What happened when converted cargo vans filled with Hashemites were driven ten kays or so into the desert was anybody's guess.
A gun jeep whined its way up the south face of the Escarpment. Victorious troops and prisoners watched the vehicle's progress. The jeep's driver regarded them only as obstacles, and the passenger seated on the other side of the pintle-mounted tribarrel paid them no attention at all.
Des Grieux rolled bits of ivory between the ball of his thumb and his left hand. He turned his face toward the north, where H271 sat in the far distance with a combat car and a heavy-lift vehicle from the Slammers' maintenance battalion in attendance.
Des Grieux wasn't interested in the attempts to dig out H271, but he was unwilling to watch the jeep. Funny about it being a jeep. He'd expected at least a combat car; and Joachim Steuben present, not some faceless driver who wasn't even one of the White Mice.
The slope looked much steeper going down than it had when Des Grieux was on the plain two kilometers away. By contrast, the tilted strata on the south side of the Escarpment rose very gently, though they were as sure a barrier as the north edge that provided the name Knifeblade. There wasn't any way down from the Escarpment, except through the Notch.
And no way down at all, when Slick Des Grieux waited below with a tank and the unshakeable determination to kill everyone who faced him.
They'd rigged a bucket on the maintenance vehicle's shearlegs. A dozen Hashemite prisoners shoveled rock from H271's back deck into the bucket.
Des Grieux snorted. He could have broken the tank free in minutes. If he'd had to,if there were someplace he needed to be with a tank.While there was fighting going on, nothing mattered except a weapon; and the Regiment's panzers were the greatest weapons that had ever existed.
When the fighting was over, nothing mattered at all.
The sun had risen high enough to punish, and the tank destroyer's armor was a massive heat sink, retaining some of the fury which had devoured the vehicle. Nothing remained within the iridium shell except the fusion bottle,which hadn't ruptured when the tank destroyer's ammunition gang-fired.
The jeep was getting close. The angry sound of its fans changed every time the light vehicle had to jump or circle a large piece of debris. H271's main gun had seen to it that vehicle parts covered much of the surface of the Notch.
The heavy-lift vehicle had arrived at dawn with several hundred Sincanmos and a platoon of F Company combat cars—not Kuykendall; Des Grieux didn't know where Kuykendall had gone. Des Grieux turned H271 over to the maintenance crew and, for want of anything better to do, wandered into the gully where the blocking force had waited.
A 4x4 with two bombardment rockets in their launching cage was still parked beside H271's initial location. The Sincanmo crew sprawled nearby, riddled by shrapnel too fine to be visible under normal lighting. One of them lay across a lute with a hemispherical sound chamber.
Des Grieux lifted the driver out of his seat and laid him on the ground with the blood-speckled side of his face down. The truck was operable. Des Grieux drove it up the steep slope to the Notch, shifting to compound low every time he had to skirt another burned-out vehicle or windrow of bodies.
Troopers in the combat cars watched the tanker, but they didn't interfere.
The gun jeep stopped. Its fans whirred at a deepening note as they lost power. Des Grieux heard boots hit the soil. He turned, but Colonel Hammer had already gripped a handrail to haul himself up onto the tank destroyer.
"Feeling proud of yourself, Des Grieux?" the colonel asked grimly.
Hammer wore a cap instead of a commo helmet. There was a line of Spray Seal across his forehead, just above the pepper-and-salt eyebrows, where a helmet would have cut him if it were struck hard. His eyes were bloodshot and very cold.
"Not particularly," Des Grieux said. He wasn't feeling anything at all.
The driver was just a driver, a Charlie Company infantryman. He'd unclipped his carbine from the dash and pointed it vaguely in Des Grieux's direction, but he wasn't one of Joachim Steuben's field police.
Des Grieux had left his grenade launcher behind in H271. He was unarmed.
"They're trying to find Colonel Broglie,"Hammer said."The Legion command council is, and I am."
"Then you're in luck," Des Grieux said.
He opened his left hand. Bones had burned to lime in the glare of the tank destroyer's ammunition, but teeth were more refractory. Des Grieux had found three of them when he sifted the ashes within the tank destroyer's hull through his fingers.
Hammer pursed his lips and stared at the tanker."You're sure?" he said.Then, "Yeah, you would be."
"Nobody else was that good, Colonel," Des Grieux said softly. His eyes were focused somewhere out beyond the moons' orbits.
Hammer refused to look down into Des Grieux's palm after the first brief glance. "You're out of here, you know," he snapped. "Out of the Slammers for good, and off-planet fast if you know what's good for you. I told Joachim I'd handle this my own way, but that's not the kind of instruction you can count on him obeying."
"Right," Des Grieux said without emotion. He closed his hand again and resumed rubbing the teeth against his palm. "I'll do that."
"I ought to let Joachim finish you, you know?" Hammer said. There was an edge in his voice, but also wonder at the tanker's flat affect."You're too dangerous to leave alive, but I guess I owe something to a twelve-year veteran."
"I won't be joining another outfit, Colonel,"Des Grieux said; a statement,not a plea for the mercy Hammer had already granted. "Not much point in it now."
Alois Hammer touched his tongue to his lips in order to have time to process what he had just heard. "You know, Des Grieux?" he said mildly. "I really don't know why I don't have you shot."
Des Grieux looked directly at his commanding officer again. "Because we're the same, Colonel," he said. "You and me. Because there's nothing but war for either of us."
Hammer's face went white,then flushed except for the pink splotch of Spray Seal on his forehead. "You're a bloody fool, Des Grieux," he rasped, "and a bloody liar. I wanted to end this—" he gestured at the blackened wreckage of vehicles staggering all the way to the bottom of the slope "—by a quiet capitulation, not a bloodbath. Not like this!"
"You've got your way, Colonel," Des Grieux said. "I've got mine. Had mine. But it's all the same in the end."
He smiled, but there was only the memory of emotion behind his straight, yellowed teeth. "You haven't learned that yet. Have fun. Because when it's over, there isn't anything left."
Colonel Hammer pressed the Spray Seal with the back of his left hand,not quite rubbing it. He slid from the iridium carapace of the tank destroyer. "Come on, Des Grieux," he said. "I'll see that you get aboard a ship alive. You'll have your pension and discharge bonus."
Des Grieux followed the shorter man. The tanker walked stiffly, as though he were an infant still learning gross motor skills.