“Shogun Six, this is Phantom One. Just spotted a pig at the end of Isen.”
“Got it, Phantom. Tagged.”
We waited. I could only pray that the nearby building fires were screwing up their thermal.
I could hear our gunner above me. Blanchard was breathing heavy as he tracked the combat car. Our 60mm autocannon hadn’t had much luck penetrating even their smaller vehicles, especially not from the front. On the other hand their tribarrels would rip right through any part of our Lynx like it was made out of paper. Come on . . .
It was hot. Beneath my armor, I was drenched with sweat. My sinuses were filled with the stink of carbon and blood. I was so tired it took a moment to remember where the rotting blood stink had come from. That’s right. It was the same reason there was a hole in the driver’s compartment I could see a beam of daylight through, and why we’d just picked up a replacement driver. In the heat of the moment I’d already called Cainho by the wrong name a couple of times, but Haarde was dead . . . What . . . Two days? Three? They’d bled together. I couldn’t remember.
“Keep moving, asshole,” Cainho begged. “Nothing to see here.”
Like their big tanks, the Slammers’ combat cars were hover vehicles. I imagine they had to be really loud inside, floating on top of all those powerful fans. Our Lynx ran on rubberized tracks and had a small thorium reactor, so it was actually a pretty quiet ride. The combat cars had more human eyes manning guns all the way around, but their sensor suites didn’t seem as good as the heavies, and not nearly as good as ours.
The one thing my home planet was good at was tech, much of it designed by my family’s company. Moravia was great at designing sensor suites, which meant we got fantastic recordings of us getting our asses handed to us by the mercs with the heavier armor and bigger guns.
The combat car flashed past the holes and sped down the street in the opposite direction.
We could all hear the rumbling thunder of artillery through our thin armor. They were dropping shells on the tank. Red dots rained down my display, but one by one they flashed out of existence as the tank picked the shells out of the sky with its 2 cm air defense system. Cyan bolts flew upward and explosions ripped across the air.
Something get through. Something.
The last red dot disappeared.
“Blood and martyrs,” Blanchard snarled from the turret. The gunner’s targeting displays had told him the same story. “Can’t anything hurt these fuckers?”
“I heard a guy in the 6th rushed one with a satchel charge and tossed it under the fans,” Cainho said as he maneuvered the Lynx around wrecked cars and rubble. “Blew it all to hell.”
“Wishful thinking. They’ve got a point defense system for infantry too,” I told my crew. “If that story’s true, it’s only because that tank was broken. A combat car, maybe.”
The symbol of the tank disappeared from my map. The AI could no longer tell with certainty where it had gone. It could make logical predictions, but the mercenaries had figured that out first day, and were being annoyingly unpredictable. They were clever like that.
“Shit,” Blanchard said. A missing tank meant they were going to make us go looking for it again.
“Phantom.” They didn’t bother with our full call sign, because Phantom Two through Six were gone, all lost over the last twenty furious hours. It turns out when a soft little scout got hit with a Hellbore there wasn’t much left. “This is Shogun Six. We need eyes on that tank.”
“Keep your pants on, asshole.” That wasn’t for the command channel. That frustrated muttering was for my personal gratification. Shogun Six was twenty klicks from this slaughter. The AI might not know where that tank had gone, but my gut knew. It was waiting to pop us. The sensors on their big tanks were ridiculously good. I needed to look at the terrain models of this disintegrating city and figure out how to approach without getting our asses vaporized.
“3rd Armored is approaching the east end of the park. They need to know where that heavy is.”
The interior of the Lynx was tight. My compartment was worse. A lot of scout tank commanders liked to get their heads out of the cupola, thinking that made them more aware of their surroundings, and their visor would keep them up with the computer’s feeds, but that was a trick. That was them lying to themselves. The sensor suite provided too much information, and most commanders found it overwhelming being bombarded by that much info for long. I’d been so plugged in and fried by the last few days of fighting, that I had the opposite problem. I was scared to unplug.
“There. You see the path, Cainho?”
“Got it, Vaerst.” The new driver was excellent. He should be. Like me, he’d been fighting royalists since half the army had said enough with this tyrannical bullshit and the first shots were fired at Bangoran. He’d been an experienced tank commander himself up until a few days ago, when he’d had to bail out after his vehicle had been set ablaze by a tribarrel. The rest of his crew hadn’t made it out. “You know, 3rd is only running some cobbled together surplus.”
In other words, they were as doomed as everyone else they’d thrown against these merciless bastards.
“3rd is driving Pumas. Our 60mm barely scratches the paint. We have to get real lucky to do any damage, but those have 120mm guns. A good shot might punch one of those land whales,” Blanchard said hopefully.
“Yeah . . . Well, let’s find them a target.”
Who were we kidding? The Slammer tanks were 170-ton iridium wrecking balls with guns that could shoot down satellites. Dad hadn’t been kidding. They were running the most advanced armored vehicles in history. Even their light combat cars weighed nearly twice what our Lynx did.
The kingdom’s hardware was obsolete garbage in comparison. Our software was good. Our systems were good. Our soldiers were tough. But hell, I might as well say we had truth and justice on our side too, since it turned out that all meant jack and shit when the bolts began to fly.
