Chapter Three

Callsign Charlie Three-zero hit halfway up the berm's two-meter height. Holman had the beast still accelerating at the point of impact.

Even though Wager'd seen it coming and had tried to brace himself, the collision hurled his chest against the hatch coaming. His clamshell armor saved his ribs, but the shock drove all the breath from his body.

Air spilled from the tilted plenum chamber. The tank sagged backward like a horse spitted on a wall of pikes.

Hans Wager hoped that the smash hadn't knocked his driver's teeth out. He wanted to do that himself, as soon as things got quiet again.

"Holman," he wheezed as he keyed his intercom circuit. He'd never wanted to command a tank. . . . "Use lift, not your bloody speed. You can't—"

Dust exploded around Charlie Three-zero as if a bomb had gone off. Holman kept the blades' angle of attack flat to build up fan speed before trying to raise the vehicle again. She wasn't unskilled, exactly; she just wasn't used to moving something with this much inertia.

"—just ram through the bloody berm!" Wager concluded; but as they backed, he got a good look at the chunk they'd gouged from the protective dirt wall and had to wonder. They bloody near had plowed their way through, at no cost worse than bending the front skirts.

Rugged mother, this tank was. Might be something to be said for panzers after all, once you got to know 'em.

And got a bleedin' driver who knew 'em.

Something in the middle of the Yokel positions went off with walloping violence. Other people's problems weren't real high on Hans Wager's list right now, though.

The acting platoon leader, Sergeant Sparrow, had assigned Wager to the outside arc of the sweep and taken the berm side himself. Wager didn't like Sparrow worth spit. When Wager arrived at Camp Progress, he'd tried to get some pointers from the experienced tank sergeant, but Sparrow was an uncommunicative man whose eyes focused well beyond the horizon.

The dispositions made sense, though. The action was likely to be hottest right outside the camp. Sparrow's reflexes made him the best choice to handle it. Wager wasn't familiar with his new hardware, but he was a combat trooper who could be trusted to keep their exposed flank clear.

The middle slot of the sweep was a tank cobbled into action by the maintenance detachment. The lord only knew what they'd be good for.

The Red team's six combat cars had formed across the detachment area and were starting toward the bubbling inferno of the Yokel positions. As they did so, Sparrow's Deathdealer eeled over the berm with only two puffs where the skirts dug in and kicked dirt high enough for it to go through the fan intakes.

Even the blower from maintenance had made the jump without a serious problem. While Wager and his truckdriver—

Holman had the fans howling on full power. A lurching clack vibrated through Charlie Three-zero's fabric as the driver rammed all eight pitch controls to maximum lift.

"Via!" Wager screamed over the intercom. "Give her a little for—"

Their hundred and seventy tonnes rose—bouncing on thrust instead of using the cushion effect of air under pressure in the plenum chamber. The tank teetered like a plate spinning on a broomhandle.

"—ward!"

The stern curtsied as Holman finally tilted two of her fan nacelles to direct their thrust to the rear. Charlie Three-zero slid forward, then hopped up as the skirts gouged the top of the berm like a cookie cutter in soft dough.

The tank sailed off the front of the berm and dropped like the iridium anvil she was as soon as her skirts lost their temporary ground effect. They hit squarely, ramming the steel skirts ten centimeters into the ground and racking Wager front and back against the coaming.

Somehow Holman managed to keep a semblance of control. The tank's bow slewed right—and Charlie Three-zero roared off counterclockwise, in pursuit of the other two members of their platoon.

They continued to bounce every ten meters or so. Their skirts grounded, rose till there was more than a hand's breadth clearance beneath the skirts—and spilled pressure in another hop.

But they were back in the war.

 

The reason Warrant Leader Ortnahme fired into the rockpile 300 meters to their front was that the overgrown mound—a dump for plowed-up stones before the government took over the area from Camp Progress—was a likely hiding place for Consie troops.

The reason Ortnahme fired the main gun instead of the tribarrel was that he'd never had an excuse to do that before in his twenty-three years as a soldier.

His screens damped automatically to keep from being overloaded, but the blue flash was reflected onto Ortnahme through the open hatch as Herman's Whore bucked with the recoil.

The rockpile blew apart in gobbets of molten quartz and blazing vegetation. There was no sign of Consies.

Via! but it felt good!

Simkins was keeping them a hundred meters outside Sparrow's Deathdealer, the way the acting platoon leader had ordered. Simkins had moved his share of tanks in the course of maintenance work, but before now, he'd never had to drive one as fast as twenty kph. He was doing a good job, but—

"Simkins!" he ordered. "Don't jink around them bloody bushes like they was the landscaping at headquarters. Just drive over 'em!"

But the kid was doing fine. The Lord only knew where the third tank with its newbie crew had gotten to.

The air above the Yokels' high berm crackled with hints of cyan, the way invisible lightning backlighted clouds during a summer storm. The Red team was finding somebody to mix with.

The tanks might as well be practicing night driving techniques. The Consies that'd hit this end of the encampment must all be dead or runnin' as fast as they could to save their miserable—

WHANG! 

Herman's Whore slewed to the right and grounded, then began staggering crabwise with the left side of her skirts scraping. They'd been hit, hard, but there wasn't any trace of the shot in the screens whose sensors should've reported the event even if they hadn't warned of it.

"Sir, I've lost plenum chamber pressure," Simkins said, a triumph of the obvious that even a bloody civilian with a bloody rutabaga for a brain wouldn't've bothered to—

"Did the access door blow open again?" Simkins continued.

Blood and Martyrs. Of course.

"Lord, kid, I'm sorry," the warrant leader blurted, apologizing for what he hadn't said—and for the fact he hadn't been thinking. "Put 'er down and I'll take care of it."

The tank settled. Ortnahme raised his seat to the top of its run, then prepared to step out through the hatch. Down in the hull, the sensor console pinged a warning.

Ortnahme couldn't see the screens from this angle, and he didn't have a commo helmet to relay the data to him in the cupola.

He didn't need the electronic sensors. His eyes and the sky-glow from the ongoing destruction of Camp Progress showed him a Consie running toward Herman's Whore with an armload of something that wasn't roses.

"Simkins!" the warrant leader screamed, hoping his voice would carry either to the driver or the intercom pick-up in the hull. "Go! Go! Go!"

The muscles beneath Ortnahme's fat bunched as he swung the tribarrel. The gun tracked as smoothly as wet ice, but it was glacially slow as well.

Ortnahme's thumbs clamped on the trigger, lashing out a stream of bolts. The Consie flopped down. None of the bolts had cracked through the air closer than a meter above his head. The bastard was too close for the cupola gun to hit him.

Which the Consie figured out just as quick as Ortnahme did. The guerrilla picked himself up and shambled toward the tank again, holding out what was certainly a magnetic mine. It would detonate a few seconds after he clamped it onto the Whore's steel skirts.

Ortnahme fired again. His bolts lit the camouflaged lid of the hole in which the Consie had hidden—twenty meters from where the target was now.

There was a simple answer to this sort of problem: the close-in defense system built into each of Hammer's combat vehicles, ready to blast steel shot into oncoming missiles or men who'd gotten too close to be handled by the tribarrel.

Trouble was, Ortnahme was a very competent and experienced mechanic. He'd dismantled the defense system before he started the rebuild. If he hadn't, he'd've risked killing himself and fifty other people if his pliers slipped and sent a current surge down the wrong circuit. He'd been going to reconnect the system in the morning, when the work was done. . . .

The intake roar of the fans resumed three Consie steps before the tank began moving, but finally Herman's Whore staggered forward again. They were a great pair for a race—the tank crippled, and the man bent over by the weight of the mine he carried. A novelty act for clowns. . . .

Down in the hull the commo was babbling something—orders, warnings; Simkins wondering what the cop his superior thought he was up to. Ortnahme didn't dare leave the cupola to answer—or call for help. As soon as they drew enough ahead of the Consie, he'd blast the bastard and then fix the access plate so they could move properly again.

The trouble with that plan was that Herman's Whore had started circling. The tank moved about as fast as the man on foot, but the Consie was cutting the chord of the arc and in a few seconds—

The warrant leader lifted himself from the hatch and let himself slide down the smooth curve of the turret. He fumbled in his cargo pocket. Going in this direction, his age and fat didn't matter. . . .

The Consie staggered forward, bent over his charge, in a triumph of will over exhaustion. He must have been blowing like a whale, but the sound wasn't audible over the suction of the tank's eight fans.

Ortnahme launched himself from the tank and crushed the guerrilla to the ground. Bones snapped, caught between the warrant leader's mass and the mine casing.

Ortnahme didn't take any chances. He hammered until the grip of the multitool thumped slimy dirt instead of the Consie's head.

Herman's Whore was circling back. Ortnahme tried to stand, then sat heavily. He waved his left arm.

By the time Simkins pulled up beside him, the warrant leader would be ready to get up and weld that cursed access cover in place.

Until then, he'd figured he'd just sit and catch his breath.

 

Terrain is one thing on a contour map, where a dip of three meters in a hundred is dead flat, and another thing on the ground, where it's enough difference to hide an object the size of a tank.

Which is just what it seemed to have done to callsign Tootsie Four, the maintenance section's vehicle, so far as Hans Wager could tell from his own cupola.

It wasn't Holman's fault.

What with the late start, they'd had to drive like a bat outta Hell to get into position. It would've taken the Lord and all his martyrs to save 'em if they'd stumbled into the Consies while Wager was barely able to hang on, much less shoot.

But since they caught up, she'd been keeping Charlie Three-zero about 300 meters outboard of Sparrow's blower, just like orders. Only thing was, there was supposed to be another tank between them.

Sparrow was covering a double arc, with his tribarrel swung left and his main gun offset to the right. It was the main gun that fired, kicking a scoopload of fused earth skyward in fiery sparkles.

Wager didn't see what the platoon leader'd shot at, but three figures jumped to their feet near the point of impact. Wager tumbled them to the ground again as blazing corpses with a burst from his tribarrel.

They were doing okay. Wager was doing okay. His facial muscles were locked in a tight rictus, and he took his fingers momentarily from the tribarrel's grips to massage the numbness out of them.

His driver was doing all right too, now that it was just a matter of moving ahead at moderate speed. Deathdealer was traveling at about twenty kph, and Holman had been holding Charlie Three-zero to the same speed since they caught up with the rest of the platoon.

Because Sparrow's tank was on the inside of the pivot, it was slowly drawing ahead of them. Wager felt the hull vibration change as Holman fiddled with her power and tilt controls, but the tank's inertia took much longer to adjust.

The fan note built into a shriek.

Wager scanned the night, wishing he had the eyes of two wing gunners to help the way he would on a combat car. Having the main gun was all well and good, but he figured the firepower of another pair of tribarrels—

Via! What did Holman think they were doing? Running a race? 

—would more than make up for a twenty centimeter punch in this kind of war.

"Holman!" he snarled into his intercom. "Slow us bloody—"

Charlie Three-zero's mass had absorbed all the power inputs and was now rocketing through the night at twice her previous speed. Way too fast in the dark for anything but paved roads. Rocks clanged on the skirts as the tank crested a knoll—

And plunged down the other side, almost as steep as the berm they'd crashed off minutes before.

"—down!"

The ravine was full of Consies, jumping aside or flattening as Charlie Three-zero hurtled toward them under no more control than a 170-tonne roundshot.

Wager's bruised body knew exactly how the impact would feel, but reflex kept that from affecting anything he did. Charlie Three-zero hit, bounced. Wager's left hand flipped the protective cage away from the control on the tribarrel's mount—the same place it was on a combat car. He rammed the miniature joystick straight in, firing the entire close-in defense system in a single white flash from the top of the skirts.

Guerrillas flew apart in shreds.

The door of a bunker gaped open in the opposite side of the gully. Holman had been trying to raise Charlie Three-zero's bow to slow their forward motion. As the tank hopped forward, the bow did lift enough for the skirts to scrape the rise instead of slamming into it the way they had when trying to get out of Camp Progress.

"Bring us—" Wager ordered as he rotated his tribarrel to bear on the Consies behind them, some squirming in their death throes but others rising again to point weapons.

—around, he meant to say, but Holman reversed her fans and sucked the tank squarely down where she'd just hit. The unexpected impact rammed Wager's spine against his seat. His tribarrel was aimed upward.

"You dickheaded fool!" he screamed over the intercom as he lowered his weapon and the tank started to lift in place.

A Consie threw a grenade. It bounced off the hull and exploded in the air. Wager felt the hot flick of shrapnel beneath the cheekpiece of his helmet, but the grenadier himself flopped backward with most of his chest gone.

The tribarrel splattered the air, then walked its long burst across several of the guerrillas still moving.

Holman slammed the tank down again. They hit with a crunch, followed by a second shudder as the ground collapsed over the Consie bunker.

Holman rocked her fans. Dust and quartz pebbles flew back, covering the corpses in the gully like dirt spurned by a cat over its dung.

"Sergeant?" called the voice in Wager's intercom. "Sergeant? Want to make another pass?"

Wager was trying to catch his breath. "Negative, Holman," he managed to say. "Just bring us level with Deathdealer again.

"Holman," he added a moment later. "You did just fine."

 

Their position in line was second from the left, but Dick Suilin glimpsed the remaining combat car on his side only at intersections—and that rarely.

Its powerguns lit the parallel street in a constant reminder of its lethal presence. A burst quivering like a single blue flash showed Suilin a hump on what should have been the straight slope of a barracks roofline across the next intersection.

The reporter fired; the empty clip ejected with the choonk of his weapon.

Before Suilin's grenade had completed its low-velocity arc toward its target, the figure fired back with a stream of tracers that looked the size of bright orange baseballs. They sailed lazily out of the flickering muzzle flashes, then snapped past the reporter with dazzling speed.

The splinter shield above Suilin rang, and impacts sparkled on the iridium side armor. How could the Consie have missed— the reporter thought.

A tremendous blow knocked him backward.

His grenade detonated on the end wall of the building, a meter below the machinegunner. Cooter, screaming curses or orders to their driver, squeezed his trigger button. Cyan fire ripped from both the weapon he gripped and the left wing gun, slaved to follow the point gun's controls.

Suilin didn't hurt, but he couldn't feel anything between his neck and his waistband. He tried to say, "I'm all right," to reassure himself, but he found there was no air in his lungs and he couldn't breathe. There were glowing dimples in the splinter shield where the machinegun had hammered it.

I'm dead, he thought. It should have bothered him more than it did.

His grenade had missed the Consie. Tracers sprayed harmlessly skyward as the fellow jumped back while keeping a deathgrip on his trigger.

Cooter's powerguns lit and shattered rooftiles as they sawed toward, then through, their target. The machinegun's ammunition drum blew up with a yellow flash.

Suilin's hands hurt like Hell. "Via!" he screamed. A flash of flaming agony wrapped his chest and released it as suddenly, leaving behind an ache many times worse than what he remembered from the time he broke his arm.

Both the mercenaries, faceless in their visored helmets, were bending over him. "Where you hit?" Cooter demanded as Otski lifted the reporter's right forearm and said, "Via! But it's just fragments, it's okay."

