Speedin' Steve Riddle sat by Platt's cot in the medical tent, listening to machines pump air in and out of his buddy's lungs.
And thinking.
They sat on the lowered tailgate of Platt's truck, staring at the sky and giggling occasionally at the display. At first there'd been only the lesser moon edging one horizon while the other horizon was saffron with the sunset.
Lights, flames . . . streaks of tracers that painted letters in the sky for the drug-heightened awareness of the two men. Neither Platt nor Riddle could read the words, but they knew whatever was being spelled was excruciatingly funny. . . .
"Speed," called Lieutenant Cooter, "get your ass back to the blower and start running the prelim checklist. We're moving out tonight."
"Wha . . . ?" Riddle blurted, jerking his head up like an ostrich surprised at a waterhole. He was rapidly going bald. To make up for it, he'd grown a luxuriant moustache that fluffed when he spoke or exhaled.
"Don't give me any lip, you stupid bastard!" Cooter snapped, though Speed's response had been logy rather than argumentative. "If I didn't need you bad, you'd be findin' your own ticket back to whatever cesspit you call home."
"Hey, El-Tee!" Otski called, sitting up on his cot despite the gentle efforts of Shorty Rogers to keep him flat. "How they hangin', Cooter-baby?"
He waggled his stump.
"Come on, Otski," Rogers said. Shorty was Flamethrower's driver and probably the best medic in the guard detachment as well as being a crewmate of the wounded man. "Just take it easy or I'll have to raise your dosage, and then it won't feel so good. All right?"
The medicomp metered Platt's breathing, in and out.
"Hey, lookit," Otski burbled, fluttering his stump again though he permitted Shorty to lower him back to the cot.
An air injector spat briefly, but the gunner's voice continued for a moment. "Lookit it when I wave, Cooter. I'm gonna get a flag. Whole bunch flags, stick 'em in there 'n wave 'n wave. . . ."
"Shorty, you're gonna have to get back to the car too," Cooter said. "We'll turn 'em over to the Logistics staff until they can be lifted out to a permanent facility."
"Cop! None a' the Logistics people here'd know—"
Riddle thought:
The parts shed bulged around a puff of orange flame. The shockwave threw Riddle and Platt flat on the sloping tailgate; they struggled to sit up again. It was hilarious.
The Consie sapper rose from his crouch, silhouetted by the flaming shed he'd just bombed. He carried a machinepistol in a harness of looped rope, so that the weapon swung at waist height. His right hand snatched at the grip.
"Lookie, Speed!" Platt cackled. "He's just as bald as you are! Lookie!"
"Lookie!" Riddle called. He threw up his arms and fell backward with the effort.
The machinepistol crackled like the main truss of a house giving way. Its tracers were bright orange, lovely orange, as they drew spirals from the muzzle. One of them ricocheted around the interior of the truck box, dazzling Riddle with its howling beauty. He sat up again.
"Beauty!" he cried. Platt was thrashing on his back. Air bubbled through the holes in his chest.
The machinepistol pointed at Riddle. Nothing happened. The sapper cursed and slapped a magazine into the butt-well to replace the one that had ejected automatically when the previous burst emptied it.
The Consie's body flung itself sideways, wrapped in cyan light as a powergun from one of the combat cars raked him. The fresh magazine exploded. A few tracers zipped crazily out of the flashing yellow ball of detonating propellant.
"Beauty," Steve Riddle repeated as he fell backward.
Platt's chest wheezed.
"—a medicomp when it bit 'em on the ass!"
Air from the medicomp wheezed in and out of Platt's nostrils.
"Screw you!" called a supply tech with shrapnel wounds in his upper body.
"Then get 'em over to the Yokel side!" Cooter said. "They got facilities. Look, I'm not lookin' for an argument: we're movin' out at sunset, and none of my able-bodied crew are stayin' to bloody screw around here. All right?"
"Yeah, all right. One a the newbies had some training back home, he says." Rogers stood up and gave a pat to the sleeping Otski. "Hey, how long we gonna be out?"
"Don't bloody ask," Cooter grunted bitterly. "Denzil, where's your driver?"
The left wing gunner from Sergeant Wylde's blower turned his head—all the motion of which he was capable the way he was wrapped. "Strathclyde?" he said. His voice sounded all right. The medicomp kept his coverings flushed and cool with a bath of nutrient fluid. "Check over to One-one. He's got a buddy there."
