Reality 36 (6 page)

  Lehmann sighted down the barrel of the 36mm cannon, zeroing in on the lead GMM, tracking its progress, poised to destroy foremost and rear vehicles to block the road both ways. Muller and Buchwald were to catch all but a few that fled away from the initial assault, and they would flee. The rebels could be brave, but they never stuck around once they realised they were fighting cyborgs, fighting Ghosts.

  More trucks and pick-ups rounded the bluff. No aircars or other aircraft, easy prey for AI drones or laser sats. In the middle was a three-man stealth tank, early twenty-first-century Scandi model. The radar-baffling edges were chipped, black absorption paint faded to grey. It had been state of the art once, like them. The thought came unbidden to Otto, insidious.

  He thought out to Lehmann, painting up the tank in red on their iHUDs for the gunner to see.
When we attack, take that out third. They think they're being clever, force us to get three rounds off – front, back and the tank. They might even get to fire back.

It belongs in a museum, not on the battlefield.
Lehmann
. No problem.

  The convoy's final vehicle, a twelve-legged forestry truck, rounded the bend. Muller came online, his icon blinking.

Fifteen vehicles, sir. I see mostly food and personnel, some thermal
blanketing, but nothing I can't see through, more or less. We can
talk freely, they have nothing more sophisticated than personal
music players.

  Fifteen vehicles in all, a good haul. Maybe there'd be some supplies they could redistribute. The rebels could feed their countrymen instead of murdering them.

Sir,
thought out Lehmann.
Shall I take the shot?

On my mark. Three, two…

Wait!
Muller, urgency belied by the MT's soulless drone.
I'm getting something. There is a sixteenth vehicle in there, camo-scaled
and heat masked.

  Otto wiped the sweat from his face and blinked, searching where Muller indicated. His eyes ached; a fuzz of interference tracked across the left side of his field of vision every fourteen seconds. They needed servicing, all of them.

  He scrunched his eyes shut, opened them. The interference cleared. Sure enough, there was the tell-tale shimmer in the air of camolam, ahead of the legged truck. He switched to infrared, and vague orange blotches lit up in his sight.

  The rebels had a bag of cheap tricks to baffle heat sensors, but to hide something right in front of you required sophistication. Otto was mildly surprised, but then the EU and the USNA were not the only interested parties involved in Brazil's disintegration. Every power had its proxies here, the dress rehearsal for the next world war.

  The orange blotches lurched up and down; legged vehicle, Otto thought. Grinning faces flashed next to his men's icons.

Something big here, do you think, sir?
Buchwald.

Maybe they're moving camp. There are more of them than we expected.
Kaplinski.

What is it?
asked Buchwald.
Bullion truck? Weapons?

Can't tell,
Muller's reply.
It's too well masked, weak heat signatures, that's all.

  Otto ran a tactical analysis through his adjutant.
Threat indicators are not high enough to call off the attack. Stay focused. We take the column down.

I can get all four in a few seconds. It will not be a problem,
said Lehmann,

  Otto's sweat stung his cracked lips.
Good. Wait for my mark. Ready
, he thought out.
Three, two, one. Fire
.

  Four muffled cracks in quick succession. Lehmann's feed in Otto's mind jerked with the recoil from the cannon. The GMM exploded in a ball of red fire. It slewed half off the road, the truck behind it braking hard. By the time the wrecked pick-up had come to rest against a tree, the forestry truck was listing to the right, right leg set torn off. The stealth tank billowed black smoke. The turret had traversed forty degrees before Lehmann's cannon had punched a hole in its side, the hi-ex shell destroying the interior, leaving the outside eerily intact. Whatever impact the shell had had on the fourth target was hard to tell, but its camo scales were undamaged; not a good sign.

Open fire!
thought out Otto. Gunfire burst from the cyborgs' positions, felling pickets, and the convoy erupted with shouts. A few rebels panicked, diving to the floor or spraying the forest blindly with bullets, but the remainder showed admirable discipline, retreating back to the convoy, their friends in the trucks laying down covering fire. A man in a uniform and a pair of data feed cybands shouted orders from the weapons cupola of a truck, gesturing with his pistol. Otto sighted down his rifle, exhaled into the trigger squeeze as he blew the officer's brains out. The rebels scanned the bluff above them. Methodically, they lay down fire, guessing where the Ky-Tech were from incoming fire. Vs of dust exploded around Otto. They'd zeroed in on their position far too quickly. There were still thirty or so rebels left, bad odds if they did not break and run.

