by David Drake
The seven-second ROAR-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R! of the sustainer motor shook the world.
The remaining four rounds blasted out at one-a-second intervals like beads on a rosary of thunder.Their back blasts shoved the howitzer down on its suspension and raised huge doughnuts of dust from the surrounding soil.
All done. The fire mission, and the last shred of meaning in Chief Lavel's life.
There was still a green light on the ready-use indicator.
"Booster!" Lavel snapped. "Shell status!"
"One practice ready," said the console in a feminine voice. "Zero rounds in storage."
Lavel turned, rising from his seat with a face like a skull. "You!" he said to Craige. "How many rounds did you load this last time?"
"What?" said Craige. "How . . .? Six, six like you told us. Isn't that—"
"You stupid bastards!" Lavel screamed as his hand groped with the patch to Task Force Ranson,changing it from digital to voice."Those last two shells were anti-tank rounds with seeker heads! You killed 'em all!"
All the displays of Herman's Whore pulsed red with an Emergency Authenticator Signal. A voice Ortnahme didn't recognize bellowed, "Task Force! Shoot down the friendly incoming! Tank Killer rounds! Ditch your tanks! Ditch!"
Ortnahme pushed the Air Defense selector. It was already uncaged. He'd been willing to take the chance of bumping it by accident so long as he knew it would be that many seconds quicker to activate when he might need it.
Like now.
"Simkins," he said, surprised at his own calm, "cut your fans and ditch. Soonest!"
His calm wasn't so surprising after all. There'd been emergencies before.
There'd been the time a jack began to sink—thin concrete over a bed of rubble had counterfeited a solid base. Thirty tonnes of combat car settling toward a technician. The technician was dead, absolutely, if he did anything except block the low side of the car with the fan nacelle he'd been preparing to fit.
Ortnahme had said,"Kid,slide the fan under the skirt now!"—calmly—while he reached under the high side of the car. The technician obeyed as though he'd practiced the movement—
And for the moment that the sturdy nacelle supported the car's weight, Warrant Leader Ortnahme had gripped Tech 2 Simkins by the ankle and jerked him out of the deathtrap.
The kid was all thumbs when it came to powertools, but he took orders for a treat. Herman's Whore stuttered for a moment as the inertia of the air in her intake ducts drove the fans.The big blower grounded hard and skidded a twenty-meter trench in the soil as she came to rest.
Ortnahme's seat was raising him, not as fast as a younger, slimmer man could've jumped for the hatch without power assist—but Henk Ortnahme wasn't bloody young and slim.
He squeezed his torso out of the cupola hatch. The tribarrel was rotating on its Scarf ring, the muzzles lifting skyward in response to the air-defense program.
Blood and martyrs! It was going to—
The powergun fired.Ortnahme couldn't help but flinch away.Swearing,bracing himself on the coaming, he tried to lever himself out of the hatch as half-melted plastic burned the back of his hands and clung to his shirt sleeves.
He stuck. His pistol holster was caught on the smoke grenades he'd slung from a wire where he could reach them easily when he was riding with the hatch open.
Blood and martyrs.
The northern sky went livid with cyan bolts and the white winking explosions they woke in the predawn haze. Herman's Whore and the other tanks were firing preset three-round bursts—not one burst but dozens, on and on.
The incoming shells had been cargo rounds. They had burst, spilling their sheaves of submunitions.
There were hundreds of blips, saturating the armored vehicles' ability to respond. Given time, the tribarrels could eliminate every target.
There wouldn't be that much time.
Simkins rolled to the ground, pushed clear by the tank's own iridium flank as its skirts plowed the sod. He stared up at the warrant leader in amazement.
Ortnahme sucked in his chest,settled onto the seat cushion to get a centimeter's greater clearance, and rose in a convulsive motion like a whale broaching. His knees rapped the coaming, but he would've chewed his legs bloody off if that was what it took to get away now.
