First Contact

Chapter 304

Chapter 304

Planetary Armor Great Most High A'armo'o trotted up to where the Terrans were working on his tank. There was a scaffolding around it and at least a half dozen robots were busy replacing armor sections very quickly. There was a Terran in a powered loading frame standing outside his tank, holding a dataslate and looking it over.

A'armo'o had noticed that humans seemed to wear their helmets at all times, taking them off only inside of bunkers and other structures. He had even seen tankers wearing their helmets while inside the tank, a noticable difference from Unified Council troops.

"TEST NINER NINER TWO EIGHT ALPHA TWO TWO!" the human called out.

From the dataslate came the reply: "FIRE NINER NINER TWO EIGHT ALPHA TWO TWO!"

A'armo'o saw the port rear point defense system power up.

The dataslate kept talking. "NINER NINER TWO EIGHT ALPHA TWO TWO ROTATION COUNTER CLOCKWISE!"

The point defense systems spun.

As A'armo'o watched the point defense system went through a full function check.

"CUT NINER NINER TWO EIGHT ALPHA TWO TWO!" the Terran in the loading frame called out.

The point defense system depowered and A'armo'o stepped up beside the Terran, looking over his tank.

His tank had been designed over 25 million years ago, improving the older design by far. It was lighter, with greater speed, greater survival in combat, better weapons. It was supposed to be sleek looking with rounded edges, pleasing to the eye.

Now it looked somehow blocky, almost unfinished. He could see a barrier behind his tank commander's hatch and a gun had been added that could be fired from a being outside the TC hatch or, judging from the additional cabling and boxes, fired from inside.

"Most High," the human said, nodding. He tapped the dataslate and it pinged. "Dominguez, take over for me. Finish the final checks," he said. The giant insect on the dataslate screen nodded and disappeared.

"What had happened to my tank?" A'armo'o asked.

"Nothing major. Handles the same, same speed, acceleration, turning radius, ground clearance. Cannon has the same range and attack profile, only a few coaxial weapons," the Terran said. He cleared his throat. "Um, not actually coaxial, bad habit of mine."

"I thought you were Ordnance?" A'armo'o asked.

"Eh, it gets blurry," the human said, shrugging. He reached out and rubbed the space between his eyebrows with one finger. "Damn headache."

"I see more guns," A'armo'o said.

The human nodded. "You've got a .50 caliber air cooled general purpose heavy machinegun now, three of them, that can be run from the hatches as well as provide point defense, be operated from inside the vehicle, and put on reflex mode," the human said, bringing up the schematic of the tank of his datapad and giving the datapad a flick so it projected the schematic in hologram form right above the pad. "We've fixed the problems with your compression chamber, added a laser path clearance system for the plasma rounds, fixed the problems with your automatic feed loader, adjusted your fan blade tilt, your fan shaft designs."

A'armo'o had spent the better part of three centuries working with tanks. As the human called them off and highlighted what had been changed A'armo'o could see how effective each change would be and part of him wondered exactly why making these obvious adjustments took some half-crazed lemur who's use of fire was less time than some of the ammunition had been in the tank.

"Your armor laminate was cost effective, I'm sure, but just a slight modification to layer thickness as well as remanufacturing increased its combat effectiveness without changing weight or bulk. A third of your crew injuries were from interior spalling, so we added an aerogel anti-spalling liner for the cost of about an inch total of crew space. That should keep your men from eating a face full of shrapnel when a round hits but doesn't penetrate.," the human continued. "Your computers are pretty thin but we added a warboi computing core and made space by changing the configuration of your anti-personnel gun ammunition hoppers, since they wasted a lot of space."

"All of this in only ten hours?" A'armo'o asked, looking around. He could see frames being taken apart by the Terran's robots, see tanks being pulled apart and other tanks put back together. The robotic systems worked at high speed and A'armo'o felt faint nervousness and anxiety at the amount of robotic servitors being used.

"Redesign and error catching took up nearly three hours, sir," the human said, his tone somewhat apologetic. "Our initial design made it run so far out of specs that when we had a couple of your guys tried the new versions in eVR they could barely drive them, much less fight effectively, so we had to go back to base stats."

"Hmph, I can understand that problem," A'armo'o said.

