The upper half of June Ranson's visor showed a light-enhanced view of her surroundings. It flicked from side to side as her head bobbed in the nervous-pigeon motions of somebody with more things to worry about than any human being could handle.
Deathdealer led the column. Even from 200 meters ahead, the wake of the tank's vast passage rocked Warmonger's own considerable mass. Willens was driving slightly left of the center of Deathdealer's track, avoiding some of the turbulence and giving himself a better direct view forward. It raised the danger from mines, though; the tank would set off anything before the combat car reached it, if their tracks were identical. . . .
She let it go for now. The roadway between Camp Progress and the civilian settlement over the ridge had been cleared in the fighting the night before.
Stolley had his tribarrel cocked forward, parallel to the car's axis of motion instead of sweeping the quadrant to the left side like he ought to. Stolley figured—and they all figured, Junebug Ranson as sure as her wing gunner—that first crack at any Consies hereabouts would come from the front.
But a ninety percent certainty meant one time in ten you were dead. Deathdealer and the bow gunner, June Ranson, could handle the front. Stolley's job—
Ranson put her fingers on the top barrel of Stolley's weapon, well ahead of the mounting post, and pushed.
The wing gunner's hands tightened on the grips for a moment before he relaxed with a curse that he didn't even try to muffle. The gun muzzles swung outward in the direction they ought to be pointed.
Stolley stared at his commanding officer. His face was a reflecting ball behind his lowered visor.
"If you don't like your job," Ranson said, speaking over the wind noise instead of using intercom, "I can arrange for you to drive. Another blower."
Stolley crouched behind his gun, staring into the night.
Ranson nodded in approval of the words she'd been listening to, the words coming from her mouth. Good command technique—under the circumstances, under field conditions where it was more important to be obeyed than to be liked. This crew wasn't going to like its blower captain anyway . . . but they'd obey.
Ranson shook her head violently. She wasn't an observer, watching a holographic record from command school on Friesland. She was . . .
The images on the lower half of her visor wobbled at a rate different from that of the combat car and didn't change when Ranson darted her head to the left or right. She'd slaved its display to that of the sensors on Deathdealer in the lead. The tank's intakes sucked the tops of low bushes toward her from the roadside. Then, as Deathdealer came alongside, the air leaking beneath her skirts battered them away.
Moments later, Warmonger swept by the bushes. The top of Ranson's visor repeated the images of the lower section as if on a five-second delay.
Ranson shook her head again. It didn't help.
By an emergency regulation—which had been in place for fourteen years—there were to be no private structures within two kilometers of a military base. Colonel Banyussuf had enforced that reg pretty stringently. There'd been drink kiosks all along the road to within a hundred meters of the gate, but they were daylight use only.
Since the panzers swept through the night before, nothing remained of the flimsy stands but splinters and ash that swirled to the passage of Task Force Ranson.
Permanent civilian dwellings, more serious entertainment—whores, hard drugs, gambling—as well as the goods and services you'd normally find in a town the size of Camp Progress, were in Happy Days. That settlement was just over the ridge the road climbed as it ran southeast from the camp. Technically, Happy Days was within the two-kilometer interdict; but out of sight, out of mind.
Being over the ridge meant line-of-sight bolts from the Slammers' powerguns wouldn't 've hurt the civilians. The National Army might've dropped some indirect fire on Happy Days during the fighting, but Ranson doubted the Yokels had been that organized.
Janacek had taped a red-patterned bandanna to the lower rear edge of his commo helmet. At rest, it kept sun from the back of his neck, but when the car was moving, it popped and fluttered like a miniature flag.
When Task Force Ranson got beyond the settlement, they could open their formation and race cross-country through the night; but the only practical place to cross the wooded ridge was where the road did.
There were probably Consies hidden among the civilians of Happy Days. One of them might try a shot as the armored vehicles howled past. . . .
