Huber gestured to the display and said over the two-way link he’d set with Captain Orichos’ borrowed commo helmet, “We’re on track, Captain. Another two minutes.”
Sergeant Tranter ran up his fans, keeping the blade incidence fine so that they didn’t develop any lift. Huber heard the note change minusculely as the driver adjusted settings, bringing the replacement nacelle into perfect balance with the other seven.
Sergeant Deseau nodded approvingly, chopping the lip of the armor with his hand and then pointing forward to indicate the driver’s compartment. Trooper Learoyd didn’t react. He usually didn’t react, except to do his job; which he did very well, though Huber had met cocker spaniels he guessed had greater intellectual capacity than Learoyd.
The fighting compartment was crowded with Orichos sharing the space with the three men of the combat crew, but Via! it was always crowded. A slim woman who wasn’t wearing body armor—her choice, and Huber thought it was a bad one—didn’t take up as much room as the cooler of beer they’d strapped onto the back of the bustle rack when they took her aboard. They weren’t using overhead cover for the combat cars here on Plattner’s World because they were generally operating in heavy forest.
“Wouldn’t your helmet show that information?” Orichos asked, tapping the side of the one Huber had borrowed for her from a mechanic when he learned she’d be traveling in his car. She didn’t need it so much for communications as for the sound damping it provided. A run like the one planned would jelly the brains of anybody making it without protection from all the shrieks, hums, and roars they’d get in an open combat car.
“Sierra Six to Sierra,” Captain Sangrela. “White Section—” the scouts “—move out. Over.”
The lead car, Foghorn, was already off the ground on fan thrust. Its driver nudged his control yoke forward, sending the thirty-tonne vehicle toward the northwest in a billow of dust. Foghorn’s skirts plowed a broad path through the young corn.
Four infantrymen on skimmers lifted when the combat car moved. For a moment they flew parallel to the bigger vehicle, just out of the turbulent air squirting beneath the plenum chamber; then they moved out ahead by 150 meters, spreading to cover a half-klick frontage. Foghorn’s sensor suite covered the infantry while they ranged ahead on their light mounts to discover the sort of terrain problems that didn’t show up on satellite.
“I can access everything Central’s got in its data banks here on my faceshield,” Huber replied to Orichos, thinking about her gray eyes behind her faceshield. She’d smiled at him when he offered her the helmet. “I like to keep it for stuff with immediate combat significance, though.”
He grinned through his visor and added, “Sometimes it’s more important that I’m Fencing Master’s left wing gunner than that I command platoon F-3.”
The scouts patrolled a klick ahead of whichever vehicle was leading the main body. The combat cars and infantry would rotate through White Section every hour under the present conditions, more frequently if the terrain got challenging.
Huber had picked Sergeant Nagano’s car to start out in the lead because it’d been so badly battered at Northern Star. If last night’s massive repairs weren’t going to hold up, Huber wanted to know about it now—by daylight and long before the enemy started reacting to Task Force Sangrela.
“Sierra Six to Sierra,” Sangrela ordered in a hoarsely taut voice.
“Red Section—” the main body, with Fencing Master leading two tanks, followed by the recovery vehicles and the last two tanks “— move out. Over.”
“That’s us, Tranter,” Huber ordered on the intercom channel. “Hold us at thirty kph until the whole section’s under way, got that?”
They planned to average sixty kph on the run, putting them in Midway exactly twenty-four hours from this moment, including breaks to switch drivers and the stretches of bad terrain that’d hold down their speed. Ordinarily on this sort of smooth ground they’d have belted along at the best speed the infantry could manage on skimmers, close to 100 kph. Sierra had to build speed gradually, however, or the vehicles would scatter themselves too widely to support each other in event of enemy action.
Which was certain to come; more certain than any trooper in Task Force Sangrela could be of seeing the next sunrise.
Sergeant Tranter brought Fencing Master up from a dead halt as smoothly as if he were twisting a rheostat. He’d been a maintenance technician, so he’d learned to drive armored vehicles by shifting them—frequently badly damaged—around one another in the tight confines of maintenance parks. He’d stopped being a tech when a hydraulic jack blew out, dropping a tank’s skirts to a concrete pad and pinching his right leg off as suddenly as lightning.
The mechanical leg was in most respects as good as the original one, but in serious cold the organic/electrical interface degraded enough to send the limb into spasms. The Regiment had offered Tranter the choice of retirement on full pay or a rear-echelon job he could do in a heated building. He’d chosen the latter, a berth in Logistics Section.
Summer temperatures on Plattner’s World never dropped below the level of mildly chilly. If Regimental Command was willing to make an exception, there was nobody Arne Huber would’ve preferred driving his car than Tranter.
Huber looked over his shoulder, twisting his body at the waist because the clamshell armor stiffened his neck and upper torso. The lead tank, Dinkybob, lifted to follow thirty meters behind Fencing Master. Mitzi’s driver echeloned the big vehicle slightly to the right of Tranter’s line to stay out of the combat car’s dust. That was fine on a grain field like this, but pretty soon Task Force Sangrela would be winding through hillside scrub where the big vehicles’d feel lucky to have one route.
Well, troopers got used to dust pretty quick. The only thing they knew better was mud…. The commo helmets had nose filters that dropped down automatically and static charges to keep their faceshields clear, but on a run like this Huber knew to expect a faintly gritty feeling every time he blinked. The ration bars he ate on the move would crunch, too.
The tribarrels were sealed against dust—until you had to use them. It didn’t take much grit seeping down the ejection port to jam mechanisms as precise as those in the interior of an automatic weapon.
Captain Orichos swayed awkwardly, uncertain of what she could safely grab or sit on. She was familiar with aircars and thought this would be the same. She hadn’t realized that terrain affected the ride of air-cushion vehicles—not as much as it affected wheels and treads, but still a great deal.
She caught Huber’s glance and waved a hand in frustration. “I’d expected the floor to vibrate,” she said. “But the jolting—what does that? I didn’t feel anything like that when I rode here with Major Pritchard.”
Huber grinned. “You rode here in a convoy traveling at the speed of heavily loaded supply vehicles, with the number two man in the Slammers aboard. Sierra has different priorities. Even on these fields, the front skirt digs in every time there’s a little dip or rise in the ground. It’ll get a lot worse when we start working along the sides of the foothills we’re scheduled to hit pretty soon.”
“Then it’s always like this?” she asked. Deliberately she lifted her faceshield, squinting slightly against the wind blast. She quirked the wry smile he’d seen the night before as she discussed the moral courage of elected officials.
“No, not always,” Huber said, raising his own shield to give Orichos a much broader smile than the one he’d been wearing before. “Sometimes they’re shooting at us, Captain.”