“Costunna!” Huber screamed. He leaned forward, trying to see the man, but the driver’s hatch was closed. “Via, man! Cut right! Get us up out of here!”
Foghorn was stalled, unable to climb up from the canal. Her fans and skirts had taken a serious hammering while she advanced alone toward the Solace position. Fencing Master was nowhere near that badly damaged, but Costunna seemed unwilling or emotionally unable to turn back toward the guns that’d targeted him before.
And until he did, neither of the cars in Huber’s section could support the infantry at the moment they needed it most. The tribarrels were unable to shoot through the haze surrounding Fencing Master; the water droplets would absorb the bolts as surely as a brick wall or a meter of armor plate could do.
Captain Sangrela was bellowing furious orders over the command channel, but Huber didn’t need to be told there was a problem. He opened his mouth to shout at Costunna again because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. Before he got the words out, Deseau snarled over the intercom, “Costunna, get us the fuck outa this ditch or I’ll stick my gun up your ass before I pull the trigger!”
Maybe it was the threat, maybe it was realizing that the car’s bumping was its skirts hitting the bodies of Militiamen before smearing them into the concrete. Whatever the reason, Costunna twisted his yoke convulsively. Fencing Master lurched from the canal, her plenum chamber shrieking over the concrete coping.
Three white flares burst over the central complex, a signal that the surviving mercenaries wanted to surrender. They were probably broadcasting on one of the general-purpose frequencies as well, but you couldn’t trust radio in a battle. Powerguns and drive fans both kicked out seas of RF trash, so even commands could be lost or distorted in the middle of a battle. A moment after the flares went up, four soldiers in mottled battledress came out of a smoldering barn with their hands in the air.
“Fox Three elements cease fire!” Huber ordered. He didn’t raise the muzzles of his tribarrel, but he took his hands off the grips. If some trooper got trigger happy now with those easy targets, it’d be the difference between peaceful surrender and a last-ditch defense that meant a lot more Slammers’ casualties before it was over. “Stop shooting now! Three-six out.”
Captain Sangrela was shouting much the same thing over the common task force push also, and Huber figured Lieutenant Mitzi Trogon echoed the words to her four D Company tanks. A power-gun snapped a single shot into the bright sky: an infantryman trying to put his weapon on safe while he steered his tiny skimmer had managed to shoot instead.
No serious harm done: the rest of the mercenary company emerged from dugouts and the concrete buildings. They’d been armed with crew-served lasers, bulky weapons but effective even against tanks when they were close enough. Rather than bull straight in, Captain Sangrela had used F-3’s combat cars to draw the lasers into sight where the tanks could vaporize them from a safe three kilometers away. Arne Huber understood the logic and he trusted the skill of Mitzi’s gunners about as far as he trusted anybody, but he’d known who was going to catch it if something went wrong.
“Costunna, pull around to the tramhead,” he ordered, frowning. The main thing that’d gone wrong this time had been with Fencing Master’s driver, and that was Arne Huber’s responsibility.
Most of the single continent of Plattner’s World was accessible only by aircar or dirigible. The trees covering the coastal lowlands were parasitized by “Moss,” a fungus which in turn was the source of an anti-aging drug. The forests were therefore more valuable than almost anything that would have replaced them on other planets, highways and railroads included.
The exception was Solace, the state comprising the central highlands. There the soil supported Terran grains and produce, but native trees which grew in the drier climate were stunted and free of the Moss. Solace had become the granary of Plattner’s World, and its bedrock supported the only starport on the planet which could accept the largest interstellar freighters.
A network of monorail tramways connected Solace’s collective farms with Bezant, the capital, from which giant dirigibles distributed food and manufactured goods to the Outer States. They brought back Moss, Pseudofistus thalopsis, which factories on Solace turned into Thalderol base and shipped off-planet for final processing.
In theory one might have thought that the huge profits from Thalderol meant that the inhabitants of Plattner’s World lived with one another in wealthy harmony. Mercenary soldiers, even Academy-trained officers like Arne Huber, learned about human nature in a practical schooclass="underline" the riches of Plattner’s World just meant people could hire better talent to fight for them. When Solace raised port dues by five percent and the buyers refused to pay more for Thalderol base, the Outer States had hired Hammer’s Slammers to reverse the increase.
“Fox Three-six, this is Charlie Six!” Captain Sangrela called abruptly. “The mercs have surrendered but the locals are planning to break out to the north in their aircars. Cut ’em off, will you? I don’t want a massacre, but I’m curst if I want to fight ’em again either! Six out.”
Sangrela was obviously using signals intelligence; it was probably forwarded to him as task force commander by Central, Slammers headquarters at Base Alpha far to the rear. The locals didn’t understand what they were up against, of course. The tanks on high ground to the south could track and vaporize even fast-moving aircars at a greater distance than the eye could see: there was no escape from a battlefield they overwatched.
But a volley of 20-cm bolts wasn’t a threat, it was a massacre just as Sangrela had said. The Slammers took prisoners wherever possible: that encouraged their opponents to do the same. Needlessly converting several hundred locals into steam and carbonized bone, on the other hand, was likely to have a bad result the next time a trooper got in over his head and wanted to surrender.
“Cancel that, Costunna!” Huber said, setting his faceshield left-handed to caret the electromagnetic signatures of aircar fans revving up. Two equipment sheds on the north side of the complex became a forest of red highlights as the AI obeyed. If they were as full of vehicles as the carets implied, there was a score of large aircars in each. “Get us around north of the buildings—but stay away from the canal, right? Goose it!”
The sheds were aligned east-west and had overhead doors the length of both long sides. As Huber spoke, all twelve of the north-side doors began to rise.
“Guns!” Huber shouted over the intercom to the men with him in the fighting compartment. “Aim low, don’t kill anybody you don’t have to! Costunna, get on it!”
Fencing Master finally started to accelerate. The car was five hundred meters from the west sidewall of the nearer shed, almost twice that from the far end of the other one. The tribarrels were effective at many times that distance, but it was beyond the range at which you could expect delicate shooting from a moving vehicle. It’d be what it’d be.
An aircar with room for twenty soldiers or two tonnes of cargo nosed out of the nearer shed. Huber laid his holographic sights on it, letting the aircar’s forward motion pull it through his rope of vividly cyan bolts. The plastic quarterpanel exploded in a red fireball, flipping the car onto its right side in the path of the identical vehicle pulling out of the adjacent bay. They collided, and the second car also overturned.
A third truck started from the near end of the shed and pitched nose-high as the driver tried to vault the line of powergun bolts. He didn’t have enough speed. The bow slammed back into the ground, breaking the vehicle’s frame and hurling passengers twenty meters from the wreck.