Armored Tears (26 page)

Surprised
or not, though, the UEN tank crews reacted fast. Salvos of concealment grenades
launched; tanks evaded and returned fire. The newly revealed Arcadian tanks
were mostly positioned out of cover, and 44 megajoule shots began to slam into
them.

One
by one the laser targeting systems went dead. Not a single Arcadian tank got
off a round.

Maybe
a few of the UEN crews wondered about it, in the seconds before all twenty of
Tara's remaining War-Hammers unmasked and fired at the UEN tanks, which were
busy pumping shots into the dead hulks of tanks knocked out in the previous
battle. The decoys had been fitted with improvised heat sources to give them a
thermal signature and spare laser range finders salvaged from the framers of
the 9th to make them seem like a threat.

The
muzzle blasts from the Arcadian's salvo sent clouds of dust rolling out from
their positions. A storm of 41 megajoule rounds flashed across the distance
between the two forces, hitting nineteen more UEN tanks, taking out nine in a
matter of seconds and leaving four more damaged and immobile. Despite the
eruption of debris and dust from the Arcadian salvo, about a half-dozen UEN
tanks managed to acquire and fire back before the Arcadians got back behind
cover. Two War-Hammers took glancing hits; one suffered a penetration that
killed all three turret crew but left the driver and the tank's mobility
unimpaired.

Return
fire from some War-Hammers that hadn't been quite as quick to get back behind
cover took out two of the UEN tanks that had been immobilized in the prior
salvo and scored hits on one more undamaged tank, a K19, though the K19's armor
shed the 41 megajoule shots in a shower of sparks.

Another
War-Hammer was hit in return. The shot penetrated and eradicated the tanks
sensors operator, but the fire it started was within the capacity of the tank's
fire suppression system to put out, and the damaged tank could still fight.

"All
units reverse and return to cover!" Tara ordered.

No
matter how tempting the targets, she knew her people could not afford a
slugging match with the UEN tanks.

But
now, Tara thought, came the part she dreaded. She'd managed to take out sixteen
of the enemy and lost only one or two of hers, a superb, almost amazing result.
But now she was out of clever ruses. There were more than fifty enemy tanks
left, and if their losses had been heavy, still they showed no signs of
retreating. And she had only eighteen or nineteen tanks to stop them.

           
"All
units," she ordered, dreading her own next words, "unmask and
engage!"

***

Aran
could track the ebb and flow of the battle by means of the jerks and surging
swerves of the tank he was riding. The interior space of the tank's huge turret
was painted white and consisted of three stations, each one a veritable cocoon
of display screens and controls. The sensors operator's station where he sat was,
thankfully, not too cramped; about the same space as the driver's seat of a
compact sports car. He'd been shown the drone controls and, also thankfully,
found them to be similar enough to the control setup of the Series 70 news
drones —close relations of the Series 70 military drones that the
Arcadian tanks carried— to be comprehensible. For the rest, he could
watch the displays, some set to visual, some to thermal, easily enough. He had
no idea how to control the many variable settings of the sensors, or how to use
the counter-mine systems, or the radar. And he didn't know the terse, almost
coded jargon that the tank crew used to speak to each other. If he was —as
the female colonel in charge of the tank battalion had told him— better
than nothing, he suspected it wasn't by much.

His
tank was firing and moving. The thudding reports of the huge main gun's bursts
were surprisingly muted inside the tank, but the shouts of his fellow crew —if
he could think of them as such— were loud and full of nerves and tension.

"Tank!
12 o'clock! Gunner, engage!"

"Engaging!"

"Driver,
evasive! Evasive left! Left!"

"Got
him!"

"Another
one at 2 o'clock!"

"Acquire
him! Get the gun on that pisser bastard!"

"#1
just nailed him!"

"OK.
Find me another one."

"Shit!
#4 is hit! He's burning!"

"Shit!
Driver, reverse. Get us back to the second firing position!"

