One improvement we had made on the tanks as originally designed was to rig polished steel mirrors that we could swing into place angled behind a couple of the slits. That allowed us to close most of the slits against the few, but deadly, needler rounds among thousands that would have found their way in through the slits. We were kidding ourselves, because really the mirrors were scarcely better than blindness. But it was better than a needler round in the eye.
If Kit’s infantry behind us had charged without the cover we provided, they would all be dead or wounded already, without even reaching the concertina wire.
Spang.
My head snapped back as something seared my eye.
“Oh, God!” My hand flew to my eye. Somehow a needler round had found its way inside our armor and rendered me half blind.
I opened my eye, closed the uninjured one, and could still see.
Running my fingers beneath my eye, I felt a bloody gash, but hardly a needler wound.
We had just taken our first round of conventional Tressen gunpowder machine-gun fire. It had struck the armor plate in front of my face. The steel plate on a Mark V or a Thunderer stopped such rounds, but the impact spalled steel slivers off the plate’s backside, like struck billiard balls. British Mark V crews had actually worn chain-mail masks to protect against secondary internal shrapnel. If the mix of machine guns we faced that day had been more conventional Tressen and less Yavi needler, the inside of our tank would have been a steel hailstorm.
I peeped out the slit again, grimacing.
Ten yards to our front loomed the concertina barbed wire that blocked our way forward. Multiple tubular razor-cut coils that would slash a man’s flesh like knives gleamed slick with rain in the dim light.
We crossed the wire without a hiccup. Frankly, anybody who owns a family electric has run over a Styrofoam cup and been more jostled. Thirty tons will squash a lot of wire.
Ahead of us loomed the perimeter fortifications. The Tressens had built up, rather than dug in, because they wanted to be able to see their attackers coming. Every hundred yards, strongpoints of chest-high sandbags shielded crew-served needlers and were connected by a three-foot-high earth berm behind which Tressen riflemen sheltered.
If the Tressens and the Yavi had paid any attention whatsoever to the possibility that they faced armored attack, they would have dug into the Tressen arsenal and emplaced a few direct-fire cannon in those strongpoints. If they had done so, they would have blown us all to hell before we reached the concertina.
That was where intelligence, so often maligned, had saved our butts before the first shot was fired. Kit and I had bugged the Yavi-Tressen defense-planning sessions. That had nearly gotten us killed in the bell tower, but we knew with absolute confidence that our enemy was preparing to defend only against light infantry. So that was exactly what we hadn’t attacked with.
Thunderer One and Thunderer Two rumbled forward, side by side, at a stately but unstoppable four miles per hour and plowed into the berms defended by Tressen infantry. By the time our tanks crested the berms, they were long-since deserted. The infantry had fled, helpless and terrified. The driver and sponson gunners hosed the fleeing men with machine-gun fire as they ran away. Some fell, wounded, in our path. We couldn’t have steered the beasts around them if we had tried. They disappeared, screaming, beneath the treads, their bones offering the resistance of Styrofoam cups.
We struck the Tressen line midway between two sandbagged strongpoints. These we reduced, meaning blew the crap out of, with our side-firing sponson cannons. The cannons were massively inaccurate given the lurching of the tank and the tiny slits through which the cannoneers peered to aim them.
But the strongpoints were placed just a hundred yards apart, so that the Yavi needlers could overlap their fields of fire.
That meant that the range to target for our cannoneers was less than fifty yards, virtually point-blank.
I actually saw a blown-up Yavi needler spin through the air with its tripod legs still attached. Also attached was a hand, that still grasped the gun’s pistol grip.
Any unfortunates who escaped us were dealt with by our following infantry.
I learned later that one brave Yavi soul, a corporal, was actually openly wearing Yavi armor. That breach of Cold War etiquette told us how desperately they wanted to keep their cavorite. It also must have persuaded the Yavi that he was bulletproof. He climbed aboard our slow-rolling tank and tried to stick his needle pistol through the commander’s view port, which would have ruined what was left of my day.