The human shrugged again. "Sir, the big problem is, well, to tell it to you straight, you're pretty much driving obsolete junk. No offense. I'm sure they were working before you ran into the Precursors, who are tough sons of bitches without a doubt, but for the real, actual modern battlefield, they're obsolete."

"How obsolete?" A'armo'o asked, part of him refusing to believe this insane lemur, but the majority of him recognizing that the lemur was undoubtedly right.

"Terran Pre-Diasporia tanks from the Age of Paranoia could take you. Nail-Toe Military Force tanks, using their generation of warfare tactics, wiped the floor with you and only took 20% casualties wiping out your entire force. They were hitting at over two miles, before you could get in range, using density enhanced munitions in use at the time, and killing your tanks before you could even engage them, using superior speed and turning capability to hold open the kill distance," the Terran said. He brought up a wireframe of a smaller looking tank. Low profile, a quarter of the mass taken up for the big gun and its support systems. "You have crews of six, that tank has a crew of four. They can hand-load ammo faster than your autoloading systems are."

"May I see it? Perhaps VR?" A'armo'o asked. "How old is the tank?"

"About 10,000 years ago," the human said. He tapped a few keys on the datapad. "There you go, sir. Step over the and touch the glitter ball, the base network will do the rest."

A'armo'o moved over and touched an orb that twinkled and glittered, a holographic projection thrown out by the work lattice around his tank.

The world dissolved and reformed. He stood on a tarmac under a blue sky with white clouds. Words appearing in his vision telling him he was in a Eurogoon MechaKrautland Tank Motorpool during the Age of Paranoia. Virtual humans ran about, doing tasks, and he could see tankers actually performing minor maintenance on their tanks themselves instead of waiting for Maintenance Section to do them. The letters appeared in mid-air again, telling him he was currently loaded into a historical educational virtual reality program without enhanced capabilities.

A'armo'o had to admit, the tank was lethal looking. He looked down to see his VR self was a human body, which felt a bit odd. He walked around the tank, examining it with a critical eyes. He checked the specs, watched videos of the tank in action. He was startled to see it ran off of fossil fuels refined to nearly be an explosive. It was extraordinarily primitive, the computer systems compact and dedicated to single tasks. He examined the specifications, watched the videos of it in action, watched the videos of the crews in action, even allowed the sim to have him take part.

When it was over he shook his head to clear it. The Terran in charge of A'armo'o's tank was supervising the scaffolding being removed. His tank had chalk X's on the sides.

"You all right, sir?" the Terran asked.

"It was... illuminating," A'armo'o admitted. Privately, he had been frightened by the sheer monomaniacal attitude Terrans had toward war. Sure, he had spent the better part of three hundred years as a tanker, but what he had witnessed was entirely different.

"Those VR sims can be a little rough," the Terran admitted, shrugging. He reached up and rubbed between his eyebrows again, sighing with annoyance. "Anyway, your tank is done. We're going to finish up with the rest of them. The General wanted your tanks ready in sixteen hours, looks like we'll finish with the last of the tests in about two hours, giving us an hour to spare."

A'armo'o nodded, swallowing thickly. Rearming and refitting over ten thousand tanks in fifteen hours was a feat unheard of in the Lanaktallan military forces.

"We'll finish with Trucker and Ekret's tanks about an hour after yours. Lotta guys rolling coal when they came in. They've got all new tank designs, so we've got to do a bit more after action checks then on yours, since yours had about a million years of design studies in the databases," the human said. He gave a nod. "I'll leave you to it, sir."

Before A'armo'o could say anything, the Terran was walking away, his loading frame making hissing and mechanical noises.

"Krawgrak, count your wrenches, you've got an empty slot on your wrench harness! Looks like your 15mm wrench!" the Terran called out. "Brubaker, I only count seven data-orbs, you should have eight. Find it. Nikikilk, where's your goddamn rifle? Goddamn it, Dominguez, how the hell are you going to get promoted if you can't make sure these guys don't accidentally shove their fucking tools up their asses?"

Turning away from the shouting lemur, A'armo'o put it out of his mind as he moved up to his tank. He put his hand on the panel at the back and the tank dutifully beeped and lowered the back ramp.

He had to jump out of the way with how quickly and smoothly it unfolded.

He trotted in, missing the fact that someone had drawn a dick on the ramp motor housing, and moved over to his commander's harness. He brought the tank online, carefully going down the checklist, until it sat, weapons safety interlocked, vibrating.

