“Sierra Six to Sierra,” Captain Sangrela said. “Blue Section, move out.”
Blue Section was the two remaining combat cars under Platoon Sergeant Jellicoe. They’d follow the main body at a kilometer’s distance, extending the column’s sensor range to the rear by that much. There wasn’t a high likelihood that the enemy would sweep up on the task force from behind, but some of the mercenary units Solace was known to have hired had equipment with sufficient performance to manage it.
The cars in Blue Section would rotate at the same intervals as the scouts did. Either Huber or Jellicoe would be at the front or rear of the column—but never both at the same end.
“Then I guess I’d better get used to it, hadn’t I?” Orichos said. She spread her left hand over her eyes to shield them as she surveyed the terrain. She added, “Have you been with Hammer’s Slammers long, Lieutenant?”
“Five years,” Huber said, facing forward and lowering his faceshield so that Orichos could do the same. “I entered the Military Academy on Nieuw Friesland with the intention of enlisting in the Regiment when I graduated …and I did.”
The scouts were already into the gullied scrubland that the task force would grind through for the first half of the route. Central had timed the departure from Northern Star so that Sierra would be in pitch darkness while it navigated the last of the foothills south of Point territory where forests resumed.
Until the task force set off, the enemy would assume the Slammers intended to return to UC territory after capturing Northern Star. It’d take Solace Command time to react when they realized the Slammers’ real intent. The most dangerous ambush sites were in the foothills; by waiting till noon to set off, the task force would have the advantage of the Regiment’s more sophisticated night vision equipment in that last stretch which the enemy might reach in time to block them.
Huber hoped the Colonel was right; but then, he hoped a lot of things, and his tribarrel was ready to take care of whatever reality threw at them. You couldn’t always blast your way through problems, but the ability to out-slug the other fellow never stopped being an advantage.
“Do you know much about the political structure of the Point, Lieutenant?” Orichos asked. Since her voice came through the commo helmet, she could’ve been standing anywhere on the planet—but Huber was very much aware of her presence beside and just behind him.
“Not a thing, ma’am,” he admitted. “I studied the United Cities some from the briefing cubes because they were hiring us, but I didn’t look at the rest of you folks.”
He touched the controller with his left hand, projecting an image remoted from Foghorn into the air before him. The scout car was bulling through brush already. The stems were wiry enough to spring back after Foghorn passed, but they were too thin to be a barrier to a thirty-tonne vehicle.
He hoped what he’d just said didn’t sound too much like, “I’m not interested in you dumb wogs;” which wasn’t true for Arne Huber himself but pretty well summed up the attitude of a lot of Slammers, officers as well as line troopers like Sergeant Deseau. Trooper Learoyd wasn’t likely to have thoughts so abstract.
“Midway’s the only city in the Point,” Orichos said. “We’re not like Trenchard or the UC where there’s half a dozen places each as big as the next. There’s a quarter million people in Midway, and no town as big as a thousand in all the rest of the country.”
“So about a third of your population’s in the one city,” Huber said. He hadn’t studied the Point, not like you’d really mean studied; but he’d checked the basic statistics on Plattner’s World, sure. “I guess there’s a lot of trouble between people in Midway and the rest of the country, then?”
“There wasn’t any trouble at all before Melinda Grayle came along!” snapped Captain Orichos, her very vehemence proving that she was lying. “She started stirring up the Moss rangers ten years ago. All she’s interested in is power for herself.”
Not unlikely, Arne Huber thought. Of course, Melinda Grayle wasn’t the only politician you could say that about; and she maybe wasn’t the only politician in the Point you could say it about, either.
“Grayle claims that the votes in the last election were falsified and that she should’ve been elected Speaker of the Assembly,” Orichos went on. “She’s threatening to take by force what she claims her Freedom Party lost by fraud. Everybody knows that the reason most Assemblymen are residents of Midway is because Moss rangers can’t be bothered to vote!”
“Ma’am,” said Arne Huber, “I wouldn’t know about that. But if the lady thinks she’s going to use force while we’re in Midway—”
He turned his head toward her again and patted the receiver of his tribarrel.
“—then she’ll have another think coming. Because force is something I do know about.”
“Amen to that, El-Tee,” said Frenchie Deseau. He didn’t raise his voice on the intercom, but his words had the timbre of feeding time in the lion house.
It was four hours to dawn; the sky was a hazy overcast through which only the brightest stars winked. The car’s vibration and buffeting wind of passage—seventy kph, a little more or a little less— drew the strength out of the troopers who’d been subjected to it for the past half-day.
Huber sat cross-legged beside the left gun, watching the shimmering holographic display. He was too low to look out of the fighting compartment from here, but the range of inputs from Fencing Master’s sensors should provide more warning than his eyes could even during daylight.
Body heat, CO2 exhalations, and even the bioelectrical field which every living creature created were grist for the sensors to process. They scanned the gullied slopes a full three kilometers ahead, noting small animals sleeping in burrows and the scaly, warm-blooded night-flyers of Plattner’s World which curvetted in the skies above.
Tranter was sleeping—was curled up, anyway—under the right wing gun on a layer of ammo boxes. Orichos squatted behind him with her back to the armor, looking as miserable as a drenched kitten. Learoyd had just taken over the driving chores from Deseau, awake but barely as he hunched over the forward tribarrel. Huber didn’t worry about how the sergeant’d react to an alarm— Deseau was enough of a veteran and a warrior both to lay fire on a target in a sound sleep—but he certainly wasn’t going to raise the alarm.
That would be Arne Huber’s job. As platoon leader he wasn’t taking a turn driving, but neither did he catch catnaps like the rest of the crew between stints in the driver’s compartment. Fencing Master was the combat car in White Section during this leg, so Huber had the sensor suite on high sensitivity.
Task Force Sangrela was running the part of the route which Solace forces might have been able to reach for an ambush. Central hadn’t warned of enemy movement, but there could’ve been troops already in place in the region. Technically they were still within Solace territory, not that anybody was likely to stand on a technicality during wartime.
“Bloody fuckin’ hell,” Sergeant Deseau growled over the intercom. He clung to the grips of his tribarrel as though he’d have fallen without them to hold onto …which he might well have done. High-speed driving over rough terrain at night was a ten-tenths activity, many times worse than the grueling business of surviving the ride in the fighting compartment. “I wish somebody’d just shoot at us for a break from this bloody grind.”
“There’s nobody around to shoot, Frenchie,” Huber said; and as he spoke, he saw he was wrong.
Keying the emergency channel with the manual controller he’d been using to switch between sensor modes, Huber said, “White Six to Sierra, we’ve got locals waiting for us ahead. It’s six-three, repeat six-three—” the display threw up the numbers in the corner; he sure wasn’t going to have counted the blips overlaying the terrain map that fast “—personnel, no equipment signatures. Looks like dispersed infantry with personal weapons only.”