Hundreds of targets.A firecracker round,anti-personnel and surely targeted on the opposite side of the river. Harmless except for the way the half-kilo bomblets screened the three much heavier segments of an anti-tank—
Ortnahme bounced from the skirt of Herman's Whore and somersaulted to the ground. His body armor kept him from breaking anything when he hit on his back, but his breath wheezed out in an animal gasp.
Two brighter, bigger explosions winked in the detonating mist above him.
The third anti-tank submunition triggered itself. It was an orange flash and a streak of white, molten metal reaching for Deathdealer like a mounting pin for a doomed butterfly.
It took Birdie Sparrow just under three seconds to absorb the warning and slap the air defense button. The worst things you hear for heartbeats before you understand, because the mind refuses to understand.
The tribarrel slewed at a rate of 100 degrees per second, so even the near one-eighty it turned to bear on the threat from the sky behind was complete in less than two seconds more.
Four and a half seconds, call it. Deathdealer was firing skyward scarcely a half second after small charges burst the cases of both cargo shells and spilled their submunitions in overwhelming profusion.
It wasn't the first time that the distance between life and death had been measured in a fraction of a second.
Albers cut the fans and swung Deathdealer sideways on residual energy so that they grounded broadside on, carving the sod like a snowplow and halting them with a haste that lifted the tank's off-side skirts a meter in the air.
Sparrow's seat cradled him in the smoky, stinking turret of his tank. Screen Two showed a cloud of debris that jumped around the pipper like snow in a crystal paperweight.
A redlight winked in a sidebar of the main screen,indicating that Deathdealer's integrity had been breached: the driver's hatch was open.In the panoramic display Albers, horizontally compressed by the hologram, was abandoning the vehicle.
"Better ditch too, Birdie," said the horribly ruined corpse of DJ Bell. "This is when it's happening."
"Booster!" Sparrow screamed to his AI. "Air defense! Sort by size, largest first!"
If it'd been two anti-tank rounds, no sweat. The handful of submunitions in each cargo shell would've been blasted in a few seconds, long before they reached their own lethal range and detonated.
"Hey,there's still time."DJ's facewas changing;but this time his features knitted, healed, instead of splashing slowly outward in a mist of blood and bone and brains. "Not a lot, but there's time. You just gotta leave, Birdie."
A pair of firecracker rounds, that was fine too. Their tiny bomblets wouldn't more than etch Deathdealer's dense iridium armor when they went off. Hard lines for the combat cars, but that was somebody else's problem . . . and anyway, none of the bomblets were going to land within a kilometer of the task force.
The heavy anti-tank submunitions weren't aimed at this side of the river either. If the shell had been of ordinary construction, it would've impacted on a bunker somewhere far distant from the friendly tanks.
But the submunitions had seeker heads. As they spun lazily from the casing that bore them to the target area, sophisticated imaging systems fed data to their on-board computers.
A bunker would've done if no target higher in the computers' priorities offered.
A combat car would've done very well.
But if the imaging system located a tank, then it was with electronic glee that the computer deployed vanes to brake and guide the submunition toward that prime target.
Too little time.
Birdie Sparrow slammed the side of his fist into the buckle to disengage himself from the seat restraints. A fireball lighted the
gunnery screen as Deathdealer's reprogrammed tribarrel detonated a larger target than the anti-personnel bomblets to which the law of averages had aimed it.
"Birdie, quick," DJ pleaded. His face was almost whole again.
Sparrow sank back onto his seat as the screen flared again. "No,"he whispered. "No. Not out there."
DJ Bell smiled at his friend and extended a hand. "Welcome home, snake," he said.
There was a white flash.
Chapter Ten
"Watch it," warned Cooter, ducking beneath the level of his gunshield. Part of Dick Suilin's mind understood, but he continued to stand upright and stare.
The dawn sky was filthy with rags of black smoke, tiny moth-holes streaming back in the wind when bomblets exploded. That was nothing, and the crackle of two tank tribarrels still firing as the remaining anti-personnel cloud impacted on the far ridge was little more.
Deathdealer was devouring itself.
