Overkill by Robert Buettner Page A

The captain understood his operation, and he understood what he was seeing. But he wasn’t understanding what I was seeing.
    What I was seeing through the thermal wasn’t a tank park emptied out of tanks. There were no fuel trucks, no spares vans, no sentries. It was a movable tent cluster occupied by sleeping noncombatant nomads.
    Below me, something moved. I leaned forward toward the display again and watched, then I radioed, “Red One, I’m watching a little kid who just wandered out from one tent in his nightshirt. He’s taking a leak against some rocks.”
    “Sergeant, you’re brevet Third Platoon commander because Haren let a Tassini kid like that get too close, with a satchel charge under his nightshirt.”
    I sighed. The captain liked Lieutenant Haren. We all had.
    The captain asked, “No bunkers? No hard-shell vehicles?”
    The hardest things in that encampment were fired clay milk jugs. “Uh, no, sir.”
    “Then load flechette, and stand by.”
    I swallowed. One 145-mm anti-personnel flechette round from a Kodiak’s main gun distributed razor microdarts in an expanding, conical pattern. The pattern spread at this range insured that, within the tent cluster, no object larger in circumference than a child’s fist would remain unpenetrated. Five tanks, one round each, to assure overkill. Three seconds after the order to fire, those tents would be confetti on the breeze. Every living thing within that encampment larger than a sand flea would be dead, or hemorrhaging life faster than pee splashing rocks.
    I toggled to platoon net. “Red Group, this is Red Three. Load flechette. Then form up, on line with visual on the target, and stand by.”
    I looked away from the thermal’s eyepiece, across at my gunner, who faced me in the turret, separated from me by the recoil path of the main gun breech and its autoload ramp. As assistant tank commander, he had heard my exchange over the Command Net. Beneath his helmet visor his eyes were wide.

    “Parker?” In the mud yard of the warehouse on Dead End, Kit Born poked my shoulder.
    I blinked, then turned and faced her.
    She said, “to answer your question, Parker, no, it wasn’t your friend’s caste line that surprised me. What surprised me is that a man brave enough to engage hovertanks with crawlers, like horse cavalry against panzers, would have anything to do with a merc like you.”
    I’ve never considered slugging a woman before, but when I looked down at my right hand, it had balled into a fist.
    Then another Sixer, this one a fresh-washed hired car, with a climate-sealed cabin, bounced into the yard.
    Kit and I turned as it stopped, and Kit’s new boss, who was already mine, stepped out into the mud. Cutler wore a designer’s flap-pocketed idea of battle dress uniform, and a bush hat with one side pinned up. Behind him, his driver unloaded matched luggage. We already had a warehouse full of crap that we didn’t need, so it hardly bothered me that Cutler was going to dress for dinner in the jungle.
    Cutler tugged one booted foot out of the mud, turned his boot sole up to examine it, then turned his frown on Kit. “Right now, how many obstacles stand between us and a live grezzen?”
    She ticked items off on her fingers as she spoke. “A hundred miles of bad road. One river ford. Lots of lesser monsters. That’s three.” She raised her thumb. “Four would be if you suffer an outbreak of common sense.”
    He sniffed, ignored her, and faced me while he pointed at the Abrams. “How about the equipment?”
    “The C-lift trailer’s got to be loaded. Fuel bladders, spares, all three ammunition lockers, Sleeper, repair ’bot. Then we run the checklists on the Abrams, remount the auxiliary guns, and we’ll be good to go. We could finish tonight, but three days would make better sense. Unless we need any of that other stuff.” I pointed at the equipment mountain.
    He pointed at us. “The other stuff doesn’t concern you. We leave in the morning,