Kuykendall slid down from the cupola into the fighting compartment. She was a petite woman, black-haired and a good enough driver. To Des Grieux, Kuykendall was a low-key irritation that he had to work around, like a burr in the mechanism that controlled his turret's rotation.
A driver was a necessary evil, because Des Grieux couldn't guide his tank and fight at the same time. Kuykendall took orders, but she had a personality of her own. She wasn't a mere extension of Des Grieux's will, and that made her more of a problem than someone blander though less competent would have been.
Nothing he couldn't work around, though. There was nothing Des Grieux couldn't work around, if his superiors just gave him the chance to do his job. "Anything new?" Kuykendall asked.
Des Grieux stood on his seat so that he could look out over the sandbags toward Hill 661."What'd you think?"he said.He switched the visual display on his helmet visor to infrared and cranked up the magnification.
The sniper had gone home. Nothing but ripples in the atmosphere and the cooler blue of trees transpiring water they sucked somehow from this Lord-blasted landscape.
Des Grieux climbed out of the hatch again. He shoved a sandbag off the top layer. The bastard would be back, and when he was . . .
He pushed away another sandbag.The bags were woven from a coarse synthetic that smelled like burning tar when it rubbed.
"We're not supposed to do that,"Kuykendall said from the cupola."A lucky shot could put the tribarrel out of action. That'd hurt us a lot worse than a hundred dead grunts does the Reps."
"They don't have a hundred powerguns," Des Grieux said without turning around. He pushed at the second-layer sandbag he'd uncovered but that layer was laid as headers. The bags to right and left resisted the friction on their long sides."Anyway,it's worth something to me to give a few of those cocky bastards their lunch."
Hawes' Susie Q ripped the sky. Des Grieux dropped into a crouch, then rose again with a feeling of embarrassment. He knew that Kuykendall had seen him jump.
It wasn't flinching. If Warrior's AAD sensed incoming from Hill 661, Des Grieux would either duck instantly—or have his head shot off by the tribarrel of his own tank. The fire-direction computer didn't care if there was a man in the way when it needed to do its job.
Des Grieux liked the computer's attitude.
He lifted and pushed, raising his triceps into stark ridges. Des Grieux was thin and from a distance looked frail. Close up, no one noticed anything but his eyes; and there was no weakness in them.
The sandbag slid away. The slot in Warrior's protection gave Des Grieux a keyhole through which to rake Hill 661 with his tribarrel. He got back into the turret. Kuykendall dropped out of the way without further comment.
"You know . . ." Des Grieux said as he viewed the enemy positions in the tribarrel's holographic sight. Warrior's sensors were several orders of magnitude better than those of the tankers' unaided helmets."The Reps aren't much better at this than these Federal pussies we gotta nursemaid."
"How d'ye mean?" Kuykendall asked.
Her voice came over the intercom channel. She'd slipped back into the driver's compartment.Most drivers found the internal hatch too tight for use in anything less than a full buttoned-up emergency.
"They've got calliopes up there,"Des Grieux explained as he scanned the bleak silence of Hill 661. The Republican positions were in defilade. Easy enough to arrange from their greater height.
"If it was me,"Des Grieux continued,"I'd pick my time and roll'er up to direct fire positions. They'd kick the cop outa this place."
"They're not going to bet 3cm calliopes against tank main guns, Sarge," Kuykendall said carefully.
"They would if they had any balls,"Des Grieux said.His voice was coldly judgmental, stating the only truth there was. He showed no anger toward those who were too stupid to see it. "Dug in like we are, they could blow away the cupolas and our sensor arrays before we even got the main guns to bear. A calliope's no joke, kid."
He laughed harshly. "Wish they'd try, though. I can hip-shoot a main gun if I have to."
"There's talk they're going to try t' overrun us before Task Force Howes relieves us," Kuykendall said with the guarded nonchalance she always assumed when talking to the tank commander.
Des Grieux's two years in the Slammers made him a veteran,but he was scarcely one of the longest-serving members of the regiment. His drive, his skill with weapons, and the phenomenal ruthlessness with which he accomplished any task set him gave Des Grieux a reputation beyond simple seniority.
"There's talk," Des Grieux said coldly. Nothing moved on Hill 661. "There's been talk. There's been talk Howes is going to get his thumbs out of his butt and relieve us, too."
The tribarrel roused, swung, and ignited the sky with a four-round burst of plasma.A shell from Hill 504 broke apart without detonating.The largest piece of casing was still a white glow when it tumbled out of sight in the valley below.
The sky flickered to the south as well, but at such a distance that the sounds faded to a low rumble. Task Force Howes still slugged it out with the Republicans who defended Route 7. Maybe they were going to get here within seventy-two hours. And maybe Hell was going to freeze over.
Des Grieux scanned Hill 661, and nothing moved.
The only thing Des Grieux knew in the instant he snapped awake from a sound sleep was that it was time to earn his pay.
Kuykendall looked down into the fighting compartment from the commander's seat. "Sarge?" she said. "I—" and broke off when she realized Des Grieux was already alert.
"Get up front 'n drive," Des Grieux ordered curtly. "It's happening."
"It's maybe nothing," the driver said, but she knew Des Grieux. As Kuykendall spoke, she swung her legs out of the cupola. Hopping from the cupola and past the main gun was the fastest way to the driver's hatch in the bow. The tank commander blocked the internal passage anyway as he climbed up to his seat.
The Automatic Air Defense plate on Warrior's control panel switched from yellow, standby, to red. The tribarrel rotated and fired. Des Grieux flicked the plate with his boot toe as he went past, disconnecting the computer-controlled defensive fire. He needed Warrior's weapons under his personal direction now that things were real.
When the siege began, Lieutenant Lindgren ordered that one member of each two-man tank crew be on watch in the cupola at every moment. What the tankers did off-duty, and where they slept, was their own business.
Most of the off-duty troops slept beneath their vehicles, entering the plenum chamber through the access plate in the steel skirts. The chambers were roomy and better protection than anything cobbled together by shovels and sandbags could be. The only problem was the awareness before sleep came that the tank above you weighed 170 tonnes . . . but tankers tended not to be people who thought in those terms.