Free Overkill by Robert Buettner Page A

ammunition type. From habit I might call for flechette.”

    “—Flechette, yet? What the hell are you talking about, Parker?” The captain’s voice crackled to me across five miles of Tassin desert.
    I adjusted my helmet mike. “We haven’t fired yet. Autoloader relay won’t select flechette, sir.”
    My gunner covered his own mike with his fingers and hissed, “Jazen, that’s bullshit!”
    I waved him off with one hand.
    The captain said, “Parker, I ordered you to—Goddammit! Something just spooked the Tassini. Their column’s turned back, short of the kill zone.”
    My gunner whispered, “I told you they had a radio down there!”
    Below, in the thermal’s sight picture, Tassin women, robes flapping, dragged children by the hands, or clutched babies as they fled the tents and disappeared over the opposite dune, like green-lit ghosts. Within fifty seconds, nothing moved below us but tent canvas. The camp had emptied out faster than a nightclub on fire. I switched to platoon net. “Fire!”
    Whoom . Whoom . Whoom . Whoom . Whoom .
    Five rounds of flechette left nothing of the camp below but canvas tatters and shattered pots. But nobody in it was dead that wasn’t dead before we fired.
    I switched back to command net. “Red One, this is Red Three. We cleared the autoloader malfunction. Target destroyed. Over.”
    “Outstanding, Parker. Truly outstanding. Five simultaneous malfunctions is incredibly bad luck. And clearing them all within one minute is incredibly fast work. I’ll put Third Platoon up for a unit citation. Right after your court martial.”
    My gunner laid his palm across his visor while he lowered his head and shook it.
    The captain said, “Meantime, get your platoon out of there, max mil speed. You got thirty Tassini crawlers inbound full-gas. And if you think I’m pissed off... ”

    “Parker?” Kit rapped her knuckles on my helmet. “After you call for a round, what do I do?”
    I showed her. The loader’s job is female-unfriendly. The rounds weigh as much as fifty-three pounds, and have to be wrestled out of the ready rack tubes, then cradled across the turret rear-tofront, dodging sharp steel corners, then slammed into the main gun breech. Speed and accuracy count, and errors cost fingers.
    After an hour of practice reps, Kit’s hands and one elbow were bruised and bleeding, her lips stretched tight across her teeth, and I could see spasms in her forearms, but she never complained.
    Late that afternoon, Zhondro drove the Abrams out to the east tree line that bordered Kit’s camp, and I inflated a threedie target intended to represent a grezzen. It was actually a life-sized pink elephant advertising balloon. Kit pronounced it too small, but adequate.
    Then we backed the tank across the plateau to the opposite tree line. That put Cutler a thousand yards from his target. The wooded terrain beyond the Line wouldn’t allow a clear shot near that long, but I reasoned that if Cutler could hit a target smaller than a grezzen at a thousand yards, he could certainly hit a full-sized one at five hundred.
    Everybody strapped on helmets, so we could converse over the intercom, but really, so the earphone flaps would protect our hearing. Not from engine noise. Abrams’ gas turbines are actually so quiet that adversary infantry used to call them “whispering death.” But a 120-millimeter fired live doesn’t whisper.
    Cutler sat hunched forward in the Abrams’ gunner well, his eye to the rubber reticle of the standard sight. He waggled the turret, and the gun, left and right with two hands on the gunner’s yoke, then slid his thumbs to the two red buttons atop the yoke arms. He depressed both buttons once. “Got it!”
    I watched the commander’s image screen, which was slaved to Cutler’s sight. Cutler had succeeded in centering the grezzen in the rectangular sight reticle, which was easier than playing a holo game. Cutler’s button push pulsed a laser beam out that struck, then