With angry helplessness, Kustaa forced out a long breath as he steadied his aim on the gunner's vision-block; bullets were already sparking and whickering off the sloped plates of the car's armor, leaving lead-splashes and gouges but not penetrating the welded-alloy plates. The warcar lurched over the rough ground, its six independently-sprung wheels moving with a horrible semblance of life, like the legs of some monstrous insect. A few seconds and that line of fire would walk across his missiles, across him. He squeezed gently at the trigger—
—And the shot went wild as a streak of fire dazzled across his vision to impact on the glacis-plate of the warcar. Pazooka, he thought, with an involuntary snigger of relief. Actually a Finnish copy of the German 88mm Panzerschreck, but never mind… A globe of magenta fire blossomed against the armor, and the warcar turned flank-on and stopped as if it had run into a wall. The American's mind drew in the picture within, the long jet of plasma and superheated metal from the shaped-charge warhead spearing through like a hot poker through cellophane, searing flesh, flash-igniting fuel and ammunition. A second of hesitation, and then the turret of the car blew apart with a sharp rending crang; pieces of jagged metal went whirring by overhead, and he dropped back to a prudent knees-and-elbows position.
Now he could see the rocket-launcher team; the backblast had set a grass fire that was a black and orange finger pointing to their position. The gunner rose, letting the sheet-metal tube droop behind him while his partner carefully slid a second round home and slapped his shoulder. They shifted position in a quick scuttling run, moving a hundred yards north towards the rear of the convoy-, dug-in guerrillas cheered as they passed.
Kustaa wiped a shaky hand over his forehead; that had been far too close, and he could smell the rank musk of his own sweat, taste the sickly-salt of it on his lips. His eye caught the wristwatch. Only four minutes, and the muscles of his shoulders were shaking. He forced them to untense as he rolled back to look for his original targets; dense black smoke was billowing past, obscuring the view, but he could see one of the APC's past the trucks glowing cherry-red with interior fires, another nose-down in the roadside ditch, disabled by a contact-mine but exchanging fire with the guerrillas. No, another lancing shriek of fire from the antitank launcher, striking high on its flank; the small turret on its deck fell silent.
The women were still visible through the thickening smoke to his front, barely; milling and screaming, some with their underwear around their ankles. No, the big black woman was running among them, pushing them down into whatever safety there was on fire-beaten ground. The German-speaking girl with the braids had dashed forward; now she was dragging the Janissary Kustaa had shot back toward the road, leaning into it with her hands clenched in the shoulder-straps of his web harness. The American could see her face quite clearly, huge-eyed with terror and speckled with blood now as thickly as the freckles, her mouth flared in a rictus of effort and determination.
From the way the man's head lolled Kustaa thought there was probably very little point, but he had done things as pointless himself, in combat. Overload, no way to take it all in, so you focused on something. Your job, or some detail you could make your job, even if it was meaningless and the only sensible thing was to scream and run, it was still something you could do. Better than freezing, or cowering, or panic. At least, that's my preference, the American thought, scanning the thickening smoke for a target. As for the rights and wrongs of a slave-whore risking her life to save a slave-soldier, he supposed she was operating on the genera] assumption that the people shooting at her were not friends. He could sympathize with that, too; the equation "someone trying to kill me = enemy" had a certain primitive force…
From their right, from the north beyond the veil of smoke, came a sound like a chainsaw. But far too loud; it would have had to be a Paul Bunyan-sized model. A courier dashed up, fell panting on his knees by Arvid and gasped out a message as he leaned on his rifle; between the breathy gabble and the thick Karelian dialect, Kustaa caught only the English word in the middle of the sentence: "Gatling." Then he heard the engine-sound from the same direction, and saw two horizontal lines of white-orange light stab out of the smoke. Where they struck the edge of the uncleared forest, trees fell, sawn through at knee height in white-flashing explosions that sent splinters flying as lethal as shrapnel. The hundred-foot pines swayed forward, quivered, fell.
