Armored Tears (19 page)

The
surviving frame troopers were moving off at a run, spread out to keep from
making too tempting a target. A few of the frame troopers were carrying
comrades who were too badly hurt to move in their own frames. Luckily there
hadn't been any badly wounded survivors. The dead would have to wait to be
reclaimed.

As
her men ran past her, Bernie realized that no one had checked on the civilians.
The odds were that they had died in the missile barrage, but if they'd been in
the last, luck carrier, they would have been kicked out; that carrier wasn't
going to make it back, and its crew weren't going to take foreign civilians
with them.

"Shit!"
she cursed, and ran back to the trenches near where the carriers had been.

Out
on the open ground, the last carrier met its inevitable fate; its trail of
smoke did a bit to interfere with the tanks' targeting, but not enough. Two
long bursts of main gun fire echoed out across the barren landscape, and the
carrier's smoke trail came to sudden stop, punctuated by a jagged spray of
debris and fragments.

Bernie
hoped that the driver had somehow managed to get out, but it wasn't likely. But
he had bought the remains of the company some time.

And
she was using that time, not to run, but to look for a pair of UEN civilians.

"I
am fucking
insane
!" she hissed
to herself as she bounded over the jagged remains of a dead carrier and
stopped, looking for any signs of life.

She
found the Australian reporter, Aran, looking dazed but intact.
    

"Come
on!" she shouted. We're getting out of here. Where's your friend?"

"She's
gone," he said. His voice sounded surprisingly calm... or maybe just
shocked.

Bernie
had no time to wonder what he meant.

"Come
on!" she shouted, and grabbed the man, slinging him over her shoulder in a
fireman's carry before taking off across the broken ground.

If
the enemy tanks saw her, perhaps they decided that a lone framer wasn't worth a
round from their main guns. Whatever the reason, the two of them made it to a
cluster of rocks a few hundred meters away from the site of the now-blasted
outpost.

"Look,"
Bernie said to Aran, as she set him down, "if you don't want to come with
us, you can try to wait for the UEN to show up. If I leave you here, you can
wave to them when the pisser troops... the Peace Force troops... show up. Maybe
you can flag them down, get them to take you someplace safe."

"I'm...
I'm not... I'd rather not wait for the for UEN troops," Aran said.
"At this point, I don't think they'll give me anything but a bullet in the
head. But I... I'll slow you down, won't I?"

"Not
much. Come on. It's not the most comfortable ride, but you're not heavy as long
as the frame has power," Bernie said, lifting Aran again. "This is
so
not the way I like to pick up guys,
though," she added, and started to run.

23.

"Hey
Cal!" came a shout from Dave.

"Yeah?"

"How
you doing up there?"

"OK,
Dave. Haven't seen anything yet."

"Radio's
still out. Keep looking," Dave said. "Though if we're lucky, there
won't be anything to see. How about it, Cal? Get that crazy fucking luck of
yours working for us, man, huh?"

"Yeah,
sure. Got it," Cal said, wishing he could manage to sound as confident as
Dave, and wishing even more than he felt a tenth as confident as he'd managed
to sound.

He
was perched atop the watch tower at the center of Hamilton Station, with the old
M39 smart-rifle that he'd been given. With his abbreviated Infantry Corps
training, Cal was the best man with an M39 in the Auxiliary Corps squad under
Dave's —Sergeant Halgren's— command. He'd proved that beyond doubt.

Right
now, Cal and his M39 were about half of Hamilton Station's defenses if whatever
was happening south of the Isthmus Highlands decided to show up. The other half
being the 6.7mm light machinegun mounted on the ATV mover... though the rest of
the squad had slung G60 rifles or AC44 zippers with them, for what that was
worth.

 
The memory of their would-be rescue
mission was making Cal dry in the mouth. He'd shot those people, killed them.
And all he could think was that he wished he'd been able to get there earlier
and kill them all. On some level it scared him, thinking like that, until he
thought of the unmoving dark shapes on the ground, the bodies of the family
they had failed to save. It was enough to almost make him forget the shock of
being shot at, earlier that same day. The whole thing was so unreal that he
found himself, at the same time, half unable to believe it had all actually
happened and half unable to fully recall what he'd felt like yesterday, before
he's been shot at, before he'd killed people, before he'd seen the corpses of
those people lying across the dirt that had been their home.

Cal
was lost enough in his thoughts that it took a while for him to realize that he
had been seeing dust on the southern horizon for some time.

