"D'ye got medics along?" the driver from Blue Three whined over the radio, a female voice in June Ranson's ears.
She sounded stunned and terrified, just as she was supposed to. The tank was the only vehicle of Task Force Ranson that would give a close-enough-to-correct reading to Yokel direction finders. . . .
"Via, we need medics. Via, we need help. This is ah, Tootsie Six, over."
A game, a test program for the officer commanding 1st of the 4th armored. An electronic construct which was perfectly believable, like any good test program. The officer being tested would be judged on his reactions. . . .
"Booster," Ranson muttered. "Hostile Order of Battle."
She shouldn't have to speak. Electrons should flow from her nerve endings and race down the gold-foil channels of the artificial intelligence, then spring over high-frequency carrier waves to the sensor array of Blue Three. June Ranson should feel everything.
She should be the vehicles she commanded. . . .
"Tootsie Six, this is Delta three Mike four one," replied the voice that had been unfamiliar until it began whispering over the UHF Allied Common Channel an hour before, requesting Task Force Ranson's position. "We have doctors and medical supplies. We're ten kilometers from Kawana. We'll bring your medical help in half an hour, but you must stay where you are. Do you understand? Mike four one over."
The water of Upper Creek flared beneath Warmonger in a veil. The spray was iridescent where daggers of sunlight stabbed it through the low canopy. The two cars closely following Warmonger were hidden by the spray and the creek's wide loops.
Upper Creek drained the area south of Sugar Knob. The trees here had been cropped about ten years before so that their cellulose could be converted by bacteria to crude protein for animal feed. The second-growth trees that replaced the original forest were densely packed and had thin boles. They provided good cover, but they weren't obstacles for vehicles of the power and weight of combat cars.
Yokel tanks would find the conditions passable also, even if they left the trails worn by animals and the local populace.
"We can't go anywhere," Blue Three's driver whined. "We—"
Warmonger's artificial intelligence threw a print sidebar on the holographic condenser lens.
"—only got two cars left and they're shot t' bloody hell. We're right at the little store, where the road crosses the crik."
Willens, following the course Ranson and the AI set for him, nosed Warmonger against the north bank of the creek. The black, root-laced soil rose only a meter above the black, peat-rich water. The car snorted, then mounted to firm ground through a bending wall of saplings.
The distance between barren Chin Peng Rise and the thin trees of Sugar Knob was about a kilometer and a half. Ranson's western element followed a winding three-kay course to stay low and unnoticed while encircling the Yokels' expected deployment area. Cooter and the two-car eastern element had an even longer track to follow to their hide . . . but the Yokel tanks seemed to be giving them the time they needed.
Willens advanced twenty meters further, to give room to One-five and One-one behind him, then settled with his fans on idle.
Task Force Ranson didn't want to stumble into contact before they knew where all their targets were.
Blue Three's sensors had greater range and precision by an order of magnitude than those crammed into the combat cars, but the cars could process the data passed to them by the larger vehicle. The sidebar on Ranson's multi-function display listed callsigns, isolated in the cross-talk overheard by the superb electronics of the tank pretending to be in Kawana while it waited behind Chin Peng Rise north of the tiny hamlet.
There were twenty-five individual callsigns. The AI broke them down as three companies each consisting of three platoons—but no more than four tanks in any platoon (five would have been full strength). Some platoons were postulated from a single callsign.
Not all the Yokel tanks would be indulging in the loose chatter that laid them out for Task Force Ranson like a roast for the carving; but most of them would, most of them were surely identified. The red cross-hatching that overlay the relief map in the main field of the display was the AI's best estimate thus far of the armored battalion's dispositions.
Blue Three was the frame of the trap and the bait within it; but the five combat cars of west and east elements were the spring-loaded jaws that would snap the rat's neck.
And this rat, Yokel or Consie, was lying. It was clear that the leading elements of 1st of the 4th were already deploying onto the southern slope of Sugar Knob, half a kilometer from the store and shanties of Kawana rather than the ten kays their commander claimed.
In the next few seconds, the commander of the armored battalion would decide whether he wanted to meet allied mercenaries—or light the fuse that would certainly detonate in a battle more destructive than any a citizen of Prosperity could imagine. He was being tested. . . .
