The Tank Lords (4 page)

The ground bucked. From the grainplot spouted rock, smoke and metal fragments into a black column fifty meters high.

"Are we on?" the voice demanded.

"Oh, Lord," Rob prayed, beating his fists against the sand, "Oh Lord."

"Via, what is this?" the helmet wondered aloud. Then, "All guns, battery five."

And the earth began to ripple and gout under the hammer of the guns.

Rolling Hot

The camera light threw the shadow of the Slammers' officer harshly across the berm which the sun had colored bronze a few moments ago as it set. Her hair was black and cut as short as that of a man.

"For instance, Captain Ranson," Dick Suilin said, "here at Camp Progress there are three thousand national troops and less than a hundred of your mercenaries, but—"

shoop
 

Ranson's eyes widened, glinting like pale gray marble. Fritzi Dole kept the camera focused tightly on her face. He'd gotten an instinct for a nervous subject in the three years he'd recorded Suilin's probing interviews.

"—the cost to our government—"

shoop-shoop
 

"—is greater for your handful of—"

"Incoming!" screamed Captain June Ranson as she dived for the dirt. It wasn't supposed to be happening here—

But for the first instant, you
never
really believed it could be happening, not even in the sectors where it happened every bleeding night. And when things were bad enough for one side or the other to hire Hammer's Slammers you could be pretty sure that there were no safe sectors.

Camp Progress was on the ass end of Prosperity's inhabited continent—three hundred kilometers north of the coast and the provincial capital, Kohang, but still a thousand kays south of where the real fighting went on in the areas bordering the World Government enclaves. Sure, there'd been reports that the Conservatives were nosing around the neighborhood, but nothing the Yokel troops themselves couldn't handle if they got their thumbs out.

For a change.

Camp Progress was a Yokel—was a National Army—training and administrative center, while for the Slammers it served as a maintenance and replacement facility. In addition to those formal uses, the southern sector gave Hammer a place to post troops who were showing signs of having been at the sharp end a little too long.

People like Junebug Ranson, for instance, who'd frozen with her eyes wide open during a firefight that netted thirty-five Consies killed-in-action.

So Captain Ranson had been temporarily transferred to command the Slammers' guard detachment at Camp Progress, a "company" of six combat cars. There'd been seventeen cars in her line company when it was up to strength; but she couldn't remember a standard day in a war zone that they
had
been up to strength . . .

And anyway, Ranson knew as well as anybody else that she needed a rest before she got some of her people killed.

shoop
 

But she wasn't going to rest here.

The bell was ringing in the Slammers' Tactical Operations Center, a command car in for maintenance. The vehicle's fans had all been pulled, leaving the remainder as immobile as a 30-tonne iridium boulder; but it still had working electronics.

The Yokel garrison had a klaxon which they sounded during practice alerts. It was silent
now
despite the fact that camp security was supposedly a local responsibility.

Slammers were flattening or sprinting for their vehicles, depending on their personal assessment of the situation. The local reporter gaped at Ranson while his cameraman spun to find out what was going on. The camera light sliced a brilliant swath through the nighted camp.

Ranson's left cheek scraped the gritty soil as she called, "All Red Team personnel, man your blowers and engage targets beyond the berm. Blue Team—" the logistics and maintenance people "—prepare for attack from within the camp."

She wasn't wearing her commo helmet—that was in her combat car—but commands from her mastoid implant would be rebroadcast over her command channel by the base unit in the TOC. With her free hand, the hand that wasn't holding the sub-machinegun she always carried, even here, Ranson grabbed the nearer of the two newsmen by the ankle and jerked him flat.

The Yokel's squawk of protest was smothered by the blast of the first mortar shell hitting the ground.

"I said
hold
it!" bellowed Warrant Leader Ortnahme, his anger multiplied by echoes within the tank's plenum chamber. "Not slide the bloody nacelle all across the bloody baseplate!"

"Yessir," said Tech 2 Simkins. "Yes, Mr. Ortnahme!"

Simkins gripped his lower lip between his prominent front teeth and pushed. The flange on the fan nacelle slid a little farther from the bolt holes in the mounting baseplate. "Ah . . . Mr. Ortnahme?"

