The Tank Lords (19 page)

MASALLAH. God help us. They'd
need
God's help when the tribarrels started slicing into 'em.

The third truck came abreast with its gearbox moaning. Yokel maintenance was piss-poor, at least from what Ortnahme'd seen of it. Guess it didn't matter, not if they were handing over their hardware to the Consies.

Nobody in the trucks looked up, though they were within fifty meters of Task Force Ranson. Half the distance was vertical . . . which was a problem in itself for Ortnahme, since the guns in the turret and cupola of
Herman's Whore
couldn't depress as low as the pintle-mounted weapons of the combat cars.

"Tootsie, this is Blue One," said the radio. "Vehicles approaching the bridge from the west, too."

"Bloody marvelous," somebody muttered on the general push. It might have been the warrant leader himself.

"Roger, Blue One," replied Ranson coolly. "They're stopping, so it shouldn't affect us. Six out."

The gunnery pipper didn't bear on the trucks when they were directly below
Herman's Whore
. Life being what it bloody was, that's where Ortnahme's target would be when the balloon went up.

"Simkins," the warrant leader said, "when I give the word, get us over the edge. Got that? Not even a bloody eyeblink later."

"Yessir," agreed the intercom. "Ah, sir . . . ?"

Ortnahme grimaced. The fourth truck was below them. "Go ahead."

"Sir, won't the guards be even more alerted if we start shooting before we cross the bridge? Than if we'd gone sooner, I mean?"

"Yeah," Ortnahme said, stating the bloody obvious, but this wasn't the time to tear a strip off the kid. "But we don't want a Consie battalion waiting for us on the other side, do we? It's the hand we got, kid, so we play it."

"Yessir," Simkins agreed. "I just wondered."

From his voice, that's all it was.

Maybe Simkins hadn't figured out that one
real
likely response from an altered guard detachment would be to blow the bloody bridge—maybe with most of Task Force Ranson learning to fly a hundred meters above the Padma River.

The fifth truck, Yokel Army again, grunted and snarled its way onto Screen Two. Ortnahme's pipper quivered across the canvas top, bloody useless unless the Consies all died of fright when the main gun ripped over their heads, but he still had a view of the troops. There was something funny about this lot. They were wearing armbands, and their uniforms—

"
All Tootsie elements
—"

"Simkins,
go!
" the warrant leader shouted.

Herman's Whore
lurched sideways and down. Startled faces glanced upward in the magnified display, warned at last but only a microsecond before the command push added, "
Fire!
"

The pure, heart-wrenching blue of powerguns firing saturated the roadcut. Ortnahme's foot took up the slack in the gun pedal as his tank slid—and the orange pipper slid down onto one of the mouths screaming in the back of the fifth truck.

The 20cm bolt merged with a white and orange explosion. The whole truck was a fireball. Heated by the plasma, the steel chassis blazed with even greater venom than the contents of the fuel tanks and the flesh of the soldiers at the point of impact.

Ortnahme switched to his tribarrel as the tank rushed down the slope, its fans driving into a sea of flame.

Not that it mattered, but the troops in the truck he'd just destroyed weren't wearing black uniforms.

Three blazing figures lurched out of the inferno. Ortnahme shot them down, more as an act of mercy than of war.

They were in camouflaged National Army fatigues with black armbands, and they were carrying National Army assault rifles.

Not that it mattered.

"Fire!" June Ranson heard her voice say. Her visor opaqued, shutting out the double microsecond dazzles of
Deathdealer
's main gun firing almost on top of her, but the momentary blindness didn't matter. The battle was taking place within a holographic screen while Ranson watched it from above.

Her tribarrel scissored bolts across those of Stolley's weapon, turning fist-sized chunks of the leading truck into meter-diameter flashes colored by material that vaporized and burned: rubber/metal/wood across the truck; cloth/flesh/munitions as the muzzles lifted into the bed.

Metals burned with a gorgeous intensity of color, white and red and green.

The target exploded into a lake of fire that screamed. Willens kept
Warmonger
as high on her fans as he could as the combat car entered the roadcut at a barely-controlled slide and cranked hard right to follow
Deathdealer
up the bridge approach.

