The War for Profit Series Omnibus (68 page)

We moved, the tanks of HQ and C and B in a wedge to the front, my platoon at the rear, two hundred meters back. The Marines spread out ahead and to the sides and zipped all around, up and down and in behind the areas outside our main body. I saw that the drivers also held their weapons at the ready and drove the vehicles with their feet. Foot pedal controls, that was a useful feature. It looked more like they were having a great time playing with their toys than performing a serious mission. Which makes sense, they don’t get out much, cooped up on spacecraft most of their careers.

We travelled seventy klicks North and came across a blue line that had clear, fast-moving water half a meter deep in most places, clear water dancing over and around rocks and boulders. It looked like the creek was what was left of a glacier that had cut a U-shaped channel about five klicks wide. A broad flood plain formed where the creek made a turn West about three klicks East of our crossing point and then turned South about three klicks to the West of that. There were several breaks in the walls of the valley. The task force crossed where the creek ran East-West and halted in a dried-up tributary creek, high ground all around. Service Company sent its water tanker trucks to suck up fresh water from the creek and my platoon took up a position on the high ground South of the creek to provide security for them. The Marines left the valley and skimmered around the high ground while the task force took a break in place.

I popped my hatch and looked over at ORF-2. Captain Blythe was stretched out on his back on the flat area behind the turret of his tank, feet propped up on the bustle rack. I looked into the valley and saw the six Command Post Carries hitching up the flak guns with tow bars, to help them move through the rough terrain ahead. The two remaining flak guns hitched up to recovery vehicles. The chuck wagons didn’t set up. No hot chow today. I managed to get a line-of-sight laser comms link with the TOC and snatched all the latest traffic into my buffer and went through it. I gathered that the plan was to take a ten hour break and then continue North for another fifty klicks to get to the Northwest corner of the beefalo herd and then push the herd closer to the safe zone. Push the herd into the safe zone, to make it easier to keep the Indigs in the safe zone as well.

Comms got real squirrely and then an Indig drone flew right over my tank from behind. I gave it a three second burst from my cupola gun--about seventy five rounds--and then it blew apart. I thought I’d got it but when I reviewed my gun camera footage it was obvious the cook serving as gunner in A-13 had shot it down using his main gun on charge three. A Marine skimmer rode back into the task force center at top speed, its speaker blaring, “Indigs! Indigs!”

The rest of the Marine skimmers returned and they formed up as a platoon on the West side of the parked task force vehicles. Two tank platoons from Charlie moved to provide closer security so the water trucks could get back into the main body. The trucks got away fine but then on a low hill to the Northeast of Charlie’s third platoon, a company-sized group of armored dismounts began firing. My platoon gave suppressing fire from three klicks away. Well, it started out more like a turkey shoot, but there were a lot of them and soon they wised up and went to ground where they were hard to hit. 3-Charlie (Third Platoon, Charlie tank Company) decided to charge the indigs and made them retreat to another low hilltop two klicks North-northwest of their old position. 2-Charlie attacked the Indig flank while 3-C made a charge, a coordinated attack that sent the Indigs running as fast as their powered battle armor would allow. And that was pretty fast; I didn’t see that group again. While that was going on, 1-Charlie’s three tanks plus the Charlie command tank moved Southwest one kilometer to better defensive ground, another low hill top. There, 1-C was attacked on three sides by indigs in powered armor, three groups of about thirty each. The Charlie Infantry Company dismounted and formed a skirmish line and moved up and broke the attack against 1-C, then moved past 1-C to form a defensive skirmish line. Then 1-C moved two klicks West-northwest along the ridge line in pursuit but was ordered back to C Infantry’s position by Major D.

Major D and the Service Company and the command post carriers and the Alpha and Bravo Infantry Companies and the Bravo tanks all moved to the north about two klicks and occupied a ridge line that ran Southeast to Northwest, where it ended in a cone-shaped hill.

1-C and the C infantry were attacked again, unable to break contact. One of their tanks reported losing power.

Finally my platoon got a call to action. I monitored comms and heard D say, “Hey Blythe, I got a job for you.”

Captain Blythe said, “Send it.”

D said, “Go around back to the East and find out why these Indigs are attacking. They must want to prevent us from finding something important. I want you to find out what that is.”

Blythe said, “Roger. Gotcha.”

“Task Force Six out.”

We pulled forward and down the steep slope ahead of us and then crossed the stream and turned right to follow its course. Four klicks later the stream curved to the North and then Northwest. We followed it up, travelled twelve klicks but didn’t see anything. Captain Blythe decided to follow a dried-up intermittent stream bed that ran mostly West, to get back closer to the main body. We approached the cone-shaped hill and saw a dozen Indig light tanks and a hundred Indig dismounts massing on the Northwest side of the conical hill, preparing to come around the hill and attack the main body.

