Armored Tears

by Mark Kalina

  The surviving frame troopers were moving off at a run, spread out to keep from making too tempting a target. A few of the frame troopers were carrying comrades who were too badly hurt to move in their own frames. Luckily there hadn't been any badly wounded survivors. The dead would have to wait to be reclaimed.

  As her men ran past her, Bernie realized that no one had checked on the civilians. The odds were that they had died in the missile barrage, but if they'd been in the last, luck carrier, they would have been kicked out; that carrier wasn't going to make it back, and its crew weren't going to take foreign civilians with them.

  "Shit!" she cursed, and ran back to the trenches near where the carriers had been.

  Out on the open ground, the last carrier met its inevitable fate; its trail of smoke did a bit to interfere with the tanks' targeting, but not enough. Two long bursts of main gun fire echoed out across the barren landscape, and the carrier's smoke trail came to sudden stop, punctuated by a jagged spray of debris and fragments.

  Bernie hoped that the driver had somehow managed to get out, but it wasn't likely. But he had bought the remains of the company some time.

  And she was using that time, not to run, but to look for a pair of UEN civilians.

  "I am fucking insane!" she hissed to herself as she bounded over the jagged remains of a dead carrier and stopped, looking for any signs of life.

  She found the Australian reporter, Aran, looking dazed but intact.

  "Come on!" she shouted. We're getting out of here. Where's your friend?"

  "She's gone," he said. His voice sounded surprisingly calm... or maybe just shocked.

  Bernie had no time to wonder what he meant.

  "Come on!" she shouted, and grabbed the man, slinging him over her shoulder in a fireman's carry before taking off across the broken ground.

  If the enemy tanks saw her, perhaps they decided that a lone framer wasn't worth a round from their main guns. Whatever the reason, the two of them made it to a cluster of rocks a few hundred meters away from the site of the now-blasted outpost.

  "Look," Bernie said to Aran, as she set him down, "if you don't want to come with us, you can try to wait for the UEN to show up. If I leave you here, you can wave to them when the pisser troops... the Peace Force troops... show up. Maybe you can flag them down, get them to take you someplace safe."

  "I'm... I'm not... I'd rather not wait for the for UEN troops," Aran said. "At this point, I don't think they'll give me anything but a bullet in the head. But I... I'll slow you down, won't I?"

  "Not much. Come on. It's not the most comfortable ride, but you're not heavy as long as the frame has power," Bernie said, lifting Aran again. "This is so not the way I like to pick up guys, though," she added, and started to run.

  23.

  "Hey Cal!" came a shout from Dave.

  "Yeah?"

  "How you doing up there?"

  "OK, Dave. Haven't seen anything yet."

  "Radio's still out. Keep looking," Dave said. "Though if we're lucky, there won't be anything to see. How about it, Cal? Get that crazy fucking luck of yours working for us, man, huh?"

  "Yeah, sure. Got it," Cal said, wishing he could manage to sound as confident as Dave, and wishing even more than he felt a tenth as confident as he'd managed to sound.

  He was perched atop the watch tower at the center of Hamilton Station, with the old M39 smart-rifle that he'd been given. With his abbreviated Infantry Corps training, Cal was the best man with an M39 in the Auxiliary Corps squad under Dave's —Sergeant Halgren's— command. He'd proved that beyond doubt.

  Right now, Cal and his M39 were about half of Hamilton Station's defenses if whatever was happening south of the Isthmus Highlands decided to show up. The other half being the 6.7mm light machinegun mounted on the ATV mover... though the rest of the squad had slung G60 rifles or AC44 zippers with them, for what that was worth.

  The memory of their would-be rescue mission was making Cal dry in the mouth. He'd shot those people, killed them. And all he could think was that he wished he'd been able to get there earlier and kill them all. On some level it scared him, thinking like that, until he thought of the unmoving dark shapes on the ground, the bodies of the family they had failed to save. It was enough to almost make him forget the shock of being shot at, earlier that same day. The whole thing was so unreal that he found himself, at the same time, half unable to believe it had all actually happened and half unable to fully recall what he'd felt like yesterday, before he's been shot at, before he'd killed people, before he'd seen the corpses of those people lying across the dirt that had been their home.

