The acting platoon leader, Sergeant Sparrow, had assigned Wager to the outside arc of the sweep and taken the berm side himself. Wager didn't like Sparrow worth spit. When Wager arrived at Camp Progress, he'd tried to get some pointers from the experienced tank sergeant, but Sparrow was an uncommunicative man whose eyes focused well beyond the horizon.
The dispositions made sense, though. The action was likely to be hottest right outside the camp. Sparrow's reflexes made him the best choice to handle it. Wager wasn't familiar with his new hardware, but he was a combat trooper who could be trusted to keep their exposed flank clear.
The middle slot of the sweep was a tank cobbled into action by the maintenance detachment. The lord only knew what they'd be good for.
The Red team's six combat cars had formed across the detachment area and were starting toward the bubbling inferno of the Yokel positions. As they did so, Sparrow's Deathdealer eeled over the berm with only two puffs where the skirts dug in and kicked dirt high enough for it to go through the fan intakes.
Even the blower from maintenance had made the jump without a serious problem. While Wager and his truckdriver—
Holman had the fans howling on full power.A lurching clack vibrated through Charlie Three-zero's fabric as the driver rammed all eight pitch controls to maximum lift.
"Via!" Wager screamed over the intercom. "Give her a little for—"
Their hundred and seventy tonnes rose—bouncing on thrust instead of using the cushion effect of air under pressure in the plenum chamber. The tank teetered like a plate spinning on a broomhandle.
"—ward!"
The stern curtsied as Holman finally tilted two of her fan nacelles to direct their thrust to the rear. Charlie Three-zero slid forward, then hopped up as the skirts gouged the top of the berm like a cookie cutter in soft dough.
The tank sailed off the front of the berm and dropped like the iridium anvil she was as soon as her skirts lost their temporary ground effect.They hit squarely, ramming the steel skirts ten centimeters into the ground and racking Wager front and back against the coaming.
Somehow Holman managed to keep a semblance of control. The tank's bow slewed right—and Charlie Three-zero roared off counterclockwise, in pursuit of the other two members of their platoon.
They continued to bounce every ten meters or so. Their skirts grounded, rose till there was more than a hand's breadth clearance beneath the skirts—and spilled pressure in another hop.
But they were back in the war.
The reason Warrant Leader Ortnahme fired into the rockpile 300 meters to their front was that the overgrown mound—a dump for plowed-up stones before the government took over the area from Camp Progress—was a likely hiding place for Consie troops.
The reason Ortnahme fired the main gun instead of the tribarrel was that he'd never had an excuse to do that before in his twenty-three years as a soldier.
His screens damped automatically to keep from being overloaded, but the blue flash was reflected onto Ortnahme through the open hatch as Herman's Whore bucked with the recoil.
The rockpile blew apart in gobbets of molten quartz and blazing vegetation. There was no sign of Consies.
Via! but it felt good!
Simkins was keeping them a hundred meters outside Sparrow's Deathdealer, the way the acting platoon leader had ordered. Simkins had moved his share of tanks in the course of maintenance work, but before now, he'd never had to drive one as fast as twenty kph. He was doing a good job, but—
"Simkins!" he ordered. "Don't jink around them bloody bushes like they was the landscaping at headquarters. Just drive over 'em!"
But the kid was doing fine. The Lord only knew where the third tank with its newbie crew had gotten to.
The air above the Yokels' high berm crackled with hints of cyan, the way invisible lightning backlighted clouds during a summer storm. The Red team was finding somebody to mix with.
The tanks might as well be practicing night driving techniques. The Consies that'd hit this end of the encampment must all be dead or runnin' as fast as they could to save their miserable—
WHANG!
Herman's Whore slewed to the right and grounded, then began staggering crabwise with the left side of her skirts scraping. They'd been hit, hard, but there wasn't any trace of the shot in the screens whose sensors should've reported the event even if they hadn't warned of it.
"Sir, I've lost plenum chamber pressure," Simkins said, a triumph of the obvious that even a bloody civilian with a bloody rutabaga for a brain wouldn't've bothered to—
"Did the access door blow open again?" Simkins continued.
Blood and Martyrs. Of course.
"Lord, kid, I'm sorry," the warrant leader blurted, apologizing for what he hadn't said—and for the fact he hadn't been thinking. "Put 'er down and I'll take care of it."
The tank settled. Ortnahme raised his seat to the top of its run, then prepared to step out through the hatch. Down in the hull, the sensor console pinged a warning.
Ortnahme couldn't see the screens from this angle, and he didn't have a commo helmet to relay the data to him in the cupola.
He didn't need the electronic sensors. His eyes and the sky-glow from the ongoing destruction of Camp Progress showed him a Consie running toward Herman's Whore with an armload of something that wasn't roses.
"Simkins!" the warrant leader screamed, hoping his voice would carry either to the driver or the intercom pickup in the hull. "Go! Go! Go!"
The muscles beneath Ortnahme's fat bunched as he swung the tribarrel. The gun tracked as smoothly as wet ice, but it was glacially slow as well.
Ortnahme's thumbs clamped on the trigger, lashing out a stream of bolts. The Consie flopped down.None of the bolts had cracked through the air closer than a meter above his head. The bastard was too close for the cupola gun to hit him.
Which the Consie figured out just as quick as Ortnahme did. The guerrilla picked himself up and shambled toward the tank again, holding out what was certainly a magnetic mine. It would detonate a few seconds after he clamped it onto the Whore's steel skirts.
Ortnahme fired again. His bolts lit the camouflaged lid of the hole in which the Consie had hidden—twenty meters from where the target was now.
There was a simple answer to this sort of problem: the close-in defense system built into each of Hammer's combat vehicles, ready to blast steel shot into oncoming missiles or men who'd gotten too close to be handled by the tribarrel.