The Tank Lords (30 page)

In gunnery simulators, the screaming tank crew didn't try to abandon their vehicle a second or two after it was too late. Ranson's bolts punched into the interior of the tank. A blast of foul white smoke erupted from the turret hatches and the cavity ripped by the tribarrel.

The tank commander and the naked torso of his gunner flew several meters in the air. The tank began to burn sluggishly.

June Ranson's hands swung for another target, but there were no targets remaining here.

The tanks' thickest armor was frontal. Striking from above and behind, the tribarrels ripped them as easily as so many cans of sardines.

Cans of barbecued pork. The gunnery simulators didn't provide the odor of close action, either.

All the ammunition on a Yokel tank detonated simultaneously, pushing aside the nearest vehicles and flinging the turret roof fifty meters in the air in a column of smoke.

"Willens, steer three hundred degrees," Ranson heard/said. "West element, form on me."

Her eyes sought the multi-function display, while part of her mind wondered why she couldn't blend with Cooter's vehicles when she wanted to know their progress. . . .

Dick Suilin's ribs slammed hard against the edge of the fighting compartment as
Flamethrower
grounded heavily on its mad rush through the scrub forest. The reporter swore and wondered whether he'd be pissing blood in the morning, despite the clamshell armor that protected his kidney from the worst of the shock.

In the morning
. He made a high-pitched sound somewhere between laughter and madness.

He'd fallen sideways because the only thing that he had to hang onto were the grips of his tribarrel.
That
was pointed over the left side, at ninety degrees to the combat car's direction of motion. The reporter swung back and forth as his weapon pivoted.

The blazing red-orange hairline on his visor demanded Suilin cover the left side. He horsed his gun in the proper direction again, wincing at the pain in his side, and tried to find a target in the whipping foliage.

There was no doubt where
Flamethrower
's artificial intelligence wanted him to aim, though the rational part of the reporter's mind wondered why. They had—they were supposed to have—enveloped the enemy's right wing, so the first targets would be on the right side of
Flamethrower
. . . .

He supposed
Daisy Belle
was somewhere behind them. He supposed the other vehicles of the task force were somewhere also. He hadn't seen much of them. . . .

Dick Suilin supposed a lot of things; but all he knew was that his side hurt, his hands hurt from their grip on the automatic weapon, and that he really should've pissed in the minute while they waited for the go signal.

Flamethrower
slid through a curtain of reeds. Two meters from the muzzle of Suilin's tribarrel,
that close
, was a tank with its hatches open, bogged in a swale. The soil was so damp that water gleamed in the ruts the treads had squeezed before being choked to a halt.

Right where the AI's vector had said it would be.

Suilin clamped his trigger so convulsively that he forgot for a moment that he was pointing a weapon. Two bolts splashed on the turret face, cyan and white, blazing steel, before several following rounds exploded stems and flattened further swathes in the reeds with blasts of steam and flying cellulose.

Flamethrower
grunted past the tank's bow at the speed of a running horse. The reporter pivoted to follow the target with his gun, ignoring the way he thrust himself against the sidearmor just as the impact had done moments before.

His sights steadied where a ball mantlet joined the tank's slim cannon to the turret face. Panning like a photographer with a moving subject, Suilin kept the muzzles aligned as they spat cyan hell to within millimeters, bolt by bolt.

Suilin would have kept shooting, but the cannon barrel sagged and a sharp explosion lifted the turret a hand's breadth so that bright flame could flash momentarily all around the ring.

He didn't notice until they were past that there'd been a second tank on the other side of the swale, and that several men in National Army uniforms had been stringing tow cables between the vehicles. The second tank was burning fiercely. The crewmen were sprawled in the arc they'd managed to run before Gale's tribarrel searched them down.

Suilin thought the men were wearing black armbands, but he no longer really cared.

Dick Suilin heard the CRACK-CRACK-CRACK of automatic cannons upslope, the same timbre as machineguns firing but louder, much louder, despite the vegetation.

Shorty Rogers was running the valley south of Sugar Knob at a hellbent pace for the conditions.
Warmonger
cut to the right, bypassing some of the unseen tanks whose gunfire betrayed their presence.