  Cal was lost enough in his thoughts that it took a while for him to realize that he had been seeing dust on the southern horizon for some time.

  "Shit," he said to himself and tried to get the M39's scope lined up with whatever it was out there.

  "Dave!" he shouted a few moments later. "Dave!"

  "Yo?"

  "There's something coming, from the south. It looks... it looks like tanks!"

  ***

  Major Aaron Feldman watched as the Auxiliary Corps troops helped pull the dead men out of his tanks. The sensor operator from #4 tank, Private Farington, was still alive, and even likely to stay that way, so long as nothing else went wrong. But his own driver, Corporal Scott, was dead, and so was the #2 tank commander, Sergeant Walter Terence, a man Feldman knew well enough to bring to mind a mental picture of his wife and little daughter.

  The feeling of losing men was familiar, but it wasn't supposed to happen again, Feldman thought with silent fury. I'm supposed to have learned from the last time. Instead I got them killed. Tara told me something was wrong, and I bulled ahead anyway, with my crews not buttoned up, and got them killed!

  There was no point blaming anyone else, Feldman knew. But there was also no point dwelling on it further. He had a job to do and people dying was often the horrid cost of doing it. Right now, that job was to get his tanks ready to roll and then to get back to his commanding officer, taking the Auxiliary Corps troops with him. This place wasn't going to hold out against whatever was out there, that was for sure.

  The situation was confused, to put it mildly, Feldman thought. It seemed that the comm satellites were either out of action due to some sort of info-warfare attack, or maybe even shot down, though Feldman thought the former was more likely. Much worse, there seemed to be some sort of subtle jamming of the shortwave radio system as well. He could talk to his people in line of sight, but over-the-horizon communications came through as garbled fragments, or didn't come through at all. Which meant he couldn't even report what had happened to the colonel, at least until he got his tanks within sight of hers.

  This, to put it mildly, was bad, he thought again. How the fuck had the UEN managed to infiltrate so many troops into the Southern Wastes? They must, he thought, have been sneaking in people and weapons for years, hiding among the humanitarian shipments sent to the refugees. The Defense Force was supposed to scan those shipments, but it seemed that the UEN was as good at smuggling as the Defense Force had been, back in the '60s... which was, Feldman thought, a certain, bitter irony.

  Meanwhile, though, there was nothing left to do but get his tanks back into shape and fall back to the battalion.

  The Auxiliary Corps squad was doing a pretty good job getting a new track onto the left bow track pod of #4 tank. Each of the tanks carried enough spare alloy-and-carbon-fiber-mesh track segments to replace the track of one of the four track pods, so there was no shortage of parts and the job was mostly a matter of nothing more than hard, hard work. No one had ever accused the Auxiliary Corps of not working hard, and the rest of the tanks crews were helping.

  "Sergeant Tanaka, Sergeant Bonetti, Corporal Wise," Feldman called out, "let's get the crews figured out. We're down by three people, out of twelve. That means we'll have to run three tanks with crews of three, with the tank commander doing the gunner's job. Not optimal, but I don't see an alternative.

  "
Now, Corporal Wise, are you up to commanding your tank? I need a clear, sober answer, son."

  The young corporal hesitated. "Sir... sir, I've never commanded a tank. I just finished my gunnery training six months ago."

  "OK, thanks for being honest about it, Corporal," Feldman said and called over to the men working on #4 tank, "Corporal Velazquez!"

  "Sir," Velazquez shouted back, from where he was helping with the repairs on #4.

  "I need you to take over #2 tank, Velazquez. You're senior Corporal in the platoon and you have a clue of what you're doing."

  "Ah, yes, sir. I... I'm on it."

  "Good," Feldman said. "Talk with your new crew and get ready to roll. Corporal Wise, here, will fill you in."

  "Sir!" Corporal Wise acknowledged.

  "Sir!" said the sergeant in charge of the squad of Auxiliary Corps men who manned the station, stepping up to where Feldman and his NCOs were talking.

  "Yes, Sergeant..." Feldman said, not able to summon the man's name to mind; the man's uniform looked sloppy, and his bearing lacked any sort of military dignity; Feldman knew that the Auxiliary Corps had relaxed standards, but...

