"I figure twenty, twenty-five hostiles and a pair of mortars," I told the squad. "Anybody got the boppers targeted?"
"On it, Sarge," White Cloud answered.
"Show us."
White Cloud snaked out of his crevasse. He was a Dinneh Apache from the Badlands who had developed a taste for firewater and civilized warfare. Aiming the bulky Gauss gun, he fired two quick shots. The whining cracks echoed from the cliffs to our right. Two puffs of snow were kicked up on the top of the rampart. Then White Cloud was chased back into his hole by a flock of slugs.
"All right, it's hero time!" I growled. "You know the drill! On my mark. . cover fire!"
Toglog's Enforcer coughed twice. The grenades chewed a piece out of the rampart where one of the snow puffs had been. Reloading, he took out the second mortar. Part of a combat-suited body tumbled down the slope, staining the snow red in its wake. Meanwhile White Cloud was working on the sniper positions.
"Charge! I ordered. Instead of going around the boulder, which might have been expected, I went over the top. Then I zigzagged up the slope, using what cover there was.
A slug glancing off my thick torso Nemourlon knocked me down. I jumped back up and kept going. Spotting the hijacker, I drove him back behind his rock with a burst from my Kalashnikov.
Ski, Preacher and Schmidt were tight behind me, adding their fire. I figured to punch through the ambush straight ahead, then hit it from the flank and roll it up.
Two hijackers reared up to throw grenades. White Cloud picked one off, and Schmidt cut the other in half with a clip-emptying burst. The exploding grenades removed any doubt.
Then the ground shook.
Not another tremor, but a full-blown quake that rumbled for at least ten seconds. Everybody was knocked down. Snow slid and boulders rolled.
A fifty-meter chunk of the rampart crumbled. Three hijackers on top tried to get clear, but they didn't make it. The pool of lava behind the rampart poured through the gap like water through a broken dam. The snow in its path exploded into steam.
The lava flow was heading for Toglog and White Cloud. Toglog scrambled up the slope toward us, and barely avoided a very hot bath. But White Cloud was closer to the rampart. Facing the onrushing fiery red river, he waved the Gauss gun over his head and yelled in Apache. Probably swearing.
The lava rolled over him, and he was gone. I wondered what it felt like.
A rifle slug at my feet reminded me that I wasn't here on a tour. I spun, spotted the sniper kneeling behind a rock, and blew out his helmet with a luck shot.
Gesturing with my Kalashnikov for the squad to follow, I started up the slope again. Ski and Preacher flanked me to the right, Toglog and Schmidt to the left. Grenades hurtled down. We picked them off in mid-air. The explosions kicked up a snow-screen which hid us for a few seconds.
Bursting through it, I saw that the nine surviving hijackers on this side of the lava river had assembled about a hundred meters upslope. That suited me just fine.
"Grenades!" I ordered.
Yanking a grenade from my belt, I threw it high and hard. Ski, Preacher and Schmidt did the same, and the Enforcer coughed. The hijackers bagged a few of the grenades, but the rest went off around and among them. Bits of equipment and bodies shot out of the pink-tinted cloud. Four hijackers dove for cover and laid down withering fire. One writhed on the snow, screaming.
We hugged ground to avoid the storm of depleted uranium slugs. I popped up long enough to finish off the wounded hijacker, and caught a bell-ringing ricochet off the side of my helmet for my trouble.
Time to finish this. "Fix bayonets!" I ordered. I hoped the hijackers were still monitoring our transmissions.
I clipped my knife to the end of my Kalashnikov's barrel, and added a three count for molasses-slow Toglog. Then I growled, "Over the top!"
I jumped up and ran flat out right at the hijackers, bayonet first. The deep snow was like quicksand under my driving legs. I heard the squad tight behind, yelling in four languages.
The hijackers' rifles spat desperately at us. A few ricochets felt like punches from the Fleet champ, but there were none of the clean hits needed to penetrate body armor. Not surprising. The sight of five red-flickering bayonets charging was enough to put a twitch in the most case-hardened marksman.
The hijackers were wearing combat suits like ours, only khaki instead of white. I targeted the big bruiser who seemed to be in command. He sidestepped my lunge, then clubbed me in the back with his rifle butt. I slipped and fell.