Maybe the course was deliberate. Maybe
Daisy Belle
would take care of the other tanks. . . .

Suilin saw tank tracks slanting toward the crest an instant before he saw the tank itself, backing the way it had come. There was a guerrilla on the turret, hammering at the closed hatch. The Consie shouted something inaudible.

Suilin fired, aiming at the Consie rather than the tank. He missed both; his bolts sailed high to shatter trees on the crest.

That didn't matter. Cooter's helmet had given him the same target. The lieutenant's tribarrel focused on the hull where flowing script read
Queen of the South
. Paint blazed an instant before the armor collapsed and a fuel tank ruptured in a belch of flame.

Beyond
Queen of the South
, backing also, was a command vehicle with a high enclosed cab instead of a turret. Suilin caught only a glimpse of the vehicle before Gale's tribarrel punched through the thin vertical armor of the cab.

The rear door opened. Nothing came out except an arm flopping in its black sleeve.

They had almost reached the top of the knob. If
Daisy Belle
fired at them, the bolts would hit on Gale's side; but if
Flamethrower
was closing with the three cars in Captain Ranson's elements—

Dick Suilin aimed downhill because the glowing line directed him that way, but the artificial intelligence was using data now minutes old. The Consie tank was above them, backing around in the slender trees. It swung the long gun in its turret to cover the threat that bellowed toward it in a drumbeat of secondary explosions.

Suilin tried to point at the unexpected target. Cooter was firing as he swung his own weapon, but that tribarrel didn't bear either and the lash of cyan bolts across treeboles did nothing to disconcert the hostile gunner.

The cannon steadied on
Flamethrower
's hull.

A twenty-centimeter bolt from Blue Three across the valley struck, and the whole stern of the light tank blew skyward.

The Yokel tank's shot was a white streak in the sky as it ricocheted from the face of Blue Three's turret.

Ragged blotches appeared on Wager's main screen as if the hologram were a mirror losing its silver backing. Booster spread the load of the damaged receptor heads among the remainder; the image cleared.

Hans Wager didn't see what was happening to his screen because he was bracing his head against it. He hadn't strapped himself into his seat, and Holman's attempt to back her hundred and seventy tonnes finally succeeded in a rush.

Wager wasn't complaining. His hatch was open and he could hear the
crack-crack
of two more hypersonic shots snapping overhead.

The Yokels' armor-piercing projectiles were only forty-three millimeters in diameter when they dropped their sabots at the gun's muzzle, but even here, a kilometer and a half away, they were traveling at 1800 meters per second. The shot that hit had smashed a dish-sized concavity from the face of Blue Three's armor.

"Holman!" Wager cried. "Open season! Get us hull-down again."

They grounded heavily. Wager thought of the strain the tank's huge weight must be putting on the skirts and wondered if they were going to take it. Still, Holman wasn't the first tank driver to get on-the-job training in a crisis.

Anyway, the skirts'd better take it.

Chin Peng Rise had been timbered within the past two years. None of the scrub that had regrown on its loose, rock-strewn soil was high enough to conceal Blue Three's skirts, but the rounded crest itself would protect the hull from guns firing from the wooded knob across the valley.

The thing was, Holman had to halt them in the right place: high enough to clear their main gun but still far enough down the backslope that the hull was in cover.

Shells boomed among the shacks of Kawana. The residents wouldn't 've had any idea that two armies were maneuvering around them until the artillery started to land.

Innocent victims weren't Hans Wager's first concern right now. Via, it was their planet, their war, wasn't it?

His war too.

A plume of friable soil spewed from beneath the skirts as Holman fed power to her fans. Wager felt Blue Three twist as she lifted.
The silly bitch was losing control, letting 'em slide downhill instead of—
 

"Holman!" he shouted. "Bring us up to firing level! They need us over—"

As Wager spoke the tank lifted—there'd been no downward motion, just the bow shifting. They climbed the twenty degree slope at a walking pace that brought a crisp view of Sugar Knob onto both the main and gunnery displays.

Shot and shells from Yokel cannon ripped the crest beside Blue Three, where the Slammers vehicle had lain hull-down before—and where they'd 've been now if Holman hadn't had sense enough to shift before she lifted them into sight again.