Kit had clambered up on the tank from the rear and shot him through his armor’s neck-ring latch gap with one pistol shot from thirty-five feet. The neck-ring latch gap is the chink in Yavi armor, but it’s only a quarter-inch wide and a third of an inch tall. Considering conditions, it was a shot that the Trueborn markswoman Annie Oakley would have been proud of. Except that the only pride a sane soldier takes in a shooting is surviving it.
After we breached the perimeter, I wasn’t sure precisely where we ought to head next.
Then two shapes loomed up ahead, dim through the rain.
They were open Yavi skimmers, inbound for us at sixty miles per hour, rooster-tailing spray from beneath their skirts as they came. Both were equipped with crewed dual-sidemount needlers, spraying rounds at us as voluminously as the rooster tails sprayed rain.
In that moment, the wind and rain abated for a few heartbeats.
Behind the skimmers and to our left, an enormous, blunt black shape slid into view. The shuttle. They surely hadn’t fired up the space plane and rolled it out of the hangar in a rainstorm because the pilot wanted to spin doughnuts on the tarmac.
We had come so far to get to this point, but if the shuttle lifted off with the cavorite aboard, we would have failed completely.
Kit had told me that the shuttle, fully fueled and loaded, needed all twelve thousand feet of runway to get airborne, and then spaceborne, in the atmosphere and gravity of Tressel.
If we could get one of the thirty-ton Thunderers out onto the runway, then, as long as it remained there, the shuttle and the cavorite would remain here on Tressel, too.
I peered out a side peephole. Thunderer Two had apparently reached the same conclusion I had. The tank adjusted course, then leapt—who am I kidding, crawled—at all of five miles per hour toward the long runway.
The distance to the runway was only about four hundred yards. But between our two tanks and the runway the two skimmers buzzed like frenzied hornets. Their drivers hovered them, and juked them left and right, while their gunners hosed out an ineffectual curtain of needler rounds at us. They could literally run circles around us, but they couldn’t get under our skins. We, on the other hand, could penetrate each skimmer’s skin with our machine guns like it was foil. To say nothing of our cannons.
We rolled forward toward the runway.
In the distance, the pitch of the shuttles engines rose until it overmatched the thunder.
Eighty-nine
Polian peered through his rain-drenched goggles at the two drab-painted vehicles that lumbered toward the skimmer in which he rode. He vaguely recalled seeing something similar to them on a history chip. They were crawler tanks, and not tractors. They had already breached his meticulously designed and executed perimeter.
Tressen riflemen by the dozen dashed by the skimmer, away from the relentless, bellowing behemoths. As the tanks lurched and rumbled, they spit yellow flame from machine guns that protruded, seemingly in all directions at once, from gimbaled mountings set in their sides.
A retreating Tressen ran straight at Polian, looked up with wide eyes and dodged only a blink before he was run down. As the man dashed past, he threw away his rifle, and it clattered off the skimmer’s flank.
Polian reached out and grabbed the man’s arm. “Stop! Pull yourself to—”
Bam-bam-bam-bam.
The man stiffened, and his head snapped back as a burst from a tank machine gun struck him in th
e back. He fell away as the skimmer’s driver sideslipped the craft to dodge the burst.
Polian felt heat in his right thigh, looked down, and saw that a bullet had torn his trouser and grazed his leg.
A neat row of holes stitched the skimmer’s armor, which was effective against the needler rounds a criminal might fire at it back home, but useless against a gunpowder weapon’s heavy bullet.
Another man ran toward him, zigzagging through the rain. This one was an armored Yavi private. He, too, carried no weapon. The private’s face shield was raised, and he panted, wide-eyed, as he threw a leg over the side and rolled into the skimmer’s rear compartment.
Polian turned back to the man, who lay gasping on the floor. “Get up, man! And fight back! You’re wearing armor!”
The man shook his head. “No. Mazzen. They killed Mazzen right through his armor!” The man pointed his index finger against the back of his own neck, like a pistol.
Polian balled his fists, then stared at the oncoming tank. In his mind, he saw Mazzen, good, solid, promising Mazzen. Kneeling while these ghouls executed him with a pistol shot to the back of the head. He muttered, “Bastards!”