One smashed down in front of the forward wheels of the Draka flakpanzer, clearing the smoke like a fan for an instant before the burning truck next to it ignited the dry resinous branches. Kustaa recognized the type, Dragon class, two four-wheeled power units at each end and a big boxy turret between them: antiaircraft mounting, originally designed to escort mechanized-infantry columns. The armament was two six-barreled gatling-cannon, 25mm; each was capable of pumping out 6,000 rounds a minute. That was why the vehicle was so large, it had to be to carry enough ammunition for the automatic cannon to be useful. Very effective against ground-attack aircraft coming in low; at short range, against surface targets, whatever came in front of the muzzles simply disappeared.
"Shit," Arvid said, listening to the courier and twisting to keep the attacking flakpanzer in view, then rising to his knees and cupping his hands about his mouth. "Tuuvo! Keikkonnen!" The rocket-launcher team looked up from their new blind. "Circle around and take it out!" he shouted. They rose and went back into the woods at a flat run, wasting no time on acknowledgments. "This had better be worth it, American," he continued in a flat conversational voice.
The Dragon's turret moved again, a 180-degree arc; two seconds of the savage chainsaw roar, and a hundred yards of forest went down like grass before a scythe, the twin lines of fire solid bars through the smoke. Then it lurched forward again, the wedge-shaped bow plowing through burning timber in a shower of sparks. The outside wheel-sets were in the ditch to allow the gun-truck to ease past the burning wreckage in the center of the road, and the thick cylindrical tubes of the gatlings were canted up sharply to compensate. Trees were burning half a kilometer back into the woods, ignited by stray incendiary rounds and sparks, and he could hear the pulsing bellow of a full-fledged forest fire beginning.
And the volume of small-arms fire from the area under the iron flail of the flakpanzer's cannon was slacking off noticeably.
Another runner slid into the covered zone, gasping as the shock of landing on her back jarred the crudely-bandaged arm bound across her body.
"There were four trucks more of infantry at the rear of the convoy," she gasped, between deep panting breaths.
"Replacements," Arvid rasped. "Goddam."
"They've pushed us back into the woods on the west side but everything's on fire, we and the snakes are both breaking contact and trying to circle round, it's spreading fast." She glanced back to where the armored vehicle was systematically clearing this side of the road. "The antitank teams on the west are out of range and the one you sent back up toward us is gone." The runner gestured toward her bound arm. "Nearly got it in the same burst. Eino's going to try and take out that fucker with a—"
Another roar of autocannon fire. Kustaa swiveled his rifle, in time to see three figures in guerrilla uniform bounce to their feet and race forward toward the Dragon with satchel charges in their hands. The gatlings can't depress enough to stop them, God damn it, they're going to make it! went through him with a shock of elation.
The crew of the Dragon reached the same conclusion. Hatches cracked open on the square-wheeled power-units at either end of the long vehicle, and the muzzles of machine-pistols whickered spitefully.
"Shit, shit, shit," Kustaa cursed under his breath, emptying his magazine at the narrow gap between hatch-cover and deck. The machine-pistol jerked and ceased firing, lay slumped for a moment before it pulled back inside with a limp dragging motion that suggested an inert body being manhandled down into the driving compartment. The hatch clanged shut again, and the guerrilla was only ten yards away, his arm going back in the beginning of the arc that would th
row the cloth bag of explosives under the hull of the Dragon; the other two satchelmen were down. "Go, go, go," the American chanted under his breath, eyes urging the Finn on as his hands felt blindly for a fresh clip and slid it into the loading well of the rifle.
The hatch opened again, this time only for a second, just long enough for a stick-grenade to come spinning out. It flew in a flat arc, whirling on its own axis, the sharp bang of its detonation coming while it was still at head-height. The Finn stopped and fell with an abrupt finality, as if he were a puppet whose strings had been cut, and the sweep of his arm faltered. Wobbling, the satchel charge fell short, throwing up a plume of rock and soil amid the muffled thump of an open-air explosion. Dust cleared, with a ringing hail of rock on metal; the armored cab of the Dragon was intact, but three of the wheels on the outer flank were shredded ruin, and the fourth was jammed by a twisted steel panel.
