The Tank Lords (31 page)

"
Blue Three, this is Tootsie Six—
"

Thousand one, thousand two—

"
—we had to bypass the east-flank hostiles. Cross the valley and help us soonest.
"

Wager trod his foot-trip. The gunnery screen cleared—somewhat—just in time to display the Yokel tank disintegrating with an explosion so violent that it snuffed the burning vegetation around the vehicle.

"Roger, Tootsie Six," Hans Wager responded. "Holman, move us—"

But Holman was already feeding power to her fans. You didn't have to tell her what her job was, not that one. . . .

Four more artillery shells burst in black plumes across the sandy furrows which Blue Three had to cross. The remains of Blue Three's cupola glowed white, and there was no hatch to button down over the man in the turret.

Hans Wager's throat burned from the gases which filled his compartment.

He didn't much care about that, either.

"Willens, bring us—" June Ranson began, breaking off as she saw the Yokel tank.

It was crashing through the woods twenty meters to
Warmonger
's right, on an opposite and almost parallel course. The 60mm cannon was pointed straight ahead, but the black-clad guerrilla riding on the turret screamed something down the gunner's open hatch as he unlimbered his automatic rifle.

Janacek's tribarrel was on target first. Half the burst exploded bits of intervening vegetation uselessly, but the remaining bolts sawed the Consie's legs off at the knee before hammering the sloped side of the turret.

The outer facing of the armor burned; its ceramic core spalled inward, through the metallic backing. It filled the turret like the contents of a shotgun loaded with broken glass. Smoke puffed from the hatches.

The tank continued to grind its way forward for another thirty seconds while Janacek fired into the hull without effect. The target disintegrated with a shattering roar.

Ranson's multi-function display indicated that both the remaining blowers in her element were within fifty meters of
Warmonger
, but she couldn't see any sign of them.

She couldn't
feel
them. They were real only as beads of light; and the red beads of hostile tanks were no longer where Blue Three had plotted them before the Yokels began to retreat. . . .

A tank ground through the screening foliage like a snorting rhinoceros, bow on with its cannon lowered. June Ranson willed a burst through the muzzles of her tribarrel. . . .

Cyan bolts slashed and ripped at glowing steel.

Stolley swung forward. His bolts intersected and merged with the captain's. The cannon's slim barrel lifted without firing and hurled itself away from the crater bubbling in the gun mantle.

"No!" Ranson screamed at her left wing gunner. "Watch your own—"

Another Yokel tank appeared to the left, its gun questing.

"—side!"

Leaves lifted away from the cannon's flashing muzzle. The blasts merged with the high-explosive charges of the shells which burst on
Warmonger
's side.

The combat car slewed to a halt. The holographic display went dead; Ranson's tribarrel swung dully without its usual power assist.

For the first time in—months?—June Ranson truly saw the world around her.

The Yokel tank was within ten meters. It fired another three-round burst—shot this time. The rounds punched through the fighting compartment in sparkling richness and ignited the ammunition in Janacek's tribarrel.

The gunner bellowed in pain as he staggered back. Ranson grabbed the bigger man and carried him with her over the side of the doomed vehicle. Leaf mould provided a thin cushion over the stony forest soil, but
Warmonger
's bulk was between them and the next hammering blasts.

"Stolley," Janacek whispered. "Where's Stolley and Willens?"

June Ranson looked over her shoulder. Dunnage slung to
Warmonger
's sides was ablaze. The thin, dangerous haze of electrical fires spurted out of the fan intakes and the holes shots had ripped in the hull. Where Janacek's tribarrel had been, there was a glowing cavity in the iridium armor.

Willens had jumped from his hatch and collapsed. There was no sign of Stolley.

Ranson rose in a crouch. Her legs felt wobbly. She must have hit them against the coaming as she leaped out of the fighting compartment. She staggered back toward
Warmonger
.

Shots rang against the armor. A chip of white-hot tungsten ripped through both sides to scorch her thighs.

She tried to call Stolley, but her voice was a croak inaudible even to her over the roar of the flames in
Warmonger
's belly.