For the first time it seemed to almost vibrate with restrained malice. Like it was eager to get into the fight.

Same amount of ammunition, same types of ammunition. He examined the profiles of the ammo. Nearly triple the battlescreen penetration, capable of three times the range, accuracy improved by 19%, flight time reduced by 11.5%. He shook his head. The tank's compression chamber was nearly five times more efficient and cooled three times as fast and he couldn't even really see what the Terrans had done.

They probably just tapped it a few times with a wrench and told it that it was part of a tank, he snorted to himself. Each system now feels like part of a whole instead of a separate system.

He checked the radio, listening in to broadcasts. Most of it was Terran radio chatter and he was aware he could listen in on the channels because of his rank, which felt odd listening to a Terran artillery battery fire, move, fire again, confounding Precursor counter-battery systems and 'suckering' them into revealing which machines had counter-battery capability so the strikers could bring 'the brrt to the dirt' and wipe them out.

Sighing he leaned back slightly.

"Hey, boss," He heard from his left. He looked over to a screen that the Terrans had added in time to see a digital representation of a Lanaktallan face made up of swirling code form on the screen.

"Hello," A'armo'o said carefully to the face. "Who are you?"

"I am Tank Combat Assistant Warboi 8376453a32," the face said. "It is up to you to give me an additional designation." Its tones were formal and serious.

"T'Caw sounds good," A'armo'o said.

"I am T'Caw. I'll help you run the auxiliary systems as well keep the tank at optimum performance during combat and refit periods," the digital face said. It seemed to be firming up. "You are Planetary Armor Great Most High A'armo'o."

"Yes," A'armo'o said. He felt slightly off center. He had slept poorly.

"Do you wish me to wake up your warplan advisor? His name is Torgath, a former armor division commander during the Nakterran War," T'Caw asked. "He will provide you with strategic and tactical advice and assist in interlocking properly with Terran forces."

"Yes, please," A'armo'o said.

There was a chiming noise.

"I awaken again," a deep human voice said. The screen wavered and a Terran face appeared. "I am General Torgath, Fifth Armor Division, Heavy Metal, Fifth Terran Republic."

"I am System Armor Most High A'armo'o, Unified Military Council," A'armo'o said.

It is strangely easy to forget that the Terrans are not as old as the Councils. They have a weird feeling of age about them, A'armo'o thought to himself. Is it because that, despite the short time periods, they have many distinct periods in their history that all seem to provide the blocks of a foundation of what they currently are, or is it something else?

"I will be pleased to help T'Caw assist you in the upcoming battle. You are facing an enemy in force that still appears to be landing reinforcements into your operational area. This is a situation I am sadly familiar with," Torgath said.

"Thank you," A'armo'o said again. "Let us begin. Instruct me on the common Terran tank formations and battle maneuvers."

The lessons began.

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"How do you like your new tanks?" Trucker asked, spitting on the ground. He was leaning against the massive slab of metal that had Cry Little Sister painted on the barrel of the main gun.

A'armo'o noticed that someone had drawn a crude approximation of Terran male genitalia on one of the road wheels of Trucker's tank.

"They are largely identical in obvious combat performance, making them easy for my men to use," A'armo'o answered.

"What do you think of the plan?" Trucker asked. He used one finger to scoop the cud out from between his lower lip and lower gum and slung it to the ground, his other hand pulling out a plas can that he began shaking in a weird way that had one of his finger thumping the side.

The Terran ability to do two different things while speaking to another person still astounded A'armo'o.

"Seize the landing zones the enemy is using, mine them, pull back? It seems over-simplified," A'armo'o admitted.

"Yeah, seems that way to me too. Sounds like a good way to catch a brilliant pebble from some smart-ass in orbit," Trucker shrugged. "Have your warboi keep an eye out for any orbital strikes."

A'armo'o nodded as Trucker put more cud in his lower lip. "This battle is a daring strategy, but seems fraught with risk. Still, I have my orders."

"Good luck, A'armo'o," Trucker said, turning away and heading toward his tank.

A'armo'o blinked. He'd been looking right at the base of Trucker's neck.

He'd noticed the three LED's at the base of every human's skull. They usually were green.

He'd seen Trucker's blink three times and change color.

The bottom one red, the next two were amber.

A'armo'o wondered what it meant as he headed for his own tank.