Cooter's big index finger prodded Suilin in the chest. "Yeah," he said. "No penetration." He tugged at something.

Suilin felt a cold, prickling sensation over his left nipple. "What're you—" he said, but the Slammers had turned back to their guns.

The car must have paused while they checked him. Now it surged forward faster than before.

They swept by the barracks. Cooter's long double burst had turned it into a torch.

Suilin lay on his back. He looked down at himself. There was a charred circle as big as a soup dish in the fabric cover of his clamshell. In the center of that was a thumb-sized crater in the armor itself.

The pockmark in the ceramic plate had a metallic sheen, and there were highlights of glittering metal in the blood covering the backs of both Suilin's hands. When the bullet hit the clamshell armor and broke up, fragments splashed forward and clawed the reporter's bare hands.

He rose, pushing himself up with his arms. For a moment, his hands burned and there were icepicks in his neck and lower back.

Coolness spreading outward from his chest washed over the pain. There were colored tabs on the breast of the armor. Suilin had thought they were decorations, but the one Cooter had pulled was obviously releasing medication into Suilin's system.

Thank the Lord for that.

He picked up the grenade launcher and reloaded it. Shock, drugs, and the tiny bits of metal that winked when he moved his fingers made him clumsy, but he did it.

Like working against a deadline. Your editor didn't care why you hadn't filed on time; so you worked when you were hung over, when you had flu. . . .

When your father died before you had had time to clear things up with him. When your wife left you because you didn't care about her, only your cursed stories.

Dick Suilin raised his eyes and his ready weapon just as both the combat car and the immediate universe opened up with a breathtaking inferno of fire.

They'd reached the Headquarters of Camp Progress.

It was a three-story building at the southern end of the encampment. Nothing separated the pagoda-roofed structure from the berm except the camp's peripheral road. The berm here, like the hundred-meter square in front of the building, had been sodded and was manicured daily.

There were bodies sprawled on the grass. Suilin didn't have time to look at them, because lights flared in several ground-floor windows as Consies launched buzzbombs and ducked back.

The grenade launcher's dull report was lost in the blurred crackling of the three tribarrels, but the reporter knew he'd gotten his round away as fast as the veterans had theirs.

Unlike the rest of Camp Progress, the Headquarters building was a masonry structure. At least a dozen powerguns were raking the two lower floors. Though the stones spattered out pebbles and molten glass at every impact, the walls themselves held and continued to protect the Consies within them.

The grenade was a black dot against the window lighted by bolts from the powerguns. It sailed through the opening, detonated with a dirty flash, and flung a guerrilla's corpse momentarily into view.

The oncoming buzzbomb filled Suilin's forward vision. He saw it with impossible clarity, its bulbous head swelling on a thread of smoke that trailed back to the grenade-smashed room.

The close-in defense system went off, spewing miniature steel barrels into the path of the free-flight missile. They slashed through the warhead, destroying its integrity. When the buzzbomb hit the side of the combat car between the left and center gun positions, the fuze fired but the damaged booster charge did not.

The buzzbomb bounced from the armor with a bell sound, then skittered in tight circles around the grass until its rocket motor burned out.

Cooter's driver eased the vehicle forward, onto the lawn, at barely walking speed. The square was normally lighted after sunset, but all the poles had been shot away.

Dick Suilin had spent three days at or close to the Headquarters building while he gathered the bulk of his story. Clean-cut, professional members of the National Army, doing their jobs with quiet dedication—to contrast with ragged, brutal-looking mercenaries (many of whom were female!), who absorbed such a disproportionate share of the defense budget.

"Hey turtle!" Otski called. "Watch that—"

To either side of the grassed area were pairs of trailers, living quarters for Colonel Banyussuf and his favored staff. The one on the left end was assigned to Sergeant-Major Lee, the senior non-com at Camp Progress. Suilin was billeted with him. The door was swinging in the light breeze, and a dozen or so bulletholes dimpled the sidewall at waist height, but Suilin could at least hope he'd be able to recover his gear unharmed when this was over.

The car to their left fired a short burst at the trailer. The bolts blew the end apart, shattering the plywood panels and igniting the light metal sheathing. The reporter swore at the unnecessary destruction.

The air criss-crossed with machinegun bullets and the smoke trails of at least a dozen buzzbombs. All four of the silent trailers were nests of Consie gunners.

Suilin ducked below the car's armored side.

Bullets hit the iridium and rang louder than things that small could sound. The defense system, a different portion of the continuous strip, went off. The light reflected from the underside of the splinter shield was white and orange and cyan, and there was no room in the universe for more noise.

The reporter managed to raise himself, behind the muzzle of his grenade launcher, just in time to see Sergeant-Major Lee's trailer erupt in a violent explosion that showered the square with shrapnel and blew the trailer behind it off its slab foundation.

There was a glowing white spot on the armor of the combat car to Suilin's left. As he watched, the driver's hatch popped open and a man scrambled out. Another crewman rolled over the opposite sidewall of the fighting compartment.

The car blew up.

Because the first instants were silent, it seemed a drawn-out affair, though the process couldn't have taken more than seconds from beginning to end. A streak of blue-green light shot upward, splashed on the splinter shield and through the steel covering almost instantaneously.

The whole fighting compartment became a fireball that bulged the side armor and lifted the remnants of the shield like a bat-wing.

A doughnut of incandescent gas hung for a moment over the wreckage, then imploded and vanished.

Suilin screamed and emptied the clip of his grenade launcher into the other trailer on his side. It was already burning; Cooter didn't bother to fire into its crumpled remains as their car accelerated toward the Headquarters building.

Two flags—one white, the other the red-and-gold of the National Government—fluttered from the top floor of the building on short staffs. No one moved at those windows.

Now the lower floors were silent also. Otski raked the second story while Cooter used the car's slow drift to saw his twin guns across the lowest range of windows. Cooter's rotating iridium barrels were glowing white, but a ten-meter length of the walls collapsed under the point-blank jackhammer of his bolts.

Suilin reloaded mechanically. He didn't have a target. At this short range, his grenades were more likely to injure himself and the rest of the crew than they were to find some unlikely Consie survivor within the Headquarters building.

He caught motion in the corner of his eye as he turned.

The movement came from a barracks they'd passed moments before, on the north side of the square. Tribarrels, Otski's and that of the next combat car in line, had gnawed the frame building thoroughly and set it alight.

A stubby black missile was silhouetted against those flames.

Gear on the floor of the fighting compartment trapped the reporter's feet as he tried to swing his grenade launcher. The close-in defense system slammed just above the skirts. The buzzbomb exploded in a red flash, ten meters away from the combat car.

A jet of near-plasma directed from the shaped-charge warhead skewered the night.

The spurt of light was almost lost to Suilin's retinas, dazzled already by the powerguns, but the blast of heat was a shock as palpable as that of the bullet that had hit him in the chest.

Otski fell down. Something flew past the reporter as he reeled against the armor.

The barrel of the grenade launcher was gone. Just gone, vaporized ten centimeters from the breech. If the jet had struck a finger's breadth to the left, the grenade would have detonated and killed all three of them.

The shockwave had snatched off Otski's helmet. The gunner's left arm was missing from the elbow down. That explained the stench of burned meat.

Suilin vomited onto his legs and feet.

"I'm all right," Otski said. He must have been screaming for Suilin to be able to hear him. "It don't mean nothin'."

A line was charred across the veteran's clamshell armor. A finger's breadth to the left, and . . .

There were two tabs on the front of Otski's back-and-breast armor. Suilin pulled them both.

"Is it bleeding?" Cooter demanded. "Is it bleeding?"

The bone stuck out a centimeter beyond where the charred muscle had shrunk back toward the gunner's shoulder. "He's—" Suilin said. "It's—"

"Right," shouted Cooter. He turned back to his tribarrel.

"I'm all right," said Otski. He tried to push himself erect. His stump clattered on the top of an ammunition box. His face went white and pinched in.

Don't mean nothin', Otski's lips formed. Then his pupils rolled up and he collapsed.

The combat car spun in its own length and circled the blasted Headquarters building. There were figures climbing the berm behind the structure. Cooter fired.

Dick Suilin leaned over Otski and took the grips of his tribarrel. Another car was following them; a third had rounded the building from the other side.

When Suilin pressed the thumb button, droplets of fire as constant as a strobe-lit fountain streamed from his rotating muzzles.

Sod spouted in a line as the reporter walked toward the black-clad figure trying desperately to climb the steep berm ahead of them. At the last moment the guerrilla turned with his hands raised, but Suilin couldn't have lifted his thumbs in time if he'd wanted to.

Ozone and gases from the empty cases smothered the stink of Otski's arm.

For a moment, Consies balanced on top of the berm. A scything crossfire tumbled them as the tanks and combat cars raked their targets from both sides.

When nothing more moved, the vehicles shot at bodies in case some of the guerrillas were shamming. Twice Suilin managed to explode the grenades or ammunition that his targets carried.

Cooter had to pry the reporter's fingers from the tribarrel when Tootsie Six called a ceasefire.

 

 

Chapter Four

"I've got authorization," said Dick Suilin, fumbling in the breast pocket of his fatigues. The "Extend all courtesies" card signed by his brother-in-law, Governor Samuel Kung, was there, along with his Press ID and his Military Status Papers.

Suilin's military status was Exempt-III. That meant he would see action only in the event of a call-up of all male citizens between the ages of sixteen and sixty.

He was having trouble getting the papers out because his fingers were still numb from the way they'd been squeezing the tribarrel's grips.

For that matter, the National Government might've proclaimed a general call-up overnight—if there was still a National Government.

"Buddy," snarled the senior non-com at the door of the communications center, "I can't help you. I don't care if you got authorization from God 'n his saints. I don't care if you are God 'n his saints!"

"I'm not that," the reporter said in a soft, raspy voice. Ozone and smoke had flayed his throat. "But I need to get through to Kohang—and it's your ass if I don't."

He flicked at his shirtfront. Some of what was stuck there came off.

Suilin's wrist and the back of his right hand were black where vaporized copper from the buzzbomb had recondensed. All the fine hairs were burned off, but the skin beneath hadn't blistered. His torso was badly bruised where the bullet-struck armor had punched into him.

The butt of the pistol he now carried in his belt prodded the bruise every time he moved.

"Well, I'm not God neither, buddy," the non-com said, his tone frustrated but suddenly less angry.

He waved toward his set-up and the two junior technicians struggling with earphones and throat mikes. "The land lines're down, the satellites're down, and there's jamming right across all the bands. If you think you can get something through, you just go ahead and try. But if you want my ass, you gotta stand in line."

The National side of Camp Progress had three commo centers. The main one was—had been—in the shielded basement of Headquarters. A few Consies were still holed up there after the rest of the fighting had died down. A Slammers' tank had managed to depress its main gun enough to finish the job.

The training detachment had a separate system, geared toward the needs of homesick draftees. It had survived, but Colonel Banyussuf—who'd also survived—had taken over the barracks in which it was housed as his temporary headquarters. Suilin hadn't bothered trying to get through the panicked crowd now surrounding the building.

The commo room of the permanent maintenance section at Camp Progress was installed in a three-meter metal transport container. It was unofficial—the result of scrounging over the years. Suilin hadn't ever tried to use it before; but in the current chaos, it was his only hope.

"What do you mean, the satellites are down?" he demanded.

He was too logy with reaction to be sure that what he'd heard the non-com say was as absurd as he thought it was. The microwave links were out? Not all of them, surely. . . .

"Out," the soldier repeated. "Gone. Blitzed. Out."

"Blood and martyrs," Suilin said.

The Consie guerrillas couldn't have taken down all the comsats. The Terran enclaves had to have become directly involved. That was a stunning escalation of the political situation—

And an escalation which was only conceivable as part of a planned deathblow to the National Government of Prosperity.

"I've got to call Kohang," said Dick Suilin, aloud but without reference to the other men nearby. All he could think of was his sister, in the hands of Consies determined to make an example of the governor's wife. "Suzi . . ."

"You can forget bloody Kohang," said one of the techs as he stripped off his headphones. He ran his fingers through his hair. The steel room was hot, despite the cool morning and the air conditioner throbbing on the roof. "It's been bloody overrun."

Suilin gripped the pistol in his belt. "What do you mean?" he snarled as he pushed past the soldier in the doorway.

"They said it was," the technician insisted. He looked as though he intended to get out of his chair, but the reporter was already looming over him.

"Somebody said it was," argued the other tech. "Look, we're still getting signals from Kohang, it's just the jamming chews the bugger outta it."

"There's fighting all the hell over the place," said the senior non-com, putting a gently restraining hand on Suilin's shoulder. " 'Cept maybe here. Look, buddy, nobody knows what the hell's going on anywhere just now."

"Maybe the mercs still got commo," the first tech said. "Yeah, I bet they do."

"Right," said the reporter. "Good thought."

He walked out of the transport container. He was thinking of what might be happening in Kohang.

He gripped his pistol very hard.

 

The chip recorder sitting on the cupola played a background of guitar music while a woman wailed in Tagalog, a language which Henk Ortnahme had never bothered to learn. The girls on Esperanza all spoke Spanish. And Dutch. And English. Enough of it.

The girls all spoke money, the same as everywhere in the universe he'd been since.

The warrant leader ran his multitool down the channel of the close-in defense system. The wire brush he'd fitted to the head whined in complaint, but it never quite stalled out.

It never quite got the channel clean, either. Pits in the steel were no particular problem—Herman's Whore wasn't being readied for a parade, after all. But crud in the holes for the bolts which both anchored the strips and passed the detonation signals . . . that was something else again.

Something blew up nearby with a hollow sound, like a grenade going off in a trash can. Ortnahme looked around quickly, but there didn't seem to be an immediate problem. Since dawn there'd been occasional shooting from the Yokel end of the camp, but there was no sign of living Consies around here.

Dead ones, sure. A dozen of 'em were lined up outside the TOC, being checked for identification and anything else of intelligence value. When that was done—done in a pretty cursory fashion, the warrant leader expected, since Hammer didn't have a proper intelligence officer here at Camp Progress—the bodies would be hauled beyond the berm, covered with diesel, and barbecued like the bloody pigs they were.

Last night had been a bloody near thing.

Ortnahme wasn't going to send out a tank whose close-in defenses were doubtful. Not after he'd had personal experience of what that meant in action.

He bore down harder. The motor protested; bits of the brush tickled the faceshield of his helmet. He'd decided to wear his commo helmet this morning instead of his usual shop visor, because—

Via, why not admit it? Because he'd really wished he'd had the helmet the night before. He couldn't change the past, couldn't have all his gear handy back then when he needed it; but he could sure as hell have it on him now for a security blanket.

There was a 1cm pistol in Ortnahme's hip pocket as well. He'd never seen the face of the Consie who'd chased him with the bomb, but today the bastard leered at Ortnahme from every shadow in the camp.

The singer moaned something exceptionally dismal. Ortnahme backed off his multitool, now that he had a sufficient section of channel cleared. He reached for a meter-long strip charge.

