Armored Tears (21 page)

"They
left," Cal breathed, eyes going wide behind his helmet visor. "They
fucking
left
us!" he screamed.

"Keep
cool," said the sergeant. "Keep it tight!" But her voice verged
on panic, sounding anything but cool and tight to Cal.

"Oh,
god," Cal whispered.

A
War-Hammer loomed suddenly out of the smoke. A helmeted head projected from one
of the turret hatches, three meters up.

"Get
the fuck on!" screamed a voice that sounded like the major's. "And if
one of you is my driver, get the
fuck
back in and fucking
drive
!"

26.

General
Alan Stirling looked at his displays and wondered if the sense of numb shock
was an asset or a liability. The sense of glassy unreality, he thought, might
be all that was keeping him functional.

Reports
from scientific sensors inside the gate dome were still getting through —by
optical-wire phone lines, of all things— and his technical advisors were
now unanimous in their judgment of the readings; the Tannhauser gate was still,
somehow, intermittently operational, and the UEN had managed to bring in at
least one wave of reinforcements.

Whatever
method they had of powering the gate, it didn't seem to be able to operate
continuously, but there was no telling when the UEN forces would be able to
manage another opening and receive even more reinforcements.

What
they already had on the ground was bad enough. Eye witnesses had reported Peace
Force framers in large numbers, and forward units of the Defense Force had come
under heavy missile fire. Meanwhile drones were being burned out of the sky in
a manner that proved that the pissers had a powerful battlefield laser system
set up for air and anti-bombardment defense.

And
now there were rumors of UEN vehicles being seen in the vicinity of the gate
complex. Maybe even tanks. Getting tanks though a gate wasn't impossible, after
all. A few seconds per tank was all it would take. How many did they already
have, Stirling wondered?

His
own forces, meanwhile, were still racing to get organized. An improvised
defensive line had been established between the gate structure and the gate
control and power facilities, almost a hundred kilometers away. Right now, it
was being held by a few companies of frame infantry, a company of tanks, and
men and women taken from any available Defense Force unit, acting as light
infantry. A hard push from the UEN forces could break the line, he knew, and
take the facilities.

"We
have to stop any move to the control and power facilities," he said into
the silence.

"Worst
case, we could blow them. The pissers will never take them intact," said
an Infantry Corps brigadier-general named Cooper.
          

Stirling
knew Cooper's reputation as a hard-charger; the man had been the one in charge
of the desperate, mad, airborne framer assault on the gate dome in '70.
Stirling had learned to work with him since, though not without some friction.
Still, Cooper, though blunt and often abrasive, was far from stupid.
  

"The
UEN has already shown they have some other power source," Stirling
reminded the man. "Blowing our facility might do
nothing
to stop them."

"We
have forces coming on line rapidly," said an Armored Corps colonel named
McMaster. "But I think we need to accept the fact that the UEN has won
aerospace superiority. All our satellites are down, and we've picked up hints
of enemy 'ghosts' at the edges of our surface laser arrays' range."

"I'm
afraid that sounds right," admitted Colonel Farber; she was still the
senior-most Aerospace Corps officer present and her superiors seemed content to
leave her in place as the liaison to high command for now.

"How
could they bring 'ghosts' thought the gate?" asked Cooper, sounding
belligerent.

"I
think," the Aerospace colonel said, "that we have to take as factual
the last report from that 'ghost' we had. I think the UEN has managed to land
forces into the southern wastes."

"How?"
demanded Cooper.

"An
orbital Tannhauser gate," replied Farber. Cooper towered over her,
glaring, but she met his gaze evenly enough. Not calmly, Stirling thought, but
then, no one in the command facility was calm just now.

"It's
possible," interjected Major Villers, the only officer present from the
Technical Corps. "They could have generated a new gate, if they started
right
after the last war; it would be
opening just about now. Or... they could have reactivated the original
exploratory gate. I know that official UEN policy was to stop using all first
generation gates due to instability, but..."

"It
doesn't actually matter, does it?" said Stirling. "Whatever the
source, we have reports of multiple engagements in the southern wastes."

"Yes,
sir," confirmed one of his staffers. "We had a garbled report from a
frame-infantry company; the 9th, I think it was. And then there's a battalion
of tanks that was doing a publicity-stunt escort mission for a charity convoy
to the refugee camps. The battalion's colonel says her forces are holding
against UEN attacks."

"So
we can take it as fact that the UEN they managed to sneak
something
into the southern wastes," Stirling said.

"Sir,"
said Farber, "along those lines, if I may remind you of the report we had
from that 'ghost'..."

"I
remember, Colonel," Stirling said. "One of your 'ghosts' reported
tracking something like two-dozen re-entry vehicles..."

"Twenty-three
reentry vehicles," said Farber, "large ones. The report was somewhat
garbled, and then it cut off. We've since confirmed the loss of the aircraft.
No sign of survivors."

"Twenty-three...
that's got to be wrong," Stirling mused, shaking his head. "I doubt
the UEN even
has
that many, in total.
But if they deployed decoys as they re-entered... there could be as many as a
half-dozen. You could cram a battalion of infantry into a big orbital cargo
rocket. Or a platoon of tanks."

