The Tank Lords (32 page)

He didn't sound certain, even to himself.

"Albers," Cooter said as he climbed over the back of the combat car. "See if you can help Tillman line up billets and rations, okay?"

Albers nodded minusculy. He was sitting on the beer cooler. He didn't look at the big lieutenant. Except for the slight lift of his chin, he didn't move.

Suilin slid down the last step and almost fell. His legs didn't want to support him. They seemed all right after a few steps.

"The Consies 're asking for a cease fire," Cooter announced as he and the reporter walked toward the entrance to the Governor's Palace, the middle building of those closing the Compound on three sides. "Not just here. Their Central Command announced it."

"From the Enclaves," Suilin said, thinking aloud.

The soldiers at the entrance thirty meters away wore fatigues with the crossed-saber collar tabs of the Presidential Guard Force. They eyed the newcomers cautiously.

A buzzbomb had cratered the second floor of the Palace, directly above the entrance. Other than that, damage was limited to broken glass and bullet-pocks on the stone. The fighting hadn't been serious around here after all.

Dick Suilin now knew what buildings looked like when somebody really meant business.

"Will they get it?" he said aloud. "The cease fire, I mean."

Cooter shrugged. "I'm not a politician," he said.

Now that the reporter had taken off his clamshell armor, the sling holding his grenade launcher was too long. He adjusted the length.

The pink-faced captain commanding the guards blinked.

Cooter looked at his companion. "I'm not sure you'll need that in here," he said mildly.

"I'm not sure of anything," Dick Suilin replied without emotion. "Not any more."

"The hole in the skirt," said Warrant Leader Ortnahme in a judicious tone as he walked slowly toward Blue Three, "we can patch easy enough. . . ."

"Yessir," said Tech 2 Simkins through tight lips.

When a Yokel tank blew up three meters from Simkins' side of
Daisy Belle
, he'd been spattered with blazing diesel fuel. Bandages now covered the Sprayseal which replaced the skin of the technician's left arm.

He wasn't hurting, exactly; nobody carrying Simkins' present load of analgesics in his veins could be said to be in pain. Still, the technician had to concentrate to keep his feet moving in the right order.

"The bloody rest of it, though . . ." Ortnahme murmured.

Hans Wager had managed to find a can of black paint and a brush somewhere. He was painting something on the tank's bow skirts. His driver, a woman Ortnahme couldn't put a bloody name to, watched with a drawn expression.

The pair of 'em looked like they'd sweated off five kilos in the last two days. Maybe they had.

The tungsten-carbide shot that holed the skirt must have been so close to the muzzle that its fins hadn't had time to stabilize it. The shot was still yawing when it struck, so it'd punched a long oval in the steel instead of a neat round hole.

Ortnahme estimated the shot's probable further course with his eyes and called, "Did ye lose a bloody fan when that hit you?"

Wager continued painting, attempting a precision which was far beyond his present ability.

The driver turned slowly toward the pair of maintenance personnel. She said, "Yeah, that's right. Number 3 Port went out. That was okay, but the air spilling through the hole here—" nodding toward the gaping oval "—that was bad."

She paused for memory before she added, "Can you fix it?"

"Sure," the warrant leader said. "As soon as they ship in a spare." He shook his head. "A whole bloody lotta spares."

Simpkins nodded without speaking.

"What, ah . . . are you doing?" Ortnahme asked.

Wager turned at last. "We're putting the name on our tank," he croaked.

Wager's vacant expression turned to utter malevolence. "She's ours and we can call her anything we bloody please!" he shouted hoarsely. "They're not takin' her and givin' us some clapped out old cow instead, d'ye hear? Not even the Old Man's gonna take her away from us!"

The warrant leader looked at the tank that had only been a callsign until now.

The turret had taken at least a dozen direct hits, most of them from armor-piercing shot. Ortnahme wondered if any part of the sensor array had survived.

One round had blasted a cavity in the stubby barrel of the main gun. It hadn't penetrated, but until the tube was replaced, firing the 20cm weapon would be as dangerous as juggling contact grenades.

