Worst case, Captain Ranson would notice her second-in-command hadn't pulled out on time and would check Flamethrower's own sensors. If she found Cooter gone from his post now, she'd have him dragged behind a blower all the way back to Camp Progress as soon as the mission was over.
Which was pretty much what Cooter had in mind for Speed Riddle.
He lumbered across the ground, burdened by his armor and half-blinded by dust despite his lowered visor. Cooter was a big man, but no man was significant in an area packed with the huge, slowly maneuvering masses of armored vehicles.
Logistics section—the warehouses, truck park, and bunkered sleeping quarters for the associated personnel—formed the boundary between the Slammers' positions and the remainder of Camp Progress. Sappers who'd gotten through the Yokel defenses had bombed a parts shed and shot up a few trucks, but the Red section's counterattack put paid to the Consies here before they'd really gotten rolling.
The doss—half dug into the berm, half sandbagged—was undamaged except for six plate-sized cups which a tribarrel had blasted from the front wall. There was a gap in the line of glassy impact craters where one round had splashed a Consie sapper instead of hitting the sandbags.
Chief Lavel stood in the doorway. He gestured to Cooter but hunched his way into the doss before the lieutenant arrived.
Chief tried to give himself a little advantage when there was anything tricky to do, like negotiating the double step that put the floor of the doss below ground level for safety. He got around amazingly well for a man missing his left arm and leg, though.
Outside the bunker, armored vehicles filled the evening with hot lubricant and the sharpness of ozone arcing away from dirty relays. The bunker's interior stank of human waste.
"What the . . . ?" Cooter muttered as he followed Chief down the narrow hallway along the front wall of the structure.A glowstrip was tacked to the ceiling; Cooter's helmet scraped it. He swore, ducked, and then straightened to bump again.
Board partitions made from packing cases divided the doss into rooms—decent-sized ones for Lavel and his permanent staff and,at the farend,tiny cubicles to house transients like the drivers making supply runs. The rooms were empty; the personnel were either involved with the departure or watching it.
Except for the last cubicle, where Speed Riddle lay sprawled on a cot with a broad smile. The balding gunner had fouled himself thoroughly enough that waste was dripping from his pants leg onto the floor.
Riddle's fingers held a drug phial. Two more empties lay beside his hand.
Cooter stared at the gunner for several seconds. Then he turned around and strode back down the aisle.
His helmet brushed the glowstrip. He punched upward with his knotted right fist, banging the flat fixture against the ceiling of steel plank and causing grit to drift down through the perforations from the sandbagged top cover.
"Coot!" Lavel called, stumping along behind him. "Hey Coot. Slow down."
"Chief," Cooter said without slowing or turning, "I want that bastard tied up until he can be delivered to Central.With wire.Barbed wire'd be fine.Somethin' happens to me, you take care of the Court Martial, right?"
The end of Lavel's long crutch shot across the doorway, blocking Cooter's exit. "Wait a bloody minute!" Chief said.
Lavel was leaning against the right wall. The crutch was strapped to his stump, since he didn't have a left hand with which to grip it. He lowered it, a slim wand of boron monocrystal, when Cooter turned at last to face him.
"Going to use one of the newbies in Riddle's place?" he asked.
Cooter shook his head violently, as much to clear it as for a gesture. "Put the last one I could trust on One-five for a driver," he said. "I'll be better off watching that side myself than trusting some hick who's still got both thumbs up his ass."
"Take me, Cooter," said Chief Lavel.
Cooter looked at his friend with a cold lack of passion. Chief was so tall that he also had to duck to clear the ceiling. His shoulders were massive. Lavel had been thin when he was a whole man, but the inertia of his years of injury gave him a grotesque pot belly.
"Please, Coot," he said. "You won't regret it."
"I need you here, Chief," Cooter said as he turned. "You take care of Riddle, you hear?"
"Coot?"
"Gotta go now," Cooter muttered as he took both steps to the exterior with one stretch of his long, powerful legs.
The armored vehicles were snorting, running up the speed of their fans again; and, as Cooter strode toward Flamethrower, a tank fired its main gun skyward.
There were too bloody many vehicles in too little space, and the bloody drivers had too much on their minds.
A combat car was drifting toward Herman's Whore. The lighter vehicle was already so close that Ortnahme had to crank down his display to read the number stenciled on its skirts. "Tootsie One-two!" he snarled. "You're fouling—"
The tank lurched. For an instant, Ortnahme thought Simkins was trying to back away from the oncoming car. That wouldn't work, because Herman's Whore had rotated in place and her skirts were firmly against the berm.
"—us, you dickheaded—"
The man in the fighting compartment of Tootsie One-two turned, his face a ball of blank wonder as he stared at the tank looming above him. He was probably gabbling to his driver over the intercom, but there was no longer time to avoid the collision. The skirts of both vehicles were thick steel, but the combined mass would start seams for sure.
