The War for Profit Series Omnibus (60 page)

“I assure you—”

“Siddown. S-1, brief me.”

The A-3 sat and displayed the S-1 presentation on the screen. Labels to the left with a column of green balls to the right. The S-1 said, “Sir, we’re a hundred percent. We also have a deep bench of 5% over strength in all specialties but intel.”

“Good. Two, what you got?”

The S-2 said, “No immediate threats at this time, and the weather is stable and in line with seasonal expectations.”

“No slide, two?”

“Nossir.”

“Roger, waste of time when you got nothing to say. But prepare to be challenged.”

“Sir?” The S-2 pulled out his personal communicator, prepared to make notes.

“A Brigade survey team comes back tonight. I expect we’re getting a contract soon. Three, what you have for me?”

The A-3 brought up my slide for Tasking. “We met all tasking requirements this quarter, didn’t have to rebuff any of them. But there was some negative feed back from the Sisterhood Friendship tasking.”

Stallion Six said, “How did we mess that up?”

The A-3 pointed at me. “To be fair, I’ll let Sergeant Slaughter explain it in his own words.”

I stood. “Sir, the Sisterhood Friendship tasking failure was due entirely to my poor judgment and misunderstanding. No one else had a hand in it. I received the mission, sent out the takings to subordinate units all on my own, with no—”

Six waved his left hand. “Just tell me what happened.”

I took a deep breath. “I was tasked to provide twenty troops to spend a day with indigenous workers employed by the Brigade here on our compound. Civilian administrative workers. They were to play golf or go bowling or hiking or fishing or whatever. So I screened for unmarried men under age 25, above average intelligence, good medical history. Everything seemed fine. But then a month later the Garrison Commander called me in to his office and chewed my ass. The indigenous office workers were all young women, and many were quitting their jobs to marry our troops. He was mad as hell because he was suddenly having to hire more workers.”

Stallion Six let out a huge belly laugh and the staff laughed along with him. Six said, “You did good, Sergeant. We’re supposed to send our female troops to that stuff. But hey, you did good.”

The A-3 put up my data for training and I said, “Sir, the training—”

“You’re good, Sergeant Slaughter.” Six wiped his eyes. “Four, how you doing?”

The S-4 gave his brief. It was long, showing new equipment fielding schedules, vehicle maintenance service charts, low-density specialty training stats, and more things I didn’t care about because I was already tracking most of it. Finally the meeting was over and Six stood and the staff stood.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, good job. Be prepared to meet back here again in a couple of days for a contract brief. I’ll give you a one-hour heads-up on that so hang loose. I have a good feeling about this. That’s all for now.”

The staff saluted and said, “Hundred Percent!”

Six returned the gesture and said “Hundred Percent!” and strode out of the room.

After the meeting I went to my barracks room and changed into coveralls and took an early lunch at the snack bar. The snack bar was two hundred meters from my barracks, just outside the walk-through gate of the adjacent motor pool. It was two discarded shipping containers welded together, the interior opened up so that one container was the cooking area and the other set up with two-seater booths. A middle-aged Mandarin couple worked inside, the owners. There was also a walk-up window and umbrella tables set up outside. The weather was nice so I used the window to get a hot dog and iced tea and sat at an umbrella table alone, the only customer, it still being too early for lunch. But I was hungry because I’d skipped breakfast so I could go to the office early to prepare my data for the meeting.

I’d just taken the last bite of my hot dog when Corporal Parks came out of the motor pool and got two tacos and a beer from the walk up window. He sat across from me at the umbrella table.

Parks said, “We got another tank, coded out from Alpha.”

“That figures. They tear up more tanks than anybody.”

“Idiots.” Parks took a bite of his taco.

Corporal Parks is my gunner, and we have a driver. She came out of the motor pool and bought a salad and glass of water and sat. She said, “Hi, Sergeant,” bowed her head and crossed her chest in a silent prayer and then started eating.

Her name is Trooper Caldwell and she’s still serving her first year with the Brigade. She has dark brown hair cut so that it hangs longer on the sides and shorter in the back, as though a prankster had just shorn off a pony tail near its base. Tawny skin, her high forehead and wide jaw sit above a sturdy neck, her shoulders wide and her upper torso angled into narrow hips. But still, she looks agreeable and she’s easy to get along with. Certainly not my type with those deep brown eyes, but an honest man would do well to marry her.

Corporal Parks has been with the Brigade for five years and has just reenlisted for another five. He’s often mistaken for my brother, but we’re not related. He’s average height, average build, square-faced with a cleft chin, light brown hair, green eyes, arms a bit too long but muscular, barrel-chested. Just like me. But I’m five years older; he’s twenty four. We worked together before, when I was the Colonel’s gunner and he was the driver. That was in a Hercules tank, the Brigade command tank. That was a great job but it was time for a change.