"Shit,"
he said to himself and tried to get the M39's scope lined up with whatever it
was out there.

"Dave!"
he shouted a few moments later. "Dave!"

"Yo?"

"There's
something coming, from the south. It looks... it looks like tanks!"

***

Major
Aaron Feldman watched as the Auxiliary Corps troops helped pull the dead men
out of his tanks. The sensor operator from #4 tank, Private Farington, was
still alive, and even likely to stay that way, so long as nothing else went
wrong. But his own driver, Corporal Scott, was dead, and so was the #2 tank
commander, Sergeant Walter Terence, a man Feldman knew well enough to bring to
mind a mental picture of his wife and little daughter.

The
feeling of losing men was familiar, but it
wasn't
supposed to happen
again
, Feldman
thought with silent fury. I'm supposed to have
learned
from the last time. Instead I got them killed. Tara
told
me something was wrong, and I
bulled ahead anyway, with my crews not buttoned up, and got them killed!

There
was no point blaming anyone else, Feldman knew. But there was also no point
dwelling on it further. He had a job to do and people dying was often the
horrid cost of doing it. Right now, that job was to get his tanks ready to roll
and then to get back to his commanding officer, taking the Auxiliary Corps troops
with him. This place wasn't going to hold out against whatever was out there,
that was for sure.

The
situation was confused, to put it mildly, Feldman thought. It seemed that the
comm satellites were either out of action due to some sort of info-warfare
attack, or maybe even shot down, though Feldman thought the former was more
likely. Much worse, there seemed to be some sort of subtle jamming of the
shortwave radio system as well. He could talk to his people in line of sight,
but over-the-horizon communications came through as garbled fragments, or
didn't come through at all. Which meant he couldn't even report what had
happened to the colonel, at least until he got his tanks within sight of hers.

This,
to put it mildly, was
bad
, he thought
again. How the
fuck
had the UEN
managed to infiltrate so many troops into the Southern Wastes? They must, he
thought, have been sneaking in people and weapons for
years
, hiding among the humanitarian shipments sent to the
refugees. The Defense Force was supposed to scan those shipments, but it seemed
that the UEN was as good at smuggling as the Defense Force had been, back in
the '60s... which was, Feldman thought, a certain, bitter irony.

Meanwhile,
though, there was nothing left to do but get his tanks back into shape and fall
back to the battalion.

The
Auxiliary Corps squad was doing a pretty good job getting a new track onto the
left bow track pod of #4 tank. Each of the tanks carried enough spare
alloy-and-carbon-fiber-mesh track segments to replace the track of one of the
four track pods, so there was no shortage of parts and the job was mostly a
matter of nothing more than hard, hard work. No one had ever accused the
Auxiliary Corps of not working hard, and the rest of the tanks crews were
helping.

"Sergeant
Tanaka, Sergeant Bonetti, Corporal Wise," Feldman called out, "let's
get the crews figured out. We're down by three people, out of twelve. That
means we'll have to run three tanks with crews of three, with the tank
commander doing the gunner's job. Not optimal, but I don't see an alternative.

"Now,
Corporal Wise, are you up to commanding your tank? I need a clear, sober
answer, son."
     

The
young corporal hesitated. "Sir... sir, I've never commanded a tank. I just
finished my gunnery training six months ago."

"OK,
thanks for being honest about it, Corporal," Feldman said and called over
to the men working on #4 tank, "Corporal Velazquez!"

"Sir,"
Velazquez shouted back, from where he was helping with the repairs on #4.

"I
need you to take over #2 tank, Velazquez. You're senior Corporal in the platoon
and you have a clue of what you're doing."

"Ah,
yes, sir. I... I'm on it."

"Good,"
Feldman said. "Talk with your new crew and get ready to roll. Corporal
Wise, here, will fill you in."

"Sir!"
Corporal Wise acknowledged.

"Sir!"
said the sergeant in charge of the squad of Auxiliary Corps men who manned the
station, stepping up to where Feldman and his NCOs were talking.

"Yes,
Sergeant..." Feldman said, not able to summon the man's name to mind; the
man's uniform looked sloppy, and his bearing lacked any sort of military
dignity; Feldman knew that the Auxiliary Corps had relaxed standards, but...

"Halgren,
sir," the Auxiliary Corps sergeant said. "I, ah, I couldn't help
overhear what you were saying. I've got two people who can drive a track. One
guy, Private Piper, has even got some simulator time on tanks. He's a good guy;
seen some shooting and he held up real good. Plus he's just unbelievably
lucky... ah, if you know what I mean, sir."