"Yeah, well, One-five needs a driver," Cooter explained. "I'm going to put him on it."
Shorty Rogers looked up. "What happened to Darples on One-five?" he asked.
"Head shot. One a the gunners took over last night, but I figure it makes sense to transfer Strathclyde for a regular thing."
"Cop," muttered Rogers. "I'll miss that snake." Then, "Don't mean nuthin'."
"Riddle!" Cooter snarled. "What the bloody hell are you doing still here? Get your ass moving, or you won't bloody have one!"
Riddle walked out of the medical tent. The direct sunlight made him sneeze, but he didn't really notice it.
Bright orange tracers, spiraling toward his chest.
He reached his combat car, Deathdealer. The iridium armor showed fresh scars. There was a burnished half-disk on the starboard wall of the fighting compartment—copper spurted out by a buzzbomb. The jet had cooled from a near-plasma here on the armor. Must've been the round that took out Otski. . . .
Riddle sat on the shaded side of the big vehicle. No one else was around. Cooter and Rogers had their own business. They wouldn't get here for hours.
Otski wouldn't be back at all. Never at all.
Bright orange tracers . . .
Riddle took a small cone-shaped phial out of his side pocket. It was dull gray and had none of the identifying stripes that marked ordinary stim-cones, the ones that gave you a mild buzz without the aftereffects of alcohol.
He put the flat side of the cone against his neck, feeling for the carotid pulse. When he squeezed the cone, there was a tiny hiss and a skin-surface prickling.
Riddle began to giggle again.
Troops were moving about the Slammers' portion of the encampment in a much swifter and more directed fashion than they had been the afternoon before, when Dick Suilin first visited this northern end of Camp Progress.
The reporter glanced toward the bell—a section of rocket casing—hung on top of the Tactical Operations Center. Perhaps it had rung, unheard by him while he drove past the skeletons of National Army barracks . . . ?
The warning signal merely swayed in the breeze that carried soot and soot smells even here, where few sappers had penetrated.
Suilin had figured the commo gear would be at the TOC, whether Captain Ranson was there or not. In the event, the black-haired female officer sat on the back ramp of the vehicle, facing three male soldiers who squatted before her.
She stood, thumping out her closing orders, as Suilin pulled up; the men rose a moment later. None of the group paid the local reporter any attention.
Suilin didn't recognize the men. One of them was fat, at least fifty standard years old, and wore a grease-stained khaki jumpsuit.
"No problem, Junebug," he called as he turned away from the meeting. "We'll be ready to lift—if we're left alone to get ready, all right? Keep the rest a your people and their maintenance problems off my back—" he was striding off toward a parked tank, shouting his words over his shoulder "—and we'll be at capacity when you need us."
Suilin got out of his truck. They called their commanding officer Junebug?
"Yeah, well," said another soldier, about twenty-five and an average sort of man in every way. He lifted his helmet to rub his scalp, then settled the ceramic/plastic pot again. "What do you want for a callsign? Charlie Three-zero all right?"
Ranson shook her head. "Negative. You're Blue Three," she said flatly.
Blue Three rubbed his scalp again. "Right," he said in a cheerless voice. "Only you hear 'Charlie Three-zero,' don't have kittens, okay? I got a lot to learn."
He turned morosely, adding, "And you know, this kinda on-the-job training ain't real survivable."
Suilin stood by, waiting for the third male mercenary to go before he tried to borrow the Slammers' communications system to call Kohang.
Instead of leaving, the soldier turned and looked at the reporter with a disconcertingly slack-jawed, vacant-eyed stare. The green-brown eyes didn't seem to focus at all.
Captain Ranson's eyes followed her subordinate's. She said angrily, "Who the bloody hell are you?"
It wasn't the same face that Suilin had been interviewing the night before.
There were dark circles around Ranson's eyes, and her left cheek was badly scratched. Her face, her hands, and her neck down to the scallop where she'd been wearing armor, were dingy with fouling spewed from the breeches of her tribarrel when jets of nitrogen expelled the empty cases.
Ranson had been angry at being forced into an interview. She'd known the power was in the reporter's hands: the power to probe for answers she didn't want to give; the power to twist questions so that they were hooks in the fabric of her self-esteem; the power to make a fool out of her, by the words he tricked her into saying—or the form into which he edited those words before he aired them.