"Tank!
1 o'clock! Gunner, engage!"

"Engaging!
Fuck, he's close! Got him! Look at him burn!"

"Scan
for targets!"

"Shit!
Tank, 3 'o clock!"

"Driver!
Evasive! Evasive! Gunner! Get the gun on h..."

Aran
felt the sudden, violent jolt as the tank he was riding in was hit, but it
wasn't till the compartment began to fill with smoke and the gunner, sitting in
the armored alcove next to him, started screaming, that Aran
realized
they'd been hit.

He
looked over to the gunner, hoping to help, and the sight he saw froze him. A
spray of white hot fragments had hit the gunner, missing Aran by no more than
half a meter. The gunner's jumpsuit and flesh were smoldering and smoking where
the burning fragments had buried themselves in his body. The man's left arm was
gone —only a stump of jagged, bloody bone projecting from his shoulder—
and half of his face had been ripped away, so that Aran could see the bloody
skull beneath. And he was still screaming.

Aran
heard himself screaming, too, and then the sight was mercifully cut off as his
survival pod inflated. The jolt of the survival pod launching him out of the
tank felt like being hit by a whole rugby squad. In comparison, the jolt of
hitting the ground again was felt more like falling on a mattress.

The
survival pod deflated and Aran found himself on the barren, rocky ground, about
fifty meters away from a burning Arcadian tank. It took him a moment to figure
out it had been the tank he'd been riding in seconds ago.

He
lay there, on the ground, coughing, while the concussion of tank guns firing
battered him like fists. All around were burning tanks, and the ground
exploding into towering columns of shattered rock and dirt as main gun rounds
stuck it.
           

A
figure was running to him, moving like a broken-field runner across the
hell-scape before him. A soldier in a frame, he realized. The frame trooper was
anonymous inside a face-covering visor and helmet, but Aran thought that the
frame had the look of the sort that the Arcadians used, and not the somewhat
different look of the UEN Peace Force frames.

"Move
it!" a voice screamed at him as the frame trooper grabbed him. The frame's
servos lifted him from the ground as if he were a child, and the frame trooper
began to run back to a jagged outcropping of rocks and boulders, bearing Aran
in a fireman's carry.
       

"Are
you hit?" shouted the frame trooper's voice, as they two of them made
behind the rocks and ducked down out of sight. "Are you hurt?"

"I...
I don't think so," Aran said, trying to take stock of himself. He felt
battered, but nothing hurt bad, and a quick look showed no visible wounds.
"I think I'm OK. Thank you."

"Yeah,"
the frame trooper said, in a voice he could now tell was a woman's. "You
were just sitting there. If a round had hit next to you, you'd have been pulped
by the blast and fragments."

"Bernie?"
he asked, realizing whose voice it was.

"Hey,
Aran," she said, flipping up the visor. Her grin was weary and her face
was smeared with grime, but for a movement all he could think of was how
beautiful she looked.

"I
didn't know you'd volunteered to ride one of our tanks," she added.
"Aren't you fighting for the wrong side?"

"No,"
he said, and she grinned again.

"Besides,"
he added, "all I did was run some drones. I don't know how to fight in a
tank."

"Good
enough. Glad you got out of there," Bernie said. "Now stay low."

With
that, she lowered her visor and jogged to the edge of the truck-sized boulder
they had hidden behind. She brought up her long rifle, an M39, he remembered it
was called, and after a moment of stillness, fired a single shot, then darted
back under cover.

Bernie
moved to the other side of the boulder, closer to where Aran was crouched, and
again aimed around the side of the stone with her rifle.

"There's
enemy framers moving in behind the pisser tanks," she said, without taking
her eyes off her rifle's sights. "They got anti-tank launchers, too. Every
now and then, they break cover. And I shoot them."

She
suited action to words a second later, firing a single round and ducking back
behind the stone. Another second later, an enemy bullet pinged from the edge of
the boulder where she had just been standing, leaving a little cloud of dust in
its wake.