It was hot and dry. The breeze curling through the access port and the fan intakes did nothing but drift grit into the eyes of the two men lying on their backs in the plenum chamber. It had been a hard day.

It wasn't getting any easier as it drew to a close.

The lightwand on the ground beneath the baseplate illuminated everything in the scarred, rusty steel cavern—including the flange, until Simkins tried to position the nacelle and his arms shadowed the holes. The young technician looked scared to death. The good Lord knew he had reason to be, because if Simkins screwed up one more time, Ortnahme was going to reverse his multitool and use the welder end of it to—

Ortnahme sighed and let his body relax. He set down the multitool, which held a bolt ready to drive, and picked up the drift punch to realign the cursed holes.

Henk Ortnahme was tired and sweaty, besides being a lot older and fatter than he liked to remember . . . but he was also the Slammers' maintenance chief at Camp Progress, which meant it was his business to get the job done instead of throwing tantrums.

"No problem, Simkins," he said mildly. "But let's get it right this time, huh? So that we can knock off."

The tank,
Herman's Whore
, had been squarely over the blast of a hundred-kilogram mine. The explosion lifted the tank's 170-tonne mass, stunning both crewmen and damaging the blades of five of the six fans working at the time.

By themselves, bent blades were a field repair job—but because the crew'd been knocked silly, nobody shut down the system before the fans skewed the shafts . . . which froze the bearings . . . which cooked the drive motors in showers of sparks that must've been real bloody impressive.

Not only did the entire fan nacelles have to be replaced now—a rear echelon job by anybody's standards—but three of the cursed things had managed to weld their upper brackets to the hull, so the brackets had to be replaced also.

It was late. Ortnahme'd kept his assistant at it for fourteen hours, so he couldn't rightly blame Simkins for being punchy . . . and the warrant leader knew his own skills and judgment weren't maybe all they bloody oughta be, just at the moment. They should've quit an hour before; but when this last nacelle was set, they were done with the cursed job.

"I got it, kid," he said calmly.

Simkins hesitated, then released the nacelle and watched nervously as his superior balanced the weight on his left palm. The upper bracket was bolted solidly, but there was enough play in the suspension to do real harm if the old bastard dropped—

A bell rang outside in the company area—rang and kept on ringing. Simkins straightened in terrified surmise and banged his head on the tank's belly armor. He stared at Ortnahme through tear-blinded eyes.

The warrant leader didn't move at all for a moment. Then his left biceps, covered with grit sticking to the sweat, bunched. The nacelle slid a centimeter and the drift punch shot through the realigned holes.

"Kid," Ortnahme said in a voice made tight by the tension of holding the fan nacelle, "I want you to get into the driver's seat and light her up, but don't—"

White light like the flash of a fuse blowing flickered through the intakes. The
blam!
of the mortar shell detonating was almost lost in the echoing clang of shrapnel against the skirts of the tank. Two more rounds went off almost simultaneously, but neither was quite as close.

Ortnahme swallowed. "But don't spin the fans till I tell you, right? I'll finish up with this myself."

"S—" Simkins began. Ortnahme had let the drift punch slide down and was groping for the multitool again. His arm muscles, rigid under their covering of fat, held the unit in place.

Simkins set the multitool in his superior's palm, bolt dispenser forward, and scuttled for the open access plate. "Yessir," he called back over his shoulder.

The multitool whirred, spinning the bolt home without a shade of difficulty.

Simkins' boots banged on the skirts as the technician thrust through the access port in the steel wall. It was a tight enough fit even for a young kid like him, and as for Ortnahme—Ortnahme had half considered cutting a double-sized opening and welding the cover back in place when he was done with this cursed job.

Just as well he hadn't done that. With a hole that big venting the plenum chamber, the tank woulda been anchored until it was fixed.

Tribarrels fired, the thump of expanding air preceded minutely by the hiss of the energy discharge that heated a track to the target. Another salvo of mortar shells landed, and an earthshock warned of something more substantial hitting in the near distance.

Not a time to be standing around outside, welding a patch on a tank's skirts.