Now . . .
Now Suilin wondered what had happened to Fritzi Dole's body. He was almost certain that this small, fierce mercenary wouldn't shoot a reporter out of hand to add to the casualty count, no matter how angry and frustrated she was now. . . .
"I'm, ah," he said, "Dick Suilin. I'm, ah, we met yesterday when the—"
"The reporter," Ranson said. "Right, the bloody fool who didn't know t' hit the dirt for incoming. The interview's off."
She started to turn. "Beat it," she added.
"It's not—" Suilin said. "Captain Ranson, I need to talk to somebody in Kohang, and your commo may be the—"
"Buddy," said Ranson with a venom and disgust that shocked the reporter more than the content of the words did, "you must be out of your mind. Get out of here."
The other soldier continued to watch without expression.
"Captain, you don't understand," Suilin called to Ranson's back. "I need to make sure my sister's all right."
The woman bent to re-enter the immobile command blower.
"Curse it! She's the wife of the District Governor. Now will you—"
Ranson turned. The reporter thought he'd seen her angry before.
"The District Governor," she repeated softly. "The District Bleeding Governor."
She walked toward Suilin. He poised, uncertain as to what the female officer intended.
She tapped him on the chest as she said, "Your brother-in-law doesn't have any balls, buddy." The tip of her index finger was like a mallet.
"Captain—"
"He's got a brigade of armor," Ranson continued, "and maybe ten battalions of infantry and gendarmes, according to the order of battle in my data banks."
She tapped even harder. Suilin backed a step. "But no balls a'tall."
The reporter set his leg to lock him into place. "Captain, you can't—"
Ranson slapped him, forehand and then back across the other cheek. Her fingers were as hard as the popper of a bullwhip. "And he's got an ass, so we're going to get our ass shot off to save his!"
She spun on her heel. "Sparrow, get him out of my sight," she called over her shoulder as she entered her TOC.
Suilin viewed the world through a blur of tears. Sparrow put a hand on his shoulder and turned him with a detached gentleness that felt like compassion to the reporter at the moment.
"S'okay, turtle," the mercenary said as he walked Suilin toward the truck he'd borrowed. "We just got orders to relieve the District Governor ourself, and we got bugger-all t' do it with."
"What?" the reporter said. "In Kohang?"
His right cheek burned, and his left felt as if someone had flayed the skin from it. He wondered if Ranson had been wearing a ring. "Who's relieving Kohang?"
Sparrow waved an arm as deliberately as a stump speaker gesturing. "You're lookin' at it, turtle," he said. "Three tanks, five cars . . . and maybe crews for most of 'em."
The veneer of careless apathy dropped away. Sparrow shivered. He was tall and thin with an olive complexion several shades darker than Suilin's own.
"Via," the mercenary muttered. "Via!"
Sparrow turned and walked, then trotted in a loose-limbed way toward the tank across the enclosure from the TOC. He climbed the shallow steps up its skirts and battered hull, then popped into the turret with the haste of a man boarding under fire.
The hatch clanged loudly behind him.
Dick Suilin sat in his truck, blinking to clear his eyes and mind. He started the vehicle and turned it in a tight circle, heading back toward National Army Headquarters.
His own gear had been destroyed in the firefight, but he thought the barracks in which Fritzi Doyle was billeted had survived. The cameraman had worn fatigues. One of his spare sets would fit Suilin well enough.
Fritzi wouldn't mind.
The corpse of a National Army sergeant was sprawled at the doorway of a bombed-out building. He'd thrown on a uniform shirt, but he had no shoes or trousers. His left arm was outstretched while his right was folded under his face as though cushioning it from the ground.
He'd been carrying a grenade launcher and a satchel of reloads for it. They lay beside his body.
Suilin stopped the truck, picked up the weapon and ammunition, and set the gear on the passenger seat. As an afterthought, he tried to lift the dead man. The body was stiff and had already begun to blacken in the bright sun.
Someone whose job it was would deal with the sergeant. Not Dick Suilin.
Suilin's hands felt slimy. He accelerated away, kicking gravel over the corpse in his haste to be shut of it.
"Blue One," said Captain June Ranson, checking the artificial intelligence in her multi-function display. A digit on the holographic map blinked twice in yellow, then twice more in blue light when the transponder in Deathdealer answered the call automatically.
