The Tank Lords (33 page)

"So let's go home," Frosty said. He relaxed a catch of his clamshell body armor to scratch his armpit. "I'm not thrilled being out alone in Injun Country like this."

"It might be the transmitter at Scepter Base," Panchin said. He squeezed the edge of the bulkhead between thumb and forefinger to remind himself of how thick the armor was between him and hostile guns. "Goldman was working on it before the move. She said the traverse was getting wonky."

"Fucking wonderful," Cortezar said. "Just wonderful."

Long-distance communications for Hammer's Slammers on Sulewesi were by microwaves bounced off the momentary ionization tracks meteors drew in the upper atmosphere. The commo bursts were tight-beam and couldn't be either jammed or intercepted by hostile forces.

That same directionality was the problem now. Unless the bursts were precisely aligned, they didn't reach their destination.
Hula Girl
's crew had been out of communication with the remainder of the force ever since Captain Stenhuber sent them off to find a column that had gotten separated from the main body during the change of base.

"Rita, ease us forward a half klick on this heading," Jonas said. "We'll check again there. If that doesn't work we'll head for the barn."

He gave Ericssen a gloomy nod, then lifted his commo helmet with one hand to rub his scalp with the other. The sergeant was completely bald, though his eyebrows were unusually thick for a man of African ancestry.

"That won't be too soon for me," Frosty muttered.

Cortezar switched on the fans and let them spin for a moment before she flared the blades to lift the car. Even on idle the drive fans roared as they sucked air through the armored intake vents. There was no chance of hearing the missing column while the fans were running, though the acoustics of a landscape baffled with gullies, knolls, and clumps of brush up to four meters high made sound a doubtful guide here.

Hula Girl
lifted with a greasy shudder. Sand sprayed through the narrow gap between the ground and the lower edge of the steel skirts enclosing the air cushion on which the combat car rode. A fusion bottle powered the eight drive fans. They in turn raised the pressure in the plenum chamber high enough to support the vehicle's thirty tonnes on ground effect. A combat car couldn't fly, but it could dance across quicksand or bodies of still water because the bubble of air spread the car's weight evenly over any surface.

"What did the locals do before they had us for guide dogs?" Cortezar asked as she took
Hula Girl
down one of the channels winding though the desert. The car wasn't moving much faster than a man could walk.

Wind and the occasional flash flood scoured away the soil here except where it was bound by rocks or the roots of plants. The desert vegetation stood on pedestals of its own making.

"They used positioning satellites," Panchin said. "The whole constellation got blasted as soon as the shooting started."

He'd read up on the planet when the Slammers took the Sulewesi Government contract. Mostly the line troopers didn't bother with the briefing materials. The information usually didn't affect mercenaries enough to matter more than a poker game did, but Panchin was interested.

"That puts both sides in the same leaky boat, don't it?" Frosty asked. "You'd think they could've figured that out and left the satellites up so that we could get some sleep."

"In a few minutes we'll head for Scepter Base," Jonas said in a reasonable tone. "I'll see if I can't keep us off perimeter watch for tonight. What's left of it."

The sergeant obviously didn't like the situation either, but his rank kept him from grumbling about orders. Ericssen would have probably acted the same as Jonas if their positions had been reversed. Mercenary soldiering had never been the easiest way to earn a living. People who didn't know that when they signed on with the Slammers learned it quick enough thereafter.

Hula Girl
's intakes made the brush to either side wobble toward the vehicle. Gossamer fuzz as long as a man's fingers hung from the branches. The tendrils sucked moisture from the air at night when the relative humidity rose, though the vegetation only flowered after a rain.

It might not rain here for years.

"If they'd left the satellites up to begin with," Panchin said, "then one side or the other would've knocked them down when they thought that gave them an advantage. Maybe before an attack, when they had their people in position already. We'd still be out here."

War is a costly business. Importing mercenaries and their specialist equipment from off-planet is devastatingly expensive, but at least in the short run it costs less than losing. Both sides on Sulewesi had hired a few of the best and most expensive troops in the human universe. Hammer's Slammers were paid by the government, while the rebels had three comparable armored battalions from Brazil on Earth.