The handgrips on the armor were hot enough to sear layers from her hands as she climbed back into the fighting compartment.

Stolley lay crumpled against the bulkhead. He was still breathing, because she could see bubbles forming in the blood on his lips. She gripped his shoulders and lifted, twisting her body.

The synthetic fabric of her trousers was being burned into her flesh as she balanced. Janacek crawled toward them, though what help he could be . . .

Because her back was turned, June Ranson didn't see the tank's cannon rock back and forth as it fired, aiming low into
Warmonger
's hull. She felt the impacts of armor-piercing shot ringing on iridium—

But only for an instant, because this burst fractured the car's fusion bottle.

Dick Suilin was looking over his shoulder toward the bow of
Flamethrower
when the center of his visor blacked. Through the corners of his eyes, the reporter saw foliage withering all around him in the heat of the plasma flare. His hands and the part of his neck not shielded by visor or breastplate prickled painfully.

The gout of stripped atoms lasted only a fraction of a second.
Warmonger
's hull, empty as the shell of a fossil tortoise, continued to blaze white.

The Yokel tank, its cannon nodding for further prey, squealed past the wreckage.

Suilin's tribarrel was still pointed to cover the car's rear quadrant. Cooter's burst splashed upwards from the tank's glacis plate, blasting collops from the sheath and ceramic core.

Before the tribarrel could penetrate the armor at its point of greatest thickness, the tank's 60mm gun cracked out a three-round clip. Dick Suilin's world went red with a crash that struck him like a falling anvil.

The impact knocked him forward. He couldn't hear anything. The fighting compartment was brighter, because cannon shells had blown away the splinter shield overhead. The sun streamed down past the bare poles of plasma-withered trees.

The ready light over his tribarrel's trigger no longer glowed green. Suilin rotated the switch the way Gale had demonstrated a lifetime earlier. The metal felt cool on his fingertips.

The cannon's muzzle began to recoil behind a soundless yellow flash.
Warmonger
shuddered as Suilin's thumbs pressed his butterfly trigger. Cyan bolts roiled the bottle-shaped flare of unburned powder, then carved the mantlet before the 60mm gun could cycle to battery and fire again.

Steel blazed, sucked inward, and blew apart like a bomb as the tank's ready ammunition detonated.

Suilin's tribarrel stopped firing. His thumbs were still locked on the trigger. A stream of congealed plastic drooled out of the ejection port. The molten cases had built up until they jammed the system.

The hull of the vehicle Dick Suilin had destroyed was burning brightly. Another tank crawled around it. The Consie on the second tank's turret was mouthing orders down the open hatch.

The long cannon swung toward
Flamethrower.
 

Lieutenant Cooter rose to his hands and knees on the floor of the fighting compartment. His helmet was gone. There was a streak of blood across the sweat-darkened blond of his hair. He shook himself like a bear surrounded by dogs.

Gale sprawled, halfway out of the fighting compartment. A high-explosive round had struck him between the shoulderblades. It was a tribute to the trooper's ceramic body armor that one arm was still attached to what remained of his torso.

Suilin unslung his grenade launcher, aimed at the tank thirty meters away, and squeezed off. He couldn't hear his weapon fire, but the butt thumped satisfyingly on his shoulder. His eye followed the missile on its flat arc to the face of the tank's swivelling turret.

The grenades were dual purpose. Their cases were made of wire notched to fragment, but they were wrapped around a miniature shaped charge that could piece light armor.

Armor lighter than the frontal protection of a tank. The guerrilla flung his arms up and toppled, his chest clawed to ruins by shrapnel, but the turret face was only pitted.

The tank moved forward as it had to do so that as the turret rotated, the long gun would clear the burning wreckage of the sister vehicle.

Cooter dragged his body upright. He was still on his knees. The big man gripped the hull to either side of his tribarrel, blocking Suilin from any chance of using that weapon.

No time anyway. The reporter's grenades burst on the turret, white sparks that gouged the armor but didn't penetrate, couldn't penetrate.

Two hits, three—not a hand's breadth apart, remarkable rapid-fire shooting as the turret swung.

