The Tank Lords Read Online Free PDF Page A

impressive on the entertainment cube?
    "On the way," warned the voice.
    The big tribarrel whined again from the combat car, the silent lash of its bolts answered this time by a crash of rifle shots. A flattened bullet burred through the air over where Rob lay. It was lost in the eerie, thunderous shriek from the northwest.
    "Splash," the helmet said.
    The ground bucked. From the grainplot spouted rock, smoke and metal fragments into a black column fifty meters high.
    "Are we on?" the voice demanded.
    "Oh, Lord," Rob prayed, beating his fists against the sand, "Oh Lord."
    "Via, what is this?" the helmet wondered aloud. Then, "All guns, battery five."
    And the earth began to ripple and gout under the hammer of the guns.
     
     
    Rolling Hot
     
     
Chapter One
    The camera light threw the shadow of the Slammers' officer harshly across the berm which the sun had colored bronze a few moments ago as it set. Her hair was black and cut as short as that of a man.
    "For instance, Captain Ranson," Dick Suilin said, "here at Camp Progress there are three thousand national troops and less than a hundred of your mercenaries, but—"
    shoop  
    Ranson's eyes widened, glinting like pale gray marble. Fritzi Dole kept the camera focused tightly on her face. He'd gotten an instinct for a nervous subject in the three years he'd recorded Suilin's probing interviews.
    "—the cost to our government—"
    shoop-shoop  
    "—is greater for your handful of—"
    "Incoming!" screamed Captain June Ranson as she dived for the dirt. It wasn't supposed to be happening here—
    But for the first instant, you never really believed it could be happening, not even in the sectors where it happened every bleeding night. And when things were bad enough for one side or the other to hire Hammer's Slammers you could be pretty sure that there were no safe sectors.
    Camp Progress was on the ass end of Prosperity's inhabited continent—three hundred kilometers north of the coast and the provincial capital, Kohang, but still a thousand kays south of where the real fighting went on in the areas bordering the World Government enclaves. Sure, there'd been reports that the Conservatives were nosing around the neighborhood, but nothing the Yokel troops themselves couldn't handle if they got their thumbs out.
    For a change.
    Camp Progress was a Yokel—was a National Army—training and administrative center, while for the Slammers it served as a maintenance and replacement facility. In addition to those formal uses, the southern sector gave Hammer a place to post troops who were showing signs of having been at the sharp end a little too long.
    People like Junebug Ranson, for instance, who'd frozen with her eyes wide open during a firefight that netted thirty-five Consies killed-in-action.
    So Captain Ranson had been temporarily transferred to command the Slammers' guard detachment at Camp Progress, a "company" of six combat cars. There'd been seventeen cars in her line company when it was up to strength; but she couldn't remember a standard day in a war zone that they had been up to strength . . .
    And anyway, Ranson knew as well as anybody else that she needed a rest before she got some of her people killed.
    shoop  
    But she wasn't going to rest here.
    The bell was ringing in the Slammers' Tactical Operations Center, a command car in for maintenance. The vehicle's fans had all been pulled, leaving the remainder as immobile as a 30-tonne iridium boulder; but it still had working electronics.
    The Yokel garrison had a klaxon which they sounded during practice alerts. It was silent now despite the fact that camp security was supposedly a local responsibility.
    Slammers were flattening or sprinting for their vehicles, depending on their personal assessment of the situation. The local reporter gaped at Ranson while his cameraman spun to find out what was going on. The camera light sliced a brilliant swath through the nighted camp.
    Ranson's left cheek scraped the gritty soil