Rich Man's War (18 page)

That
hadn’t stopped him from hating them for it. Or from stealing. Or from hating himself.

He only learned discipline during basic training, where he first found people who would neither lower their standards, nor buckle for his anger. Unlike school, the military wouldn’t put him through their system only to kick him out with a massive bill. He either met their expectations or he kept trying until he did. He didn’t like his drill instructors, but he liked the things they taught him.

He liked the man he’d become.

He liked his crew, too. No attitude. No pretension. Half of the crew came from backgrounds as poor as his. The officers never talked down to him, never came up with unnecessary busywork… and never let him slack on the things that actually needed doing.
They listened to him when he had something to contribute, as the XO did when Sanjay and Tanner coached him through tactical entry. He had to respect that, and had to do his part.

As much as Sanjay wanted to watch what happened as Tanner jogged down the street and then got up on that tank—and as much as he felt like he should go down that street with him—he instead did what he needed to do without complaint. He stayed down behind the concrete planter, kept his rifle up and looked down its sights at the rifleman hiding behind the parked
hovercar near the tank, just like the XO said.

He watched as the men reacted to activity on the top of the tank. He saw them shift their rifles over, saw his target grab the barrel of another man’s gun and lower it lest he shoot a friendly target. And then he saw his target change his attitude and raise his weapon.

“Fire,” ordered Booker.

Sanjay pulled the trigger, releasing three pulses of lethally hot energy. He watched his target jerk forward, smoke and crumple to the ground. Agent Rios fired off her rifle in the same instant, bringing down another man. A third soldier threw himself to the ground as his comrades died, but Sanjay didn’t watch, let alone train his rifle on the guy. He shifted his attention to a second pair of targets who took cover behind a large tree as Booker
predicted.

Something blew up near the tank. Maybe it was on top of the tank. Maybe it was Tanner, but Sanjay hoped not. He couldn’t spare the moment to look. That was Booker’s job.
Sanjay had to trust him to do that, just like Booker trusted Sanjay to stay focused on his shooting.

Another target went down. More scrambled for cover. From the way they acted, one would think they were being attacked by a whole platoon.

* * *

Everything seemed to be going okay until Harris heard a crunch and a moan from Abnett over the comm net. He had his eyes on the tactical feed from the ships overhead showing the spaceport many kilometers away. “What’s that, Abnett?” he asked. “You okay? Abnett?”

Harris turned his attention away from the tactical feed to scan the other viewscreens, but by then he heard the grenade go off. Abnett screamed over the comm net. Harris saw Basara stand up on top of the turret with smoke billowing from both hatches behind him, raising his sword over his head as if he was about to execute someone hanging from the cannon while pulse lasers flew all around them.

“Get in there!” Harris demanded over the comm net. He turned to the status screen and jabbed at the icon for the infantry platoon leader. “The command tank! Get that guy on the command tank, now!”

* * *

Tanner had to let go of the cannon with his left arm to swing himself away from the scimitar coming at his head, but that left him with a new problem: hanging on at all. Despite the officer trying to cut him in half from above, there was enough gunfire all around
Tanner that the tank was the safest place he could possibly be. He couldn’t hang on with one hand. He wanted to wrap his legs around the cannon but that would only offer easier targets for his enemy. The glove of his vac suit offered a decent grip but not the sort of traction he could get with his bare skin.

Then it all came together in his head.

“Suit clamps!” he yelled out as the major steadied himself for another blow. Tanner grabbed the tank cannon with his free left hand, let go with his right and repeated, “Suit clamps!”

The magnetizing relays in his vac suit activated all at once. Tanner’s grip went from fair to ironclad. He put one knee against the underside of the cannon, all but locking himself to it.
He wrenched himself upward through a single punch, using almost every muscle in his body to swing up and plant his fist into the side of the major’s knee.

The major fell from the tank with a yelp, brushing against Tanner’s shoulder but doing no harm on the way. Tanner scrambled up on top of the cannon and then the turret in mere seconds,
turning off his suit clamps as soon as he had decent footing once again. He pulled the pistol from his hip holster and heaved himself through one of the open hatches. The padding of his suit did little to protect his right knee from his painful landing on the cramped, tiny command platform inside the tank.

Unfamiliar with his surroundings, Tanner found himself surprised at how
intact the interior was after the grenade blast. Most of the smoke had already cleared, but an uncomfortably warm haze still filled the air. The other officer from up above seemed to have survived, though he now hung halfway out of his hatch platform in a bloody and whimpering mess. Wherever the grenade landed, it seemed his platform offered partial protection, but that still left him to suffer countless shrapnel wounds. The other men in the tank, it seemed, suffered worse.

Tanner focused on the hardware rather than the carnage. A seat toward the front and right within the hull offered a bowtie-shaped steering mechanism and an intact viewscreen. The man in the seat gave no sign of life. Climbing out of the hatch platform as quickly as he could, Tanner picked his way over to the seat and unfastened the man’s seatbelt.

“Uunnh,” the driver groaned. Tanner flinched. The driver’s chair and helmet had protected him from much of the blast, but as with the officer in the hatch he still caught a good deal of ricocheting shrapnel, not to mention the grenade’s concussive force. Tanner froze. Some frightened, guilt-ridden reaction leapt up within him as if trying to seize control of his body.

The man hardly had a left arm anymore. Blood flowed from a major gash in his cheek. His eyes were open, but didn’t track anything.

No time
, urged a voice inside of him.
No time for this.
His hesitation only lasted a heartbeat or two, but it felt like much longer. Pushing past his feelings, Tanner unclasped the man’s seatbelt. With one hand still filled with his pistol, Tanner awkwardly grabbed the driver’s shoulders and pulled. If the driver felt anything, he gave little more reaction than a low groan. Then a forceful impact slammed Tanner against the side of the compartment as someone tackled him from behind.

