by Tom Kratman
Yet nuclear it had to be. Antimatter was simply too dangerous inside a combat vehicle. It drove up the internal cube, expanded the size of the envelope that had to be armoured, and increased the weight, which, until a point of equilibrium was reached, likewise drove up the power requirements.
Then there was the question of tracked versus the recently developed antigravity technology, itself an offshoot of the development of artificial gravity needed to preserve Man's health aboard spacefaring craft. The five options were: tracked, anti-gravity, both but with emphasis on tracked and an anti-gravity assist to reduce ground pressure, both but with an emphasis on anti-gravity and tracks for steering, and a balanced approach incorporating both.
Different models and prototypes were built incorporating every version of those but for the last, before settling on an antigravity-based propulsion and suspension system. The reason for that choice was fourfold. First, the force of gravity repelled could be twisted and turned into a much more intense—albeit not black hole levels of intense—band of hyper-gravity all about the vehicle, which added substantially to its defence, by turning or dispersing incoming threats. Second, it was, in effect, free motive power once one had paid the energy cost of redirecting the force of gravity. Third was the ease of maintenance; anti-gravity was much easier to keep going in an undeveloped planetary theater. Fourth, it was a splendid way, once some kinks had been worked out, of dealing with recoil, for those Rathas that used kinetic energy for their main armament projectiles in the case of the early versions, or the particle beams and ion cannons used by current models.
CHAPTER THREE
Fratricide was not an overriding concern to the Slugs. It mattered not to them if their enemy’s screens directed their beams of charged particles up or to the sides to gouge great spewing geysers of granite from the rock face. It didn’t matter, either, when the rock was mixed in with chunks of plasma cannon, or bits and pieces of recently deceased Slugs. The superheated spouts of fractured, molten rock poured down onto the ground, and on to the Ratha hovering a few feet above it, without doing much harm to either.
Even so, the Ratha’s gravity-fed screens could only handle so much…
Magnolia
I am safe enough from the plasma cannon behind me; they cannot depress enough to fire at my less well-armored top deck, while my rearward anti-personnel/anti-flyer turrets are sufficient to keep any infantry which may be with them off me. I wish I could have the same confidence in my ability to handle the scores of Slug armored vehicles, and hundreds, possibly thousands, of infantry units pouring into the valley to my front.
I call them “infantry,” but in fact they move on anti-gravity sleds rather than legs. This is presumably a consequence of the fact that they don’t actually have legs, hence their name. Still, they are armored about as well as my long-lost footmen, and they carry weapons of similar power. They are slightly faster than human infantry but they are not as maneuverable and they present bigger targets. I will make them pay for those weaknesses.
The Ratha’s turret swiveled imperceptibly, keeping her ion cannon focused on the spot where the Slug turret met the top deck. The Slug kept on coming until the shimmering distortion that marked its anti-grav-fed shield flashed and died. Its prow, no longer supported by the ion-fried anti-gravity generators, plowed into the dirt below. This not only slowed the enemy vehicle, it exposed its thinly armored top deck, since the rear anti-grav kept the stern elevated. Magnolia’s cannon punched through the lighter armor as if it weren’t even there, vaporized the brain below it and—possibly, spectral analysis suggested but couldn’t prove—the bodies of one or more Slugs which may have been inside. The resultant flash of metal and plastic—and maybe flesh—turned to gas and plasma that demolished the power station and drove the turret up out of the hull. Even if it was a less spectacular death than Leo's, the Slug Xiphos died all the same.
Meanwhile, the Ratha’s secondary armament, a 75mm KE cannon, electrically driven and coaxially mounted, plus two similarly mounted 15mm Gauss Guns, the twin gatlings in the bow, the three on the cupolae atop her turret, and the top deck-mounted AP/AF guns, kept busy, whirring out a nearly continuous stream of smaller, hypersonic projectiles, eviscerating Slugs and blasting their sleds into wicked, black clouds of fragmented metal.