"A
serious problem," said Cooper, "if those forces plough into the back
of our defensive perimeter."

"Well,
ladies and gentlemen," said Stirling, "I think this might be the
first bit of decent luck today. We've got a whole battalion of tanks, led by
Lieutenant-Colonel O'Connor, on site to hold back the second UEN force. She was
the officer who led the relief of our infantry in the gate fight in '70, you'll
recall."

"Damn
good," said Cooper, barring his teeth in a sudden, hard grin. "She
got the job done back in '70. At least that's
one
thing that's not in the crapper today."

"Can
we get her reinforcements?" asked Colonel McMaster.

"Not
right now," replied Stirling. "She has enough force to hold, and
nothing can get past the Isthmus Highlands while we hold them. We've got a
laser defense station, and we've got a crack battalion of tanks. We can hold
the back door. Let's focus on the front door, or the pissers will open the gate
wide and then it won't matter a bit if we hold the Isthmus Highlands or
not."

27.

"Glad
to have you back, Feldman," Tara said, crouching in the shadow of
Feldman's War-Hammer, conferring with her company commanders. Major Feldman
crouched with her, both of them staying in the shadow. Captain Younger didn't
bother; there was no room in the shade for his bulk, so he stood tall, forcing
the other two officers to look up at him.

"You
did good, Major Feldman," Tara added, studying the face of her
second-in-command. He looked a bit worn, a bit tired. It didn't worry her; like
him or not, Tara knew that Feldman was tough.

"We
managed to rescue twenty-two frame troopers," Feldman said, "and a
foreign civilian. Out of a company of eighty-one people. And I lost three of my
people, and five Auxiliary Corps troops. I suppose I could count the three
surviving Auxiliary Corps people as rescues, too, except I've got two of them
as crew in my tank now, and the third one in another tank... so I'm not sure
how they count. How does any of that count as doing good, Colonel?"

"You
did what you had to do," Tara said. "You pulled off the rescue. We
didn't leave our people behind. You did good. But what's this about a foreign
civilian?"

"Yeah.
Seems that there was an Earth reporter on assignment, taking some sort of field
trip with the 9th Frame Infantry Company. When it all fell into the pot, he
managed to escape with them. We picked him up along with the other survivors of
the 9th.

"Actually,"
Feldman added with a half-laugh, "he sort-of kidnapped my driver to help
him save one of the frame troopers we brought back. I talked with him, the
reporter, I mean. He's from the Pacific Alliance, so I didn't have him arrested
or shot or anything. I think he's back at the aid station right now, helping
with the wounded."

"Hah.
Well, that's something new," Younger said, sounding bemused.

Feldman
nodded, took a deep breath and let it out.

"Their
tanks are something new," he said. "Not the M58s we were up against
last time. Heavy fucking armor. My people scored some hits that just seemed to
bounce off. We had to concentrate fire from a couple of tanks... I think that
might have knocked one of them out."

"We
saw 'em," Tara said. "T-66s. Russian. As for heavy armor, yeah. But
at seven kilometers, our Type-51's frontal armor will shed a 41 megajoule hit
as often as not, too. We managed to take them out OK at closer ranges. Though
I'll grant you; not too many one-shot stops. They
are
heavily armored."

"How
long will our ammo hold out, if we have to fire bursts at everything?"
Feldman asked.

"As
long as it can," Tara replied. "Good job loading your tanks up with
extra rounds from that Auxiliary base, by the way. We'll distribute the excess
among the tanks with the highest ammo expenditure.

"There's
another thing, though," she added. "Enemy reconnaissance. I noticed
they didn't use drones when they sent in their first attack. I've been thinking
about that, since. I've come to the conclusion that they didn't send in drones
because they didn't need to. I think that we have to assume the UEN has some
sats up."

"Which
means they're watching us, huh?" Younger said. "Maybe even now?"

"It's
the way to bet," Tara replied.

"Damn,"
Feldman said. "We don't have anything in the way of anti-sat weapons. The
laser installation could blind them, but only if we knew
exactly
where they were. Which we
don't.
Damn it!"

"Right,"
Tara said. "But we
can
do some
things. Let's move the tanks to new firing positions. A parallel move, not giving
up any ground. We can use our current fighting positions as alternates to shift
to once the fighting starts. We don't know when a UEN bird might be looking, so
we do the move under a smoke-screen, and then we set up our camo-netting. Not perfect,
but at least the pissers won't know
exactly
where we are."

"Yeah,
that sounds good, Boss," Younger said.
          

"Yes,
ma'am," Feldman agreed. "Let's do it. Fast."

Tara
watched her company commanders hustle off to set up the maneuver, wondering
again at the wisdom of the Defense Force's stripped-down policy on staff and combat
officers. She had no dedicated executive officer, no staff officers of any sort
out in the field; a legacy of desperation and maverick informality from the
Defense Force's earliest days. As it was, managing her battalion would have
been impossible without the integrated Defense Force data-cloud and dedicated
military operations "software agent" programs. Of course half the
time, the information she needed wasn't in the data-cloud due to info-warfare
security concerns. Not that it mattered now, since the whole data-cloud was
down, along with the comm satellites. All in all, it still made life damn hard
on field commanders.