With the first bolt in place, the second was a snap. Or maybe
Herman's Whore
had just decided to quit fighting him now that the shooting had started. The bitch was Slammers' equipment, after all.

The tank shuddered. It was just Simkins hitting the main switch, firing up the containment/compression lasers in the fusion bottle that powered the vehicle, but for a moment Ortnahme thought the fan he held was live.

And about to slice the top half of his body into pastrami as it jiggled around in its mounting.

Shrapnel glanced from the thick iridium of the hull. It made a sharp sound that didn't echo the way pieces did when they rang on the cavernous steel plenum chamber. Ortnahme found the last hole with the nose of a bolt and triggered the multitool. The fastener spun and stopped—too soon. Not home, not aligned.

Another earthshock, much closer than the first.
Herman's Whore
shuddered again, and the bolt whirred the last centimeter to seat itself properly.

Warrant Leader Henk Ortnahme, wheezing with more than exertion, squirmed on his belly toward the access port. He ignored the way the soil scraped his chest raw.

He started to lift himself through the access port—carefully: the mine had stripped half the bolts holding down the cover plate, so there was sharp metal as well as a bloody tight fit.

Tribarrels ripped outward, across the berm. To the south flares and tracers—mostly aimed high, way too high—from the Yokel lines brightened the sky.

Ortnahme was halfway through the access port when, despite the crash and roar of gunfire, he heard the whisper of more incoming mortar shells.

The 20cm main gun of another tank fired, blotting every other sight and sound from the night with its thunderous cyan flash.

When Ranson hit the deck, Dick Suilin's first reaction was that the woman officer was having convulsions. He turned to call for help, blinking because Fritzi's light had flared across him as the cameraman spun to record a new subject: half-clad soldiers sprinting or sprawling all across the detachment area. Somebody was ringing a raucous bell that—

Ranson, flat on the ground, grabbed Suilin's right ankle and jerked forward.

"Hey!" the reporter shouted, trying to pull away.

Standing straight, the woman didn't even come up to his collarbone, but she had a grip like a wire snare. Suilin overbalanced, flailing his arms until his butt hit the coarse soil and slammed all the air out of his lungs.

There was a white flash, a bang, and—about an inch above Suilin's head—something that sounded like a bandsaw hitting a pineknot. Fritzi grunted and flung his camera in the opposite direction. Its floodlights went out.

"Fritzi, what are you—" Suilin shouted, stopping when his words were punctuated by two more blasts.

They were being
shelled
for God's sake! Not two hours' ride from Kohang!

The Slammers' captain had disappeared somewhere, but when Suilin started to get up to run for cover, Fritzi Dole fell across him and knocked him flat again.

Suilin started to curse, but before he got the first word out a nearby combat car lighted the darkness with a stream of bolts from a tribarrel.

The chunk of shrapnel which grated past Suilin a moment before had chopped off the back of his cameraman's skull. Fritzi's blood and brains splashed Suilin's chest.

Dick Suilin had seen death before; he'd covered his share of road accidents and nursing home fires as a junior reporter. Even so, he'd been on the political beat for years now.
This
was a political story; the waste of money on foreign mercenaries when the same sums spent on the National Army would give ten times the result.

And anyway, covering the result of a tavern brawl wasn't the same as feeling Fritzi's warm remains leak over the neat uniform in which Suilin had outfitted himself for this assignment.

He tried to push the body away from him, but it was heavy and as flexible as warm bread dough. He thought he heard the cameraman mumbling, but he didn't want to think that anyone so horribly wounded wouldn't have died instantly. Half of Fritzi's brains were gone, but he moaned as the reporter thrust him aside in a fit of revulsion.

Suilin rolled so that his back was toward the body.

The ground which he'd chosen for his interview was bare of cover, but a tank was parked against the berm twenty meters from him. He poised to scuttle toward the almost astronomical solidity of the vehicle and cower under the tarpaulin strung like a lean-to from its flank.

Before the reporter's legs obeyed his brain's decision, a man in the Slammers' dull khaki ran past. The mercenary was doubled over by the weight of equipment in his arms and fear of shrapnel.