Another machine-gun burst, from the tank directly in front of Polian’s skimmer, ripped through the skimmer’s flank on the driver’s side.
The driver screamed, then collapsed forward onto the wheel.
Polian twisted in his seat. One of the crew was gone. Out over the side? Deserted? In this chaos, who knew? The others slumped grotesquely, dead or unconscious.
He slumped himself, dazed, while the unguided skimmer spun slowly in a perpetual left turn, as aimless as his thoughts.
He had failed as a commander. He had failed dead young men of promise like Sandr and Mazzen. He had failed his father, who had admonished him to beware the undercurrents. The only failure that remained to him lay in the future, to betray Gill, the man who had been a better father to him in weeks than his biological father had been in a lifetime.
Polian straightened himself, then dragged the unconscious driver into the rear compartment and slipped behind the skimmer’s wheel himself. He peered out through the skimmer’s spiderweb-cracked windscreen at the tank clanking toward him. Now a figure knelt atop the tank, alongside the slitted, topside forward box. Polian realized that the box housed the driver. The exposed figure was a woman, in Iridian uniform, and she leaned down to shout directions to the blindered box as she pointed ahead with her free hand.
She looked up, and Polian recognized her rain-slicked face from the hospital wanted-poster sketches. Celline. The mythic heart of the rebellion that had now spoiled so much.
Ruberd Polian’s hands gripped the wheel so tightly that it quivered. Then the heat in him receded and a cold rage replaced it. He drew a breath, held it.
Pointing the skimmer’s nose at the tank’s oncoming prow, he rammed the throttles to their forward stops. Acceleration slammed him back against the driver’s seat as the skimmer roared head-on toward the tank and the woman at over sixty miles per hour.
Ninety
As Thunderer One rolled on, I peeked out a side peephole. Thunderer Two was fifty yards closer to the airstrip than we were, hare to our tortoise in the glacial dash to block the shuttle.
The shuttle’s engines, which had crescendoed moments earlier, settled back and purred like a three-hundred-foot-long cat. I had upped ship the old-fashioned way often enough that I knew the pilot had just run his engines up, against the brakes, to test them. Given a shuttle’s checklist—and the Rand followed their checklists as surely as cats purred—that meant we had three minutes before the big ship rolled out for real.
The Yavi had either given up on wasting needler rounds on our armor, or had run out of them. Celline had clambered up onto Thunderer Two’s turtle back and was leading the charge with one arm thrust forward like an animated war memorial.
Maybe you have to be nuts to be a hero. Maybe when people think you’re a hero it drives you nuts. I’m too sane to join the club, so I’ll never know.
Suddenly, Thunderer Two’s bow machine gun, which had been quiet, flashed, firing straight ahead. Celline dropped into a crouch like the tank had become a Trueborn surfboard.
I switched peepholes to see what Celline saw.
A skimmer dead ahead of Thunderer Two streaked straight toward the tank’s prow. It hit a bad air patch inbound, wobbled, and one of the limp Yavis in armor in the rear compartment, who seemed to be reclining in back, bounced up and was catapulted out of the skimmer like a stuffed doll.
Behind Thunderer Two, Celline’s troops scattered and ran.
The skimmer driver hunched over the wheel, his face obscured by the cracks that veined the windscreen. I don’t know whether he was a member of the hero’s club. I do know he was nuts. A skimmer’s listed best military speed is sixty-one miles per hour, but if this one wasn’t making seventy when it hit Thunderer Two, dogs don’t bark.
Four tons traveling at seventy meets thirty tons traveling at five. Kit the college girl was fond of saying that physics were a bitch. So you do the math.
Skimmers are really pretty flimsy, like most things that fly. But their fuel is highly flammable, and the pressurized nitrogen vessels that power the needlers are such bombs in their own right that they’re located inboard, protected by the vehicle frame, and armor plated.
Therefore, when the skimmer hit the tank, pointed prow against pointed prow, the skimmer just seemed to disappear into itself, the way an empty beer can did back at the bar when I stomped it.