He was bringing the rifle to bear on my helmet as I rolled over. Too slow. I shoved my bayonet into his belly button, and eviscerated him with a Saigon Slice. He dropped on top of his steaming guts.
Getting up, I looked around to see who needed help. But it was all over. The other hijackers were down. So was Preacher; a full-auto burst had turned his chest into spaghetti with meat sauce. Ski, Toglog and Schmidt were cleaning their knives.
"What about the ones on the other side of the lava, Sarge?" Ski asked.
There were probably two or three of them, hidden by the clouds of steam. "Not a factor," I told him. "We'll be long gone before they can hike around it. Everybody ambulatory?"
We all had bullet and shrapnel wounds in non-vital areas, where our Nemourlon was thinner. Blood was still leaking from some of them. Schmidt was limping, and we were all dragging ass. But I got three affirmatives.
"Fall out for first aid," I ordered. Getting out my medkit, I patched my holes and gulped a keep-going pill. The others did the same. I kept a wary eye out for more trouble, but didn't spot any.
Ski and Schmidt, out of ammo, rearmed themselves with Skoda assault rifles, bandoliers and grenades that the hijackers wouldn't be needing anymore. "Who do you figure these guys were, Sarge?" Ski asked.
Unit patches had been cut off the khaki combat suits. "Mercs. Not a front-line outfit like Falkenberg's-not the way they pulled off this ambush."
"Too bad we didn't keep one alive," Toglog grunted. "We could have gotten him to guide us to his base."
"Mercs have a well-earned rep for stubbornness."
"My people have ways to make still tongues wag."
"There's a wagging one I'd like to still." I shouldered my Kalashnikov. "Saddle up, grunts! Time to get back in the war! I'm on point-Ski, take the rear!"
"On it, Sarge."
The blizzard started to pick up again. The air was thick with ash, and it stank of sulphur even after filtering. I plodded to the crest of the slope, with the squad strung out behind me. Then we slipped and slid down the steeper far side into another raw, broken gorge.
As we followed a boiling stream, I dropped back beside Ski and jacked my com line into his helmet.
"Why the private conversation, Sarge?" he asked.
"The hijackers couldn't have known for sure what they were going up against. They have heavy weapons, yet the ambush was strictly infantry."
"So?"
"So the ambushers must have been a ready-reaction force. Since they couldn't handle us, the real hammer should be in place by now, waiting for us."
Ski licked his lips in anticipation. "Up ahead, where the gorge widens into what looks like an old crater floor? Coming out we would be sitting ducks."
I nodded. "If I were the hijacker commander, that's where I'd hit us. So I'm going to take Schmidt and throw a surprise party of my own. You and Toglog keep going like you don't know any better, with lots of com yack. But go slow. When you reach the end of the gorge, take cover until we spring our surprise. Then join the party."
"On it, Sarge."
I had a private yack with Schmidt, while Ski did the same with Toglog. Then Schmidt and I headed for the left wall of the gorge.
It was about eighty meters high and damned steep, but shot with enough cracks and ledges to make climbing possible. We pressed flat against the glossy black igneous rock to keep from being blown off, and an aftershock from the quake almost knocked us off anyway. Even with the pill's boost it was hard going
; my glow had spawned a golden haze. Schmidt and I communicated by Marine hand-talk.
We reached the top, a wind-polished plateau that looked like the loneliest spot on Haven. The blizzard and the slick surface made running hard, but we did the best we could, paralleling Ski's and Toglog's trail until we caught up with and passed them.
We finally came to the end of the plateau. Dropping flat, we crawled to the edge and peered down through the snow and ash. A half-kilometer circle of chopped-up tundra was surrounded by low mounds; beyond it a row of young volcanoes belched lava, smoke and hellish light. But the scenery didn't interest me nearly as much as the hijacker force deployed around the gorge's mouth.
Forty or so soldiers were dug in, with two mortars and three.50 caliber machine guns among the riflemen. Backing them up were the two APCs they had come in, and a T-680 tank.
I jacked my com into Schmidt's. "I brought you along, because you've had heavy weapons training. Think you can handle the T-680's gun?"
