Undercurrents (32 page)

A figure strode down the shuttle’s ramp. The shuttle’s pilot wore a characteristic Rand full beard and black coveralls that stretched across broad shoulders. The man reached the ramp’s base, leapt the puddle, and walked to Polian. “We’re loaded and fueled. ’Puter forecasts a weather break in an hour. And an orbital matching window from right now ’til noon.”

“You’ll take off in an hour, then?”

“We’ll take off when it’s safe. That may be in an hour. It may be at midnight. Is there a hurry, mister?”

“Major.”

The pilot waved his arm at the open hangar door, at the distant revetment and barbed-wire perimeter barely visible through the rain. “We’ve never had this circus here before.”

“The Iridian rebels have become more active recently. I think you’d be well advised to take off as soon as possible. Our cargo could be in jeopardy.”

“Mister, I care about your cargo. It’s my job to care, and I really do. But I care more about my ship. The Iridian rebels may be a myth. Wind shear out past the end of this runway is no myth.”

“You’re saying you can’t take off?”

“I’m saying that my ship’s safer here at the moment”—the pilot pointed at the clouds—“than up there. The moment that changes, I’ll be off this rock before you can tap dance on that cast of yours.”

Gill walked up to the two of them, hands clasped behind his back and smiling. “Captain Berger! Wet enough for you?”

The pilot shrugged, half smiled at Gill. “We’ll see.”

“Sir!” A Tressen private ran to Polian, stopped in front of him, and saluted. He held out a handtalk. “Something going on beyond the perimeter.”

Polian frowned, snatched the receiver, and held it near his ear. Gill stood close and listened. Polian spoke. “This is Base One.”

“Outpost Six reports. The machine shows something inbound.”

Polian rolled his eyes. The “machine”? Outpost Six was manned by Tressens. There weren’t half enough Yavi to go around. “Be more specific, man!”

“There’s two of them. Tractors or trucks or something. They’re barely moving.”

“Range?”

“Twelve hundred yards.”

“They’re tanks!” Another voice, this one with a Yavi accent, broke in.

Polian recognized the voice. “Mazzen? Are you looking at a sensor display, or do you have visual?”

“Both, sir. They’re old crawlers, but their turrets have been removed. We’ve got indicators of a platoon-sized infantry unit tucked in behind each of them.”

“Infantry? Is anyone shooting?”

“Uh. No, sir.”

Polian touched his chin. A Tressen farm tractor resembled a tank without a turret. “It could be locals demonstrating for influenza vaccine. There’s a quarantine site out beyond OP Six.”

Polian rather hoped it was a demonstration. Skimmers and needlers were designed to control unruly civilians. Though neither Yavet nor Tressen had spawned much in the way of civil disobedience over the last few decades.

Gill whispered, “Ruberd, I gave you this show, and it’s yours to run. But do you think you should send a pair of skimmers out past the wire to probe them? Just in case?”

Polian realized that the normal skimmer patrols out beyond the wire had been suspended after one crashed into a sensor array in the rain. He called over the soldier who had fetched him the handtalk. Polian pointed to the hangar’s far wall, where twenty skimmers were parked, two in ready-reserve status with crews strapped in place and side-mount needlers loaded. “Corporal, tell the two ready-reserve skimmers to slide out to OP Six and challenge some inbounds the post has identified.”

Ping
.

The Rand pilot thumbed his ’puter. “What’cha got, Mr. Sciefel?”

The pilot’s ’puter squawked back at him. “Hole in the weather, sir. For the next twenty minutes. After that, we’re socked for four hours, guaranteed.”

The pilot scratched his beard, then turned to Polian. “Is there any chance these things your people are seeing may endanger my ship?”

Polian shook his head. “None. We’re a thousand strong. This demonstration, or whatever it is, involves a hundred people. You’re one hundred percent safe in here.”

The Rand pilot spoke into his ’puter. “Heat ’em up, Mr. Sciefel. No time to wait on a tug. We’ll power out.”

He spun on his heel, but Polian caught his arm. “Captain, if…if these so-called tanks with no turrets do turn out to be a threat, that runway is in the line of fire. You’re safer in here for a few minutes.”

