by David Drake
Hoodoo's crew could repair the tank themselves as they'd done many times in the field, but the job might take anything up to a week. Harding had to decide whether to delay sixteen tanks whose punch was potentially crucial on Beresford, or to risk leaving Hoodoo behind alone to rejoin when Heth and Stegner got her running again.
For the moment Ambiorix seemed as quiet as if Bishop Moses had never had his revelation. Harding had chosen the second option and lifted with the remainder of H Company.
Hoodoo's crew spent the next thirteen hours tracing the fault through the on-board diagnostics, then six more hours pulling the damaged harness and reeving a new one through channels in armor thick enough to deflect all but the most powerful weapons known to man. Then and only then, they had slept.
It was four more days before the tramp freighter hired to carry Hoodoo to Beresford would be ready to lift, but Heth and Stegner could relax once they had the tank running again. Hoodoo's speed, armor, and weaponry meant there was nothing within twenty light-years of Ambiorix to equal her.
And she was about to enter the service of the Mosite Rebellion.
A boarding ladder pivoted from Hoodoo's hull, but Lamartiere walked up the smooth iridium bow slope instead like a real tanker. Local Service Personnel were taught to drive the Slammers' vehicles so that they could ferry them between maintenance and supply stations, freeing the troops for more specialized tasks.
Personal travel on Ambiorix, where roads were bad and often steep, was generally by air-cushion vehicle. A 170-tonne tank didn't handle like a 2-tonne van, but the principle was the same. Most of the LSPs were competent tank drivers, and Lamartiere flattered himself that he was pretty good—at least within the flat confines of the spaceport.
Lamartiere didn't need his stolen electronic key because the driver's hatch wasn't locked. He gripped the handle and slid the curved plate forward, feeling the counterweights move in greasy balance with the massive iridium forging.
He lowered himself into the compartment. The seat was raised for the driver to look out over the hatch coaming instead of viewing the world through the multifunction flat-plate displays that ringed his position.
Lamartiere took a deep breath and switched on Hoodoo's drive fans.
The whine of the powerful impellers coming up to speed told everyone within a kilometer that the tank was in operation, but only the crew and the LSPs with them realized something was wrong. Lamartiere had cut the landlines into the building when he'd gone out earlier "to fetch another bottle".
The maintenance building had barred windows and heavy doors to safeguard the equipment within. Even if those partying inside had been sober, they wouldn't have been able to break out in time to affect the result. No one on base could hear their shouts over the sound of the adjacent tank. They were the least of Lamartiere's problems.
None of Hoodoo's electronics were live, and that was a problem. Lamartiere realized what had happened as soon as he switched on: Heth and Stegner had disabled the systems while they were working on the wiring. They hadn't bothered to reconnect anything but the drive train to test it when they were done. There was probably a panel of circuit breakers in some easily accessible location, but Lamartiere didn't know where it was and he didn't have time to find it now in the dark.
He increased the bite of the fans so that instead of merely spinning they began to pump air into Hoodoo's plenum chamber. The skirts enclosing the chamber were steel, not a flexible material like that used for lighter air-cushion vehicles. These had to support the tank's enormous mass while at rest. They couldn't deform to seal the chamber against irregularities in the ground, but the output of the eight powerful fans driven by a fusion generator made up for the leakage.
Hoodoo shivered as the bubble of air in the plenum chamber reached the pressure required to lift 170 tonnes. The tank hopped twice, spilling air beneath the skirts, then steadied as the flow through the fans increased to match the leakage. She was now floating a finger's breadth above the ground.
Lamartiere moved the control yoke forward. The fan nacelles tilted within the plenum chamber to direct their thrust rearward instead of simply down. Hoodoo moved at a sedate pace, scarcely more than a fast walk, through the shops area toward the spaceport's main gate.
Lamartiere shook violently in relief. He released the control yoke for the moment: the tank's AI would hold their speed and heading, which was all that was required now.
