by David Drake
"It's not just us 'n them,"Des Grieux said. Lindgren and Hawes, sitting on ammunition boxes on opposite sides of the bunker, swivelled their heads from one veteran to the other like spectators at a tennis match. "There's five, six thousand Federals on this crap pile with us, and they can't like it much better than I do."
"They're not—" Lieutenant Lindgren began. Cyan light flickered through the bunker entrance. A Republican sniper, not one of the Slammers' weapons. The Reps had a few powerguns, and Hill 661 was high enough that a marksman could slant his bolts into the Federal position.
The snap! of the bolt impacting made Lindgren twitch. Des Grieux's lips drew back in a snarl, because if he'd been in his tank he just might have put paid to the bastard.
"Not line soldiers," the lieutenant concluded in an artificially calm tone.
"They'd fight if they had somebody to lead them," Des Grieux said. " Via , anything's better'n being wrapped up here and used for Rep target practice."
"They've got a leader,"Broglie replied, "and it's General Wycherly,not us.For what he's worth."
Des Grieux grimaced as though he'd been kicked. Even Hawes snorted.
"I don't believe you appreciate the constraints that General Wycherly operates under," Lindgren said in a thin voice.
Lindgren knew how little his authority was worth to the veterans. That, as well as a real awareness of the Federal commander's difficulties, injected a note of anger into his tone."He's outnumbered three or four to one,"he went on."Ten to one, if you count just the real combat troops under his command. But he's holding his position as ordered. And that's just what we're going to help him do."
"We're pieces of a puzzle,Slick,"said Broglie.Here laxed enough to rub his lips, massaging them out of the rictus into which the discussion had cramped them. "Wycherly's job is to keep from getting overrun; our job's to help him; and our people with the relieving force 're going to kick the cop outa the Reps if we just hold 'em a few days more."
Another incoming shell detonated a kilometer short of Hill 541 North.The Republicans knew they couldn't do serious physical damage so long as the position was guarded by the Slammers' tanks . . . but they knew as well the psychological effect the constant probing fire had on the defenders.
For an instant Broglie's hard smile was back. "Or not a puzzle," he added. "A gun. Every part has to do the right job, or the gun doesn't work."
"Okay, we had our unit meeting," Des Grieux said. He squeezed his hands together so fiercely that his fingers were dark with trapped blood between the first and second joints. "Now can I get back to my tank where I can maybe do some good?"
"The AAD does everything that can be done, Sergeant," Lindgren said."That's what we need now. That and discipline."
Des Grieux stood up, though he had to bend forward to clear the bunker's low ceiling."Having the computer fire my guns,"he said with icy clarity, "is like jacking off. With respect."
Lindgren grimaced. "All right," he said. "You're all dismissed."
In an attempt to soften the previous exchange,he added,"There shouldn't be more than a few days of this."
But Des Grieux, ignoring the incoming fire, was already out of the bunker.
A howitzer fired from the center of the Federal position. The night outside the bunker glowed with the bottle-shaped yellow flash. There were fifteen tubes in the Federal batteries, but they were short of ammunition and rarely fired.
When they did, they invariably brought down a storm of Republican counterfire.
Des Grieux continued to walk steadily in the direction of Warrior; his tank, his home.
Not his reason for existence, though. Des Grieux existed to rip the enemy up one side and down the other. To do that he could use Warrior, or the pistol in his holster, or his teeth; whatever was available. Lieutenant Lindgren was robbing Des Grieux of his reason for existence . . . .
He heard the scream of the shell—one round, from the northwest. He waited for the sky-tearing sound of Warrior's tribarrel firing a short burst of cyan plasma, copper nuclei stripped of their electron shells and ravening downrange to detonate or vaporize the shell.
Warrior didn't fire.
The Reps had launched a ground-hugging missile from the lower altitude of Hill 504. Warrior and the other Slammers' tanks couldn't engage the round because they were dug in behind the bunker line encircling the Federal positions. The incoming missile would not rise into the line-of-sight range of the powerguns until—
There was a scarlet streak from the horizon like a vector marker in the dark bowl of the sky. A titanic crash turned the sky orange and knocked Des Grieux down. Sandy red dust sucked up and rolled over, forming a doughnut that expanded across the barren hilltop.