  "Halgren, sir," the Auxiliary Corps sergeant said. "I, ah, I couldn't help overhear what you were saying. I've got two people who can drive a track. One guy, Private Piper, has even got some simulator time on tanks. He's a good guy; seen some shooting and he held up real good. Plus he's just unbelievably lucky... ah, if you know what I mean, sir."

  Feldman nodded, half in confirmation, half to say, get on with it.

  "Also, sir, I've got a soldier who knows drones. She might be able to manage a sensors operator's slot."

  "Is that so, Sergeant?" Feldman said, smiling slightly. "Well, I think your people just got seconded to the Armored Corps, then. Very good. Meanwhile, have you had any luck punching a signal through to my battalion?"

  "Sir, we laid the parabolic transmitter on the exact coordinates you gave us and pushed the signal strength right to the max. And we used basic Morse code, like you instructed. We've been transmitting for almost an hour now, right since you arrived. Basically, sir, we're screaming. But I've got no idea if they've heard us or not..."

  "And could you hear them if they replied?"

  "Not sure, sir," Sergeant Halgren said. "We haven't got a really big receiver antenna. I mean, everyone just relies on sat-comm, you know? I guess it depends on how strong a signal your battalion could generate. If they've got a big emplaced parabolic transmitter this..."

  "They haven't," Feldman said. "Which means, they could be hearing our signal and unable to reply so that we can hear. Alright, Sergeant, good work. Meanwhile, start getting your people ready to move. You can load up your ATV mover, but not the trailers. We'll be moving fast. Concentrate loading medical supplies... and any 41 megajoule rounds you might have in storage."

  "Yes, sir," the sergeant replied.

  "Major," came a call via Feldman's helmet comm. It sounded like Private Park, the sensors operator in Sergeant Bonetti's tank, a pretty, Asian-featured girl with a high, breathy voice.

  "Yes?" he replied, wondering when little kids like Park —who looked barely older that Feldman's own kids— had started taking over jobs in the Armored Corps. He hadn't noticed himself getting old enough to see them as children, but it seemed to have crept up on him even so.

  "Major, we've got an inbound drone."

  "Hostile?"

  "No, sir. It's a drone from Battalion. It's been rigged as a message drone."

  "Son of a bitch!" Feldman exclaimed. "Why didn't I think of that? Never mind. What does the colonel say?"

  24.

  Tara had her battalion in their primary firing positions. She'd set up the positions, and the multiple fallback alternate firing positions, more for the sake of giving her crews practice than in any real expectation of combat. Each tank had a compact, retractable bulldozer blade built into the armor under its bow, just forward of the anti-mine systems; it was one of the less glamorous and less appreciated, but more useful features of most modern tanks, the Type-51 included. So digging the revetments and piling up the ramps had been... not easy, but at least doable. Maneuvering between firing positions under fire was hard, and the more her crews practiced it when no one was shooting at them, the better they'd be if —or when— someone did shoot at them.

  And something was going on. A refugee uprising, maybe... no doubt seriously supported by UEN infiltrators. The loss of communication was by far the most disturbing thing, but it made sense; it would give the refugee gangsters time to do a lot of damage, before the Defense Force could coordinate and move in to stop them.

  And then, no doubt the UEN would try to use the Defense Force's actions as a pretext to shut down Arcadian trade. Sometimes Tara wondered why the UEN, in charge of maybe ten billion people on Earth and the other colony worlds, would even care about a few million Arcadians. Maybe they just couldn't deal with the idea that anyone was independent of them. The old UN had been pretty intent on "representing" the whole world, and its UEN successor was quite a bit more ambitious about the scope of its power.

  "Contact, front," said Corporal Malan, her sensors operator.

  "Feldman's back?" Tara asked, a bit surprised. She knew that long range communications were iffy, but she expected to hear from Feldman before she saw him again.

  "Negative, ma'am. More than four tanks," the sensors operator said, his voice sounding more than a bit worried. "At least eight."

  Tara forced herself to ignore the icy, sinking feeling that Malan's words sent running down into her gut.

