Armored Tears

by Mark Kalina

  His War-Hammer took most ground with a flowing smoothness, its four track-pods pivoting to glide over the terrain. The low rumble of the tracks and the whine of the motors somehow added to the feeling of surging, powerful speed.

  The long 41 megajoule gun thrust forward like a pointer, weaving and bobbing as it kept itself aimed at the horizon in spite of the tanks flowing motion. Lots of jokes about "big guns" was another thing tankers got used to.

  He had his visor down just enough to cover his eyes, which gave him a thin display screen area superimposed with his vision. The tank-commander's sensors were currently slaved to his helmet, so his casual scanning of the ground ahead was being mirrored by a battery of sensitive thermal, optical and radio sensors.

  His sensors operator was down in the turret, monitoring a tank-deployed drone that flew low a few kilometers ahead of the formation. His platoon's three other tanks were in a staggered row, spread out across four kilometers of desert, and each of their sensors operators had a drone out as well. If there was something to spot out here, they had a very good chance of finding it.

  The rest of his crew, his gunner and his driver, had both elevated their seats so that they sat head and shoulders out of the tank, unwilling to pass up the chance to enjoy the feeling of the hot wind whipping by as the tank raced. Feldman couldn't see it, but he was willing to bet that his driver, Corporal Scott, was grinning behind his visor.

  Reckless, he thought. But that was the way the Armored Corps tended. The colonel, for instance, he thought. The colonel had a bee in her bonnet. Which didn't mean she was wrong. Lieutenant-colonel Tara "Legs" O'Connor had a superb, honed sense of intuition, and it had served her well in her career. Sometimes —often— she infuriated Feldman. Her nickname, for instance, and her shiny prosthetic legs; it was just like her to embrace being maimed and to turn it into a defiant joke. Just like her. But she got the job done... whatever the job might be. And whatever the cost.

  "Anything from our drones?" he asked into his helmet comm. He was on the Platoon push, so his three other tanks would hear him. Each tank had launched a drone on a separate heading, allowing the platoon to cover more ground.

  "Nothing but sand," replied Sergeant Terence, in charge of the #2 tank.

  "There's rocks, too," added Corporal Velazquez, Feldman's tank's sensors operator, via the intercom.

  "Keep scanning. If the colonel says something's out here, odds are it is," Feldman said, suppressing a bit of smile.

  Hypocrite, he thought to himself. He didn't buy into the colonel's myth, but here he was, using it to motivate his people. Ah, well, the things an officer has to learn to do.

  For a moment, he thought back to that mad, death-or-glory charge, seven years ago, following then-Captain O'Connor on her company's famous death-ride. Tank after tank dying, till the company was barely an over-strength platoon. But they had succeeded. So many friends dead... burned to charred meat or blasted into fragments of mangled gore. For glory, he thought, almost wanting spit at the word. But we did win, he thought. We took the gate. And for that matter, Tara O'Connor had never cared about glory either; that hadn't been her reason.

  Feldman shook his head. He had a job to do now, and it didn't include daydreams and old memories.

  "Sir, something up ahead. Some sort of thermal pattern in the sand," the sensors operator reported, sounding confused.

  Thermal patterns in the sand, Feldman thought, remembering the endless charge through buried missile pods and concealed frame infantry.

  "Sir," added the sensors operator, "I just lost the drone!"

  "Driver, stop!" he snapped. "Platoon! All tanks stop! Everyone, bring your counter-missile and counter-mine systems on-line!"

  All the tanks had mine detection sensor suits at the bow, along with counter-measures; a battery of tiny ground-penetrating rockets that could penetrate down to a buried mine and either wreck it, or set it off safely ahead of the tank. Faced with a mine-field, the tanks would form up in columns of two, trading off as each lead tank expended its anti-mine rocket payload.

  "OK, people," Feldman said over the platoon comm push, "you know the drill. Go slow, and let's tighten up."

  If there were hostiles ahead, a dispersed formation, useful for searching and scanning, would be a bad idea.

  "And let's button up," Feldman added. "No sense in giving a sniper with a smart-rifle a targ..."

