Elemental

by Steven Savile

  The Government artillerymen ran to their howitzers from open-sided tents where they’d been dozing or throwing dice. Several automatic weapons began to fire from the bunkers. One was on the western side of the compound and had no better target than the waving grass. The guns shooting northward were pointed in the right direction, but the slugs would fall about fifteen kilometers short.

  The Brotherhood tank destroyers fired, one and then the other. An ammunition truck in the compound blew up in an orange flash. The explosion dismounted the nearest howitzer and scattered the sandbag revetments of the other three, not that they’d been much use anyway. A column of yellow-brown dirt lifted, mushroomed a hundred meters in the air, and rained grit and pebbles down onto the whole firebase.

  The second 9-cm bolt lashed the crest of the rise that sheltered the combat cars. Grass caught fire and glass fused from silica in the soil sprayed in all directions. Buntz nodded approval. The Brotherhood gunner couldn’t have expected to hit the cars, but he was warning them to keep under cover.

  Brotherhood APCs slid out of the shelter of the trees and onto the grasslands below. They moved in companies of four vehicles each, two east of the firebase and two more to the west. They weren’t advancing toward the Government position but instead were flanking it by more than five kilometers to either side.

  The sound of the explosion reached Herod, dulled by distance. A little dirt shivered from the side of the swale. Twenty klicks is a hell of a long way away, even for an ammo truck blowing up.

  The tank destroyers fired again, saturated cyan flashes that Buntz’s display dimmed to save his eyes. Their target was out of his present magnified field of view, a mistake.

  “Full field, Quadrant Four,” Buntz said, and the lower left corner of his visor showed the original 270° display. A bunker had collapsed in a cloud of dust, though without a noticeable secondary explosion, and there was a new fire just north of the combat cars. The cars’ tribarrels wouldn’t be effective against even the tank destroyers’ light armor at this range, but the enemy commander wasn’t taking any chances. The Brotherhood was a good outfit, no mistake.

  Eight more vehicles left the hills now that the advanced companies had spread to screen them. Pairs of mortar carriers with pairs of APCs for security followed each flanking element. The range of Brotherhood automatic mortars was about ten klicks, depending on what shell they were firing. It wouldn’t be any time before they were in position around the firebase.

  Rennie’s combat cars were moving southward, keeping under cover. Running, if you wanted to call it that.

  The Brotherhood APCs were amazingly fast, seventy kph cross-country. They couldn’t fight the combat cars head-on, but they wouldn’t try to. They obviously intended to surround the Slammers platoon and disgorge their infantry in three-man buzzbomb teams. Once the infantry got into position, and with the tank destroyers on overwatch to limit the cars’ movement, the Brotherhood could force Lieutenant Rennie to surrender without a shot.

  One of the Government howitzers fired. The guns could reach the Brotherhood vehicles in the hills, but this round landed well short. A red flash and a spurt of sooty black smoke indicated that the bursting charge was TNT.

  The gunners didn’t get a chance to refine their aim. A 9-cm bolt struck the gun tube squarely at the trunnions, throwing the front half a dozen meters. The white blaze of burning steel ignited hydraulic fluid in the compensator, the rubber tires, and the hair and uniforms of the crew. A moment later propellant charges stacked behind the gun went off in something between an explosion and a very fierce fire.

  Two howitzers were more or less undamaged, but their crews had abandoned them. Another bunker collapsed—a third. Buntz hadn’t noticed the second being hit, but a pall of dust was still settling over it. Government soldiers started to leave the remaining bunkers and huddle in the connecting trenches.

  Flashes and spurts of white smoke at four points around the firebase indicated that the mortars had opened fire simultaneously. They were so far away that the bombardment seemed to be happening in silence. That wasn’t what Buntz was used to, which made him feel funny. Different generally meant bad to a soldier, or anybody else in a risky business.

  The tank destroyers fired again. One bolt blew in the back of a bunker; the other ignited a stand of brushwood ahead of the combat cars. That Brotherhood gunner was trying to keep Rennie off-balance, taking his attention off the real threat: the APCs and their infantry, which in a matter of minutes would have the cars surrounded.