The submunition's location, as well as its attitude and range in respect to Deathdealer, were determined by a computer more sophisticated than anything indigenously built on Prosperity. The computer's last act was to trigger the explosion that shattered it in an orange fireball high above the tank.
The blast spewed out a projectile that rode the shockwave, molten with the energy that forged and compressed it. It struck Deathdealer at a ninety degree angle where the tank's armor was thinnest, over the rear turtleback covering the powerplant.
Hammer's anti-tank artillery rounds were designed to defeat the armor of the most powerful tanks in the human universe. This one performed exactly as intended, punching its self-forging fragment through the iridium armor and rupturing the integrity of the fusion bottle that powered the huge vehicle's systems.
Plasma vented skyward in a stream as intensely white as the heart of a star. It etched and ate away the edges of the hole without rupturing the unpierced portion of the armor. The internal bulkheads gave way.
Plasma jetted from the driver's hatch an instant before the cupola blew open. Stored ammunition flashed from underdeck compartments. It stained the blaze cyan and vaporized the joint between hull and skirts.
The glowing husk of what had been Deathdealer settled to the ground. Where the hull overlay portions of the skirt,the thick steel plates melted from the iridium armor's greater residual heat.
The entire event was over in three seconds. It would be days before the hull had cooled to the temperature of the surrounding air.
The thunderclap, air rushing to fill the partial vacuum of the plasma's track, rocked the thirty-tonne combat cars. Suilin's breastplate rapped the grips of his tribarrel.
Across the river, Consie positions danced in the light of hundreds of bomblets. They looked by contrast as harmless as rain on a field of poppies.
"All units," said Suilin's helmet. "Remount and move on. We've got a job to do. Six out."
Another combat car slid between Deathdealer and the figure of the tank's driver. He'd been running away from his doomed vehicle until the initial blast knocked him down. He rose to his feet slowly and climbed aboard the car whose bulk shielded him both from glowing metal and remembrance of what had just happened/almost happened.
Flamethrower rotated on its axis so that all three tribarrels could cover stretches of the bunker line the task force had just penetrated.
"We're the rear guard," Cooter said. "Watch for movement."
The lieutenant triggered a short burst at a figure who stumbled along the ridgeline—certainly harmless since he'd crawled from a shattered bunker; probably unaware even when the two cyan bolts cut him down.
Suilin thought he saw a target. He squinted. It was a tendril of smoke, not a person.
He wasn't sure he would have fired anyway.
Other cars were advancing toward the town, but it took some moments for the crews of the surviving tanks to reboard. One of the tanks jolted forward taking Deathdealer's former place at the head of the column.
The fat maintenance officer who captained Herman's Whore was still climbing into the cupola of the other giant vehicle. His belt holster flapped loosely against his thigh.
"Here," said Gale, handing Suilin an open beer.
Cooter was already drinking deeply from a bottle. He fired a short burst with his left hand, snapping whorls in the vapor above the ridge.
The Consie siege lines were gray with blasted earth and the smoke of a thousand fires. There must have been survivors from the artillery and the pounding, bunker-ripping fury of the powerguns, but they were no longer a danger to Task Force Ranson.
Suilin's beer was cold and so welcome to his parched throat that he'd drunk half of it down before he realized that it tasted—
Tasted like transmission fluid. Tasted worse than the plastic residues of the empty cases flung from his tribarrel. He stared at the bottle in amazement.
Flamethrower spun cautiously again and fell in behind Herman's Whore. Cooter dropped his bottle over the side of the vehicle. He began talking on the radio, but Suilin's numbed ears heard only the laconic rhythm of the words.
Gale broke a ration bar in half and gave part to the reporter. Suilin bit into it, feeling like a fool with the food in one hand and a horribly spoiled beer in the other. He thought about throwing the bottle away, but he was afraid the veteran would think he was spurning his hospitality.
The ration bar tasted decayed.
Gale, munching stolidly, saw the reporter's eyes widen and said, "Aw, don't worry. It always tastes like that."