The two sharp green beads of Lieutenant Cooter's element settled into position.
She heard a whisper in the southern sky. Incoming.
"All right, Holman, move us hull-down," Hans Wager ordered as his driver whined, "They're shooting at us! They're shooting at us!" over the Allied Common Channel and the scream of the incoming salvo wrote its own exclamation point in four crashing impacts on the valley below.
The nameless tank lifted, scraped, and hopped forward—up and out of its stand-by hide to a position so near the crest of Chin Peng Rise that the turret and sensor arrays had a clear sight across Kawana to the slumping mass of Sugar Knob beyond.
The hamlet had never been prepossessing. It was less so now that the ill-aimed Consie salvo had shaken down several shacks. Raider Camp Creek roiled with the muddy aftermath of the shell that had landed on it, and the footbridge paralleling the ford had collapsed into the turbid current.
Men and women in the sugarbush fields dropped their tools to run for their homes. The sandy rows in which the bushes were planted would've given better protection than the board walls of the shanties.
That much came to Wager's eyes from the direct view of his main screen. Screen Three displayed the data his chuckling AI processed, a schematic vision of the terrain behind Sugar Knob and the unseen Yokel tanks showing themselves to Wager's sensors.
A sidebar on the main screen noted an incoming second salvo, ten rounds but very ragged—even for Yokel artillery.
The Yokel vehicles were diesel-powered, so Wager's tank couldn't locate them precisely from sparkcoil emissions; but their diesels had injector motors whose RF output could be pin-pointed by the Slammers' sensors.
Without the added shielding of Chin Peng Ridge to block Blue Three, the cross-hatched blur south of Sugar Knob on Screen Three began to coalesce into bright red beads: Yokel tanks, located to within a few meters.
Their disposition explained why the second salvo was so scattered. The Consies were using the 130mm howitzers on ten of their tanks to supplement regular artillery firing from the vicinity of Kohang.
For indirect fire, these tanks were concentrated in a tight arc along Upper Creek. They'd run their bows up on the north bank in order to get more elevation for their howitzers than their turret mechanisms would permit.
The tank shells scattered around Kawana, detonating with white flashes and the hollow whoomps characteristic of shape-charge anti-tank warheads. Sand spewed in great harmless fountains.
The store where the unpaved road forded the creek flung its walls sideways at a direct hit. Half a body arced into the water and sank.
"Six, this is Blue Three!" Wager shouted. "Am I clear to shoot?"
Then, though Ranson could see it herself as easily as Wager could if the crazy bitch saw anything, "Six, there's ten tanks a kilometer south of the Knob, just off the road, but the rest of the bastards are moving onto the crest!"
The Yokels were moving into direct-fire positions covering Kawana . . . and which covered the tank on Chin Peng Rise with no more cover than the fuzz on a baby's ass.
The saplings on Sugar Knob shifted with the weight of black masses behind them, the dark-camouflaged bows of Consie tanks.
Two, three; seven tanks highlighted by Wager's AI. Their high-velocity 60mm cannons quested toward Kawana like the feelers of loathsome crustaceans. There were men in black uniforms riding on each turret.
If Wager fired, the plasma jolt from his powergun would blind and deafen the sensors on which the combat cars depended.
One of the long-barreled cannon suddenly lifted and turned. The tank commander had seen the gray gleam of the real enemy lurking behind Chin Peng Rise.
Red location beads were still appearing on Screen Three, the same view that was being remoted to the combat car AIs, but surely Ranson had enough data to—
"Tootsie Six!" Hans Wager cried, "Can you clear us?"
"Sarge, I'm backing—" Holman said.
"All Tootsie units," said the voice of Captain Ranson. "Take 'em."
The muzzle flash was a bright yellow blaze against the dark camouflage. The tungsten-carbide shot rang like a struck cymbal on the turret of Wager's nameless tank.
"Willens," said June Ranson, converting the holographic map on her display into a reality more concrete than the stems of young trees around her, "steer one-twenty degrees. West element, conform to my movements."
"Why we doin' this?" Stolley shouted, grabbing the captain's left arm and tugging to turn her.
Off to the left, only slightly muffled by intervening vegetation, the flat cracks of high-velocity guns sounded from the crest of Sugar Knob.