Simkins, who should've been buffing the channels while the warrant leader bolted in charges, had disappeared minutes after they'd parked Herman's Whore back in her old slot against the berm. The kid'd done a bloody good job during the firefight—but that didn't mean he'd stopped being a bloody maintenance tech. Ortnahme was going to burn him a new asshole as soon as—

"Mr. Ortnahme?" Simkins said. "Look what I got!"

The warrant leader turned, already shouting. "Simkins, where in the name of all that's holy have—"

He paused. "Via, Simkins," he said. "Where did you get that?"

Simkins was carrying a tribarrel, still in its packing crate.

"Tommy Dill at Logistics, sir," the technician answered brightly. "Ah, Mr. Ortnahme? It's off the books, you know. We set a little charge on the warehouse roof, so Tommy can claim a mortar shell combat-lossed the gun."

Just like that was the only question Ortnahme wanted to ask.

Though it was sure-hell one of 'em, that was God's truth.

"Kid," the warrant leader said calmly, more or less. "What in the bloody hell do you think you're gonna do with that gun?"

From the way Simkins straightened, "more or less" wasn't as close to "calmly" as Ortnahme had thought.

"Sir!" the technician said. "I'm gonna mount it on the bow. So I got something to shoot, ah . . . you know, the next time."

The kid glanced up at the blaring recorder. He was holding the tribarrel with no sign of how much the thing weighed. He wouldn't have been able to do that before Warrant Leader Ortnahme started running his balls off to teach him his job.

Ortnahme opened his mouth. He didn't know which part of the stupid idea to savage first.

Before he figured out what to say, Simkins volunteered, "Mister Ortnahme? I figured we'd use a section of engineer stake for a mount and weld it to the skirt. Ah, so we don't have to chance a weld on the iridium, you know?"

Like a bloody puppy, standin' there waggling his tail—and how in bloody hell had he got Sergeant Dill to agree to take a tribarrel off manifest?

"Kid," he said at last, "put that down and start buffing this channel for me, all right?"

"Yes, Mister Ortnahme."

The klaxon blurted, then cut off.

Ortnahme and every other Slammer in the compound froze. Nothing further happened. The Yokels must've been testing the system now that they'd moved it.

The bloody cursed fools.

"Sir," the technician said with his face bent over the buzz of his own multitool. "Can I put on some different music?"

"I like what I got on," Ortnahme grunted, spinning home first one, then the other of the bolts that locked the strip of explosive and steel pellets into its channel.

"Why, sir?" Simkins prodded unexpectedly. "The music, I mean?"

Ortnahme stared at his subordinate. Simkins continued to buff his way forward, as though cleaning the channel were the only thing on his mind.

"Because," Ortnahme said. He grimaced and flipped up the faceshield of his helmet. "Because that was the kinda stuff they played in the bars on Esperanza, my first landfall with the regiment. Because it reminds me of when I was young and stupid, kid. Like you."

He slid another of the strip charges from its insulated packing, then paused. "Look," he said, "this ain't our tank, Simkins."

"It's our tank till they send a crew to pick it up," the technician said over the whine of his brush. "It's our tank tonight, Mister Ortnahme."

The warrant leader sighed and fitted the strip into place. It bound slightly, but that was from the way the skirt had been torqued, not the job Simkins was doing on the channel.

"All right," Ortnahme said, "but we'll mount it solid so you swing the bow to aim it, all right? I don't want you screwing around with the grips when you oughta be holding the controls."

Simkins stopped what he was doing and turned. "Thank you, Mister Ortnahme!" he said, as though he'd just been offered the cherry of the most beautiful woman on the bloody planet.

"Yeah, sure," the warrant leader said with his face averted. "Believe me, you're gonna do the work while I sit on my butt 'n watch."

Ortnahme set a bolt, then a second. "Hey kid?" he said. "How the hell did you get Tommy to go along with this cop?"

"I told him it was you blasted the Consie with the satchel charge when Tommy opened his warehouse door."

Ortnahme blinked, "Huh?" he said. "Somebody did that? It sure wasn't me."

"Tommy's got a case of real French brandy for you, sir," the technician said. He turned and grinned. "And the tribarrel. Because I'm your driver, see? And he didn't want our asses swingin' in the breeze again like last night."

"Bloody hell," the warrant leader muttered. He placed another bolt and started to grin himself.

"We won't use engineer stakes," he said. "I know where there's a section of 10cm fuel-truck hose sheathing. We'll cut and bend that. . . ."

"Thank you, Mister Ortnahme."

"And I guess we could put a pin through the pivot," Ortnahme went on. "So you could unlock the curst thing if, you know, we got bogged down again."

"Thank you, Mister Ortnahme!"

Cursed little puppy. But a smart one.

 

Two blocks from the commo room, Dick Suilin passed the body of a man in loose black garments. The face of the corpse was twisted in a look of ugly surprise. An old scar trailed up his cheek and across an eyebrow, but there was no sign of the injury that had killed him here.

The Slammers' TOC was almost two kilometers away. Suilin was already so exhausted that his ears buzzed except when he tried to concentrate on something. He decided to head for the infantry-detachment motor pool and try to promote a ride to the north end of the camp.

It occurred to the reporter that he hadn't seen any vehicles moving in the camp since the combat cars reformed and howled back to their regular berths. As he formed the thought, a light truck drove past and stopped beside the body.

A lieutenant and two soldiers wearing gloves, all of them looking morose, got out. Before they could act, a group of screaming dependents, six women and at least as many children, swept around the end of one of the damage buildings. They pushed the soldiers away, then surrounded the corpse and began kicking it.

Suilin paused to watch. The enlisted men glanced at one another, then toward the lieutenant, who seemed frozen. One of the men said, "Hey, we're s'posed to take—"

A woman turned and spat in the soldier's face.

"Murdering Consie bastard! Murdering little Consie bastard!"

Two of the older children were stripping the trousers off the body. A six-year-old boy ran up repeatedly, lashed out with his bare foot, and ran back. He never quite made contact with the corpse.

"Murdering Consie Bastard!"

The officer drew his pistol and fired in the air. The screaming stopped. One woman flung herself to the ground, covering a child with her body. The group backed away, staring at the man with the gun.

The officer aimed at the guerrilla's body and fired. Dust puffed from the shoulder of the black jacket.

The officer fired twice more, then blasted out the remainder of his ten-round magazine. The hard ground sprayed grit in all directions; one bullet ricocheted and spanged into a doorjamb, missing a child by centimeters at most.

The group of dependents edged away. Bullets had disfigured still further the face of the corpse.

"Well, get on with it!" the lieutenant screamed to his men. His voice sounded tinny from the muzzle blasts of his weapon.

The soldiers grimaced and grasped the body awkwardly in their gloved hands. A glove slipped as they swung the guerrilla onto the tailgate of the truck. The body hung, about to fall back.

The lieutenant grabbed a handful of the Consie's hair and held it until the enlisted men could get better grips and finish their task.

Suilin resumed walking toward the motor pool. He was living in a nightmare, and his ears buzzed like wasps. . . .

 

"Now, to split the screen," said squat Joe Albers, Deathdealer's driver, "you gotta hold one control and switch the other one whatever way."

Hans Wager set his thumb on the left HOLD button and clicked the right-hand magnification control of the main screen to x4. The turret of the unnamed tank felt crowded with two men in it, although Wager himself was slim and Albers was stocky rather than big.

"Does it matter which control you hold?" asked Holman, peering down through the hatch.

"Naw, whichever you want," Albers said while Wager watched the magical transformations of his screen.

The left half of the main screen maintained its portion of a 360° panorama viewed by the light available in the human visual spectrum. Broad daylight, at the moment. The right portion of the screen had shrunk into a 90° arc whose field of view was only half its original height.

Wager twisted the control dial, rotating the magnified sector slowly around the tank's surroundings. Smoke still smoldered upward from a few places beyond the berm; here and there, sunlight glittered where the soil seared by powerguns had enough silicon to glaze.

The berth on the right side of the tank was empty. The combat car assigned there had bought it in the clearing operation. Buzzbombs. The close-in defense system hadn't worked or hadn't worked well enough, same difference. Albers said a couple of the crew were okay. . . .

Wager's field of view rolled across the Yokel area. The barracks nearest the Slammers were in good shape still; but by focusing down one of the streets and rolling the magnification through x16 to x64, he could see that at least a dozen buildings in a row had burned.

A few bolts from a powergun and those frame structures went up like torches. . . .

The best protection you had in a combat car wasn't armor or even your speed: it was the volume of fire you put on the other bastard and anywhere the other bastard might be hiding.

Tough luck for the Yokels who'd been burned out. Tougher luck, much tougher, for the Consies who'd tried to engage Hammer's Slammers.

"For the driver," Albers said with a nod up toward Holman's intent face, "it's pretty much the same as a combat car."

"The weight's not the bloody same," Holman said.

"Sure, you gotta watch yer inertia," the veteran driver agreed, "but you do the same things. You get used to it."

He looked back over at Wager. The right half-screen was now projecting a magnified slice of what appeared at one-to-one on the left.

On the opposite side of the encampment, a couple of the permanent maintenance staff worked beside another tank. The junior tech looked on while his boss, a swag-bellied warrant three, settled a length of pipe in the jig of a laser saw.

"Turret side, though," Albers went on, "you gotta be careful. About half what you know from cars, that's the wrong thing in the turret of a panzer."

"I don't like not having two more pair of eyes watchin' my back," Wager muttered as his visuals swam around the circumference of the motionless tank.

"The screens'll watch for you," Albers said gently.

He touched a key without pressing it. "You lock one of 'em onto alert at all times. The AI in here, it's like a thousand helmet systems all at once. It's faster, it catches more, it's better at throwing out the garbage that just looks like it's a bandit."

The hatches of the Tactical Operations Center, a command car without drive fans, were open, but from this angle Wager couldn't see inside. The backs of two Slammers, peering within from the rear ramp, proved there was a full house—a troop meeting going on. What you'd expect after a contact like last night's.

"Not like having tribarrels pointing three ways, though," Holman said. Dead right, even though she'd never crewed a combat vehicle before.

Albers looked up at her. "If you want," he said, "you can slave either of the guns to the threat monitor. It'll swing 'em as soon as it pops the alert."

Deathdealer, Albers' own tank, was parked next to the TOC. A tarpaulin slanted from the top of the skirts to the ground, sheltering the man beneath. "Via," Wager muttered. "He's racked out now?"

Birdie Sparrow's right hand was visible beneath the edge of the tarp. It was twitching. Albers looked at the magnified screen, then laid his fingers over Wager's on the dial and rolled the image away.

"Birdie's all right," the veteran driver said. "He takes a little getting used to, is all. And the past couple months, you know, he's been a little, you know . . . loose."

"That's why they sent you back here with the blower instead of using some newbies for transit?" Holman asked.

Bent over this way, Holman had to keep brushing back the sandy brown curls that fell across her eyes. Her hair was longer than Wager had thought, and the strands appeared remarkably fine.

"Yeah, something like that, I guess," Albers admitted. "Look, Birdie's great when it drops in the pot like last night. Only . . . since his buddy DJ got zapped, he don't sleep good, is all."

"Newbies like us," Wager said bitterly. Not new to war, not him at least; but new to this kind of war. 

"I can see this gear can do everything but tuck me goodnight. But I'm bloody sure that I won't remember what to do the first time I need to. And that's liable to be my ass." He glanced upward. "Our ass."

Holman flashed him a tight smile.

"Yeah, well," Albers agreed. "Simulators help, but on the job training's the only game there's ever gonna be for some things."

Albers rubbed his scalp, grimacing in no particular direction. "You know," he went on, "you can take care a' most stuff if you know what button to push. But some things, curst if I know where the button is."

It seemed to Hans Wager that Albers' eyes were searching for the spot on the main screen where his tank commander lay shivering beneath a sunlit tarp.

 

When Dick Suilin was twenty meters from the motor pool, a jeep exploded within the wire-fenced enclosure. The back of the vehicle lurched upward. The contents of its fuel tank sprayed in all directions, then whoomped into a fireball that rose on the heat of its own combustion.

No one was in the jeep when it blew up, but soldiers throughout the area scattered, bawling warnings.

A few men simply cowered and screamed. One of them continued screaming minutes after the explosion.

Suilin resumed walking toward the entrance.

The combined motor pool held well over three hundred trucks, from jeeps to articulated flat-beds for hauling heavy equipment. The only gate in and out of Camp Progress was visible a block away. A pair of bunkers, massive structures with three-meter walls of layered sandbags and steel planking, guarded the highway where it passed through the wire, minefields, and berm.

The sliding barrier was still in place across the road. When the Consies came over the berm, they took the bunkers from behind. Satchel charges through the open doors set off the munitions within, and the blasts lifted the roofs.

The bunkers had collapsed. The craters were still smoldering.

One of the long sheds within the motor pool had been hit by an artillery rocket. The blast folded back its metal roof in both directions. Grenades and automatic weapons had raked and ignited some of the trucks parked in neat rows, but there were still many undamaged vehicles.

A three-tonne truck blew up. The driver jumped out of the cab and collapsed. Diesel from the ruptured fuel tank gushed around him in an iridescent pool. Nobody moved to help, though other soldiers stared in dazed expectation.

Two officers were arguing at the entrance while a number of enlisted men looked on. A lieutenant wearing the green collar tabs of Maintenance & Supply said in a voice that wavered between reasonableness and frustration, "But Major Schaydin, it isn't safe to take any of the vehicles yet. The Consies have booby—"

"God curse you for a fool!" screamed the major. His Summer Dress uniform was in striking contrast to the lieutenant's fatigues, but a nearby explosion had ripped away most of the right trouser leg and blackened the rest. "You can't deny me! I'm the head of the Intelligence Staff! My orders supersede any you may have received. Any orders at all!"

Schaydin carried a pair of white gloves, thrust jauntily through his left epaulet. His hat hadn't survived the events of the evening.

"Sir," the lieutenant pleaded, "this isn't orders, it isn't safe. The Consies boobytrapped a bunch of the vehicles during the attack, time delays and pressure switches, and they—"

"You bastards!" Schaydin screamed. "D' you want to find yourselves playing pick-up-sticks with your butt cheeks?"

He stalked past the lieutenant, brushing elbows as though he really didn't see the other man.

A sergeant moved as though to block Schaydin. The lieutenant shook his head in angry frustration. He, his men, and Suilin watched the major jump into a jeep, start it, and drive past them in a spray of dust.

"I need a jeep and driver," Suilin said, enunciating carefully. "To carry me to the Slammers' TOC." He deliberately didn't identify himself.

The lieutenant didn't answer. He was staring after Major Schaydin.

Instead of following the road, the intelligence officer pulled hard left and drove toward the berm. The jeep's engine lugged for a moment before its torque converter caught up with the demand. The vehicle began to climb, spurning gravel behind it.

"He'd do better," said the lieutenant, "if he at least tried it at a slant."

"Does he figure just to drive through the minefields?" asked one of the enlisted men.

"The Consies blew paths all the cop through the mines," said a sergeant. "If he's lucky, he'll be okay."

