The Tank Lords (26 page)

He wasn't sure he would have fired anyway.

Other cars were advancing toward the town, but it took some moments for the crews of the surviving tanks to reboard. One of the tanks jolted forward taking
Deathdealer
's former place at the head of the column.

The fat maintenance officer who captained
Herman's Whore
was still climbing into the cupola of the other giant vehicle. His belt holster flapped loosely against his thigh.

"Here," said Gale, handing Suilin an open beer.

Cooter was already drinking deeply from a bottle. He fired a short burst with his left hand, snapping whorls in the vapor above the ridge.

The Consie siege lines were gray with blasted earth and the smoke of a thousand fires. There must have been survivors from the artillery and the pounding, bunker-ripping fury of the powerguns, but they were no longer a danger to Task Force Ranson.

Suilin's beer was cold and so welcome to his parched throat that he'd drunk half of it down before he realized that it tasted—

Tasted like transmission fluid. Tasted worse than the plastic residues of the empty cases flung from his tribarrel. He stared at the bottle in amazement.

Flamethrower
spun cautiously again and fell in behind
Herman's Whore
. Cooter dropped his bottle over the side of the vehicle. He began talking on the radio, but Suilin's numbed ears heard only the laconic rhythm of the words.

Gale broke a ration bar in half and gave part to the reporter. Suilin bit into it, feeling like a fool with the food in one hand and a horribly-spoiled beer in the other. He thought about throwing the bottle away, but he was afraid the veteran would think he was spurning his hospitality.

The ration bar tasted decayed.

Gale, munching stolidly, saw the reporter's eyes widen and said, "Aw, don't worry. It always tastes like that."

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, grimy with recondensed vapors given off when his tribarrel fired. "It's the Wide-awakes, you know." He fished more of the cones from the pouch beside the cooler, distributing two of them to Cooter and Suilin.

Suilin dropped the cone into a sidepocket. He forced himself to drink the rest of his beer. It was horrible, as horrible as everything else in this bleeding dawn.

He nodded back toward
Deathdealer
, still as bright as the filament of an incandescent lightbulb. "Is it always like . . . ? Is it always like that?"

"Naw, that time, they got the fusion bottle, y'know?" Gale said, gazing at the hulk with only casual interest.

Internal pressures lifted
Deathdealer
's turret off its ring. It slid a meter down the rear slope before welding itself onto the armor at a skew angle. "S' always differ'nt, I'd say."

"Except for the guys who buy it," Cooter offered, looking backward also. "Maybe it's the same for them."

Suilin bit another piece from the chalk-textured, vile-flavored ration bar.

"I'll let you know," he heard his voice say.

"Blue Two," said Captain June Ranson, watching white light from
Deathdealer
quiver on the inner face of her gunshield, "this is Tootsie Six. You're acting head of Blue Section. Six out."

"Roger, Tootsie."

Sergeant Wager's nameless tank, now the first unit in Task Force Ranson, was picking its way through rubble and shell craters at the entrance to la Reole. It had been a new vehicle at the start of this ratfuck. Now it dragged lengths of barbed wire—and a fencepost—and its skirts were battered worse than those of
Herman's Whore
.

The tank's newbie driver swung wide to pull around a pile of bricks and roof tiles. Too wide. The wall opposite collapsed in a gout of brick dust driven by the tank's fans. Uniformed Yokels, looking very young indeed, scurried out of the ruin, clutching a machinegun and boxes of ammunition.

Warmonger
slid into the choking cloud. Filters clapped themselves over Ranson's nose. Janacek swore. Ranson hoped Willens had switched to sonic imaging before the dust blinded him.

Dust enfolded her in a soft blur. Static charges kept her visor clear, but the air a millimeter beyond the plastic was as opaque as the silicon heart of a computer.

Sparrow was dead, vaporized; out of play. But his driver had survived, and she could transfer him to Blue Three. Take over from the inexperienced driver—or perhaps for Sergeant Wager, also inexperienced with panzers but an asset to the understrength crew of One-six.

Mix and match.
What is your decision on this point, Candidate Ranson . . . ?
 