"Go ahead, Tootsie Six," said Sergeant Sparrow's voice.
"Linkage check," Ranson said. "Blue Two."
Deathdealer led the line-to-be, quivering on its fans just ahead of Ranson's Warmonger.
There wasn't enough room in the Slammers' end of the encampment to form up completely until the blowers started to move south, toward the gate. Sound, re-echoing from the berm and the sloped iridium sides of the vehicles, vibrated the flesh of everyone around.
Exclusion circuits in Ranson's commo helmet notched out as much of the fan's racket as possible, but the sound of multiple drive nacelles being run up to speed created an ambiance beyond the power of electronics to control. Air forced beneath the lips of eight plenum chambers picked up grit which ricocheted into standing waves where the currents from two or three blowers intersected.
Deathdealer's turret was already buttoned up. Nothing wrong with that—it'd be quieter inside, though the fan-driven chaos would penetrate even the massive iridium castings that stopped all but direct pointblank hits by the largest powerguns.
Ranson had never seen Birdie Sparrow man his tank from the open cupola. A tank's electronics were better than human senses, even when those senses were augmented by the AI and sensors in a commo helmet. The screens within a panzer's turret gave not only crisper definition on all the electro-optical bands but also gave multiple simultaneous options.
That information glut was one of the reasons most tank commanders chose to fight their vehicles from the cupola instead of the closed turret whenever possible.
It was difficult to get experienced crewmen to transfer from combat cars to the panzers, even though it usually meant promotion. Most tank commanders were promoted from driver, while the driver slots were filled by newbies with no previous combat experience in the Slammers.
Ranson had checked Birdie Sparrow's personnel file—this afternoon; she'd had no reason to call up the records from Central's database before. . . .
Before Colonel Hammer handed her command of a suicide mission.
Sparrow had five standard years, seven months, service with the Regiment. All but the training in the first three months had been in line companies, so there was no need to wonder how he handled combat: just fine or he wouldn't 've lasted out his fourth month. Hammer's Slammers weren't hired by people who needed them to polish their gear in barracks.
A few problems on stand-down; a more serious one with a platoon leader in the field that had cost Sparrow a pay-grade—but it was the lieutenant who'd been transferred back to Central and, after the discreet interval required for discipline, out of the Slammers. Sparrow had an excellent record and must have been in line for his own platoon—
Instead of which, he'd been sent down here to the quiet South for a little time off.
Junebug Ranson had an even better service record than Sparrow did. She knew curst well what she was doing down here at Camp Progress.
Task Force Ranson was real lucky to have a company commander as experienced as Junebug Ranson to lead the mission, and a tanker as good as Birdie Sparrow to head up the unit's tank element.
The trouble was, they were both bughouse bleeding crazy, and Ranson knew it.
It was her job to know it, and to compensate the best way she could.
"Roger, Tootsie Six," said her helmet in the voice of Warrant Leader Ortnahme as the digit 2 flickered on the map display.
"Linkage check," responded Captain Ranson. "Blue Three."
Needs must, when the Devil drives.
"Cooter," said Chief Lavel over the commo helmet's Channel 3. It was a lock-out push normally reserved for vehicle intercoms, so that even Tootsie Six couldn't overhear without making a point of it. "I found 'im. The sonuvabitch."
Flamethrower shuddered violently and began to skid as the tank to starboard ran up its fans to full pitch and thrust for a test.
The panzer's drivers had his nacelles vertical, so the hundred and seventy tonnes of tank simply rose a hand's breadth off the ground. The air bleeding beneath the skirts was at firehose pressure, though; the smack of it pushed the lighter combat car away until Shorty Rogers grounded Flamethrower to oppose the friction of steel on soil to the blast of wind.
Cooter keyed Channel 3 and said, "Can you get him here, Chief? We're gonna get the word any time now."
"Cooter," said his friend, "I think you better take a look at this one yourself."
Chief Lavel had been a gun captain. He knew about time and about movement orders; and he knew what he was saying.
"Cop!" Cooter swore. "He in his doss, then?"
The tank, the nameless one crewed by a couple newbies, settled back onto its skirts. The sergeant in the cupola looked down at Cooter. In formation, they'd be running well ahead of Flamethrower's tailass Charlie slot.
"Negative," said Chief. "He's in his buddy's bunk—you know, Platt's? In the Logistics doss."
