The Tank Lords(11)

"Huh?" said Cooter. His face was a blank behind his lowered visor as he looked over his shoulder in surprise.

"We're gonna clear your Consie buddies outta Camp Progress," Otski said with a feral grin in his voice.

"Yeah, right, you don't have a commo," Cooter said/apologized. "Look, anybody you see in a black uniform, zap him. Anybody shoots at us, zap him. Fast."

"Anything bleedin' moves," said Otski, "you zap it. Any mistake you gotta make, make it in favor of our ass, right?"

Suilin nodded tightly. There was a howl and whump! behind them. For a moment he thought the noise was a shell, but it was only one of the huge tanks lifting its mass over the berm.

A combat car on the right flank fired down one of the neat boulevards which served the National Army's portion of the camp.

"Hey, turtle?" the right wing gunner said. "You got a name?"

"Dick," Suilin said. He'd lifted the grenade launcher to his shoulder twice already, then lowered it because he felt like a fool to be aiming at no target. The noise around him was hideous.

"Don't worry, Dick," Otski said. "We'll tell yer girl you was brave."

He chuckled, then lighted the wide street ahead of them with a burst from his tribarrel.



"You must send the 4th Armored Brigade to relieve us!" Colonel Banyussuf was ordering his superiors in Kohang. Since June Ranson's radio was picking up the call down in the short-range two-meter push, there was about zip possibility that anybody 300 kilometers away could hear the Yokel commander's panicked voice.

Two men in full uniform poked their rifles gingerly southward, around the corner of a barracks. Light reflected from their polished leather and brightly-nickeled Military Police gorgets. The MPs stared in open-mouthed amazement as the combat car slid past them.

"About zip" was still a better chance than that District Command in Kohang would do anything about Banyussuf's problems.

Trouble here meant there was big trouble everywhere on Prosperity. District Command wasn't going to send the armored brigade based on the coast near Kohang haring off into the sticks to relieve Banyussuf.

"Watch it," Willens, their driver, warned.

Warmonger slid into an intersection. A crowd of thirty or so women and children screamed and ran a step or two away from them, then screamed again and flattened as another car crossed at the next intersection east. Dependents of senior non-coms, looking for a place to hide. . . .

Ranson wouldn't have minded having a Yokel armored brigade for support, but it'd take too long to reach here. Her team could do the job by themselves.

"Two o'clock!" she warned. Movement on the second floor of a barracks, across the wide boulevard that acted as a parade square every morning for the Yokels.

The left corner of her visor flashed the tiny red numeral 2. Her helmet's microprocessor had gathered all its sensor inputs and determined that the target was of Threat Level 2.

Cold meat under most circumstances, but in Camp Progress there were thousands of National Army personnel who looked the same as the Consies to scanners. With her visor on thermal, Ranson couldn't tell whether the figure wore black or a green-on-green mottled Yokel uni—

The figure raised its gun. 2 blinked to 1 in Ranson's visor, then vanished—

Because a dead man doesn't have any threat level at all. Ranson's burst converged with Janacek's; the upper front of the barracks flew apart as the powerguns ignited it.

Willens slewed the car left. Somebody leaned out of a window of the same barracks and fired—missed even the combat car except for one bullet ricocheting from the dirt street to whang on the skirts.

Ranson killed the shooter, letting Warmonger's forward motion walk the flashing cyan cores of her burst down the line of barracks windows. Janacek was raking the lower story, and as they came abreast of the building, the One-five blower to Warmonger's right laid on a crossfire from two of its tribarrels.

A single bolt from the other car sizzled through gaps already blown in the structure and hit the barracks on the other side of the street. The cyan track missed Ranson by little enough that the earphones in her helmet screamed piercingly with harmonics from the energy release.

She noticed it the way she'd notice a reflection in a shop window. Everything around her seemed to be reflected or hidden behind sheets of thick glass. Nothing touched her. Her skin felt warm, the way it did when she was on the verge of going to sleep.

A tank's main gun flashed beyond the berm. Ranson would've liked the weight of the panzers with her to push the Consies out, but their 20cm cannon were too destructive to use within a position crammed with friendly troops and their dependents. If things got hot enough that the combat cars needed a bail-out—