  Just then, the pinging warning of the tank's laser detector sounded.

  "Button up!" Feldman shouted as he hit his drop lever. His seat dropped like a stone, and the armored hatch slammed shut above him with a violent ringing clang. He thought he might have heard the sound of a gunshot just before his hatch slammed closed.

  "All units, prepare for..."

  "Major, they're shooting at us!" came a scared, unfamiliar voice from the platoon's #2 tank. "Sergeant Terence has been hit! I think he's dead!"

  "Who is this?" Feldman said, trying to keep his own voice calm.

  "Corporal Wise, sir; gunner on #2."

  "Alright, Corporal, take over and run your tank. We'll get your tank commander to a medic as soon as we can," Feldman replied.

  "Platoon; all tanks, make sure your defensive systems are up," Feldman added. "And get on the sensors! Find that sniper!"

  God damn it, he cursed silently. Sergeant Terence was a veteran tank commander, but his crew were all new recruits, just out of Armored Corps training. And if there was a sniper out there, he could be tracking the tanks, setting them up for...

  The sudden burst of missiles from the sand wasn't as much as surprise to Feldman as a bitter realization of what was to come.

  "Stand by missile counter-measures" Feldman shouted, and prayed that the rest of his people were down in their tanks, protected by armor.

  Salvos of little counter-missiles flashed from the tanks, drawing trails of smoke as they arced over and tracked on the inbound anti-tank missiles. A shower of explosions rattled over the desert as missiles and counter-missiles ripped themselves apart.

  "Driver, reverse," Feldman ordered. A serious ambush would mean that there were threats to his sides as well, and he needed to get out of this position, fast.

  The tank didn't move.

  "Driver, reverse! Hit it!" he shouted, but nothing happened.

  "I think Scott's been hit!" said the sensors operator.

  More missiles punched out of concealed launch pods in the sand ahead of the tanks. More counter-missiles fired. The space ahead of the tanks was choked with more explosions. A few enemy missiles got through, heading for the tanks. The entire engagement hadn't lasted five seconds yet.

  Outside, the tank's compact Metal-Storm anti-missile turret whirred and roared; the little turret had a cluster of stubby barrels, each loaded with multiple superimposed rounds; each round was, in effect, an oversized shot shell. The system could spray out fire at insane rates; literally a million rounds per minute; it carried nothing like that much ammo, of course, but the rate of fire meant that an inbound missile was met by an instantaneous "wall" of projectiles.

  Missiles exploded short of the tanks in flashes of fire-tinged dirty smoke and fragments rang off of armor.

  "Shit," cried Feldman, and engaged the driver override. Controlling a tank from inside the turret was possible, but disorienting. Since the turret wasn't always facing the direction of travel, you had to trust your displays and ignore you sense of motion and balance. Some newer tank models had the driver inside the turret in a counter-spinning crew station, but the Type-51 had nothing like that, sticking to a conventional driver position in the hull.

  Even so, you could drive a tank from the commander's station, and Feldman did, backing up as another salvo of missiles punched out of the ground, streaked towards his tanks and died under a combination of counter-missiles and a flail of Metal Storm projectiles.

  "Find me a target!" Feldman shouted.

  "I've got nothing!" shouted the sensors operator. "Just buried missile pods. Wait, there's a framer out there
, in some rocks; two kilometers."

  "Engage with auto-smartguns," ordered Feldman.

  "Engaging," said the gunner.

  Two of the four auto-smartguns mounted on the turret top twitched onto their target and opened fire. From inside the tank, the sound of their hammering bursts was a barely a muffled popping sound.

  Dust and pulverized stone rose up from the distant rocks where the sensors operator had spotted the target.

  "Inbound missiles," reported the sensors operator, as a salvo of missiles rose out of the desert. This wasn't a missile-pod, though, Feldman thought. The salvo was dispersed and coming in from longer range; dug-in frame infantry, hidden behind the distant rocks so that their signatures wouldn't stand out before they fired.

  "Platoon," Feldman ordered, "all units reverse. Pull back. I think we've run into a prepared defensive line."