Buchmann! Fallen tree!
He indicated a length of sun-baked timber, thick enough to stop small-arms fire, a little across and downhill from his position.
Lehmann, covering fire!
Otto and Buchwald moved rapidly. Bullets followed their dust trails. They converged on the toppled trunk and scrambled down behind it.

  "Jesus!" shouted Buchwald, holding hard to his helmet. "They almost hit me!"

Why aren't they running?
thought out Muller. The rebels were covering the woods to the other side of the road where he and Kaplinski lay in wait. They were wise to Ghost tactics.

  Otto and his men were pinned down.

These
, thought out Lehmann, as his cannon barked twice, slamming hi-ex into the hidden form of the sixteenth vehicle,
are not starving farmers.

  Bullets whined through the air, burying themselves in the wood of the dead trees. Guns chattered loudly, engines roared as the rebels tried to push the GMM off the trail into the woods. Men shouted, the wounded screamed. The ambush had turned into a full-scale battle.
So much for stealth
.

  A new sound joined the cacophony, a high-pitched hum, climbing higher.

You hear that?
Lehmann. He switched to full auto and pumped a magazine of rounds into the invisible vehicle.

EMP! EMP!
Muller.
Down down down!

  The whine reached a crescendo, subsonics building with it blurring out lower registers, suppressing the sound of battle, then it ceased and a sharp cone of energy burst into the forest, targetted on Buchwald and Otto.

  EMP had little effect on biological or mechanical systems, but as a cyborg Otto felt it to his bones as an insistent swell and tug, a riptide of invisible light. His body and internal electronics were protected by Faraday armour and multiple failsafes. The camo-scales and wave-sweeper units, delicate, exposed, were another matter.

  Electrical shorts skittered over Otto and Buchwald and died, leaving them visible. Shouts from the convoy directed the attention of more of the rebels towards them. The buzzing of metal redoubled, sketching cages of fire about them.

Get out of there!
Muller, his urgency blunted by the MT.
Crawltank! Get out! Get out!

  Buchwald: "What the…"

  "Move!" Otto shouted, grabbing Buchwald's webbing, half dragging him. Behind them the fallen tree exploded into splinters. Buchwald cried out as they found their way past his armour. The tree bent upwards, middle shattered, then sagged downwards as if a giant were shuffling a deck of cards, half of it breaking away to roll down the hill and crash into the wrecked GMM. The trunk began to smoke in the flames of the wrecked vehicle. Otto and Buchwald threw themselves into a hollow in the hill; shallow, but awkward to hit from below.

  Otto risked a look. The tank's camouflage had failed, its own EMP burst frying its lamellae, the forest behind the machine flickering across its body only intermittently. It was a hexapedal type, legs arranged round a polygonal thorax, a toroidal turret atop it – the killing, business end of the thing. A ball pivot in the centre, protected by an angled skirt, gave it a wide range of movement. Missile racks and EMP projectors were situated on the top, twin cannon hanging from below either side of the torso. The front was a mass of lenses, and antennae that combed and tasted the air bristled from an aperture that looked like the mouth of a malformed sea creature. It had four-fingered maniples in two pairs on either side. Squatting on the forest path, its sharp feet planted firm in the baked forest floor, the tank swept the hillside with ordnance, its shell the colour of blood in the dying light, a monstrous land crab.

  "Where the hell did they get that!" Buchwald. "It's the fucking Chinks. I'll bet it's the fucking Chinks! Shit! We're fucked!"

  "Shut up, Buchwald!" said Otto.
Muller, schema, now!

Mark IV Glorious Dawn autonomous spider tank, People's Dynasty manufacture.
There was a momentary stutter in Muller's signal as a flood of data in comprehensive blueprints flashed into the minds of the squad, built-in near-Is quickly highlighting weak points and suggesting fresh avenues of attack.

  Perhaps it was the weight of the datastream, perhaps the tank's sensor array finally snagged their communication's carrier signal, but the tank heard the MT broadcast. Its torso abruptly rotated and sent round after round of shells directly toward Muller's position. There was a judder in Muller's feed. He let out a raw yell. A group of rebels looked toward the source of the noise. They broke off from the convoy and, running between fire from Lehmann, Buchwald and Kaplinski, went haring off towards him.

  They needed to get that tank down, and fast. Otto scanned the blueprint. The tank was well designed, heavily armoured, no crew; one weak spot, and not that weak.
Lehmann!
thought out Otto.
Ball joint. Hit it! Hit it now!