Night fell like an axe at Camp Progress. Except for the red blur on the western horizon, the sun had disappeared completely in the past three minutes.
Cooter switched his visor to enhancement and checked to make sure the nameless tank was between him and Tootsie Six, then cut back to standard optical.
Depth perception was never quite as good on enhanced mode. There were enough lights on in the encampment for Cooter to find his way to the Logistics bunker/barracks.
Cooter tapped the shoulder of Gale, the right-wing gunner from Tootsie One-four, transferred to Flamethrower now that Otski and the other blower had both become casualties. Speaking on 12, the other lock-out push, to be heard over the fan noise, Cooter said, "Hold the fort, Windy. I'll be back in a couple minutes max."
"We'll be bloody gone in a couple minutes, Cooter," Gale replied.
He was an older man, nearly thirty; not a genius, but bright and competent enough that he'd 've had a blower of his own years before had he not adamantly refused the promotion.
"Yeah, well," Cooter said, climbing awkwardly past Speed Riddle's clamshell and helmet stacked in front of the left tribarrel. "We're last in line. Worst case, Shorty'll have to make up a little time."
Worst case, Captain Ranson would notice her second-in-command hadn't pulled out on time and would check Flamethrower's own sensors. If she found Cooter gone from his post now, she'd have him dragged behind a blower all the way back to Camp Progress as soon as the mission was over.
Which was pretty much what Cooter had in mind for Speed Riddle.
He lumbered across the ground, burdened by his armor and half-blinded by dust despite his lowered visor. Cooter was a big man, but no man was significant in an area packed with the huge, slowly-maneuvering masses of armored vehicles.
Logistics section—the warehouses, truck park, and bunkered sleeping quarters for the associated personnel—formed the boundary between the Slammers' positions and the remainder of Camp Progress. Sappers who'd gotten through the Yokel defenses had bombed a parts shed and shot up a few trucks, but the Red section's counterattack put paid to the Consies here before they'd really gotten rolling.
The doss—half dug into the berm, half sandbagged—was undamaged except for six plate-sized cups which a tribarrel had blasted from the front wall. There was a gap in the line of glassy impact craters where one round had splashed a Consie sapper instead of hitting the sandbags.
Chief Lavel stood in the doorway. He gestured to Cooter but hunched his way into the doss before the lieutenant arrived.
Chief tried to give himself a little advantage when there was anything tricky to do, like negotiating the double step that put the floor of the doss below ground level for safety. He got around amazingly well for a man missing his left arm and leg, though.
Outside the bunker, armored vehicles filled the evening with hot lubricant and the sharpness of ozone arcing away from dirty relays. The bunker's interior stank of human waste.
"What the . . . ?" Cooter muttered as he followed Chief down the narrow hallway along the front wall of the structure. A glowstrip was tacked to the ceiling; Cooter's helmet scraped it. He swore, ducked, and then straightened to bump again.
Board partitions made from packing cases divided the doss into rooms—decent-sized ones for Lavel and his permanent staff and, at the far end, tiny cubicles to house transients like the drivers making supply runs. The rooms were empty; the personnel were either involved with the departure or watching it.
Except for the last cubicle, where Speed Riddle lay sprawled on a cot with a broad smile. The balding gunner had fouled himself thoroughly enough that waste was dripping from his pants' leg onto the floor.
Riddle's fingers held a drug phial. Two more empties lay beside his hand.
Cooter stared at the gunner for several seconds. Then he turned around and strode back down the aisle.
His helmet brushed the glowstrip. He punched upward with his knotted right fist, banging the flat fixture against the ceiling of steel plank and causing grit to drift down through the perforations from the sandbagged topcover.
"Coot!" Lavel called, stumping along behind him. "Hey Coot. Slow down."
"Chief," Cooter said without slowing or turning, "I want that bastard tied up until he can be delivered to Central. With wire. Barbed wire'd be fine. Somethin' happens to me, you take care of the Court Martial, right?"
The end of Lavel's long crutch shot across the doorway, blocking Cooter's exit. "Wait a bloody minute!" Chief said.
Lavel was leaning against the right wall. The crutch was strapped to his stump, since he didn't have a left hand with which to grip it. He lowered it, a slim wand of boron monocrystal, when Cooter turned at last to face him.
"Going to use one of the newbies in Riddle's place?" he asked.