Des Grieux got to his feet and resumed walking. The bastards couldn't make him run, and they couldn't make him bend over against the sleet of shell fragments which would rip him anyway—running or walking, cowering or standing upright like a man.
The Republicans fired a dozen ordinary rounds. Tank tribarrels splashed each of the shells a fraction of a second after they arched into view. The powerguns' snarling dazzle linked the Federal base for an instant to orange fireballs which faded into rags of smoke. There were no more ground-huggers.
An ordinary shell was no more complex than a hand grenade. Ground-hugging missiles required sophisticated electronics and a fairly complex propulsion system. There weren't many of them in the Rep stockpiles.
Ground-huggers would be as useless as ballistic projectiles if Lindgren used his platoon the way tanks should be used, as weapons that sought out the enemy instead of cowering turret-down in defilade.
Blood and Martyrs! What a way to fight a war.
The top of Hill 541 North was a barren moonscape. The bunkers were improvised by the troops themselves with shovels and sandbags. A month ago, the position had been merely the supply point for a string of Federal outposts. No one expected a siege.
But when the Republicans swept down in force, the outposts scrambled into their common center, 541N. Troops dug furiously as soon as they realized that there was no further retreat until Route 7 to the south was cleared from the outside.
If Route 7 was cleared. Task Force Howes, named for the CO of the Slammers 2nd Battalion, had promised a link-up within three days.
Every day for the past two weeks.
A sniper on Hill 661, twelve kilometers away, fired his powergun. The bolt snapped fifty meters from Des Grieux, fusing the sandy soil into a disk of glass which shattered instantly as it cooled.
Kuykendall, Warrior's driver, should be in the tank turret. If Des Grieux had been manning the guns, the sniper would have had a hot time of it . . . but Des Grieux was walking back from a dickheaded meeting, and Kuykendall wasn't going to disobey orders to leave the tribarrel on Automatic Air Defense and not, under any circumstances, to fire the 20cm main gun since ammunition was scarce.
The garrison of Hill 541N, the Slammers included, had the supplies they started the siege with. Ground routes were blocked. Aerial resupply would be suicide because of the Rep air-defense arsenal on the encircling hills.
The sniper fired again. The bolt hit even farther away, but he was probably aiming at Des Grieux anyhow. Nothing else moved on this side of the encampment except swirls of wind-blown sand.
A shell fragment the size of a man's palm stuck up from the ground. It winked jaggedly in the blue light of the bolt.
Warrior was within a hundred meters. Des Grieux continued to walk deliberately.
The hilltop's soil blurred all the vehicles and installations into identical dinginess. The dirt was a red without life, the hue of old blood that had dried and flaked to powder.
The sniper gave up.A gunon541Scougheda shell which Broglie's Honey Girl blew from the sky a moment later.
Every five minutes; but not regularly, and twice the Reps had banged out more than a thousand rounds in a day, some of which inevitably got through . . . .
"That you, Slick?" Kuykendall called from the Warri
or's cupola.
"Yeah, of course it's me," Des Grieux replied. He stepped onto a sandbag lip, then hopped down to Warrior's back deck. His boots clanked.
The tanks were dug in along sloping ramps. Soil from the trenches filled sandbag walls rising above the vehicles' cupolas. Lieutenant Lindgren was afraid that powerguns from 661—and the Reps had multi-barreled calliopes to provide artillery defense—would rake the Slammers' tanks if the latter were visible.
Des Grieux figured the answer to that threat was to kick the Reps the hell off Hill 661. By now, though, he'd learned that the other Slammers were just going to sigh and look away when he made a suggestion that didn't involve waiting for somebody else to do the fighting.
Kuykendall slid down from the cupola into the fighting compartment. She was a petite woman, black-haired and a good enough driver. To Des Grieux, Kuykendall was a low-key irritation that he had to work around, like a burr in the mechanism that controlled his turret's rotation.