Feldman
nodded, half in confirmation, half to say, get on with it.
 

"Also,
sir, I've got a soldier who knows drones. She might be able to manage a sensors
operator's slot."

"Is
that so, Sergeant?" Feldman said, smiling slightly. "Well, I think
your people just got seconded to the Armored Corps, then. Very good. Meanwhile,
have you had any luck punching a signal through to my battalion?"

"Sir,
we laid the parabolic transmitter on the exact coordinates you gave us and
pushed the signal strength right to the max. And we used basic Morse code, like
you instructed. We've been transmitting for almost an hour now, right since you
arrived. Basically, sir, we're screaming. But I've got no idea if they've heard
us or not..."

"And
could you hear them if they replied?"
    

"Not
sure, sir," Sergeant Halgren said. "We haven't got a really big
receiver antenna. I mean, everyone just relies on sat-comm, you know? I guess
it depends on how strong a signal your battalion could generate. If they've got
a big emplaced parabolic transmitter this..."

"They
haven't," Feldman said. "Which means, they could be hearing our
signal and unable to reply so that
we
can hear. Alright, Sergeant, good work. Meanwhile, start getting your people
ready to move. You can load up your ATV mover, but not the trailers. We'll be
moving fast. Concentrate loading medical supplies... and any 41 megajoule
rounds you might have in storage."

"Yes,
sir," the sergeant replied.

"Major,"
came a call via Feldman's helmet comm. It sounded like Private Park, the
sensors operator in Sergeant Bonetti's tank, a pretty, Asian-featured girl with
a high, breathy voice.

"Yes?"
he replied, wondering when little kids like Park —who looked barely older
that Feldman's own kids— had started taking over jobs in the Armored
Corps. He hadn't noticed himself getting old enough to see them as children,
but it seemed to have crept up on him even so.

"Major,
we've got an inbound drone."

"Hostile?"

"No,
sir. It's a drone from Battalion. It's been rigged as a message drone."

"Son
of a
bitch
!" Feldman exclaimed.
"Why didn't
I
think of that?
Never mind. What does the colonel say?"
           

24.

Tara
had her battalion in their primary firing positions. She'd set up the
positions, and the multiple fallback alternate firing positions, more for the
sake of giving her crews practice than in any real expectation of combat. Each
tank had a compact, retractable bulldozer blade built into the armor under its
bow, just forward of the anti-mine systems; it was one of the less glamorous
and less appreciated, but more useful features of most modern tanks, the Type-51
included. So digging the revetments and piling up the ramps had been... not
easy, but at least doable. Maneuvering between firing positions under fire was
hard
, and the more her crews practiced
it when no one was shooting at them, the better they'd be if —or when—
someone
did
shoot at them.

And
something
was going on. A refugee
uprising, maybe... no doubt seriously supported by UEN infiltrators. The loss
of communication was by far the most disturbing thing, but it made sense; it
would give the refugee gangsters time to do a lot of damage, before the Defense
Force could coordinate and move in to stop them.

And
then, no doubt the UEN would try to use the Defense Force's actions as a
pretext to shut down Arcadian trade. Sometimes Tara wondered why the UEN, in
charge of maybe ten
billion
people on
Earth and the other colony worlds, would even care about a few million
Arcadians. Maybe they just couldn't deal with the idea that
anyone
was independent of them. The old
UN had been pretty intent on "representing" the whole world, and its
UEN successor was quite a
bit
more
ambitious about the scope of its power.

"Contact,
front," said Corporal Malan, her sensors operator.

"Feldman's
back?" Tara asked, a bit surprised. She knew that long range
communications were iffy, but she expected to hear from Feldman before she saw
him again.

"Negative,
ma'am. More than four tanks," the sensors operator said, his voice
sounding more than a bit worried. "At least eight."

Tara
forced herself to ignore the icy, sinking feeling that Malan's words sent
running down into her gut.

"Hostiles,
front! Button up!" she called out on the battalion push, just as the first
enemy rounds began impacting.

The
enemy attack was coming in at the point where her company's front met the line
held by Younger's company. The first enemy round hit one of Younger's tanks,
glancing off the slope of the turret with a sound like a trip-hammer. A spray
of shot and armor fragments decapitated the tank commander, who hadn't managed
to drop down into the turret in time.

Tara
hit her drop lever and her seat dropped into the turret with jarring force. The
armored hatch clanged shut above her a fraction of a second later.