Schmidt smiled thinly. "I have panzer diesel in my blood. But how do you plan to arrange the opportunity? Are we going to surround them?"
"Something like that. Did you have your usual sauerkraut for breakfast?" I shuddered at the thought.
"Of course," he answered, puzzled.
"Good. Give me your suit's fecal bag."
He handed it over, looking even more puzzled. I clipped it to my belt. Unjacking, I ordered, "Move out," in hand-talk.
We crept down the steep slope behind the hijacker force. We were in their fine of sight, but our suits blended well with the snow, and they weren't expecting company from our direction. Nobody seemed to notice us.
Down on the tundra I signed Schmidt his orders. He took cover behind a rock outcrop, and I started crawling toward the T-680. I had learned infiltration in a school where the diploma was continued respiration. I became part of the snow-covered ground: cold, hard and silent. Soon the tank loomed over me like a fortress of duralloy and reactive armor. It had an anti-personnel sensor, but I hoped the local conditions were confusing it.
They must have been, because I reached the shadow between the tracks without eating a shell. The idling engine sounded like a huge carnivore's growling. I hunted along the low duralloy roof, until I found what I was looking for: the environmental air intake. Quickly I squeezed the contents of Schmidt's fecal bag and my own through the grating.
The filter system wasn't designed to cope with shit, and the T-680 wouldn't be on inboard air because it wasn't engaged. The two man crew would be wondering what they had parked over. If they weren't too worried about the opposition, they might-
Yeah. I heard the turret hatch pop, hobnail boots stomping down the treadshield, thudding into the snow. I slid my knife from its sheath, as a pair of khaki-suited legs walked around to the back.
When the hijacker leaned over to take a look, I uncoiled like a striking rattler. The finely honed carbon steel blade cleaved the thin Nemourlon below the hijacker's neck ring, and the throat behind it. Blood from his mouth sprayed over the inside of his helmet. With a bubbling sigh he folded into the snow.
Knife in hand, I retraced his steps and started up the T-680"s flank. I had to get to the hatch before the remaining tanker caught on and buttoned up. I reached the top of the turret, when a slug spranged off the camo-finished duralloy between my legs.
Three hijackers were running toward me, firing bursts from their Skodas as they came. More depleted uranium hammered the duralloy around me. They must have alerted the tanker because the hatch started closing.
A slug punched through the Nemourlon, skin and muscle over my right hip. The sharp thrill energized me. I scrambled to the hatch. Three shots rang out from Schmidt's rock, and the hijackers went down. But others weren't far behind. I dove through the last sliver of hatchway.
The interior of the T-680 was dim, cramped, and mostly hard edges that I hit on my way down. A sidearm barked. Slugs bounced off my chest armor, ricocheting around the interior. I landed on something soft: the tanker. I brought my knife up to cut his throat, but wiped it clean and sheathed it instead. One of his own tumbling slugs had taken the back of his head off.
I heard somebody climbing up the outside, and unlimbered my Kalashnikov to welcome him. But it was Schmidt who jumped down from the hatchway. "Button up, Sarge!" he snapped. "Company on my heels!"
Slugs clanged futilely against the T-680's armor, punctuating his warning.
I slid into the driver's seat, while Schmidt climbed back up to the turret. I hadn't played tanker for a long time, but it was like riding a bike. I buttoned the T-680 up. Ignoring the angry banging of rifle butts on the hatch, I took off my helmet. The thick reek of shit and dead meat was like perfume.
"Ready for action?" I yelled over the engine rumbling.
"Ja!" Schmidt had taken his helmet off too.
Grenade explosions slammed us, but it would take a lot more than that to damage a T-680. "Engaging!" I yelled. "Take out the APCs!"
I put on the driver's VR helmet; the view was like I was outside, except for the superimposed displays. Two hijackers were trying to plant their grenades under the left tread. My hands and feet worked controls by touch. The T-680 lurched back, twisted, and lunged Forward. The hijackers became red stains on the tread they had been trying to blow.
Through the swirling snow I spotted both APCs closing in, hoping to recapture or at least disable their prime piece of armament. The remaining riflemen cautiously flanked them, while the mortars and machine guns were frantically being repositioned. The T-680 shuddered as the APCs'.50 calibers tried to cut a tread; the only damage they could hope to inflict.