We three serve as the ‘crew’ of the two spare tanks, or Ordinance Floats, held by the Battalion maintenance section. We perform operator-level maintenance checks and services, run the vehicles through their paces at qualification ranges, and in general advise and assist the Battalion maintenance section with getting them up to standard. When a tank at the Company level gets fouled up beyond the ability of the Company maintenance section to repair, they bring it here and take one of our squared-away tanks. That leaves us with the task of getting the junk they dropped off fixed back up to standard. And mostly it’s Alpha Company screwing up tanks during training. Buncha type A personalities, they all think they have to show off and beat the next guy and generally have a ‘me first me best’ attitude about everything, as individuals. But as a unit, Alpha sucks. Can’t spell ‘team’ with nothing buy ‘I’s. When I first came to the Stallion Battalion I wondered why the units were stacked that way and asked Major Wood about it. Most other Battalions in the Brigade tried to balance out the personalities for more effective team building. Major Wood told me that Stallion Six wanted to put all the Alpha cats in one bag and let them scratch each other. Let the team players and quiet professionals live in peace in B and C companies.

I finished my iced tea and got a refill and sipped it while my crew ate.
Caldwell took her glass and tray back to the window and sat back down. She said, “You working with us this afternoon?”

I shrugged. “Nothing happening at the office.”

Parks said, “Suspension brakes.”

I groaned. I knew what that meant. The Stallion tank has an articulated suspension that can be compressed or expanded, and locked into any position in between. When ‘hull-down,’ it’s really hull down touching the ground, the road wheel arms pulled up to the hull, making the tank a half meter lower. Then the suspension can expand, the road wheel arms extended down all the way, to make the tank a full meter and a half taller. Like a pop-up gun, it can drop down and acquire a target with its sensor mast, pop up and shoot the target and drop right back down. The suspension braking system is what locks the suspension at whatever height the crew chooses, or can be used to adjust the ride of the tank across the ground. In effect, the suspension brake takes the place of shock absorbers. A broken suspension brake is a deadline item that makes the vehicle un-drivable, and a tank is a pacing item. So me and my crew won’t get off work until it’s repaired.

I stood. “Let’s do this.”

We entered the motor pool and went into the maintenance bay and met the Motor Officer. She was a Captain with an engineering background, tall and slender with dark red hair pulled back in a pony tail that hung down to the base of the collar of her dark blue mechanic’s coveralls that nearly matched the color of her eyes.

She greeted me with a smile. “Hey, Sergeant Slaughter.”

“Ma’am. What’s going on?”

“There she is,” she pointed at a chassis. Its turret was lifted out and set aside, its upper armor removed and set to the side. The chassis looked naked, rather like a turtle with its shell removed. The fusion bottle at the rear, the lower hull surrounding the turret base and the driver’s compartment like a tub, the torsion bars of the suspension sticking out the sides at the base, the road wheels removed. The final drive electric motors and the sprockets at the front looked like sunken eyes peering out to each side, the sprocket teeth, eyelashes.

She pointed outside through the open bay door. “The track is off; you can go square that away.”

“Got it.”

Me and my crew went out and inspected the track and identified eight dead track shoes. Two were cracked; the rest, the track shoe pins were off center which indicated worn or damaged bushings. On a tank less than six months old. Alpha really knew how to screw up a tank. Trooper
Caldwell and Corporal Parks went and signed out tools from the motor bay. I used a breaker bar and a socket to remove the nuts. Caldwell held the L-shaped track guide pin tool while Parks hit it with a sledgehammer. First she held the flat nub against the track pin, to get it started, then the short end, then the long end. I used the pinch-point crowbar to pry the bad shoes out. Caldwell used a cart to wheel over the new track shoes and I helped Parks set them in place. Caldwell and Parks hammered the track guide pin into the new track shoe joints to ensure the bushings were aligned, then hammered the new pins in from the opposite side. I held the new shoes up at a two hundred and fifty mil angle, so that the shoes would ride flat after they were joined. This took the better part of three hours and I was tired. We then loaded the old track shoes and pins and nuts onto the cart and hauled them to the recovery bin, wiped down and returned the tools, and reported back to the Motor Officer.

She looked at me, glanced at a checklist and said, “The mechanics are done repairing the suspension brakes. Check inside the hull for any loose material or debris.”

“Roger. Clean the inside of the hull. Got it.” Caldwell and Parks got shop rags and a can of denatured alcohol and climbed up inside the tank’s hull and began wiping the surfaces down. It was the first time I’d seen a Stallion tank with the upper hull removed. I stood on a ladder and looked at the power pack. It was different from anything I’d ever seen or heard of before. Instead of a single, large fusion bottle with a single main power cable coming off it, there were two small fusion bottles. There was a mess of wires leading between them and a junction box toward the front, more confusing than a plate of spaghetti. From the junction box, four primary and two smaller cables led away. And on each side of the junction box was a hydraulic line, one in and one out.

The Motor Officer said, “Make way.”