A driver was a necessary evil, because Des Grieux couldn't guide his tank and fight at the same time. Kuykendall took orders, but she had a personality of her own. She wasn't a mere extension of Des Grieux's will, and that made her more of a problem than someone blander though less competent would have been.
Nothing he couldn't work around, though. There was nothing Des Grieux couldn't work around, if his superiors just gave him the chance to do his job. "Anything new?" Kuykendall asked.
Des Grieux stood on his seat so that he could look out over the sandbags toward Hill 661."What'd you think?"he said.He switched the visual display on his helmet visor to infrared and cranked up the magnification.
The sniper had gone home. Nothing but ripples in the atmosphere and the cooler blue of trees transpiring water they sucked somehow from this Lord-blasted landscape.
Des Grieux climbed out of the hatch again. He shoved a sandbag off the top layer. The bastard would be back, and when he was . . .
He pushed away another sandbag.The bags were woven from a coarse synthetic that smelled like burning tar when it rubbed.
"We're not supposed to do that,"Kuykendall said from the cupola."A lucky shot could put the tribarrel out of action. That'd hurt us a lot worse than a hundred dead grunts does the Reps."
"They don't have a hundred powerguns," Des Grieux said without turning around. He pushed at the second-layer sandbag he'd uncovered but that layer was laid as headers. The bags to right and left resisted the friction on their long sides."Anyway,it's worth something to me to give a few of those cocky bastards their lunch."
Hawes' Susie Q ripped the sky. Des Grieux dropped into a crouch, then rose again with a feeling of embarrassment. He knew that Kuykendall had seen him jump.
It wasn't flinching. If Warrior's AAD sensed incoming from Hill 661, Des Grieux would either duck instantly—or have his head shot off by the tribarrel of his own tank. The fire-direction computer didn't care if there was a man in the way when it needed to do its job.
Des Grieux liked the computer's attitude.
He lifted and pushed, raising his triceps into stark ridges. Des Grieux was thin and from a distance looked frail. Close up, no one noticed anything but his eyes; and there was no weakness in them.
The sandbag slid away. The slot in Warrior's protection gave Des Grieux a keyhole through which to rake Hill 661 with his tribarrel. He got back into the turret. Kuykendall dropped out of the way without further comment.
"You know . . ." Des Grieux said as he viewed the enemy positions in the tribarrel's holographic sight. Warrior's sensors were several orders of magnitude better than those of the tankers' unaided helmets."The Reps aren't much better at this than these Federal pussies we gotta nursemaid."
"How d'ye mean?" Kuykendall asked.
Her voice came over the intercom channel. She'd slipped back into the driver's compartment.Most drivers found the internal hatch too tight for use in anything less than a full buttoned-up emergency.
"They've got calliopes up there,"Des Grieux explained as he scanned the bleak silence of Hill 661. The Republican positions were in defilade. Easy enough to arrange from their greater height.
"If it was me,"Des Grieux continued,"I'd pick my time and roll'er up to direct fire positions. They'd kick the cop outa this place."
"They're not going to bet 3cm calliopes against tank main guns, Sarge," Kuykendall said carefully.
"They would if they had any balls,"Des Grieux said.His voice was coldly judgmental, stating the only truth there was. He showed no anger toward those who were too stupid to see it. "Dug in like we are, they could blow away the cupolas and our sensor arrays before we even got the main guns to bear. A calliope's no joke, kid."
He laughed harshly. "Wish they'd try, though. I can hip-shoot a main gun if I have to."
"There's talk they're going to try t' overrun us before Task Force Howes relieves us," Kuykendall said with the guarded nonchalance she always assumed when talking to the tank commander.
Des Grieux's two years in the Slammers made him a veteran,but he was scarcely one of the longest-serving members of the regiment. His drive, his skill with weapons, and the phenomenal ruthlessness with which he accomplished any task set him gave Des Grieux a reputation beyond simple seniority.
"There's talk," Des Grieux said coldly. Nothing moved on Hill 661. "There's been talk. There's been talk Howes is going to get his thumbs out of his butt and relieve us, too."
The tribarrel roused, swung, and ignited the sky with a four-round burst of plasma.A shell from Hill 504 broke apart without detonating.The largest piece of casing was still a white glow when it tumbled out of sight in the valley below.