Cooter shook his head violently, as much to clear it as for a gesture. "Put the last one I could trust on One-five for a driver," he said. "I'll be better off watching that side myself than trusting some hick who's still got both thumbs up his ass."
"Take me, Cooter," said Chief Lavel.
Cooter looked at his friend with a cold lack of passion. Chief was so tall that he also had to duck to clear the ceiling. His shoulders were massive. Lavel had been thin when he was a whole man, but the inertia of his years of injury gave him a grotesque pot belly.
"Please, Coot," he said. "You won't regret it."
"I need you here, Chief," Cooter said as he turned. "You take care of Riddle, you hear?"
"Coot?"
"Gotta go now," Cooter muttered as he took both steps to the exterior with one stretch of his long, powerful legs.
The armored vehicles were snorting, running up the speed of their fans again; and, as Cooter strode toward Flamethrower, a tank fired its main gun skyward.
There were too bloody many vehicles in too little space, and the bloody drivers had too much on their minds.
A combat car was drifting toward Herman's Whore. The lighter vehicle was already so close that Ortnahme had to crank down his display to read the number stenciled on its skirts. "Tootsie One-two!" he snarled. "You're fouling—"
The tank lurched. For an instant, Ortnahme thought Simkins was trying to back away from the oncoming car. That wouldn't work, because Herman's Whore had rotated in place and her skirts were firmly against the berm.
"—us, you dickheaded—"
The man in the fighting compartment of Tootsie One-two turned, his face a ball of blank wonder as he stared at the tank looming above him. He was probably gabbling to his driver over the intercom, but there was no longer time to avoid the collision. The skirts of both vehicles were thick steel, but the combined mass would start seams for sure.
"—fool! Watch your—"
The bow of Herman's Whore lifted slightly. Simkins had run up his fans and vectored them forward. The tank couldn't slide backward because of the berm, so its bow skirts blasted a shrieking hurricane of air into the combat car.
Tootsie One-two, Flamethrower, pitched as though it had just dropped into a gully. The trooper in the fighting compartment bounced off the coaming before he could brace himself on the grips of two of the tribarrels.
Why in blazes was there only one man in the back of Flamethrower when the task force was set to move out?
The combat car slid two meters under the thrust of the tank's fans before Shorty Rogers dumped his own ground effect and sparked to a halt on bits of gravel in the soil.
The figure in the fighting compartment stood up again and gave Herman's Whore an ironic salute. "Blue Two," said Ortnahme's helmet. "Sorry 'bout that."
"Tootsie One-two," the warrant leader responded. He felt expansive and relieved, now that he was sure they wouldn't be deadlined at the last instant by a stupid mistake. "No harm done. It's prob'ly my bloody fault for not seeing your nacelles were aligned right when we had time to screw with 'em."
Herman's Whore settled, a little abruptly. Their skirts gave the ground a tap that rattled Ortnahme's teeth and probably cut a centimeter-deep oval in the hard soil.
"Simkins—" the warrant leader began, the word tripping the helmet's artificial intelligence to intercom mode.
"Sir, I'm sorry," his driver was already blurting. "I let the sucker—"
"Blood 'n martyrs, Simkins," Ortnahme interrupted, "don't worry about that! Where dja learn that little maneuver, anyhow?"
"Huh?" said the helmet. "Sir, it was just, you know, the leverage off the berm . . . ?"
He sounded like he thought Ortnahme was gonna chew his head off. Which had happened maybe a little too often in the past . . . but bloody hell, you had t' break 'em in the start. . . .
"Sir?" Simkins added in a little voice.
"Yeah?"
"Sir, I really like tanks. D'ye suppose that—"
"Like bloody hell!" the warrant leader snapped. "Look, kid, you're more good to me and Colonel Hammer right where you bloody are!"
"Yessir."
Which, come t' think about it, was driving a panzer. Well, there'd be time t' worry about that later.
Or there wouldn't.
The turret interior had darkened as the sky did, because the main screen was set on direct optical. Ortnahme frowned, then set the unit for progressive enhancement, projecting images at 60% of average daylight ambiance.
The visual display brightened suddenly, though the edges of the snarling armored vehicles lacked a little of the definition they would have had in unaided sunlight. No matter what the sky did—sun, moons, or the Second Coming—the main screen would continue to display at this apparent light level until Ortnahme changed its orders.