“I’m sure you know your job, Major. But I know mine, too. I intend to have my ship gone, out of harm’s way, long before your ‘if’ turns to ‘when.’ ” He strode away from Polian, up the ramp, and disappeared.

Whuummm.

Polian turned toward the sound that echoed in the hangar so loudly it was audible above the rain’s rumble. It was the two ready skinks. They had just popped off the stone floor, and now wobbled while their drivers trimmed them. He caught the eye of the lead driver and waved him to slide the skink over. The second followed
en
echelon.

Polian motioned the trooper in the right-hand seat of the lead ready skimmer to dismount, and took his place. Polian had to lift his cast leg up and over the flank armor, but then he was in.

“Ruberd?”

Polian turned and realized that Gill still stood there and had reached out and touched the younger man’s sleeve.

“Yes, General?”

“You know, if this is enemy armor, it could present a meaningful threat.”

“Sir, with respect, I doubt it. But that’s why I’m going out there to see for myself.” Polian nodded to his driver, and the skink slid out toward the rain.

Booom. Booom.

Polian jumped a fraction of an inch in his seat. Ahead of the skimmer the great bells of the shuttle’s engines glowed orange and shuddered as the big ship came to life. The engines’ thunder half drowned the hydraulic whine as the shuttle’s loading ramp rose and sealed the shuttle’s belly.

Polian smiled, a witness to history. The magical stones, now hidden throughout the cargo in the space plane’s hold, were about to embark on the next leg of their journey to free Yavet from Trueborn domination.

The second skink slid alongside them, and Polian’s eyes widened when he saw a flash of silver gray in the right-hand seat. The old moustache was coming, too. Was it because he didn’t trust Polian? Polian frowned when he realized that the mistrust in the relationship now ran precisely the other way. Polian had concluded that the slight old man who had befriended him would have to be killed, on suspicion of the crime of having been born.

Polian reached up and snapped his goggles down over his eyes, just in time, as the open skink slid out from beneath the great protective umbrella of the hangar’s dome roof and a torrent of rain blinded him.

Eighty-eight

For the first three-fourths of a mile after Thunderer One and Thunderer Two clanked out from behind the cover provided by the quarantined row houses, I kept waiting to be slammed by a cannon round, or at least to run across a patrol, either on foot or in a Yavi skimmer. But it didn’t happen. I supposed it was possible that we did run across a patrol but passed in the downpour without seeing or hearing or smelling one another. Most likely, though, the Tressens and the Yavi had suspended patrols due to the weather.

For us inside Thunderer One, it seemed that no one else could miss us. We couldn’t see much through our slits, but we were wider than a mag-lev and nearly as long. The engine roar and vibration that left us deaf and battered surely outshouted the unabated thunder. Also, the mixture of one-hundred-twenty-degree internal temperature, unvented carbon monoxide, kerosene exhaust fumes, and the vomit that the combination of the above had already provoked from the right-side cannoneer, would alert anyone who got within sniffing distance to our presence.

As unpleasant and dangerous as it was to be route-marching behind us in a chill maelstrom, I would have preferred to be out there in the downpour with Kit.

Ping-ping-ping-ping.

At two hundred yards out from the perimeter wire, even though we couldn’t see the perimeter emplacements that were four hundred yards from us, we began taking fire.

At first the needler rounds just sounded like tinnier rain against the hull. But even after we recognized them for what they were, and as we came close enough that they became an incessant hail against our forward plating, they were as ineffectual as pelting us with handfuls of jelly beans.

One improvement we had made on the tanks as originally designed was to rig polished steel mirrors that we could swing into place angled behind a couple of the slits. That allowed us to close most of the slits against the few, but deadly, needler rounds among thousands that would have found their way in through the slits. We were kidding ourselves, because really the mirrors were scarcely better than blindness. But it was better than a needler round in the eye.

If Kit’s infantry behind us had charged without the cover we provided, they would all be dead or wounded already, without even reaching the concertina wire.

Spang
.

My head snapped back as something seared my eye.

“Oh, God!” My hand flew to my eye. Somehow a needler round had found its way inside our armor and rendered me half blind.

I opened my eye, closed the uninjured one, and could still see.

Running my fingers beneath my eye, I felt a bloody gash, but hardly a needler wound.

