The Tank Lords by David Drake

And besides, he was busy figuring out what Central thought it was doing with his tank.

The warrant leader couldn’t countermand the orders coming from Firebase Purple, but he could ask his own artificial intelligence to tell him what firing solution was being fed to it. Screen Three obligingly threw up the figures for azimuth, elevation, and range.

“Blood ‘n martyrs,” Henk Ortnahme whispered.

Now he knew why the departure of Task Force Ranson had been delayed.

They had to wait for the Terran World Government’s recce satellite to come over the horizon—

Herman’s Whore fired its main gun; cyan lightning and a thunderclap through the open hatch, a blast of foul gases within the turret.

—so they could shoot it down.

The unexpected bolt didn’t blind Cooter because his visor reacted in microseconds to block the intense glare. The shock stunned him for a moment anyway; then the big man began to run through the mass of restive vehicles.

A tank—Deathdealer, Blue One—slid forward. When the big blower was clear, entering the Yokel area between the demolished shed and a whole one, Captain Ranson’s Warmonger fell in behind it. It was as though the echoing blast from Herman’s Whore had triggered an iridium avalanche.

The third vehicle, another combat car, sidled up to the line of departure. That’d be One-five, its driver a newbie on whom Cooter had decided to take a chance. The fellow was matching his blower’s speed to that of the leading vehicles, but he had his bow pointing thirty degrees off the axis of motion.

Some dickhead Yokel had parked a light truck just inside the Slammer’s area. One-five’s tail skirts managed to tap the little vehicle and send it spinning halfway up the berm, a graphic illustration of the difference between a tonne at rest and thirty tonnes in motion.

Cooter reached his car panting with exertion, anger, and a relieved awareness of how bloody near that asshole Riddle had made him cut it. One-one was already pulling into line for the run through Camp Progress, though the second and third combat cars would spread left and right as outriders as soon as they left the gate.

A Yokel wearing fatigues cut for somebody shorter put a hand on Cooter’s shoulder as he set his foot on Flamethrower’s skirt. The fellow carried a slung grenade launcher, a kitbag, and a satchel of ammunition.

Cooter had never seen him before.

“Who the hell are you?” he snarled over the fans’ intake howl. The skirts were quivering with repressed violence, and the nameless Blue Three was already headed into the Yokel compound.

“I’m Dick,” the fellow shouted. “From last night. Lieutenant, can you use a grenadier for this run?”

Cooter started at him a second, five seconds . . . ten. One-six was pulling out. . . .

“You bet your ass I can, turtle,” Cooter said. “Welcome aboard!”

Chapter Six

The upper half of June Ranson’s visor showed a light-enhanced view of her surroundings. It flicked from side to side as her head bobbed in the nervous-pigeon motions of somebody with more things to worry about than any human being could handle.

Deathdealer led the column. Even from 200 meters ahead, the wake of the tank’s vast passage rocked Warmonger’s own considerable mass. Willens was driving slightly left of the center of Deathdealer’s track, avoiding some of the turbulence and giving himself a better direct view forward. It raised the danger from mines, though; the tank would set off anything before the combat car reached it, if their tracks were identical. . . .

She let it go for now. The roadway between Camp Progress and the civilian settlement over the ridge had been cleared in the fighting the night before.

Stolley had his tribarrel cocked forward, parallel to the car’s axis of motion instead of sweeping the quadrant to the left side like he ought to. Stolley figured—and they all figured, Junebug Ranson as sure as her wing gunner—that first crack at any Consies hereabouts would come from the front.

But a ninety percent certainty meant one time in ten you were dead. Deathdealer and the bow gunner, June Ranson, could handle the front. Stolley’s job—

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