Gradually, an almost perfect semi-circle of destruction built up around the Ratha, to a distance of several kilometers. Its imperfections were due to folds and depressions in the ground, as well as some of the dead space created by the granite tors rising above the plain.
Not that there weren’t plenty of dead Slugs in that dead space; the Ratha had a twin battery of 300mm mortars, mounted behind the main turret and rising in a broad, flat turret of their own, as well as two arrays dedicated to vertically launched missiles. The problem was that unlike her ion cannon, both mortars and missiles were limited, and her stock would eventually run out unless replenished. So, she had to limit her use of them to the most critically dangerous concentrations of known Slug infantry….
I can't find them! I can’t always see the Slugs! How do they defeat my sensors? Even visual is sometimes unreliable. There was heat shimmer across the valley already, of course; but all this destruction has made it worse. I can hardly pick out one thing from other, not from all the glowing spots and wrecks.
In an effort at improving her position, expending power that she had in abundance to conserve ammunition she did not, the Ratha began targeting the granite tors, hitting them with enough energy to shatter them, thereby spreading showers of razor sharp granite shards out in a fan behind them.
The problem was that the Slugs’ infantry and heavy combat vehicles were essentially immune to the shards and they had taken cover in the low ground.
This is preposterous! There’s no benefit to the Slugs in destroying me that’s remotely commensurate with the price they’ve already paid, let alone what they’re going to have to pay! No wonder we haven’t talked; we don’t share even rudimentary mathematics!
A score of wrecked Xiphos-class vehicles smoked across the landscape. A few of the larger and more powerful Phasganons were littered among them. There were others out there that the Ratha could sense, but rarely well enough for good targeting. Only when they showed themselves did she have a shot worth expending the energy on, and the havoc she’d already wreaked upon them seemed to have finally dissuaded them from launching another direct assault. She sat there for the time being, immobile, scanning… scanning… scanning….
Suddenly, from all around that perimeter of well-marked death, surged the Slugs in their hundreds and thousands. Incoming fire poured down upon her like a hailstorm from Hell, but for the nonce, the Ratha’s screens held. Even so, she had to divert more power to them than she liked. And then….
6f68686868736869747069737363756e746675636b636f636b7375636b65726d6f746865726675636b6572616e6474697473! I want my boys back! They never should have taken them from me!
From around the Ratha, on both flanks and even a couple in the space behind, where her close-defense weapons could not train, began to rise some twenty-seven pairs of Slugs. They’d slithered across the open space, unarmored, flattened to nearly nothing and so nearly transparent as to be invisible. Apparently, they’d also dragged their weapons behind them. They aimed these from extended pseudopods and fired at the underside of the Ratha, at her close-defense turrets and even at her side armor. Pain exploded across Magnolia’s mind, as well as fury at being so easily deceived. Her screens flickered and went out. An ion bolt from a Slug Xiphos struck near her gun mantlet, shearing off a piece of her main armament. Soon her armor began to boil off in silvery clouds of superheated metal steam.
There were four Slug Phasganon, eleven Xiphoi, and many, many infantry on sleds, that managed to get close enough to matter. The Ratha couldn’t tell, not after losing so many sensors to the blasts, how many infantry were attacking. Only her analysis of the amount of communications traffic enabled her to determine even a rough estimate of the number
s of her enemies. Then, too, the agony of losing so many sensors and appendages made it very difficult to use what little information she could glean.
Two heavies exposed themselves to draw her fire. She fired the damaged ion cannon but missed both.
A third crept to within six hundred meters of her and fired into her side. She shuddered with the agony, her light under-armor being no match for its main armament at that range.
The light ablative plates burned away first, exposing pain receptors. These too died, yet such was her design that behind these were other receptors, and behind those still others. Each layered set felt what the exterior set would have felt had it not been destroyed… in addition to its own. The Ratha screamed, silently.
