"No, sarge."
"Huh?"
"Sarge, I'm sorry," Holman said, "but if we do that, we bring it down for sure. And us. Sarge, look, I'm, you know, I'm not great on tanks. But I took a lotta trucks over piddly bridges, right? We'll take it slow and especially no braking or acceleration. That'll work if anything does. I promise. Okay?"
She sounded nervous, telling a veteran he was wrong.
She sounded like she curst well thought she was right, though.
Via, maybe she was. Holman didn't have any line experience . . . but that didn't mean she didn't have any experience. They needed everything they could get right now, her and him and everybody else in Task Force Ranson. . . .
"They say she's a real space cadet," Wager said aloud. "Her crew does. Cap'n Ranson, I mean."
"Because she's a woman," Holman said flatly.
"Because she flakes out!" Wager snapped. "Because she goes right off into dreamland in the middle a' talking."
He looked at the disk of sky speeding past his open hatch. It didn't seem perceptibly brighter, but he could no longer make out the stars speckling its sweep.
"At least," said Holman with a touch more emotion than her previous comment, "Captain Ranson isn't so much of a flake that she'd go ahead with the mission without her tanks."
"Yeah," said Sergeant Hans Wager in resignation. "Without us."
Camp Progress stank of death: the effects of fire on scores of materials; rotting garbage that had been ignored among greater needs; and the varied effluvia each type of shell and cartridge left when it went off.
There was also the stench of the wastes which men voided as they died.
It was a familiar combination to Chief Lavel, but some of the newbies in his work crew still looked queasy.
A Consie had died of his wounds beneath the tarp covering the shells off-loaded from the self-propelled howitzer. It wasn't until the shells were needed that the body was found. The corpse's skin was as black as the cloth of the uniform which the gas-distended body stretched.
They'd get used to it. They'd better.
Lavel massaged the stump of his right arm with his remaining hand as he watched eight men cautiously lift a 200mm shell, then lower it with a clank onto the gurney. They paused, panting.
"Go on," he said, "One more and you've got the load."
"Via!" said Riddle angrily. There were bright chafe lines on both of the balding man's wrists. "We can rest a bloody—"
"Riddle!" Lavel snapped. "If you want to be wired up again, just say the word. Any word!"
Two of the work crew started to lower their clamp over the remaining shell in the upper of the two layers. The short, massive round was striped black and mauve. Ridges impressed in the casing showed where it would separate into three parts at a predetermined point in its trajectory.
"Not that one!" Lavel ordered sharply. "Nor the other with those markings. Just leave them and bring the—bring one of the blue-and-whites."
Firecracker rounds that would rain over four hundred anti-personnel bomblets apiece down on the target area. No good for smashing bunkers, but much of the Consies' hasty siegeworks around la Reole lacked overhead cover. The Consies'd die in their trenches like mice in a mincer when the firecracker rounds burst overhead . . .
Lavel stumped away from the crew, knowing that they could carry on well enough without him. He was more worried about the team bolting boosters onto the shells already loaded onto the hog. A trained crew could handle the job in a minute or less per shell, but the scuts left at Camp Progress when the task force pulled out. . . .
Scuts like Chief Lavel, a derelict who couldn't even assemble artillery rounds nowadays. A job he could do drunk in the dark a few years ago, back when he'd been a man.
But he had to admit, he felt alive for almost the first time since Gresham's counter-battery salvo got through the net of cyan bolts that should've swept it from the sky. It wasn't any part of Lavel's fault, but he'd paid the price.
That's how it was in war. You trusted other people and they trusted you . . . so when you screwed up—
—and Chief knew he'd screwed up lots of times in the past, you couldn't live and not transpose a range figure once—
—it was some other bastard got it in the neck.
Or the arm and leg. What goes around, comes around.
Lavel began whistling "St. James' Infirmary" between his teeth as he approached the self-propelled howitzer. His self-propelled howitzer for the next few hours.
Craige and Komar, transit drivers who hadn't been promoted to line units after a couple years service each, seemed to have finished their task. Six assembled rounds waited on the hog's loading tray.
Between each 200mm shell (color-coded as to type) and its olive-drab base charge was a white-painted booster. The booster contained beryllium-based fuel to give the round range sufficient to hit positions around la Reole.