We had just taken our first round of conventional Tressen gunpowder machine-gun fire. It had struck the armor plate in front of my face. The steel plate on a Mark V or a Thunderer stopped such rounds, but the impact spalled steel slivers off the plate’s backside, like struck billiard balls. British Mark V crews had actually worn chain-mail masks to protect against secondary internal shrapnel. If the mix of machine guns we faced that day had been more conventional Tressen and less Yavi needler, the inside of our tank would have been a steel hailstorm.

I peeped out the slit again, grimacing.

Ten yards to our front loomed the concertina barbed wire that blocked our way forward. Multiple tubular razor-cut coils that would slash a man’s flesh like knives gleamed slick with rain in the dim light.

We crossed the wire without a hiccup. Frankly, anybody who owns a family electric has run over a Styrofoam cup and been more jostled. Thirty tons will squash a lot of wire.

Ahead of us loomed the perimeter fortifications. The Tressens had built up, rather than dug in, because they wanted to be able to see their attackers coming. Every hundred yards, strongpoints of chest-high sandbags shielded crew-served needlers and were connected by a three-foot-high earth berm behind which Tressen riflemen sheltered.

If the Tressens and the Yavi had paid any attention whatsoever to the possibility that they faced armored attack, they would have dug into the Tressen arsenal and emplaced a few direct-fire cannon in those strongpoints. If they had done so, they would have blown us all to hell before we reached the concertina.

That was where intelligence, so often maligned, had saved our butts before the first shot was fired. Kit and I had bugged the Yavi-Tressen defense-planning sessions. That had nearly gotten us killed in the bell tower, but we knew with absolute confidence that our enemy was preparing to defend only against light infantry. So that was exactly what we hadn’t attacked with.

Thunderer One and Thunderer Two rumbled forward, side by side, at a stately but unstoppable four miles per hour and plowed into the berms defended by Tressen infantry. By the time our tanks crested the berms, they were long-since deserted. The infantry had fled, helpless and terrified. The driver and sponson gunners hosed the fleeing men with machine-gun fire as they ran away. Some fell, wounded, in our path. We couldn’t have steered the beasts around them if we had tried. They disappeared, screaming, beneath the treads, their bones offering the resistance of Styrofoam cups.

We struck the Tressen line midway between two sandbagged strongpoints. These we reduced, meaning blew the crap out of, with our side-firing sponson cannons. The cannons were massively inaccurate given the lurching of the tank and the tiny slits through which the cannoneers peered to aim them.

But the strongpoints were placed just a hundred yards apart, so that the Yavi needlers could overlap their fields of fire.

That meant that the range to target for our cannoneers was less than fifty yards, virtually point-blank.

I actually saw a blown-up Yavi needler spin through the air with its tripod legs still attached. Also attached was a hand, that still grasped the gun’s pistol grip.

Any unfortunates who escaped us were dealt with by our following infantry.

I learned later that one brave Yavi soul, a corporal, was actually openly wearing Yavi armor. That breach of Cold War etiquette told us how desperately they wanted to keep their cavorite. It also must have persuaded the Yavi that he was bulletproof. He climbed aboard our slow-rolling tank and tried to stick his needle pistol through the commander’s view port, which would have ruined what was left of my day.

Kit had clambered up on the tank from the rear and shot him through his armor’s neck-ring latch gap with one pistol shot from thirty-five feet. The neck-ring latch gap is the chink in Yavi armor, but it’s only a quarter-inch wide and a third of an inch tall. Considering conditions, it was a shot that the Trueborn markswoman Annie Oakley would have been proud of. Except that the only pride a sane soldier takes in a shooting is surviving it.

After we breached the perimeter, I wasn’t sure precisely where we ought to head next.

Then two shapes loomed up ahead, dim through the rain.

They were open Yavi skimmers, inbound for us at sixty miles per hour, rooster-tailing spray from beneath their skirts as they came. Both were equipped with crewed dual-sidemount needlers, spraying rounds at us as voluminously as the rooster tails sprayed rain.

In that moment, the wind and rain abated for a few heartbeats.

Behind the skimmers and to our left, an enormous, blunt black shape slid into view. The shuttle. They surely hadn’t fired up the space plane and rolled it out of the hangar in a rainstorm because the pilot wanted to spin doughnuts on the tarmac.