Crew 3-14-C
Corwyth — Day Fifteen
The dead man’s seat still smelled of him.
Emeric Voss stood on the rear deck of the Iron Widow with a mug of tea going lukewarm in his fist and watched his loader scrub the gunner’s compartment with a rag and a jerrycan of river water.
Josef Kallin worked with his head and shoulders inside the turret, and all Voss could see of him was the back of his flak vest and his boots braced against the hull.
He had been at it for twenty minutes.
He had done it yesterday and the day before that.
The water ran out of the hatch in a thin pink thread, down the turret ring and across the engine deck, and pooled in the rust-colored dirt of the embankment.
It was not blood anymore.
It was the foam of the seat, which had taken the blood in and would not give it up.
It would smell like copper and cold iron until someone cut the foam out with a knife.
Anselm Dreyer had been the gunner for four years.
On the ninth day a Concord anti-tank missile had come in low across the Varn and punched through the turret side at the height of his ribs, a shaped-charge jet no thicker than a thumb, and it had put itself through the compartment in less than a millisecond.
The blow-out panels in the bustle had vented as they were built to, and the ammunition stowed behind Dreyer had not detonated, and the crew had lived.
Kallin and the driver, Rasa Eldin, had been pulled out of the hatches by their belts.
Voss had come out on his own, and he remembered nothing of the climb.
Dreyer they had taken out afterward, in pieces, with a folded tarp.
Voss drank the tea.
He set the mug on the hull and took from the breast pocket of his tunic a thin black notebook with a rubber band around it, and slid the band off, and opened it to the last page.
Fifteen years.
Thirteen names, in his small square hand, one to a line, each with a date.
He had kept it since the second man died.
It was not a diary.
It did not record how anybody had died, only that they had, and under whose command.
He thought of it as an account.
A sergeant took on a crew the way a man takes on a debt, and there ought to be a record of what had been paid.
He had entered Dreyer that first night, as the fourteenth, with the date and the number 9 beside it, the ninth day of the war.
Then he closed the book and put the band back on and did not look at it again.
Three kilometers of railway embankment ran south from Kessa junction to the Varn crossing, and the Third Armored Corps had put itself behind it like men behind a wall.
From the air, if anyone had cared to look, the line was a string of dark shapes half-buried in the ballast, fourteen tanks and thirty-odd fighting vehicles spaced a hundred meters apart, each with a scrape of dirt shoved up in front of it and a cage of welded farm-gate over its turret.
There were sixteen hundred meters of open beet field between the embankment and the river, and beyond the river a low ridge with a village on it called Sennet, which the Concord had taken on the ninth and held ever since.
There was no more to the front than that.
It was a line drawn through mud by men who were exhausted, and it held only because the other side was exhausted too.
Voss had spent six days sitting behind it.
He knew the state of the Iron Widow’s stowage as a man knows the balance of his own purse.
The Bastion-2 carried forty rounds of 120mm in its bustle and hull racks when full.
At dawn the Widow held twenty-two: fourteen of the sabot dart, eight shaped-charge.
Every one had been counted at first light by Kallin and reported in the same flat voice, and every one Voss had repeated back to himself.
At 0530 the captain’s voice came over the company net, pitched low and worn thin.
Captain Hollis Bruun had commanded the company for a year.
In six days he had slept, by his own estimate, eleven hours.
“All Widow elements. Fire discipline continues. One round, one target. No harassing fire. No suppression. If it isn’t a confirmed armored vehicle or a confirmed launcher, you hold it. Resupply is due on the twenty-first. Acknowledge.”
“Widow Three-Fourteen, acknowledge,” said Voss.
He let go the switch.
He looked at the sky, which was pewter and low, and at the beet field, which was mist.
Twenty-two, he thought.
Six days.
It should be enough.
He did the arithmetic again to make sure.
The replacement came up the embankment road a little after seven on the back of a ration truck, sitting on a sack of flour with a duffel bag between his knees.
He was tall and thin and very clean.
That was what Voss noticed first: the boy’s face had been shaved that morning, and his boots had been polished, and his collar sat flat.
He climbed down from the tailgate with a small stiff grace, like a man getting out of a car in a good suit, and stood on the embankment looking at the tank, at the welded cage, at the smear of rust-colored water drying on the engine deck.
He looked at it for perhaps three seconds.
Then he turned to Voss and saluted.