Something jogged her arm. She could see again.

The tracked landing vehicle had backed into a cross-street again, making way for the lead tank. The dust was far behind
Warmonger
. The third car in line was stirring it back to life.

A helmeted major in fatigues the color of mustard greens—a Yokel Marine—waved toward them with a swagger stick while he shouted into a hand communicator.

"Booster, match frequencies," Ranson ordered.

She saw through the corners of her eyes that Stolley and Janacek were exchanging glances. How long had her eyes been staring blankly before Stolley's touch brought her back to the physical universe?

". . . onsider yourselves under my command as the ranking National officer in the sector!" the headphones ordered Ranson as her AI found the frequency on which the major was broadcasting. "Halt your vehicles now until I can provide ground guides and reform my defensive perimeter."

"Local officer," Ranson said, trusting her transmitter to overwhelm the hand-held unit even if the Yokel were still keying it, "this is Captain Ranson, Hammer's Regiment. That's a negative. We're just passing through."

The Yokel major was out of sight behind
Warmonger
. A ridiculous little man with creased trousers even now, and a coating of dust on his waxed boots and moustache.

A little man who'd held la Reole with a battalion of recruits against an attack much heavier than that which crumpled three thousand Yokels at Camp Progress. Maybe not so ridiculous after all. . . .

"Local officer," Ranson continued, "I think you'll find resistance this side has pretty well collapsed. We'll finish off anything we find across the river. Slammers out."

La Reole had been an attractive community of two- and three-story buildings of stuccoed brick. Lower floors were given over to shops and restaurants for bridge traffic. Shattered glass from display windows now jeweled the pavement, even where shellfire had spared the remainder of the structures.

The highway kinked into a roundabout decorated with a statue, now headless; and kinked again as it proceeded to the bridge approaches. The buildings on either side of the dogleg had been reduced to rubble. The Consie gunners hadn't been able to get a clear shot at the bridge with their direct-fire weapons or to spot the shells their mortars and howitzers lobbed toward the span.

"No! No! No!" shouted the major, his voice buzzy and attenuated by interference from drive fans. "You're needed here! I order you to stop—and anyway, you can't cross the bridge, it's too weak. Do you hear me! Halt!"

Another landing vehicle sheltered in a walled forecourt with its diesel idling. The gunner lifted his helmet to scratch his bald scalp, then saluted Ranson. He was at least twice the age of any of the six kids in the vehicle's open bay, but they were all armed to the teeth and glaring out with wild-eyed fury.

The Consies had attempted a direct assault on la Reole before they moved their heavy weapons into position. That must've gotten interesting.

A few civilians raised their heads above window sills, but they ducked back as soon as any of the mercenaries glanced toward them.

"Local Officer," Ranson said as echoes of drive fans hammered her from the building fronts, "I'm sorry but we've got our orders. You'll have to take care of your remaining problems yourself. Slammers out."

She split her visor to take the remote from the new lead tank. The controls had reverted to direct view when transmission from
Deathdealer
ceased.

The bridge at la Reole was a suspension design with a central tower in mid-stream and slightly lower towers on either bank to support the cables. Consie gunners had battered the portions of the towers which stuck up above the roof peaks. They had shattered the concrete and parted the cable on the upstream side.

The span sagged between towers, but the lowest point of its double arc was still several meters above the water. The downstream cable continued to hold, although it now stretched over piles of rubble instead of being clamped firmly onto the towers. A guardpost of Marines with rocket launchers, detailed to watch for raft-borne Consies, gaped at the huge tank that approached them.

"Willens," Ranson ordered her driver, "hold up."

The lower half of her visor swayed as the tank moved onto the raised approach.

"All Tootsie units, hold up. One vehicle on the bridge at a time. Take it easy. Six out."

The lead tank was taking it easy. Less than a walking pace, tracking straight although the span slanted down at fifteen degrees to the left side. Flecks of gravel and dust flew off in the fan draft, then drifted toward the sluggish water.

There were cracks in the asphalt surface of the bridge. Sometimes the cracks exposed the girders beneath.