The lead tank crested the rise in a cloud of ash and charred wood. There'd been groves of mighty trees to either side of the road. Panels of bright silk strung from trunk to trunk sectioned the copses into open-air brothels in fine weather.
Before. During the previous night, return fire and the backblasts of bombardment rockets had torched the trees into ash and memories. That permitted Deathdealer's driver to swing abruptly to the right, off the roadway and any weapons targeted on it, just before coming into sight of Happy Days.
Debris momentarily blanked the lower half of Ranson's visor. It cleared with a view of the settlement. The ground across the ridge dropped away more steeply than on the side facing Camp Progress, so the nearest of the one- and two-story houses were several hundred meters away where the terrain flattened.
Happy Days was a ghost town.
Deathdealer was proceeding at forty kph, fractionally slower than her speed a few moments before. Warmonger started to close the 200-meter separation, but Willens throttled back and swung to the left of the road as the combat car topped the rise. Ranson's left hand switched her visor off remote; her right was firm on the tribarrel's grip.
Happy Days hadn't been damaged in the previous night's fighting. The buildings crowded the stakes marking the twenty-meter right of way, but their walls didn't encroach—another regulation Banyussuf had enforced, with bulldozers when necessary.
Half the width was road surface which had been stabilized with a plasticizer, then pressure-treated. The lead tank slipped down the incline on the right shoulder behind a huge cloud of dust.
Nothing moved in the settlement.
A few of the structures were concrete prefabs, but most were built of laths covered with enameled metal. Uncut sheets already imprinted with the logos of soups or beers gleamed in an array more colorful than that of a race course. Behind the buildings themselves, fabric barriers enclosed yards in which further business could be conducted in the open air.
The lead tank was almost between the rows of buildings. Ranson's visor caught and highlighted movement of the barred window of a popular knocking-shop across the street and near the far end of the strip. She switched her display to thermal.
Stolley swung his tribarrel toward the motion.
"No!" June Ranson shouted.
The wing gunner's short burst snapped through the air like a single streak of cyan, past Deathdealer and into a white coruscance as the window's iron grillwork burned at the impacts.
A buzzbomb arced from the left and exploded in the middle of its trajectory as the tank's close-in defense system fired with a vicious crackling.
At least twenty automatic weapons volleyed orange tracers from Happy Days. The bullets ricocheted from Deathdealer and clanged like hammerblows on Warmonger's hull and gunshields.
"All Tootsie elements!" Ranson shouted. Willens had chopped his throttles; Warmonger's skirts tapped the soil. "Bandits! Blue One—"
But it was too late to order Blue One to lay a mine-clearing charge down the road. The great tank accelerated toward Happy Days in a spray of dust and pebbles, tribarrel and main gun blasting ahead of it.
"Hey, snake?" said DJ Bell from the main screen as bolts from a powergun cracked past Deathdealer. "Watch out for the Pussycat, OK?"
"Go 'way, DJ!" Birdie Sparrow shouted. "Albers! Goose it! Fast! Fast!"
The sound of bullets striking their thick armor was lost in the roar of the fans whose intakes suddenly tried to gulp more air than fluid flow would permit. The impacts quivered through Sparrow's boots on the floorplate like the ticks of a mechanical clock gone haywire.
Sparrow gripped a gunnery joystick in either hand. Most tankers used only one control, thumb-switching from main gun to tribarrel and back at need. He'd taught himself years ago to operate with both sticks live. You didn't get sniper's precision that way, but—
"Bandits!" cried the captain. "Blue One—"
Whatever she wanted would wait.
—when it was suppressing fire you needed, like now—
Whatever anybody else wanted could wait.
Using the trigger on the right joystick, Sparrow rapped a five-round burst from the tribarrel across a shop midway down the Strip on the left side. Sheet metal blew away from the wood beneath it, fluttering across the street as if trying to escape from the sudden blaze behind it.
The main screen was set on a horizontally-compressed 360 degree panorama. Sparrow was used to the distortion. He caught the puff of a buzzbomb launch before his electronics highlighted the threat.
