The Tank Lords(73)

Yokel tanks would find the conditions passable also, even if they left the trails worn by animals and the local populace.

"We can't go anywhere," Blue Three's driver whined. "We—"

Warmonger's artificial intelligence threw a print sidebar on the holographic condenser lens.

"—only got two cars left and they're shot t' bloody hell. We're right at the little store, where the road crosses the crik."

Willens, following the course Ranson and the AI set for him, nosed Warmonger against the north bank of the creek. The black, root-laced soil rose only a meter above the black, peat-rich water. The car snorted, then mounted to firm ground through a bending wall of saplings.

The distance between barren Chin Peng Rise and the thin trees of Sugar Knob was about a kilometer and a half. Ranson's western element followed a winding three-kay course to stay low and unnoticed while encircling the Yokels' expected deployment area. Cooter and the two-car eastern element had an even longer track to follow to their hide . . . but the Yokel tanks seemed to be giving them the time they needed.

Willens advanced twenty meters further, to give room to One-five and One-one behind him, then settled with his fans on idle.

Task Force Ranson didn't want to stumble into contact before they knew where all their targets were.

Blue Three's sensors had greater range and precision by an order of magnitude than those crammed into the combat cars, but the cars could process the data passed to them by the larger vehicle. The sidebar on Ranson's multi-function display listed callsigns, isolated in the cross-talk overheard by the superb electronics of the tank pretending to be in Kawana while it waited behind Chin Peng Rise north of the tiny hamlet.

There were twenty-five individual callsigns. The AI broke them down as three companies each consisting of three platoons—but no more than four tanks in any platoon (five would have been full strength). Some platoons were postulated from a single callsign.

Not all the Yokel tanks would be indulging in the loose chatter that laid them out for Task Force Ranson like a roast for the carving; but most of them would, most of them were surely identified. The red cross-hatching that overlay the relief map in the main field of the display was the AI's best estimate thus far of the armored battalion's dispositions.

Blue Three was the frame of the trap and the bait within it; but the five combat cars of west and east elements were the spring-loaded jaws that would snap the rat's neck.

And this rat, Yokel or Consie, was lying. It was clear that the leading elements of 1st of the 4th were already deploying onto the southern slope of Sugar Knob, half a kilometer from the store and shanties of Kawana rather than the ten kays their commander claimed.

In the next few seconds, the commander of the armored battalion would decide whether he wanted to meet allied mercenaries—or light the fuse that would certainly detonate in a battle more destructive than any a citizen of Prosperity could imagine. He was being tested. . . .

The two sharp green beads of Lieutenant Cooter's element settled into position.

She heard a whisper in the southern sky. Incoming.



"All right, Holman, move us hull-down," Hans Wager ordered as his driver whined, "They're shooting at us! They're shooting at us!" over the Allied Common Channel and the scream of the incoming salvo wrote its own exclamation point in four crashing impacts on the valley below.

The nameless tank lifted, scraped, and hopped forward—up and out of its stand-by hide to a position so near the crest of Chin Peng Rise that the turret and sensor arrays had a clear sight across Kawana to the slumping mass of Sugar Knob beyond.

The hamlet had never been prepossessing. It was less so now that the ill-aimed Consie salvo had shaken down several shacks. Raider Camp Creek roiled with the muddy aftermath of the shell that had landed on it, and the footbridge paralleling the ford had collapsed into the turbid current.

Men and women in the sugarbush fields dropped their tools to run for their homes. The sandy rows in which the bushes were planted would've given better protection than the board walls of the shanties.

That much came to Wager's eyes from the direct view of his main screen. Screen Three displayed the data his chuckling AI processed, a schematic vision of the terrain behind Sugar Knob and the unseen Yokel tanks showing themselves to Wager's sensors.

A sidebar on the main screen noted an incoming second salvo, ten rounds but very ragged—even for Yokel artillery.

The Yokel vehicles were diesel-powered, so Wager's tank couldn't locate them precisely from sparkcoil emissions; but their diesels had injector motors whose RF output could be pin-pointed by the Slammers' sensors.

Without the added shielding of Chin Peng Ridge to block Blue Three, the cross-hatched blur south of Sugar Knob on Screen Three began to coalesce into bright red beads: Yokel tanks, located to within a few meters.