"—fool! Watch your—"
The bow of Herman's Whore lifted slightly. Simkins had run up his fans and vectored them forward. The tank couldn't slide backward because of the berm, so its bow skirts blasted a shrieking hurricane of air into the combat car.
Tootsie One-two, Flamethrower, pitched as though it had just dropped into a gully. The trooper in the fighting compartment bounced off the coaming before he could brace himself on the grips of two of the tribarrels.
Why in blazes was there only one man in the back of Flamethrower when the task force was set to move out?
The combat car slid two meters under the thrust of the tank's fans before Shorty Rogers dumped his own ground effect and sparked to a halt on bits of gravel in the soil.
The figure in the fighting compartment stood up again and gave Herman's Whore an ironic salute. "Blue Two," said Ortnahme's helmet. "Sorry 'bout that."
"Tootsie One-two," the warrant leader responded. He felt expansive and relieved, now that he was sure they wouldn't be deadlined at the last instant by a stupid mistake. "No harm done. It's prob'ly my bloody fault for not seeing your nacelles were aligned right when we had time to screw with 'em."
Herman's Whore settled, a little abruptly. Their skirts gave the ground a tap that rattled Ortnahme's teeth and probably cut a centimeter-deep oval in the hard soil.
"Simkins—"the warrant leader began, the word tripping the helmet's artificial intelligence to intercom mode.
"Sir, I'm sorry," his driver was already blurting. "I let the sucker—"
"Blood'n martyrs,Simkins,"Ortnahme interrupted,"don't worry about that! Where dja learn that little maneuver, anyhow?"
"Huh?" said the helmet. "Sir, it was just, you know, the leverage off the berm . . .?"
He sounded like he thought Ortnahme was gonna chew his head off. Which had happened maybe a little too often in the past . . . but bloody hell, you had t' break 'em in the start . . . .
"Sir?" Simkins added in a little voice.
"Yeah?"
"Sir, I really like tanks. D'ye suppose that—"
"Like bloody hell!"the warrant leader snapped."Look,kid,you're more good to me and Colonel Hammer right where you bloody are!"
"Yes sir."
Which, come t' think about it, was driving a panzer. Well, there'd be time t' worry about that later.
Or there wouldn't.
The turret interior had darkened as the sky did,because the main screen was set on direct optical. Ortnahme frowned, then set the unit for progressive enhancement, projecting images at sixty percent of average daylight ambiance.
The visual display brightened suddenly, though the edges of the snarling armored vehicles lacked a little of the definition they would have had in unaided sunlight.No matter what the sky did—sun, moons, or the Second Coming—the main screen would continue to display at this apparent light level until Ortnahme changed its orders.
Henk Ortnahme knew tanks. He knew their systems backward and forward, better than almost any of the panzers' regular crews.
Line troops found a few things that worked for them. Each man used his handful of sensor and gunnery techniques, ignoring the remainder of his vehicle's incredibly versatile menu. You don't fool around when your life depends on doing instinctively something that works for you.
The maintenance chief had to be sure that everything worked, every time. He'd spent twenty years of playing with systems that most everybody else forgot. He could run the screens and sensors by reflex and instantly critique the performance of each black box.
What the warrant leader hadn't had for those twenty years was combat experience . . . .
"Sir," said the helmet. "Ah, when are we supposed to pull out?"
A bloody stupid question.
Sunset,and Simkins could see as well as Ortnahme that it was sunset plus seven. Captain Ranson had said departure time would be coordinated by Central, so probably the only people who knew why Task Force Ranson was on hold were a thousand kilometers north of—
Screen Two, which in default mode—as now—was bore sighted to the main gun, flashed the orange warning director control. As the letters appeared, the turret of Herman's Whore began to rotate without any input from Warrant Leader Ortnahme.
The turret was being run by Fire Central, at Headquarters. Henk Ortnahme had no more to say about the situation than he did regarding any other orders emanating directly from Colonel Hammer.
"Sir?" Simkins blurted over the intercom.
"Blue Two—" demanded at least two other vehicles simultaneously, alerted by the squealing turret and rightly concerned about what the hell was going on. Screwing around with a tank's main gun in these close quarters wasn't just a bad idea.
"Simkins," Ortnahme said. His fingers stabbed buttons. "It's all right. The computer up in Purple's just took over."
As he spoke, Ortnahme set his gunnery screen to echo on Screen Three of the other tanks and the multi-function displays with which the combat cars made do. That'd answer their question better 'n anything he could say—
And besides, he was busy figuring out what Central thought it was doing with his tank.
The warrant leader couldn't countermand the orders coming from Firebase Purple, but he could ask his own artificial intelligence to tell him what firing solution was being fed to it. Screen Three obligingly threw up the figures for azimuth, elevation, and range.
"Blood 'n martyrs," Henk Ortnahme whispered.
Now he knew why the departure of Task Force Ranson had been delayed.
They had to wait for the Terran World Government's recce satellite to come over the horizon—
Herman's Whore fired its main gun; cyan lightning and a thunderclap through the open hatch, a blast of foul gases within the turret.
—so they could shoot it down.