"Gunner!
Target front! 12 o'clock!" she shouted, "hostile tanks at four
kilometers!"

"Acquired,"
the gunner shouted back.

"Engage!"

The
41 megajoule gun hammered out a three shot burst, sending a roiling cloud of
fire-shot dust rolling forward ahead of the tank.

"Driver,
reverse ten meters!" she ordered as her tank's shots arced across the
distance to their targets.

The
War-Hammer backed down the slope she had placed it on, just enough to get fully
behind the cover of an outcrop of rocks a few dozen meters ahead.

"Drone
out!" she ordered the sensors operator. "Let's get a look at what we
have."

The
drone showed the enemy tanks clearly enough. A full dozen, it looked like; an
entire company of enemy armor. According to the target systems computer, they
were T-66s; Russian made tanks almost a generation more modern than the Type
51s her battalion was riding... though the War-Hammers were heavily upgraded
enough that they weren't totally overmatched. Still, the T-66 had heavier armor
than even the latest Mark IIIb version of the War-Hammer, and a 44 megajoule
main gun against the 41 megajoule weapon of her tanks.

Heavier
armor or not, though, her first burst had taken out one of the T-66s in
spectacular fashion. The War-Hammer's main gun rounds were made of tungsten —in
place of depleted uranium alloy, unavailable on Arcadia— with a sleeve of
magnesium to provide a pyrophoric effect; at least one round had penetrated and
managed to set off the electrothermal-chemical propellant of the enemy tank's
main gun ammo. The explosion had sent the 35 ton mass of the T-66's turret
flipping into the air to land upside down beside the burning hulk of the
tank.
 

All
around Tara, the rest of her battalion was engaging as well, firing and pulling
back into prepared positions behind cover. Drones darted about, looking for
more targets and assessing the damage done.

The
enemy tanks fired back, and did their best to dodge incoming fire; at four
kilometers range, though, they had barely two seconds to evade an inbound shot,
and both sides were firing bursts, tracking their fire across their targets to
make evasion harder.

Tara's
sensors operator picked out another enemy tank via her drone sent the
information to Tara.

"Good
target, sensors," Tara said. "Prepare to engage. Driver, stand by to
bring us forward into firing position. Gunner, stand by to engage. Ready?
Go!"

"Target
acquired," the gunner reported a moment later.

"Engage!"
Tara shouted.

"Firing,"
the gunner said, and the tank rang with another three round burst from the
forty-one.

"Driver,
reverse!" Tara ordered. "Sensors, did we get him?"

"Negative,
ma'am. Two hits, but both looked like they glanced off."
  

"Shit.
Prepare to re-engage. Driver, we'll use the second firing position, got
it?"

"Got
it, second position."

"Gunner
ready?"

"Ready
to engage."

"Driver,
go!"

"Where's
the target?" called the gunner.

"I
got him," the sensors operator replied, marking the enemy tank, now moving
in a radical zigzag and spouting salvos of concealment-smoke grenades.

"Track
him!" Tara ordered, "use the targeting radar!"

"Tracking,"
replied the sensors operator.

"Gunner,
lock on and engage!"

"Engaging,"
the gunner replied, as the main gun spoke again.

"Driver,
reverse," Tara called, triggering a salvo of her own smoke grenades.
"Head for fallback position Alpha!"

Staying
too long in a firing position was a fatal mistake. Of course, darting from one
position to another was dangerous. If the driver got hung up, or had to slow
down for some reason, the tank would be an easy target.

The
driver, Private Hanneman, didn't make any mistakes, backing the War-Hammer
unerringly into its new position. Tara saw that the enemy tanks were laying
down blind fire on her old position, their mighty 44 megajoule rounds
pulverizing rock into violent fountains of reddish dust.

She'd
timed her tank's move just right, she thought with a certain degree of
professional satisfaction.

"Sensors,
get another drone out and tell me if we got that last one," Tara ordered.
Their first drone had stopped transmitting, the victim of enemy fire, or maybe
just of fragments of dirt and rock kicked up by impacting main gun kinetic
rounds.

"Driver,
get ready to move forward into firing position. Sensors, get me a target.
Gunner, prepare to engage."
           

"Ma'am,
enemy tanks are pulling back behind smoke," the sensors operator reported.
"Radar's picking up their dust, but no clear targets."

"Bring
us forward to firing position, driver," Tara said, some of the edge gone
now from her voice.