  Buntz figured it was time. “Lahti, fire ’em up,” he said. He switched on his radios, then unplugged the lead from his helmet and let the coil of glass fiber spring back to the take-up reel on the sensor. The hollow stoonk-k-k of the mortars launching finally reached him, an unmistakable sound even when the breeze sighing through the tree branches almost smothered it.

  The hatch cover swiveled closed over Buntz as Herod’s eight drive fans spun. Lahti kept the blades in fine pitch to build speed rapidly, slicing the air but not driving it yet.

  “Lamplight elements, move to start position,” Buntz ordered. That was being a bit formal since the Lamplight call sign covered only Herod and Hole Card, but you learned to do things by rote in combat. A firefight’s no place for thinking. You operated by habit and reflex; if those failed, the other fellow killed you.

  The fan note deepened. Herod vibrated fiercely, spewing a sheet of grit from beneath her skirts. She didn’t move forward; it takes time for thrust to balance a tank’s 170 tons.

  A calliope—only one—ripped the sky with a jet of 2-cm bolts. The burst lasted only for an eyeblink, but a mortar shell detonated at its touch. The gun was concealed, but Buntz knew the crew was slewing it to bear on a second of the incoming rounds before it landed.

  They didn’t succeed; proximity fuses exploded the three remaining shells a meter in the air. Fragments sleeted across the compound. Because mortars are low pressure, their shell casings can be much thinner than those of conventional artillery; that leaves room for larger bursting charges. The blasts flattened all the structures that’d survived the ammo truck blowing up. One of the shredded tents ignited a few moments later.

  Herod’s fans finally bit deeply enough to start the tank climbing up the end of the gully. Buntz had a panoramic view on his main screen. He’d already careted all the Brotherhood vehicles either white—Herod’s targets—or orange, for Hole Card. That way both tanks wouldn’t fire at the same vehicle and possibly allow another to escape.

  Buntz’s smaller targeting display was locked on where the right-hand Brotherhood tank destroyer would appear when Herod reached firing position. Hole Card would take the other tank destroyer, the only one visible to it because of a freakishly tall tree growing from the grassland north of its position.

  “Top, I’m on!” shouted Cabell in Hole Card on the unit frequency. As Cabell spoke, Buntz’s orange pipper slid onto the rounded bow of a tank destroyer. The magnified image rocked as the Brotherhood vehicle sent another plasma bolt into the Government encampment.

  “Fire!” Buntz said, mashing the firing pedal with his boot. Herod jolted backward from the recoil of the tiny thermonuclear explosion; downrange, the tank destroyer vanished in a fireball.

  Hole Card’s target was gone also. Shrubbery was burning in semicircles around the gutted wreckage, and a square meter of deck plating twitched as it fell like a wounded goose. It could’ve come from either Brotherhood vehicle, so complete was the destruction.

  There was a squeal as Cabell swung Hole Card’s turret to bear on the plains below. Buntz twitched Herod’s main gun only a few mils to the left and triggered it again.

  The APC in the foothills was probably the command vehicle overseeing the whole battle. The Brotherhood driver slammed into reverse when the tank destroyers exploded to either side of him, but he didn’t have enough time to reach cover before Herod’s 20-cm bolt caught the APC squarely. Even from twenty kilometers away, the slug of ionized copper was devastat
ing. The fires lit by the burning vehicles merged into a blaze of gathering intensity.

  Now for the real work. “Lahti, haul us forward a couple meters, get us onto the forward slope!” Buntz ordered. The main gun could depress only 5°, so any Brotherhood vehicles that reached the base of the rise the tanks were on would otherwise be in a dead zone.

  They shouldn’t get that close, of course, but the APCs were very fast. Buntz hadn’t made platoon sergeant by gambling when he didn’t need to.

  The Brotherhood troops on the plains didn’t realize—most of them, at least—that their support elements had been destroyed. The mortar crews had launched single rounds initially to test the Placidan defenses. When those proved hopelessly meager, the mortarmen followed up with a Battery Six, six rounds from each tube as quickly as the automatic loaders could cycle.

