The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century (33 page)

The mine-sweeping team cleared the Portela-Haacin road, as directed. The men returned to Benoit’s encampment an hour before dusk. The French did not come within five kilometers of the Dutch village.

Pritchard watched the retiring mine sweepers, then snapped off the console. He stood. “I’m going out to my blower,” he said.

His crew had been watching for him. A hatch shot open, spouting condensate, as soon as Pritchard came out the door. The smooth bulk of the tank blew like a restive whale. On the horizon, the sun was so low that the treetops stood out in silhouette like a line of bayonets.

Wearily, the captain dropped through the hatch into his seat. Jenne and Margritte murmured greeting and waited, noticeably tense. “I’m going to get a couple hours’ sleep,” Pritchard said. He swung his seat out and up, so that he lay horizontal in the turret. His legs hid Margritte’s oval face from him. “Punch up coverage of the road west of Haacin, would you?” he asked. “I’m going to take a tab of Glirine. Slap me with the antidote when something moves there.”

“If something moves,” Jenne amended.

“When.” Pritchard sucked down the pill. “The squareheads think they’ve got one last chance to smack Portela and hijack the powerguns again. Thing is, the Portelans’ll have already distributed the guns and be waiting for the Dutch to come through. It’ll be a damn short fight, that one….” The drug took hold and Pritchard’s consciousness began to flow away like a sugar cube in water. “Damn short….”

A
T FIRST
P
RITCHARD
felt only the sting on the inside of his wrist. Then the narcotic haze ripped away and he was fully conscious again.

“There a line of trucks, looks like twenty, moving west out of Haacin, sir. They’re blacked out, but the satellite has ’em on infra-red.”

“Red alert,” Pritchard ordered. He locked his seat upright into its combat position. Margritte’s soft voice sounded the general alarm. Pritchard slipped on his radio helmet. “Michael One to all Michael units. Check off.” Five green lights flashed their silent acknowledgements across the top of the captain’s face-shield display. “Michael One to Sigma One,” Pritchard continued.

“Go ahead, Michael One.” Sally’s voice held a note of triumph.

“Sigma One, pull all your troops into large, clear areas—the fields around the towns are fine, but stay the hell away from Portela and Haacin. Get ready to slow down anybody coming this way from across the Aillet. Over.”

“Affirmative, Danny, affirmative!” Sally replied. Couldn’t she use the satellite reconnaissance herself and see the five blurred dots halfway between the villages? They were clearly the trucks which had brought the Portelans into their ambush positions. What would she say when she realized how she had set up the villagers she was trying to protect? Lambs to the slaughter….

The vision block showed the Dutch trucks more clearly than the camouflaged Portelans. The crushed stone of the roadway was dark on the screen, cooler than the surrounding trees and the vehicles upon it. Pritchard patted the breech of the main gun and looked across it to his blower chief. “We got a basic load for this aboard?” he asked.

“Do bears cop in the woods?” Jenne grinned. “We gonna get a chance to bust caps tonight, Captain?”

Pritchard nodded. “For three months we’ve been here, doing nothing but selling rope to the French. Tonight they’ve bought enough that we can hang ’em with it.” He looked at the vision block again. “You alive, Kowie?” he asked on intercom.

“Ready to slide any time you give me a course,” said the driver from his closed cockpit.

The vision block sizzled with bright streaks that seemed to hang on the screen though they had passed in microseconds. The leading blobs expanded and brightened as trucks blew up.

“Michael One to Fire Central,” Pritchard said.

“Go ahead, Michael One,” replied the machine voice.

“Prepare Fire Order Alpha.”

“Roger, Michael One.”

“Margritte, get me Benoit.”

“Go ahead, Captain.”

“Slammers to Benoit. Pritchard to Benoit. Come in please, Colonel.”

“Capt. Pritchard, Michel Benoit here.” The colonel’s voice was smooth but too hurried to disguise the concern underlying it. “I assure you that none of my men are involved in the present fighting. I have a company ready to go out and control the disturbance immediately, however.”

The tanker ignored him. The shooting had already stopped for lack of targets. “Colonel, I’ve got some artillery aimed to drop various places in the forest. It’s coming nowhere near your troops or any other human beings. If you interfere with this necessary shelling, the Slammer’ll treat it as an act of war. I speak with my colonel’s authority.”

“Captain, I don’t—”

Pritchard switched manually. “Michael One to Fire Central. Execute Fire Order Alpha.”

