If Costunna had known his job better, he’d have slewed Fencing Master so that her bow pointed thirty degrees to starboard of her axis of movement. Because he didn’t—and Via! Sure, he was a newbie but didn’t he know any cursed thing?—Huber stopped firing when Sergant Deseau’s gunshield masked his point of aim.
Deseau and Learoyd didn’t need help anyway. The gunners punched three-round bursts into each truck that showed its bow past the side of the sheds. Though the bolts couldn’t penetrate even an aircar’s light body, the energy they liberated vaporized the sheathing in blasts with the impact of falling anvils, slamming the targets in the opposite direction. Aircars skidded, bounced, and overturned. None of them got properly airborne.
Huber swung his tribarrel onto the canal half a klick to the north, intending to cover the troops who’d been using it as a trench like their fellows in the stretch Huber’s section had overrun. None of them showed themselves, let alone fired at Fencing Master.
A pair of gleaming troughs reaching from the south to just short of the canal’s inner lip indicated why: while Huber concentrated on the equipment sheds, two D Company tanks had warned the hidden Militiamen of what’d happen to them if they continued to make a fight of it. The main-gun bolts had converted all the silica in the ground they struck to molten glass, spraying it over those huddled in the canal. The flashes and concussion must have been enormous, but Huber hadn’t been aware of it while it was happening.
Huber glanced to his right, past the two gunners hunched over their tribarrels. The crown of red markers on his faceshield collapsed as he looked. The surviving vehicles were shutting down; the only fan motors still racing were in the wrecks whose drivers weren’t able to obey the order to switch off.
Deseau fired into the bow of a motionless truck, visible now because Fencing Master was crossing the front of the nearer shed. The molded plastic flared red, blooming into a meters-wide bubble that hung shimmering for several seconds in front of the building.
“Guns, cease fire!” Huber ordered. “They’re surrendering, boys. Cease fire!”
Via! He hoped he was right because there was the Lord’s own plenty of locals, coming out of the equipment sheds and rising from the canals on the other side of Fencing Master. The troops in the sheds must’ve been the crews for the howitzers dug into pits in the center of the complex. There the guns were safe from the sniping tanks, but they hadn’t been able to threaten the assault force with direct fire either. The commander must have pulled the crews under cover, knowing the artillerymen would’ve been no better than targets if he’d tried to use them as infantry against the oncoming mercenaries.
The nearest friendly unit was Foghorn, just managing to work out of the channel where she’d been stuck. Maybe some of Captain Sangrela’s troopers were still advancing from the south, but Huber guessed most of those figured to let Fencing Master learn what the locals intended before putting themselves in the middle of things. Huber couldn’t say he blamed them.
Costunna slowed the car, then brought it to a halt with the fans idling. Huber’d been about to order him to do that, but the driver shouldn’t have made the decision on his own. Well, Costunna was business for another time—though the time was going to come pretty cursed soon.
A middle-aged man limped toward Fencing Master with his helmet in his left hand. He looked haggard, and the left side of his face and shoulder were covered with soot. A younger man hovered at his side. The glowing muzzles of Learoyd’s tribarrel terrified the aide, but the older officer didn’t appear to notice the gun aimed point blank at them.
“I am Colonel Apollonio Priamedes,” he said. His voice was raw with emotion and the mix of ozone and combustion products that fouled the atmosphere; the Solace Militia didn’t have nose filters or gas masks that Huber could see. “I was in command here. I have ordered my men to lay down their weapons and surrender. May I expect that we will be treated honorably as prisoners of war?”
Huber raised his faceshield. His fingers were claws, cramping from their grip on his tribarrel.
“Yes sir,” Huber said, “you sure can.”
And the Solace colonel couldn’t possibly be more relieved by the end of this business than Lieutenant Arne Huber was.
When the resupply and maintenance convoy radioed, they’d estimated they were still fifteen minutes out from Northern Star. If they’d get on the stick they could cut their arrival time by two-thirds. Huber supposed the commander was afraid stragglers from the garrison would ambush his mostly soft-skinned vehicles. That was a reasonable concern—if you hadn’t seen how completely the assault had broken the Solace Militiamen.
When the convoy arrived Task Force Sangrela could stand down and let the newcomers take care of security, but right now everybody was on alert. The eight combat vehicles were just west of the building complex, laagered bows-outward so that their weapons threatened all points of the compass. The jeep-mounted mortars were dug in at the center. Two infantry squads were in pits between the vehicles, while the remainder of the platoon was spread in fire teams around the two relatively undamaged buildings into which the prisoners had been herded.
Sangrela had ordered each car to send a man to help guard the prisoners. Normally Huber would’ve complained—F-3 had carried out the assault pretty much by itself, after all—but he was just as glad for an excuse to send Costunna off. Learoyd was in the driver’s compartment now with the fans on idle. The squat, balding trooper wasn’t the Regiment’s best driver, but you never had to worry about his instincts in a firefight.
Nights here on the edge of the highlands were clearer than under the hazy atmosphere of the United Cities. Arne Huber could see the stars for the first time since he’d landed on Plattner’s World.
They made him feel more lonely, of course. The one thing that hadn’t changed during Huber’s childhood on Nieuw Friesland was the general pattern of the night sky. Since he’d joined the Slammers, he couldn’t even count on that.
He smiled wryly. “El-Tee?” Sergeant Deseau said, catching the expression.
“Change is growth, Frenchie,” Huber said. “Have you ever been told that?”
“Not so’s I recall,” the sergeant said, rubbing the side of his neck with his knuckles. “Think they’re going to leave us here to garrison the place?”
The slug that splashed the bow slope had peppered Deseau between the bottom of his faceshield and the top of his clamshell body armor. He knew that a slightly bigger chunk might have ripped his throat out, just as he knew that he was going to be sweating in the plenum chamber tomorrow, when he helped Maintenance replace the fan that’d been shot away. Both facts were part of the job.
Huber could hear the convoy now over Fencing Master’s humming nacelles. The incoming vehicles, mostly air-cushion trucks but with a section of combat cars for escort, kept their fans spinning at high speed in case they had to move fast.
“Charlie Six to all units,” said a tense voice on the common task force channel. “Eleven vehicles, I repeat one-one vehicles, entering the perimeter at vector one-seven-zero. They will show—”
A pause during which the signals officer waited for Captain Sangrela’s last-instant decision.
“—blue. Charlie Six out.”
As he spoke, the darkness to the southeast of the laager lit with quivering azure spikes: static discharges from the antennas of the incoming convoy. Huber didn’t bother to count them: there’d be eleven. Electronic identification was foolproof or almost foolproof; but soldiers were humans, not machines, and they liked to have confirmation from their own eyes as well as from a readout.