EARLIER: TANNAHILL
“Sarge . . .” Lieutenant Mary Margulies said as Angel Tijuca slid their two-seat air-cushion jeep between a pair of road trains. The huge vehicles had accelerated slowly, but they were maintaining 50 kph now and there was just enough clearance to spare the jeep’s paint. “If you don’t take it easy, you’re not going to survive the last three days of your enlistment.”
Margulies didn’t sound concerned. Her eyes continued to search the roadsides instead of glaring at her driver.
Angel laughed infectiously. “Now, Missie Mary,” he said. “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar. And anyway, it’s not three days, it’s two and a wake-up.”
In public Sergeant Tijuca was never less than deferential to his superior officer, but he and Margulies had gone through a lot in the year he’d been driving her. Angel was ending his enlistment in the Frisian Defense Forces, and Margulies was curst sorry to see him go.
“Only if you survive,” Margulies remarked, but she wasn’t serious. Angel’s willingness to take chances was just as important a reason for her keeping him as her permanent driver as his skill at the joystick was.
Angel accelerated to 60 kph. The jeep passed along the right side of the road trains at an increment that was slightly faster than a man could walk.
The convoy consisted of ten articulated road trains, each of which had three track-laying segments with a driver in the lead cab. There was a gun tub crewed by Brigantian troops on the center segment of each individual train, but the convoy’s real security was provided by the four combat cars manned by Frisian military police under Lieutenant Margulies’ command.
The war was over, but the fighting might not stop for years. Brigantian regiments, spearheaded by armored companies of Frisian mercenaries, had swept across Tannahill’s Beta Continent. The armies of the continent’s local population, mostly Muslims of South Indian descent, had been smashed if they stood and run down if they retreated.
The guerrillas, supported by the local communities even when they weren’t actually members of those communities, were a more difficult problem. They were controllable, at least for as long as the Brigantians of Alpha Continent could afford to pay their Frisian mercenaries, but Margulies suspected it would be decades if not generations before the locals accepted Brigantian domination.
That was somebody else’s worry. Margulies had a convoy to take through eighty klicks of—literally—Indian Country.
“Yes sir,” Angel said. “Inside a week and a half, I figure, I’ll be back on Cantilucca with a forty-hectare gage farm of my own. Three more days here. Three days objective to Delos, that’s the cluster’s port of entry. Maybe a day to get transport from there to Cantilucca, another day’s transit, and bam! I’m home, with a discharge bonus in my pocket. How long can it take then to buy some land, hey?”
Tijuca began to whistle a flamenco tune. Margulies smiled at his enthusiasm. She noticed that despite the sergeant’s air of heedless relaxation, every time they overhauled a road train his eyes flicked left. He was checking through the gaps between vehicles to see what was happening along the far treeline.
Combat engineers had defoliated, then burned off, strips a hundred meters wide along either edge of the road. Ash flew out from beneath the jeep’s skirts. It merged with the yellow dust which the trains’ cleats raised from the gravel road surface. The breeze was slightly from the right, so for the moment the jeep was clear. Tijuca kept them ten meters out in the burned zone—comfortable, but by that amount the closest vehicle to the enemy if the guerrillas decided to start something.
“Take us back across between the second and first trucks,” Margulies said. “I don’t believe in giving anybody long enough to compute the lead on a full-deflection shot.”
“Your wish is my command,” Angel said. He goosed the fans, let the jeep settle into its new, higher speed, and angled the vehicle sideways across the line of heavy trucks. It was an expert job, as difficult as threading a needle blindfolded.
“My command is your command,” Margulies grumbled. Her commo helmet slapped nose filters in place automatically, but she tasted the chalky dust on her tongue.
She wished that a battery of Frisian howitzers rather than Brigantian artillery was providing call fire for the run. Brigantian artillery was reasonably accurate, but Margulies didn’t trust the indigs to react as fast as Frisian hogs would if anything blew.
The chance of an ambush was less than one in ten, but Margulies’ platoon had provided security on this run fourteen times already.
“You ought to come to Cantilucca, Missie,” Angel said, throttling back to 60 kph. “You’d love it. With a tract of top gage land—”
“Sarge,” Margulies said, “I’m a city girl, born right smack in the center of Batavia. I wouldn’t know which end of a hoe to use, and I don’t even like gage. Alcohol works just fine for me.”
