six kids in the vehicle's open bay, but they were all armed to the teeth and glaring out with wild-eyed fury.
The Consies had attempted a direct assault on la Reole before they moved their heavy weapons into position. That must've gotten interesting.
A few civilians raised their heads above window sills, but they ducked back as soon as any of the mercenaries glanced toward them.
"Local Officer," Ranson said as echoes of drive fans hammered her from the building fronts, "I'm sorry but we've got our orders. You'll have to take care of your remaining problems yourself. Slammers out."
She split her visor to take the remote from the new lead tank. The controls had reverted to direct view when transmission from Deathdealer ceased.
The bridge at la Reole was a suspension design with a central tower in mid-stream and slightly lower towers on either bank to support the cables. Consie gunners had battered the portions of the towers which stuck up above the roof peaks. They had shattered the concrete and parted the cable on the upstream side.
The span sagged between towers, but the lowest point of its double arc was still several meters above the water. The downstream cable continued to hold, although it now stretched over piles of rubble instead of being clamped firmly onto the towers. A guardpost of Marines with rocket launchers, detailed to watch for raft-borne Consies, gaped at the huge tank that approached them.
"Willens," Ranson ordered her driver, "hold up."
The lower half of her visor swayed as the tank moved onto the raised approach.
"All Tootsie units, hold up. One vehicle on the bridge at a time. Take it easy. Six out."
The lead tank was taking it easy. Less than a walking pace, tracking straight although the span slanted down at fifteen degrees to the left side. Flecks of gravel and dust flew off in the fan draft, then drifted toward the sluggish water.
There were cracks in the asphalt surface of the bridge. Sometimes the cracks exposed the girders beneath.
The Yokel major was shouting demands at June Ranson, but she heard nothing. Her eyes watched the bridge span swaying, the images in the top and bottom of her visor moving alternately.
"Just drive through it, kid," snarled Warrant Leader Ortnahme as he felt Herman's Whore pause. Close to the bridge, la Reole had taken a tremendous pasting from Consie guns. Here, collapsed buildings cascaded bricks and beams from either side of the street.
The tank seemed to gather itself on a quivering column of air. "Like everybloodybody else did!" Ortnahme added in a raised voice.
Simkins grabbed handfuls of his throttles instead of edging them forward in the tiny increments with which he normally adjusted the tank's speed and direction. The pause had cost them momentum, but Herman's Whore still had plenty of speed and power to batter through the obstacle.
Larger chunks of building material parted to either side of the blunt prow like bayou scum before a barge. Dust billowed out from beneath the skirts in white clouds. It curled back to feed through the fan intakes.
Behind the great tank, wreckage settled again. The pile had spread a little from the sweep of the skirts, but it was built up again by blocks and bits which the thunder of passage shook from damaged buildings.
"Sorry, sir," muttered Simkins over the intercom.
The kid's trouble wasn't that he couldn't drive the bloody tank: it was that he was too bloody careful. Maybe he didn't have the smoothness of, say, Albers from . . .
Via. Maybe not think about that.
Simkins didn't have the smoothness of a veteran driver, but he had plenty of experience shifting tanks and combat cars in and out of maintenance bays where centimeters counted.
Centimeters didn't count in the field. All that counted was getting from here to there without delay, and doing whatever bloody job required to be done along the way.
Ortnahme sighed. The way he'd reamed the kid any time Simkins brushed a post or halted in the berm instead of at it, he didn't guess he could complain now if his technician was squeamish about dingin' his skirts.
Simkins eased them to a halt just short of the bridge approach. Cooter's blower was making the run—the walk, rather—and bleedin' Lord 'n martyrs, how the Hell did they expect that ruin to hold a tank?
The near span rippled to the rhythm of Flamethrower's fans, and the span beyond the crumbling central support towers still danced with the weight of the car that'd crossed minutes before. This was bloody crazy!
The Yokels guarding the bridge must've thought so too, from the way they stared in awe at Herman's Whore.
Ortnahme, hidden in the tank's belly, glared at their holographic images. They'd leaned their buzzbomb launchers against the sandbagged walls of their bunker.
Hard to believe that ten-kilo missiles could really damage something with the size and weight of armor of Herman's Whore, but Henk Ortnahme believed it. He'd rebuilt his share of tanks after they took buzzbombs the wrong way—and, regretfully, had combat-lossed others when the cost of repair would exceed the cost of buying a new unit in its place.
There were costs for crew training and, less tangibly, for the loss of experience with veteran crewmen; but those problems weren't in Ortnahme's bailiwick.
"Sir?" the intercom asked. "The . . . you know, the guns they been hitting this place with. Wasn't that a, you know, an awful lot?"
"Don't worry about it, kid," the warrant leader said smugly. "Our only problem now's this bloody bridge."
Ortnahme adjusted his main screen so that the panorama's stern view was central rather than being split between the two edges. The shattered bunkers were hidden by the same buildings that'd protected the bridge from Consie gunfire. Smoke, turgid and foul, covered the western horizon.