The filters of Ranson's helmet snapped into place as flames
whuffed
out like crinolines encircling the combat car. For a moment, everything was orange and hot; then
Warmonger
was through.

Junebug Ranson was back in the physical world in which her troops were fighting.

The Adako beach community was a few hovels on this east side of the Padma River. There were twenty or thirty more dwellings, still unpretentious, beyond the gravel strand across the stream. The bridge itself was a solid concrete structure with a sandbagged blockhouse on the far end and a movement-control kiosk in the center of the span.

The blockhouse and kiosk had been added in reaction to the worsening security situation. When
Deathdealer
's main gun punched the center of the blockhouse twice, the low building blew apart with an enthusiasm which the ammunition going off within did little more than color. Swatches of fiberglass fabric from the sandbags burned red as they drifted in the updraft.

A bus was waiting on the other side to cross the bridge. It lurched off the road and heeled slowly over onto its side, its headlights still burning. The truck behind it didn't move, but both cab doors flew open and figures scuttled out.

A man without pants ran from one of the huts near the bridge approach and began firing an automatic rifle at
Deathdealer
. Sparrow ignored—or was unaware of—the fleabites, but Stolley triggered a burst in the Consie's direction.

The hovel disintegrated into burning debris under the touch of the cyan bolts. The Consie dropped flat and continued firing, sheltered by the rocky irregularity of the ground. Another set of muzzleflashes sparkled yellow from closer to the streambed. A bullet rang on
Warmonger
's hull.

The long span between the concrete guardrails of the bridge had been narrowed by coils of concertina wire, reducing the traffic flow to a single lane past the central checkpoint. A round, pole-mounted signal board, white toward the east and presumably red on the other face, reached from the kiosk.

An attendant bolted out of the kiosk, waving his empty hands above his head. He was running toward the armored vehicles rather than away, but he didn't have a prayer of reaching safety in either direction.

The flash of
Deathdealer
's main gun ended the possibility of a threat lurking within the kiosk and crisped the attendant on his third stride.

"All Tootsie!" Ranson shouted. "Watch the left of the near side, there's bandits!"

The gunners on her combat cars were momentarily blind as they bucked out of the fireball to which they had reduced the trucks. That made them a dangerously good target for the riflemen firing from the downslope.

Those Consies were good. Caught completely by surprise, hideously outgunned—and still managing to make real pests of themselves. Hammer could use more recruits of their caliber—

To replace the troops this run was going to use up.

Sparks cascaded in all directions as
Deathdealer
entered the bridge approach and Albers, the only experienced tank driver in the task force, dropped his skirts so low they scraped. The truck-width passage across the bridge was too narrow for the blowers, and there wasn't time for the lengthy spooling and restringing of the barriers that would've been required during a normal down-time move.

June Ranson felt the satisfaction common to any combat soldier when circumstances permit him to use the quick and dirty way to achieve his objective. But that didn't mean there weren't risks. . . .

Deathdealer
hit the first frame and smashed it to kindling while loops of wire humped like terrified caterpillars. Strands bunched and sparkled. The tank slid forward at forty kph, grinding the concertina wire between the guardrail and the vehicle's own hundred and seventy tonnes.

The wire couldn't
stop
a tank or even a combat car, but any loop that snaked its way into a fan intake would lock up the nacelle as sure as politicians lie. A bulldozer with treads for traction was the tool of choice for clearing this sort of entanglement; but, guided by a driver as expert as Albers, a tank would do the job just fine.

Warmonger
followed
Deathdealer
at a cautious fifty meters, in case a strand of wire came whipping back unexpectedly. Willens drove with his hatch buttoned up above him, while Ranson and her two gunners crouched behind their weapons. The blades of a drive fan weren't the only thing you could strangle with a loop of barbed wire.

Steel rubbed concrete in an aural counterpart of the hell-lit road the task force had left behind them. Sparks ricocheted in wild panic, scorching when they touched. Ranson smelled a lock of her hair that had grown beyond the edge of her helmet.

