“Blue Three—” still no emotion in the voice “—if you like, for this operation I can replace you and your driver with more experienced—”
“Negative!” Wager snarled. He hand-keyed his helmet to break out of the council net. “Tootsie Six, that’s a negative. We’ll do our job. We understand. Out.”
“Roger, Blue Three,” said the voice. “All Tootsie units, courses and phase lines are being down-loaded into your AIs—now.”
Wager’s palms rubbed his thighs.
“Sarge?” whispered his intercom. “Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me, Holman,” Wager said. “I think I just bought us both the farm.”
Thirty or more guns aimed at them, and Blue Three wouldn’t be able to reply until the combat cars had the data needed to target every one of the enemy tanks.
Yeah, he understood all right.
Chapter Twelve
“D’ye got medics along?” the driver from Blue Three whined over the radio, a female voice in June Ranson’s ears.
She sounded stunned and terrified, just as she was supposed to. The tank was the only vehicle of Task Force Ranson that would give a close-enough-to-correct reading to Yokel direction finders. . . .
“Via, we need medics. Via, we need help. This is ah, Tootsie Six, over.”
A game, a test program for the officer commanding 1st of the 4th armored. An electronic construct which was perfectly believable, like any good test program. The officer being tested would be judged on his reactions. . . .
“Booster,” Ranson muttered. “Hostile Order of Battle.”
She shouldn’t have to speak. Electrons should flow from her nerve endings and race down the gold-foil channels of the artificial intelligence, then spring over high-frequency carrier waves to the sensor array of Blue Three. June Ranson should feel everything.
She should be the vehicles she commanded. . . .
“Tootsie Six, this is Delta three Mike four one,” replied the voice that had been unfamiliar until it began whispering over the UHF Allied Common Channel an hour before, requesting Task Force Ranson’s position. “We have doctors and medical supplies. We’re ten kilometers from Kawana. We’ll bring your medical help in half an hour, but you must stay where you are. Do you understand? Mike four one over.”
The water of Upper Creek flared beneath Warmonger in a veil. The spray was iridescent where daggers of sunlight stabbed it through the low canopy. The two cars closely following Warmonger were hidden by the spray and the creek’s wide loops.
Upper Creek drained the area south of Sugar Knob. The trees here had been cropped about ten years before so that their cellulose could be converted by bacteria to crude protein for animal feed. The second-growth trees that replaced the original forest were densely packed and had thin boles. They provided good cover, but they weren’t obstacles for vehicles of the power and weight of combat cars.
Yokel tanks would find the conditions passable also, even if they left the trails worn by animals and the local populace.
“We can’t go anywhere,” Blue Three’s driver whined. “We—”
Warmonger’s artificial intelligence threw a print sidebar on the holographic condenser lens.
“—only got two cars left and they’re shot t’ bloody hell. We’re right at the little store, where the road crosses the crik.”
Willens, following the course Ranson and the AI set for him, nosed Warmonger against the north bank of the creek. The black, root-laced soil rose only a meter above the black, peat-rich water. The car snorted, then mounted to firm ground through a bending wall of saplings.
The distance between barren Chin Peng Rise and the thin trees of Sugar Knob was about a kilometer and a half. Ranson’s western element followed a winding three-kay course to stay low and unnoticed while encircling the Yokels’ expected deployment area. Cooter and the two-car eastern element had an even longer track to follow to their hide . . . but the Yokel tanks seemed to be giving them the time they needed.
Willens advanced twenty meters further, to give room to One-five and One-one behind him, then settled with his fans on idle.
Task Force Ranson didn’t want to stumble into contact before they knew where all their targets were.
Blue Three’s sensors had greater range and precision by an order of magnitude than those crammed into the combat cars, but the cars could process the data passed to them by the larger vehicle. The sidebar on Ranson’s multi-function display listed callsigns, isolated in the cross-talk overheard by the superb electronics of the tank pretending to be in Kawana while it waited behind Chin Peng Rise north of the tiny hamlet.