"Good," Arvid said. "Runner, get back to Eino; bring some of those trees down on that thing, there're a dozen or so in reach." He looked at her arm. "And then get out to the fallback rendezvous; you're not fit for combat."
A shout from a machine-gun team beside them. "Ahh, thought so," Arvid muttered. "They're going to try and peel us back up here while the Dragon keeps the center of our line busy."
Figures were dodging through the smoke of the burning trucks on the road ahead, behind the clump of women prone in the roadside grass. A sudden scream like a retching cat, and a line of fire streaked out toward Kustaa's position, slamming the cluster of rocks ahead of him with an explosion that sent fragments of granite blasting uncomfortably close overhead. The sound was fainter than it should have been; his eardrums were ringing, overstrained and losing their capacity to absorb the battering noise. Muzzle-flashes and tracer, and the Janissary infantry poured out into the cleared zone along the road, into the waist-high grass and stumps.
A score of them, running, some falling as the Finnish positions swept them. Squads throwing themselves down to give covering fire, others leapfrogging their positions. The American picked a target, fired, shifted to another. Lizard-mottled uniforms, drug-magazined assault rifles, machetes slung over their backs. Bucket-shaped helmets with cutouts for the faces; he could see one's mouth move, a curse, as he broke stride to avoid stamping on a hysterical girl who lay face-down, beating her hands into the earth. A sergeant, bare-headed save for a checked bandanna around his gleaming dome of skull. Kustaa's bullet struck his thigh, sledged him around in a circle that sent a cone of tracer into the air from the light machine-gun in his hand. Then he was up again, kneeling, firing from the hip and waving his men on as blood gouted from the massive flap of torn muscle hanging down his leg.
Kustaa slapped another magazine into his weapon, jacked the slide with his right hand; the metal of the barrel burned his palm, overheating from rapid fire. The volume of fire from the Draka infantry was appalling, and damnably well-aimed. He ducked as he reloaded, thankful of an excuse to get out of the way of the light high-velocity bullets that tinked and spanged off the stones before him. He had seen enough combat to know that a firefight was less dangerous than it sounded, it took thousands of rounds to cause a casualty, but standing up in front of that many automatic weapons was still unhealthy.
"We can't hold them!" he shouted to the man beside him.
"Hell we can't!" Arvid said, reaching for a handclasp solenoid-detonator linked to a spreading fan of wires. "This is what I laid the directional-mines' for."
Kustaa froze. His mind's eye saw the weapons, curved steel plates lined with plastique, faced in turn with hundreds of ballbearings. Lake giant shotgun shells, their casings spiked to the stumps and ready to fill the whole space between forest and road with a hail of ricocheting metal. His hand streaked toward the guerrilla's.
"The women—" he shouted. The Finn hacked back-ward with an elbow, a paralyzing blow into the point of Kustaa's shoulder.
"Fuck them," he said, still not raising his voice. His other hand clenched, and the roar of the fires was cut by explosions and a sound like the whining of a million wasps. "Get your missiles ready, American," he continued. Then he raised his voice to a shout. "Follow me, the rest of you, don't let them rally!"
A leap, and he was over the stones and running toward the road. The others followed him with a deep guttural shout, loud enough to drown out the shrill screaming of the wounded lying among the murdered trees.
The Twin-Zebra slid in, flaps dappling the square wing to shed lift, touched smoothly down with the gentle touch of an expert's hands on the controls, rolled to a stop not twenty meters from the two cars. The ramp dropped, but the first two passengers were down before the further end touched. Bodyguards: Special Tasks Section, General Staff Division.
Ah, Andrew von Shrakenberg mused. They did send someone important. Standard camo uniforms, but cut away from the arms, customized assault rifles, automatic pistols in quick-draw Buchliner harnesses across the stomach. The eyes slid over him without pausing, flickering in an endless animal wariness. Special training, careful selection, and there weren't very many of them. Even among Draka, few had the aptitude, and fewer still were the Citizens who could be spared for such work.
