Des Grieux climbed deliberately onto the deck of H271.The bustle rack behind the turret held personal gear in a pair of reused ammunition containers.
"You got any experience, Wartburg?" Des Grieux asked without looking back toward the men on the ground.
"Year and a half," the dark-haired man said. "Wing gunner on a combat car, then I drove for a while. This was going to be my first command."
Wartburg's tone was carefully precise.If he was disappointed to be kicked back to driver at the last instant, he kept the fact out of his voice.
Des Grieux slid the cupola hatch closed and open, ignoring the others again.
"One question, Sarge," Wartburg called. The irritation he had hidden before was now obvious."Grimsrud told us a veteran'd be taking over the tank,but she didn't say who. You got a name?"
"Des Grieux," the veteran said. The tribarrel rotated on its ring, even with the power off. That was good, and a little surprising in a tank that hadn't yet been broken in. "Slick Des Grieux. You just do what I tell you and we'll get along fine."
Wartburg laughed brittlely. "The bloody hell I will," he said as he hopped up to the tank's deck himself.
Des Grieux turned in surprise.His eyes were flatand wide open.All he was sure of was that he'd need to pay more attention than he wanted to his new driver.
Wartburg said nothing further. He reached into the bustle rack and pulled out one of the cases, then tossed it to the ground.
The container crashed down and bounced before it fell flat. Flowers jumped to avoid it. The dense plastic was designed to protect 3,000 disks of 2cm ammunition against anything short of a direct from another powergun. It withstood the abuse, and its hinged lid remained latched.
"What d'ye think you're doing?" Des Grieux demanded.
Wartburg threw down the other container. "I think I'm not doin' anybloodything with you, Des Grieux," he said. He jumped to the ground.
"Wait a minute, Trooper!" said the outraged depot superintendent. "You've got your orders!"
He waggled the flimsies in his hand at Wartburg, though in fact neither of the documents directly mentioned that trooper.
Trooper Flowers looked from Wartburg to Des Grieux to Farrell—and back. His mouth was slightly open.
"Look,Warrant Leader,"Wartburg said to Farrell. "I heard about this bastard. Noway I'm riding with him.Noway.You want me to resign from the Regiment, you got it. You wanna throw me in the lockup, that's your business."
He turned and glared at the man still on the deck of H271. "But I don't ride with Slick Des Grieux. If I ever get that hot to die, I'll eat my gun!"
"Screw you, buddy," Des Grieux said softly. He looked at the depot superintendent. "Okay, Mister Farrell, you get me a driver. That's your job. If you can't do that, then I'll drive and fight this mother both, if that's what it takes."
The three men on the ground began speaking to one another simultaneously in rasping, nervous voices. Des Grieux lowered himself through the cupola hatch.
H271's fighting compartment had the faintly medicinal odor of solvents still seeping from recently extruded plastics. Des Grieux touched control buttons, checking them for feel and placement. There were always production-line variations, even when two vehicles were ostensibly of the same model.
He heard the clunk of boot toes on the steps formed into H271's armor. Somebody was boarding the vehicle.
Des Grieux threw the main power switch. Gauges and displays hummed to life. There was a line of distortion across Screen #3, but it faded after ten seconds or so. A tinge of ozone suggested arcing somewhere, probably in a microswitch. It would either clear itself or fail completely in the next hundred hours.
A hundred hours was a lifetime for a tank on the same planet as Colonel Luke Broglie . . . .
A head shadowed the light of the open hatch. Des Grieux looked up, into the face of Trooper Flowers.
"Sarge?" Flowers said. "Ah, I'm gonna drive for you. If that's all right?"
"Yeah, that's fine," said Des Grieux without expression. He turned to his displays again.
"Only, I've just drove trucks before, y'see," Flowers added.
"I don't care if you rolled hoops," Des Grieux said. "Get in and let's get moving."
"Ah—I'll get my gear," said Flowers. "I off loaded when they said I was back in Logistics."
"Booster," said Des Grieux, keying H271's artificial intelligence. "Course data on Screen One."
He watched the left-hand screen. He wasn't sure that the depot had gotten around to loading the course information into the tank's memory, but the route and topography came up properly. Des Grieux thought there was a momentary hesitation in the AI's response, but that might have been his own impatience.
The deck clanked as Flowers jumped directly to the ground in his haste. The way things were going, the kid probably slipped 'n broke his neck . . . .
The course to Base Camp Two and H Company was a blue line curving across three hundred kilometers of arid terrain. No roads, but no problems either. Gullies cut by the rare cloudbursts could be skirted or crossed.
Des Grieux spread his hands, closed his eyes, and rested his forehead against the cool surface of the main screen. Everything about H271 was smooth and cold. The tank functioned, but it didn't have a soul.
He shivered. He could remember when he had enough hair that it wasn't bare scalp that touched the hologram display when he leaned forward like this.
Tank H271 was the right vehicle for Slick Des Grieux.
In the gully beside H271,twenty or so Sincanmo troops sang around a campfire to the music of strings and a double flute. There'd been drums, too. Lieutenant Kuykendall threatened to send a tank through the group if the drummer didn't toss his instrument into the fire immediately.
That was one order from the commander of Task Force Kuykendall that Des Grieux would have cheerfully obeyed. Not that he had anything against this particular group of indigs.
There were thirty or forty other campfires scattered among the gullies like opals on a multistrand necklace. With luck, the force's camouflage film concealed the firelight from the hostile outpost two kilometers away on the Notch. Silencing the drums, whose low-frequency beat carried forever in the cool desert air, was as much of a compromise as Kuykendall thought she could enforce.
The Sincanmos were a militia organized by extended families. Each family owned four to six vehicles which they armed with whatever the individuals fancied and could afford. Medium-powered lasers; post-mounted missile systems, both guided and hypervelocity; automatic weapons; even a few mortars, each of a different caliber . . . .
Logistics would have been a nightmare—if the Sincanmo Federation had had a formal logistics system. On the credit side, each band was highly motivated, extremely mobile, and packed a tremendous amount of firepower for its size.
The families made decisions by conclave. They took orders from their own Federation rather more often than they ignored those orders; but as for an off-planet mercenary—and a female—Kuykendall's authority depended on her own platoon of combat cars and the four H Company tanks attached to her for this operation.