Deathdealer
's tribarrel fired. Ranson didn't bother remoting an image of Sparrow's target, and there was nothing to see from behind the tank's bulk now.

"Six," said her commo helmet, "Blue One. The bus 'n truck 're—"

Deathdealer
swung onto the western approach, pushing as well as dragging tangled masses of concertina wire. The tank shook herself like a whore waggling a come-on. A touch of her skirts pulverized half a meter of bridge abutment.

"—civvie, no threat. Over."

As Albers accelerated forward,
Deathdealer
's stern rebounded from the concrete and slapped the three-axled truck that had been waiting to cross the bridge. The lighter vehicle danced away from the impact with the startled delicacy of a horse shying. Ten meters from the pavement, the crumpled wreckage burst into flame.

"All Tootsie elements," Ranson relayed. "Vehicles at the west approach are no threat, repeat, no threat. Six out."

Warmonger
blasted through a cloud of powdered concrete as Willens pulled them clear of the bridge. Blue One fired his tribarrel into the houses to the right. There was no sign of hostile activity or even occupation. A ball of wire still dragged twenty meters behind the tank, raising a pall of dust.

One of the tires of the overturned bus revolved lazily. The vehicle lay on both its doors. Figures were climbing out of the windows. They flattened as
Warmonger
swept by behind the tank.

Stolley's tribarrel snapped over the civilians as he fired across the river, trying to nail the Consie riflemen from this better angle. Rock flashed and gouted, but the muzzleflashes bloomed again.

A trooper screamed on the unit push.

Junebug Ranson's eyes were glazed. Her mouth was open.

Ozone and matrix residues from her tribarrel flayed her throat as she fired into the village, shattering walls and roofslates.

It was very beautiful in the hologram of her mind.

Five-year-old Dickie Suilin screamed, "
Suzi!
" as his older sister squeezed his nostrils shut and clapped her other hand over his mouth. The flames arcing over the skirts of
Flamethrower
roared their laughter.

He could breathe after all. A mask of some sort had extended from the earpieces of the commo helmet as soon as the inferno waved an arm of blazing diesel fuel to greet the combat car plunging toward it. Suilin could breathe, and he could see again when overload reset his visor from thermal display to optical.

Though there wasn't much to see except flames curling around black steel skeletons, the chassis of trucks whose flammable portions were already part of the red/orange/yellow/white billows.

Even steel burned when Suilin raked it with his tribarrel. Faces bloomed into smears of vapor and calcined bones. . . .

Blue Two grunted head-on down the road, spewing a wake of blazing debris to either side. Cooter's driver followed, holding
Flamethrower
at a forty-five degree angle along the edge of the cut.

The slant threw the men in the fighting compartment toward the fire their vehicle was skirting. Gale clung to the starboard coaming. Cooter must have locked his tribarrel in place, because he was frozen like a statue of Effort on its grips.

And Dick Suilin, after a hellish moment of feeling his torso swing out and down toward the bellowing flames, braced his feet against the inner face of the armor and grabbed Cooter by the waist. If the big lieutenant minded, they could discuss it later.

Something as soft-featured and black as a tar statue reached out of the flames and gripped the coaming to either side of Suilin's tribarrel. The only parts of the figure that weren't black were the teeth and the great red cracks writhing in what had been the skin of both arms. The thing fell away without trying to speak.

Only a shadow. Only a sport thrown by the flames.

"Help me, Suzi," the reporter whispered. "Help me, Suzi."

Blue Two sucked fire along with it for an instant as the tank cleared the ambush site. Then the return flow, cool sweet air, pistoned Hell back into its proper region and washed Suilin in its freedom as well.

This car was
Flamethrower
. For the first time, Suilin realized how black was the humor with which the Slammers named their vehicles.

The driver brought them level with a violence that banged the skirts on the roadway. Suilin grunted. He reached for the grips of his tribarrel, obeying an instinct to hang onto something after he lost his excuse to hold Cooter.

Powerguns punctuated the night with flashes so intense they remained for seconds as streaks across the reporter's retinas. His mind tried desperately to process the high-pitched chatter from the commo helmet—a mixture of orders, warnings and shouted exclamations.