The
enemy was indeed retreating, leaving five wrecked tanks on the open ground that
stretched out in front of Tara's battalion's fighting positions.

"OK,
people," she said, switching to the battalion comm push. "Sound off.
How are we doing?"

***

"What
I want to know," Captain Younger said, "is where the fuck they came
from."

He
and Tara, along with their platoon-leader lieutenants, and the two lieutenants
from Major Feldman's company, were gathered on the ground beside Tara's
War-Hammer, all doing their best to all get a look at the roll-out flexible
display screen that Tara had set up. With his height, Younger had quite an advantage
in that regards, Tara noted with a faint smile.

Her
smile faltered when she thought of the cost of the short, savage little fight
her battalion had just been in. Two of her tanks had been destroyed, and a
third one hit and damaged, though it would probably be ready to fight within an
hour. They'd killed five of the enemy tanks in exchange, but Tara resented
any
of her tanks being lost.

Worse,
she'd lost seven people, and one more badly wounded; a tank commander from her
company's 3rd platoon who, along with his driver, had managed to eject from his
burning tank. The driver was fine, but the commander had been badly burned. The
other two crewmembers hadn't made it out. For the rest, one of Younger's tanks
had suffered a catastrophic hit, leaving no survivors at all. The last casualty
was the tank commander she'd seen die when his tank took a skim-hit from the
first enemy shot of the engagement; another one of Younger's people.

Except
that they were
all
her people. All of
them. And they were dying again... just like they had seven years ago. Where
the
fuck
had those pisser tanks come
from?

"Good
question," she said to Younger, keeping all traces of dismay out of her
voice. Younger was a seasoned commander with fighting experience against a
roving UEN tank platoon in 2070, and against the improvised gun-trucks of
refugee gang-lords since then. But none of the lieutenants in the battalion had
ever commanded anything more than a single tank in combat... and half of them
had never been in combat at all. All of them were scared now; some of them
probably too scared to spit... and not necessarily the newbies. The battalion
commander's voice, she knew, had to carry
nothing
but absolute calm and confidence.

"Could
they have smuggled tanks into the wastes in pieces? Assembled them out
there?" asked Lieutenant Higgins, one of Feldman's platoon leaders, and in
Feldman's absence, the acting commander of 2nd Company.

"I
guess it's possible. We managed to do something like that in the '50s,"
Tara replied. "I think we need to worry more about what we're facing than
how they got there, though. And we need to figure out what to do about this
jamming. Has anyone got any thoughts about how to contact Major Feldman?"

"I
could take another platoon out to find him," suggest Younger.

Tara
shook her head. "We've already seen one company of enemy tanks. What
happens if you run into them? Or what happens if there's more than one
company?"

"How
would they smuggle in that many?"

"You're
making assumptions, Younger," Tara said. "You're assuming it's
smuggling that brought those tanks in; I can't think of any other way, but that
doesn't mean there
isn't
another way.
And you're assuming that there can't be that many of them. Even if it is
smuggling, what if they started seven years ago, right after we took the gate?
How many disassembled tanks could they have gotten past us in that time?"
         

"I...
ah... No clue, Colonel," Younger said.

"Me
neither," Tara said. "So let's forget about sending out platoons in
penny packets. I just hope Feldman can get past whatever the pissers have out
there and make it back."

The
battalion was in touch with Feldman's platoon, in a manner of speaking. They
had a crude transmission for an Auxiliary Corps station, Hamilton Station,
situated well into the Southern Wastes.
 
He had reported running into a defensive line held by hostile infantry,
which gave Tara one more thing to worry about, but also gave her a clue as to
the enemy's strength.

The
problem was that Feldman's platoon didn't seem to be able to hear their transmissions
in return. And they had no idea what might be between Feldman and the
battalion's position on the Isthmus Highlands... and, it seemed, no way to warn
him about the presence of enemy tanks.

"Colonel,
if I may," interjected Lieutenant Higgins. His voice held more than a
trace of a British accent; Tara recalled reading his dossier; an immigrant
family that had gotten out of the European Federal Union in the late '60s.

"Yes,
Lieutenant?" she said.

"I...
wonder, Colonel; why do you think the enemy came in without sending drones
first? They would have done
rather
more damage if they'd had a better sense of our positions. I've heard stories
about the 'pissers,' but are the UEN forces really so unskilled?"

Tara
frowned slightly. "No...," she said. "All your experience has
been against refugee bandits, hasn't it, Lieutenant?"