The sky flickered to the south as well, but at such a distance that the sounds faded to a low rumble. Task Force Howes still slugged it out with the Republicans who defended Route 7. Maybe they were going to get here within seventy-two hours. And maybe Hell was going to freeze over.
Des Grieux scanned Hill 661, and nothing moved.
The only thing Des Grieux knew in the instant he snapped awake from a sound sleep was that it was time to earn his pay.
Kuykendall looked down into the fighting compartment from the commander's seat. "Sarge?" she said. "I—" and broke off when she realized Des Grieux was already alert.
"Get up front 'n drive," Des Grieux ordered curtly. "It's happening."
"It's maybe nothing," the driver said, but she knew Des Grieux. As Kuykendall spoke, she swung her legs out of the cupola. Hopping from the cupola and past the main gun was the fastest way to the driver's hatch in the bow. The tank commander blocked the internal passage anyway as he climbed up to his seat.
The Automatic Air Defense plate on Warrior's control panel switched from yellow, standby, to red. The tribarrel rotated and fired. Des Grieux flicked the plate with his boot toe as he went past, disconnecting the computer-controlled defensive fire. He needed Warrior's weapons under his personal direction now that things were real.
When the siege began, Lieutenant Lindgren ordered that one member of each two-man tank crew be on watch in the cupola at every moment. What the tankers did off-duty, and where they slept, was their own business.
Most of the off-duty troops slept beneath their vehicles, entering the plenum chamber through the access plate in the steel skirts. The chambers were roomy and better protection than anything cobbled together by shovels and sandbags could be. The only problem was the awareness before sleep came that the tank above you weighed 170 tonnes . . . but tankers tended not to be people who thought in those terms.
Lindgren insisted on a bunker next to his vehicle. He was sure that he would go mad if his whole existence, on duty and off, was bounded by the steel and iridium shell of his tank.
Des Grieux went the other way around. He slept in the fighting compartment while his driver kept watch in the cupola above. The deck was steel pressed with grip rosettes. He couldn't stretch out. His meter-ninety of height had to twist between the three-screen control console and the armored tube which fed ammuni
tion to the autoloading 20cm main gun.
Nobody called the fighting compartment a comfortable place to sleep; but then, nobody called Des Grieux sane, either.
A storm of Republican artillery fire screamed toward Hill 541N. Some of the shells would have gotten through even if Des Grieux had left Warrior in the defensive net. That was somebody else's problem. The Reps didn't have terminally guided munitions that would target the Slammers' tanks, so a shell that hit Warrior was the result of random chance.
You had to take chances in war; and anyway, Warrior oughta shrug off anything but a heavy-caliber armor-piercing round with no more than superficial damage.
Kuykendall switched her fans on and brought them up to speed fast with their blades cutting the airstream at minimum angle. Warrior trembled with what Des Grieux anthropomorphized as eagerness, transferring his own emotions to the mindless machine he commanded.
A Slammers' tank was a slope-sided iridium hull whose turret, smooth to avoid shot traps, held a 20cm powergun. The three-barreled automatic weapon in the cupola could operate independently or be locked to the same point of aim as the main gun. Eight intake ducts pierced the upper surface of the hull, feeding air down to drive fans in armored nacelles below.
At rest, the tanks sat on their steel skirts. When the vehicles were under way, they floated on a cushion of air pressurized by the fans.At full throttle,the power required to drive a tank was enormous, and the fusion bottle which provided that power filled the rear third of the hull.
The tanks were hideously expensive. Their electronics were so complex and sensitive that at least a small portion of every tank's suite was deadlined at any one time. The hulls and running gear were rugged, but the vehicles' own size and weight imposed stresses which required constant maintenance.
When they worked, and to the extent they worked, the Slammers' tanks were the most effective weapons in the human universe. As Warrior was about to prove to two divisions of Republican infantry . . . .
"Back her out!" Des Grieux ordered. If he'd thought about it, he would have sounded a general alarm because he knew this was a major attack,but he had other things on his mind besides worrying about people he wasn't planning to kill.