The jeep lurched over the top of the berm to disappear in a rush and a snarl. There was no immediate explosion.

"Takes more 'n luck to get through the Consies themselfs," said the first soldier. "Wherever he thinks he's going. Bloody officers."

"I don't need an argument," said Dick Suilin quietly.

"Then take the bloody jeep!" snapped the lieutenant. He pointed to a row of vehicles. "Them we've checked, more or less, for pressure mines in the suspension housings and limpets on the gas tanks. They must've had half a dozen sappers working the place over while their buddies shot up the HQ."

"No guarantees what went into the tanks," offered the sergeant. "Nothin' for that but waiting—and I'd as soon not wait on it. You want to see the mercs so bad, why don't you walk?"

Suilin looked at him. "If it's time," the reporter said, "it's time."

The nearest vehicle was a light truck rather than a jeep. He sat in the driver's seat, feeling the springs sway beneath him. No explosion, no flame. Suilin felt as though he were manipulating a marionette the size and shape of the man he had been.

He pressed the starter tit on the dash panel. A flywheel whirred for a moment before the engine fired normally.

Suilin set the selector to Forward and pressed the throttle. No explosion, no flame.

As he drove out of the motor pool, Suilin heard the sergeant saying, ". . . no insignia and them eyes—he's from an Insertion Patrol Group. Just wish them and the Consies'd fight their war and leave us normal people alone. . . ."

 

"Here he is, Captain Ranson," said the hologram of the commo tech at Firebase Purple. The image shifted.

Major Danny Pritchard looked exhausted even in hologram, and he was still wearing body armor over his khaki fatigues. He rubbed his eyes. "What do you estimate the strength of the attack on Camp Progress, Junebug?" he asked.

"Maybe a battalion," Ranson replied, wondering if her voice was drifting in and out of timbre the way her vision was. "They hit all sides, but it was mostly on the south end."

"Colonel Banyussuf claims it was a division," Pritchard said with a ghost of a smile. "He claims his men've killed over five thousand Consies already."

An inexperienced observer could have mistaken for transmission noise the ripping sounds that shook the hologram every ten or twenty seconds. Even over a satellite bounce, Ranson recognized the discharge of rocket howitzers. Hammer's headquarters was getting some action too.

Cooter laughed. "If the Yokels killed anybody, it was when one of 'em fell out a window and landed on 'im. We got maybe three hundred."

"Stepped on?" demanded the image of Hammer's executive officer—and some said, heir.

"Stepped on and gun camera, maybe two hundred," Ranson said. "But there's a lot of stuff won't show up till they start sifting the ashes. Cooter's right, maybe three. It was a line battalion, and it won't be bothering anybody else for a while."

The command car was crowded. Besides Ranson herself, it held a commo tech named Bestwick at the console, ready if the artificial intelligence monitoring the other bands needed a human decision; Cooter, second in command of the detachment; and Master Sergeant Wylde, who'd been a section leader before, and would be again as soon as his burns healed.

Wylde was lucky to be alive after the first buzzbomb hit his car. He shouldn't have been present now; but he'd insisted, and Ranson didn't have the energy to argue with him. Anyway, between pain and medications, Wylde was too logy to be a problem except for the room his bandaged form took up.

"Hey?" said Cooter. He lifted his commo helmet slightly with one hand so that he could knuckle the line of his sweat-darkened auburn hair. "Major? What the hell's happening, anyway? Is this all over?"

Danny Pritchard smiled a great deal; usually it was a pleasant expression.

Not this smile.

"They hit the three firebases and all but one of the line companies," the major said. "We told everybody hold what they got; and then the hogs—" Pritchard nodded; a howitzer slashed the sky again from beyond the field of view "—scratched everybody's back with firecracker rounds. Each unit swept its circuit before the dust settled from the shellbursts."

The smile hardened still further. "Kinda nice of them to concentrate that way for us."

Ranson nodded, visualizing the white flare of precisely-directed cluster bomblets going off. The interlocking fields of fire from Firebases Red, Blue, and Purple covered the entire Strip. Guerrillas rising in panic, to be hosed down by the tribarrels in the armored vehicles. . . .

"Yeah," said Sergeant Wylde in a husky whisper. The wounded man's face didn't move and his eyes weren't focused on the hologram. "But how about the Yokels? Or is this a private fight fer us 'n the Consies?"

"Right," said Pritchard with something more than agreement in his tone of voice. "Hold one, Junebug."

The sound cut off abruptly as somebody hit the muting switch of the console at HQ. Major Pritchard turned his head. Ranson could see Pritchard's lips moving in profile as he talked to someone out of the projection field. She was in a dream, watching the bust of a man who spoke silently. . . .

What's your present strength in vehicles and trained crews? 

Junebug? 

Captain Ranson? 

Ranson snapped alert. Cooter had put his big arm around her shoulders to give her a shake.

"Right," she said, feeling the red prickly flush cover her, as though she'd just fainted and come around. She couldn't remember where she was, but in her dream somebody had been asking—

"We've got—" Cooter said.

"We're down a blower," Ranson said, facing Pritchard's worried expression calmly. "A combat car."

"Mine," said Wylde to his bandaged hands. Ranson wasn't sure whether or not the sergeant was within the hologram pick-up.

"My crews, two dead," Ranson continued. "Three out for seven days or more. Sergeant Wylde, my section leader, he's out."

"Oh-yew-tee," Wylde muttered. "Out."

"Can you pick anybody up from the Blue side?" Pritchard asked.

"There's the three panzers," Ranson said. "Only one's got a trained crew, but they came through like gangbusters last night."

She frowned, trying to concentrate. "Personnel, though . . . Look, you know, we're talking newbies and people who're rear echelon for a reason."

People even farther out of it than Captain June Ranson, who nodded off while debriefing to Central. . . .

"Look, sir," Cooter interjected. "We shot the cop outta the Consies. I don't know about no 'five thousand dead' cop, but if they'd had more available, they'd a used it last night. They bloody sure don't have enough left to try anytime soon."

"I believe you, Lieutenant," Pritchard said wearily. "But that's not the only problem." He rubbed the palms of his hands together firmly. "Hold one," he repeated as he got up from the console.

Colonel Alois Hammer sat down in Pritchard's place.

The hologram was as clear as if Hammer were in the TOC with Ranson. The Colonel was madder than hell; so mad that his hand kept stabbing upward to brush away the tic at the corner of his left eye.

"Captain . . ." Hammer said. He fumbled with the latches of his clamshell armor to give himself time to form words—or at least to delay the point at which he had to speak them.

He glared at June Ranson. "We kicked the Consies up one side and down the other. The National Army had problems."

"That's why they hired us, sir," Ranson said. She was very calm. Thick glass was beginning to form between her and the image of the regimental commander.

"Yeah, that's why they did, all right," Hammer said. He ground at his left eye.

He lowered his hand. "Captain, you saw what happened to the structure of Camp Progress during the attack?"

"What structure?" Cooter muttered bitterly.

Ranson shivered. The glass wall shivered also, falling away as shards of color that coalesced into Hammer's face.

"Sir, the Consies were only a battalion," Ranson said. "They could've done a lot of damage—they did. But it was just a spoiling attack, they couldn't 've captured the base in the strength they were."

"They can capture Kohang, Captain," Hammer said. "And if they capture a district capital, the National Government is gone. The people who pay us."

Ranson blinked, trying to assimilate the information.

It didn't make any sense. The Consies were beat—beaten good. Multiply what her teams had done at Camp Progress by the full weight of the Regiment—with artillery and perfect artillery targets for a change—and the Conservative Action Movement on Prosperity didn't have enough living members to bury its dead. . . .

"Nobody was expecting it, Captain Ranson," Hammer said. The whiskers on his chin and jowls were white, though the close-cropped hair on the colonel's head was still a sandy brown. "The National Government wasn't, we weren't. It'd been so quiet the past three months that we—"

His eye twitched. "Via!" he cursed. "I thought, and if anybody'd told me different I'd 've laughed at them. I thought the Consies were about to pack it in. And instead they were getting ready for the biggest attack of the war."

"But Colonel," Cooter said. His voice sounded desperate. "They lost. They got their butts kicked."

"Tell that to a bunch of civilians," Hammer said bitterly. "Tell that to your Colonel Banyussuf—the bloody fool!"

Somebody at Central must have spoken to Hammer from out of pick-up range, because the colonel half-turned and snarled, "Then deal with it! Shoot 'em all in the neck if you want!"

He faced around again. For an instant, Ranson stared into eyes as bleak and merciless as the scarp of a glacier. Then Hammer blinked, and the expression was gone; replaced with one of anger and concern. Human emotions, not forces of nature.

"Captain Ranson," he resumed with a formality that would have been frightening to the junior officer were she not drifting again into glassy isolation. "In a week, it'll all be over for the Consies. They'll have to make their peace on any terms they can get—even if that means surrendering for internment by the National Government. But if a district capital falls, there won't be a National Government in a week. All they see—"

Hammer's left hand reached for his eye and clenched into a fist instead. "All they see," he repeated in a voice that trembled between a whisper and a snarl, "is what's been lost, what's been destroyed, what's been disrupted. You and I—"

His hand brushed out in a slighting gesture. "We've expended some ammo, we've lost some equipment. We've lost some people. Objectives cost. Winning costs."

Sergeant Wylde nodded. Blood was seeping from cracks in the Sprayseal which replaced the skin burned from his left shoulder.

"But the politicians and—and what passes for an army, here, they're in a panic. One more push and they'll fold. The people who pay us will fold."

One more push. . . . Ranson thought/said; she wasn't sure whether the words floated from her tongue or across her mind.

"Captain Ranson," Hammer continued, "I don't like the orders I'm about to give you, but I'm going to give them anyway. Kohang has to be relieved soonest, and you're the only troops in position to do the job."

June Ranson was sealed in crystal, a tiny bead that glittered as it spun aimlessly through the universe. "Sir," said the voice from her mouth, "there's the 4th Armored at Camp Victory. A brigade. There's the Yokel 12th and 23rd Infantry closer than we are."

Her voice was enunciating very clearly. "Sir, I've got eight blowers."

"Elements of the 4th Armored are attempting to enter Kohang from the south," Hammer said. "They're making no progress."

"How hard are they trying?" shouted Cooter. "How hard are they bloody trying?"

"It doesn't matter," Ranson thought/said.

"Lieutenant, that doesn't matter," said Hammer, momentarily the man who'd snarled at an off-screen aide. "They're not doing the job. We're going to. That's what we're paid to do."

"Cooter," said Ranson, "shut up."

She shouldn't say that with other people around. Screw it. She focused on the hologram. "Sir," she said, "what's the enemy strength?"

"We've picked up the callsigns of twenty-seven Consie units in and around Kohang, company-size or battalion," Hammer said, in a tone of fractured calm. "The data's been downloaded to you already."

Bestwick glanced up from the console behind the projected image and nodded; Ranson continued to watch her commanding officer.

"Maybe three thousand bandits," Ranson said.

"Maybe twice that," Hammer said, nodding as Ranson was nodding. "Concentrated on the south side and around Camp Victory."

"There's two hundred thousand people in Kohang," Ranson said. "There's three thousand police in the city."

"The Governmental Compound is under siege," Hammer said coldly. "Some elements of the security forces appeared to be acting in support of the Consies." He paused and rubbed his eye.

"A battalion of the 4th Armored left Camp Victory without orders yesterday afternoon," he continued. "About an hour before the first rocket attack. Those troops aren't responding to messages from their brigade commander."

"Blood and martyrs," somebody in the TOC said. Maybe they all said it.

"Sir," said Ranson, "we can't, we can't by ourself—"

"Shoot your way into the compound," Hammer said before she could finish. "Reinforce what's there, put some backbone into 'em. They got enough bloody troops to do the job themselves, Captain . . . they just don't believe it."

He grimaced. "Even a couple blowers. That'll do the trick until G and H companies arrive. Just a couple blowers."

"Cop," muttered Wylde through his bandages.

"Bloody hell," muttered Cooter with the back of his hand tightly against his mouth.

"May the Lord have mercy on our souls," said/thought June Ranson.

"Speed's essential," Hammer resumed. "You have authorization to combat-loss vehicles rather than slow down. The victory bonus'll cover the cost of replacement."

"I'll be combat-lossing crews, Colonel," Ranson's voice said. "But they're replaceable too. . . ."

Cooter gasped. Wylde grunted something that might have been either laughter or pain.

Hammer opened his mouth, then closed it with an audible clop. He opened it again and spoke with a lack of emotion as complete as the white, colorless fury of a sun's heart. "You are not to take any unnecessary risks, Captain Ranson. It is necessary that you achieve your objective. You will accept such losses as are required to achieve your objective. Is that understood?"

"Yes sir," said Ranson without inflection. "Oh, yes sir."

Hammer turned his head. The viewers at Camp Progress thought their commander was about to call orders or directions to someone on his staff. Instead, nothing happened while the hologram pick-ups stared at the back of Alois Hammer's head.

"All right," Hammer said at last, beginning to speak before he'd completely faced around again. His eyes were bright, his face hard. "The Consies' night vision equipment isn't as good as ours for the most part, so you're to leave as soon as it's dark. That gives you enough time to prepare and get some rest."

"Rest," Wylde murmured.

"The World Gov satellites'll tell the Consies where we are to the millimeter," Ranson said. "We'll have ambush teams crawling over us like flies on a turd, all the way to Kohang."

Or however far. 

"Junebug," said Hammer, "I'm not hanging you out to dry. Thirty seconds before you start your move, all the WG satellites are going to go down, recce and commo both. They'll stay down for however long it suits me that they do."

Ranson blinked, "Sir," she said hesitantly, "if you do that . . . I mean, that means—"

"It means that our commo and reconnaissance is probably going to go out shortly thereafter, Captain," Hammer said. "So you'll be on your own. But you don't have to worry about tank killers being vectored into your axis of advance."

"Sir, if you hit their satellites—" Ranson began.

"They'll take it and smile, Captain," Hammer said. "Because if they don't, there won't be any Terran World Government enclaves here on Prosperity to worry about. I guarantee it. They may think they can cause me trouble on Earth, but they know what I'll do to them here!"

"Yessir," June Ranson said. "I'll check the status of my assets and plot a route, then get back to you."

"Captain," Hammer said softly, "if I didn't think it could be done, I wouldn't order it. No matter how much it counted. Good luck to you and your team."

The hologram dissolved into a swirl of phosphorescent mites, impingement points of the carrier wave itself after the signal ceased. Bestwick shut down the projector.

"Cooter," Ranson said, "get the guard detachment ready. I'll take care of the tanks myself."

Cooter nodded over his shoulder. The big man was already on the way to his blower. It was going to be tricky, juggling crews and newbies to fill the slots that last night's firefight had opened. . . .

If Hammer took on the World Government, he was going to lose. Not here, but in the main arena of politics and economics on Earth.

That bothered June Ranson a lot.

But not nearly as much as the fact that the orders she'd just received put her neck on the block, sure as Death itself.

 

 

Chapter Five

Speedin' Steve Riddle sat by Platt's cot in the medical tent, listening to machines pump air in and out of his buddy's lungs.

