“Corporal Vinatelli is unable to comply with that ~order, Lieutenant.”
“Hell,” Martins said, looking down at the top of the Mark III’s superstructure, where fingers of brown water were already running over the armor.
It looked like she was going to leave two of her people here dead. The kid had frozen after all, only it took the form of refusal to come out of his durochrome womb, rather than catatonia. Frozen, and it was going to kill him—when the ham sandwiches and Coke ran out down there, if not before. There was certainly nothing she could do about it. Sending a team down with a blasting charge to open the hatch didn’t look real practical right now. Even if they had time, there was no telling what someone in Vinatelli’s mental condition might do, besides which the tank was programmed to protect its own integrity. And she certainly had better things to do with the time.
A whump of explosive went off behind her; Kernan making sure the captured Glorio weapons weren’t any use to anyone.
“Max units, pull in,” she said, and began climbing back to the cable anchor point to board Kernan’s UATV. Behind her, a thin muddy wave washed across the top surface of the Bolo Mark III.
“Comrades, we have won a glorious victory!” Commandante Chavez shouted.
He was standing in front of the crater where the guerilla mortars had been. For sixty meters around, the trees were bare of leaves and twigs; they sparkled in the afternoon sunlight, a fairy garden of glittering glass fibers. The crater where the ready ammunition had gone off was several meters across; the enemy had arranged the bodies of the crew—or parts thereof—in more-or-less regular fashion, the better to count them. Nothing useable remained.
“The giant tank filled some of our weaker comrades with fear,” Chavez went on. The ground that he paced on was damp and slightly greasy with the body fluids of several Glorios, and the bluebottles were crawling over it. “They wanted to run and hide from the monster tank!
“Yet we—mere humanity, but filled with the correct ideological perspective—triumphed over the monster. We buried it, as the Glorious Way shall bury all its enemies, all those who stand between suffering humanity and utopia!”
With several of the commandante’s special guards standing behind him, the cheering was prolonged. And sincere; they had destroyed the tank that had been like nothing anyone had ever seen before. Now it was just a lump in the river below the fallen bridge.
“Onward to victory!” Chavez shouted, raising his fist in the air.
The Caatinga River was powerful at this time of year, when the limestone soil yielded up the water it had stored during the brief, violent rains. Maximum flow was in May, well after the last clouds gave way to endless glaring sun and the fields shriveled into dusty, cracked barrenness where goats walked out on limbs to get at the last shoots.
Now it backed at the rock dam created by the bridge. The lower strata were locked together by the girders, and the upper by the weight of the stone and the anchoring presence of the tank; its pyramidal shape made it the keystone. Water roared over the top a meter deep, and the whole huge mass ground and shifted under the pounding.
“Vini, the water will help,” the Mark III said. “I’m going to try that now.”
Mud and rock and spray fountained skyward, sending parrots and shrikes fleeing in terror. Boulders shifted. A bellowing roar shook the earth in the river valley, and the monstrous scraping sound of durachrome alloy ripping density-enhanced steel through friable limestone.
“It’s working.”
“Talk about irony,” Jenkins said.
“Yeah, Tops?” Martins replied.
Jenkins had had academic ambitions before the university system pretty well shut down.
“Yeah, El-Tee. Most of the time we’ve been here, the Mark III would have been as useful as a boar hog to a ballerina. The Glorios would have just gone away from wherever it was, you know? But now we just want to move one place one time, and they want to get in our way—and that big durachrome mother would have been real useful.”
“I’m not arguing,” she said.
The little hamlet of San Miguel de Dolorosa lay ahead of them. The brief tropical nightfall was over, and the moon was out, bright and cool amid a thick dusting arch of stars, clear in the dry upland air. In previous times troops had stopped there occasionally; there was a cantina selling a pretty good beer, and it was a chance to see locals who weren’t trying to kill you, just sell you BBQ goat or their sisters. Right now there were a couple of extremely suspicious readings on the fixed sensors they’d scattered around in the hills months back, when they decided they didn’t have the manpower to patrol around here any more.
Suspicious readings that could be heavy machine-guns and rocket launchers in the town. There were no lights down there, but that was about par for the course. Upcountry towns hadn’t had electricity for a long time, and kerosene cost real money.
“It’s like this,” Martins said. “If we go barreling through there, and they’re set up, we’re dogmeat. If we go around, the only alternate route will eat all our reserve of time—and that’s assuming nothing goes wrong on that way either.”
Jenkins sighed. “You or me?”
Somebody was going to have to go in and identify the sightings better than the remotes could do it—and if the Glorios were there, distract them up close and personal while the UATVs came in.
“I’d better do it, Tops,” she said. The squad with the two vehicles was really Jenkins’. “I’ll take Pineapple and Marwitz.”
Half the string of mules were in the water when the Glorio sergeant—Squad Comrade—heard the grinding, whirring noise.
“What’s that?” he cried.
The ford was in a narrow cut, where the river was broad but shallow; there was little space between the high walls that was not occupied by the gravelled bed. That made it quite dark even in the daytime. On a moonless night like this it was a slit full of night, with nothing but starlight to cast a faint sparkle on the water. The guerrillas were working with the precision of long experience, leading the gaunt mules down through the knee-deep stream and up the other side, while a company kept overwatch on both sides. They were not expecting trouble from the depleted enemy forces, but their superior night vision meant that a raid was always possible. Even an air attack was possible, although it was months since there had been any air action except around the main base at Cuchimba.
When the Bolo Mark III came around the curve of the river half a kilometer downstream, the guerrillas reacted with varieties of blind panic. It was only a dim bulk, but the river creamed away in plumes from its four tracks, and it ground on at forty KPH with the momentum of a mountain that walked.
The sergeant fired his AK—a useless thing to do even if the target had been soft-skinned. A bar of light reached out from the tank’s frontal slope, and the man exploded away from the stream of hypervelocity slugs.
A team on the left, the western bank, of the river opened up with a four-barreled heavy machine gun ~intended for antiaircraft use. They were good; the stream of half-ounce bullets hosed over the Mark III’s armor like a river of green-tracer fire arching into the night. The sparks where the projectiles bounced from the density-enhanced durachrome were bright fireflies in the night. Where the layer of softer ablating material was still intact there was no spark, but a very careful observer might have seen starlight on the metal exposed by the bullets’ impact.
There were no careful observers on this field ~tonight; at least, none outside the hull of the Mark III. The infinite repeaters nuzzled forward through the dilating ports on its hull. Coils gripped and flung 50mm projectiles at velocities that burned a thin film of plasma off the ultra-dense metal that composed them. They left streaks through the air, and on the retinas of anyone watching them. The repeaters were intended primarily for use against armor, but they had a number of options. The one selected now broke the projectiles into several hundred shards just short of the target, covering a dozen square yards. They ripped into the multibarrel machine gun, its mount—and incidentally its operators—like a mincing machine pounded down by a god. Friction-heated ammunition cooked off in a crackle and fireworks fountain, but that was ~almost an anticlimax.
“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Comrade Chavez bellowed.
It was an unnecessary command for those of the Glorios blundering off into the dark, screaming their terror or conserving their breath for flight. A substantial minority had remained, even for this threat. They heard and obeyed, except for one team with the best antiarmor weapons the guerrillas possessed, a cluster of hypervelocity missiles. One man painted the forward tread with his laser designator, while the second launched the missiles. They left the launcher with a mild chuff of gasses, then accelerated briefly with a sound like a giant tiger’s retching scream.