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, grimy with recondensed vapors given off when his tribarrel fired. "It's the Wide-awakes, you know." He fished more of the cones from the pouch beside the cooler, distributing two of them to Cooter and Suilin.
Suilin dropped the cone into a sidepocket. He forced himself to drink the rest of his beer. It was horrible, as horrible as everything else in this bleeding dawn.
He nodded back toward Deathdealer, still as bright as the filament of an incandescent lightbulb. "Is it always like . . .? Is it always like that?"
"Naw, that time, they got the fusion bottle, y' know?" Gale said, gazing at the hulk with only casual interest.
Internal pressures lifted Deathdealer's turret off its ring. It slid a meter down the rear slope before welding itself onto the armor at a skew angle. "S' always differ'nt, I'd say."
"Except for the guys who buy it," Cooter offered, looking backward also. "Maybe it's the same for them."
Suilin bit another piece from the chalk-textured, vile-flavored ration bar.
"I'll let you know," he heard his voice say.
"Blue Two,"said Captain June Ranson, watching white light from Deathdealer quiver on the inner face of her gunshield,"this is Tootsie Six.You're acting head of Blue Section. Six out."
"Roger, Tootsie."
Sergeant Wager's nameless tank, now the first unit in Task Force Ranson, was picking its way through rubble and shell craters at the entrance to la Reole. It had been a new vehicle at the start of this ratfuck. Now it dragged lengths of barbed wire—and a fencepost—and its skirts were battered worse than those of Herman's Whore.
The tank's newbie driver swung wide to pull around a pile of bricks and roof tiles. Too wide. The wall opposite collapsed in a gout of brick dust driven by the tank's fans. Uniformed Yokels, looking very young indeed, scurried out of the ruin, clutching a machine gun and boxes of ammunition.
Warmonger slid into the choking cloud. Filters clapped themselves over Ran-son's nose. Janacek swore. Ranson hoped Willens had switched to sonic imaging before the dust blinded him.
Dust enfolded her in a soft blur. Static charges kept her visor clear, but the air a millimeter beyond the plastic was as opaque as the silicon heart of a computer.
Sparrow was dead, vaporized; out of play. But his driver had survived, and she could transfer him to Blue Three. Take over from the inexperienced driver—or perhaps for Sergeant Wager, also inexperienced with panzers but an asset to the understrength crew of
One-six.
Mix and match. What is your decision on this point, Candidate Ranson . . .?
Something jogged her arm. She could see again.
The tracked landing vehicle had backed into a cross-street again, making way for the lead tank. The dust was far behind Warmonger. The third car in line was stirring it back to life.
A helmeted major in fatigues the color of mustard greens—a Yokel Marine—waved toward them with a swagger stick while he shouted into a hand communicator.
"Booster, match frequencies," Ranson ordered.
She saw through the corners of her eyes that Stolley and Janacek were exchanging glances. How long had her eyes been staring blankly before Stolley's touch brought her back to the physical universe?
" . . . onsider yourselves under my command as the ranking National officer in the sector!" the headphones ordered Ranson as her AI found the frequency on which the major was broadcasting. "Halt your vehicles now until I can provide ground guides and reform my defensive perimeter."
"Local officer," Ranson said, trusting her transmitter to overwhelm the handheld unit even if the Yokel was still keying it,"this is Captain Ranson,Hammer's Regiment. That's a negative. We're just passing through."
The Yokel major was out of sight behind Warmonger. A ridiculous little man with creased trousers even now, and a coating of dust on his waxed boots and moustache.
A little man who'd held la Reole with a battalion of recruits against an attack much heavier than that which crumpled three thousandYokels at Camp Progress. Maybe not so ridiculous after all . . . .
"Local officer," Ranson continued, "I think you'll find resistance this side has pretty well collapsed. We'll finish off anything we find across the river. Slammers out."
La Reole had been an attractive community of two-and three-story buildings of stuccoed brick. Lower floors were given over to shops and restaurants for bridge traffic. Shattered glass from display windows now jeweled the pavement, even where shellfire had spared the remainder of the structures.