Zip from the console, as the AI replaced the pause which the burst compression had edited out.
"Speed is absolutely essential. If you don't get to Kohang within the next six hours, we may as well all have stayed home. Over."
"Tootsie Six to Slammer Six," Ranson said with textbook precision. She could feel her soul merging with that of the nameless tank, viewing the world through its sensors and considering her data in an electronic balance."Task Force Ranson will proceed in accordance with the situation as it develops. We will transmit further data if a fire mission is required. Tootsie Six, out. Execute."
She was the officer on-site. She would make the final decision. And if Colonel Hammer didn't like it, what was he going to do? Put her in command of a suicide mission?
"Tootsie Six,"said her headset,"this is Blue Two. The hog's operable,all right. The trouble's in the turret-traversing mechanism, and that won't matter for a few rounds to a single point. But I dunno about the bloody crew. Over."
"Six,Three,"Cooter's voice responded."Chief Lavel's solidas they come.He'll handle the fire control, and the rest—that's just lift 'n carry, right? Getting the shells on the conveyor? Nothin' even a newbie with a room-temperature IQ's going t' screw up. Over."
She would make the final decision.
"All Tootsie elements," June Ranson heard her voice ordering calmly. Her touch shrank the map's scale; then her index finger traced the course to la Reole on the screen.
"Transmit," she said. "We will proceed on the marked trace to Phase Line Piper—" fingertip stroking the crest across a shadowy valley from the Consie positions above the beleaguered town on the Santine Estuary "—and punch through enemy lines to the bridge after a short artillery preparation. Prepare to execute in five minutes. Tootsie Six out."
She used the seat as a step instead of raising herself to the hatch with its power lift. Clouds streaked the sky, but the earlier thin overcast was gone.
The Lord have mercy on our souls.
Chapter Nine
"Sarge," said Holman on the intercom, "why aren't we just crossing the river instead of fooling with a damaged bridge? When I was in trucks, we'd see the line companies go right around us while we was backed up for a bridge. Down, splash, up the far bank, and gone."
Now that the task force had moved into open country, Holman was doing a prettygood jobof keeping station.You couldn't take somebody straight out of a transport company and expect them to drive blind and over broken terrain—with no more than forty hours of air-cushion experience to begin with.
If your life depended on it, though, that was just what you did expect.
"Combat cars have that much lift," Wager explained bitterly. "These mothers don't. Via! but I wish I was back in cars."
He was down in the turret, trying to get some sort of empathy with his screens and controls before the next time he needed them.He was okay on mine-clearing, now; he had the right reflexes.
But the next time,Tootsie Six wouldn't be ordering him to lay a mine-clearance charge, it'd be some other cursed thing. It'd be the butt of Hans Wager and the whole cursed task force when he didn't know what the hell to do.
"Look, Holman," he said, because lift was something he did understand, lift and tribarrels laying fire on the other mother before he corrected his aim at you. "We're in ground effect. The fans pressurize the air in the plenum chamber underneath. The ground's the bottom of the pressure chamber, right? And that keeps us floating."
"Right, but—"
Holman swore. The column was paralleling the uphill side of a wooded fenceline. She'd attempted to correct their tank's tendency to drift downslope, but the inertia of 170 steel and iridium tonnes had caught up with her again. One quadrant of Wager's main screen exploded in a confetti of splintered trees and fence posts.
"Bleedin' motherin' martyrs!"snarled the intercom as Holman's commo helmet dutifully transmitted to the most-recently accessed recipient.
Friction from the demolished fence and vegetation pulled the tank farther out of its intended line, despite the driver's increasingly violent efforts to swing them away. When the cumulative over-corrections swung the huge pendulum their way, the tank lurched upslope and grounded its right skirt with a shock that rattled Wager's head against the breech of the main gun.
Bloody amateur!
Like Hans Wager, tank commander.
Blood and martyrs.
"S'okay, Holman," Wager said aloud, more or less meaning it. "Any one you walk away from."
He'd finally cleared the mines at Happy Days, hadn't he?
"Look, the lift," he went on. "Without something pretty solid underneath, these panzers drop. Sink like stones. But combat cars, the ones you been watchin', they've got enough power for their weight they can use thrust to keep 'em up, not just ground effect."
Wager wriggled the helmet. It'd gotten twisted a little on his brow when he bounced a moment ago. Their tank was now sedately tracking the car ahead, as though the mess behind them had been somebody else's problem.
"Only thing is,"Wager continued,"A couple of the cars,they're running shorta fan or two themselves by now. Talkin' to the guys on One-one while we laagered.
Stuff that never happens when you're futzing around a firebase, you get twenty kays out on a route march and blooie."
"We're all systems green,"Holman said."Ah, Sarge? I think I'm gettin' the hang of it, you know? But the weight, it still throws me."
"Yeah, well," Wager said, touching the joystick cautiously so as not to startle the other vehicles. The turret mechanism whined restively; Screen Two's swatch of rolling farmland, centered around the orange pipper, shifted slightly across the panorama of the main screen.
"Look, when we get to the crossing point,if we do,get across that cursed bridge fast, right?" he added. "It's about ready to fall in the river, see, from shelling? So put'cher foot on the throttle 'n keep it there."
"No, Sarge."
"Huh?"
"Sarge,I'm sorry,"Holman said, "but if we do that,we bring it down for sure. And us. Sarge, look, I'm, you know, I'm not great on tanks. But I took a lotta trucks over piddly bridges, right? We'll take it slow and especially no braking or acceleration. That'll work if anything does. I promise. Okay?"
She sounded nervous, telling a veteran he was wrong.
She sounded like she curst well thought she was right, though.
Via, maybe she was. Holman didn't have any line experience . . . but that didn't mean she didn't have any experience. They needed everything they could get right now, her and him and everybody else in Task Force Ranson . . . .
"They say she's a real space cadet," Wager said aloud. "Her crew does. Cap'n Ranson, I mean."
"Because she's a woman," Holman said flatly.