After burning through the lightly armored lower exterior, the bolt struck the inner belt of her core envelope’s armor. Here it fragmented, two beams burning through to her control center, her brain, while a half-dozen more were scattered around her inner compartments. New pain sensors flared. Her brain was damaged badly, in two distinct places. Interior gears melted.
Writhing in torment, the Ratha shuddered and rolled, her left and right sides smashing the ground in quick succession, completely without control. The turret mechanisms, overcome by pain impulses beyond her ability to endure or override any longer, caused the turret to spin wildly through more than two complete rotations. This further ruined the gears responsible for moving the turret.
A Xiphos closed for what might have been intended to be a mercy shot. But a Ratha accepts no mercy from the enemy. Nor does it surrender to fate short of its complete destruction. Magnolia engaged her back-up turret controls and aimed. The Slug paused as if it was uncertain. Enraged, the Ratha fired first. A single Xiphos, at that range, was no match for even a badly damaged Ratha. It died.
Agonized, the Ratha Magnolia, once beloved of her human escorts, lost consciousness as the last of her power drained from her huge metal corpse with a pitiful whine. The remnants of her giant cannon drooped as she fell to rest on the valley’s sandy floor.
Excursus
From: Imperial Suns: The March of Mankind Through the Orion Arm, copyright © CE 2936, Thaddeus Nnaji-Olokomo, University of Wooloomooloo Press, Digger City, Wolloomooloo, al-Raqis.
After many failed models of multi-turreted tanks, in human military history, from the British A1E1 to the French FCM F1 to the Russian T-28, T-35, and SMK, the sentiment was strong against adding secondary turrets to the early Rathas. The reasons for the earlier failures were various, but there was a certain pattern to them. One was that in order to fit extra turrets, a design had to be bigger. This increased weight even as it reduced both mobility and armor protection. A second was that it was nearly impossible for a tank commander to control more than his main turret and driver. A third, but less well understood problem was that mounting a secondary turret was inconsistent with mounting the best protected turret, just as mounting a second cannon in that turret made it impossible to mount the most powerful possible main armament.
Most of these historical drawbacks did not apply to the Ratha concept. They were intended from the first to be so big and heavy that the addition of a few dozen lesser-firing positions meant little. Power was not a problem. And, given the small size of the envelope that actually had to be sufficiently armoured to ensure survival and combat effectiveness, what did it matter if the purely secondary turrets were essentially unarmoured? Between the use of nuclear power and the replacement of the human crew with synthetic brains, the centuries-old weight problem had been solved.
Part II
CHAPTER FOUR
The battle was long past and the human front had advanced by twenty kilometers or more, when, with a whine and a rush of dust-laden air, the wrecker sled glided to a stop between the Ratha and the wreckage of a Xiphos. The wrecker’s chief, a senior sergeant, measured the ambient radiation from safely inside the wrecker’s cab. After whistling softly at the results, he said, “Chilluns, do NOT take your suits off until we are safely away from here. I think the Slug’s fusion chamber is breached.”
The sergeant briefly considered his options. “Okay… Team Alpha, hook up heavy anti-grav lifts at all standard points. Bravo, support Alpha. Charlie, assemble aux power packs to support the antigrav and run the wires. Delta, here is a list of replacement parts needed at the front. Don’t detach anything, but identify useable parts from the list as best you can.”
“Right, sarge… sure thing, sarge… Goddamit, sarge, why us?… no sweat, sergeant….”
Magnolia
My internal magnetic anomaly detector senses the approach, halting, and settling of a large anti-gravity vehicle. Comparison with known sources in my data banks confirms to a nearly ninety-four percent probability that it is a regimental recovery vehicle. The damage to my components forbids greater accuracy than this. In any case, the variance between the magnetic signature on record and the present reading is likely explainable by the variation in the on-board load of parts carried. I diagnose that I have one close defense weapon available to me… though I must apply more power to breaking the weld holding that secondary turret fixed than I can easily afford at this juncture. I decide to risk my last remaining visual sensor to confirm that this is, indeed, a friend. On command, one armor plate moves grudgingly aside on slide bearings… the bearing is itself badly damaged….