Wager could apologize later.

He'd locked his main and cupola guns on the same axis. His left hand rotated the turret clockwise with the gunnery screen's orange pipper hovering just above the projected crest of Sugar Knob. When the dark bulk of a Yokel tank slid into the sight picture, needlessly carated by the artificial intelligence, Wager thumbed his joystick control and laced the trees with cyan bolts from the tribarrel.

A bolt flashed white on the screen as it vaporized metal from the Yokel tank. Wager stamped on the pedal to fire his main gun.

Two more Yokel shots hit and glanced from Blue Three. Their impact was lost in the
crash
of the 20cm main gun firing.

Across the valley, the rear end of the Yokel tank jumped backward as the front became a ball of glowing gas.

Wager's main screen was highlighting at least a dozen targets, now. The Yokels had moved into positions overlooking Kawana so their direct fire could finish the tattered survivors of Task Force Ranson as soon as the artillery began to impact.

Some of the tank gunners were still focused on the innocent hamlet. Through the corner of his eye, Wager could see spouting tracks in the valley below as automatic cannons raked shacks and the figures running in terror among the sugarbushes they'd been tending.

Dirt blasted up in front of Blue Three an instant before the turret rang to a double hammerblow. Not all the Yokels were deceived as to their real enemy.

There wasn't time to sort 'em out, to separate the immediate dangers from the targets that might catch on in the next few seconds or minute. Hans Wager had to kill them all—

If he had time before they killed him.

Wager let the turret rotate at its own speed, coursing the further crest. He aimed with the cupola gun rather than the electronic pipper. During his years in combat cars, he'd gotten into the habit of hosing a tribarrel onto its target.

When things really drop in the pot, habit's the best straw to snatch.

Ignoring the shots that hit Blue Three and the shots that blasted grab-loads of dirt from the barren crest around them, Wager stroked his foot-trip again—

A tank exploded.

Again.

Too soon. The twenty-centimeter bolt ignited a swathe of forest beside the Yokel vehicle, but the tank's terrified crew was already bailing out. Wager's tribarrel spun their lifeless bodies into the blazing vegetation as his turret continued to traverse.

A huge pall of smoke leaped skyward from somewhere south of Sugar Knob. It mushroomed when the pillar of heated air could no longer support the mass of dirt, scrap metal, and pureed flesh it contained.

The ground-shock of the explosion rolled across Kawana in a ripple of dust.

Something hit Blue Three. Three-quarters of Wager's gunnery screen went black for a moment. He rocked forward on his foot-trip. The main gun fired, shocking the sunlight and filling the turret with another blast of foul gases from the spent case.

The screen brightened again, though the display was noticeably fuzzier. Another of the tanks on Sugar Knob had become a fireball.

The Yokels were running, backing out of the firing positions on the hillcrest that made them targets for Wager's main gun. He didn't know how the combat cars were doing, but there were columns of smoke from behind the knob where his own fire couldn't reach.

The cars'd have their work cut out for them, playing hide 'n seek with the surviving Yokels in thick cover. At point-blank range, the first shot was likely to be the last of the engagement and the tanks' thick frontal armor would be a factor.

A target backed in a gout of black diesel exhaust as Wager's sight picture slid over it. He tripped his main gun anyway, knowing that he'd hit nothing but foliage. His turret continued to traverse, left to right.

The Yokel tank snarled forward again, through the trees the twenty-centimeter bolt had vainly withered.
That sonuvabitch hadn't run, he'd just ducked back to shoot safe—
 

In the fraction of a second it took Hans Wager to realize that
this
target had to be hit, that he
had
to reverse the smooth motion of his turret, yellow light flashed three times from the muzzle of the Yokel's cannon.

Hot metal splashed Wager and the interior of the turret. The cupola blew off above him. The tribarrel's ammunition ripped a pencil of cyan upward as it burned in the loading tube.

The gunnery screen was dead, and the central half of the main screen pulsated with random phosphorescence. Motors whined as the turret began tracking counterclockwise across the landscape Wager could no longer see.