“Castagnac, Sergeant. Gunner, Crew 3-14-C. Reporting.”
Voss looked at the salute and let it stand a moment before he returned it.
“Castagnac.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Any relation?” It was an idle question.
The name was known; there was a minister with it, and a cartoon of him that ran in the Dunmarrow papers every other Sunday.
The boy’s face did not change, and the answer came a fraction too smoothly.
“It’s a common name in the Foundry District, Sergeant.”
“Is it.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
Voss studied him a moment longer.
Twenty, perhaps.
Grey eyes, a straight nose, a small white scar through the left eyebrow.
His hands were steady at his sides and he did not fidget, and there was in his face something Voss had seen before in young men from good families who had come to the army to prove a point to someone who was not there.
It was not a bad quality.
It made for careful shooters and short lives.
“Your predecessor was Dreyer,” said Voss.
“He was good. You’ll take his seat. You’ll find it isn’t clean.”
“I understand, Sergeant.”
“You don’t. But you will.”
The boy’s jaw tightened, once, and released.
He did not look away.
Voss decided he could keep him.
He watched the gunner climb through the loader’s hatch and lower himself into the compartment.
He heard Kallin say something short.
He heard the boy’s boots find the floor, and the small scuff of a body settling into a seat that was damp under the cloth, and then nothing at all.
It went on for a while.
Voss, on the deck, looked away at the beet field.
At length the boy’s voice came up from below, flat and careful.
“Sergeant. The sights are aligned. I’d like to run a boresight check on the thermal, if the range allows it.”
“Do it.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
That was all.
Voss stood on the hull with his back to the hatch and listened to the servos whine as the turret traversed a few degrees and settled, and he felt something in his chest unlock by the width of a finger.
The boy had not said a word about the seat.
The Concord came at ten past nine.
It began with a noise so faint that Voss took it for the rail wire.
A thin, high whine, a mosquito in the middle distance, rising and falling.
The drivers heard it first.
Eldin’s voice came sharp over the intercom: “Contact, air, bearing zero-nine-five, low.”
Voss was already down in the commander’s hatch with the lid drawn.
He swung the sight.
There, a hundred meters above the beet field, three dark specks were coming toward the embankment in a loose line, wobbling slightly, quick as wasps.
“Jammer on,” he said.
“Jammer’s on, Sergeant,” said Kallin.
“Light’s green.”
“Is it doing anything?”
Nothing on the intercom.
The specks came on.
The first went into the cage over the tank on their right, the Ninth Hour.
There was a small hard flash, a puff of black smoke from the welded gate, and a sound like a tin plate dropped on concrete.
The cage held.
For a full second Voss thought it had held.
Then the second drone dropped through the hole the first had opened, straight and unhurried, and went into the turret roof.
The Ninth Hour opened like a fist.
There was a light in it, white and total, and a slam that Voss felt in the bones of his face.
The turret hatch blew off and spun away in the air.
Flame went straight up, orange with black in it, twenty meters, and a sound came out of the tank that Voss recognized because he had heard it before: the shriek of rounds cooking off in a closed hull, a long ripping crackle, like a great sheet of canvas torn in half.
Two men came out of the loader’s hatch on fire.
They ran, one behind the other, twenty meters, thirty, and both went down in the beet field and rolled.
The third drone had turned.
It was coming straight at the Widow.
“Down,” said Voss.
He heard himself say it very quietly.
“Everyone down. Heads down. Hold.”
The whine got louder.
It filled the sight.
He saw the small black cross of its wings and the round glass eye under the nose, and he saw the cage above him shiver as something struck it with a crack like a rifle shot, and the drone tumbled away in two pieces and went into the ballast twenty meters behind him and burst there in a plume of dirt.
His hands were shaking on the sight.
He noticed it as one notices weather.
“Widow Three-Fourteen, report,” said the captain’s voice, and Voss said, “All well,” and heard how thin it came out.
“Armor. Bearing zero-nine-zero, range one-nine-hundred. Three vehicles crossing the river.”
He was already swinging the sight.
There they were, on the far bank, low black hulks coming down the ford at Sennet with a bow wave of brown water around each, three Molots in a loose wedge, turrets traversed toward the embankment.
Their guns were not yet firing.
They were coming to see what the drones had done.
“Gunner,” Voss said.
“Lead vehicle. Sabot.”