When they crossed the road, Margulies hunched higher in the seat to view the left treeline over her driver’s head. Angel watched the potential danger area also, navigating with his peripheral vision. A sub-machine gun was clamped beside his seat. Though it was ready for use, it didn’t interfere with his driving the way a slung weapon would have done.
“Huh!” Angel said. “The only thing you can get from booze that you can’t from gage is a hangover. The good stuff—the pure stuff, we’re not talking about refinery tailings, sure—there’s no side effects at all. You just go to sleep when you come down. Why would anybody want booze over gage?”
“Because if something pops, I can deal with it if I’m hung over and I can’t if I’m in a gage coma,” Margulies said tartly. That was true enough, but it wasn’t the reason she relaxed with alcohol instead of stim cones of gage. It was all a matter of what you got used to—
Like everything else across the board. There was no question that a city was the most dangerous combat environment you could find: stone and concrete ate troops. Nonetheless, Margulies was always more comfortable patrolling or even fighting in a city than she was in the open air like this.
Not that it mattered. She was here to do a job.
This portion of the route was through lowlands. The soil was mucky, and there were frequent potholes where the treads of road trains had chewed through the gravel. The trees outside the cleared strip were five to ten meters tall. Their foliage was vaguely blue.
Margulies’ four combat cars flanked the convoy front and rear, fifty meters out from the road. Because of the size of the road trains, the convoy was more than half a kilometer long even when closed up properly. The tribarrels of the combat cars could still sweep the full length of it on straight stretches.
They were coming to one of the route’s few major curves, nicknamed Ambush Junction until the guerrillas hit what turned out to be a platoon of Frisian tanks instead of the Brigantian armor they’d expected. The route had been quiet as a grave since then.
Margulies keyed her commo helmet. “White Six to Rose One,” she said, calling the driver of the leading road train. She glanced up at the cab looming beside her. Because of the angle, she couldn’t see the Brigantian to whom she was speaking. “Can you crank up the speed a little? This isn’t a place I want to hang around. Over.”
A wash of hollow noise flooded Margulies’ helmet, racket echoing from within the driver’s compartment. The cab was lightly armored but not sound-proofed. A moment later the Brigantian said, “All right, we’ll see, but I don’t want to put this sucker in the bog either.”
The background noise shut off. It was as effective a close-transmission signal as more standard commo procedures would have been. Presumably the Brigantian notched his hand throttle forward, though change came very slowly for mechanical dinosaurs the size of the road trains.
The leading combat cars pulled farther ahead and swung a little closer to their respective sides of the cleared strip. Margulies hadn’t bothered to give her own people orders. They knew what the situation was and had been dealing with it for the better part of a month now.
There was new growth where Frisian tanks had blasted hundred-meter notches through the vegetation with their main guns. The flushes of new leaves were red and violet.
There wasn’t enough silica in the soil to glaze when struck by powerguns, but steam from the high water content exploded main-gun impacts into craters that could swallow the jeep. During file ambush, one of the panzers had swept out into the forest, deliberately scraping its steel skirts across the dirt to uncover the guerrillas’ spider holes. The arcing scar was still barren save for speckles of low growth.
Angel hung off the left front fender of the leading road train as the convoy squealed and rumbled into the long right-hand curve. He glanced at Margulies to remind her that this wasn’t the position he would choose for a plastic-bodied jeep, though whatever the lieutenant wanted . . .
“Yeah, ease back, let them pass us, and we’ll cross to the right side between the second and third trucks,” Margulies agreed. She was holding her 2-cm shoulder weapon at high port. Now her index finger pushed the lever at the front of the trigger guard forward, off safe.
She had a bad feeling about this spot. That was nothing new. She’d had a bad feeling about it every bloody time she crossed it.
Angel eased the fan nacelles closer to vertical, raising clearance beneath the skirt to slow the jeep as ordered. He kept the power up. The wasted charge was a cheap price to pay for greater agility in a crisis. Margulies rose in her seat to get a better view back along the convoy.
The lead road train’s quad automatic cannon was swung to starboard, aiming at the inside of the curve. That was fine, but the crew of the second vehicle was doing the same cursed thing instead of covering the left side of the route as each alternate crew should do.
Margulies swore and took her left hand from the powergun’s forestock to key her helmet—as a command-detonated mine went off under the third segment of the leading road train.