Henk Ortnahme knew tanks. He knew their systems backward and forward, better than almost any of the panzers' regular crews.
Line troops found a few things that worked for them. Each man used his handful of sensor and gunnery techniques, ignoring the remainder of his vehicle's incredibly versatile menu. You don't fool around when your life depends on doing instinctively something that works for you.
The maintenance chief had to be sure that everything worked, every time. He'd spent twenty years of playing with systems that most everybody else forgot. He could run the screens and sensors by reflex and instantly critique the performance of each black box.
What the warrant leader hadn't had for those twenty years was combat experience. . . .
"Sir," said the helmet. "Ah, when are we supposed to pull out?"
A bloody stupid question.
Sunset, and Simkins could see as well as Ortnahme that it was sunset plus seven. Captain Ranson had said departure time would be coordinated by Central, so probably the only people who knew why Task Force Ranson was on hold were a thousand kilometers north of—
Screen Two, which in default mode—as now—was boresighted to the main gun, flashed the orange warning director control. As the letters appeared, the turret of Herman's Whore began to rotate without any input from Warrant Leader Ortnahme.
The turret was being run by Fire Central, at Headquarters. Henk Ortnahme had no more to say about the situation than he did regarding any other orders emanating directly from Colonel Hammer.
"Sir?" Simkins blurted over the intercom.
"Blue Two—" demanded at least two other vehicles simultaneously, alerted by the squealing turret and rightly concerned about what the hell was going on. Screwing around with a tank's main gun in these close quarters wasn't just a bad idea.
"Simkins," Ortnahme said. His fingers stabbed buttons. "It's all right. The computer up in Purple's just took over."
As he spoke, Ortnahme set his gunnery screen to echo on Screen Three of the other tanks and the multi-function displays with which the combat cars made do. That'd answer their question better 'n anything he could say—
And besides, he was busy figuring out what Central thought it was doing with his tank.
The warrant leader couldn't countermand the orders coming from Firebase Purple, but he could ask his own artificial intelligence to tell him what firing solution was being fed to it. Screen Three obligingly threw up the figures for azimuth, elevation, and range.
"Blood 'n martyrs," Henk Ortnahme whispered.
Now he knew why the departure of Task Force Ranson had been delayed.
They had to wait for the Terran World Government's recce satellite to come over the horizon—
Herman's Whore fired its main gun; cyan lightning and a thunderclap through the open hatch, a blast of foul gases within the turret.
—so they could shoot it down.
The unexpected bolt didn't blind Cooter because his visor reacted in microseconds to block the intense glare. The shock stunned him for a moment anyway; then the big man began to run through the mass of restive vehicles.
A tank—Deathdealer, Blue One—slid forward. When the big blower was clear, entering the Yokel area between the demolished shed and a whole one, Captain Ranson's Warmonger fell in behind it. It was as though the echoing blast from Herman's Whore had triggered an iridium avalanche.
The third vehicle, another combat car, sidled up to the line of departure. That'd be One-five, its driver a newbie on whom Cooter had decided to take a chance. The fellow was matching his blower's speed to that of the leading vehicles, but he had his bow pointing thirty degrees off the axis of motion.
Some dickhead Yokel had parked a light truck just inside the Slammer's area. One-five's tail skirts managed to tap the little vehicle and send it spinning halfway up the berm, a graphic illustration of the difference between a tonne at rest and thirty tonnes in motion.
Cooter reached his car panting with exertion, anger, and a relieved awareness of how bloody near that asshole Riddle had made him cut it. One-one was already pulling into line for the run through Camp Progress, though the second and third combat cars would spread left and right as outriders as soon as they left the gate.
A Yokel wearing fatigues cut for somebody shorter put a hand on Cooter's shoulder as he set his foot on Flamethrower's skirt. The fellow carried a slung grenade launcher, a kitbag, and a satchel of ammunition.
Cooter had never seen him before.
"Who the hell are you?" he snarled over the fans' intake howl. The skirts were quivering with repressed violence, and the nameless Blue Three was already headed into the Yokel compound.
"I'm Dick," the fellow shouted. "From last night. Lieutenant, can you use a grenadier for this run?"
Cooter started at him a second, five seconds . . . ten. One-six was pulling out. . . .
"You bet your ass I can, turtle," Cooter said. "Welcome aboard!"