“Identified.” The boy’s voice was quiet and level, the voice of a man reading a list.
“Range one-eight-eight-zero. Laser is on.”
“Loader.”
“Up,” said Kallin, and the breech clanged.
“Fire when ready.”
There was a long moment in which nothing happened.
Voss could hear his own breathing, and the servo, and the small dry ticking of the sights as the gunner laid the crosshair on the Molot’s low front slope.
He could see, in the thermal, a faint blur of heat on the hull where its engine sat.
He counted.
One.
Two.
“On,” said the boy.
The Widow fired.
The whole tank jumped and the compartment filled with a flat brutal whump that pushed on Voss’s eardrums with a palm.
The breech recoiled.
The spent case fell into its basket and rang.
A fraction of a second later a white spark leaped on the Molot’s hull, a small bright thing, no bigger than a struck match, and the vehicle went on rolling for a heartbeat as though nothing had occurred.
Then the turret came off.
It went straight up.
It rose ten meters on a column of fire with the long gun still pointing at the sky, turning a lazy quarter-turn, and it came down in the river with a splash Voss saw and did not hear.
The hull under it was burning from the inside, a bright hard blaze that turned the ford water to steam.
The Molot’s autoloader carousel, twenty-two rounds arranged in a ring at the feet of its crew, had done what it was known to do.
Nobody had climbed out.
Nobody would.
“Hit,” said Kallin.
“Next,” said Voss.
“Second vehicle. Sabot.”
“Identified.” The boy’s voice was the same as before.
“Range one-nine-two-zero. On.”
“Fire.”
The second went as the first had, with a different sound, a flat ugly crack, and a small spinning piece of the hull flew off and turned over in the air.
It did not burn.
It stopped where it was in the middle of the ford, and its hatch flopped open, and a man in a black coverall pulled himself halfway out and sat on the rim with his arms hanging, looking at nothing.
The third Molot had reversed.
It was backing into the river, its turret swinging, its gun going up.
“Fire,” said Voss, and the Widow fired a third time, and missed.
The third vehicle got out of the ford and behind the ridge and was gone.
It was half past nine.
The smoke was rising from three places in the field and one in the river.
Nobody was screaming now.
Somewhere out on the beets a man was calling mama in a high voice and someone was calling him to be quiet.
Voss sat in the commander’s hatch and let his hands go.
He looked down through the hatch.
The boy sat in the gunner’s seat with both hands flat on his knees and his back straight.
His face was white.
His mouth was very slightly open.
He was looking at the thermal sight, in which the man on the rim of the ruined Molot was still sitting, hunched, quite calm, and had started, slowly, to burn.
“Don’t watch,” said Voss.
“He’s—”
“I know what he is. Don’t watch.”
The boy did not move.
His eyes stayed on the sight.
A small muscle worked in his cheek.
Voss reached down and turned the screen off with his thumb, and the man went out like a match.
Then he put his hand for a moment on the boy’s shoulder, and felt it shaking, a fine constant tremor all through the thin frame, like a wire in a wind.
“That was clean shooting,” he said.
“Both hits. First round each. Nobody in this company has done that in a week.”
“I— thank you, Sergeant.”
“Breathe.”
The boy breathed.
It shuddered in and shuddered out.
“How many did we use?” said Kallin quietly, from the loader’s seat.
“Three.”
“Nineteen left.”
“Nineteen,” said Voss.
The company net crackled.
Captain Bruun’s voice came through, and it was not tired now, it was just very flat.
“All Widow elements. Good work. Ninth Hour is lost. Two men evacuated. Message from Corps. Resupply column has been rescheduled. Departure now twenty-six, repeat twenty-six. Rail slots. Acknowledge.”
For a while nobody answered.
Then, one by one, down the line, the acknowledgments came in.
“Widow Three-Fourteen,” said Voss.
“Acknowledge.”
He let go of the switch.
He sat with his hands on his knees and looked at the smoke and thought, Nineteen rounds.
And the column would not even leave for eleven days.
Then he took the black notebook from his pocket, and slid off the band, and opened it to the last page.
He looked at it for some time.
He had never in fifteen years written anything in it but a name.
Now, under Dreyer’s line, in his small square hand, he wrote the date and the number 19.
He looked at the two numbers, side by side.
It came to him that he was keeping a count of what remained, and that it was the same column.