The charge buried beneath the gravel was huge, at least fifty kilos of high explosive. It lifted the segment, blew the track plates and several road wheels from the suspension, and dropped the 30-tonne mass on its right side.
The blast stunned the gun crew atop the middle segment and flung several of them out of the tub. The jeep flipped like a tiddlywink.
Margulies didn’t hear the explosion. The shockwave gripped like a fevered giant’s hand, crushing her in conditions of intense heat. She couldn’t see anything but white light. Both her shins broke against the dashboard as she and the jeep spun in different trajectories. There was no present pain, but she heard the bones go with tiny clicks like those of fingers on a data-entry keyboard.
Margulies’ world reformed as she lay prone on soggy ground. She wasn’t sure whether or not she’d been unconscious. Her skin crawled, and all her senses were preternaturally sharp.
Twenty meters away the leading road train was skewed across the gravel. The rear segment lay on its side, but the coupling still held. The segment had acted as an anchor, bringing the huge vehicle to a dead halt. The cab door was open. A splotch of blue uniform marked the driver huddling in the ditch beside his abandoned charge.
The combat cars maneuvered violently, engaging the weapons shooting at them. Explosive shells raked the road train, igniting the two upright segments. Margulies thought part of the cargo was ammunition. Tracers or rocket exhaust trails fanned from a position at the treeline.
The second road train had tried to pass on the right side of its disabled fellow, but the ground to that side was apparently even softer than that on which Margulies lay. The vehicle had sunk in over its running gear, hopelessly mired. The gun crew jumped from the tub and hid between the bogies.
The driver fired a pistol from his cab doorway. Machine gun bullets sparkled on the armor, starred the windscreen opaque, and punched the driver’s lungs out through the back of his rib cage.
Margulies had lost her 2-cm powergun and her commo helmet. She didn’t wear a pistol because it got in the way in a jeep’s tight seating. Anyhow, she couldn’t hit anything with a handgun. She wished she had one now. Her legs ached so fiercely that she had to look down to be sure that they hadn’t been blown off at the knees.
Angel Tijuca ran toward her. A guerrilla machine gun combed for him, aiming low and making the black soil spurt upward. Angel tumbled, slapping at his pelvis.
Powerguns and automatic cannon fired at the rear of the convoy, out of sight around the curve. Small arms were probably involved also, but the sound was lost in the blasts of the heavier weapons.
Margulies tried to crawl toward the center of the convoy. Ash on the ground made her sneeze violently. The machine gunner shifted his aim toward her. The guerrilla wasn’t very good, but it could be only a matter of time before he found the range.
Angel jumped to his feet, scooped Margulies up, and staggered toward the road with her in a packstrap carry. “Fucking ricochet,” he said. “Knocked me—down!”
Margulies’ toes dragged the ground. The pain in her shins was indescribable. Angel’s normally olive complexion had paled to a jaundiced yellow, and his skin gleamed with perspiration.
“Not there!” Margulies cried. She wasn’t sure if she was speaking audibly. “That truck’ll blow any minute now!”
“That’s—” her driver gasped “—the next—thing, M-Missie.”
He tumbled into the mine crater with his burden and released her. The pulverized soil was pillow-soft, but the reek of explosive residues clung to the pit chokingly. The machine gun sent a last spiteful burst of white tracer over the jeep’s crew before casting off for other targets.
Angel had lost his helmet and sub-machine gun, but the butt of a pistol projected from the left cargo pocket of his trousers. He drew the weapon as he lurched out of the crater.
Margulies tried to follow her sergeant, using her knees and elbows for purchase on the loose soil. It was like swimming through molasses. Every pulse tightened a red-hot vise on her lower legs.
Angel ran to the coupling which linked the overturned third segment to the pair whose running gear was undamaged. The machine gun and the guerrillas’ light cannon traversed toward the motion, but the Frisian was fairly well covered by the bogies of the second segment. Cannon shells fanned the flames already snorting through holes in the cargo box.
The coupling was torqued and immobile. Angel aimed his pistol at it point-blank, covered his eyes with his right forearm, and fired. The 1-cm powergun bolt sprayed blazing steel in all directions.
Angel’s battle dress smoldered in a score of places. He squinted, fired again, and again, and again.