I spun the T-680 and charged them. If Schmidt couldn't hit them, I was going to try to run them over. The turret traversed. The tank shook from the cannon's recoil. A fireball erupted a handful of meters behind the lead APC, spewing smoke and steam, leaving a pool-sized crater. Two hijacker riflemen didn't exist anymore; the rest were running for the gorge mouth.
"Pretty sloppy shooting, grunt!" I yelled up at Schmidt. "Maybe they will laugh themselves to death!"
The APCs were curving away from us in opposite directions. The cannon roared again, and a near-miss knocked the lead APC on its side. A third round blew it sky-high in a beautiful mushroom of orange flame and black smoke.
"I might make a soldier out of you yet!" I yelled.
The fleeing hijackers ran into more trouble. Grenades and sharpshooting cut down the first six, driving the rest to cover near the gorge's mouth. Ski and Toglog had joined the party.
The remaining APC was hightailing it at max speed. Schmidt was firing as quickly as he could reload. The first four shells missed the zigzagging target, but the fifth nailed it.
I swung the T-680 around. A quake opened a crack in the tundra in front of us, but we jumped it before it got too wide. Ash from the line of volcanos was turning the snow black. The surviving dozen or so hijackers, caught between Ski and Toglog and us, were digging in for a last stand around the mortars and machine guns. Nobody was trying to surrender, which was smart, because we weren't taking any prisoners.
Switching to the twin anti-personnel machine guns, Schmidt scythed the hijacker position. Slugs from their.50 calibers and Skodas rattled off the T-680's armor, while mortar shells hammered it. All they accomplished was to throw off Schmidt's aim and to get me a refresher course in kraut obscenity.
The turret kept traversing, and the anti-personnel guns kept buzzing. Snow and frozen ground erupted. Hardware crumpled. Bodies shredded. The position was pretty well reduced by the time we reached it, but I rolled over it a few times to make sure.
I spotted a white-suited figure limping from the gorge's mouth, and drove over. It was Toglog. Stopping in front of him, I popped the turret hatch. "Schmidt, get rid of the tanker corpse and help Toglog in!"
"Ja, Sarge!"
Toglog had acquired a few more minor wounds, and he was packing a Skoda instead of his Enforcer. "Grenades all used up!" he explained as we pat
ched ourselves and gulped more keep-going pills. It was a good thing that we had transport again; we were all running down despite the pills.
"What happened to Ski?" I growled at Toglog.
"One of the.50 calibers carved him from head to toe! Fine weapons-too bad you crunched them!"
"You would want to stagger into combat carrying a field piece! Forget it! The run and games are over, you yahoos-time to do the job we came to do!"
"We still don't have anybody to ask where the base is!"
"Don't need to!" I tapped buttons on the command console, and a map appeared on the tac screen. "The auto-con will show us!"
Following the map course, we set out for the hijackers' base. I drove, and Schmidt stood by in the turret just in case. Toglog didn't like the cramped quarters; he rode on top of the turret, enjoying the scenery.
Rounding the volcanos, the T-680 wove through a region of geysers and hot springs. Blasts of steam turned the tank's interior into an oven. The hijacker force's outbound tracks had been covered by fresh snow, and visibility was down to a handful of meters, so I had to rely mostly on the auto-con. Picking a way through the rough, dangerous terrain kept me pretty busy.
"Expecting another attack, Sarge?" Schmidt asked.
"It's the one you don't expect that fries your ass! Keep your eyes open, and that wound under your mustache zipped!"
But the trip was uneventful, except for a few quakes, avalanches, crevasses, and a hail of lava chunks that almost knocked Toglog off the turret. I could see how the hijackers had managed to operate here so long without being discovered. What I couldn't see was how they managed to operate here at all.
The T-680 climbed through a pass in a nuked-looking ridge. In the middle of the snowbound lava field beyond, I could make out a lone dome-shaped hill. There were streams and some vegetation on its lower slopes, but the wind kept the glossy black summit swept clear.
"According to the auto-con," I yelled, "that's our target!"
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