“On the way, Michael One.”

“Michael One to Michael First, Second, Fourth. Command Central has fed movement orders into your map displays. Incendiary clusters are going to burst over marked locations to ignite the forest. Use your own main guns to set the trees burning in front of your immediate positions. One round ought to do it. Button up and you can move through the fire—the trees just fall to pieces when they’ve burned.”

The turret whined as it slid under Rob’s control. “Michael Third, I’m attaching you to the infantry. More Frenchmen’re apt to be coming this way from the east. It’s up to you to see they don’t slam a door on us.”

The main gun fired, its discharge so sudden that the air rang like a solid thing. Seepage from the ejection system filled the hull with the reek of superheated polyurethane. The side vision blocks flashed cyan, then began to flood with the mounting white hell-light of the blazing trees. In the central block, still set on remote, all the Dutch trucks were burning, as were patches of forest which the ambush had ignited. The Portelans had left the concealment of the trees and swept across the road, mopping up the Dutch.

“Kowie, let’s move,” Jenne was saying on intercom, syncopated by the mild echo of his voice in the turret. Margritte’s face was calm, her lips moving subtly as she handled some traffic that she did not pass on to her captain. The tank slid forward like oil on a lake. From the far distance came the thumps of incendiary rounds scattering their hundreds of separate fireballs high over the trees.

Pritchard slapped the central vision block back on direct; the tank’s interior shone white with transmitted fire. The Plow’s bow slope sheared into a thicket of blazing trees. The wood tangled and sagged, then gave in a splash of fiery splinters whipped aloft by the blower’s fans. The tank was in hell on all sides, Kowie steering by instinct and his inertial compass. Even with his screens filtered all the way down, the driver would not be able to use his eyes effectively until more of the labyrinth had burned away.

Benoit’s calliopes had not tried to stop the shelling. Well, there were other ways to get the French mercs to take the first step over the line. For instance—

“Punch up Benoit again,” Pritchard ordered. Even through the dense iridium plating, the roar of the fire was a subaural presence in the tank.

“Go ahead,” Margritte said, flipping a switch on her console. She had somehow been holding the French officer in conversation all the time Pritchard was on other frequencies.

“Colonel,” Pritchard said, “we’ve got clear running through this fire. We’re going to chase down everybody who used a powergun tonight; then we’ll shoot them. We’ll shoot everybody in their families, everybody with them in this ambush, and we’ll blow up every house that anybody involved lived in. That’s likely to be every house in Portela, isn’t it?”

More than the heat and ions of the blazing forest distorted Benoit’s face. He shouted, “Are you mad? You can’t think of such a thing, Pritchard!”

The tanker’s lips parted like a wolf’s. He could think of mass murder, and there were plenty of men in the Slammers who would really be willing to carry out the threat. But Pritchard wouldn’t have to, because Benoit was like Riis and Schilling: too much of a nationalist to remember his first duty as a merc…. “Col. Benoit, the contract demands wekeep the peace and stay impartial. The record shows how we treated people in Haacin for
having
powerguns. For what the Portelans did tonight—don’t worry, we’ll be impartial. And they’ll never break the peace again.”

“Captain, I will not allow you to massacre French civilians,” Benoit stated flatly.

“Move a man out of your present positions and I’ll shoot him dead,” Pritchard said. “It’s your choice, Colonel. Over and out.”

The Plow bucked and rolled as it pulverized fire-shattered trucks, but the vehicle was meeting nothing solid enough to slam it to a halt. Pritchard used a side block on remote to examine Benoit’s encampment. The satellite’s enhanced infra-red showed a stream of sparks flowing from the defensive positions toward the Portela road: infantry on skimmers. The pair of larger, more diffuse blobs were probably anti-tank guns. Benoit wasn’t moving his whole battalion, only a reinforced company in a show of force to make Pritchard back off.

The fool. Nobody was going to back off now.

“Michael One to all Michael and Sigma units,” Pritchard said in a voice as clear as the white flames around his tank. “We’re now in a state of war with Barthe’s Company and its civilian auxiliaries. Michael First, Second, and Fourth, we’ll rendezvous at the ambush site as plotted on your displays. Anybody between there and Portela is fair game. If we take any fire from Portela, we go down the main drag in line and blow the cop out of it. If any of Barthe’s people are in the way, we keep on sliding west. Sigma One, mount a fluid defense, don’t push, and wait for help. It’s coming. If this works, it’s Barthe against Hammer—and that’s wheat against the scythe. Acknowledged?”