At the fourth bolt, the coupling parted with the sound of a shattered bell. The overturned segment slid a meter from the remainder of the burning vehicle.
Margulies knelt at the top of the mine crater and waved her arms. She knew what Angel intended to do, knew also that she couldn’t stop him as she wished she could. But if the guerrilla gunners concentrated on her, then there was at least a chance Angel would succeed.
The light cannon shifted aim toward Margulies. It had a three-round charger, so the tracers snapped out in trios. They left tight gray helices in the air, like the tailings of a metal drill.
Angel ran toward the road train’s open cab. The machine gun pursued him, bullets flickering against the chassis and treads a half-step behind. The cargo boxes breathed blowtorch flames from every shell hole.
An explosive bullet buried itself in the rim of loose dirt beneath Margulies and detonated. The shock threw her back as though she’d been hit by a medicine ball. She lay at the bottom of the crater, wheezing and blinking at the sky for a moment before she resumed crawling upward.
When Margulies regained the crater lip, the only combat car she could see had been hit in the skirts by a shoulder-launched rocket. Air gushing through the jagged hole in the plenum chamber slowed the vehicle’s motions to those of a half-crushed cockroach, but the tribarrels were still in action.
The two-segment road train staggered across the cleared ground like a drunken streetwalker. When one bogie or another found a soft spot the gigantic vehicle lurched, but each time inertia dragged it from the potential bog.
Angel was steering toward the guerrillas’ automatic cannon.
Three buzzbombs like the one that had disabled the combat car burst on the road train’s bow. The shaped-charge warheads went off with hollow thocks, like the sound of boards being slapped together. The cannon, the machine gun, and at least a dozen guerrilla riflemen were firing at the vehicle.
Ricochets and explosive shells danced across the cab like a fireworks display. The protective windows were starred white, the armor was holed in a hundred places, and gray smoke or coolant trailed back from the power plant to mix with the flames shooting from the cargo boxes.
The cab door opened fifty meters from the treeline. Angel somersaulted from the vehicle. He splashed into a muddy trench gouged by a main-gun bolt in the earlier ambush. He didn’t move. A machine gun had hosed the side of the cab as the Frisian left it.
A guerrilla stood up in plain view to aim her buzzbomb at the road train. Smoke spurted from the back of the launcher as a rocket motor lobbed the missile into a near-side bogie. The warhead’s pearly flash enveloped the running gear for an instant. The track broke, shedding links behind it and pulling the vehicle slightly to the left as it continued to trundle onward.
A single cyan bolt winked past the guerrilla’s face. She dropped her useless rocket launcher and unslung the automatic rifle from her back. Angel’s second pistol shot hit her in the chest. She spun as she fell to the ground.
The road train kept up a walking pace as its battered bow crunched through the stunted trees. A guerrilla leaped desperately for the cab, caught his sandal in metal torn by gunfire, and toppled screaming beneath the second set of bogies. It wouldn’t have made much difference if he’d set his feet properly, because an instant later the munitions in the second segment exploded.
The first charge bulged the sides of the cargo box. Margulies ducked in time, before the shock wave compressed the mass of burning propellants and detonated them. A blast hugely greater than that of the guerrilla mine flattened vegetation in a hundred-meter radius and sent tonnes of excavated soil skyward on an orange fireball.
The surface waggled, flipping Margulies like a pancake. She hit the ground again and bounced onto her back, stunned but no more severely injured than the mine had left her. Dirt rained down for tens of seconds.
All the shooting from the left side of the roadway ceased. A guerrilla, stark naked and bleeding from nose and ears, ran out of the trees. A tribarrel on the combat car roaring forward from the rear of the convoy cut the man in half.
The Frisian vehicle swung around the bogged second road train, ripping the right treeline with its full firepower. The guerrillas on that side were already disengaging. Hoses of cyan plasma devoured the few snipers trying to provide a rear guard for the main body.
Artillery shells began to land on both treelines. They were late as Margulies had feared, but at least they were accurate.
She saw a Brigantian carbine, dropped or flung on the ash ten meters from the crater. She crawled toward the weapon, ignoring the pain in her legs.
Halfway between her and the smoking gap in the treeline, a man in Frisian khaki rose on one arm and waved his muddy pistol at Margulies. Her eyes filled with tears of joy, but she continued to crawl.