Captain Sangrela walked forward, holding a blue marker wand in his left hand. The troops between the armored vehicles rose and moved to the center of the laager where they wouldn’t be driven over. The newcomers would be parking between the vehicles of Task Force Sangrela.
If the units spent the night in two separate laagers they risked a mutual firefight, especially if the enemy was smart enough to slip into the gap and shoot toward both camps in turn. The Solace Militia probably didn’t have that standard of skill, but some of mercenaries Solace had hired certainly did. Soldiers, even the Slammers, could get killed easily enough without taking needless chances.
The convoy came in, lighted only by its static discharges. Huber could’ve switched his faceshield to thermal imaging or light-amplification if he’d wanted to see clearly—that’s how the drivers were maneuvering their big vehicles into place—but he was afraid he’d drop into a reverie if he surrounded himself with an electronic cocoon. He still felt numb from reaction to the assault.
“El-Tee, that combat car’s from A Company,” Deseau said, one hand resting idly on the grip of his tribarrel. He was using helmet intercom because the howls of incoming vehicles would’ve overwhelmed his voice even if he’d shouted at the top of his lungs. “So’s the infantry riding on the back of them wrenchmobiles. When did the White Mice start pulling convoy security?”
Huber’s mind kept playing back the moment Fencing Master had lurched into position above the canal so he could rake it with his tribarrel. In his memory there was only equipment and empty uniforms in the sun-struck channel. No men at all …
“You’ve got me, Frenchie,” Huber said. He should’ve noticed that himself.
A Company—the White Mice, though Huber didn’t know where the name came from—was the Regiment’s field police, under the command of Major Joachim Steuben. The White Mice weren’t all murderous sociopaths; but Major Steuben was, and the troopers of A Company who still had consciences didn’t let them get in the way of carrying out the orders Steuben gave.
“Officers to the command car ASAP,” a female voice ordered without bothering to identify herself. “All units shut down, maintaining sensor watch and normal guard rosters. Regiment Three-three out.”
Huber felt his face freeze. Regiment Three-three was the signalman for the Slammers’ S-3, the operations officer. What was Major Pritchard doing out here?
Though his presence explained why the White Mice were escorting the convoy, that was for sure.
Resupply was aboard six air-cushion trucks. They could keep up with the combat vehicles on any terrain, but their only armor was thin plating around the cab. Besides them the convoy included two combat cars for escort and two recovery vehicles—wrenchmobiles— which could lift a crippled car in the bed between their fore and aft nacelles. For this run the beds had been screened with woven-wire fencing, so that the twenty A Company infantrymen aboard each wouldn’t bounce out no matter how rough the ride.
The last member of the convoy was a command vehicle. Its high, thinly armored box replaced the fighting compartment and held more signal and sensor equipment than would fit in a standard combat car. It backed between Fencing Master and the tank to Huber’s left, then shut down; the rear wall lowered to form a ramp with a whine of hydraulic pumps.
“Well, you don’t got far to go, El-Tee,” Deseau said judiciously. He rubbed his neck again. “What d’ye suppose is going on?”
“I’ll let you know,” Huber said as he swung his legs out of the fighting compartment and stood for a moment on the bulge of the plenum chamber. He gripped the frame of the bustle rack left-handed, then slid down the steel skirt with the skill of long practice.
His right hand held a sub-machine gun, the butt resting on his pelvis. It fired the same 1-cm charges as the Slammers’ pistols, but it was fully automatic.
Deseau sounded like he didn’t expect to like the answer his lieutenant came back with. That was fair, because Huber didn’t think he was going to like it either.
Captain Sangrela, looking older than Huber remembered him being at the start of the operation, had just shaken hands with Pritchard at the bottom of the ramp. Mitzi Trogon, built like one of her tanks and at least as hard, was climbing down from Dinkybob on the other side of the command track from Fencing Master. She was a good officer to serve with—if you were able to do your job to her standards.
“Lieutenant Myers’s on the way from the prisoner guard in the farm buildings,” Sangrela explained to Pritchard as Huber joined them. The buzz of a skimmer was faintly audible, wavering with the breeze but seeming to come closer. “I moved us half a klick out before laagering for the night so we wouldn’t have hostiles in the middle of us if they got loose or some curst thing.”
This was the first time Huber had seen Major Danny Pritchard in the field; body armor made the S-3 seem bigger than he did addressing the Regiment from a podium. His normal expression was a smile, so he looked younger than his probable real age of thirty-eight or so standard years. He’d come up through the ranks, and the pistol he wore over his clamshell in a shoulder rig wasn’t just for show.
A woman wearing a jumpsuit uniform of a style Huber hadn’t seen before—it wasn’t United Cities garb, and it sure wasn’t Slammers—had arrived in the car with Pritchard but now waited at the top of the ramp. She responded to Huber’s grin with a guarded nod. She was trimly attractive, very alert, and—if Arne Huber was any judge of people—plenty tough as well.
Pritchard looked to his right and said, “Good to see you again, Mitzi,” in a cheerful voice. Turning to Huber he went on, warmly enough but with the touch of reserve proper between near strangers, “Lieutenant Huber? Good to meet you.”
Lieutenant Myers’ skimmer buzzed to a halt beside them, kicking dirt over everybody’s feet. Sangrela glared at the infantry platoon leader who now acted as the task force’s executive officer.
“Sorry,” Myers muttered as he got to his feet. He was a lanky, nervous man who seemed to do his job all right but never would let well enough alone. “I was, I mean—”
“Can it, Lieutenant!” Sangrela said in a tone Huber wouldn’t have wanted anyone using to him. To Pritchard he continued apologetically, “Sir, all my officers are now present.”
Pritchard quirked a smile. “I guess we’ll fit inside,” he said, stepping back into the command car and gesturing the others to follow. The roof hatch forward was open; from the inside, all Huber could see of Pritchard’s signals officer was the lower half of her body standing on the full-function seat now acting as a firing step. “Not for privacy, but the imagery’s going to be sharper if we use the car.”
Huber unlatched his body armor and shrugged it off before he climbed into the compartment. Mitzi wasn’t wearing hers any-way—she said she bumped often enough in a tank turret as it was. Lieutenant Myers saw Huber strip, started to follow suit, then froze for a moment with the expression of a bunny in the headlights. He was the last to enter, and even then only when Sangrela gestured him angrily forward.
The compartment was smaller than it looked from the outside because the sidewalls were fifteen centimeters thick with electronics. There were fold-down seats at the three touchplate consoles on each side, blandly neutral at this moment because nobody’d chosen the function they were to control.
“Right,” said Pritchard when they were all inside. “Officially the government of United Cities has hired the Regiment to support it in its tariff discussions with the government of Solace. Unofficially, everybody on the planet knows that the other five of the Outer States are helping the UC pay our hire.”
Huber suspected that not all the Slammers—and not even all the officers here in the S-3’s command car—knew or cared who was paying the Slammers. It wasn’t their job to know, and a lot of the troopers didn’t want to clutter up their minds with things that didn’t matter. It might get in the way of stuff that helped them stay alive….