A defensive charge blasted from above Deathdealer's skirts. It made the hull ring as none of the hostile fire had managed.
Sparrow's tribarrel raked shop-fronts further down the Strip in a long burst. The bolts flashed at an increasing separation because the tank was accelerating.
Deathdealer's turret rotated counter-clockwise, independently of the automatic weapon in the cupola. The left pipper, the point-of-aim indicator for the main gun, slid backward across the facade of one of the settlement's sturdier buildings.
The neon sign was unlighted, but Sparrow knew it well—a cat with a Cheshire grin, gesturing with a forepaw toward her lifted haunches.
That was where the buzzbomb had come from. Three more sparks spat in the darkness—light, lethal missiles, igniting in the whorehouse parlor—just as Sparrow's foot stroked the pedal trip for his 20cm cannon.
Deathdealer's screens blacked out the cyan flash. The displays were live again an instant later when dozens of ready missiles went off in a secondary explosion that blew the Pussycat's walls and roof into concrete confetti.
"Blue Three," the command channel was blatting, "move forward and—"
Albers brought Deathdealer into the settlement with gravity aiding his desperately-accelerating fans. He was hugging the right side of the Strip, too close for a buzzbomb launched from that direction to harm. Anti-personnel mines banged harmlessly beneath them.
"—lay a clearing charge before anybody else proceeds!"
Across the roadway, shopfronts popped and sizzled under the fire of Sparrow's tribarrel and the more raking bolts of combat cars pausing just over the ridgeline as Tootsie Six had ordered.
Deathdealer brushed the front of the first shop. The building collapsed like a bomb going off.
The tank accelerated to eighty kph. Albers used his mass and the edge of his skirts like a router blade, ripping down the line of flimsy shops. The fragments scattered in the draft of his fans.
A Consie took two steps from a darkened tavern, knelt, and aimed his buzzbomb down the throat of the oncoming tank.
Sparrow's foot twitched on the firing pedal. The main gun crashed out a bolt that turned a tailor's shop across the road into a fireball with a plasma core. The blast was twenty meters from the rocketeer, but the Consie flung away his weapon in surprise and tried to run.
A combat car nailed him, half a pace short of the doorway that would have provided concealment if not protection.
Sparrow had begun firing with his tribarrel at a ten o'clock angle. As Deathdealer raced toward the far end of the settlement, he panned the weapon counter-clockwise and stuttered bursts low into shop fronts. Instants after the tribarrel raked a facade, his main gun converted the entire building into a self-devouring inferno.
Two controls, two pippers sliding across a compressed screen at varying rates. The few bullets that still spattered the hull were lost in the continuous rending impact of Albers' 170-tonne wrecking ball.
Choking gases from the cannon breech, garbled orders and warnings from the radio.
No sweat, none of it. Birdie Sparrow was in control, and they couldn't none of 'em touch him.
Another whorehouse flew apart at the touch of Deathdealer's skirt. A meter by three-meter strip of metal enameled with a hundred and fifty bright Lion Beer logos curled outward and slapped itself over the intake of #1 Starboard fan.
The sudden loss of flow dipped the skirt to the soil and slewed Deathdealer's bow before plenum-chamber pressure could balance the mass it carried. The stern swung outward, into the clang-clang impact of bolts from a combat car's tribarrel. Fist-sized chunks vaporized from iridium armor that had ignored Consie bullets.
Sparrow rocked in his turret's stinking haze, clinging grimly to the joysticks and bracing his legs as well. The standard way to clear a blocked duct was to reverse the fan. That'd ground Deathdealer for a moment, and with the inertia of their present speed behind that touchdown—
Albers may have chopped his #1S throttle but he didn't reverse it—or try to straighten Deathdealer's course out of the hook into which contact had canted it. They hit the next building in line, bow-on at seventy kph—shattering panels of pre-stressed concrete and sweeping the fan duct clear in the avalanche of heavy debris.