Four or five thousand soldiers, no matter how well equipped, weren't enough to fight a war across the whole surface of a planet; locally-raised forces could only be trained as mechanized infantry because time was so short. To bridge the gap between the general mass and the highly-paid cutting edge, the government and rebels both used less-sophisticated mercenaries. The mid-range troops provided weapons and communications of a higher order than those produced on Sulewesi, but at a tenth the cost of outfits like the Slammers and the Brazilians.

A tenth as effective too, the Slammers thought; but a pipe gun throwing a chunk of lead was still enough to splash your brains across the deck of a tank if you happened to be in the wrong place. War didn't stop being a dangerous business just because you were good at it.

Cortezar goosed the fans to take
Hula Girl
onto a ridge whose rocks had resisted the wind better than the light soil to either side. The skirts rubbed stones, clanking and throwing sparks. Ball-shaped vegetation flattened and shivered away from the gale that squirted under the plenum chamber.

Panchin held firmly onto the twin spade grips of his tribarrel as the deck slanted beneath his boots. "I don't see why they had to split the Regiment up this way," he said. "You can't blame Captain Stenhuber sending us out alone when all he's got to work with is seven combat cars and the G Company command vehicle."

"Yeah," Frosty agreed. "If we were all together we'd go through everything else on this planet like a spike through an eyeball."

"You bet we would," Jonas said in grim disapproval. "And while we were doing that, the rebels'd smash the rest of the government army, putting a platoon or two of Brazilian armor on point each time. The people who hired us want to win the war, not just one battle."

"The odometer says this is half a kilometer, sarge," Cortezar said with an edge in her voice. Reg Panchin felt alone, but really he was elbow to elbow with two fellow troopers. Cortezar sat by herself in the driver's compartment, and she was a meter closer to the most likely direction for a first shot besides.

"Yeah, all right," Jonas agreed. "I make Scepter Base forty-two degrees from here, but we'll want to dodge—"

A hand flare popped against the heavens and drained back to the desert floor as a shower of silver droplets. Panchin wasn't an expert at judging distances at night, but he didn't imagine the signal could have been launched from more than half a kilometer away.

"Bloody hell," said Ericssen. "We found them after all."

Jonas tilted the muzzles of his tribarrel skyward and tapped out three spaced rounds on the butterfly trigger between the grips. Each bolt of copper plasma lit the night cyan. Heated air cracked shut behind each hissing discharge.

"Head for the flare, Rita," the sergeant ordered. "But take it easy—I want to raise them with the laser communicator before we go barreling in."

Frosty nodded. "There's no such thing as friendly fire," he agreed. "And if they're not trigger happy, they ought to be with as many rebels as there are operating in this sandbox."

Three flares and at least a dozen bursts of automatic gunfire lofted skyward from the previous location northeast of
Hula Girl
. Distance thinned the muzzleblasts to a nervous rustling, like brushes stroking a drumhead. The tracers were the white used by local forces and a strobing pink that Panchin hadn't seen before.

He switched through the UHF and VHF bands on his commo helmet but only picked up static. He couldn't tell whether the problem was the helmet—even intercom was scratchy; this desert, where mineral deposits and temperature inversions played hell with everything in the electro-optical spectrum—or most likely, that nobody in the missing column was transmitting on any push that
Hula Girl
's crew had been given for the operation.

The combat car ambled toward the flares as Sergeant Jonas bent over the multifunction display fixed to the bulkhead beside his tribarrel. Panchin echoed the display for a moment on his faceshield but cut back quickly to light amplification of his normal viewpoint. If he'd been in the Tactical Operations Center at Scepter Base where he belonged, it might have been interesting to watch blurs resolve into icons against a terrain map as the car processed sensor data on the column
Hula Girl
was approaching. Out here it might mean that Reg Panchin, right wing gunner, didn't see the hostile who was aiming a buzzbomb at
Hula Girl
.