Two more figures came walking sedately down the ramp in garrison blacks. Silently, he approved; even out here, fairly near the sharp end, it was a little ridiculous for staff types to travel in field kit and armed to the teeth. He drew himself up and saluted, conscious of the other officer doing likewise.
"Merarch Andrew von Shrakenberg," he said. "Cohortarch Corwin Hartmann. Service to the State."
The leading staff officer removed her peaked cap and nodded; small, slight, gray-streaked brown hair, broad face and snub nose… She smiled at the slight shock of recognition.
Tantie Sannie, I'll be damned, he thought, slightly dazed. Sannie van Reenan; Uncle Karl's aide… Andrew had been born on Oakenwald, the original von Shrakenberg estate south of Archona; his father a younger brother of Karl, landless until after the Great War. Tantie Sannie had been there often enough when he visited, had taken him under her wing when he was stationed there during his year at the Staff Academy.
"Glory to the Race," she replied formally. "Strategos Sannie van Reenan. Soon to be von Shrakenberg." A laugh; this time his brows had risen appreciably. "Permission to satisfy your curiosity, Andrew. Yes, its officially Tantie Sannie now, not just by courtesy."
"Uncle Karl?"
"Who else, man?" She parted her stomach. "You're due for another cousin, come eight months, too." She turned to Hartmann, saluted. "Combinin" the tour with a little family business, Centurion." A wave to the other officer. "Cohortarch Ivar Barden Couteaux." A cluster of gray-uniformed auxiliaries were following, secretaries and clerks.
"Ah, mmm, this is rather sudden, Strategos," Andrew muttered, as they walked toward the cars.
"It's breakin' out all over, now the war's—as we jokin'ly put it—over. An' I'm not that old, Merarch; bit of a risk, but one can always terminate. About time I did my duty to the Race, anyway."
She stepped into the car, paused standing with one hand on the rollbar, looking about. Andrew stopped beside her, stripping away the veil of familiarity and trying to see it through her eyes. Ugly, of course; vegetation stripped away to leave rutted sand and mud, pavements of gravel and crushed stone. Bunkers, buildings of modular asbestos-cement heaped about with earth berms, a few floating balloon-held aerials. Spider-webbed with communications trenches, skeletal support towers for lookouts and arc-lights…
"You've got a Century of the III Airborne Legion here, I understand," she said, nodding to a section of revetments; the long drooping blades of helicopter rotors showed over the sandbagged enclosures.
"Ya, it's unorthodox"—Citizen Force troops were rarely brigaded with Janissaries, and it was even rarer for them to come under the command of an officer commanding a Janissary formation—"but we needed a quick-reaction force pretty bad. Trio of gunboats, too." Nearly three thousand troops inside the wire, counting several hundr
ed unarmed Auxiliaries in the maintenance and combat-support units.
"I wondered why Castle Tarleton would send anyone to Finland," he continued, as the driver twisted the utility-car's fuel-feed. "Back to HQ, Mustapha. We goin' get some organic helicopter transport of our own?"
"Not my department, officially," she said, as the car accelerated with a quiet chuffchuffchuff of steam. "Unofficially, no, not fo' while. Bottlenecks in the turbine plants, they tell me, an' maintenance problems. Still a new technology, aftah all. Also, we're givin' priority to convertin' more Citizen Force units to air-cavalry, cuttin' back on the heavy armor."
"An' we get the short end of the stick, as usual," he said. Conscious of her questioning look, he added: "Take it this is a general survey?"
"Very general," she replied. "Makin' a swing-through all the way from China to the Atlantic, gettin' an overview, combinin' with the Board's compilation of regular data." She was silent for a moment. "A mess,'t' be frank."
"Well, we did take a shonuff big bite, this time," he said, absently returning the salute of a Citizen officer as they ate dust down the gravel street.
"Hmmmm, yes. Still, only thing we could do, at the time." A pause. "Long-range strategic situation's what I was talkin' about, though." Sannie reached for her cigarettes, remembered the doctor's advice and settled for a hard candy. "Damn those Fritz, they had to go an' discover tobacco's bad for yo'. Anyway… we're just realizin' down in Archona that the progress of the Race is, ahhh, enterin' a new phase."