  The calliope didn’t make even a token effort to meet the incoming catastrophe; the early blasts must’ve knocked it out. The twenty-four shells were launched on slightly different trajectories so that all reached the target within a fraction of a same instant. Their explosions covered the interior of the compound as suddenly and completely as flame flashes across a pool of gasoline.

  The lead APC in the western flanking element glared cyan; then the bow plate and engine compartment tilted inward into the gap vaporized by Hole Card’s main gun. As Lahti shifted Herod, Buntz settled his pipper on the nearest target of the eastern element, locked the stabilizer, and rolled his foot forward on the firing pedal.

  Recoil made Herod stagger as though she’d hit a boulder. The turret was filling with a gray haze as the breech opened for fresh rounds. The bore purging system didn’t get quite all of the breakdown products of the matrix which held copper atoms in alignment. Filters kept the gases out of Buntz’s lungs, but his eyes watered and the skin on the back of his hands prickled.

  He was used to it. He wouldn’t have felt comfortable if it hadn’t happened.

  The lead company of the commando’s eastern element was in line abreast, aligning the four APCs—three and a dissipating fireball now—almost perfectly with Herod’s main gun. Buntz raised his pipper slightly, fired; raised it again as he slewed left to compensate for the APCs’ forward movement, fired; raised it again—

  The driver of the final vehicle was going too fast to halt by reversing the drive fans to suck the APC to the ground; he’d have pinwheeled if he’d tried it. Instead he cocked his nacelles forward, hoping that he’d fall out of his predicted course. The APC’s tribarrel was firing in Herod’s general direction, though even if the cyan stream had been carefully aimed the range was too great for 2-cm bolts to damage a tank.

  As Buntz’s pipper steadied, the side panels of the APC’s passenger compartment flopped down and the infantry tried to abandon the doomed vehicle. Buntz barely noticed the jolt of his main gun as it lashed out. Buzzbombs and grenades exploded in red speckles on his plasma bolt’s overwhelming glare. The back of the APC tumbled through the fiery remains of the vehicle’s front half.

  Half a dozen tribarrels were shooting at the tanks as the surviving APCs dodged for cover. The same rolling terrain that’d protected Platoon G3 from the tank destroyers sheltered the Brotherhood vehicles also. Buntz threw a quick shot at an APC. Too quick: his bolt lifted a divot the size of a fuel drum from the face of a hillock as his target slid behind it. Grass and topsoil burned a smoky orange.

  The only Brotherhood vehicles still in sight were a mortar van and the APC that’d provided its security. They’d both been assigned to Hole Card originally, but seeing as all of Herod’s targets were either hidden or blazing wreckage—

  Cabell got on the mortar first, so as its unfired shells erupted in a fiery yellow mushroom Buntz put a bolt into the bow of the APC. The side panels were open and the tribarrel wasn’t firing. Like as not the gunner and driver had joined the infantry in the relative safety of the high grass.

  The mortars hadn’t fired on Rennie’s platoon, knowing that the combat cars would simply put their tribarrels in air-defense mode and sweep the bombs from the sky. The only time mortar shells might be useful would be if they distracted the cars from line-of-sight targets.

  The Brotherhood commando had been well and truly hammered, but what remained was as dangerous as a wounded leopard. One option was for Rennie to claim a victory and withdraw in company with the tanks. In the short term that made better economic sense than sending armored vehicles against trained, well-equipped infantry in heavy cover. In the longer term, though, that gave the Slammers the reputation of a unit that was afraid to go for the throat … which meant it wasn’t an option at all.

  “Myrtle Six to Lamplight Six,” said Lieutenant Rennie over the command push. “My cars are about to sweep the zone, west side first. Don’t you panzers get hasty for targets, all right? Over.”

  “Lamplight to Myrtle,” Buntz replied. “Sir, hold your screen and let me flush’em toward you while my Four-seven element keeps overwatch. You’ve got deployed infantry in your way, but if we can deal with their air defense—right?”

  Finishing the commando wouldn’t be safe either way, but it was better for a lone tank. Facing infantry in the high grass the combat cars risked shooting one another up, whereas Herod had a reasonable chance of bulling in and out without taking more than her armor could absorb.

