"Numbers made it a mutiny," Jolober continued. Part of him wondered whether Red Ike could hear the words he was speaking in a soft voice, but he was unwilling to shout.
It would have been disrespectful.
Fierce wind rocked the flames as the armored vehicles, tank in the lead as before, lifted and began to howl their way out of Paradise Port.
"I'll take care of you," Red Ike said. "You'll have Vicki back in three weeks, I promise. Tailored to you, just like the other. You won't be able to tell the difference."
"There's no me to take care of anymore," said Horace Jolober with no more emotion than a man tossing his uniform into a laundry hamper.
"You see," he added as he reached behind him, "if they'd killed you tonight, the Bonding Authority would have disbanded both units whatever the Placidans wanted. But me? Anything I do is my responsibility."
Red Ike began to scream in a voice that became progressively less human as the sound continued.
Horace Jolober was strong enough that he wouldn't have needed the knife despite the way his victim struggled.
But it seemed like a fitting monument for Vicki.
NIGHT MARCH
Panchin heard Sergeant-Commander Jonas swear softly as he tried to coax anything more than a splutter from the ionization-track communicator. The wind blew a hiss of sand against Hula Girl's iridium armor.
On a map of any practical scale this swatch of desert would look as flat as a mirror, but brush and rocky knobs limited Reg Panchin's view to a hundred meters in any direction from the combat car's right wing gun. Night stripped the terrain of all color but grays and purple-grays. Panchin could have added false color to the light-amplified view through the face shield of his commo helmet, but that would have made the landscape even more alien—and Panchin more lonely.
"I'm curst if I know what they're fighting over," muttered the driver, Trooper Rita Cortezar, over Hula Girl's intercom channel. "I sure don't see anything here worth getting killed over."
Frosty Ericssen chuckled from the left gun. "Did you ever see a stretch of country that looked much better than this does, Tits?" he asked. "At least after we got through blowing it inside out, I mean."
Panchin was a Clerk/Specialist with G Company's headquarters section. He rode Hula Girl during the change of base because the combat car was short a crewman and HQ's command car was overloaded. You had to know Cortezar better than he did to call her "Tits" to her face.
Hula Girl carried three tribarreled powerguns—left wing, right wing, and the commander's weapon mounted on the forward bulkhead to fire over the driver's head. Space in the rear fighting compartment was always tight, but the change of base made the situation even worse than it would have been on a normal combat patrol.
A beryllium fishnet hung on steel stakes a meter above the bulkheads. It was meant to catch mortar bombs and similar low-velocity projectiles before they landed in the fighting compartment, but inevitably it swayed with the weight of the crew's personal baggage. More gear was slung to the outside of the armor, and the deck of the compartment was covered with a layer of ammo cans.
"They're fighting about power, not territory," Panchin said. Spiky branches quivered as wind swept a hillock, then danced toward Hula Girl in a dust devil that quickly dispersed. "Everybody on Sulewesi's a Malay, but they came in two waves—original colonists and the batch brought in three generations afterwards. The first lot claims to own everything, including the folks who came later. Eventually the other guys decided to do something about it."
Reg Panchin wasn't so much frightened as empty: he'd never expected to be out in the middle of a hostile nowhere like this. He supposed the line troopers were used to it. Talking about something he knew didn't help Panchin a lot, but it helped.
"We're working for the old guys, right?" Frosty said.
"Right," Panchin said. "Hammer's Slammers support the Sulewesi government. The rebels have a Council. I don't guess there's a lot to choose except who's paying who."
Sergeant Jonas straightened and patted the communicator. "Well, this thing's fucked," he said in a conversational tone. "I can't get more than three words at a time from Scepter Base. If they've got a better fix on the missing column than we do, they can't send it so I hear it."
Hula Girl's crew knew exactly where they were. Sulewesi had been mapped by satellite before the war broke out, and the combat car's inertial navigation system was accurate to within a meter in a day's travel. That didn't tell the Slammers where the missing platoon of local troops was, though.
"So let's go home," Frosty said. He relaxed a catch of his clamshell body armor to scratch his armpit. "I'm not thrilled being out alone in Injun Country like this."
"It might be the transmitter at Scepter Base," Panchin said. He squeezed the edge of the bulkhead between thumb and forefinger to remind himself of how thick the armor was between him and hostile guns. "Goldman was working on it before the move. She said the traverse was getting wonky."
"Fucking wonderful," Cortezar said. "Just wonderful."
Long-distance communications for Hammer's Slammers on Sulewesi were by microwaves bounced off the momentary ionization tracks meteors drew in the upper atmosphere. The commo bursts were tight-beam and couldn't be either jammed or intercepted by hostile forces.
That same directionality was the problem now. Unless the bursts were precisely aligned, they didn't reach their destination. Hula Girl's crew had been out of communication with the remainder of the force ever since Captain Stenhuber sent them off to find a column that had gotten separated from the main body during the change of base.
"Rita, ease us forward a half klick on this heading," Jonas said. "We'll check again there. If that doesn't work we'll head for the barn."
He gave Ericssen a gloomy nod, then lifted his commo helmet with one hand to rub his scalp with the other. The sergeant was completely bald, though his eyebrows were unusually thick for a man of African ancestry.
"That won't be too soon for me," Frosty muttered.
Cortezar switched on the fans and let them spin for a moment before she flared the blades to lift the car. Even on idle the drive fans roared as they sucked air through the armored intake vents. There was no chance of hearing the missing column while the fans were running, though the acoustics of a landscape baffled with gullies, knolls, and clumps of brush up to four meters high made sound a doubtful guide here.
Hula Girl lifted with a greasy shudder. Sand sprayed through the narrow gap between the ground and the lower edge of the steel skirts enclosing the air cushion on which the combat car rode. A fusion bottle powered the eight drive fans. They in turn raised the pressure in the plenum chamber high enough to support the vehicle's thirty tonnes on ground effect. A combat car couldn't fly, but it could dance across quicksand or bodies of still water because the bubble of air spread the car's weight evenly over any surface.
"What did the locals do before they had us for guide dogs?" Cortezar asked as she took Hula Girl down one of the channels winding though the desert. The car wasn't moving much faster than a man could walk.
Wind and the occasional flash flood scoured away the soil here except where it was bound by rocks or the roots of plants. The desert vegetation stood on pedestals of its own making.
"They used positioning satellites," Panchin said. "The whole constellation got blasted as soon as the shooting started."
He'd read up on the planet when the Slammers took the Sulewesi Government contract. Mostly the line troopers didn't bother with the briefing materials. The information usually didn't affect mercenaries enough to matter more than a poker game did, but Panchin was interested.