Deathdealer's hull deadened most sounds, but mortar fragments rang on her skirts like sleet on a window. "Booster, Screen Three," Birdie said, ordering the tank's artificial intelligence to bring up Screen Three, which he habitually used for non-optical sensor inputs.
The tracks of mortar shells were glowing holographic arcs, red for the first salvo and orange for the second. Birdie computed a vector and overlaid it on his main screen at the same time he fed the data to fire control. The turret began to rotate on its frictionless magnetic bearings; the breech of the main gun raised a few centimeters as the muzzle dipped onto its aiming point.
Deathdealer grunted as her fans took a first bite of air. Albers had boarded, so they were fully combat ready.
Light enhancement on the main screen showed the shell tracks arcing from a copse 1800 meters from the berm at a deflection of 43° east of true north. The orange pipper on Screen Two, the gunnery display, was centered on that point.
The Consies might be in a gully hidden by the trees, and there was a limit to the amount of dirt and rock even a 20cm powergun could excavate, but—
Birdie rocked his foot switch, sending two rounds from his main gun crashing downrange.
Deathdealer shook. The amount of copper plasma being expelled was only a few grams, but when even that slight mass was accelerated to light speed, its recoil force shifted the tank's 170 tonnes. Spent casings ejected onto the turret floor, overwhelming the air conditioning with the stench of hot matrix.
The copse exploded in a ball of fire and live steam. A tree leaped thirty meters skyward, driven by the gout of energy that had shattered the bole at root level.
Birdie chuck led and coughed in the atmosphere of reeking plastic.The mortar crew might not 've bought it this time, but they bloody sure weren't going to call attention to themselves for a while. DJ'd have appreciated that.
The main screen highlighted movement in blue: two figures hunched with the weight of the burden they carried between them toward the berm.
Birdie's left thumb rocked the gun control from main to coax while his right hand expertly teased the joystick to bring the pipper onto his targets. They went to ground just as his foot was tensing on the gunswitch, disappearing into a minute dip that meant the difference between life and death.
Birdie started to switch back to the main gun and do the job by brute force, but—
Y' know it's gonna happen, DJ had said in his dream. Birdie waited, ten seconds, twenty . . . .
The Consies popped up from cover, their figures slightly blurred by phosphor delays in the enhanced hologram. Birdie's foot pressed down the rest of the way. A drive motor whirred as the cupola tribarrel thumped out its five-round burst. Cyan impacts flung the targets to left and right as parts of their bodies vaporized explosively.
Death had waited; thirty seconds for that pair, years for other men. But Death didn't forget.
Birdie was safe. He was inside the heaviest piece of land-based armor in the human universe.
Three artillery rockets hit in the near distance. A fourth rumbled overhead, shaking Deathdealer and Birdie's vision of safety.Those were definitely big enough to hurt anything in their impact zone.
Even a tank.
The reflexes of five years' combat, including a year as platoon sergeant, took over. Birdie kept one eye on the panoramic main screen while his hands punched data out of his third display.
The other tanks in the encampment were powered up. The tribarrel couldn't override it without codes he didn't have. The third tank, an H Company repair job named Herman's Whore, didn't respond when he pinged it, and a remote hookup indicated nobody was in the turret.
From his own command console, Birdie rotated the Whore's tribarrel to the south and slaved it to air defense. Until somebody overrode his command, the gun would engage any airborne targets her sensors offered her.
That left Birdie to get back to immediate business. An alarm pinged to warn him that a laser rangefinder painted Deathdealer's armor. The gunnery computer was already rotating the turret, while a pulsing red highlight arrowed the source: an anti-tank missile launcher 1200 meters away, protected only by night and distance.
Which meant unprotected.
Deathdealer's close-in defense system would detonate the missile at a distance with a sleet of barrel-shaped steel pellets, but the Consies needed to learn that you didn't target Colonel Hammer's tanks.
Birdie Sparrow thumbed the gunswitch, preparing to teach the Consies a main-gun lesson.
Henk Ortnahme, panting as he mounted the turret of Herman's Whore, didn't notice the cupola tribarrel was slewed until the bloody thing ripped out a bloody burst that almost blew his bloody head off.
The plasma discharge prickled his scalp and made the narrow fringe that was all the hair he had stand out like a ruff.
Ortnahme ducked blindly, banging his chin on the turret. He couldn't see a bloody thing except winking afterimages of the bolts, and he was too stunned to be angry.
The southern sky flashed and bled as one warhead detonated vainly and another missile's fuel painted the night instead of driving its payload down into the Slammers' positions. Sure, somebody'd slaved the cupola gun to air defense, and that was fine with Ortnahme.
Seeing as he'd managed to survive learning about it.
He mounted the cupola quickly and lowered himself into the turret, hoping the cursed gun wouldn't cut loose again just now. The hatch was a tight fit, but it didn't have sharp edges like the access port.
The port had torn Ortnahme's coveralls so he looked like he'd been wrestling a tiger. Then the bloody coverplate—warped by the mine that deadlined the tank to begin with—hadn't wanted to bolt back in place.
But Ortnahme was in the turret now, and Herman's Whore was ready to slide.
The radio was squawking on the command channel. Ortnahme'd left the hatch open, and between the racket of gunfire and incoming—most of that well to the south by now—the warrant leader couldn't hear what was being said. If he'd known he was in for a deal like this,he'd've brought the commo helmet stashed in his quarters against the chance that someday he'd get back out in the field . . . .
For now he rolled the volume control up to full and blasted himself with, "—DO YOU HAVE A CREW? O—"
Ortnahme dumped some of the volume.
"—ver."
"Roger,Tootsie Six,"the warrant leader reported."Herman's Whore is combat ready. Over."
He sat down, the first chance he'd had to do that since sunup, and leaped to his feet again as the multitool he'd stowed in his cargo pocket clanged against the frame of the seat. Blood and martyrs!