Guns muttered far to the south. When Des Grieux listened very carefully, he could distinguish the hiss-crack reports of big-bore powerguns. Tanks and tank destroyers were beginning to mix it—twenty kilometers away.
Des Grieux shivered and cursed; and after a time, he began to pray to a personal God of Battles . . . .
"Sir?"said Trooper Flowers from the narrow duct joining his station to H271's fighting compartment. The driver's shoulders were a tight fit in the passage."I'm ready to take my watch, sir. Do you want me in the cupola, or . . .?"
Des Grieux adjusted a vernier control on Screen #1, dimming the topographic display fractionally."I'm not'sir,'"he said. He didn't bother to look toward Flowers through the cut-out sides of the turret basket."And I'll worry about keeping watch till I tell you different."
He returned his attention to Screen #3 on the right side of the fighting compartment. It was live but blank in pearly lustrousness; Des Grieux was missing a necessary link in the feed he wanted to arrange.
"Ah, S-sergeant?" the driver said. The only light in the fighting compartment was scatter from the holographic screens. Flowers' face appeared to be slightly flushed. "Sergeant Des Grieux? What do you want me to do?"
On the right—astern—edge of the topo screen, a company of Slammers infantry supported by combat cars moved up the range of broken hills held by the Thunderbolt Division. The advance seemed slow, particularly because the map scale was shrunk to encompass a ten-kilometer battle area; but it was as certain and regular as a gear train.
If navigational data passed to the map display, then there had to be a route for—
"Sir?" said Flowers.
"Go play with yourself!" Des Grieux snarled. He glared angrily at his driver.
As Des Grieux's mind refocused to deal with the interruption, the answer to the main problem flashed before him. The information he wanted wasn't passing on the command channels he'd been tapping out of the Regiment's rear echelon back in Sanga: it was in the machine-to-machine data links, untouched by human consciousness . . . .
"Right," Des Grieux said mildly. "Look, just stick close to the tank, okay, kid? Do anything you please."
Flowers ducked away, surprised at the tank commanders sudden change of temper. His boots scuffled hollowly as he backed through the internal hatch to the driver's compartment.
"Booster,"Des Grieux ordered the tank's artificial intelligence, "switch to Utility Feed One and synthesize on Screen Three."
The opalescent ready status on the right-hand screen dissolved into multicolored garbage. Whatever data was coming through UF1 didn't lend itself to visual presentation.
"Via!" Des Grieux snarled."Utility Feed Two."He heard boots on H271's hull, but he ignored them because Screen #3 was abruptly live with what appeared to be a live-action view through the gunnery screen of another tank. The orange circle of the main-gun pipper steadied on a slab of rock kilometers away. There was no visible target—
Until the point of aim disintegrated in a gout of white-hot glass under the impact of the 20cm powergun of another tank. The ledge cracked from heat shock. Half of it slid away to the left in a single piece, while the remainder crumbled into gravel.
Iridium armor gleamed beneath the pipper. Des Grieux's boot trod reflexively on his foot-trip, but the safety interlock still disengaged his guns.
The real gunner, kilometers away, was only a fraction of a second slower. The image blurred with the recoil of the sending tank's main gun, and the target—a Legion tank destroyer—erupted at the heart of the cyan bolt.
"Sergeant Des Grieux?" said a voice from the open cupola hatch. "I'm just checking how all my people are—good Lord!"
Des Grieux looked up. Lieutenant Carbury, 3d Platoon's commanding officer and almost as new to the business of war as Des Grieux's driver, stared at the images of Screen #3.
"What on earth is that?" Carbury begged/demanded as he turned to scramble backward into the fighting compartment of H271. "Is it happening now?"
"More or less," the veteran replied, deliberately vague. He pretended to ignore the lieutenant's intrusion by concentrating on the screen.His AI had switched the image feed to that from a gun camera on a combat car. Mortar rounds flashed in a series of white pulses from behind the hillcrest a hundred meters away.
The images were not full-spectrum transmissions. Each vehicle's artificial intelligence broadcast its positional and sensory data to the command vehicle of the unit to which it was attached. Part of the command vehicle's communications suite was responsible for routing necessary information—including sensory data stripped to digital shorthand to the central data banks at the Slammers' rear-area logistical headquarters.
The route was likely to be long and poor, because communications satellites were the first casualties of war. Here on Meridienne, the Regiment depended on a chain of laser transponders strung butte to butte along the line of march. When sandstorms disrupted the chain of coherent light, commo techs made do with signals bounced from whichever of Meridienne's moons were in a suitable location.
The signals did get through to the rear, though.
Des Grieux had set his tank's artificial intelligence to enter Central through Task Force Kuykendall's own long data link. The AI sorted out gunnery feeds, then synthesized the minimal squibs of information into three-dimensional holograms.
On Screen #3, fuel blazed from a vehicle struck by the probing mortar shells. A moment later a light truck accelerated up the forward slope of the next hill beyond. A dozen Hashemite irregulars clung to the truck. Their long robes flapped with the speed of their flight.
Des Grieux expected the camera through which he watched to record a stream of cyan bolts ripping the vehicle. Nothing happened. The Hashemite truck ducked over the crest to more distant cover again.
Three half-tracked APCs of the Thunderbolt Division grunted up the forward slope, following the Hashemite vehicle. Their steel-cleated treads sparked wildly on the stony surface.
The tribarrel through which Des Grieux watched and those of the combat car's two wing gunners poured a converging fire into the center APC. It exploded, flinging out the fiery bodies of Thunderbolt infantrymen. The rest of the combat car platoon concentrated on the other two carriers. Their thin armor collapsed with similar results.
Slammers infantry on one-man skimmers slid forward to consolidate the new position just as Des Grieux's AI cut to a new viewpoint.
"How do you do that?" asked Lieutenant Carbury as he stared at the vivid scenes.
The platoon leader was as slim as Des Grieux and considerably shorter, but the fighting compartment of a line tank had not been designed for two-person occupancy. Des Grieux could have provided a little more room by folding his seat against the bulkhead, but he pointedly failed to do so.
"Prob'ly the same way they showed you at the Academy,"Des Grieux said. They didn't teach cadets how to use a tank's artificial intelligence to break into Central, but Via! they were fully compatible systems. "Sir."
The sound of real gunfire whispered through the night.