Ortnahme launched himself from the tank and crushed the guerrilla to the ground. Bones snapped, caught between the warrant leader’s mass and the mine casing.
Ortnahme didn’t take any chances. He hammered until the grip of the multitool thumped slimy dirt instead of the Consie’s head.
Herman’s Whore was circling back. Ortnahme tried to stand, then sat heavily. He waved his left arm.
By the time Simkins pulled up beside him, the warrant leader would be ready to get up and weld that cursed access cover in place.
Until then, he’d figured he’d just sit and catch his breath.
Terrain is one thing on a contour map, where a dip of three meters in a hundred is dead flat, and another thing on the ground, where it’s enough difference to hide an object the size of a tank.
Which is just what it seemed to have done to callsign Tootsie Four, the maintenance section’s vehicle, so far as Hans Wager could tell from his own cupola.
It wasn’t Holman’s fault.
What with the late start, they’d had to drive like a bat outta Hell to get into position. It would’ve taken the Lord and all his martyrs to save ’em if they’d stumbled into the Consies while Wager was barely able to hang on, much less shoot.
But since they caught up, she’d been keeping Charlie Three-zero about 300 meters outboard of Sparrow’s blower, just like orders. Only thing was, there was supposed to be another tank between them.
Sparrow was covering a double arc, with his tribarrel swung left and his main gun offset to the right. It was the main gun that fired, kicking a scoopload of fused earth skyward in fiery sparkles.
Wager didn’t see what the platoon leader’d shot at, but three figures jumped to their feet near the point of impact. Wager tumbled them to the ground again as blazing corpses with a burst from his tribarrel.
They were doing okay. Wager was doing okay. His facial muscles were locked in a tight rictus, and he took his fingers momentarily from the tribarrel’s grips to massage the numbness out of them.
His driver was doing all right too, now that it was just a matter of moving ahead at moderate speed. Deathdealer was traveling at about twenty kph, and Holman had been holding Charlie Three-zero to the same speed since they caught up with the rest of the platoon.
Because Sparrow’s tank was on the inside of the pivot, it was slowly drawing ahead of them. Wager felt the hull vibration change as Holman fiddled with her power and tilt controls, but the tank’s inertia took much longer to adjust.
The fan note built into a shriek.
Wager scanned the night, wishing he had the eyes of two wing gunners to help the way he would on a combat car. Having the main gun was all well and good, but he figured the firepower of another pair of tribarrels—
Via! What did Holman think they were doing? Running a race?
—would more than make up for a twenty centimeter punch in this kind of war.
“Holman!” he snarled into his intercom. “Slow us bloody—”
Charlie Three-zero’s mass had absorbed all the power inputs and was now rocketing through the night at twice her previous speed. Way too fast in the dark for anything but paved roads. Rocks clanged on the skirts as the tank crested a knoll—
And plunged down the other side, almost as steep as the berm they’d crashed off minutes before.
“—down!”
The ravine was full of Consies, jumping aside or flattening as Charlie Three-zero hurtled toward them under no more control than a 170-tonne roundshot.
Wager’s bruised body knew exactly how the impact would feel, but reflex kept that from affecting anything he did. Charlie Three-zero hit, bounced. Wager’s left hand flipped the protective cage away from the control on the tribarrel’s mount—the same place it was on a combat car. He rammed the miniature joystick straight in, firing the entire close-in defense system in a single white flash from the top of the skirts.
Guerrillas flew apart in shreds.
The door of a bunker gaped open in the opposite side of the gully. Holman had been trying to raise Charlie Three-zero’s bow to slow their forward motion. As the tank hopped forward, the bow did lift enough for the skirts to scrape the rise instead of slamming into it the way they had when trying to get out of Camp Progress.
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