While Cainho moved us to the next hiding place, I expanded out the map until I could see the entire Moravian coast. That was one of the dangers of being too plugged in, too aware. Curiosity.
We were getting crushed.
“The Slammers are really that good?”
“They’re the best,” Dad said. “Alois Hammer has put together one of the most successful fighting outfits in human history. No bullshit, no politics, no ass kissing. They don’t play games, they don’t have to make anybody happy. They agree to a mission, sign a contract, then they fill it. They’re very good at that. Maybe the best there’s ever been. And sadly for us, they’ve landed in the west.”
“They can’t be that good.” Oh, how naïve I’d been back then. I’d seen some combat by that point, so I thought I knew a thing or two about war. My brothers were fighting for liberty, for our families, and for each other. I couldn’t comprehend someone fighting just for money. “Only honorless scum would fight for anyone as evil as King Soboth!”
But Dad was wise, and he just shook his head sadly. “It isn’t about good or evil to them. Hammer doesn’t give a damn about Soboth beyond the fact the man is willing to mortgage a planet to save his crown. They only care about completing the mission and getting paid. Most of their trigger pullers won’t even bother to read the briefings to learn what each side believes in, just which color uniform they’re supposed to shoot. They’ve done it on plenty of other worlds, and they’ll do it again somewhere else when they’re done here.”
“Not if we beat them.”
Dad just laughed.
I watched the displays in horror as 3rd Armored was ripped to pieces.
The old Pumas crashed through the trees of Grand Park, big guns booming. The Slammers’ tanks were moving across the grass, far too fast, and every time one of those 20 cm Hellbores went off in a blinding flash, another one of our tanks turned into an expanding ball of plasma. The combat cars were darting about, using the terrain, popping over rises to rip off bursts from their tribarrels. They were concentrati
ng on our infantry. Rockets and small arms fire were lancing out from the surrounding buildings’ windows, but the tribarrels responded and ripped those facades into concrete dust.
“Shogun Six, this is Phantom. Targets are marked.”
But there was no response, just dead air. I pulled back the screens. Shogun was gone, icon blinking red. The artillery battery was overrun. I didn’t even know where those attackers had come from. No time to think about it. We were on our own.
A warning pinged, but Cainho’s instincts had kicked in even before the AI had decided we were in danger and our Lynx was already scooting backward down the hill. A combat car was flying across the lake in a huge spray. Water exploded into steam as molten bolts lashed out and tore apart the rocks we’d been hiding behind. Flaming gravel clanged against our armor. That’s about all it was good for.
There was nobody left to spot for. That fucking combat car had been chasing us all morning, and it was used to us running away. It would be expecting more of the same. As Cainho reversed us through the manicured flowerbeds, crushing carved topiary beneath our treads, I flagged a new course for him. “Come around the bottom of the hill.” Using the terrain, we could stay low until the last second. “Blanchard, shoot that pig in the ass.”
The Lynx hit the bottom and turned on a dime. The combat car would be climbing the hill. The AI told me that it was unlikely the pig would silhouette itself on that hill, even for a second, but I knew the AI was wrong. We’d been an annoyance. They wanted us dead, and they would figure if they risked climbing, they could get a few shots at us while we scurried for cover.
We swung around the bushes and every warning ping we had went off at once. Sure enough, the combat car was above us, tilting across the blasted rocks. By the time I shouted “Fire!” Blanchard had already launched the first burst right into their fighting compartment. The rounds that hit the iridium armor left orange glowing dents, but the ones that entered fragmented inside and caused the vehicle to puke fire. Blanchard kept the triggers mashed, raking 60mm AP into that pig. A severed arm sailed through the air. An empty helmet bounced down the hill.
The combat car began to skew sideways. One of the tribarrels was cranking our way, but the edge of its skirts ground on the rocks, and the blast of air pressure suddenly drove one side of the pig into the dirt. The tribarrel fired wildly. Cyan flashes ripped burning holes into the grass towards us. “Pull back,” I ordered. Cainho calmly reversed as Blanchard kept shooting. The helmet crunched beneath our treads. The gunner was so focused on killing that pig that his last few rounds hit nothing but the earthen berm we were now hiding behind.
We’d only been in the open for a moment, but already other things were vectoring in to kill us. The compartment was filled with powder smoke. Fans were blowing and the respirator in my helmet had kicked in. I tagged another route, keeping our head down, using the streambed and drainage culverts, and before I was even done, Cainho had us tearing across the park, quickly accelerating to sixty KPH. Considering the state of the ground, it was stupidly fast, but if we slowed down, we were dead.
There was an explosion from the top of the hill. Something had cooked off. We’d killed a Slammer’s combat car. We’d actually done it. I had nobody to call that in to, and by the time I checked the screens, the twenty Puma tanks of 3rd Armored were all dead.
I had never seen my father like this. Even though we’d fought hard, built an army, hell, built a whole government, overthrown a king, and beat the wretched royalists, it was like he already knew we’d been defeated.