Deathdealer bucked and pitched like a bull trying to pin a tiger to the jungle floor. The collision was almost as bad as the one for which Sparrow had prepared himself, but the tank never quite lost forward way. They staggered onward, cascading chunks of wall, curtains, and gambling tables.
The tank's AI threw up a red-lit warning on Screen Three. Deathdealer's ground-penetrating radar showed a thirty-centimeter tunnel drilled beneath the road's hard surface from the building they'd just demolished. The cavity was large enough to contain hundreds of kilos of explosive—
And it almost certainly did.
Without the blocked fan, Deathdealer would've been over the mine before the radar warning. Maybe past the mine before the Consie at the detonator could react—that was the advantage of speed and the shattering effect of heavy gunfire, the elements Sparrow'd been counting on to get them through.
And their armor. Even a mine that big . . .
"All Mike—T-tootsie elements," Sparrow warned. "The road's mined! Mine!"
He'd frozen the gunnery controls as he waited for the collision. Now, while Albers muscled the tank clear of the wreckage and started to build speed again, Sparrow put both pippers on the building across the road from them. He vaporized it with a long burst and three twenty-centimeter rounds, just in case the command detonator was there rather than in the shattered gambling den.
It might have a pressure or magnetic detonator. Speed wouldn't 've helped Deathdealer then, if luck hadn't slewed them off the road at the right moment.
"Can't touch us!" Birdie Sparrow muttered as he fired back over the tank's left rear skirts. "Can't touch us!"
"Not this time, snake," said DJ Bell as bitter gases writhed through the turret.
If he'd bothered to look behind him, Hans Wager could've seen that the tail end of the column had yet to pass the gates of Camp Progress.
Just over the ridge, all hell was breaking loose.
Wager's instinctive reaction was the same as always when things really dropped in the pot: to hunker down behind his tribarrel and hope there were panzers close enough to lend a hand.
It gave him a queasy feeling to realize that this time, he was the tank element and it was for him, Blue Three, that the CO was calling.
"—move forward and lay a clearing charge!"
Something big enough to light the whole sky orange blew up behind the ridge. Pray the Lord it was Consies eating some of their own ordnance rather than a mine going off beneath a blower.
The lead tank and Tootsie Six had both dropped over the ridgeline. One-five and One-one pulled forward. The first car slid to the right in a gush of gray-white ash colored blue by gunfire while the other accelerated directly up the road.
Blue Three shuddered as her driver poured the coal to her. Through inexperience, Holman swung her fan nacelles rearward too swiftly. Their skirts scraped a shower of sparks for several meters along the pavement.
Wager found his seat control, not instinctively but fast enough. He dropped from cupola level while the tank plowed stabilized gravel with a sound like mountains screaming.
Tracers stitched the main screen and across the sky overhead, momentary flickers through the open hatch.
One-five vanished behind the crest. One-one swung to the right and stopped abruptly with a flare of her skirts, still silhouetted on the ridgeline. Blue Three was wallowing toward the same patch of landscape under full power.
Wager shouted a curse, but Holman had their mount under control. The nameless tank pivoted left like a wheeled vehicle whose back end had broken away, avoiding the combat car. They could see now that One-one had pulled up to keep from overrunning Tootsie Six.
Blue Three began to slide at a slight sideways angle down the ridge they'd just topped. The three cars ahead of them were firing wildly into the smoke and flying debris of the settlement.
Sparrow's Blue One had just smashed a building. It pulled clear with the motion of an elephant shrugging during a dust bath.
"All Mike—T-tootsie elements," came a voice that a mask on the main screen would identify (if Wager wondered) as Blue One, used to his old callsign. "Mines! Mines!"
"Blue Three!" snarled Captain Ranson. "Lay the bloody charge! Now!"
If the bitch wanted to trade jobs, she could take this cursed panzer and all its cursed hardware! She could take it and shove it up her ass!
It wasn't that Hans Wager had never used a mine-clearing charge before. On a combat car, though, they were special equipment bolted to the bow skirts and fired manually. All the tanks were fitted with integral units, controlled by the AI. So. . . .