As Pritchard’s call board lit green, a raspy new voice broke into the sector frequency. “Wish I was with you, panzers. We’ll cover your butts and the other sectors—if anybody’s dumb enough to move. Good hunting!”

“I wish you
were
here and not me, Colonel,” Pritchard whispered, but that was to himself…and perhaps it was not true even in his heart. Danny’s guts were very cold, and his face was as cold as death.

To Pritchard’s left, a lighted display segregated the area of operations. It was a computer analog, not direct satellite coverage. Doubtful images were brightened and labeled—green for the Slammers, red for Barthe; blue for civilians unless they were fighting on one side or the other. The green dot of The Plow converged on the ambush site at the same time as the columns of First and Fourth Platoons. Second was a minute or two farther off. Pritchard’s breath caught. A sheaf of narrow red lines was streaking across the display toward his tanks. Barthe had ordered his Company’s artillery to support Benoit’s threatened battalion.

The salvo frayed and vanished more suddenly than it had appeared. Other Slammers’ vehicles had ripped the threat from the sky. Green lines darted from Hammer’s own three firebases, offscreen at the analog’s present scale. The fighting was no longer limited to Sector Two. If Pritchard and Hammer had played their hand right, though, it would stay limited to only the Slammers and Compagnie de Barthe. The other Francophone regiments would fear to join an unexpected battle which certainly resulted from someone’s contract violation. If the breach were Hammer’s, the Dutch would not be allowed to profit by the fighting. If the breach were Barthe’s, anybody who joined him was apt to be punished as sternly by the Bonding Authority.

So violent was the forest’s combustion that the flames were already dying down into sparks and black ashes. The command tank growled out into the broad avenue of the road west of Haacin. Dutch trucks were still burning—fabric, lubricants, and the very paint of their frames had been ignited by the powerguns. Many of the bodies sprawled beside the vehicles were smouldering also. Some corpses still clutched their useless muskets. The dead were victims of six centuries of progress which had come to Kobold pre-packaged, just in time to kill them. Barthe had given the Portelans only shoulder weapons, but even that meant the world here. The powerguns were repeaters with awesome destruction in every bolt. Without answering fire to rattle them, even untrained gunmen could be effective with weapons which shot line-straight and had no recoil. Certainly the Portelans had been effective.

Throwing ash and fire like sharks in the surf, the four behemoths of First Platoon slewed onto the road from the south. Almost simultaneously, Fourth joined through the dying hellstorm to the other side. The right of way was fifty meters wide and there was no reason to keep to the center of it. The forest, ablaze or glowing embers, held no ambushes anymore.

The Plow lurched as Kowie guided it through the bodies. Some of them were still moving. Pritchard wondered if any of the Dutch had lived through the night, but that was with the back of his mind. The Slammers were at war, and nothing else really mattered. “Triple line ahead,” he ordered. “First to the left, Fourth to the right; The Plow’ll take the center alone till Second joins. Second, wick up when you hit the hardball and fall in behind us. If it moves, shoot it.”

At 100 kph, the leading tanks caught the Portelans three kilometers east of their village. The settlers were in the trucks that had been hidden in the forest fringe until the fires had been started. The ambushers may not have known they were being pursued until the rearmost truck exploded. Rob Jenne had shredded it with his tribarrel at five kilometers’ distance. The cyan flicker and its answering orange blast signalled the flanking tanks to fire. They had just enough parallax to be able to rake the four remaining trucks without being blocked by the one which had blown up. A few snapping discharges proved that some Portelans survived to use their new powerguns on tougher meat than before. Hits streaked ashes on the tanks’ armor. No one inside noticed.

From Portela’s eastern windows, children watched their parents burn.

A hose of cyan light played from a distant roof top. It touched the command tank as Kowie slewed to avoid a Portelan truck. The burst was perfectly aimed, an automatic weapon served by professionals. Professionals should have known how useless it would be against heavy armor. A vision block dulled as a few receptors fused. Jenne cursed and trod the foot-switch of the main gun. A building leaped into dazzling prominence in the microsecond flash. Then it and most of the block behind collapsed into internal fires, burying the machinegun and everything else in the neighborhood. A moment later, a salvo of Hammer’s high explosive got through the calliopes’ inadequate screen. The village began to spew skyward in white flashes.