And thinking.

They sat on the lowered tailgate of Platt's truck, staring at the sky and giggling occasionally at the display. At first there'd been only the lesser moon edging one horizon while the other horizon was saffron with the sunset. 

Lights, flames . . . streaks of tracers that painted letters in the sky for the drug-heightened awareness of the two men. Neither Platt nor Riddle could read the words, but they knew whatever was being spelled was excruciatingly funny. . . .  

"Speed," called Lieutenant Cooter, "get your ass back to the blower and start running the prelim checklist. We're moving out tonight."

"Wha . . . ?" Riddle blurted, jerking his head up like an ostrich surprised at a waterhole. He was rapidly going bald. To make up for it, he'd grown a luxuriant moustache that fluffed when he spoke or exhaled.

"Don't give me any lip, you stupid bastard!" Cooter snapped, though Speed's response had been logy rather than argumentative. "If I didn't need you bad, you'd be findin' your own ticket back to whatever cesspit you call home."

"Hey, El-Tee!" Otski called, sitting up on his cot despite the gentle efforts of Shorty Rogers to keep him flat. "How they hangin', Cooter-baby?"

He waggled his stump.

"Come on, Otski," Rogers said. Shorty was Flamethrower's driver and probably the best medic in the guard detachment as well as being a crewmate of the wounded man. "Just take it easy or I'll have to raise your dosage, and then it won't feel so good. All right?"

The medicomp metered Platt's breathing, in and out.

"Hey, lookit," Otski burbled, fluttering his stump again though he permitted Shorty to lower him back to the cot.

An air injector spat briefly, but the gunner's voice continued for a moment. "Lookit it when I wave, Cooter. I'm gonna get a flag. Whole bunch flags, stick 'em in there 'n wave 'n wave. . . ."

"Shorty, you're gonna have to get back to the car too," Cooter said. "We'll turn 'em over to the Logistics staff until they can be lifted out to a permanent facility."

"Cop! None a' the Logistics people here'd know—"

Riddle thought:

The parts shed bulged around a puff of orange flame. The shockwave threw Riddle and Platt flat on the sloping tailgate; they struggled to sit up again. It was hilarious. 

The Consie sapper rose from his crouch, silhouetted by the flaming shed he'd just bombed. He carried a machinepistol in a harness of looped rope, so that the weapon swung at waist height. His right hand snatched at the grip. 

"Lookie, Speed!" Platt cackled. "He's just as bald as you are! Lookie!" 

"Lookie!" Riddle called. He threw up his arms and fell backward with the effort. 

The machinepistol crackled like the main truss of a house giving way. Its tracers were bright orange, lovely orange, as they drew spirals from the muzzle. One of them ricocheted around the interior of the truck box, dazzling Riddle with its howling beauty. He sat up again. 

"Beauty!" he cried. Platt was thrashing on his back. Air bubbled through the holes in his chest. 

The machinepistol pointed at Riddle. Nothing happened. The sapper cursed and slapped a magazine into the butt-well to replace the one that had ejected automatically when the previous burst emptied it. 

The Consie's body flung itself sideways, wrapped in cyan light as a powergun from one of the combat cars raked him. The fresh magazine exploded. A few tracers zipped crazily out of the flashing yellow ball of detonating propellant. 

"Beauty," Steve Riddle repeated as he fell backward. 

Platt's chest wheezed. 

"—a medicomp when it bit 'em on the ass!"

Air from the medicomp wheezed in and out of Platt's nostrils.

"Screw you!" called a supply tech with shrapnel wounds in his upper body.

"Then get 'em over to the Yokel side!" Cooter said. "They got facilities. Look, I'm not lookin' for an argument: we're movin' out at sunset, and none of my able-bodied crew are stayin' to bloody screw around here. All right?"

"Yeah, all right. One a the newbies had some training back home, he says." Rogers stood up and gave a pat to the sleeping Otski. "Hey, how long we gonna be out?"

"Don't bloody ask," Cooter grunted bitterly. "Denzil, where's your driver?"

The left wing gunner from Sergeant Wylde's blower turned his head—all the motion of which he was capable the way he was wrapped. "Strathclyde?" he said. His voice sounded all right. The medicomp kept his coverings flushed and cool with a bath of nutrient fluid. "Check over to One-one. He's got a buddy there."

"Yeah, well, One-five needs a driver," Cooter explained. "I'm going to put him on it."

Shorty Rogers looked up. "What happened to Darples on One-five?" he asked.

"Head shot. One a the gunners took over last night, but I figure it makes sense to transfer Strathclyde for a regular thing."

"Cop," muttered Rogers. "I'll miss that snake." Then, "Don't mean nuthin'."

"Riddle!" Cooter snarled. "What the bloody hell are you doing still here? Get your ass moving, or you won't bloody have one!"

Riddle walked out of the medical tent. The direct sunlight made him sneeze, but he didn't really notice it.

Bright orange tracers, spiraling toward his chest. 

He reached his combat car, Deathdealer. The iridium armor showed fresh scars. There was a burnished half-disk on the starboard wall of the fighting compartment—copper spurted out by a buzzbomb. The jet had cooled from a near-plasma here on the armor. Must've been the round that took out Otski. . . .

Riddle sat on the shaded side of the big vehicle. No one else was around. Cooter and Rogers had their own business. They wouldn't get here for hours.

Otski wouldn't be back at all. Never at all.

Bright orange tracers . . .

Riddle took a small cone-shaped phial out of his side pocket. It was dull gray and had none of the identifying stripes that marked ordinary stim-cones, the ones that gave you a mild buzz without the aftereffects of alcohol.

He put the flat side of the cone against his neck, feeling for the carotid pulse. When he squeezed the cone, there was a tiny hiss and a skin-surface prickling.

Riddle began to giggle again.

Troops were moving about the Slammers' portion of the encampment in a much swifter and more directed fashion than they had been the afternoon before, when Dick Suilin first visited this northern end of Camp Progress.

The reporter glanced toward the bell—a section of rocket casing—hung on top of the Tactical Operations Center. Perhaps it had rung, unheard by him while he drove past the skeletons of National Army barracks . . . ?

The warning signal merely swayed in the breeze that carried soot and soot smells even here, where few sappers had penetrated.

Suilin had figured the commo gear would be at the TOC, whether Captain Ranson was there or not. In the event, the black-haired female officer sat on the back ramp of the vehicle, facing three male soldiers who squatted before her.

She stood, thumping out her closing orders, as Suilin pulled up; the men rose a moment later. None of the group paid the local reporter any attention.

Suilin didn't recognize the men. One of them was fat, at least fifty standard years old, and wore a grease-stained khaki jumpsuit.

"No problem, Junebug," he called as he turned away from the meeting. "We'll be ready to lift—if we're left alone to get ready, all right? Keep the rest a your people and their maintenance problems off my back—" he was striding off toward a parked tank, shouting his words over his shoulder "—and we'll be at capacity when you need us."

Suilin got out of his truck. They called their commanding officer Junebug? 

"Yeah, well," said another soldier, about twenty-five and an average sort of man in every way. He lifted his helmet to rub his scalp, then settled the ceramic/plastic pot again. "What do you want for a callsign? Charlie Three-zero all right?"

Ranson shook her head. "Negative. You're Blue Three," she said flatly.

Blue Three rubbed his scalp again. "Right," he said in a cheerless voice. "Only you hear 'Charlie Three-zero,' don't have kittens, okay? I got a lot to learn."

He turned morosely, adding, "And you know, this kinda on-the-job training ain't real survivable."

Suilin stood by, waiting for the third male mercenary to go before he tried to borrow the Slammers' communications system to call Kohang.

Instead of leaving, the soldier turned and looked at the reporter with a disconcertingly slack-jawed, vacant-eyed stare. The green-brown eyes didn't seem to focus at all.

Captain Ranson's eyes followed her subordinate's. She said angrily, "Who the bloody hell are you?"

It wasn't the same face that Suilin had been interviewing the night before.

There were dark circles around Ranson's eyes, and her left cheek was badly scratched. Her face, her hands, and her neck down to the scallop where she'd been wearing armor, were dingy with fouling spewed from the breeches of her tribarrel when jets of nitrogen expelled the empty cases.

Ranson had been angry at being forced into an interview. She'd known the power was in the reporter's hands: the power to probe for answers she didn't want to give; the power to twist questions so that they were hooks in the fabric of her self-esteem; the power to make a fool out of her, by the words he tricked her into saying—or the form into which he edited those words before he aired them.

Now . . .

Now Suilin wondered what had happened to Fritzi Dole's body. He was almost certain that this small, fierce mercenary wouldn't shoot a reporter out of hand to add to the casualty count, no matter how angry and frustrated she was now. . . .

"I'm, ah," he said, "Dick Suilin. I'm, ah, we met yesterday when the—"

"The reporter," Ranson said. "Right, the bloody fool who didn't know t' hit the dirt for incoming. The interview's off."

She started to turn. "Beat it," she added.

"It's not—" Suilin said. "Captain Ranson, I need to talk to somebody in Kohang, and your commo may be the—"

"Buddy," said Ranson with a venom and disgust that shocked the reporter more than the content of the words did, "you must be out of your mind. Get out of here."

The other soldier continued to watch without expression.

"Captain, you don't understand," Suilin called to Ranson's back. "I need to make sure my sister's all right."

The woman bent to re-enter the immobile command blower.

"Curse it! She's the wife of the District Governor. Now will you—"

Ranson turned. The reporter thought he'd seen her angry before.

"The District Governor," she repeated softly. "The District Bleeding Governor."

She walked toward Suilin. He poised, uncertain as to what the female officer intended.

She tapped him on the chest as she said, "Your brother-in-law doesn't have any balls, buddy." The tip of her index finger was like a mallet.

"Captain—"

"He's got a brigade of armor," Ranson continued, "and maybe ten battalions of infantry and gendarmes, according to the order of battle in my data banks."

She tapped even harder. Suilin backed a step. "But no balls a'tall."

The reporter set his leg to lock him into place. "Captain, you can't—"

Ranson slapped him, forehand and then back across the other cheek. Her fingers were as hard as the popper of a bullwhip. "And he's got an ass, so we're going to get our ass shot off to save his!"

She spun on her heel. "Sparrow, get him out of my sight," she called over her shoulder as she entered her TOC.

Suilin viewed the world through a blur of tears. Sparrow put a hand on his shoulder and turned him with a detached gentleness that felt like compassion to the reporter at the moment.

"S'okay, turtle," the mercenary said as he walked Suilin toward the truck he'd borrowed. "We just got orders to relieve the District Governor ourself, and we got bugger-all t' do it with."

"What?" the reporter said. "In Kohang?"

His right cheek burned, and his left felt as if someone had flayed the skin from it. He wondered if Ranson had been wearing a ring. "Who's relieving Kohang?"

Sparrow waved an arm as deliberately as a stump speaker gesturing. "You're lookin' at it, turtle," he said. "Three tanks, five cars . . . and maybe crews for most of 'em."

The veneer of careless apathy dropped away. Sparrow shivered. He was tall and thin with an olive complexion several shades darker than Suilin's own.

"Via," the mercenary muttered. "Via!"

Sparrow turned and walked, then trotted in a loose-limbed way toward the tank across the enclosure from the TOC. He climbed the shallow steps up its skirts and battered hull, then popped into the turret with the haste of a man boarding under fire.

The hatch clanged loudly behind him.

Dick Suilin sat in his truck, blinking to clear his eyes and mind. He started the vehicle and turned it in a tight circle, heading back toward National Army Headquarters.

His own gear had been destroyed in the firefight, but he thought the barracks in which Fritzi Doyle was billeted had survived. The cameraman had worn fatigues. One of his spare sets would fit Suilin well enough.

Fritzi wouldn't mind.

The corpse of a National Army sergeant was sprawled at the doorway of a bombed-out building. He'd thrown on a uniform shirt, but he had no shoes or trousers. His left arm was outstretched while his right was folded under his face as though cushioning it from the ground.

He'd been carrying a grenade launcher and a satchel of reloads for it. They lay beside his body.

Suilin stopped the truck, picked up the weapon and ammunition, and set the gear on the passenger seat. As an afterthought, he tried to lift the dead man. The body was stiff and had already begun to blacken in the bright sun.

Someone whose job it was would deal with the sergeant. Not Dick Suilin.

Suilin's hands felt slimy. He accelerated away, kicking gravel over the corpse in his haste to be shut of it.

 

"Blue One," said Captain June Ranson, checking the artificial intelligence in her multi-function display. A digit on the holographic map blinked twice in yellow, then twice more in blue light when the transponder in Deathdealer answered the call automatically.

"Go ahead, Tootsie Six," said Sergeant Sparrow's voice.

"Linkage check," Ranson said. "Blue Two."

Deathdealer led the line-to-be, quivering on its fans just ahead of Ranson's Warmonger. 

There wasn't enough room in the Slammers' end of the encampment to form up completely until the blowers started to move south, toward the gate. Sound, re-echoing from the berm and the sloped iridium sides of the vehicles, vibrated the flesh of everyone around.

Exclusion circuits in Ranson's commo helmet notched out as much of the fan's racket as possible, but the sound of multiple drive nacelles being run up to speed created an ambiance beyond the power of electronics to control. Air forced beneath the lips of eight plenum chambers picked up grit which ricocheted into standing waves where the currents from two or three blowers intersected.

Deathdealer's turret was already buttoned up. Nothing wrong with that—it'd be quieter inside, though the fan-driven chaos would penetrate even the massive iridium castings that stopped all but direct pointblank hits by the largest powerguns.

Ranson had never seen Birdie Sparrow man his tank from the open cupola. A tank's electronics were better than human senses, even when those senses were augmented by the AI and sensors in a commo helmet. The screens within a panzer's turret gave not only crisper definition on all the electro-optical bands but also gave multiple simultaneous options.

That information glut was one of the reasons most tank commanders chose to fight their vehicles from the cupola instead of the closed turret whenever possible.

It was difficult to get experienced crewmen to transfer from combat cars to the panzers, even though it usually meant promotion. Most tank commanders were promoted from driver, while the driver slots were filled by newbies with no previous combat experience in the Slammers.

Ranson had checked Birdie Sparrow's personnel file—this afternoon; she'd had no reason to call up the records from Central's database before. . . .

Before Colonel Hammer handed her command of a suicide mission.

Sparrow had five standard years, seven months, service with the Regiment. All but the training in the first three months had been in line companies, so there was no need to wonder how he handled combat: just fine or he wouldn't 've lasted out his fourth month. Hammer's Slammers weren't hired by people who needed them to polish their gear in barracks.

A few problems on stand-down; a more serious one with a platoon leader in the field that had cost Sparrow a pay-grade—but it was the lieutenant who'd been transferred back to Central and, after the discreet interval required for discipline, out of the Slammers. Sparrow had an excellent record and must have been in line for his own platoon—

Instead of which, he'd been sent down here to the quiet South for a little time off.

Junebug Ranson had an even better service record than Sparrow did. She knew curst well what she was doing down here at Camp Progress.