“Our only hope is to wear them down. Attrition. The people are on our side. The king will get what he paid for, but not a peso more. Hit and run, bleed them as they bleed us. To Alois Hammer this planet is just an entry on a profit and loss statement, but it is our fucking home.”
He didn’t sound convinced.
“I’m sorry, Captain Vaerst. Your father is dead.”
I’d been plugged into the Lynx’s systems continually for so many days that actual face-to-face human communication took a while to sink in. I stared at the Major for a really long time, not understanding the words coming out of his mouth. There were no symbols, flashes, lines of movement and terrain paths, AI estimates, pings for threats, or stress load outs. All I could communicate now were tanks, how to keep mine alive, and how to make theirs dead, fast. It was like I was stuck in high gear and couldn’t downshift.
“He was murdered by royalists during peace talks at the palace.” The major rested one gentle hand on my armored shoulder, taking my dimwitted exhaustion for shock. He patted me. “There, there.” And it raised a cloud of dust. “We can take you off the line until we know what’s going to happen in the capitol.”
That was meant to be comforting, but I didn’t . . . couldn’t get comfort. For the last three weeks I’d fought in my tank, slept in my tank, shit through a chute in the bottom of my tank, drank from a tube in my tank, and ate ration bars that were occasionally dropped through the open cupola of my tank whenever we stopped to resupply. So I just stared at the major, unblinking, until he took his hand away.
“Or not . . . That’s fine, Captain. The battalion is falling back toward the river today. Carry on.” He unconsciously wiped the dirt on his hand on his fatigue pants as he walked away.
I went back to my tank.
Cainho was asleep in the shade between the treads. Blanchard was painting another marking on the Lynx’s battered turret. The sixteen red vehicles were royalists. The four black ones were Slammers. According to the screens—and the screens were my whole world now—nobody else had pulled off anything close to that. Sadly, every Slammers vehicle could paint a board like this . . . If they even bothered to count us.
But I didn’t care. I just wanted to sleep.
“You know what they’re saying about our little Lynx around camp? Too cute to die, too deadly to live. We’re one tank, but they’re calling us Task Force Phantom, all by ourselves . . . Good girl,” Blanchard said, touching the turret with more actual love and kindness than the major had just shown me. “Word is they saw a Heavy in the forest fifteen minutes ago, Cap.”
I wasn’t plugged in. I’d missed that ping. Weird.
“Before this is over, I really want to paint a heavy kill on here,” Blanchard said wistfully as he put away the stencil and spray can. We’d replaced the 60mm autocannon with a 3 cm power gun we’d looted off a Palace Guard wreck a week ago. It was a hell of a lot of gun for such a little tank. The main differences were that we killed things better now, but the compartment always smelled like melting plastic instead of burning carbon. I kind of missed the carbon smoke. “Did I tell you they blew up my town, Cap?”
Blanchard had taken that hard. “Yeah, man. I know.” He didn’t need to tell me. I’d been there with him when it had happened.
“Whole damned town . . . Sniper fires from a window, they blow up the whole town. You don’t need to blow up a whole town. That’s overreaction. That’s just plain rude. I really want to paint a black heavy on here.”
“Let’s go find one for you then.” I thumped Cainho’s leg with my boot.
He snorted and woke right up. “Any news?” our driver asked immediately.
“Something about the capitol . . . My dad . . .” Neither of those things was near this camp or this forest, so it was out of my hands. I popped a couple of Stay Awake pills. “I don’t know . . . Let’s go.”
Once I got my helmet on the AI booted up, I could see clearly again. Fox company was in the north of Glad Wood, and they’d tagged a heavy. It only took a few seconds of running probabilities to see the mercs intended to seize the bridges at Constantine. I flagged it, but our chain of command had fallen apart, and our orders were a mismatched bunch of panicked gibberish. They sounded like squawking chickens over the net. They were sure upset about something.
It didn’t matter. We’d just do what we always did. Harass the shit out of the other side, murder them when given the opportunity, and then run away to do it
again later.
I checked the grids, the tank stats—the chameleon projector needed to be replaced soon—the tactical maps, expanding out further and further until I could see the whole war. It wasn’t until I watched the news footage of the mob beating and kicking my father, and then clumsily hacking at him with a golden sword that it finally registered.
This was what it felt like to lose a war.
My father knew that night why we wouldn’t win.
I didn’t understand until later. When my little tank was broken and full of holes, and I was bleeding, wading through the mud, dragging my burned gunner away, and that giant fucking monster tank came over the rise, riding on a dozen tornadoes, and it aimed that giant space gun right down at us, and blinded us with a spotlight, like some wrathful ancient war god . . . and as we stood there blind, battered by the wind, being weighed and measured and found wanting, then I knew too.
I spent the next few years in prison, mulling over the reasons we lost.
My father wasn’t a real general. He was a businessman who got rich designing and exporting sensor packages for military vehicles, who could give a rousing speech, and who had the balls to stand up against a tyrannical lunatic. But he never wanted to make war.
Alois Hammer was born to make war.
I was a soldier. Everyone here knows my service record, but I was nobody. I knew heroes. Real heroes. I saw our best and brightest fight for what they believed in . . . and I watched them die.
Onward, Drake! - eARC Page 26