"Booster," Wager ordered crisply. "Clearance charge."
The gunsight pipper on Screen Two dimmed to half its previous orange brilliance. armed appeared in the upper left corner of the screen, above range to target and length of footprint.
Magenta tracks, narrowed toward the top by foreshortening, overlay the image of the settlement toward which Blue Three was slipping with the slow grace of a beer stein on a polished bar.
Instead of aligning with the pavement, the aiming tracks skewed across the right half of the Strip.
"Holman!" Wager screamed. "Straighten up! Straighten the fuck out! With the road!"
Sparrow's Deathdealer had reached the end of the built-up Strip. The turret was rotated back at a 220° angle to the tank's course. Its main gun fired, a blacked-out streak on Blue Three's screens and a dazzle of cyan radiance through her open hatch.
Wager heard the fan note rise as his driver adjusted nacelles #1S and #2S and boosted their speed. The nameless tank seemed to hesitate, but its attitude didn't change.
"Range," Wager called to his artificial intelligence. They were about a hundred meters from the nearest buildings. Since they were still moving forward maybe he ought to—
Whang!
Wager looked up in amazement. The bullet that had flattened itself against the cupola's open hatch dropped onto his cheek. It was hotter than hell.
"Sonuvabitch!" Wager shouted.
"Blue Two," ordered the radio, "move into position and lay down a clearance charge!"
"Sergeant," begged Holman over the intercom channel, "do you want me to stop us or—"
She'd straightened 'em out all right, for about a millisecond before the counter-clockwise rotation began to swing the tank's bow out of alignment again in the opposite direction. The aiming tracks marched across the screen with stately precision.
The volume of fire from the combat cars slackened because Wager's tank blocked their aim. Another bullet rang against the hatch; this one ricocheted glowing into the darkness. Bloody good thing Wager wasn't manning the cupola tribarrel himself just now. . . .
"Fire!" Wager ordered his AI.
He didn't know what the default setting was. He just knew he wasn't going to wait in his slowly-revolving tank and get it right some time next week.
Blue Three chugged, a sound much like that of a mortar firing nearby. The charge, a net of explosive filaments deploying behind a sparkling trio of rocket drivers, arched from a bow compartment.
As soon as the unit fired, the computed aiming tracks transformed themselves into a holographic overlay of the charge being laid—the gossamer threads would otherwise have been invisible.
The net wobbled outward for several seconds, shuddering in the flame-spawned air currents. It settled, covering five-hundred meters of pavement, the road's left shoulder, and the fronts of most of the buildings on the left side.
Muzzle flashes continued to wink from the stricken ruins of Happy Days.
The charge detonated with a white flash as sudden as that of lightning. Dust and ash spread in a dense pall that was opaque in the thermal spectrum as well as to normal optics.
Hundreds of small mines popped and spattered gravel. The explosive-filled cavity whose image, remoted from Deathdealer and frozen for reference on Wager's Screen Three, didn't go off.
Fuckin' A.
Hans Wager shifted Screen Two to millimetric radar and gripped his gunnery control. "Holman, drive on," he ordered, aware as he spoke that Blue Three was already accelerating.
Holman hadn't waited to be told. She knew as sure as Wager did that if the big mine went off, it was better that a tank take the shock than the lesser mass of a combat car.
Better for everybody except maybe the tank's crew.
Wager triggered the main gun and coaxially-locked tribarrel simultaneously, throwing echoing swirls onto his display as the dense atmosphere warped even the radar patterns.
"Tootsie Six," he said as he felt the tank beneath him build to a lumbering gallop. "This is Blue Three. We're going through."
Flamethrower cleared the rise. The settlement was a scene from Brueghel's Hell, and Dick Suilin was being plunged into the heart of it.
Cooter looked back over his shoulder at the reporter. His voice in Suilin's earphones said, "Watch the stern, turtle. Don't worry about the bow—we'll go through on Ortnahme's coattails."