"Ah, sir?" Simkins said. "What I mean is, you know, we been fighting guerrillas, right? But all this heavy stuff, this was like a war."
A Yokel jeep jolted its way over the rubble pile in the wake of Task Force Ranson. The driver was young and looked desperately earnest. The Marine major who'd gestured in fury as Herman's Whore swept into la Reole at the end of the Slammers' column sat/stood beside the driver.
The officer was covering his mouth and nose with a handkerchief in his left hand while his right gripped the windshield brace to keep his ass some distance in the air. The jeep could follow where air cushions had taken the Slammers, but the wheeled vehicle's suspension and seat padding were in no way sufficient to make the trip a comfortable one.
"This war's been goin' on for bloody years, kid," Ortnahme explained.
His thumb rotated the panorama back to its normal orientation. Bad enough watching the bridge sway, without having the screen's image split Flamethrower right down the middle that way.
"They got, the Consies, they been hauling stuff outta the Enclaves all that time, sockin' it away. Bit by bit till they needed it for that last big push. All that stuff—" Ortnahme nodded toward the roiling destruction behind them, though of course the technician couldn't see the gesture "—that means the Consies just shot their bolt."
Ortnahme scratched himself beneath the edge of his armor and chuckled. "Course, it don't mean they didn't hit when they shot their bloody bolt."
Cooter's blower had just reached the far end of the bridge—safely, Via! but this tank weighed five, six, times as much—when the image on the main screen changed sharply enough to recall the warrant leader from his grim attempt to imagine the next few minutes.
Though Herman's Whore pretty well blocked the bridge approach, the driver of the Yokel jeep managed to slide around them with two wheels off on the slope of the embankment. As the jeep gunned its way back onto the concrete, its image filled a broad swath of Ortnahme's screen.
What the bloody Hell?
The major threw down his makeshift dust filter, rose to his full height, and began to shout and gesture toward the tank. The young Marines at the bunker beside Herman's Whore snapped to attention—eyes front, looking neither toward the tank nor their screaming officer.
Ortnahme could've piped the Yokel's words in through a commo circuit, scrubbed of all the ambient noise. Thing was, whatever the fellow was saying, it sure as hell wasn't anything Warrant Leader Henk Ortnahme wanted to hear.
"Simkins!" he said. "Can you get by these meatballs?"
"Ah . . . Without hitting the jeep?"
"Can you get bloody by, you dickhead?"
Herman's Whore shifted sideways like a beerstein on a slick, wet bar. The fan note built for a moment; then, using all his maintenance-bay skills, Simkins slid them past the jeep closer than a coat of paint.
The wheeled vehicle shrank back on its suspension as the sidedraft from the plenum chamber buffeted it, but metal didn't touch bloody metal!
That Yokel major was probably still pissed off. When the jeep bobbed in the windthrust, he fell sideways out of his seat. Let him file a bloody complaint with Colonel Hammer—in good time.
The left side of the tank tilted down, but that didn't bother the warrant leader near as much as the motion. It'd been bad watching the bridge sway when another vehicle was on it. The view on Ortnahme's screens hadn't made his stomach turn, though, as the reality bloody well did. Blood and martyrs, they were—
They were opening wide cracks in the asphalt surface as they passed over it. The tank's weight was stretching the underlying girders beyond their design limits.
The cracks spread forward, outrunning Herman's Whore in its sluggish progress toward the supporting pier in the center of the estuary.
And that bloody fool of a major had climbed back into his jeep. His driver had two wheels and most of the jeep's width on the narrow downstream sidewalk, using the span's tilt to advantage because it prevented the tank's sidedraft from flipping the lighter vehicle right through the damaged guardrail.
Those sum'bitch Yokels were trying to pull around the tank and block it on this shuddering nightmare of a bridge.
"Kid," Ortnahme began, "don't let 'em—"
He didn't have to finish the warning, because Simkins was already pouring the coal to his fans.
The water of the Santine Estuary was sluggish and black with tannin from vegetable matter that fed it on the forested hills of its drainage basin. Glutinous white bubbles streaked the surface, giving the current's direction and velocity. The treetrunks, crates, and other solid debris were more or less hidden by the fluid's dark opacity.
Ortnahme had a very good view of the water because of the way Herman's Whore tilted toward it.
They were approaching the central pier now while the span behind them flexed like the E-string of a bass guitar. The jeep, caught in the pulses and without the tank's weight to damp them, bounced all four wheels off the gaping roadway while the two Yokels clung for dear life.
Consie shells and the bolts from their one bunkered powergun had reduced the central towers to half their original height. The Yokels at the guardpost there were already climbing piles of rubble to be clear of the oncoming tank. Herman's Whore wasn't rocketing forward, but a tank head-on at twenty kph looks like Juggernaut on a joyride.