Task Force Ranson was real lucky to have a company commander as experienced as Junebug Ranson to lead the mission, and a tanker as good as Birdie Sparrow to head up the unit's tank element.

The trouble was, they were both bughouse bleeding crazy, and Ranson knew it.

It was her job to know it, and to compensate the best way she could.

"Roger, Tootsie Six," said her helmet in the voice of Warrant Leader Ortnahme as the digit 2 flickered on the map display.

"Linkage check," responded Captain Ranson. "Blue Three."

Needs must, when the Devil drives. 

 

"Cooter," said Chief Lavel over the commo helmet's Channel 3. It was a lock-out push normally reserved for vehicle intercoms, so that even Tootsie Six couldn't overhear without making a point of it. "I found 'im. The sonuvabitch."

Flamethrower shuddered violently and began to skid as the tank to starboard ran up its fans to full pitch and thrust for a test.

The panzer's drivers had his nacelles vertical, so the hundred and seventy tonnes of tank simply rose a hand's breadth off the ground. The air bleeding beneath the skirts was at firehose pressure, though; the smack of it pushed the lighter combat car away until Shorty Rogers grounded Flamethrower to oppose the friction of steel on soil to the blast of wind.

Cooter keyed Channel 3 and said, "Can you get him here, Chief? We're gonna get the word any time now."

"Cooter," said his friend, "I think you better take a look at this one yourself."

Chief Lavel had been a gun captain. He knew about time and about movement orders; and he knew what he was saying.

"Cop!" Cooter swore. "He in his doss, then?"

The tank, the nameless one crewed by a couple newbies, settled back onto its skirts. The sergeant in the cupola looked down at Cooter. In formation, they'd be running well ahead of Flamethrower's tailass Charlie slot.

"Negative," said Chief. "He's in his buddy's bunk—you know, Platt's? In the Logistics doss."

Night fell like an axe at Camp Progress. Except for the red blur on the western horizon, the sun had disappeared completely in the past three minutes.

Cooter switched his visor to enhancement and checked to make sure the nameless tank was between him and Tootsie Six, then cut back to standard optical.

Depth perception was never quite as good on enhanced mode. There were enough lights on in the encampment for Cooter to find his way to the Logistics bunker/barracks.

Cooter tapped the shoulder of Gale, the right-wing gunner from Tootsie One-four, transferred to Flamethrower now that Otski and the other blower had both become casualties. Speaking on 12, the other lock-out push, to be heard over the fan noise, Cooter said, "Hold the fort, Windy. I'll be back in a couple minutes max."

"We'll be bloody gone in a couple minutes, Cooter," Gale replied.

He was an older man, nearly thirty; not a genius, but bright and competent enough that he'd 've had a blower of his own years before had he not adamantly refused the promotion.

"Yeah, well," Cooter said, climbing awkwardly past Speed Riddle's clamshell and helmet stacked in front of the left tribarrel. "We're last in line. Worst case, Shorty'll have to make up a little time."

Worst case, Captain Ranson would notice her second-in-command hadn't pulled out on time and would check Flamethrower's own sensors. If she found Cooter gone from his post now, she'd have him dragged behind a blower all the way back to Camp Progress as soon as the mission was over.

Which was pretty much what Cooter had in mind for Speed Riddle.

He lumbered across the ground, burdened by his armor and half-blinded by dust despite his lowered visor. Cooter was a big man, but no man was significant in an area packed with the huge, slowly-maneuvering masses of armored vehicles.

Logistics section—the warehouses, truck park, and bunkered sleeping quarters for the associated personnel—formed the boundary between the Slammers' positions and the remainder of Camp Progress. Sappers who'd gotten through the Yokel defenses had bombed a parts shed and shot up a few trucks, but the Red section's counterattack put paid to the Consies here before they'd really gotten rolling.

The doss—half dug into the berm, half sandbagged—was undamaged except for six plate-sized cups which a tribarrel had blasted from the front wall. There was a gap in the line of glassy impact craters where one round had splashed a Consie sapper instead of hitting the sandbags.

Chief Lavel stood in the doorway. He gestured to Cooter but hunched his way into the doss before the lieutenant arrived.

Chief tried to give himself a little advantage when there was anything tricky to do, like negotiating the double step that put the floor of the doss below ground level for safety. He got around amazingly well for a man missing his left arm and leg, though.

Outside the bunker, armored vehicles filled the evening with hot lubricant and the sharpness of ozone arcing away from dirty relays. The bunker's interior stank of human waste.

"What the . . . ?" Cooter muttered as he followed Chief down the narrow hallway along the front wall of the structure. A glowstrip was tacked to the ceiling; Cooter's helmet scraped it. He swore, ducked, and then straightened to bump again.

Board partitions made from packing cases divided the doss into rooms—decent-sized ones for Lavel and his permanent staff and, at the far end, tiny cubicles to house transients like the drivers making supply runs. The rooms were empty; the personnel were either involved with the departure or watching it.

Except for the last cubicle, where Speed Riddle lay sprawled on a cot with a broad smile. The balding gunner had fouled himself thoroughly enough that waste was dripping from his pants' leg onto the floor.

Riddle's fingers held a drug phial. Two more empties lay beside his hand.

Cooter stared at the gunner for several seconds. Then he turned around and strode back down the aisle.

His helmet brushed the glowstrip. He punched upward with his knotted right fist, banging the flat fixture against the ceiling of steel plank and causing grit to drift down through the perforations from the sandbagged topcover.

"Coot!" Lavel called, stumping along behind him. "Hey Coot. Slow down."

"Chief," Cooter said without slowing or turning, "I want that bastard tied up until he can be delivered to Central. With wire. Barbed wire'd be fine. Somethin' happens to me, you take care of the Court Martial, right?"

The end of Lavel's long crutch shot across the doorway, blocking Cooter's exit. "Wait a bloody minute!" Chief said.

Lavel was leaning against the right wall. The crutch was strapped to his stump, since he didn't have a left hand with which to grip it. He lowered it, a slim wand of boron monocrystal, when Cooter turned at last to face him.

"Going to use one of the newbies in Riddle's place?" he asked.

Cooter shook his head violently, as much to clear it as for a gesture. "Put the last one I could trust on One-five for a driver," he said. "I'll be better off watching that side myself than trusting some hick who's still got both thumbs up his ass."

"Take me, Cooter," said Chief Lavel.

Cooter looked at his friend with a cold lack of passion. Chief was so tall that he also had to duck to clear the ceiling. His shoulders were massive. Lavel had been thin when he was a whole man, but the inertia of his years of injury gave him a grotesque pot belly.

"Please, Coot," he said. "You won't regret it."

"I need you here, Chief," Cooter said as he turned. "You take care of Riddle, you hear?"

"Coot?"

"Gotta go now," Cooter muttered as he took both steps to the exterior with one stretch of his long, powerful legs.

The armored vehicles were snorting, running up the speed of their fans again; and, as Cooter strode toward Flamethrower, a tank fired its main gun skyward.

There were too bloody many vehicles in too little space, and the bloody drivers had too much on their minds.

A combat car was drifting toward Herman's Whore. The lighter vehicle was already so close that Ortnahme had to crank down his display to read the number stenciled on its skirts. "Tootsie One-two!" he snarled. "You're fouling—"

The tank lurched. For an instant, Ortnahme thought Simkins was trying to back away from the oncoming car. That wouldn't work, because Herman's Whore had rotated in place and her skirts were firmly against the berm.

"—us, you dickheaded—"

The man in the fighting compartment of Tootsie One-two turned, his face a ball of blank wonder as he stared at the tank looming above him. He was probably gabbling to his driver over the intercom, but there was no longer time to avoid the collision. The skirts of both vehicles were thick steel, but the combined mass would start seams for sure.

"—fool! Watch your—"

The bow of Herman's Whore lifted slightly. Simkins had run up his fans and vectored them forward. The tank couldn't slide backward because of the berm, so its bow skirts blasted a shrieking hurricane of air into the combat car.

Tootsie One-two, Flamethrower, pitched as though it had just dropped into a gully. The trooper in the fighting compartment bounced off the coaming before he could brace himself on the grips of two of the tribarrels.

Why in blazes was there only one man in the back of Flamethrower when the task force was set to move out?

The combat car slid two meters under the thrust of the tank's fans before Shorty Rogers dumped his own ground effect and sparked to a halt on bits of gravel in the soil.

The figure in the fighting compartment stood up again and gave Herman's Whore an ironic salute. "Blue Two," said Ortnahme's helmet. "Sorry 'bout that."

"Tootsie One-two," the warrant leader responded. He felt expansive and relieved, now that he was sure they wouldn't be deadlined at the last instant by a stupid mistake. "No harm done. It's prob'ly my bloody fault for not seeing your nacelles were aligned right when we had time to screw with 'em."

Herman's Whore settled, a little abruptly. Their skirts gave the ground a tap that rattled Ortnahme's teeth and probably cut a centimeter-deep oval in the hard soil.

"Simkins—" the warrant leader began, the word tripping the helmet's artificial intelligence to intercom mode.

"Sir, I'm sorry," his driver was already blurting. "I let the sucker—"

"Blood 'n martyrs, Simkins," Ortnahme interrupted, "don't worry about that! Where dja learn that little maneuver, anyhow?"

"Huh?" said the helmet. "Sir, it was just, you know, the leverage off the berm . . . ?"

He sounded like he thought Ortnahme was gonna chew his head off. Which had happened maybe a little too often in the past . . . but bloody hell, you had t' break 'em in the start. . . .

"Sir?" Simkins added in a little voice.

"Yeah?"

"Sir, I really like tanks. D'ye suppose that—"

"Like bloody hell!" the warrant leader snapped. "Look, kid, you're more good to me and Colonel Hammer right where you bloody are!"

"Yessir."

Which, come t' think about it, was driving a panzer. Well, there'd be time t' worry about that later.

Or there wouldn't.

The turret interior had darkened as the sky did, because the main screen was set on direct optical. Ortnahme frowned, then set the unit for progressive enhancement, projecting images at 60% of average daylight ambiance.

The visual display brightened suddenly, though the edges of the snarling armored vehicles lacked a little of the definition they would have had in unaided sunlight. No matter what the sky did—sun, moons, or the Second Coming—the main screen would continue to display at this apparent light level until Ortnahme changed its orders.

Henk Ortnahme knew tanks. He knew their systems backward and forward, better than almost any of the panzers' regular crews.

Line troops found a few things that worked for them. Each man used his handful of sensor and gunnery techniques, ignoring the remainder of his vehicle's incredibly versatile menu. You don't fool around when your life depends on doing instinctively something that works for you.

The maintenance chief had to be sure that everything worked, every time. He'd spent twenty years of playing with systems that most everybody else forgot. He could run the screens and sensors by reflex and instantly critique the performance of each black box.

What the warrant leader hadn't had for those twenty years was combat experience. . . .

"Sir," said the helmet. "Ah, when are we supposed to pull out?"

A bloody stupid question.

Sunset, and Simkins could see as well as Ortnahme that it was sunset plus seven. Captain Ranson had said departure time would be coordinated by Central, so probably the only people who knew why Task Force Ranson was on hold were a thousand kilometers north of—

Screen Two, which in default mode—as now—was boresighted to the main gun, flashed the orange warning director control. As the letters appeared, the turret of Herman's Whore began to rotate without any input from Warrant Leader Ortnahme.

The turret was being run by Fire Central, at Headquarters. Henk Ortnahme had no more to say about the situation than he did regarding any other orders emanating directly from Colonel Hammer.

"Sir?" Simkins blurted over the intercom.

"Blue Two—" demanded at least two other vehicles simultaneously, alerted by the squealing turret and rightly concerned about what the hell was going on. Screwing around with a tank's main gun in these close quarters wasn't just a bad idea.

"Simkins," Ortnahme said. His fingers stabbed buttons. "It's all right. The computer up in Purple's just took over."

As he spoke, Ortnahme set his gunnery screen to echo on Screen Three of the other tanks and the multi-function displays with which the combat cars made do. That'd answer their question better 'n anything he could say—

And besides, he was busy figuring out what Central thought it was doing with his tank.

The warrant leader couldn't countermand the orders coming from Firebase Purple, but he could ask his own artificial intelligence to tell him what firing solution was being fed to it. Screen Three obligingly threw up the figures for azimuth, elevation, and range.

"Blood 'n martyrs," Henk Ortnahme whispered.

Now he knew why the departure of Task Force Ranson had been delayed.

They had to wait for the Terran World Government's recce satellite to come over the horizon—

Herman's Whore fired its main gun; cyan lightning and a thunderclap through the open hatch, a blast of foul gases within the turret.

—so they could shoot it down.

 

The unexpected bolt didn't blind Cooter because his visor reacted in microseconds to block the intense glare. The shock stunned him for a moment anyway; then the big man began to run through the mass of restive vehicles.

A tank—Deathdealer, Blue One—slid forward. When the big blower was clear, entering the Yokel area between the demolished shed and a whole one, Captain Ranson's Warmonger fell in behind it. It was as though the echoing blast from Herman's Whore had triggered an iridium avalanche.

The third vehicle, another combat car, sidled up to the line of departure. That'd be One-five, its driver a newbie on whom Cooter had decided to take a chance. The fellow was matching his blower's speed to that of the leading vehicles, but he had his bow pointing thirty degrees off the axis of motion.

Some dickhead Yokel had parked a light truck just inside the Slammer's area. One-five's tail skirts managed to tap the little vehicle and send it spinning halfway up the berm, a graphic illustration of the difference between a tonne at rest and thirty tonnes in motion.

Cooter reached his car panting with exertion, anger, and a relieved awareness of how bloody near that asshole Riddle had made him cut it. One-one was already pulling into line for the run through Camp Progress, though the second and third combat cars would spread left and right as outriders as soon as they left the gate.

A Yokel wearing fatigues cut for somebody shorter put a hand on Cooter's shoulder as he set his foot on Flamethrower's skirt. The fellow carried a slung grenade launcher, a kitbag, and a satchel of ammunition.

Cooter had never seen him before.

"Who the hell are you?" he snarled over the fans' intake howl. The skirts were quivering with repressed violence, and the nameless Blue Three was already headed into the Yokel compound.

"I'm Dick," the fellow shouted. "From last night. Lieutenant, can you use a grenadier for this run?"

Cooter started at him a second, five seconds . . . ten. One-six was pulling out. . . .

"You bet your ass I can, turtle," Cooter said. "Welcome aboard!"

 

 

Chapter Six

The upper half of June Ranson's visor showed a light-enhanced view of her surroundings. It flicked from side to side as her head bobbed in the nervous-pigeon motions of somebody with more things to worry about than any human being could handle.

Deathdealer led the column. Even from 200 meters ahead, the wake of the tank's vast passage rocked Warmonger's own considerable mass. Willens was driving slightly left of the center of Deathdealer's track, avoiding some of the turbulence and giving himself a better direct view forward. It raised the danger from mines, though; the tank would set off anything before the combat car reached it, if their tracks were identical. . . .

She let it go for now. The roadway between Camp Progress and the civilian settlement over the ridge had been cleared in the fighting the night before.