Gale, the veteran trooper, had already shifted his position behind the right wing gun so that he was facing backward at 120° to the combat car's direction of travel. Suilin obediently tried to do the same, but he found that stacked ammo boxes and the large cooler made it difficult for him to stand. By folding one knee on the cooler, he managed to aim at the proper angle, but he wasn't sure he'd be able to hit anything if a target appeared.
Flamethrower was gathering speed. They'd crawled up the slope, matching their speed to that of the tank ahead of them. That vehicle in turn was trying not to overrun the combat cars pausing at the hillcrest.
The first series of the loud shocks occurred before Suilin's car was properly beyond the berm of Camp Progress. After that, the hidden fighting settled down to the vicious sizzle of powerguns. Each bolt sounded like sodium dropping into water in blazing kilogram packets.
When Flamethrower topped the ridgeline, offset to the left of the last tank in Task Force Ranson, Suilin saw the remains of Happy Days.
Four days before, he'd thought of the place as just another of the sleazy Strips that served army bases all over Prosperity—all over the human universe. Now it was a roiling pit, as smoky as the crater of a volcano and equally devoid of life.
"Blue Two," said a voice in Suilin's earphones, "this is Tootsie One-two. We're comin' through right up yer ass, so don't change yer mind, all right?"
It was probably Cooter speaking, but the reporter couldn't be sure. The helmets transmitted on one sideband, depriving the voices of normal timbre, and static interrupted the words every time a gun fired.
"Roger that, Tootsie One-two," said a different speaker. "Simkins, you heard the man. Keep yer bloody foot in it, right?"
Suilin's visual universe was a pattern of white blurs against a light blue background. The solidity and intensity of the white depended on the relative temperature of the object viewed.
I put it on thermal for you, Gale had said as he slapped a commo helmet onto the reporter's head with the visor down.
The helmet was loose, slipping forward when Suilin dipped his head and tugging back against its chin strap in the airstream when the combat car accelerated uphill. There was probably an adjustment system, but Suilin didn't know where it was . . . and this wasn't the time to ask.
Their own car, Flamethrower, slid over the crest and slowed as a billow of dust and ash expanded from the bow skirts like half a smoke ring. The driver had angled his fans forward; they lifted the bow slightly and kicked light debris in the direction opposite to their thrust against the vehicle's mass.
The tank had offset to the right on the hilltop as Flamethrower pulled left. Now it blew forward a similar but much larger half-doughnut. The arc of dust sucked in on itself, then recoiled outward when the cannon fired. The gun's crash was deafening to Suilin, even over the howl of the fans.
There was nothing to see on the flank Suilin was supposed to be guarding except the slight differential rate at which rocks, gravel, and vegetation lost the heat they'd absorbed during daylight. He risked a look over his shoulder, just as the tank fired again and Cooter ripped a burst from his tribarrel down the opposite side of what had been the settlement.
A combat car was making the run through Happy Days. The preceding vehicles of the task force waited in line abreast on the rising ground to the east of the settlement. Their hulls, particularly the skirts and fan intakes, were white; the muzzles of their powerguns were as sharp as floodlights.
The settlement was a pearly ambiance that wrapped and shrouded the car speeding through its heart. A gout of rubble lifted. It had fused to glass under the impact of the tank's twenty-centimeter bolt.
Suilin couldn't see any sign of a target—for the big gun or even for Cooter's raking tribarrel. The car racing through the wreckage was firing also, but the vehicles waiting on the far side of the gauntlet were silent, apparently for fear of hitting their fellow.
The road was outlined in flames over which smoke and ash swept like a dancer's veils. Molten spatters lifted by the tank cannon cooled visibly as they fell. There was no return fire or sign of Consies.
There were no structures left in what had been a community of several thousand.
The tank beside Flamethrower shrugged like a dog getting ready for a fight. Dust and ash puffed from beneath it again, this time sternward.
