Chapter 304 (1/2)

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.