Ranson slipped her arm from the wing gunner's grip. "Thirty seconds to contact," her voice said.
Warmonger's artificial intelligence had given her a vector marker. Her eyes were on it, waiting for the vertical red line to merge with a target in her gunsights.
Stolley cursed and put his hands back on the grips of his tribarrel.
The gunfire from Sugar Knob doubled in intensity. Warmonger and the two cars accompanying it were headed away from the knob on a slanting course. As Warmonger switched direction, the AI fed another target vector to each gunner's helmet.
A wrist-thick sapling flicked Ranson's tribarrel to the side. Her hands realigned the weapon with the vector. They acted by reflex, unaided by the higher centers of her brain which slid beads of light in a glowing three-dimensional gameboard.
Her solution to the Yokel attack had been as simple and risky as Task Force Ranson's lack of resources required. She was using Slammers' electronics and speed to accomplish what their present gunpower and armor could not.
So, Candidate Ranson. You've decided to divide your force before attacking a superior concentration. Rather like Colonel Custer's plan at the Little Big Horn, wouldn't you say?
But there was no choice. The Yokels would deploy along the ridge. Only by hitting them simultaneously from behind on both flanks could her combat cars roll up six or seven times their number of hostile tanks.
So, Candidate; you're confident that the opposing commander won't keep a reserve? If he does, it's your force—forces, I should say—that will be outflanked.
The Yokels hadn't held back a reserve . . . but the ten tanks lobbing shells over the knob from a kilometer to the rear would act as a reserve—if they weren't eliminated first.
Guns fired from Sugar Knob a kilometer away, guns on the Yokel left flank that Ranson had decided to bypass only thirty seconds before—
Warmonger burst into a clearing gray with powdersmoke and dust kicked up by the ten stubby howitzers firing at high angles.
The Yokel tanks had their engines forward and their turrets mounted well back, over the fourth pair of roadwheels. With their hulls raised fifteen degrees by the stream bank, the vehicles bucked dangerously every time they fired their heavy weapons. The water of Upper Creek slapped between the recoiling tanks and its gravel bed.
The tanks were parked in the creek to either side of the road. Less than a three-meter hull width separated each vehicle from its neighbors. While the turret crews fed their guns, the tank drivers stood on both ends of the line of vehicles, mixing with a dozen guerrillas in black uniforms.
The dismounted men covered their ears with their palms and opened their mouths to equalize pressure from the muzzle blasts. When the three combat cars slid from the forest, their hands dropped but their mouths continued to gape like the jaws of gaffed fish.
Men spun and fell, shedding body parts, as Ranson's tribarrel lashed them. The group on the east side of the lined-up tanks had time to shout and run a few steps before Warmonger raced down Upper Creek as though the gravel bed were a highway, giving Ranson and Stolley shots at them also.
The Yokel tanks couldn't react fast enough to be an immediate danger, but a single Consie rifleman could clear Warmonger's fighting compartment.
Could have. When the last black-clad guerrilla flopped at the edge of the treeline, Willens spun Warmonger in a cataclysm of spray and the three tribarrels blazed into the backs on the renegade tanks.
One-one and One-five had followed Warmonger into the stream, but they hadn't had to worry about the dismounted enemy. Two of the left-side tanks were already wrapped in sooty orange palls of burning diesel fuel. The turret blew off a third as main gun ammunition detonated in the hull.
Ranson centered her projection sight on a tank's back deck, just behind the turret ring. The target's slope gave her a perfect shot. Cyan bolts streamed through the holographic image of her sight, splashing huge craters in thin armor designed only to stop shell splinters.
In gunnery simulators, the screaming tank crew didn't try to abandon their vehicle a second or two after it was too late. Ranson's bolts punched into the interior of the tank. A blast of foul white smoke erupted from the turret hatches and the cavity ripped by the tribarrel.
The tank commander and the naked torso of his gunner flew several meters in the air. The tank began to burn sluggishly.
June Ranson's hands swung for another target, but there were no targets remaining here.
The tanks' thickest armor was frontal. Striking from above and behind, the tribarrels ripped them as easily as so many cans of sardines.
Cans of barbecued pork. The gunnery simulators didn't provide the odor of close action, either.