Using both hands, Lamartiere fumbled in a bellows pocket of his coveralls and brought out a hand-held radio stolen from government stores. He keyed it on the set frequency and said, "Star, on the way. Out."
He switched off without waiting for a response. He couldn't hear anything over the intake howl, and it really didn't matter. Whether or not Franciscus and the rest of the outside team were in position, Denis Lamartiere couldn't back out now.
The spaceport perimeter was defended, but the mines, fences, and guard towers were no danger to a supertank. At the main gate, however, was a five-story citadel containing the tactical control center and a pair of 25cm powerguns on dual-purpose mountings. Those weapons could rend a starship in orbit and when raised could bear on every route out of the port. A bolt from one of them would vaporize even Hoodoo's thick iridium armor.
A spur from the four-lane Brione-Carcassone highway fed the spaceport. As Lamartiere drove slowly toward the gate, an air-cushion van and a fourteen-wheel semi turned onto the approach road from the other direction.
There was regular truck traffic to the port: a similar vehicle had just passed the checkpoint and was headed toward the warehouses. Guards at the gate waited for the oncoming semi, chatting and chewing wads of the harsh tobacco grown in Carcassone District.
Hoodoo's drive fans drew a fierce breeze past Lamartiere's face despite the tank's slow forward progress. He backed off the throttle even more. Without the tank's electronics Lamartiere had to keep his head out of the hatch to drive, so he couldn't afford to be too close when the semi reached the gate.
The small van pulled into the ditch beside the road and stopped. The semi accelerated past with the ponderous deliberation its weight made necessary.
Lamartiere watched as Hoodoo crawled forward, waiting for the driver to bail out. The truck continued to accelerate, but no one jumped from the cab. Had Franciscus decided to sacrifice himself, despite Lamartiere's loud refusal to be a part of a suicide mission?
It was too late to back out. If he met Franciscus in Hell, he could object then.
A machine gun on top of the citadel opened fire before any of the guards at the checkpoint appeared to understand what was happening. The gunner deserved full marks for reacting promptly, but his sparkling projectiles were aimed several meters high. A round flashed red when it cut one of the steel hoops supporting the trailer's canvas top, but none hit the cab. It was protected against small-arms anyway.
The driver was definitely going to stay with his vehicle. Lamartiere's stomach turned. Risk was one thing. No God Lamartiere worshipped demanded suicide of Her followers.
A siren called from the Port Operations Center in the center of the base. Half a dozen automatic rifles were firing from the roof and entranceway of the citadel. One of the guards at the checkpoint raked the truck from front to back as it swept past him. Most of his fellows had flung themselves down, though one stood in the guard kiosk and gabbled excitedly into the handset of the landline phone there.
The semi bounced over the shallow ditch—it was for drainage rather than protection—and wobbled across rough grass toward the citadel. The machine gun stopped firing because the target was too close for the gun to bear.
A guard leaned over the roof coping to aim a shoulder-launched antitank rocket but lost his balance in his haste. He bounced against the side of the building halfway down. From there to the ground he and the rocket launcher fell separately.
The semi bit the sloped glacis at the citadel's base.
Lamartiere lowered his seat, even though that meant he was drivin
g blind. The disk of sky above Lamartiere flashed white. The pavement rippled, hitting the base of Hoodoo's skirts an instant before an airborne shockwave twisted the tank sideways. It pounded Lamartiere brutally despite his protected location. Hoodoo straightened under the control of its AI. Lamartiere raised his seat and rocked the control yoke forward with the fans spinning at maximum power. The tank accelerated with the slow certainty of a boulder falling from a cliff .
A pillar of smoke and debris was still rising when Lamartiere lifted his head above the hatch coaming. It was nearly a kilometer high before it topped out into a mushroom and began to rain back on the surroundings. The citadel was a faded dream within the column, a hint of vertical lines within the black corkscrew of destruction.