  The rattle of automatic fire came loud through Muller's feed. Otto watched through his eyes as the Ky-Tech gunned a rebel down. His vitals were becoming erratic. Damage indicators flashed up on left lung, head, right arm and right leg. Another rebel died messily, then they were upon him, clubbing with rifle butts, eyes wild. Muller's feed broke up.

  Lehmann's rounds slammed into the tank, wreathing it in fire as they detonated on the skirt protecting the tank's ball joint.

  Muller's icon went dead.

No effect, sir, I can't get through, I'd have to be right over it or underneath it.
Lehmann was icily calm, even now.

  Four near-I guided mini-missiles streaked through the trees towards Otto and Buchwald's position, but the range was too short and the angle of the hill too steep for them to come down on them directly, and they impacted the ground a few metres behind. The tank shot off another salvo, moving up the hill as it did so, the threat of Ky-Tech on the other side of the trail keeping its advance to a cautious pace. "Move, now!" Otto shouted into Buchwald's ear. Dirt showered over them. "The tank will have us pinned down in seconds. We're going to have to get in close." Otto risked another look. A squad of rebels followed in the tank's wake.

  "Are you fucking serious? We can't attack that, we'll be dead men!" Buchwald yelled back.

  "There are nearly thirty of them and four of us. With that thing in operation, we're dead anyway. We need to get it killed."

  "Stingers?" asked Buchwald.

  "No good, too many countermeasures. Grenades, in close. Lehmann!" Otto spoke now via radio.

  Lehmann was switching positions every few seconds, his gun barking two, three times, moving again. "Sir!"

  "Leave the tank! Engage the footsoldiers," shouted Otto. "Take out some of those cars. Leave the trucks, I want to see what they're so eager to protect."

  "Sir."

  Vehicles began to explode. "Kaplinski! Get out of that jungle and attack close in from the rear."

  "But Muller…"

  A burst from Buchwald drowned out the rest of Kaplinski's reply. A man went down like a a discarded overcoat of meat, head over heels, ribs shattered, chest open, internal organs tumbling out.

  "Leave him, we'll do what we can for him if we get out of this. Throw them off." The tank doubtless heard the exchange, but Otto wanted to distract it. He was gambling that it had no means of communicating the information to the rebels. It wasn't unheard of in such tech-mismatched units.

  The crawltank was turning, firing missiles at Kaplinski's position as its cannons came to draw a bead on Otto and Buchwald. They were away and running before it had completed its traverse. It opened fire with its machine guns, ribbons of phosphorescent tracer bullets fizzing past them. Several rounds hit home but were snagged by Otto's combat armour and internal body plates. Otto ignored the pain. The rebels lent their bullets to the storm. Lehmann did his best to dissuade them, his cannon turning several to showers of gore, forcing the others back. From behind the trucks came screams as Kaplinski let his camouflage drop and set to work with his flamethrower. Fires were burning all round the forest trail, smoke adding to the disorientation of battle.

  "Now!" bellowed Otto.

  He unsheathed his mono-molecular-edged machete. Buchwald followed suit. They were up and under the tank in seconds, dodging gouts of flame and bullets as the machine turned its anti-personnel weapons on them. Otto struck at these; the tank's armour had some kind of exotic atomic structure judging by how many blows were needed to shear them off, but off they came.

  Otto and Buchwald were fast enough to remove the tank's small arms mostly unscathed. Under the tank they were out of the way of its main arsenal. Secondary weapons destroyed, the tank trampled round and round, servos whining, trying to crush the cyborgs into the dirt, its stamps shaking the earth. It knocked them into a car, momentarily pinning Buchwald and severing Otto's gun in two, then staggered back, bringing its cannons to bear. Otto, Buchwald and the tank danced a demented minuet, cannon fire providing an erratic beat as it shot over their heads. The men pulled their grenades from their kit as they wove in and out. Otto hacked hard at a grasping maniple and sent it spinning into the woods, evaded a leg that tried to knock him down, dived past another to get back under the tank. The tank's near-I panicked and emptied its racks, the missiles careening unguided into the trees. Cannons fired randomly, stitching lines of smoking holes across one of the trucks, killing the driver. He slumped onto the accelerator; the truck lurched off and overturned, spilling crates of supplies. Rebels ran, shouting, driven from their hiding places by the tank's stampede. Lehmann picked them off with unhurried efficiency.