All the ammunition on a Yokel tank detonated simultaneously, pushing aside the nearest vehicles and flinging the turret roof fifty meters in the air in a column of smoke.
"Willens, steer three hundred degrees," Ranson heard/said. "West element, form on me."
Her eyes sought the multi-function display, while part of her mind wondered why she couldn't blend with Cooter's vehicles when she wanted to know their progress. . . .
Dick Suilin's ribs slammed hard against the edge of the fighting compartment as Flamethrower grounded heavily on its mad rush through the scrub forest. The reporter swore and wondered whether he'd be pissing blood in the morning, despite the clamshell armor that protected his kidney from the worst of the shock.
In the morning. He made a high-pitched sound somewhere between laughter and madness.
He'd fallen sideways because the only thing that he had to hang onto were the grips of his tribarrel. That was pointed over the left side, at ninety degrees to the combat car's direction of motion. The reporter swung back and forth as his weapon pivoted.
The blazing red-orange hairline on his visor demanded Suilin cover the left side. He horsed his gun in the proper direction again, wincing at the pain in his side, and tried to find a target in the whipping foliage.
There was no doubt where Flamethrower's artificial intelligence wanted him to aim, though the rational part of the reporter's mind wondered why. They had—they were supposed to have—enveloped the enemy's right wing, so the first targets would be on the right side of Flamethrower. . . .
He supposed Daisy Belle was somewhere behind them. He supposed the other vehicles of the task force were somewhere also. He hadn't seen much of them. . . .
Dick Suilin supposed a lot of things; but all he knew was that his side hurt, his hands hurt from their grip on the automatic weapon, and that he really should've pissed in the minute while they waited for the go signal.
Flamethrower slid through a curtain of reeds. Two meters from the muzzle of Suilin's tribarrel, that close, was a tank with its hatches open, bogged in a swale. The soil was so damp that water gleamed in the ruts the treads had squeezed before being choked to a halt.
Right where the AI's vector had said it would be.
Suilin clamped his trigger so convulsively that he forgot for a moment that he was pointing a weapon. Two bolts splashed on the turret face, cyan and white, blazing steel, before several following rounds exploded stems and flattened further swathes in the reeds with blasts of steam and flying cellulose.
Flamethrower grunted past the tank's bow at the speed of a running horse. The reporter pivoted to follow the target with his gun, ignoring the way he thrust himself against the sidearmor just as the impact had done moments before.
His sights steadied where a ball mantlet joined the tank's slim cannon to the turret face. Panning like a photographer with a moving subject, Suilin kept the muzzles aligned as they spat cyan hell to within millimeters, bolt by bolt.
Suilin would have kept shooting, but the cannon barrel sagged and a sharp explosion lifted the turret a hand's breadth so that bright flame could flash momentarily all around the ring.
He didn't notice until they were past that there'd been a second tank on the other side of the swale, and that several men in National Army uniforms had been stringing tow cables between the vehicles. The second tank was burning fiercely. The crewmen were sprawled in the arc they'd managed to run before Gale's tribarrel searched them down.
Suilin thought the men were wearing black armbands, but he no longer really cared.
Dick Suilin heard the CRACK-CRACK-CRACK of automatic cannons upslope, the same timbre as machineguns firing but louder, much louder, despite the vegetation.
Shorty Rogers was running the valley south of Sugar Knob at a hellbent pace for the conditions. Warmonger cut to the right, bypassing some of the unseen tanks whose gunfire betrayed their presence.
Maybe the course was deliberate. Maybe Daisy Belle would take care of the other tanks. . . .
Suilin saw tank tracks slanting toward the crest an instant before he saw the tank itself, backing the way it had come. There was a guerrilla on the turret, hammering at the closed hatch. The Consie shouted something inaudible.
Suilin fired, aiming at the Consie rather than the tank. He missed both; his bolts sailed high to shatter trees on the crest.
That didn't matter. Cooter's helmet had given him the same target. The lieutenant's tribarrel focused on the hull where flowing script read Queen of the South. Paint blazed an instant before the armor collapsed and a fuel tank ruptured in a belch of flame.
Beyond Queen of the South, backing also, was a command vehicle with a high enclosed cab instead of a turret. Suilin caught only a glimpse of the vehicle before Gale's tribarrel punched through the thin vertical armor of the cab.
