either. The post-emancipation rebels survive on obsolete arms that they get under the table from the Marini monarchy.”
I wrinkled my forehead. She spent her days in a jungle at the end of the known universe, but she knew more about the realpolitik of an obscure civil war than most of us who had bled in it.
The warehouse was three times larger than necessary to house and work on a tank. But we were cramped. The place was crammed to its ceiling with crates bearing Cutler shipping labels that had apparently arrived before us. Whatever was in that pile, we didn’t need it to maintain a tank or hunt a monster. More Trueborn overkill.
Once Zhondro had rumbled the Abrams down the ramp and into the warehouse, I waited while he scuttled back from the driver’s compartment up to the commander’s seat. An Abrams’ interior resembles a Kodiak’s.
Zhondro rotated the turret out of opposite lock, so the main gun tube swung from its position pointing aft until it pointed ahead, off the tank’s prow. An Abrams’ turret hydraulics also whine exactly like a Kodiak’s turret hydraulics. The way they had on the day, ten months ago, when I first saw Zhondro.
Thirteen
Hydraulic whine faded, inside the turret of the Kodiak I commanded, as the hovertank slipped laterally along the Tassin Desert dune crest.
My company commander’s voice crackled in my helmet earpiece. “For the third time, Red Three, do you copy? Parker!”
“Copy, Red One.” I eyed the thermal display on the tank commander’s screen in front of me, and stared at the green-enhanced Tassini encampment in the midnight darkness below. “I’m looking at Position Victor, sir. But it’s no tank park. Just family flappers.” Fifty nomad tents, flap sides rolled up to take advantage of the desert’s night breeze, had been pitched around a rude stone water well.
“No mech?”
I shook my head, invisibly to my captain, as I spoke. “No fuel trucks, no soft rollers, nothing but hobbled wobbleheads grazing.”
The captain paused, then he whispered across the eight miles that separated my five-tank platoon from him and the rest of our company. “You sure?”
“We got the hatches open, and we’re upwind, skipper.” Of the three indigenous planetary faunas that Legion Heavy Brigade VI had encountered during my tour, the Brigade Webzine’s ask-atanker poll voted Bren’s dinosaurids foulest-smelling. And the wobbleheads that the Tassini rode won “foulest of the foul.”
The captain came back. “Well, over here we finally got the purple people eaters in our sights.”
The plan of this raid had been for a softside vehicle convoy to drive along a Tassini controlled road, to make a demonstration that would bait the Tassini tank unit in our area of operations away from their support base. There, the captain and our company’s other two tank platoons would ambush and destroy them. Yes, the big, bad Legion was reduced to sneaking up on rag-tag rebels.
Theoretically, Kodiaks were a century ahead of the rebels’ black market crawlers. So the brass allocated a single brigade to this war, figuring that even one Kodiak per five rebel crawler tanks would be overkill.
But we had no air support, with which the Kodiak was optimized to interface in combined-arms operations. The dune topography limited line-of-sight engagements to a thousand yards or less, which cancelled the Kodiak’s main gun range advantage. A hovertank’s over-water mobility advantage was worthless in the desert, and the Kodiak’s speed was slashed by engine breathing problems unique to the Tassin desert.
Also, Tassini tankers didn’t cower like escaped slaves and amechanical nomads, as the brass expected. The Tassini fought so hard and so well that we called them the purple people eaters.
The captain presumably had visual on the Tassini crawlers, approaching the ambush kill zone, as he spoke to me. Meantime, my platoon had looped in behind the Tassini tanks, to destroy their logistic support.
I wrinkled my forehead. She spent her days in a jungle at the end of the known universe, but she knew more about the realpolitik of an obscure civil war than most of us who had bled in it.
The warehouse was three times larger than necessary to house and work on a tank. But we were cramped. The place was crammed to its ceiling with crates bearing Cutler shipping labels that had apparently arrived before us. Whatever was in that pile, we didn’t need it to maintain a tank or hunt a monster. More Trueborn overkill.
Once Zhondro had rumbled the Abrams down the ramp and into the warehouse, I waited while he scuttled back from the driver’s compartment up to the commander’s seat. An Abrams’ interior resembles a Kodiak’s.
Zhondro rotated the turret out of opposite lock, so the main gun tube swung from its position pointing aft until it pointed ahead, off the tank’s prow. An Abrams’ turret hydraulics also whine exactly like a Kodiak’s turret hydraulics. The way they had on the day, ten months ago, when I first saw Zhondro.
Thirteen
Hydraulic whine faded, inside the turret of the Kodiak I commanded, as the hovertank slipped laterally along the Tassin Desert dune crest.
My company commander’s voice crackled in my helmet earpiece. “For the third time, Red Three, do you copy? Parker!”
“Copy, Red One.” I eyed the thermal display on the tank commander’s screen in front of me, and stared at the green-enhanced Tassini encampment in the midnight darkness below. “I’m looking at Position Victor, sir. But it’s no tank park. Just family flappers.” Fifty nomad tents, flap sides rolled up to take advantage of the desert’s night breeze, had been pitched around a rude stone water well.
“No mech?”
I shook my head, invisibly to my captain, as I spoke. “No fuel trucks, no soft rollers, nothing but hobbled wobbleheads grazing.”
The captain paused, then he whispered across the eight miles that separated my five-tank platoon from him and the rest of our company. “You sure?”
“We got the hatches open, and we’re upwind, skipper.” Of the three indigenous planetary faunas that Legion Heavy Brigade VI had encountered during my tour, the Brigade Webzine’s ask-atanker poll voted Bren’s dinosaurids foulest-smelling. And the wobbleheads that the Tassini rode won “foulest of the foul.”
The captain came back. “Well, over here we finally got the purple people eaters in our sights.”
The plan of this raid had been for a softside vehicle convoy to drive along a Tassini controlled road, to make a demonstration that would bait the Tassini tank unit in our area of operations away from their support base. There, the captain and our company’s other two tank platoons would ambush and destroy them. Yes, the big, bad Legion was reduced to sneaking up on rag-tag rebels.
Theoretically, Kodiaks were a century ahead of the rebels’ black market crawlers. So the brass allocated a single brigade to this war, figuring that even one Kodiak per five rebel crawler tanks would be overkill.
But we had no air support, with which the Kodiak was optimized to interface in combined-arms operations. The dune topography limited line-of-sight engagements to a thousand yards or less, which cancelled the Kodiak’s main gun range advantage. A hovertank’s over-water mobility advantage was worthless in the desert, and the Kodiak’s speed was slashed by engine breathing problems unique to the Tassin desert.
Also, Tassini tankers didn’t cower like escaped slaves and amechanical nomads, as the brass expected. The Tassini fought so hard and so well that we called them the purple people eaters.
The captain presumably had visual on the Tassini crawlers, approaching the ambush kill zone, as he spoke to me. Meantime, my platoon had looped in behind the Tassini tanks, to destroy their logistic support.
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