Ericssen must have been thinking the same thing. He touched a button on the tribarrel's pintle. The barrel group rotated a third of a turn; a flat 2-cm disk clucked from the ejection slot. The disk was a polyurethane matrix holding an alignment of copper atoms which, when stripped in a powergun's chamber, streamed downrange as a ravening cyan plasma. Frosty was checking—again—to make sure that his weapon was loaded and ready.

There was nothing on Panchin's side of the car. Nothing but wind and desert.

"Hold here, Rita," Jonas ordered. He started to raise the communications mast even before
Hula Girl
settled on idling fans.

Panchin helped set the bracing wires of the telescoping five-meter mast; this was something he'd done before. Jonas used a joystick to align the transceiver head and began to speak into the separate microphone. The lens on top of the mast directed his words over the intervening brush and sand to the local column in the form of a modulated laser beam.

After a moment the sergeant straightened. "All right, they're expecting us," he said. "Take us in, Rita."

To save time he collapsed the mast without undoing the wires; they wound like spiderweb across the fighting compartment. Panchin coiled them quickly on their spools, smoothing kinks with his left hand.

Hula Girl
wallowed over another crest. The column they'd been searching for was halted in the broad gully below. That was probably part of the reason they'd been out of communications for so long. Panchin had been a soldier too long to be surprised that nobody'd had sense enough to drive one of the working vehicles onto a ridge for a better signal.

There were four Sulewesi-built 6-wheeled armored personnel carriers and a command vehicle that was similar but slightly larger than the APCs; it had four axles instead of three. The recovery/repair vehicle with a crane and parts lockers used the longer chassis as well.

Besides the locals, the column contained three medium tanks with caterpillar tracks, ceramic armor, and a long coil gun in the hull. The tanks' turbine engines whined, but power for the coil guns must come from another source—probably magneto-hydrodynamic generators. A small cupola offset on the hull contained an automatic weapon.

One tank towed another. The third tank was towing an APC. The recovery vehicle towed a second APC; and, judging by the removed cover plates, the command vehicle had broken down also. Troops in a variety of uniforms stood around the vehicles. Some of them waved.

"Typical ratfuck," Jonas muttered. "Ninety klicks is too far for a change of base even when everybody knows what he's doing."

Hula Girl
started down the slope. Cortezar deliberately broke away the gully rim to ease the angle. Sand and pebbles, some of them big enough to whang like bullets against the skirts, blasted ahead of the car in a spreading cloud.

"We going to be able to talk to these people?" Frosty asked. He had to use helmet intercom for Jonas to hear the question over the fan noise.

"The CO, Major Lebusan, spoke good Standard," Jonas said. "The rest of them, I dunno. Probably not."

Most rich people on Sulewesi were well educated and spoke Standard, the interstellar commercial language. Most rich people also managed to stay out of the military, at least the part of the military that might have to do some fighting. A few of the Slammers learned languages for fun, but nobody aboard
Hula Girl
knew more Malay than was necessary to ask for sex or a drink.

Cortezar slowed to a halt beside the command vehicle and cut the fans. A small man covered his face with a spotted bandanna until the dust had settled, then stepped forward. He wore a saucer hat with gold braid and his uniform was tailored; he'd probably been dapper some twenty hours earlier at the start of the march.

"I am Major Lebusan," the local said. "Can you fix my vehicle? That would be best."

"We're not mechanics, major," Sergeant Jonas said. He swung a leg over the bulkhead.

"I've worked on diesels," Cortezar said as she climbed out of the driver's compartment.

"We'll take a look then," Jonas said. He jumped to the ground. "Frosty, you keep an eye on the sensors, will you?"

Panchin took that as clearance for him to leave
Hula Girl
also. The ground would feel good for a change, and it'd be nice to have more elbow room than there was in the fighting compartment.

A burly man with a full black beard walked over to Panchin. He wore a ripple-camouflaged uniform of a style Panchin hadn't seen before. The holster across the center of his chest held a heavy sidearm with a folding stock.

"I Dolgov," the man said, extending a big hand to Panchin. Panchin took it, expecting—correctly—that Dolgov would squeeze hard as they shook. "Zaporoskiye Brigade. Tanks!"