The rear door opened. Nothing came out except an arm flopping in its black sleeve.
They had almost reached the top of the knob. If Daisy Belle fired at them, the bolts would hit on Gale's side; but if Flamethrower was closing with the three cars in Captain Ranson's elements—
Dick Suilin aimed downhill because the glowing line directed him that way, but the artificial intelligence was using data now minutes old. The Consie tank was above them, backing around in the slender trees. It swung the long gun in its turret to cover the threat that bellowed toward it in a drumbeat of secondary explosions.
Suilin tried to point at the unexpected target. Cooter was firing as he swung his own weapon, but that tribarrel didn't bear either and the lash of cyan bolts across treeboles did nothing to disconcert the hostile gunner.
The cannon steadied on Flamethrower's hull.
A twenty-centimeter bolt from Blue Three across the valley struck, and the whole stern of the light tank blew skyward.
The Yokel tank's shot was a white streak in the sky as it ricocheted from the face of Blue Three's turret.
Ragged blotches appeared on Wager's main screen as if the hologram were a mirror losing its silver backing. Booster spread the load of the damaged receptor heads among the remainder; the image cleared.
Hans Wager didn't see what was happening to his screen because he was bracing his head against it. He hadn't strapped himself into his seat, and Holman's attempt to back her hundred and seventy tonnes finally succeeded in a rush.
Wager wasn't complaining. His hatch was open and he could hear the crack-crack of two more hypersonic shots snapping overhead.
The Yokels' armor-piercing projectiles were only forty-three millimeters in diameter when they dropped their sabots at the gun's muzzle, but even here, a kilometer and a half away, they were traveling at 1800 meters per second. The shot that hit had smashed a dish-sized concavity from the face of Blue Three's armor.
"Holman!" Wager cried. "Open season! Get us hull-down again."
They grounded heavily. Wager thought of the strain the tank's huge weight must be putting on the skirts and wondered if they were going to take it. Still, Holman wasn't the first tank driver to get on-the-job training in a crisis.
Anyway, the skirts'd better take it.
Chin Peng Rise had been timbered within the past two years. None of the scrub that had regrown on its loose, rock-strewn soil was high enough to conceal Blue Three's skirts, but the rounded crest itself would protect the hull from guns firing from the wooded knob across the valley.
The thing was, Holman had to halt them in the right place: high enough to clear their main gun but still far enough down the backslope that the hull was in cover.
Shells boomed among the shacks of Kawana. The residents wouldn't 've had any idea that two armies were maneuvering around them until the artillery started to land.
Innocent victims weren't Hans Wager's first concern right now. Via, it was their planet, their war, wasn't it?
His war too.
A plume of friable soil spewed from beneath the skirts as Holman fed power to her fans. Wager felt Blue Three twist as she lifted. The silly bitch was losing control, letting 'em slide downhill instead of—
"Holman!" he shouted. "Bring us up to firing level! They need us over—"
As Wager spoke the tank lifted—there'd been no downward motion, just the bow shifting. They climbed the twenty degree slope at a walking pace that brought a crisp view of Sugar Knob onto both the main and gunnery displays.
Shot and shells from Yokel cannon ripped the crest beside Blue Three, where the Slammers vehicle had lain hull-down before—and where they'd 've been now if Holman hadn't had sense enough to shift before she lifted them into sight again.
Wager could apologize later.
He'd locked his main and cupola guns on the same axis. His left hand rotated the turret clockwise with the gunnery screen's orange pipper hovering just above the projected crest of Sugar Knob. When the dark bulk of a Yokel tank slid into the sight picture, needlessly carated by the artificial intelligence, Wager thumbed his joystick control and laced the trees with cyan bolts from the tribarrel.
A bolt flashed white on the screen as it vaporized metal from the Yokel tank. Wager stamped on the pedal to fire his main gun.
Two more Yokel shots hit and glanced from Blue Three. Their impact was lost in the crash of the 20cm main gun firing.
Across the valley, the rear end of the Yokel tank jumped backward as the front became a ball of glowing gas.
Wager's main screen was highlighting at least a dozen targets, now. The Yokels had moved into positions overlooking Kawana so their direct fire could finish the tattered survivors of Task Force Ranson as soon as the artillery began to impact.