Oh, my creators!… pain… Pain… PAIN!….
The armor plate is moved as far as it will go. The pain subsides, slightly.
I extrude the visual sensor. I am relieved to confirm that I have not fallen into the hands of the enemy. I take comfort in watching my human rescuers work to recover me, hopefully for further service. While watching, I upload an objective VR record of the preceding action to the wrecker’s on-board memory. My brothers and sisters of the regiment may find use, service, and pride in it.
The wrecker pulled the mostly ruined Ratha into the maintenance bay, then slowed to a stop. The crew of the recovery vehicle sprang into action, detaching the auxiliary anti-gravity devices, then guiding them to their stowage positions on the main vehicle. With a wave, the sergeant commanding the wrecker bid farewell to the technician standing by, shaking his head in wonder at the amount of damage the Ratha had sustained.
“Will you look at that?” asked the tech, of nobody in particular.
The technician, wearing a soiled set of anti-radiation coveralls topped with a helmet, pointed toward a gaping, ragged hole in the side of the Ratha Mk XXXVII. Slagged metal ran down from the hole like hardened tears. From inside, a faint greenish glow shone. Heat-slashed wires, fused circuits and melted gears were dimly visible by that glow.
The speaker’s helmet showed the rank and name “Maintenance Technician 1st Class Weaver.” The helmet rotated slowly left and right as Weaver shook his head over the extent of damage. He turned to one of his workers.
“Childress, this is an L-model variant to a Thirty-seven. Go to my office and look for Technical Manual 9-2320-297-3524L. Slap it in my reader and bring ‘em both here.”
The tech shook his head and muttered, “What a hunk of junk.”
That was unkind. They must think that because we do not bleed, we do not feel. Because we have no hearts, they think we have no souls. We have no ears that they can see, therefore they think we cannot hear.
I am not a ‘hunk of junk’. I am a Ratha Mk XXXVII. But I confess, I have fallen on hard times.
“Yes, Tech.” Childress took off at a run. When he returned, he had a small black plastic case—the reader—with a fold-up view screen on top and an electronic stylus attached to one side.
Weaver punched in a personal code to bring the manual online. The reader beeped and ordered, “Enter unit serial number.”
Walking to one side, the maintenance tech used a ladder to climb to the Ratha’s main deck. Brushing away some soot he read aloud, “Unit serial number… what I can read of it… is…. MLN… something… S0615… that’s all I can read.”
The reader re
sponded, “Full serial number is as follows: MLN90456SS061502125. Unit familiar name is ‘Magnolia’ or “Maggie’.”
The tech muttered, mostly to himself, “I don’t think this unit is going to be answering to ‘Maggie’ or anything else ever again. Reader: bring up worksheet C for Controlled Cannibalization.”
Cannibalization? Then this is the end. I did not think it would come at friendly hands. But I am ready and more than ready.
Weaver began walking the nearly seventy-five meter port side of the Ratha, booted feet clicking on exposed heterodiamond XVI. He began speaking, with his reader automatically recording and analyzing every word. “Secondary Turret A, Gauss Gun: Turret missing. B, Gauss Gun: half of turret present, gun missing….” All the way down to “Secondary Turret I: present, armament appears serviceable…turret partially welded to deck.” Then the tech made the same inspection of the starboard side of the tank. No turrets present… J through R.”
“Noted,” chirped the reader. “Next Item: Ablative Armor.”
Turning to the next step in the cannibalization analysis process, Weaver observed, dryly, “Ablative armor notable mainly by its absence. We’ve got bluish heterodiamond showing over most of the surface, pretty much all of it badly scarred. Estimate less than twenty percent recoverability for ablative plating.”