Even a layman could see that the tribarrel's ammunition had chain-fired in its loading tube, vaporizing the weapon, the hatch, and the cupola itself. The warrant leader knew what a layman wouldn't: that when the bloody ammo went, it would've reamed its tubeway as wide as a cow's cunt, seriously weakening the turret forging itself. The whole bloody turret would have to be replaced before Ortnahme would certify
this
mother as fit for action.

Plus, of course, the fan nacelle. Pray Lord it was the only one gone when he and Simkins got underneath to look.

"No argument from me, snake," Henk Ortnahme said mildly. "I figure you guys earned the right to ride whatever you bloody well please."

Simkins had to keep moving for another half hour or so. Ortnahme nodded to the tankers, then walked on slowly with the technician's hand in his for guidance.

Behind them, Wager painted the last letter of
Nameless
on the skirt in straggling capitals.

Suzette, Lady Kung, wore neat fatigues and a look of irritation as she glanced over her shoulder toward the commotion by the door.

"Suzi!" Dick Suilin called, past the sergeant-major who blocked him and Cooter from the dignitaries milling in the conference room.

His sister's expression shifted through blank amazement to a mixture of love and horror. "Dick!" she cried. "Dick! Oh good Lord!"

She darted toward Suilin with her arms spread, striding fast enough to make her lustrous hair stream back from her shoulderblades.

The sergeant-major didn't know what was going on, but he knew enough to get out of the way of the governor's wife. He sprang to attention and repeated in a parade-ground voice what Cooter had told him: "Sir! The representatives of Task Force Ranson."

There were twenty-odd people in the room already, too many for the chairs around the map-strewn table. Most were officers of the National Army. A few civilian advisors looked up from the circle around Governor Kung.

Everyone was in fatigues, but several of the officers wore polished insignia and even medal ribbons.

Suzi hugged her brother fiercely, then gasped before she could suppress the reflex. Suilin had forgotten how he must smell. . . .

"Oh Dick," his sister said. "It's been hard for all of us."

The reporter patted her hand and let her step away.

He pretended that he hadn't seen the look of disgust flash across her face. Couldn't blame her. He'd lived two days in his clothes, stinking of fear every moment of the time . . . and that was before the shell hit Gale beside him.

Cooter walked toward the conference table, parting the clot of advisors with the shockwave of his presence.

Governor Kung shoved his chair back and stood. He looked like a startled hiker who'd met a bear on a narrow trail.

"Sir," Cooter said, halting a meter from the Governor in a vain effort not to be physically threatening. "Colonel Hammer—"

"You're Ranson, then?" Kung said sharply, his tenor voice keyed higher than Suilin remembered having heard it before. "We were told you were going to relieve us. But I see you preferred to wait until General Halas had done the job!"

Dick Suilin moved up beside the mercenary. The edges of his vision were becoming gray, like the walls of a tunnel leading to the face of Governor Samuel Kung. Suilin's brother-in-law wasn't a handsome man, but his round, sturdy features projected unshakeable determination.

Cooter shook his head as if to clear it. "Sir," he said, "we got here as fast as we could. There was a lot of resis—"

"
My
troops met a lot of resistance, Captain," growled a military man—General Halas; Suilin had interviewed him a few weeks ago, during another life. "The difference is that we broke through and acomplished our mission!"

The tunnel of Dick Suilin's vision was growing red and beginning to pulse as his heart beat. Halas' voice came from somewhere outside the present universe.

"Sir," said Lieutenant Cooter, "with all respect—the Consies put the best they had in our way. When we broke that, broke
them
, the troops they had left in Kohang ran rather than face us."

"Nonsense!" snapped Kung. "General Halas and his troops from Camp Fortune kept up the pressure till the enemy ran. I don't know why we ever decided to hire mercenaries in the first place!"

"Don't you know why we hire mercenaries, Governor?" said Dick Suilin in a voice trembling like a fuel fire. "Don't you know?"

He stepped closer; felt the massive conference table against the front of his thighs, felt it slide away from his advance.

"Dick!" called Suzi, the word attenuated by the pounding walls of the tunnel.

"Because they fight, Governor!" Suilin shouted. "Because they win, while your rear-echelon pussies wait to be saved with their thumbs up their ass!"