Some of the tank gunners were still focused on the innocent hamlet. Through the corner of his eye, Wager could see spouting tracks in the valley below as automatic cannons raked shacks and the figures running in terror among the sugarbushes they'd been tending.
Dirt blasted up in front of Blue Three an instant before the turret rang to a double hammerblow. Not all the Yokels were deceived as to their real enemy.
There wasn't time to sort 'em out, to separate the immediate dangers from the targets that might catch on in the next few seconds or minute. Hans Wager had to kill them all—
If he had time before they killed him.
Wager let the turret rotate at its own speed, coursing the further crest. He aimed with the cupola gun rather than the electronic pipper. During his years in combat cars, he'd gotten into the habit of hosing a tribarrel onto its target.
When things really drop in the pot, habit's the best straw to snatch.
Ignoring the shots that hit Blue Three and the shots that blasted grab-loads of dirt from the barren crest around them, Wager stroked his foot-trip again—
A tank exploded.
Again.
Too soon. The twenty-centimeter bolt ignited a swathe of forest beside the Yokel vehicle, but the tank's terrified crew was already bailing out. Wager's tribarrel spun their lifeless bodies into the blazing vegetation as his turret continued to traverse.
A huge pall of smoke leaped skyward from somewhere south of Sugar Knob. It mushroomed when the pillar of heated air could no longer support the mass of dirt, scrap metal, and pureed flesh it contained.
The ground-shock of the explosion rolled across Kawana in a ripple of dust.
Something hit Blue Three. Three-quarters of Wager's gunnery screen went black for a moment. He rocked forward on his foot-trip. The main gun fired, shocking the sunlight and filling the turret with another blast of foul gases from the spent case.
The screen brightened again, though the display was noticeably fuzzier. Another of the tanks on Sugar Knob had become a fireball.
The Yokels were running, backing out of the firing positions on the hillcrest that made them targets for Wager's main gun. He didn't know how the combat cars were doing, but there were columns of smoke from behind the knob where his own fire couldn't reach.
The cars'd have their work cut out for them, playing hide 'n seek with the surviving Yokels in thick cover. At point-blank range, the first shot was likely to be the last of the engagement and the tanks' thick frontal armor would be a factor.
A target backed in a gout of black diesel exhaust as Wager's sight picture slid over it. He tripped his main gun anyway, knowing that he'd hit nothing but foliage. His turret continued to traverse, left to right.
The Yokel tank snarled forward again, through the trees the twenty-centimeter bolt had vainly withered. That sonuvabitch hadn't run, he'd just ducked back to shoot safe—
In the fraction of a second it took Hans Wager to realize that this target had to be hit, that he had to reverse the smooth motion of his turret, yellow light flashed three times from the muzzle of the Yokel's cannon.
Hot metal splashed Wager and the interior of the turret. The cupola blew off above him. The tribarrel's ammunition ripped a pencil of cyan upward as it burned in the loading tube.
The gunnery screen was dead, and the central half of the main screen pulsated with random phosphorescence. Motors whined as the turret began tracking counterclockwise across the landscape Wager could no longer see.
"Blue Three, this is Tootsie Six—"
Thousand one, thousand two—
"—we had to bypass the east-flank hostiles. Cross the valley and help us soonest."
Wager trod his foot-trip. The gunnery screen cleared—somewhat—just in time to display the Yokel tank disintegrating with an explosion so violent that it snuffed the burning vegetation around the vehicle.
"Roger, Tootsie Six," Hans Wager responded. "Holman, move us—"
But Holman was already feeding power to her fans. You didn't have to tell her what her job was, not that one. . . .
Four more artillery shells burst in black plumes across the sandy furrows which Blue Three had to cross. The remains of Blue Three's cupola glowed white, and there was no hatch to button down over the man in the turret.
Hans Wager's throat burned from the gases which filled his compartment.
He didn't much care about that, either.
"Willens, bring us—" June Ranson began, breaking off as she saw the Yokel tank.
It was crashing through the woods twenty meters to Warmonger's right, on an opposite and almost parallel course. The 60mm cannon was pointed straight ahead, but the black-clad guerrilla riding on the turret screamed something down the gunner's open hatch as he unlimbered his automatic rifle.