I moved to the side and sat on the edge of the hull, my legs dangling into the engine compartment. The Motor Officer climbed the ladder and pointed at the fusion bottles. “Dual Fusion, Sergeant Slaughter. The magnetic fields feed off each other and increase the agitation of the deuterium.”

“Huh.” I wasn’t sure what that meant.

“It’s efficient but requires more control. But the savings in mass is amazing.”

“Sure. Thanks ma’am.” I always equated ‘efficient’ with ‘flimsy’ and was unimpressed, but she seemed to like the new engine setup.

She apparently sensed my dislike. “More mass for armor and firepower.”

I looked at her and smiled. She climbed back down the ladder and went to her office. The height of technology came at the very end of the Terran Empire, its collapse causing the end of any meaningful research. That was over a thousand years ago. Since then it’s been a matter of surviving, holding on to whatever technology it’s been practical to use to solve immediate problems. But from time to time some old technology is found or adapted to new uses. It seems to me that these dual mini-fusion bottles came out of some such recovered knowledge. The Stallion tank was a new design, sort of. A re-jiggering and re-balancing of existing technologies for the most part, but this engine setup was unique. That, and the main gun.

The main gun is charge twelve capable. It’s a laser cannon and the charge rating means how dense it can make the beam by reflecting the laser beam up and down the gun’s length before releasing it to destroy a target. Regular lasers, the huge ones in space or fixed in ground defenses, are much more powerful and can put out a single beam strong enough to do serious damage. But vehicle-mounted laser cannons aren’t that big. They take the laser beam and reflect it inside the gun tube for up to a full second for each charge level, the beam getting stronger as the amount of light occupying the same space increases. The beam first passes through a one-way reflector at the breach of the gun, travels to the muzzle and then gets reflected a centimeter to the side, then back to the breach, then sideways a centimeter, then back to another reflector at the muzzle, several times. The reflectors are set at both the breach and the muzzle, arranged in a circle. The gun is fired by making the final reflector at the muzzle transparent, when its material polarizes to become clear and allows the concentrated laser bolt to pass through. The ability to reach charge twelve meant the discovery of a better material for making the reflectors. The beam of light is made more dense, something like that. Charge Twelve means the beam of light is more dense by a factor of twelve. At charge one, a laser beam 300,000 kilometers long is condensed into a laser bolt two meters long. Times that energy density by about two thousand times for charge twelve, I think. I’m no math whiz, but that’s a lot of energy.

However, with each increase in charge there is a tradeoff in range and accuracy because the laser beam wants to spread back out to a normal density and doesn’t spread in a predictable pattern. I’ve fired at charge ten before, in a Hercules tank. Beyond a thousand meters it spreads like a shotgun, and past five klicks at that charge it does no more damage than a handheld laser pointer. The manual for the Stallion says that the main gun on charge twelve is ineffective against hard targets beyond five hundred meters, but is ideal for soft targets and dismounts at that range or less. Basically, a street-sweeper. But at charge six it’s a viciously accurate laser capable of burning through composite armor up to half a meter thick at a range up to ten kilometers.

But armor is always a guessing game, kind of like playing rock, paper, and scissors with the enemy. Before a battle, analyze the threat and then decide what armor will best resist the enemy’s weapons. And consider the overall mission. And then decide how much of what type of armor to hang on the tank. Which is another new feature of the Stallion tank, its outer hull lifts off as a single piece so it can be replaced in the field. And the three types of hulls have varying layers of kinetic, beam and explosive resistance. One has reflective outer armor, the next, explosive resistance and the third, kinetic. It takes a half hour under optimum conditions to change out the upper hull, so good intelligence before a battle is key to making the best use of that feature. Plus there’s bolt-on armor of each type to take into account as well, dependant on the need for mobility. I suppose the weight saved by the flimsy engine is worth it, but still, I’d prefer a more rugged and reliable engine setup.

Parks climbed out of the hull. “All done. Clean enough to eat off of.”

Caldwell handed him the cleaning gear and climbed out as well. “Break time.”

“Be back in an hour,” I told them. I stayed and watched the mechanics as they put the road wheels back on. It was a specialized job, getting the hubs seated just right. Each road wheel rode on its own electric motor, cutting the friction to near zero. It also meant the tank still had limited mobility if the track were thrown or blown off. Still good for improved surfaces and most solid terrain, but not much good for rough ground or soupy mud. Still, better than nothing. They used the bay’s overhead crane to lift the tank and remove the jack stands, then put the upper hull back on and then installed the turret.

I got in the driver’s seat and backed the tank onto its track. Then the mechanics used their recovery vehicle’s wench cable to pull the loose end of the track up and over the return rollers and up to the front main drive sprocket. My crew came back in time to help me install the track fixtures and rejoin the track and adjust its tension. Job complete, we parked the tank in its designated spot on line, painted on the correct bumper and identification numbers (ORF-2, for Ordinance Float #2) and reported back to the motor officer. She shook my hand and dismissed us for the day. I checked my chronometer: 2300 hours.