The sky roared cyan. The tank's vision blocks blanked momentarily, but the dazzle reflected through the open hatch was enough to make Pritchard's skin tingle. The smoke waved and rippled about the superheated tracks of gunfire. The horizon to the northwest was an expanding orange dome that silently dominated the sky.
"Resume advance." Then, "Spectroanalysis indicates five hostiles were loaded with chemical explosives, one was carrying fissionables."
Danny was trembling worse than before the botched attack. The briefing cubes had said the Densonites were religious nuts, sure. But to use unsupported artillery against a force whose satellite spotters would finger the guns before the first salvo landed; aircraft—probably converted cargo haulers—thrown against director-controlled powerguns that shot light swift and line straight; and then nukes, against a regiment more likely to advance stark naked than without a nuclear damper up! They weren't just nuts—Thrush central government was that, unwilling to have any of its own people join the fighting—they were as crazy as if they thought they could breathe vacuum and live. You didn't play that sort of game with the Regiment.
They'd laager for the night on the hilltop, the rest of the outfit rumbling in through the afternoon and early evening hours. At daybreak they'd leapfrog forward again, deeper into the Star Plain, closer to whatever it was the Densonites wanted to hold. Sooner or later, the rebels and Fosters Infantry—a good outfit but not good enough for this job—were going to have to make a stand. And then the Regiment would go out for contact again, because they'd have run out of work on Thrush.
"She'll be in looking for you pretty soon, won't she, handsome?"
"Two bits to stay."
"Check. Sure, Danny-boy, you Romeos from Dunstan, you can pick up a slot anywhere, huh?"
A troop of combat cars whined past, headed for their position in the laager. Pritchard's hole card, a jack, flipped over. He swore, pushed in his hand. "I was folding anyway. And cut it out, will you? I didn't go looking for her. I didn't tell her to come back. And she may as well be the colonel for all my chance of putting her flat."
Wanatamba, the lean, black Terran who drove Fourteen, laughed and pointed. A gold-spangled skimmer was dropping from the east, tracked by the guns of two of the blowers on that side. Everybody knew what it was, though. Pritchard grimaced and stood. "Seems that's the game for me," he said.
"Hey, Danny," one of the men behind him called as he walked away. "Get a little extra for us, hey?"
The skimmer had landed in front of Command Central, at rest an earth-blended geodesic housing the staff and much of the commo hardware. Wearing a wrist-to-ankle sunsuit, yellow where it had tone, she was leaning on the plex windscreen. An officer in fatigues with unlatched body armor stepped out of the dome and did a double take. He must have recollected, though, because he trotted off toward a bunker before Danny reached the skimmer.
"Hey!" the girl called brightly. She looked about seventeen, her hair an unreal cascade of beryl copper over one shoulder. "We're going on a trip."
"Uh?"
The dome section flipped open again. Pritchard stiffened to attention when he saw the short, mustached figure who exited. "Peace, Colonel," the girl said.
"Peace, Sonna. You're such an ornament to a firebase that I'm thinking of putting you on requisition for our next contract."
Laughing cheerfully, the girl gestured toward the rigid sergeant. "I'm taking Danny to the Hamper Shrine this afternoon."
Pritchard reddened. "Sir, Sergeant-Commander Daniel Pritchard—"
"I know you, trooper," the colonel said with a friendly smile. "I've watched Two Star in action often enough, you know." His eyes were blue.
"Sir, I didn't request—that is . . ."
"And I also know there's small point in arguing with our girl here, hey, Sonna? Go see your shrine, soldier, and worse comes to worst, just throw your hands up and yell 'Exchange.' You can try Colonel Foster's rations for a week or two until we get this little business straightened out." The colonel winked, bowed low to Sonna, and reentered the dome.
"I don't figure it," Danny said as he settled into the passenger seat. The skimmer was built low and sleek as if a racer, though its top speed was probably under a hundred kays. Any more would have put too rapid a drain of the rechargeables packed into the decimeter-thick floor—a fusion unit would have doubled the flyer's bulk and added four hundred kilos right off the bat. At that, the speed and an operating altitude of thirty meters were more than enough for the tanker. You judge things by what you're used to, and the blower chief who found himself that far above the cold, hard ground—it could happen on a narrow switchback—had seen his last action.
While the wind whipped noisily about the open cockpit, the girl tended to her flying and ignored Danny's curiosity. It was a hop rather than a real flight, keeping over the same hill at all times and circling down to land scarcely a minute after takeoff. On a field of grass untouched by the recent fire rose the multi-tinted crystalline structure Pritchard had glimpsed during the assault. With a neat spin and a brief whine from the fans, the skimmer settled down.
Sonna grinned. Her sunsuit, opaquing completely in the direct light, blurred her outline in a dazzle of fluorescent saffron. "What don't you figure?"
"Well, ah . . ." Danny stumbled, his curiosity drawn between the girl and the building. "Well, the colonel isn't that, ah, easy to deal with usually. I mean . . ."
Her laugh bubbled in the sunshine. "Oh, it's because I'm an Advisor, I'm sure."
"Excuse?"
"An Advisor. You know, the . . . well, a representative. Of the government, if you want to put it that way."
"My Lord!" the soldier gasped. "But you're so young."
She frowned. "You really don't know much about us, do you?" she reflected.
"Umm, well, the briefing cubes mostly didn't deal with the friendlies this time because we'd be operating without support . . . Anything was going to look good after Emporion, that was for sure. All desert there—you should've heard the cheers when the colonel said that we'd lift."
She combed a hand back absently through her hair. It flowed like molten bronze. "You won on Emporion?" she asked.
"We could've," Danny explained, "even though it was really a Lord-stricken place, dust and fortified plateaus and lousy recce besides because the government had two operating spacers. But the Monarchists ran out of money after six months and that's one sure rule for Hammer's Slammers—no pay, no play. Colonel yanked their bond so fast their ears rang. And we hadn't orbited before offers started coming in."
"And you took ours and came to a place you didn't know much about," the girl mused. "Well, we didn't know much about you either."
"What do you need to know except we can bust anybody else in this business?" the soldier said with amusement. "Anybody, public or planet-tied. If you're worried about Foster, don't; he wouldn't back the freaks today, but when he has to, we'll eat him for breakfast."
"Has to?" the girl repeated in puzzlement. "But he always has to—the Densonites hired him, didn't they?"
Strategy was a long way from Danny's training, but the girl seemed not to know that. And besides, you couldn't spend seven years with the Slammers and not pick up some basics. "OK," he began, "Foster's boys'll fight, but they're not crazy. Trying to block our advance in open land like this'd be pure suicide—as those coppy freaks—pardon, didn't mean that—must've found out today. Foster likely got orders to support the civvies but refused. I know for a fact that his arty's better'n what we wiped up today, and those planes . . ."
"But his contract . . .?" Sonna queried.