  Outside, another salvo of counter-missiles raced out and detonated amid the inbound missiles. A few seconds later another burst of Metal-Storm fire finished off a single missile that had managed to get close.

  Off to the right, the platoon's #4 tank wasn't as lucky. Two missiles got through the counter-missiles, and as the Meta-Storm turret wiped one out in a hail of projectiles, the other dove and detonated against the bow of the tank.

  "No penetration," came the report from Sergeant Tanaka, "but I've lost my left bow track! It's jammed. I need to clear it or I can't move!"

  "Shit," Feldman cursed to himself. Then, on the comm push, "Can you clear it?"

  "I think we'd need to dismount to get at it!" Tanaka replied.

  "Platoon! All unit, lay down smoke and covering fire for #4 tank! Tanaka, get that track cleared, ASAP!"

  "Roger, sir. We're on it!"

  All four tanks volleyed smoke grenade launchers and then erupted in a crackle of automatic fire, each tank opening up with all four of its 10.5mm auto-smartguns. There were no clear targets, but precise bursts of fire swept across every likely position where an enemy could be.

  A few minutes passed as Feldman watched the auto-smartgun ammo counters run down. The tanks were firing precise bursts, tracking from possible target to possible target, but even so, ammo was down almost by 50%.

  More enemy missiles probed into the smoke, but their targeting was off, and only one tank had to fire a salvo of counter-missiles.

  "Track's clear!" came Sergeant Tanaka's voice. "But my sensors operator is hit! We've got him inside, though! We can roll! But with one track gone we're going to be slow!"

  "It'll fucking have to do!" shouted Feldman. "Platoon! All units pull the fuck back!"

  19.

  General Alan Stirling looked at the display again and frowned. As the commanding officer of the entire active portion of the Arcadian Defense Force, he was used to things going wrong, but more often in a bureaucratic manner. A pissing match between two or more of the Corps that made up the Defense Force was more common than suddenly losing contact with two of the Aerospace Corps aircraft and the entire satellite network.

  Today's problem looked like it was something altogether more serious. Stirling could see himself reflected in the polished display surface of the briefing table. A stern, gray-haired visage met his gaze with tired eyes. In his mind's eye, Stirling could still see himself as a young man, his tightly curled hair black, his mahogany face unwrinkled, his eyes eager.

  Alan Stirling had been born on Earth, in the west-African nation of Ghana, but he'd been a child when his family had made its way to Arcadia in the late 2040s, driven by increasing hostility to their Kassena heritage by Ghana's majority Ashanti population. His parents had never forgotten where they came from, but Alan had grown up proudly Arcadian.

  He'd joined the Arcadian Defense Force as a young man, at its inception, in 2058. Founded to respond to raids and attacks from the refugee bandit-lords, back then the Defense Force had been nothing but poorly armed irregulars; hunting guns and garage micro-factory copies of ancient 20th century military rifles had been all they could get.

  The fighting had been bitter in those days, the bandits often outgunning the Defense Force soldiers. Everyone had known that the UEN was surreptitiously equipping the bandits, but back then, nothing could be done about it. And meanwhile, the UEN Peace Force had always been close by, ready to swoop in to disarm and arrest the "violent Arcadian radicals" who dared to resist the refugee bandits' raids.

  But the nascent Arcadian government had foreseen the need for something more, and it had secretly been buying weapons. There had been no shortage of would-be sellers; though the UEN claimed to administer all of the nations of Earth, many of its member states had their own agendas. The Pacific Alliance, was one of these; a cooperative block made up of Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, had been perfectly happy to sell weapons to Arcadia in exchange for access to cutting-edge biotech research work of a sort that was politically impossible to carry out on Earth. Bit by bit, advanced weapons were smuggled in and assembled, and bit by bit a modern, professional military Defense Force was formed and trained.