Suilin thought he could hear again, but the bitter crack of his grenades was lost in the howl of an oncoming storm. The ground shook and made the blasted trees shiver.

The last round in Suilin's clip flashed against the armor as vainly as the four ahead of it. The cannon's sixty-millimeter bore gaped toward
Flamethrower
like the gates of Hell.

Before the gun could fire, the great, gray bow of Blue Three rode downhill onto the rebel tank, scattering treeboles like matchwood.

The clang of impact seemed almost as loud to Dick Suilin as that of the shells ripping
Flamethrower
moments before. The Slammers' tank, ten times the weight of the Yokel vehicle, scarcely slowed as it slid its victim sideways across the scarred forest.

A tread broke and writhed upward like a snake in its death throes. The hull warped, starting seams and rupturing the cooling system and fuel tanks in a gout of steam, then fire.

Metal screamed louder than men could. Blue Three's skirts rode halfway up the shattered corpse of the rebel tank, fanning the flames into an encircling manacle. The Slammer's driver twisted the hundred and seventy tonnes she controlled like a booted foot crushing an enemy's face into the gutter.

Cooter stood up. Shorty Rogers raised his head from the bow hatch, glanced around, and disappeared again. A moment later,
Flamethrower
shuddered as her fans spun up to speed.

Blue Three backed away from the crackling inferno to which it had reduced its victim. Nothing else moved in the forest.

Dick Suilin's fingers were reflexively loading a fresh clip into his grenade launcher.

Task Force Ranson, consisting of one tank and four combat cars under Junior Lieutenant Brian Cooter, was within seven kilometers of the outskirts of Kohang when it received word that Consie resistance had collapsed.

The Governmental Compound within the city was relieved a few minutes later by elements of the 12th and 23rd Infantry Brigades of the National Army.

Dick Suilin looked at Kohang with eyes different from those with which he'd viewed the fine old buildings around the Park and Governmental Compound only days before.

The stone facades were bullet pocked now, but Suilin had changed much more than the city had during the intervening hours.

"Good thing we didn't have to fight through these streets," he said.

His voice was a croak from breathing powergun residues. He didn't know whether he'd ever regain the honey-smooth delivery that had been his greatest asset in the life of his past.

Tents had sprouted around the wheeled command vehicles in the central park fronting the Compound. There was a line of tarpaulin-covered bodies beside the border of shattered trees, but for the most part, the National Army soldiers looked more quizzical than afraid.

"Yeah," said Albers, now manning the right wing gun. He spoke in a similar rasping whisper. "Narrow streets and every curst one a those places built like a bunker. Woulda been a bitch."

"We'd've managed," said Cooter.

I doubt it,
Suilin thought.
But we would have tried.
 

The Compound's ornamental iron gates had been blown away early in the fighting. The makeshift barricade of burned-out cars which replaced them had already been pushed aside in the clean-up. Soldiers in clean fatigues bearing the collar flashes of the 23d Infantry stood aside as Task Force Ranson entered the courtyard.

Flamethrower
settled wearily to the rubble-strewn cobblestones. The car gave a deep sigh as Rogers shut down its fans. The other vehicles were already parked within.

Blue Three listed to starboard since Kawana. The tank had brushed a stone gatepost to widen the Compound entrance, then dragged a sparking line across a courtyard-sized mosaic map of Southern District with all the major cities and terrain features described.

Flamethrower
stank of burned plastic and blood. Gale's body was wrapped in his air-tight bedroll and slung to the skirts, but the part of him that had splashed over the interior of the fighting compartment didn't take long to rot in bright sunlight.

They took off their body armor. Suilin's fingers didn't want to bend. All three men were fumbling with their latches. Cooter gripped the edge of the hull armor and shivered.

"Blood and martyrs," he muttered tiredly. Then he said, "Tootsie One-five, this is Three. Take over here till I get back, Tillman. Colonel wants me to report t' Governor Kung."

Suilin heard the electronic click of an answer on a channel the AI didn't open to him. Surely assent. Nobody had the energy left to argue.

Cooter looked at the reporter. "You coming?" the mercenary asked.

Suilin shrugged. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, sure. That's what I came for."