The Tank Lords by David Drake

He was down in the turret, trying to get some sort of empathy with his screens and controls before the next time he needed them. He was okay on mine-clearing, now; he had the right reflexes.

But the next time, Tootsie Six wouldn’t be ordering him to lay a mine-clearance charge, it’d be some other cursed thing. It’d be the butt of Hans Wager and the whole cursed task force when he didn’t know what the hell to do.

“Look, Holman,” he said, because lift was something he did understand, lift and tribarrels laying fire on the other mother before he corrected his aim at you. “We’re in ground effect. The fans pressurize the air in the plenum chamber underneath. The ground’s the bottom of the pressure chamber, right? And that keeps us floating.”

“Right, but—”

Holman swore. The column was paralleling the uphill side of a wooded fenceline. She’d attempted to correct their tank’s tendency to drift downslope, but the inertia of 170 steel and iridium tonnes had caught up with her again. One quadrant of Wager’s main screen exploded in a confetti of splintered trees and fence posts.

“Bleedin’ motherin’ martyrs!” snarled the intercom as Holman’s commo helmet dutifully transmitted to the most-recently accessed recipient.

Friction from the demolished fence and vegetation pulled the tank farther out of its intended line, despite the driver’s increasingly violent efforts to swing them away. When the cumulative over-corrections swung the huge pendulum their way, the tank lurched upslope and grounded its right skirt with a shock that rattled Wager’s head against the breech of the main gun.

Bloody amateur!

Like Hans Wager, tank commander.

Blood and martyrs.

“S’okay, Holman,” Wager said aloud, more or less meaning it. “Any one you walk away from.”

He’d finally cleared the mines at Happy Days, hadn’t he?

“Look, the lift,” he went on. “Without something pretty solid underneath, these panzers drop. Sink like stones. But combat cars, the ones you been watchin’, they’ve got enough power for their weight they can use thrust to keep ’em up, not just ground effect.”

Wager wriggled the helmet. It’d gotten twisted a little on his brow when he bounced a moment ago. Their tank was now sedately tracking the car ahead, as though the mess behind them had been somebody else’s problem.

“Only thing is,” Wager continued, “a couple of the cars, they’re running’ short a fan or two themselves by now. Talkin’ to the guys on One-one while we laagered. Stuff that never happens when you’re futzing around a firebase, you get twenty kays out on a route march and blooie.”

“We’re all systems green,” Holman said. “Ah, sarge? I think I’m gettin’ the hang of it, you know? But the weight, it still throws me.”

“Yeah, well,” Wager said, touching the joystick cautiously so as not to startle the other vehicles. The turret mechanism whined restively; Screen Two’s swatch of rolling farmland, centered around the orange pipper, shifted slightly across the panorama of the main screen.

“Look, when we get to the crossing point, if we do, get across that cursed bridge fast, right?” he added. “It’s about ready to fall in the river, see, from shelling? So put’cher foot on the throttle ‘n keep it there.”

“No, sarge.”

“Huh?”

“Sarge, I’m sorry,” Holman said, “but if we do that, we bring it down for sure. And us. Sarge, look, I’m, you know, I’m not great on tanks. But I took a lotta trucks over piddly bridges, right? We’ll take it slow and especially no braking or acceleration. That’ll work if anything does. I promise. Okay?”

She sounded nervous, telling a veteran he was wrong.

She sounded like she curst well thought she was right, though.

Via, maybe she was. Holman didn’t have any line experience . . . but that didn’t mean she didn’t have any experience. They needed everything they could get right now, her and him and everybody else in Task Force Ranson. . . .

“They say she’s a real space cadet,” Wager said aloud. “Her crew does. Cap’n Ranson, I mean.”

“Because she’s a woman,” Holman said flatly.

“Because she flakes out!” Wager snapped. “Because she goes right off into dreamland in the middle a’ talking.”

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