The semi had vanished utterly. The Mosite Rebellion had never lacked explosives and people to use them expertly. The mines of the Western District had provided most of Ambiorix' off-planet exports in the form of hard coal with trace elements that made it the perfect culture medium for anti-aging drugs produced in the Semiramis Cluster. Ten-year-olds in the mountain villages could set a charge of slurry that would bring down a cliff face—or a two-meter section of it, if that was their intent.
The 25cm guns were housed in pits surrounded by a berm and protective dome, invulnerable until they came into action, but the control system was in the citadel. Eight tonnes of slurry exploding against the glacis wouldn't destroy the structure, but neither the gunnery computers nor their operators would be in working order for at least the next several minutes.
Nothing remained of the checkpoint or the troops who'd been firing from the top of the building. One of the objects spinning out of the mushroom might have been a torso from which the blast had plucked head and limbs.
Hoodoo hit a steel pole with a clang, one of the uprights from the perimeter fencing. The blast had thrown it onto the roadway. Lamartiere ducked without thinking. The reflex saved him from decapitation when a coil of razor wire writhed up the bow slope and hooked under Hoodoo's main gun. A moment later the wire parted with a vicious twang at the end of its stretch, leaving a bright scar on the iridium.
The van that had guided the truck to its destruction now pulled out of the sheltering ditch. A figure hopped from the passenger side of the cab and ran into Hoodoo's path, arms windmilling. What fool was—
Crossed bandoliers flopped as the figure gestured; he carried a slung rifle in addition to the submachine gun in his right had. Colonel Franciscus was identifiable even at night because of his paraphernalia.
If Franciscus was here, who had been driving the truck of explosives? Though that didn't matter, not really, except to the driver's widow or mother.
When Lamartiere realized Franciscus wasn't going to get out of his way, he swore and sank the control yoke in his belly, switching the nacelles' alignment from full rearward to full forward. Even so he was going to overrun the man. Halting the inertia of a 170-tonne mass with thrust alone was no sudden business.
"Idiot!" Lamartiere screamed as he spilled pressure from the vents on top of the plenum chamber. "Idiot!"
Hoodoo skidded ten meters in a dazzle of red sparks ground from the skirts by the concrete roadway. The bow halted just short of Franciscus. The shriek of metal was as painful as the blast a moment before and seemed equally loud.
Franciscus, his clothes smoldering in a dozen places from sparks—perhaps a just God had care of events after all—climbed aboard clumsily, grabbing a headlight bracket with his free hand. He waved the other until Lamartiere grabbed his wrist to keep from being slapped in the face with the submachine gun.
"I'll man the guns!" Franciscus shouted over the roar of the fans. He started climbing upward, this time grasping the muzzle of the stubby 20cm main gun.
"They don't work!" Lamartiere said. The vents slapped closed. He raised the yoke to vertical for a moment, building pressure before he started accelerating again. The air was harsh and dry with lime burned from the concrete by friction. "You should have stayed with the van!"
Franciscus couldn't hear him. He would have ignored the comment anyway, as he seemed to ignore everything but his own will and direct orders from Father Renaud, the spiritual head of the Company of Death.
Lamartiere needed to concentrate on his driving.
The van sprinted off now that Franciscus had boarded the tank. It had been supposed to pick up the semi's driver; there was no longer any reason for its presence.
The van's relatively high power-to-weight ratio allowed it to accelerate faster than Hoodoo, but air resistance limited the lighter vehicle's top speed to under a hundred kph. With the correct surface and time to accelerate, Hoodoo could easily double that rate.
Neither vehicle outsped gunshots, but the tank could shrug them off. If the government forces were even half-awake, for the van to wait while Franciscus played games had been a very bad idea.
Franciscus was shouting something about the hatch. It might be locked, but Lamartiere suspected the colonel was just trying to open it in the wrong direction, pushing it back instead of pulling it open. There was nothing the driver could do until—
Shells rang off Hoodoo's rear hull. Rounds that missed sailed past, the tracers golden in the night air, and exploded in red pulses on the westbound lanes of the highway ahead.