Oh,
well, she thought, at least it keeps the would-be military bureaucrats in
check.

She
reached back put hand on the bow of Feldman's tank, pulling herself up to
standing. She felt tired. Not as tired as she was going to feel soon, though,
she knew.

Feldman's
driver was head-up in his hatch, and she suddenly met the man's eyes. A very
young man, a boy, almost, and not the driver she knew Feldman had had that
morning.

"What's
your name, soldier?" Tara asked the ragged-looking blond face projecting
from the driver's compartment. The boy didn't look familiar, except for the
haunted look in his eyes.

"Piper,
ma'am. Cal Piper," he said.

"You're
new, aren't you?" she asked, and the boy nodded.

"Just
remember your training, Piper," she said, putting calm confidence into her
voice. Fake or not, she thought, a young soldiers didn't need to hear anything
but confidence from his battalion commander.

"Ma'am...
I... I'm from the Auxiliary Corps," the boy said. "I've just been
driving since the regular driver... got hit..."

"Auxiliary
Corps?" Tara said, narrowing her eyes. "And you've been driving the
major's tank in battle?"

The
boy nodded.

"Well,
then... Piper, you're not Auxiliary Corps anymore. You're an Armored Corps
driver now. And I've seen worse. Carry on, Piper."

Cal
watched the colonel go, somewhere between exhilaration and awe. Lieutenant-colonel
Tara "Legs" O'Connor was a legend, and here he was, in
her
unit, serving under
her
command. And she had just said he
was Armored Corps. He wasn't sure about how that would work, given what he knew
about Defense Force bureaucracy, but he was pretty sure that if Colonel
O'Connor said it, then it was going to stick. Armored Corps!

The
sound of conversation made him look over to his right. Some of the surviving
framers were checking over their frames in the shadow of a tarp set up next to
one of the tanks, and Cal saw Bernie —Sergeant Polawski— the lovely
redhead girl he'd helped, was one of them. He'd had a chance to talk to her for
a minute, to learn her name, and to catch her smile when she thanked him for
rescuing her, which made the terrifying, mad dash out of the tank feel
completely worth it.

Cal
saw that she had taken off her frame and her armor, and was wearing just her
fatigues. And as he watched, she doffed the her fatigue tunic, too, leaving her
in a halter-style sports bra. Her bare midriff was athlete-toned, with a
ribbon-like pattern of tattoos running across it, weaving up from where her
fatigue pants covered her hips. Another scrollwork of tattoos covered most of
her back that he could see. Her skin was pale enough that she must have needed
to constantly take anti-UV supplements —a product of Arcadian biotech—
to avoid perpetual sunburn under the fierce rays of Ravi, Arcadia's sun. Cal
found he couldn't make himself look away.

By
some chance —or maybe it was true what people said about being able to
feel someone's gaze— she looked over in his direction, meeting his eyes.
Cal could feel his face coloring, but she just grinned at him and waved.

He
waved back, feeling like a fool.

Damn
it, he thought, he was an Armored Corps tanker! A driver who had taken his tank
into combat! He wasn't going to let himself make an embarrassed fool of himself
in front of a beautiful woman, was he?

Taking
a deep breath and telling himself that this
wasn't
as scary as being shot at —or jumping out of his tank in the middle of a
fight— had been, Cal pulled himself out of the driver's hatch of his tank
and slid down the armored glacis of the bow to the ground.

Sergeant
Polawski watched him jog over, standing there with a hand cocked on her hip.

"Ah...
Sergeant..." Cal said, trying not to stammer.

"Yeah?"
she asked, looking him over. "You're the tank driver who stopped to pick
me up, aren't you?"

"Ah,
yeah," Cal said, suddenly realizing that she'd only seen him with his
visor down till now. "I'm Cal Piper. I'm... I was Auxiliary Corps,
actually. I just got transferred to Armored Corp."

"OK.
What can I do for you, Cal?" she asked.

"Ah,"
he said, "well, actually, I was wondering... if..."

"Come
on, Cal," she said, smiling again; it was an amazing smile, Cal thought.

"If
I could ask you out on a date. When all this is over," he managed to say.

Her
eyes, amazing hazel eyes, went wide. "You're asking me out on a
date
? In the middle of a fucking
war
?"

"Well,
ah, I mean, the war can't go on forever.... So, ah, yeah. I guess I am."

Bernie
laughed, grinning, eyes wide. "My God, Cal. That's... that's something
else," she said. "That's
awesome
!
I've
never
had
anyone
try that sort of line on me. OK, man, I am
impressed
. Yeah. Yeah, if we make it out
of this, we can go on a date. I mean, why not? You saved my life, you're kinda
cute, and you've got some serious brass. And besides, who knows; it might be
fun, being the older woman..." she said, still grinning, shaking her
head.
 

"Ah,
thanks," Cal said, trying not to start stammering.

"You're
welcome, Cal," she said, still grinning as she turned away.