  It had all come to a head at the battle of Hope Springs, in 2061. Stirling had found himself a newly minted lieutenant, in charge of one of the newly equipped platoons of frame infantry when the Defense Force had faced a massive raid from an alliance of "refugee" gangster warlords. The gangsters, more than a thousand strong, had certainly had the numerical advantage. But for once, the firepower advantage had been decisively with the Arcadians. Frame infantry, re-purposed, ex-utility "combat" aircraft, and even a pair of newly assembled tanks, smuggled through the gate as parts, had turned the bandits' attempt at overwhelming force into a bloody rout. Never again would the bandit lords willingly face Defense Force troops.

  Of course the UEN had been aghast, though Stirling suspected they had been more upset to realize that their Peace Force detachment was no longer the strongest military force on the planet than they were about the fate of the bandit lords.

  The UEN had tried to impose an embargo of all military goods through the gate to Arcadia, but they had quickly found that the embargo was almost impossible to enforce. Corruption of officials in the Federal States of North America —the FSNA— on the Earth side of the gate, along with clever use of "dual-purpose" goods, allowed the Arcadian Defense Force to keep increasing its combat power.

  It had been in response to the rampant corruption and smuggling though the gate that the UEN had moved the gate generation equipment from Earth to Arcadia, where it would be operated solely under UEN control. And at the same time, they had also begun a massive increase in the rate of refugee relocation to Arcadia, intending to flood the planet with a population totally dependent on the UEN.

  By 2069, it had been clear that Arcadia could not survive as an independent nation so long as the UEN controlled the gate. The UEN had been sure that there was nothing the Arcadians could do about it, but in 2070, the Arcadian Defense Force had done something about it even so. Colonel Stirling had led the frame infantry assault on the main UEN Peace Force fortified barracks, pinning their troops down while other Defense Force units had assaulted the gate dome. And taken it. It had been an impossible, heady victory, though one that had come at high cost.

  Since then, the Defense Force's problems had been... less dramatic.

  But now that it seemed that some drama had come again, General Stirling could not say he was happy to see it.

  "I think we have to consider the possibility of an info-warfare attack," General Stirling said, looking over the faces of his assembled liaison officers from the various Defense Force Corps.

  "Sir," replied the Aerospace Corps liaison officer, Colonel Danielle Farber, "we did get a transmission from one of the 'ghosts.' I think we should..."

  "I saw that, Colonel. I already saw it," Stirling replied, meeting the Aerospace Corps officer's eyes; she looked improbably young to him, a notably attractive woman... but her eyes were intense and focused enough to remind Stirling that she had flown a combat-reconnaissance-plan
e, a "ghost," in combat against UEN forces in the 2070 war. None the less, he thought she was being too quick to jump to too wild a conclusion this time.

  "But I think," he said, "that a simultaneous loss of contact seems a lot more likely to be some virus in our central communications system than a sudden attack from space. Who'd be attacking us from space, Colonel? Aliens?"

  "UEN, sir," Colonel Farber.

  "How would..." General Stirling began to reply.

  "Sir!" came an interrupting shout from one of his aides, and the sound of running feet. "Sir! Reports of a UEN infiltration force coming through the gate! There's fighting at the gate facility!"

  "My god..." breathed Stirling, feeling a coldness in his gut that he hadn't felt since he'd faced UEN Peace Force framers in desperate, close combat amid the thick, black, billowing smoke of the burning buildings of their fortified barracks.

  Then realization struck.

  "Cut the power to the gate! Shut it down! Now!" he shouted.

  "Sat-comm contact with the gate power and control facility hasn't been re-estab..." started one of the communication staffers.

  "Never mind the sat-comm system!" Stirling shouted. "Broadcast the order in the clear! Use the fucking phone! Confirm the shutdown!"

  "Yes, sir!"

  "And send out the alert! All reserves are to head to their emergency mobilization points. All active units to go to full alert! I'll inform the government."

  "What is it? What's happening?" one of the junior staff officers said to another young officer next to her, but Stirling overheard and turned to her.

  "What it is? It's war."

  20.

  Major Anwar Hafez calmly surveyed his surroundings. There wasn't too much damage here in the transit terminal building. From where he stood, Hafez could see bullet pock-marks in the walls, and some blood stains from where local resistance had been swept aside, but the building structure was still intact.