The Yokel major was shouting demands at June Ranson, but she heard nothing. Her eyes watched the bridge span swaying, the images in the top and bottom of her visor moving alternately.

"Just drive
through
it, kid," snarled Warrant Leader Ortnahme as he felt
Herman's Whore
pause. Close to the bridge, la Reole had taken a tremendous pasting from Consie guns. Here, collapsed buildings cascaded bricks and beams from either side of the street.

The tank seemed to gather itself on a quivering column of air. "Like everybloodybody else did!" Ortnahme added in a raised voice.

Simkins grabbed handfuls of his throttles instead of edging them forward in the tiny increments with which he normally adjusted the tank's speed and direction. The pause had cost them momentum, but
Herman's Whore
still had plenty of speed and power to batter through the obstacle.

Larger chunks of building material parted to either side of the blunt prow like bayou scum before a barge. Dust billowed out from beneath the skirts in white clouds. It curled back to feed through the fan intakes.

Behind the great tank, wreckage settled again. The pile had spread a little from the sweep of the skirts, but it was built up again by blocks and bits which the thunder of passage shook from damaged buildings.

"Sorry, sir," muttered Simkins over the intercom.

The kid's trouble wasn't that he couldn't drive the bloody tank: it was that he was too bloody careful. Maybe he didn't have the smoothness of, say, Albers from . . .

Via. Maybe not think about that.

Simkins didn't have the smoothness of a veteran driver, but he had plenty of experience shifting tanks and combat cars in and out of maintenance bays where centimeters counted.

Centimeters didn't count in the field. All that counted was getting from here to there without delay, and doing whatever bloody job required to be done along the way.

Ortnahme sighed. The way he'd reamed the kid any time Simkins brushed a post or halted
in
the berm instead of
at
it, he didn't guess he could complain now if his technician was squeamish about dingin' his skirts.

Simkins eased them to a halt just short of the bridge approach. Cooter's blower was making the run—the walk, rather—and bleedin' Lord 'n martyrs, how the
Hell
did they expect that ruin to hold a tank?

The near span rippled to the rhythm of
Flamethrower
's fans, and the span beyond the crumbling central support towers still danced with the weight of the car that'd crossed minutes before. This was bloody
crazy
!

The Yokels guarding the bridge must've thought so too, from the way they stared in awe at
Herman's Whore
.

Ortnahme, hidden in the tank's belly, glared at their holographic images. They'd leaned their buzzbomb launchers against the sandbagged walls of their bunker.

Hard to believe that ten-kilo missiles could really damage something with the size and weight of armor of
Herman's Whore
, but Henk Ortnahme believed it. He'd rebuilt his share of tanks after they took buzzbombs the wrong way—and, regretfully, had combat-lossed others when the cost of repair would exceed the cost of buying a new unit in its place.

There were costs for crew training and, less tangibly, for the loss of experience with veteran crewmen; but those problems weren't in Ortnahme's bailiwick.

"Sir?" the intercom asked. "The . . . you know, the guns they been hitting this place with. Wasn't that a, you know, an awful lot?"

"Don't worry about it, kid," the warrant leader said smugly. "Our only problem now's this bloody bridge."

Ortnahme adjusted his main screen so that the panorama's stern view was central rather than being split between the two edges. The shattered bunkers were hidden by the same buildings that'd protected the bridge from Consie gunfire. Smoke, turgid and foul, covered the western horizon.

"Ah, sir?" Simkins said. "What I mean is, you know, we been fighting guerrillas, right? But all this heavy stuff, this was like a war."

A Yokel jeep jolted its way over the rubble pile in the wake of Task Force Ranson. The driver was young and looked desperately earnest. The Marine major who'd gestured in fury as
Herman's Whore
swept into la Reole at the end of the Slammers' column sat/stood beside the driver.

The officer was covering his mouth and nose with a handkerchief in his left hand while his right gripped the windshield brace to keep his ass some distance in the air. The jeep could follow where air cushions had taken the Slammers, but the wheeled vehicle's suspension and seat padding were in no way sufficient to make the trip a comfortable one.

"This war's been goin' on for bloody years, kid," Ortnahme explained.