Janacek's tribarrel was on target first. Half the burst exploded bits of intervening vegetation uselessly, but the remaining bolts sawed the Consie's legs off at the knee before hammering the sloped side of the turret.
The outer facing of the armor burned; its ceramic core spalled inward, through the metallic backing. It filled the turret like the contents of a shotgun loaded with broken glass. Smoke puffed from the hatches.
The tank continued to grind its way forward for another thirty seconds while Janacek fired into the hull without effect. The target disintegrated with a shattering roar.
Ranson's multi-function display indicated that both the remaining blowers in her element were within fifty meters of Warmonger, but she couldn't see any sign of them.
She couldn't feel them. They were real only as beads of light; and the red beads of hostile tanks were no longer where Blue Three had plotted them before the Yokels began to retreat. . . .
A tank ground through the screening foliage like a snorting rhinoceros, bow on with its cannon lowered. June Ranson willed a burst through the muzzles of her tribarrel. . . .
Cyan bolts slashed and ripped at glowing steel.
Stolley swung forward. His bolts intersected and merged with the captain's. The cannon's slim barrel lifted without firing and hurled itself away from the crater bubbling in the gun mantle.
"No!" Ranson screamed at her left wing gunner. "Watch your own—"
Another Yokel tank appeared to the left, its gun questing.
"—side!"
Leaves lifted away from the cannon's flashing muzzle. The blasts merged with the high-explosive charges of the shells which burst on Warmonger's side.
The combat car slewed to a halt. The holographic display went dead; Ranson's tribarrel swung dully without its usual power assist.
For the first time in—months?—June Ranson truly saw the world around her.
The Yokel tank was within ten meters. It fired another three-round burst—shot this time. The rounds punched through the fighting compartment in sparkling richness and ignited the ammunition in Janacek's tribarrel.
The gunner bellowed in pain as he staggered back. Ranson grabbed the bigger man and carried him with her over the side of the doomed vehicle. Leaf mould provided a thin cushion over the stony forest soil, but Warmonger's bulk was between them and the next hammering blasts.
"Stolley," Janacek whispered. "Where's Stolley and Willens?"
June Ranson looked over her shoulder. Dunnage slung to Warmonger's sides was ablaze. The thin, dangerous haze of electrical fires spurted out of the fan intakes and the holes shots had ripped in the hull. Where Janacek's tribarrel had been, there was a glowing cavity in the iridium armor.
Willens had jumped from his hatch and collapsed. There was no sign of Stolley.
Ranson rose in a crouch. Her legs felt wobbly. She must have hit them against the coaming as she leaped out of the fighting compartment. She staggered back toward Warmonger.
Shots rang against the armor. A chip of white-hot tungsten ripped through both sides to scorch her thighs.
She tried to call Stolley, but her voice was a croak inaudible even to her over the roar of the flames in Warmonger's belly.
The handgrips on the armor were hot enough to sear layers from her hands as she climbed back into the fighting compartment.
Stolley lay crumpled against the bulkhead. He was still breathing, because she could see bubbles forming in the blood on his lips. She gripped his shoulders and lifted, twisting her body.
The synthetic fabric of her trousers was being burned into her flesh as she balanced. Janacek crawled toward them, though what help he could be . . .
Because her back was turned, June Ranson didn't see the tank's cannon rock back and forth as it fired, aiming low into Warmonger's hull. She felt the impacts of armor-piercing shot ringing on iridium—
But only for an instant, because this burst fractured the car's fusion bottle.
Dick Suilin was looking over his shoulder toward the bow of Flamethrower when the center of his visor blacked. Through the corners of his eyes, the reporter saw foliage withering all around him in the heat of the plasma flare. His hands and the part of his neck not shielded by visor or breastplate prickled painfully.
The gout of stripped atoms lasted only a fraction of a second. Warmonger's hull, empty as the shell of a fossil tortoise, continued to blaze white.
The Yokel tank, its cannon nodding for further prey, squealed past the wreckage.
Suilin's tribarrel was still pointed to cover the car's rear quadrant. Cooter's burst splashed upwards from the tank's glacis plate, blasting collops from the sheath and ceramic core.