Then the compressed lump that remained of the skimmer exploded in a ball of yellow flame that engulfed the front half of Thunderer Two and reached up into the rain higher than a three-story Tressen row house. I saw Celline fly through the air like the stuffed-doll Yavi had; then I lost track of her. The explosion’s heat puffed through my peephole hot enough that I blinked. Then my eye teared.
Seconds later, Thunderer Two sat within a semicircle of flaming metal bits that sizzled as rain washed them. The tank looked exactly as it had before the collision. Except that it was stationary, and silent.
That meant that my tank was the last chance to block the shuttle from taking off and changing the balance of power in the known universe. I dunno. It’s a living.
I shifted in my seat, looked ahead, and dropped my jaw.
The other skimmer sat, hunkered down on its deflated skirt, presenting its left flank to us broadside. It was thirty feet in front of our prow. The half-dozen Yavi in its open cab blazed away with the skimmer’s sidemount needlers, with short-barreled carbines, and one, in the right-hand front seat, with a needler pistol. As the range between the tank and the skimmer closed, the Yavi fired away like it was their last stand.
Which, fifteen seconds later, it was.
Our left track bit the skimmer’s flank first, and we tilted up on the left for a moment; then the skimmer collapsed. I counted five screams. The tank continued on across the pancaked skimmer, rocking front to back and side to side as it crushed one element of the machine after another. Metal groaned and snapped.
I don’t know whether the Yavi had powered down to block us, thinking that four tons squatting would be harder to bulldoze than four hovering tons. Or they had a mechanical. Or they were just nuts. There’s always a lot of nuts-ness going around during a firefight. An unfortunate truth about combat is that your enemy rarely tells you why he did what he did. Especially if he’s dead.
I grabbed a peek and saw the shuttle still stationary, but time had to be short.
We continued to lurch forward toward the runway, but something had hung up on our underside. It howled like a cat from hell as we dragged it, which was merely annoying. But it also slowed us down too much.
Maneuvering a Thunderer was a team sport. Two gearmen behind me had charge of one track each. I signaled the gearmen to reverse the left track, then the right, then repeat. The pattern would twist the tank the way you might twist your foot to scrape something unpleasant off your shoe sole
.
On the second twist, whatever was caught on our sole exploded so violently that it lifted the tank, dropped it, and knocked us all senseless.
“Jazen?”
Kit peered down at me, blue eyes wide.
I lay on my back on my tank’s floor. Behind Kit, light and rain entered the tank’s interior through the open rear left sponson hatch.
I blinked. “What happened?”
“Whatever you were dragging blew. Skimmer nitrogen bottle, I think.”
I looked around. “Crew?”
“Okay, I think. Bells rung. Like you. Most of my platoon, too.”
It suddenly occurred to me that we were inside my tank, but we were talking.
I sat up. “We’re stalled!” There was no time to restart. Besides, I only had one eyebrow left. But I still heard the shuttle’s engines purring steadily in the distance. I couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few seconds.
I pulled myself up by the six-pounder’s mount. “We’ll never get this thing onto the runway in time.”
“You’re right.”
I squinted down the cannon’s coaxial telescopic sight. The shuttle still sat, but as I spoke its engine pitch changed.
Kit said, “Crap. He’s running them up.” She turned and stared down at the six-pounder’s square breechblock. “This thing work?”
I widened my eyes. “We can’t blow up a neutral shuttle! We already talked about this.”
“That was then. This is now. Besides, we won’t blow it up.”
I pointed my index finger from the breechblock along the six-pounder’s barrel to the point where it poked out through the sponson as I raised my eyebrows. “You do see that this is a cannon?”
“We just put one armor-piercing round through one of the landing-gear struts and collapse it. No explosion. The worst case would be maybe a fuel-cell rupture.”
I stood back and crossed my arms. “Seriously?”
She bent and peered through the cannon’s ’scope at the distant shuttle. “It’s only, what? Twenty-two hundred fifty yards?”
Undercurrents Page 26