  "Hostiles, front! Button up!" she called out on the battalion push, just as the first enemy rounds began impacting.

  The enemy attack was coming in at the point where her company's front met the line held by Younger's company. The first enemy round hit one of Younger's tanks, glancing off the slope of the turret with a sound like a trip-hammer. A spray of shot and armor fragments decapitated the tank commander, who hadn't managed to drop down into the turret in time.

  Tara hit her drop lever and her seat dropped into the turret with jarring force. The armored hatch clanged shut above her a fraction of a second later.

  "Gunner! Target front! 12 o'clock!" she shouted, "hostile tanks at four kilometers!"

  "Acquired," the gunner shouted back.

  "Engage!"

  The 41 megajoule gun hammered out a three shot burst, sending a roiling cloud of fire-shot dust rolling forward ahead of the tank.

  "Driver, reverse ten meters!" she ordered as her tank's shots arced across the distance to their targets.

  The War-Hammer backed down the slope she had placed it on, just enough to get fully behind the cover of an outcrop of rocks a few dozen meters ahead.

  "Drone out!" she ordered the sensors operator. "Let's get a look at what we have."

  The drone showed the enemy tanks clearly enough. A full dozen, it looked like; an entire company of enemy armor. According to the target systems computer, they were T-66s; Russian made tanks almost a generation more modern than the Type 51s her battalion was riding... though the War-Hammers were heavily upgraded enough that they weren't totally overmatched. Still, the T-66 had heavier armor than even the latest Mark IIIb version of the War-Hammer, and a 44 megajoule main gun against the 41 megajoule weapon of her tanks.

  Heavier armor or not, though, her first burst had taken out one of the T-66s in spectacular fashion. The War-Hammer's main gun rounds were made of tungsten —in place of depleted uranium alloy, unavailable on Arcadia— with a sleeve of magnesium to provide a pyrophoric effect; at least one round had penetrated and managed to set off the electrothermal-chemical propellant of the enemy tank's main gun ammo. The explosion had sent the 35 ton mass of the T-66's turret flipping into the air to land upside down beside the burning hulk of the tank.

  All around Tara, the rest of her battalion was engaging as well, firing and pulling back into prepared positions behind cover. Drones darted about, looking for more targets and assess
ing the damage done.

  The enemy tanks fired back, and did their best to dodge incoming fire; at four kilometers range, though, they had barely two seconds to evade an inbound shot, and both sides were firing bursts, tracking their fire across their targets to make evasion harder.

  Tara's sensors operator picked out another enemy tank via her drone sent the information to Tara.

  "Good target, sensors," Tara said. "Prepare to engage. Driver, stand by to bring us forward into firing position. Gunner, stand by to engage. Ready? Go!"

  "Target acquired," the gunner reported a moment later.

  "Engage!" Tara shouted.

  "Firing," the gunner said, and the tank rang with another three round burst from the forty-one.

  "Driver, reverse!" Tara ordered. "Sensors, did we get him?"

  "Negative, ma'am. Two hits, but both looked like they glanced off."

  "Shit. Prepare to re-engage. Driver, we'll use the second firing position, got it?"

  "Got it, second position."

  "Gunner ready?"

  "Ready to engage."

  "Driver, go!"

  "Where's the target?" called the gunner.

  "I got him," the sensors operator replied, marking the enemy tank, now moving in a radical zigzag and spouting salvos of concealment-smoke grenades.

  "Track him!" Tara ordered, "use the targeting radar!"

  "Tracking," replied the sensors operator.

  "Gunner, lock on and engage!"

  "Engaging," the gunner replied, as the main gun spoke again.

  "Driver, reverse," Tara called, triggering a salvo of her own smoke grenades. "Head for fallback position Alpha!"

  Staying too long in a firing position was a fatal mistake. Of course, darting from one position to another was dangerous. If the driver got hung up, or had to slow down for some reason, the tank would be an easy target.

  The driver, Private Hanneman, didn't make any mistakes, backing the War-Hammer unerringly into its new position. Tara saw that the enemy tanks were laying down blind fire on her old position, their mighty 44 megajoule rounds pulverizing rock into violent fountains of reddish dust.