Their speed was four times what Ortnahme had planned, given the flimsy structure of the bridge. He just hadn't realized how bloody flimsy.
They had to go fast!
Ortnahme's helmet crackled with angry demands from the east bank. He switched the sound off at the console.
Tootsie Six could burn him a new one if she wanted, just as soon as Herman's Whore reached solid ground again. Until then, he didn't give a hoot in Hell what anybody but his driver had to say.
They reached the central pier in a puff of dust and clanging gravel, debris from the towers. Task Force Ranson's previous vehicles had rammed a track clear, but the kid was moving too fast to be nice about what his skirts scraped.
The Yokel jeep halted on the solid pier. The major shook his fist, but he didn't seem to be ordering his guards to try buzzbombs where verbal orders had failed.
Via, maybe they were going to make it after all. That newbie crew in Blue Three had crossed, hadn't—
A cable parted, whanging loud enough to be clearly audible. A second whang!, a third—
The bow of Herman's Whore was tilting upward. The intake howl of her fans proved that Simkins had both throttle banks slid wideflatopen.
It wasn't going to be enough.
The cables parting were the short loops every meter or so, attaching the main support cable to the bridge span. Each time one broke, the next ahead took the doubled strain of the tank's weight—and broke in turn. The asphalt roadway crumbled instantly, but the unsupported stringers beneath continued to hold for a second or two longer—until they stretched beyond steel's modulus of tension.
Thirty meters behind Herman's Whore, the span fell away from the central pier and splashed into the estuary. Froth from its impact drifted sullenly downstream.
The tank was accelerating toward safety at fifty kph and rising, but their bow was pointing up at thirty-five, forty, forty-five—
For an instant, Herman's Whore was climbing at an angle of forty-seven degrees with the east tower within a hundred meters and the round, visored faces of everybody in the task force staring at them in horror. Then the spray of the tank bellying down into the estuary hid everything for the few seconds before her roaring fans stalled out in the thicker medium.
Warrant Leader Ortnahme lifted his foot to the top of his seat and thrust his panting body upward. His eyes had just reached the level of the cupola hatch when water rushing in the opposite direction met him.
Easy, easy. He was fine if he didn't bloody panic. . . . The catches of his body armor, top and bottom; shrugging sideways, feeling them release, feeling the ceramic weight drop away instead of sinking even his fat to a grave in the bottom muck.
The water was icy and tasted of salt. Bubbles of air gurgled past Ortnahme as Herman's Whore gave its death rattle. Violet sparks flickered in the blackness as millions of dollars worth of superb, state-of-the-art electronics shorted themselves into melted junk.
Ortnahme's skin tingled. His diaphragm contracted, preventing him from taking the breath he intended as a last great gurgling shivered past his body to empty the turret of air. He shoved himself upward to follow the bubble to the surface.
He was halfway through the hatch when his equipment belt hooked on the string of grenades again.
The warrant leader reached down for the belt buckle. The drag of water on his shirtsleeves slowed the movement, but it was all going to be—
The belt had twisted. He couldn't find the buckle though his fingers scrabbled wildly and his legs strained upward in an attempt to break web gear from which Ortnahme's conscious mind knew you could support a bloody howitzer in mid-air.
Air. Blood and martyrs. He tried to scream.
Herman's Whore grounded with a slurping impact that added mud to the taste of salt and blood in Ortnahme's mouth. They couldn't be more than three meters down; but a millimeter was plenty deep enough if it was over your mouth and nose.
Plenty deep enough to drown.
The darkness pressing the warrant leader's eyes began to pulse deep red with his heartbeats, a little fainter each time. He thought he felt something brush his chest, but he couldn't be sure and he didn't think his fingers were moving anymore.
The wire parted. A grip on Ortnahme's belt added its pull to the warrant leader's natural buoyancy.
Sunlight came as a dazzling explosion. Ortnahme bobbed, sneezed in reaction. Water sprayed from his nostrils.
Tech 2 Simkins was dog-paddling with a worried look. He was trying to retract the cutting blade of his multitool, but his face kept dipping beneath the surface.
One of the combat cars had just waddled down the bank. It was poised to lift across the water as soon as the man in the stern—Cooter, it was, from his size and the crucifix on his breastplate—unlimbered a tow line for the swimmers to grab as the car skittered by.
"Sir," Simkins said. His face was wet from dunking, but Ortnahme would swear there were tears in his eyes as well. "Sir, I'm sorry. I tried to hold it but I—"
He was blubbering, all right, but the black water slapped him again when he forgot to paddle. Sometimes being hog fat and able to float had advantages. . . .
"Sir—" the kid repeated as his streaming visage lifted again.
"Via, kid!" Ortnahme said, almost choking on his swollen tongue. He'd bitten the bloody hell out of it as he struggled. "Will you shut yer bleedin' trap?"
Flamethrower roared as it moved onto the water.
"If I ever have a son," Ortnahme shouted over the fan noise, "I'll name the little bastard Simkins!"