If the tank's screens had been live, Lamartiere could have seen what was happening behind him without even turning his head. Now his choice was to ignore the pursuit or to swing the tank sideways so that he could see past the turret.
He twisted the yoke. The pursuers might have antitank missiles as well as automatic cannon, and even cannon could riddle the skirts and ground Hoodoo as surely as if they'd shot out her fan nacelles.
Two of the air-cushion vehicles that patrolled the perimeter fence had followed Hoodoo out of the spaceport. They had no armor to speak of, but they were fast and the guns in their small turrets had a range of several kilometers.
Because Hoodoo turned the next burst missed her, but red flashes ate across the back of the van. It flipped on edge and cartwheeled twice before the fuel cell ruptured. Lamartiere ducked as he drove through the fireball. He smelled flesh burning, but at least he couldn't hear the screams.
Franciscus must have opened the turret hatch because the flow past Lamartiere's chest and legs increased violently. The cross-draft cut off a moment later as Franciscus closed the cupola behind him.
Now that the colonel was clear, Lamartiere braked the tank at the end of the access road. Cannon shells crossed in front of him, then slapped both sides of the turret as the gunners adjusted. Hoodoo roared across the highway's eastbound lanes on inertia.
Lamartiere dumped pressure on the median, grounding in a gulp of yellow-gray soil far less spectacular than the sparks on the concrete. The tank pitched violently. Franciscus screamed in fury as he bounced around the fighting compartment, but Lamartiere had strapped in by habit.
He closed the vents and rotated Hoodoo clockwise. One of the patrol cars was trying to swing around their right side. It brushed the tank's bow and disintegrated as though it had hit a granite cuff. Building speed again, Lamartiere brought Hoodoo in line after the remaining government vehicle.
The minuscule bump might have been dirt, part of the patrol car, or the corpse of a government soldier. It made no difference after it passed beneath the tank's skirts.
They crossed the northern lanes of the highway, driving into the brush that grew on arid soil. If the car's driver had been thinking clearly, he'd have doubled back immediately and used his agility to escape. He'd panicked when he changed from hunter to hunted, though, and he tried to outrun the tank.
The gunner rotated his turret halfway, then gave it up as a bad job. A side door opened. The gunner jumped out, hit a thorn tree, and hung there impaled before Hoodoo's skirts ran him under.
The tank was pitching because of irregularities in the surface, but brush thick enough to slow the patrol car had no effect on 170 tonnes. The driver looked back over his shoul
der an instant before Hoodoo crushed car and driver both. Lamartiere had only a glimpse of staring eyes and the teeth that framed the screaming mouth.
There were no more immediate enemies. Lamartiere angled Hoodoo's bow to the northwest. He should hit a road after a kilometer or so of brush busting. The mountains were within a hundred kilometers on this heading; Pamiers, his destination, was only another eighty kilometers beyond. He'd have Hoodoo under cover before government troops could mount a pursuit.
They'd won. He'd won.
In the fighting compartment behind Lamartiere, Franciscus swore in darkness. He was unable even to reopen the cupola hatch.
Pamiers had been shelled repeatedly since the start of the rebellion, and once a government column had taken out its frustration at recent sniping by burning every building in the village. Besides, a city resident like Lamartiere wouldn't have been impressed by the place on its best day.
The locals seemed happy, though. Children played shrilly on the steep hillside. They'd wanted to stay beside the tank, but that would have given away Hoodoo's location. Women chatted as they hung laundry or cooked on outdoor stoves. The flapping clothes made bright primary contrasts with the general coal-dust black of the landscape.
Hoodoo stood at the north side of a tailings pile, covered by a camouflage tarpaulin with the same thermal signature as bare ground. Lamartiere had heard reconnaissance aircraft twice this morning. If the government learned where Hoodoo was, they would come for her; but government troops only entered the mountains when they were in overwhelming force, and even that had a way of being risky.
"I'm not an engineer," Dr. Clargue muttered from the driver's compartment. "I'm a medical man. I should not be here!"