  Smoke rose from a dozen grassfires on the plain, and the blaze on the hills to the north was growing into what’d be considered a disaster on a world at peace. A tiny part of Buntz’s mind noted that he hadn’t been on a world at peace in the thirteen standard years since he joined the Slammers, and he might never be on one again until he retired. Or died.

  He’d been raised to believe in the Way. Enough of the training remained that he wasn’t sure there was peace even in death for what Sergeant Darren Lawrence Buntz had become. But that was for another time, or probably no time at all.

  While Buntz waited for Myrtle Six to reply, he echoed a real-time feed from Hole Card’s on a section of his own main screen, then called up a topographic map and overlaid it with the courses of all the Brotherhood vehicles. On that he drew a course plot with a sweep of his index finger.

  “Lamplight, this is Myrtle,” Lieutenant Rennie said at last. The five cars had formed into a loose wedge, poised to sweep north through the Brotherhood anti-armor teams and the remaining APCs. “All right, Buntz, we’ll be your anvil. Next time, though, we get the fun part. Myrtle Six out.”

  “Four-seven, this is Four-two,” Buntz said, using the channel dedicated to Lamplight; that was the best way to inform without repetition not only Sergeant Cabell but also the drivers of the two tanks. “Four-two will proceed on the attached course.”

  He transmitted the plot he’d drawn while waiting for Rennie to make up his mind. It was rough, but that was all Lahti needed—she’d pick the detailed route by eyeball. As for Cabell, knowing the course allowed him to anticipate where targets might appear.

  “I’ll nail them if they hold where they are, and you get ’em if they try to run, Cabell,” he said. “But you know, not too eager. Got it, over?”

  “Roger, Four-two,” Cabell replied. “Good hunting. Four-seven out.”

  Lahti had already started Herod down the slope, using gravity to accelerate; the fans did little more than lift the skirts off the ground. Their speed quickly built up to 40 kph.

  Buntz frowned, doubtful about going so fast cross-country in a tank. Lahti was managing it, though. Herod jounced over narrow, rain-cut gullies and on hillocks that the roots of shrubs had cemented into masses a hand’s breadth higher than the surrounding surface, but though Buntz jolted against his seat restraints the shocks weren’t any worse than those of the main gun firing.

  The fighting compartment displays gave Buntz a panoramic view at any magnification he wanted. Despite that, he had an urge to roll the hatch back and ride with his head out. Like most of the other Slammers recruits, whatever planet they came from, he’d been a country boy. It didn’t feel right to shut h
imself up in a box when he was heading for a fight.

  It was what common sense as well as standing orders required, though, Buntz did what he knew he should instead of what his heart wanted to do. When he’d been ten years younger, though, he’d regularly ridden into battle with his torso out of the hatch and his hands on the spade grips of the tribarrel instead of slewing and firing it with the joystick behind armor.

  “Boomer Three-niner-one, this is Myrtle Six,” Lieutenant Rennie said, using the operation’s command channel to call the supporting battery. “Request targeting round at point Alpha Tango one-three, five-eight. Over.”

  Herod tore through a belt of heavy brush in the dip between two gradual rises. Groundwater collected here, and there might be a running stream during the wet season. The tank’s skirts sheared gnarled stems, and bits that got into the fan nacelles were sprayed out again as chips.

  Hole Card fired. Buntz had been concentrating on the panoramic screen, poised to react if the tank’s AI careted movement. Now he glanced at his echo of Cabell’s targeting display. The bolt missed, but a Brotherhood APC fluffed its fans to escape the fire spreading from the scar that plasma’d licked through thirty meters of grass.

  Cabell fired again. Maybe he’d even planned it this way, spending the first round to startle his target into the path of the second. The APC flew apart. There was no secondary explosion because the infantry had already dismounted, taking their munitions with them.

  A shell from the supporting rocket artillery screamed out of the southern sky. While the round was still a thousand meters in the air, a tribarrel fired from near the predicted point of impact. Plasma ruptured the shell, sending a spray of blue smoke through the air. It’d been a marking round, harmless unless you happened to be exactly where it hit.