We halted at a range of six hundred meters. Blythe said, “Targets!”

Park’s first shot was on target but didn’t seem to bother the Indig tank he shot. In the previous battle a few days ago near the Indig village, charge three had been more than enough to dispose of an Indig light tank. But not today. The other two gunners upped their charge to six and their targets blew apart. The Indig tanks turned to face us and they hit us. But their guns weren’t powerful enough to get through our frontal armor. Parks decided to go with charge eight, not wanting to embarrass himself again. He flattened two more Indig tanks. They backed off the ridge to get out of our field of fire.

I then popped my hatch and went to work on the dismounts. The cupola gun was only marginally effective against their armor at that range so I took a shot at them with my Eliminator shotgun. I didn’t expect much, but it was a large group and they were running towards us. I chambered an Armor Piercing round, took careful aim and fired. The projectile popped out of the gun and then its rocket motor engaged and flew flat and true, accelerating right up to the moment the projectile impacted an Indig. The round was designed to penetrate armor and then explode. It did. The remaining propellant of the projectile splattered on impact, adding a ball of fire to the exploding Indig, bits of flaming goo sticking to the Indigs near him. I pumped and fired twice more and then they were upon us. I closed my hatch and fired the cupola gun from inside. I raked Blythe’s tank, he raked A-13 and A-13 used its cupola gun to scratch the Indigs off my tank.
Caldwell pivot steered so the Indigs on all sides would be exposed, and Parks swung the turret to the rear and used the main gun to push them and the coax rail gun to shoot them, to keep the Indigs out of our engine compartment.

But with all those measures, we knew it wouldn’t be long. Let some good infantry get within arm’s length of your tank and your life expectancy gets real short real fast. Loud explosions rocked my tank. Was this the end? I shoved three AP rounds into my shotgun, chambered one, loaded one more. I was about to pop my hatch and see if I could take four more Indigs to hell with me. Then I heard Blythe on comms: “Proceed southwest at best speed.”

Caldwell took off. The number of explosions increased. Tripled. But they were behind us now. Friendly mortar fire. I popped my hatch and looked back. The Indigs were obscured from view by the dust kicked up by the mortar barrage. I told Caldwell to slow down and follow Blythe. He led us into the defensive perimeter of the main body. We parked facing out, to the Northwest, to watch the area we had just come from.

1-C and C Infantry were re-enforced by the Marine recon platoon. They held their line and waited. The flack guns were in the main body perimeter, but it took them a while to un-hitch and set up. They gave supporting fire to 1-C and C infantry and the Marine recon platoon. The flak guns fired from their slightly higher ridge, six hundred meters across the valley to a slightly lower ridge. Cut the indigs in half; the Indigs withdrew. They turned and fled, really. Major D ordered 1-C and its support to come inside the main body and take positions in the Southern edge of the perimeter. They moved slow, towing the tank that had lost power. One big, happy task force on a piece of easily defended terrain.

I sat in my hatch and peered out. Nothing to shoot at. Captain Blythe dismounted and came over, climbed up on my tank. He said, “Take charge until I get back. I’m going to the key leader meeting.”

“Yessir.” I gave a half-ass salute that he didn’t return. He smiled at me and then climbed off my tank and went to the meeting. Sure, he could have just sent me a free text. Hell, he could have just gone to the meeting without saying a word to me. I know I’m in charge when he’s gone. But he wanted to see the expression on my face. Look me in the eyes when he made it absolutely clear I was no longer the Battalion Bad Guy and I was no longer invited to the big meetings. I was now just another Sergeant in charge of a tank, a tank in his platoon. Yes, he smiled; the look on my face must have been exactly what he wanted to see.

Captain Blythe returned from the meeting and went straight to his tank and sat in his cupola. He set our comms to platoon push on short-range ultrasonic and said, “I hope you’re not hungry because we’re skipping chow.”

The other tanks reformed their wedge and moved down the Northeast side of the ridge. The Service Company was now in two parallel columns headed by Command Post Carriers towing flak guns, with IFVs on either side in two more columns. Recovery vehicles now towed two tanks that had lost power and two IFVs towed flak guns. The pace was slow, about twenty kilometers per hour. We swung around and followed two hundred meters behind. The Task Force took a right and followed the creek and then left the creek bed to head South and moved across open grassland. ORF-2 was to my right front with its turret to the right and A-13 was to my left front with its turret to the left and I rode fifty meters behind with my turret turned to the rear.

I called Blythe, “Hey Sir, how’d the meeting go?”

“Well, since you asked. It was short.”

“Any good news?”