Before the tribarrel could penetrate the armor at its point of greatest thickness, the tank's 60mm gun cracked out a three-round clip. Dick Suilin's world went red with a crash that struck him like a falling anvil.
The impact knocked him forward. He couldn't hear anything. The fighting compartment was brighter, because cannon shells had blown away the splinter shield overhead. The sun streamed down past the bare poles of plasma-withered trees.
The ready light over his tribarrel's trigger no longer glowed green. Suilin rotated the switch the way Gale had demonstrated a lifetime earlier. The metal felt cool on his fingertips.
The cannon's muzzle began to recoil behind a soundless yellow flash. Warmonger shuddered as Suilin's thumbs pressed his butterfly trigger. Cyan bolts roiled the bottle-shaped flare of unburned powder, then carved the mantlet before the 60mm gun could cycle to battery and fire again.
Steel blazed, sucked inward, and blew apart like a bomb as the tank's ready ammunition detonated.
Suilin's tribarrel stopped firing. His thumbs were still locked on the trigger. A stream of congealed plastic drooled out of the ejection port. The molten cases had built up until they jammed the system.
The hull of the vehicle Dick Suilin had destroyed was burning brightly. Another tank crawled around it. The Consie on the second tank's turret was mouthing orders down the open hatch.
The long cannon swung toward Flamethrower.
Lieutenant Cooter rose to his hands and knees on the floor of the fighting compartment. His helmet was gone. There was a streak of blood across the sweat-darkened blond of his hair. He shook himself like a bear surrounded by dogs.
Gale sprawled, halfway out of the fighting compartment. A high-explosive round had struck him between the shoulderblades. It was a tribute to the trooper's ceramic body armor that one arm was still attached to what remained of his torso.
Suilin unslung his grenade launcher, aimed at the tank thirty meters away, and squeezed off. He couldn't hear his weapon fire, but the butt thumped satisfyingly on his shoulder. His eye followed the missile on its flat arc to the face of the tank's swivelling turret.
The grenades were dual purpose. Their cases were made of wire notched to fragment, but they were wrapped around a miniature shaped charge that could piece light armor.
Armor lighter than the frontal protection of a tank. The guerrilla flung his arms up and toppled, his chest clawed to ruins by shrapnel, but the turret face was only pitted.
The tank moved forward as it had to do so that as the turret rotated, the long gun would clear the burning wreckage of the sister vehicle.
Cooter dragged his body upright. He was still on his knees. The big man gripped the hull to either side of his tribarrel, blocking Suilin from any chance of using that weapon.
No time anyway. The reporter's grenades burst on the turret, white sparks that gouged the armor but didn't penetrate, couldn't penetrate.
Two hits, three—not a hand's breadth apart, remarkable rapid-fire shooting as the turret swung.
Suilin thought he could hear again, but the bitter crack of his grenades was lost in the howl of an oncoming storm. The ground shook and made the blasted trees shiver.
The last round in Suilin's clip flashed against the armor as vainly as the four ahead of it. The cannon's sixty-millimeter bore gaped toward Flamethrower like the gates of Hell.
Before the gun could fire, the great, gray bow of Blue Three rode downhill onto the rebel tank, scattering treeboles like matchwood.
The clang of impact seemed almost as loud to Dick Suilin as that of the shells ripping Flamethrower moments before. The Slammers' tank, ten times the weight of the Yokel vehicle, scarcely slowed as it slid its victim sideways across the scarred forest.
A tread broke and writhed upward like a snake in its death throes. The hull warped, starting seams and rupturing the cooling system and fuel tanks in a gout of steam, then fire.
Metal screamed louder than men could. Blue Three's skirts rode halfway up the shattered corpse of the rebel tank, fanning the flames into an encircling manacle. The Slammer's driver twisted the hundred and seventy tonnes she controlled like a booted foot crushing an enemy's face into the gutter.
Cooter stood up. Shorty Rogers raised his head from the bow hatch, glanced around, and disappeared again. A moment later, Flamethrower shuddered as her fans spun up to speed.
Blue Three backed away from the crackling inferno to which it had reduced its victim. Nothing else moved in the forest.
Dick Suilin's fingers were reflexively loading a fresh clip into his grenade launcher.