"Hang on, turtle!" a voice crackled in Suilin's ears as Flamethrower began to build speed with the deceptive smoothness characteristic of an air cushion vehicle.
Suilin gripped his tribarrel and tried to see something–anything—over the ghost-ring sight of the weapon. The normal holographic target display wasn't picked up by his visor's thermal imaging. The air stank of ozone and incomplete combustion.
The car rocked as its skirts clipped high spots and debris flung from the buildings. The draft of Flamethrower's fans and passage shouldered the smoke aside, but there was still nothing to see except hot rubble.
Cooter and Gale fired, their bursts producing sharp static through Suilin's headset. The helmet slipped back and forth on the reporter's forehead.
In desperation, Suilin flipped up his visor. Glowing smoke became black swirls, white flames became sullen orange. The bolts from his companions' weapons flicked the scene with an utter purity of color more suitable for a church than this boiling inferno.
Suilin thumbed his trigger, splashing dirt and a charred timber with cyan radiance. He fired again, raising his sights, and saw a sheet of metal blaze with the light of its own destruction.
They were through the settlement and slowing again. There were armored vehicles on either side of Flamethrower. Gale fired a last spiteful burst and put his weapon on safe.
Suilin's hands were shaking. He had to grip the pivot before he could thumb the safety button.
It'd been worse than the previous night. This time he hadn't known what was happening or what he was supposed to do.
"Tootsie Six to all Tootsie elements," said the helmet. "March order, conforming to Blue One. Execute."
The vehicles around them were moving again, though Flamethrower held a nervous, greasy balance on its fans. They'd move out last again, just as they had when Task Force Ranson left the encampment.
Minutes ago.
"How you doing, turtle?" Lieutenant Cooter asked. He'd raised his visor also. "See any Consies?"
Suilin shook his head. "I just . . ." he said. "I just shot, in case. . . . Because you guys were shooting, you know?"
Cooter nodded as he lifted his helmet to rub his scalp. "Good decision. Never hurts t' keep their heads down. You never can tell. . . ."
He gazed back at the burning waste through which they'd passed.
Suilin swallowed. "What's this 'turtle' business?" he asked.
Gale chuckled through his visor.
Cooter smiled and knuckled his forehead again. "Nothin' personal," the big lieutenant said. "You know, you're fat, you know? After a while you'll be a snake like the rest of us."
He turned.
"Hey," the reporter said in amazement. "I'm not fat! I exercise—"
Gale tapped the armor over Suilin's ribs. "Not fat there, turtle," the reflective curve of the veteran's visor said. "Newbie fat, you know? Civilian fat."
The tank they'd followed from Camp Progress began to move. "Watch your arcs, both of you," Cooter muttered over the intercom. "They may have another surprise waiting for us."
Suilin's body swayed as the combat car slipped forward. He still didn't know what the mercenaries meant by the epithet.
And he was wondering what had happened to all the regular inhabitants of Happy Days.
"Go ahead, Tootsie," said the voice of Slammer Six, hard despite all the spreads and attentuations that brought it from Firebase Purple to June Ranson's earphones. "Over."
"Lemme check yer shoulder," said Stolley to Janacek beside her. "C'mon, crack the suit."
"Roger," Ranson said as she checked the positioning of her force in the multi-function display. "We're OK, no casualties, but there was an ambush at the strip settlement just out the gate."
Blue One was ghosting along 200 meters almost directly ahead of Warmonger at sixty kph. That was about the maximum for an off-road night run, even in this fairly open terrain.
One-one and One-five had taken their flanking positions, echeloned slightly back from the lead tank. The remaining four blowers were spaced tank-car, tank-car, behind Warmonger like the tail of a broadly diamond-shaped kite.
Just as it ought to be . . . but the ratfuck at Happy Days had cost the task force a good hour.
"We couldn't 've avoided it," Ranson said, "so we shot our way through."
