The Tank Lords by David Drake

The combat car’s driver spun its fans to life. Dust lifted, scattering the light of the tribarrel firing from the vehicle.

Three more mortar shells struck. Through the corner of his eye, Suilin saw the tarp plastered against the side of the tank.

The cloth was shredded by the blast that had flung it there.

“Hey, snake,” said DJ Bell, smiling like he always had, though he’d been dead three months. “How they hangin’?”

Sergeant Birdie Sparrow moaned softly in his sleep. “Go away, DJ,” his dream-self murmured. “I don’t need this.”

“Via, Birdie,” said the dead trooper. “You need all the friends you can get. We—”

The short, smiling man started to change, the way he did in this dream.

“—all do.”

Birdie didn’t sleep well in the daytime, but with a tarp shading him, it was OK, even with the heat.

He couldn’t sleep at all after dark, not since DJ bought it but kept coming back to see him.

DJ Bell was a little guy with freckles and red hair. He kept his helmet visor at ninety degrees as an eyeshade when he rode with his head and shoulders out of the commander’s hatch of his tank, but his nose was usually peeling with sunburn anyways.

He’d had a bit of an attitude, DJ did; little-guy stuff. Wanted to prove he was as tough as anybody alive, which he was; and that he could drink anybody under the table—which he couldn’t, he just didn’t have the body weight, but he kept trying.

That stuff only mattered during stand-downs, and not even then once you got to know DJ. Birdie’d known DJ for five years. Been his friend, trusted him so completely that he never had to think about it when things dropped in the pot. DJ’d covered Birdie’s ass a hundred times. They were the kind of friends you only had when you were at the sharp end, when your life was on the line every minute, every day.

It’d been a routine sweep, G Company’s combat cars had pushed down a ridgeline while the tanks of M Company’s 3rd Platoon held a blocking position to see what the cars flushed. One tank was deadlined with problems in its main-gun loading mechanism, and Lieutenant Hemmings had come down with the rolling crud, so Birdie Sparrow was in charge of the platoon’s three remaining tanks.

Being short a tank didn’t matter; G Company blew a couple of deserted bunkers, but they couldn’t find any sign of Consies fresher than a month old. The combat cars laagered for the night on the ridge, while the tanks headed back for Firebase Red.

They were in line abreast. Birdie’d placed his own Deathdealer on the right flank, while DJ’s Widowmaker howled along forty meters away in the center of the short line. They were riding over fields that’d been abandoned years before when the National Government cleared the area of civilians in an admission that they could no longer defend it from Conservative guerrillas slipping across the enclave borders.

All three tank commanders were head-and-shoulders out of their cupolas, enjoying the late afternoon sun. DJ turned and waved at Birdie, calling something that wasn’t meant to be heard over the sound of the fans.

The motion sensor pinged a warning in Birdie’s helmet, but it was too late by then.

Later—there was plenty of time later to figure out what had happened—they decided that the stand-off mine had been set almost three years before. It’d been intended to hit the lightly-armored vehicles the Yokels had been using in the region back then, so its high-sensitivity fuze detonated the charge 200 meters from the oncoming tanks.

Birdie’s tanks didn’t have—none of the Hammer’s tanks had—its detection apparatus set to sweep that far ahead, because at that range the mine’s self-forging projectile couldn’t penetrate the armor even of a combat car. What the motion sensor had caught was the warhead shifting slightly to center on its target.

The mine was at the apex of an almost perfect isosceles triangle, with the two tanks forming the other corners. It rotated toward Widowmaker instead of Deathdealer.

Both tank commanders’ minds were reacting to the dirty, yellow-white blast they saw in the corner of their eyes, but there hadn’t been time for muscles to shift enough to wipe away DJ’s grin when the projectile clanged against Widowmaker’s sloping turret and glanced upward. It was a bolt of almost-molten copper, forged from a plate into a spearpoint by the explosive that drove it toward its target.

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