“No. Maybe. Depends on what you call good news.”

“Well? Sir?”

I heard a switch in the background, checked my comms. Blythe had changed the settings so that he now spoke with the entire platoon, but the platoon only. “We had eighteen injured but no deaths. Enemy deaths are estimated at near fifty, maybe more. By the rules of battle, because we held the field after the fight; we won.”

I said, “That’s good news.”

“But…” Blythe trailed off.

Caldwell said, “We were lucky. Thank God for mortars.”

The gunner in A-13, the cook, said, “One more tank kill and I’m an ACE. Armored Combat Expert.”

Blythe said, “You did well. When we stop you can paint some kill rings on your gun tube. Now, about those tanks. You may have noticed they were a little harder to kill this time.”

“Yessir.”

“They welded thin metal boxing onto the outsides of their tanks and filled them with concrete. Nice trick but it slows them down. They also fired hotter rounds. The new gashes on A-13’s glacis plate are deeper than the old ones. They’re adapting.”

I looked. The new gashes were a lot deeper. I looked back at the horizon behind the column. The sun was rising and my tank rose to slightly higher ground, giving me a wide view. I saw a glint of light and zoomed my optics and saw three Indigs on trikes, about ten klicks behind. “Sir, we’re being followed.”

“I see ‘em. Set the grass on fire.”

Parks fired his laser cannon on charge one, staring a dozen fires, closer to the Indigs first, then walked the shots back towards us. Then my tank fell to lower ground and the line of sight with the Indigs was lost. Parks started one last fire right at the crest of the horizon, two hundred meters back.

I said, “Nice shooting, Parks. Sir, where are we headed?”

“We’re going back to that airstrip we made a couple of days ago.”

“That was yesterday, Sir.” I wished I hadn’t said that. I knew what he meant.

“These eleven hour local days are screwing with my head.”

“Yessir.”

Captain Blythe said, “Now let me explain things and keep your little comments to your self, Sergeant.”

Silence. Tension. Then he spoke again, “We stopped there to take on fresh water in a place that had good defensive terrain. The Indigs were also nearby, perhaps seeking good defensive terrain for themselves while they reorganize. They saw us first and prepared to trap us on the low ground. As luck would have it, the Marines alerted us in time and slowed the Indigs long enough for us to get on better terrain. Then our counterattacks and maneuver allowed our task force to come together on the best high ground near that creek. But what really saved the day was this platoon, striking the flank of their main force right before it could make its attack around the cone-shaped hill along the ridge line occupied by the task force. We saved their asses, and then the mortars saved us.”

Corporal Parks said, “So we were damned lucky. But why are we headed South now? We beat them. They left.”

Blythe said, “According to Marine recon, the route North would take us into a great spot to get ambushed. That’s were the Indigs fell back to. Task Force Six decided we would head back to our air strip and evacuate our wounded to the ship. Then stand down and take a break, get our battle damage repaired. He also said we have more IFVs than we need now, due to personnel losses. He wants time to mount four of the flak guns on four of the IFV chassis. Having four Flak Panzers will improve our effectiveness against the Indigs.”

The A-13 commander, CPL Williams, said, “I thought the new mission is to kill all the Indigs.”

“All the Indigs outside the safe zone.” Blythe coughed. “Major D thinks they’re trying to do the same thing we were about to do, drive the beefalo herd into the safe zone. He decided it’s better to let them do that job for us.”

“But—”

“We’re stuck here for at least three more months. There’s plenty of time left to kill Indigs.”

“Yessir.”

Comms got squirrely again and I saw an Indig drone approach. At six hundred meters I began firing bursts at it from my cupola gun. Damned thing sensed my rounds coming at it and dodged them, the way bats circling a street lamp can avoid air-gun pellets. Parks brought his main gun up to charge twelve and waited until it was less than a hundred meters away and blasted it to a million burning pieces that floated to the ground as ash, not hot enough to set the grass on fire. Comms improved. Parks switched to charge one and set half a dozen grass fires behind us in a half-circle four hundred meters wide.

Blythe said, “Good job, Slaughter.”

I held my tongue. I wanted to say, “Shuddup Capin’ !” but I didn’t. I was still in the process of adjusting back to being subordinate to people other than the Six. It takes time. Parks said, “Thank you, Sir.” Over comms, his voice sounds a lot like mine. Parks was helping smooth the transition.

The task force arrived at the improvised air strip and set up shop on the South side, centered halfway along the landing field. All the Service Company and HQ tents and shelters went up. I was happy to avoid all that hard work, the tanks and IFVs left around the perimeter for security. The Marines parked their skimmers in a tight circle near the chuck wagons and went to sleep. I ate a cold ration and stretched out on my tank for a nap.