If she'd known, known, there was a company of Consies in Happy Days, she'd 've bypassed the place by heading north cross-country and cutting east, then south, near Siu Mah. It'd 've been a hundred kilometers out of their way, but—
"Look, bugger off," said Janacek. "I'm fine. I'll take another pill, right?"
"Any of the bypass routes might've got you in just as deep," said Colonel Hammer, taking a chance that, because of the time lag, his satellited words were going to step on those of his junior officer. "It's really dropped in the pot, Captain, all the hell over this country. But you don't see any reason that you can't carry out your mission?"
The question was so emotionless that concern stuck out in all directions like barbs from a burr. "Over."
"Quit screw'n around, Checker," Stolley demanded. "You got bits a jacket metal there. I get 'em out and there's no sweat."
Ranson touched the scale control of her display. The eight discrete dots shrank to a single one, at the top edge of a large-scale moving map that ended at Kohang.
Latches clicked. Janacek had opened his clamshell armor for his buddy's inspection. A bullet had disintegrated on the shield of Janacek's tribarrel during the run through Happy Days; bits of the projectile had sprayed the wing gunner.
Ranson felt herself slipping into the universe of the map, into a world of electronic simulation and holographic intersections that didn't bleed when they dropped from the display.
That was the way to win battles: move your units around as if they were only units, counters on a game board. Do whatever was necessary to check your enemy, to smash him, to achieve your objective.
Commanders who thought about blood, officers who saw with their mind's eye the troops they commanded screaming and crawling through muck with their intestines dangling behind them . . . those officers might be squeamish, they might be hesitant to give the orders needful for victory.
The commander of the guerrillas in this district understood that perfectly. Happy Days was a deathtrap for anybody trying to defend it against the Slammers. There was no line of retreat, and the vehicles' powerguns were sure to blast the settlement into ash and vapor, along with every Consie in it.
The company or so of patriots who'd tried to hold Happy Days on behalf of the Conservative Action Movement almost certainly didn't realize that; but the man or woman who gave them their orders from an office somewhere in the Terran Government enclaves on the North Coast did. The ambush had meant an hour's delay for the relief operation, and that was well worth the price—on the North Coast.
Men and munitions were the cost of doing business. You needed both of them to win.
You needed to spit them both in the face of the enemy. They could be replaced after the victory.
Stolley's hand-held medikit began to purr as it swallowed bits of metal that it had separated from the gunner's skin and shoulder muscles. Janacek cursed mildly.
Colonel Hammer knew the rules also.
"Slammer Six," June Ranson's voice said, "we're continuing. I don't know of any . . . I mean, we're not worse off than when we received the mission. Not really."
She paused, her mouth miming words while her mind tried to determine what those words should be. Hammer didn't interrupt. "We've got to cross the Padma River. Not a lotta choices about where. And we'll have the Santine after that, that'll be tricky. But we'll know more after the Padma."
Warmonger's fans ruled the night, creating a cocoon of controlled sound in which the electronic dot calling itself Junebug Ranson was safe with all her other dots.
Her chestplate rapped the grips of the tribarrel. She'd started to doze off again.
"Tootsie Six, over!" she said sharply. Her skin tingled, and all her body hairs were standing up straight.
There was a burst of static from her headset, but no response.
"Tootsie Six, over," she repeated.
Nothing but carrier hum.
Ranson craned her neck to look upward, past the splinter shield. There was a bright new star in the eastern sky, but it was fading even as she watched.
For fear of retribution, the World Government had spared the Slammers' recon and comsats when they swept the Yokels' own satellites out of orbit. When Alois Hammer raised the stakes, however, the Terrans stayed in the game.
"Now a little Sprayseal," Stolley muttered, "and we're done. Easier 'n bitchin', ain't it?"
Task Force Ranson was on its own now.
But they'd been on their own from the start. Troops at the sharp end were always on their own.
"Awright, then latch me up, will ya?" Janacek said. Then, "Hey, Stolley. When ya figure we get another chance t' kick butt?"
Warmonger howled through the darkness.