"The
pisser framers aren't very good, though," she added. "But they've
localized me, so we have to move. See that big rock behind us," she said,
pointing.

"Yeah,"
he said.

"When
I say, you take off and run for it. Don't run straight. Zigzag. But move
fast
. Get behind it as fast as you can.
OK? If you're too slow, or if you run straight, you're gonna get shot."

"Shit,"
Aran said. "First I find out how not to be a tanker, and now I find out
how not to be an frame infantryman."

"Ready?"
Bernie asked.

"Ready."

She
took a small cylinder from a clip on her shoulder armor and tossed it around
the side of the boulder. "Now!" she shouted, and took off, zigzagging
with every few steps, running like a sprinter in spite of the bulk of her armor
and weapons.

Aran
ran after her, trying to remember to not run straight for too many steps.
Gunfire sounded far behind him as he ran.

It
was like some sort of dodge-ball death-sport, he thought as a bullet
cracked
by past him, close enough for
him to feel the faint slap of displaced air.

"Made
it!" he shouted as he rolled to the ground behind another big rock.

"Made
it!" Bernie echoed, grinning as he turned to face her. "You did good.
You should be a framer. Wasted as a tanker."

Aran
only shook his head.

"Hey,
Aran," Bernie said a moment later.

"Huh?"

"I'm
sorry I dragged you into this. And I'm sorry about... about your girlfriend.
Ulla. I'm really sorry."

"I..."
Aran started to say. "It wasn't your fault. What happened to her. She...
she panicked. She couldn't come to grips with this whole thing. And then those
UEN Peace Force bastards killed her. Pissers, you call them, right?"

"Right,"
Bernie said softly, her vivid hazel eyes meeting his. "You really are
something else, Aran."

***

The
sound of the main gun was a constant thunder in Cal's ears as he drove the
War-Hammer, mixing with the sound of the debris from near-miss enemy rounds
ringing off the hull and turret armor.

"Enemy
tank!" shouted the major, "3 o'clock! Driver, evasive!"

Cal
slammed the accelerator and jerked the steering hard left.

"Gunner,
traverse right!" the major screamed, "get our gun on him!"

From
inside the driver's compartment, the sound of the UEN K19 tank's burst of 47
megajoule fire was drowned out by the sound of the tracks and the engine.

The
sound of the burst hitting was a series of massive, thudding clangs. Cal felt
the whole seventy-five ton mass of the War-Hammer skid under the hammer-blows.
Behind him in the turret, he heard a brief, cut-off shriek. Then one of the
rounds of the burst stuck the War-Hammer's hull-side armor level with the
driver's compartment.

Cal
saw a sudden white flash, felt a massive impact that seemed to lift him out of
his seat and slap him into the side of the compartment. Oddly, there was no
pain. All sensation faded, first into a bright, floating silence, and then into
nothing.

A
second later, the driver's station survival pod inflated and ejected out of the
burning tank.

Bernie
saw one of the UEN tanks race up between two of the remaining War-Hammers and
traverse its long main gun to fire. The tank it chose jerked forward to evade,
but the pisser tank's burst raked it and it exploded in a spray of sparks and
flames. A second later, a single survival pod ejected from the driver's
hatch.
 

The
other War-Hammer, on the other side of —and maybe unseen by— the
UEN tank, brought its gun to bear and opened fire, ringing three rounds off the
UEN tank's armor before a fourth and fifth penetrated. The UEN tank rolled to a
stop and began to burn sullenly, pouring thick white smoke out from its gun
barrel and its cooling exhausts.

Tara
heard Lieutenant Higgins report that Feldman's tank had been hit, but there
were more enemy tanks out there in the smoke, and there wasn't even time to
acknowledge it. Maybe Feldman was still alive, maybe dead. And if dead, all too
likely she'd be joining him shortly.