The wild assault-rifle fire of the fifty or so indig troops with the convoy may have been a factor, but she doubted it.
“Get those turkeys to cease fire!” she snapped through the helmet comm to Jenkins. It took a ~moment, and another burst from the UATV’s machine-gun—into the ground or over their heads, she supposed, although it didn’t much matter. “We got the others to worry about.”
The Glorio mortars had made three more attempts to shell the convoy. Pretty soon now they were going to get fed up with that and come down and party.
A dot of red light strobed at the bottom left corner of her faceplate, then turned to solid red.
“Makarov?”she asked.
“Took one the long way,” Corporal Kernan said ~laconically.
Damn. The big Russki had been a good troop, once he got over his immigrant’s determination to prove himself a better American than any of them, and he’d done that fairly quick—down here in San Gabriel, you were pretty sure of your identity, Them or Us. More so than in any of the Slavic ghettos that had grown up with the great refugee exodus of the previous generation. Damn. He’d also been the last of their replacements. In theory the whole unit was to be rotated, but they’d been waiting for that for over a year.
“The Mark III’s moving a little,” Jenkins said.
She could hear that herself, a howling and churning from the streambed a thousand meters to her rear; it must be noisy, to carry that well into the ravines on the edge of the stream valley.
“Fuck the Mark III—” she began.
A new noise intruded onto the battlefield. A multiple blam sound from the riverbed, and a second later the distinctive surf-roar of cluster bomblets saturating a ravine two ridges over from the road. Right after that came a series of secondary explosions, big enough that the top of a ball of orange fire rose over the ridgeline for a second. Echoes chased each other down the river valley, fading into the distance.
“Well,” she said. “Well.” Silence fell, broken only by the rustling of the brush and the river. “Ah, Pineapple, we’ll go take a look at that.”
Somehow she didn’t think there would be much left of the guerilla mortars or their operators. “Pity about that Mark III. Looks like it might have been good for something at that.”
“Vinatelli, come in,” Martins said, perched on one of the bridge pilings.
Close up, the Mark III looked worse than she’d thought. Only the sensor array and two of the upper weapons ports showed. The bulk of the hull was buried under chunks of concrete, wedged with steel I-beams from the bridge. Limestone blocks the size of a compact car had slid down on top of that; the Glorios had evidently been operating on the assumption that if one kilo of plastique was good, ten was even better. She couldn’t argue with the methodology; overkill beat minimalism most times, in this business. Water was piling up and swirling around the improvised dam, already dropping loads of reddish-brown silt on the wreckage. With the water this high, the whole thing would probably be under in a few hours, and might well back up into a miniature lake for weeks, until the dry season turned the torrent into a trickle.
“Vinatelli!” she said again. If the radio link was out, someone would have to rappel down there on a line and beat on the hatch with a rifle-butt.
The newbie had come through pretty well in his first firefight, better than some . . . although to be sure, he hadn’t been in any personal danger in his ~armored cruise liner. It was still creditable that he hadn’t frozen, and that he’d used his weapons intelligently. He might well be curled up in after-action shock right now, though.
“Lieutenant Martins,” the excessively sexy voice of the tank said. Christ, how could Vinatelli do that to himself? she thought. The voice made her think of sex, and she was as straight as a steel yardstick. Mind you, he was probably a hand-reared boy anyhow. Maybe a programming geek made the best rider for a Mark III.
“Vinatelli!” Martins began, starting to get annoyed. Damned if she was going to communicate with him through a 150-ton electronic secretarial machine.
McNaught’s voice came in over the Company push. “Martins, what’s going on there?”
“Mopping up and assessing the situation with the Mark III, sir,” Martins said. “It’s screwed the pooch. You’d need a battalion of Engineers to get it loose.”
“Can you get the UATVs across?”
“That’s negative, sir. Have to go a couple of clicks upstream and ford it. Double negative on the indig convoy.” Who had cleared out for the coast as soon as they’d patched their wounded a little; so much for the supplies, apart from what her people had on their UATVs . . . supplemented by what they’d insisted on taking off the trucks.
“What if you shitcan the loads, could you get the UATVs across then?”
“Well, yeah,” she said, her mind automatically tackling the problem. Use a little explosive to blow the ends of the rubble-pile, then rig a cable . . . the UATVs were amphibious, and if they could anchor them against being swept downstream, no problem. “But sir, we need that stuff.”
“Not any more we don’t,” McNaught said grimly. She sat up. “Just got something in from Reality.”
That was the U.S. Martins extended a hand palm-down to stop Jenkins, who was walking carefully over the rocks toward her. The Captain’s voice continued: “The President, the Veep, the Speaker and General Margrave were on a flight out of Anchorage today. A Russian fighter shot them down over the ocean. No survivors.”
“Jesus Christ,” Martins whispered. Her mind gibbered protests; the Russians were a shell of a nation, and what government they had was fairly friendly to the US.
“Nobody knows what the hell happened,” McNaught went on. “There’s some sort of revolution going on in Moscow, so they aren’t saying. The East African Federation has declared war on North Africa and launched a biobomb attack on Cairo. China and Japan have ~exchanged ultimatums. There are mobs rioting in DC, New York, LA—and not just the usual suspects, in ~Seattle and Winnipeg too. General mobilization and martial law’ve been declared.”
Martin’s lips shaped a soundless whistle. Then, since she had survived four years in San Gabriel, she ~arrowed in on practicalities:
“How does that affect us, sir?”
“It means we’re getting a tiltrotor in to collect us in about six hours,” he replied. “CENPAC told the 15th HQ element at Cuchimba to bring everyone in pronto—they want the warm bodies, not the gear. We cram on with what we carry and blow everything else in place. They’re sending heavy lifters to pick up what’s left of the division and bring us home from Cuchimba. If you read between the lines, it sounds like complete panic up there—the Chiefs don’t know what to do without Margrave, and Congress is meeting in continuous session. Much good that will do. Sure as shit nobody cares about San Gabriel and the Glorios any more. Division tells me anyone who isn’t at the pickup in six hours can walk home, understood?”
“Sir yes sir,” Martins said, and switched to her platoon push.
“All right, everyone, listen up,” she began. “Jenkins—”
“What did you say?”
“This unit is still operable,” Vinatelli’s voice replied.
My, haven’t we gotten formal, Martins thought furiously. “I told you, newbie, we’re combat-lossing the tank and getting out of here. Everyone is getting out of here; in twenty-four hours the only Amcits in San Gabriel are going to be the ones in graves. Which will include Corporal Vinatelli if you don’t get out of there now.”
Behind her the first UATV was easing into the water between the two cable braces, secured by improvised loops. The woven-synthetic ropes were snubbed to massive ebonies on both banks, and with only the crew and no load, it floated fairly high. Water on the upstream side purled to within a handspan of the windows, but that was current. The ball wheels spun, thrashing water backward; with his head out the top hatch, Jenkins cried blasphemous and scatological encouragement to the trooper at the wheel and used his bulk to shift the balance of the light vehicle and keep it closer to upright. Most of the rest of her detachment were out in overwatch positions. Nobody was betting that the Glorios wouldn’t come back for more, despite the pasting they’d taken.
You could never tell with the Glorios; the death-wish seemed to be as big a part of their makeup as the will to power. Revolutionary purity, they called it.
“Lieutenant,” Vinatelli said, “this unit is still operable. Systems are at over ninety-five percent of nominal.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, the thing’s buried under four hundred tons of rock! I’m combat-lossing it, corporal. Now get out, that’s a direct order. We’re time-critical here.”