Stolley had his tribarrel cocked forward, parallel to the car's axis of motion instead of sweeping the quadrant to the left side like he ought to. Stolley figured—and they all figured, Junebug Ranson as sure as her wing gunner—that first crack at any Consies hereabouts would come from the front.

But a ninety percent certainty meant one time in ten you were dead. Deathdealer and the bow gunner, June Ranson, could handle the front. Stolley's job—

Ranson put her fingers on the top barrel of Stolley's weapon, well ahead of the mounting post, and pushed.

The wing gunner's hands tightened on the grips for a moment before he relaxed with a curse that he didn't even try to muffle. The gun muzzles swung outward in the direction they ought to be pointed.

Stolley stared at his commanding officer. His face was a reflecting ball behind his lowered visor.

"If you don't like your job," Ranson said, speaking over the wind noise instead of using intercom, "I can arrange for you to drive. Another blower."

Stolley crouched behind his gun, staring into the night.

Ranson nodded in approval of the words she'd been listening to, the words coming from her mouth. Good command technique—under the circumstances, under field conditions where it was more important to be obeyed than to be liked. This crew wasn't going to like its blower captain anyway . . . but they'd obey.

Ranson shook her head violently. She wasn't an observer, watching a holographic record from command school on Friesland. She was . . .

The images on the lower half of her visor wobbled at a rate different from that of the combat car and didn't change when Ranson darted her head to the left or right. She'd slaved its display to that of the sensors on Deathdealer in the lead. The tank's intakes sucked the tops of low bushes toward her from the roadside. Then, as Deathdealer came alongside, the air leaking beneath her skirts battered them away.

Moments later, Warmonger swept by the bushes. The top of Ranson's visor repeated the images of the lower section as if on a five-second delay.

Ranson shook her head again. It didn't help.

By an emergency regulation—which had been in place for fourteen years—there were to be no private structures within two kilometers of a military base. Colonel Banyussuf had enforced that reg pretty stringently. There'd been drink kiosks all along the road to within a hundred meters of the gate, but they were daylight use only.

Since the panzers swept through the night before, nothing remained of the flimsy stands but splinters and ash that swirled to the passage of Task Force Ranson.

Permanent civilian dwellings, more serious entertainment—whores, hard drugs, gambling—as well as the goods and services you'd normally find in a town the size of Camp Progress, were in Happy Days. That settlement was just over the ridge the road climbed as it ran southeast from the camp. Technically, Happy Days was within the two-kilometer interdict; but out of sight, out of mind.

Being over the ridge meant line-of-sight bolts from the Slammers' powerguns wouldn't 've hurt the civilians. The National Army might've dropped some indirect fire on Happy Days during the fighting, but Ranson doubted the Yokels had been that organized.

Janacek had taped a red-patterned bandanna to the lower rear edge of his commo helmet. At rest, it kept sun from the back of his neck, but when the car was moving, it popped and fluttered like a miniature flag.

When Task Force Ranson got beyond the settlement, they could open their formation and race cross-country through the night; but the only practical place to cross the wooded ridge was where the road did.

There were probably Consies hidden among the civilians of Happy Days. One of them might try a shot as the armored vehicles howled past. . . .

The lead tank crested the rise in a cloud of ash and charred wood. There'd been groves of mighty trees to either side of the road. Panels of bright silk strung from trunk to trunk sectioned the copses into open-air brothels in fine weather.

Before. During the previous night, return fire and the backblasts of bombardment rockets had torched the trees into ash and memories. That permitted Deathdealer's driver to swing abruptly to the right, off the roadway and any weapons targeted on it, just before coming into sight of Happy Days.

Debris momentarily blanked the lower half of Ranson's visor. It cleared with a view of the settlement. The ground across the ridge dropped away more steeply than on the side facing Camp Progress, so the nearest of the one- and two-story houses were several hundred meters away where the terrain flattened.

Happy Days was a ghost town.

Deathdealer was proceeding at forty kph, fractionally slower than her speed a few moments before. Warmonger started to close the 200-meter separation, but Willens throttled back and swung to the left of the road as the combat car topped the rise. Ranson's left hand switched her visor off remote; her right was firm on the tribarrel's grip.

Happy Days hadn't been damaged in the previous night's fighting. The buildings crowded the stakes marking the twenty-meter right of way, but their walls didn't encroach—another regulation Banyussuf had enforced, with bulldozers when necessary.

Half the width was road surface which had been stabilized with a plasticizer, then pressure-treated. The lead tank slipped down the incline on the right shoulder behind a huge cloud of dust.

Nothing moved in the settlement.

A few of the structures were concrete prefabs, but most were built of laths covered with enameled metal. Uncut sheets already imprinted with the logos of soups or beers gleamed in an array more colorful than that of a race course. Behind the buildings themselves, fabric barriers enclosed yards in which further business could be conducted in the open air.

The lead tank was almost between the rows of buildings. Ranson's visor caught and highlighted movement of the barred window of a popular knocking-shop across the street and near the far end of the strip. She switched her display to thermal.

Stolley swung his tribarrel toward the motion.

"No!" June Ranson shouted.

The wing gunner's short burst snapped through the air like a single streak of cyan, past Deathdealer and into a white coruscance as the window's iron grillwork burned at the impacts.

A buzzbomb arced from the left and exploded in the middle of its trajectory as the tank's close-in defense system fired with a vicious crackling.

At least twenty automatic weapons volleyed orange tracers from Happy Days. The bullets ricocheted from Deathdealer and clanged like hammerblows on Warmonger's hull and gunshields.

"All Tootsie elements!" Ranson shouted. Willens had chopped his throttles; Warmonger's skirts tapped the soil. "Bandits! Blue One—"

But it was too late to order Blue One to lay a mine-clearing charge down the road. The great tank accelerated toward Happy Days in a spray of dust and pebbles, tribarrel and main gun blasting ahead of it.

 

"Hey, snake?" said DJ Bell from the main screen as bolts from a powergun cracked past Deathdealer. "Watch out for the Pussycat, OK?"

"Go 'way, DJ!" Birdie Sparrow shouted. "Albers! Goose it! Fast! Fast!"

The sound of bullets striking their thick armor was lost in the roar of the fans whose intakes suddenly tried to gulp more air than fluid flow would permit. The impacts quivered through Sparrow's boots on the floorplate like the ticks of a mechanical clock gone haywire.

Sparrow gripped a gunnery joystick in either hand. Most tankers used only one control, thumb-switching from main gun to tribarrel and back at need. He'd taught himself years ago to operate with both sticks live. You didn't get sniper's precision that way, but—

"Bandits!" cried the captain. "Blue One—"

Whatever she wanted would wait.

—when it was suppressing fire you needed, like now—

Whatever anybody else wanted could wait.

Using the trigger on the right joystick, Sparrow rapped a five-round burst from the tribarrel across a shop midway down the Strip on the left side. Sheet metal blew away from the wood beneath it, fluttering across the street as if trying to escape from the sudden blaze behind it.

The main screen was set on a horizontally-compressed 360 degree panorama. Sparrow was used to the distortion. He caught the puff of a buzzbomb launch before his electronics highlighted the threat.

A defensive charge blasted from above Deathdealer's skirts. It made the hull ring as none of the hostile fire had managed.

Sparrow's tribarrel raked shop-fronts further down the Strip in a long burst. The bolts flashed at an increasing separation because the tank was accelerating.

Deathdealer's turret rotated counter-clockwise, independently of the automatic weapon in the cupola. The left pipper, the point-of-aim indicator for the main gun, slid backward across the facade of one of the settlement's sturdier buildings.

The neon sign was unlighted, but Sparrow knew it well—a cat with a Cheshire grin, gesturing with a forepaw toward her lifted haunches.

That was where the buzzbomb had come from. Three more sparks spat in the darkness—light, lethal missiles, igniting in the whorehouse parlor—just as Sparrow's foot stroked the pedal trip for his 20cm cannon.

Deathdealer's screens blacked out the cyan flash. The displays were live again an instant later when dozens of ready missiles went off in a secondary explosion that blew the Pussycat's walls and roof into concrete confetti.

"Blue Three," the command channel was blatting, "move forward and—"

Albers brought Deathdealer into the settlement with gravity aiding his desperately-accelerating fans. He was hugging the right side of the Strip, too close for a buzzbomb launched from that direction to harm. Anti-personnel mines banged harmlessly beneath them.

"—lay a clearing charge before anybody else proceeds!"

Across the roadway, shopfronts popped and sizzled under the fire of Sparrow's tribarrel and the more raking bolts of combat cars pausing just over the ridgeline as Tootsie Six had ordered.

Deathdealer brushed the front of the first shop. The building collapsed like a bomb going off.

The tank accelerated to eighty kph. Albers used his mass and the edge of his skirts like a router blade, ripping down the line of flimsy shops. The fragments scattered in the draft of his fans.

A Consie took two steps from a darkened tavern, knelt, and aimed his buzzbomb down the throat of the oncoming tank.

Sparrow's foot twitched on the firing pedal. The main gun crashed out a bolt that turned a tailor's shop across the road into a fireball with a plasma core. The blast was twenty meters from the rocketeer, but the Consie flung away his weapon in surprise and tried to run.

A combat car nailed him, half a pace short of the doorway that would have provided concealment if not protection.

Sparrow had begun firing with his tribarrel at a ten o'clock angle. As Deathdealer raced toward the far end of the settlement, he panned the weapon counter-clockwise and stuttered bursts low into shop fronts. Instants after the tribarrel raked a facade, his main gun converted the entire building into a self-devouring inferno.

Two controls, two pippers sliding across a compressed screen at varying rates. The few bullets that still spattered the hull were lost in the continuous rending impact of Albers' 170-tonne wrecking ball.

Choking gases from the cannon breech, garbled orders and warnings from the radio.

No sweat, none of it. Birdie Sparrow was in control, and they couldn't none of 'em touch him.

Another whorehouse flew apart at the touch of Deathdealer's skirt. A meter by three-meter strip of metal enameled with a hundred and fifty bright Lion Beer logos curled outward and slapped itself over the intake of #1 Starboard fan.

The sudden loss of flow dipped the skirt to the soil and slewed Deathdealer's bow before plenum-chamber pressure could balance the mass it carried. The stern swung outward, into the clang-clang impact of bolts from a combat car's tribarrel. Fist-sized chunks vaporized from iridium armor that had ignored Consie bullets.

Sparrow rocked in his turret's stinking haze, clinging grimly to the joysticks and bracing his legs as well. The standard way to clear a blocked duct was to reverse the fan. That'd ground Deathdealer for a moment, and with the inertia of their present speed behind that touchdown—

Albers may have chopped his #1S throttle but he didn't reverse it—or try to straighten Deathdealer's course out of the hook into which contact had canted it. They hit the next building in line, bow-on at seventy kph—shattering panels of pre-stressed concrete and sweeping the fan duct clear in the avalanche of heavy debris.

Deathdealer bucked and pitched like a bull trying to pin a tiger to the jungle floor. The collision was almost as bad as the one for which Sparrow had prepared himself, but the tank never quite lost forward way. They staggered onward, cascading chunks of wall, curtains, and gambling tables.

The tank's AI threw up a red-lit warning on Screen Three. Deathdealer's ground-penetrating radar showed a thirty-centimeter tunnel drilled beneath the road's hard surface from the building they'd just demolished. The cavity was large enough to contain hundreds of kilos of explosive—

And it almost certainly did.

Without the blocked fan, Deathdealer would've been over the mine before the radar warning. Maybe past the mine before the Consie at the detonator could react—that was the advantage of speed and the shattering effect of heavy gunfire, the elements Sparrow'd been counting on to get them through.

And their armor. Even a mine that big . . .

"All Mike—T-tootsie elements," Sparrow warned. "The road's mined! Mine!"

He'd frozen the gunnery controls as he waited for the collision. Now, while Albers muscled the tank clear of the wreckage and started to build speed again, Sparrow put both pippers on the building across the road from them. He vaporized it with a long burst and three twenty-centimeter rounds, just in case the command detonator was there rather than in the shattered gambling den.

It might have a pressure or magnetic detonator. Speed wouldn't 've helped Deathdealer then, if luck hadn't slewed them off the road at the right moment.

"Can't touch us!" Birdie Sparrow muttered as he fired back over the tank's left rear skirts. "Can't touch us!"

"Not this time, snake," said DJ Bell as bitter gases writhed through the turret.

 

If he'd bothered to look behind him, Hans Wager could've seen that the tail end of the column had yet to pass the gates of Camp Progress.

Just over the ridge, all hell was breaking loose.

Wager's instinctive reaction was the same as always when things really dropped in the pot: to hunker down behind his tribarrel and hope there were panzers close enough to lend a hand.

It gave him a queasy feeling to realize that this time, he was the tank element and it was for him, Blue Three, that the CO was calling.

"—move forward and lay a clearing charge!"

Something big enough to light the whole sky orange blew up behind the ridge. Pray the Lord it was Consies eating some of their own ordnance rather than a mine going off beneath a blower.

The lead tank and Tootsie Six had both dropped over the ridgeline. One-five and One-one pulled forward. The first car slid to the right in a gush of gray-white ash colored blue by gunfire while the other accelerated directly up the road.

Blue Three shuddered as her driver poured the coal to her. Through inexperience, Holman swung her fan nacelles rearward too swiftly. Their skirts scraped a shower of sparks for several meters along the pavement.

Wager found his seat control, not instinctively but fast enough. He dropped from cupola level while the tank plowed stabilized gravel with a sound like mountains screaming.

Tracers stitched the main screen and across the sky overhead, momentary flickers through the open hatch.

One-five vanished behind the crest. One-one swung to the right and stopped abruptly with a flare of her skirts, still silhouetted on the ridgeline. Blue Three was wallowing toward the same patch of landscape under full power.

Wager shouted a curse, but Holman had their mount under control. The nameless tank pivoted left like a wheeled vehicle whose back end had broken away, avoiding the combat car. They could see now that One-one had pulled up to keep from overrunning Tootsie Six.

Blue Three began to slide at a slight sideways angle down the ridge they'd just topped. The three cars ahead of them were firing wildly into the smoke and flying debris of the settlement.

Sparrow's Blue One had just smashed a building. It pulled clear with the motion of an elephant shrugging during a dust bath.

"All Mike—T-tootsie elements," came a voice that a mask on the main screen would identify (if Wager wondered) as Blue One, used to his old callsign. "Mines! Mines!"

"Blue Three!" snarled Captain Ranson. "Lay the bloody charge! Now!"

If the bitch wanted to trade jobs, she could take this cursed panzer and all its cursed hardware! She could take it and shove it up her ass! 

It wasn't that Hans Wager had never used a mine-clearing charge before. On a combat car, though, they were special equipment bolted to the bow skirts and fired manually. All the tanks were fitted with integral units, controlled by the AI. So. . . .

"Booster," Wager ordered crisply. "Clearance charge."

The gunsight pipper on Screen Two dimmed to half its previous orange brilliance. armed appeared in the upper left corner of the screen, above range to target and length of footprint.