Kung's face vanished. Suilin could see nothing but a core of flame.

"They saved you, you worthless bastards!" he screamed into the blinding darkness. "They saved us all!"

The reporter floated without volition or sight. "Reaction to the Wide-awakes," he heard someone, Cooter, murmur. "Had a pretty rough time. . . ."

A door closed, cutting off the babble of sounds. The air was cool, and someone was gently holding him upright.

"Suzi?" he said.

"You can't let 'em get t' you," said Cooter. His right arm was around Suilin's shoulders. His fingers carefully detached the grenade launcher from the reporter's grip. "It's okay."

They were back in the hallway outside the conference room. The walls were veneered with zebra-patterned marble, clean and cool.

"It's not okay!" screamed Dick Suilin. "You saved all their asses and they don't care!"

"They don't have t' like us, snake," said Lieutenant Cooter, meeting Suilin's eyes. "They just have t' make the payment schedule."

Suilin turned and bunched his fist. Cooter caught his arm before he could smash his knuckles on the stone wall.

"Take it easy, snake," said the mercenary. "It don't mean nothin'."

Panchin heard Sergeant-Commander Jonas swear softly as he tried to coax anything more than a splutter from the ionization-track communicator. The wind blew a hiss of sand against
Hula Girl
's iridium armor.

On a map of any practical scale this swatch of desert would look as flat as a mirror, but brush and rocky knobs limited Reg Panchin's view to a hundred meters in any direction from the combat car's right wing gun. Night stripped the terrain of all color but grays and purple grays. Panchin could have added false color to the light-amplified view through the faceshield of his commo helmet, but that would have made the landscape even more alien—and Panchin more lonely.

"I'm curst if I know what they're fighting over," muttered the driver, Trooper Rita Cortezar, over
Hula Girl
's intercom channel. "I sure don't see anything here worth getting killed over."

Frosty Ericssen chuckled from the left gun. "Did you ever see a stretch of country that looked much better than this does, Tits?" he asked. "At least after we got through blowing it inside out, I mean."

Panchin was a Clerk/Specialist with G Company's headquarters section. He rode
Hula Girl
during the change of base because the combat car was short a crewman and HQ's command car was overloaded. You had to know Cortezar better than he did to call her "Tits" to her face.

Hula Girl
carried three tribarreled powerguns—left wing, right wing, and the commander's weapon mounted on the forward bulkhead to fire over the driver's head. Space in the rear fighting compartment was always tight, but the change of base made the situation even worse than it would have been on a normal combat patrol.

A beryllium fishnet hung on steel stakes a meter above the bulkheads. It was meant to catch mortar bombs and similar low-velocity projectiles before they landed in the fighting compartment, but inevitably it swayed with the weight of the crew's personal baggage. More gear was slung to the outside of the armor, and the deck of the compartment was covered with a layer of ammo cans.

"They're fighting about power, not territory," Panchin said. Spiky branches quivered as wind swept a hillock, then danced toward
Hula Girl
in a dust devil that quickly dispersed. "Everybody on Sulewesi's a Malay, but they came in two waves—original colonists and the batch brought in three generations afterwards. The first lot claims to own everything, including the folks who came later. Eventually the other guys decided to do something about it."

Reg Panchin wasn't so much frightened as empty: he'd never expected to be out in the middle of a hostile nowhere like this. He supposed the line troopers were used to it. Talking about something he knew didn't help Panchin a lot, but it helped.

"We're working for the old guys, right?" Frosty said.

"Right," Panchin said. "Hammer's Slammers support the Sulewesi government. The rebels have a Council. I don't guess there's a lot to choose except who's paying who."

Sgt. Jonas straightened and patted the communicator. "Well, this thing's fucked," he said in a conversational tone. "I can't get more than three words at a time from Scepter Base. If they've got a better fix on the missing column than we do, they can't send it so I hear it."

Hula Girl
's crew knew exactly where they were. Sulewesi had been mapped by satellite before the war broke out, and the combat car's inertial navigation system was accurate to within a meter in a day's travel. That didn't tell the Slammers where the missing platoon of local troops was, though.