He heard an enraged, frightening voice yell out a command he couldn’t understand. Hands struck at his side and his chest. Anguished demands in Arabic rang in Tanner’s ears as he struggled to turn and face his attacker. Tanner bashed and kicked back, trying to find leverage against a plainly much larger opponent.

The break came when Tanner’s elbow came against the drive controls. He braced himself against them and pushed back on his opponent, trying to get room to use the gun in his other hand, and felt the tank lurch forward. His assailant lost his balance with the vehicle’s sudden motion, stepping back far enough to give Tanner the opening he needed.

A blind man could have made the shot, but he wouldn’t have seen the tank crewman’s young face. In a single instant, Tanner’s laser pistol cut a vertical line down through his opponent’s chest. Tanner saw his eyes go wide and his mouth open in a silent scream. He fell backward, almost sitting down on the deck before he collapsed.

He looked to be Tanner’s age. Maybe a little younger. Bigger, more muscular, but clearly trying to grow in a beard that wouldn’t come fast enough. His last words and actions had been in defense of a comrade, maybe a friend. Tanner registered all of it as the youth fell over, but once again, he had no time to process such thoughts. He turned back to the driver’s seat.

Tanner pushed forward on the bowtie-shaped controls. Again, the tank lurched forward. “Good enough,”
he grunted, shoved the pistol back into his holster, and then pulled back hard on the controls. He bent at the knees in time to keep himself up as the tank revved into reverse. On the viewscreen before him, he saw vindication of his actions as the consulate fell further and further away.

Then he saw the consequences of those actions as the tank off to the left of the T-intersection rose in the air through its antigrav engines and swung around in pursuit.

Tanner’s eyes flashed from one viewscreen to the next. He tried to hold the controls steady, but in truth he knew he didn’t have to drive the tank far, or well. He half expected that he’d have to abandon the tank where it sat once he’d neutralized the crew, which he’d predicted to Booker in the first place. The goal was chaos and disruption, not a stand-up fight. Still, moving the tank away from the consulate obviously constituted a positive outcome.

Escape from pursuit clearly wouldn’t happen. His few options flashed quickly through his mind: back, left, or right. He never considered stopping or charging forward. Tanner looked at the viewscreens again and spotted the NorthStar Educational building off to his left.

“Fuck it,” Tanner growled, knowing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when he saw one. He turned the tank hard and watched as the office rapidly grew large on his rear view screen. The impact shook the whole tank as it demolished everything in its path, rolling backwards through the office with the cacophony of shattering concrete, glass and steel against the armor filling the compartment until Tanner lost his footing. His hand slipped from the controls as he tried to steady himself, bringing the vehicle to a halt.

T
he viewscreen showed that the tank was fully embedded within the building. Tanner’s eyes made one last sweep of the compartment for unrecognized dangers. To his left, at a station similar to the driver’s, sat another dead man. On the station’s targeting screen, Tanner saw the pursuing tank pull up directly outside, still facing down the street but with its turret now turning toward Tanner’s tank.

He rushed to the control station. He didn
’t understand even half of the labels, but the enemy tank sat right in front of his cannon. For all the complexity of modern military technology, everyone knew what a big red trigger on a control stick did.

* * *

Sanjay’s tunnel vision held out only so long. He couldn’t ignore a tank backing up at high speed in his direction. Much like the soldiers down at the end of the street, Sanjay instinctively held fire as the vehicle got rolling. “Shit, what’s happening?” Sanjay yelled out.

Then the other tank, hovering rather than rolling, whipped around from the corner up to the left and gave pursuit. T
he fleeing tank only held its course for a couple dozen meters before making a hard left as it continued backward, crashing into the NorthStar Education building up across the street from Sanjay’s position.

“Tanner must be at the wheel!” Vanessa called back. She shifted her rifle into full automatic fire, sending rapid blasts down the street to suppress the remaining infantry.

“How do you know?”

“Because he can’t drive for shit! Mr. Booker, I’d say the enemy is pretty distracted!”

Though he’d taken part in the shooting, the XO focused more on suppressive fire and spotting for his comrades rather than aiming for specific individuals. Heeding Vanessa’s advice, Booker turned from the firefight to the jammer pack sitting behind the planter that served as his cover. He deactivated the device and immediately sent out a signal over his holocom. “
Joan of Arc
, this is—!”

A loud hum split the air as the tank half-buried in the demolished office fired its main gun. The wide red particle beam struck the other tank across its rear flank with a sustained blast that burned through both armor and engine
. The explosion shattered windows up and down the block.

* * *

“Fucking Christ!” exclaimed Harris. His own tank had barely advanced into the intersection when the explosion occurred, blanketing the area with smoke and debris. His tank’s scanners worked to compensate for the mess, but then the destroyed vehicle’s chaff systems began to spontaneously ignite and cause further problems.

“Why are we stopping?” he demanded of the tank’s Hashemite commander. “Get in there! We’ve got to get after them!”

“You see what just happened?” the commander retorted, his accent thick but still understandable. “I am not rushing in blind!”

“So go in from the flank!” Harris countered. “You’re a tank driver, do you not know how to do this shit?” He knew the answer before he finished asking: of course the other guy thought of that already.

“I
am
the commander, yes, and
you
are the guest here. What of our mission?”

“
Fuck
the consulate. We can’t keep that place surrounded now. The whole mission’s fucked. And—dammit, that ship is moving,” Harris said, pointing to the overhead tactical map. “We’ve lost the consulate. We can at least get those fuckers there!”