Magenta tracks, narrowed toward the top by foreshortening, overlay the image of the settlement toward which Blue Three was slipping with the slow grace of a beer stein on a polished bar.

Instead of aligning with the pavement, the aiming tracks skewed across the right half of the Strip.

"Holman!" Wager screamed. "Straighten up! Straighten the fuck out! With the road!"

Sparrow's Deathdealer had reached the end of the built-up Strip. The turret was rotated back at a 220° angle to the tank's course. Its main gun fired, a blacked-out streak on Blue Three's screens and a dazzle of cyan radiance through her open hatch.

Wager heard the fan note rise as his driver adjusted nacelles #1S and #2S and boosted their speed. The nameless tank seemed to hesitate, but its attitude didn't change.

"Range," Wager called to his artificial intelligence. They were about a hundred meters from the nearest buildings. Since they were still moving forward maybe he ought to—

Whang! 

Wager looked up in amazement. The bullet that had flattened itself against the cupola's open hatch dropped onto his cheek. It was hotter than hell.

"Sonuvabitch!" Wager shouted.

"Blue Two," ordered the radio, "move into position and lay down a clearance charge!"

"Sergeant," begged Holman over the intercom channel, "do you want me to stop us or—"

She'd straightened 'em out all right, for about a millisecond before the counter-clockwise rotation began to swing the tank's bow out of alignment again in the opposite direction. The aiming tracks marched across the screen with stately precision.

The volume of fire from the combat cars slackened because Wager's tank blocked their aim. Another bullet rang against the hatch; this one ricocheted glowing into the darkness. Bloody good thing Wager wasn't manning the cupola tribarrel himself just now. . . .

"Fire!" Wager ordered his AI.

He didn't know what the default setting was. He just knew he wasn't going to wait in his slowly-revolving tank and get it right some time next week.

Blue Three chugged, a sound much like that of a mortar firing nearby. The charge, a net of explosive filaments deploying behind a sparkling trio of rocket drivers, arched from a bow compartment.

As soon as the unit fired, the computed aiming tracks transformed themselves into a holographic overlay of the charge being laid—the gossamer threads would otherwise have been invisible.

The net wobbled outward for several seconds, shuddering in the flame-spawned air currents. It settled, covering five-hundred meters of pavement, the road's left shoulder, and the fronts of most of the buildings on the left side.

Muzzle flashes continued to wink from the stricken ruins of Happy Days.

The charge detonated with a white flash as sudden as that of lightning. Dust and ash spread in a dense pall that was opaque in the thermal spectrum as well as to normal optics.

Hundreds of small mines popped and spattered gravel. The explosive-filled cavity whose image, remoted from Deathdealer and frozen for reference on Wager's Screen Three, didn't go off.

Fuckin' A.

Hans Wager shifted Screen Two to millimetric radar and gripped his gunnery control. "Holman, drive on," he ordered, aware as he spoke that Blue Three was already accelerating.

Holman hadn't waited to be told. She knew as sure as Wager did that if the big mine went off, it was better that a tank take the shock than the lesser mass of a combat car.

Better for everybody except maybe the tank's crew.

Wager triggered the main gun and coaxially-locked tribarrel simultaneously, throwing echoing swirls onto his display as the dense atmosphere warped even the radar patterns.

"Tootsie Six," he said as he felt the tank beneath him build to a lumbering gallop. "This is Blue Three. We're going through."

 

Flamethrower cleared the rise. The settlement was a scene from Brueghel's Hell, and Dick Suilin was being plunged into the heart of it.

Cooter looked back over his shoulder at the reporter. His voice in Suilin's earphones said, "Watch the stern, turtle. Don't worry about the bow—we'll go through on Ortnahme's coattails."

Gale, the veteran trooper, had already shifted his position behind the right wing gun so that he was facing backward at 120° to the combat car's direction of travel. Suilin obediently tried to do the same, but he found that stacked ammo boxes and the large cooler made it difficult for him to stand. By folding one knee on the cooler, he managed to aim at the proper angle, but he wasn't sure he'd be able to hit anything if a target appeared.

Flamethrower was gathering speed. They'd crawled up the slope, matching their speed to that of the tank ahead of them. That vehicle in turn was trying not to overrun the combat cars pausing at the hillcrest.

The first series of the loud shocks occurred before Suilin's car was properly beyond the berm of Camp Progress. After that, the hidden fighting settled down to the vicious sizzle of powerguns. Each bolt sounded like sodium dropping into water in blazing kilogram packets.

When Flamethrower topped the ridgeline, offset to the left of the last tank in Task Force Ranson, Suilin saw the remains of Happy Days.

Four days before, he'd thought of the place as just another of the sleazy Strips that served army bases all over Prosperity—all over the human universe. Now it was a roiling pit, as smoky as the crater of a volcano and equally devoid of life.

"Blue Two," said a voice in Suilin's earphones, "this is Tootsie One-two. We're comin' through right up yer ass, so don't change yer mind, all right?"

It was probably Cooter speaking, but the reporter couldn't be sure. The helmets transmitted on one sideband, depriving the voices of normal timbre, and static interrupted the words every time a gun fired.

"Roger that, Tootsie One-two," said a different speaker. "Simkins, you heard the man. Keep yer bloody foot in it, right?"

Suilin's visual universe was a pattern of white blurs against a light blue background. The solidity and intensity of the white depended on the relative temperature of the object viewed.

I put it on thermal for you, Gale had said as he slapped a commo helmet onto the reporter's head with the visor down.

The helmet was loose, slipping forward when Suilin dipped his head and tugging back against its chin strap in the airstream when the combat car accelerated uphill. There was probably an adjustment system, but Suilin didn't know where it was . . . and this wasn't the time to ask.

Their own car, Flamethrower, slid over the crest and slowed as a billow of dust and ash expanded from the bow skirts like half a smoke ring. The driver had angled his fans forward; they lifted the bow slightly and kicked light debris in the direction opposite to their thrust against the vehicle's mass.

The tank had offset to the right on the hilltop as Flamethrower pulled left. Now it blew forward a similar but much larger half-doughnut. The arc of dust sucked in on itself, then recoiled outward when the cannon fired. The gun's crash was deafening to Suilin, even over the howl of the fans.

There was nothing to see on the flank Suilin was supposed to be guarding except the slight differential rate at which rocks, gravel, and vegetation lost the heat they'd absorbed during daylight. He risked a look over his shoulder, just as the tank fired again and Cooter ripped a burst from his tribarrel down the opposite side of what had been the settlement.

A combat car was making the run through Happy Days. The preceding vehicles of the task force waited in line abreast on the rising ground to the east of the settlement. Their hulls, particularly the skirts and fan intakes, were white; the muzzles of their powerguns were as sharp as floodlights.

The settlement was a pearly ambiance that wrapped and shrouded the car speeding through its heart. A gout of rubble lifted. It had fused to glass under the impact of the tank's twenty-centimeter bolt.

Suilin couldn't see any sign of a target—for the big gun or even for Cooter's raking tribarrel. The car racing through the wreckage was firing also, but the vehicles waiting on the far side of the gauntlet were silent, apparently for fear of hitting their fellow.

The road was outlined in flames over which smoke and ash swept like a dancer's veils. Molten spatters lifted by the tank cannon cooled visibly as they fell. There was no return fire or sign of Consies.

There were no structures left in what had been a community of several thousand.

The tank beside Flamethrower shrugged like a dog getting ready for a fight. Dust and ash puffed from beneath it again, this time sternward.

"Hang on, turtle!" a voice crackled in Suilin's ears as Flamethrower began to build speed with the deceptive smoothness characteristic of an air cushion vehicle.

Suilin gripped his tribarrel and tried to see something–anything—over the ghost-ring sight of the weapon. The normal holographic target display wasn't picked up by his visor's thermal imaging. The air stank of ozone and incomplete combustion.

The car rocked as its skirts clipped high spots and debris flung from the buildings. The draft of Flamethrower's fans and passage shouldered the smoke aside, but there was still nothing to see except hot rubble.

Cooter and Gale fired, their bursts producing sharp static through Suilin's headset. The helmet slipped back and forth on the reporter's forehead.

In desperation, Suilin flipped up his visor. Glowing smoke became black swirls, white flames became sullen orange. The bolts from his companions' weapons flicked the scene with an utter purity of color more suitable for a church than this boiling inferno.

Suilin thumbed his trigger, splashing dirt and a charred timber with cyan radiance. He fired again, raising his sights, and saw a sheet of metal blaze with the light of its own destruction.

They were through the settlement and slowing again. There were armored vehicles on either side of Flamethrower. Gale fired a last spiteful burst and put his weapon on safe.

Suilin's hands were shaking. He had to grip the pivot before he could thumb the safety button.

It'd been worse than the previous night. This time he hadn't known what was happening or what he was supposed to do.

"Tootsie Six to all Tootsie elements," said the helmet. "March order, conforming to Blue One. Execute."

The vehicles around them were moving again, though Flamethrower held a nervous, greasy balance on its fans. They'd move out last again, just as they had when Task Force Ranson left the encampment.

Minutes ago.

"How you doing, turtle?" Lieutenant Cooter asked. He'd raised his visor also. "See any Consies?"

Suilin shook his head. "I just . . ." he said. "I just shot, in case. . . . Because you guys were shooting, you know?"

Cooter nodded as he lifted his helmet to rub his scalp. "Good decision. Never hurts t' keep their heads down. You never can tell. . . ."

He gazed back at the burning waste through which they'd passed.

Suilin swallowed. "What's this 'turtle' business?" he asked.

Gale chuckled through his visor.

Cooter smiled and knuckled his forehead again. "Nothin' personal," the big lieutenant said. "You know, you're fat, you know? After a while you'll be a snake like the rest of us."

He turned.

"Hey," the reporter said in amazement. "I'm not fat! I exercise—"

Gale tapped the armor over Suilin's ribs. "Not fat there, turtle," the reflective curve of the veteran's visor said. "Newbie fat, you know? Civilian fat."

The tank they'd followed from Camp Progress began to move. "Watch your arcs, both of you," Cooter muttered over the intercom. "They may have another surprise waiting for us."

Suilin's body swayed as the combat car slipped forward. He still didn't know what the mercenaries meant by the epithet.

And he was wondering what had happened to all the regular inhabitants of Happy Days.

 

"Go ahead, Tootsie," said the voice of Slammer Six, hard despite all the spreads and attentuations that brought it from Firebase Purple to June Ranson's earphones. "Over."

"Lemme check yer shoulder," said Stolley to Janacek beside her. "C'mon, crack the suit."

"Roger," Ranson said as she checked the positioning of her force in the multi-function display. "We're OK, no casualties, but there was an ambush at the strip settlement just out the gate."

Blue One was ghosting along 200 meters almost directly ahead of Warmonger at sixty kph. That was about the maximum for an off-road night run, even in this fairly open terrain.

One-one and One-five had taken their flanking positions, echeloned slightly back from the lead tank. The remaining four blowers were spaced tank-car, tank-car, behind Warmonger like the tail of a broadly diamond-shaped kite.

Just as it ought to be . . . but the ratfuck at Happy Days had cost the task force a good hour.

"We couldn't 've avoided it," Ranson said, "so we shot our way through."

If she'd known, known, there was a company of Consies in Happy Days, she'd 've bypassed the place by heading north cross-country and cutting east, then south, near Siu Mah. It'd 've been a hundred kilometers out of their way, but—

"Look, bugger off," said Janacek. "I'm fine. I'll take another pill, right?"

"Any of the bypass routes might've got you in just as deep," said Colonel Hammer, taking a chance that, because of the time lag, his satellited words were going to step on those of his junior officer. "It's really dropped in the pot, Captain, all the hell over this country. But you don't see any reason that you can't carry out your mission?"

The question was so emotionless that concern stuck out in all directions like barbs from a burr. "Over."

"Quit screw'n around, Checker," Stolley demanded. "You got bits a jacket metal there. I get 'em out and there's no sweat."

Ranson touched the scale control of her display. The eight discrete dots shrank to a single one, at the top edge of a large-scale moving map that ended at Kohang.

Latches clicked. Janacek had opened his clamshell armor for his buddy's inspection. A bullet had disintegrated on the shield of Janacek's tribarrel during the run through Happy Days; bits of the projectile had sprayed the wing gunner.

Ranson felt herself slipping into the universe of the map, into a world of electronic simulation and holographic intersections that didn't bleed when they dropped from the display.

That was the way to win battles: move your units around as if they were only units, counters on a game board. Do whatever was necessary to check your enemy, to smash him, to achieve your objective.

Commanders who thought about blood, officers who saw with their mind's eye the troops they commanded screaming and crawling through muck with their intestines dangling behind them . . . those officers might be squeamish, they might be hesitant to give the orders needful for victory.

The commander of the guerrillas in this district understood that perfectly. Happy Days was a deathtrap for anybody trying to defend it against the Slammers. There was no line of retreat, and the vehicles' powerguns were sure to blast the settlement into ash and vapor, along with every Consie in it.

The company or so of patriots who'd tried to hold Happy Days on behalf of the Conservative Action Movement almost certainly didn't realize that; but the man or woman who gave them their orders from an office somewhere in the Terran Government enclaves on the North Coast did. The ambush had meant an hour's delay for the relief operation, and that was well worth the price—on the North Coast.

Men and munitions were the cost of doing business. You needed both of them to win.

You needed to spit them both in the face of the enemy. They could be replaced after the victory.

Stolley's hand-held medikit began to purr as it swallowed bits of metal that it had separated from the gunner's skin and shoulder muscles. Janacek cursed mildly.

Colonel Hammer knew the rules also.

"Slammer Six," June Ranson's voice said, "we're continuing. I don't know of any . . . I mean, we're not worse off than when we received the mission. Not really."

She paused, her mouth miming words while her mind tried to determine what those words should be. Hammer didn't interrupt. "We've got to cross the Padma River. Not a lotta choices about where. And we'll have the Santine after that, that'll be tricky. But we'll know more after the Padma."

Warmonger's fans ruled the night, creating a cocoon of controlled sound in which the electronic dot calling itself Junebug Ranson was safe with all her other dots.

Her chestplate rapped the grips of the tribarrel. She'd started to doze off again.

"Tootsie Six, over!" she said sharply. Her skin tingled, and all her body hairs were standing up straight.

There was a burst of static from her headset, but no response.

"Tootsie Six, over," she repeated.

Nothing but carrier hum.

Ranson craned her neck to look upward, past the splinter shield. There was a bright new star in the eastern sky, but it was fading even as she watched.

For fear of retribution, the World Government had spared the Slammers' recon and comsats when they swept the Yokels' own satellites out of orbit. When Alois Hammer raised the stakes, however, the Terrans stayed in the game.

"Now a little Sprayseal," Stolley muttered, "and we're done. Easier 'n bitchin', ain't it?"

Task Force Ranson was on its own now.

But they'd been on their own from the start. Troops at the sharp end were always on their own.

"Awright, then latch me up, will ya?" Janacek said. Then, "Hey, Stolley. When ya figure we get another chance t' kick butt?"

Warmonger howled through the darkness.