A company of infantry with small arms would be plenty to wipe out White Section if they’d driven straight into the ambush. Mind, knowing about the ambush didn’t mean there was no risk remaining, especially to the scouts on point.
“Sierra, this is Sierra Six,” Captain Sangrela snapped. His voice sounded sleep-strangled, but he’d responded instantly to the alert. “Throttle back to twenty, repeat two-zero, kay-pee-aitch. Charlie Four-six—” The sergeant commanding the infantry of White Section “—take your team ahead while they’re listening to the cars and see if you can get a sight of what we’re dealing with. Six out.”
Deseau, now wakeful as a stooping hawk, stretched his right leg backward without looking. He kicked Tranter hard on the buttocks, bringing him out of the fetal doze as the alarm call had failed to do.
Swaying, drunk with fatigue, Tranter took his place behind the right gun. He didn’t look confident there.
“Charlie Four-six,” responded a female voice without a lot of obvious enthusiasm. On Huber’s display, the four beads of the skimmer-mounted fire team curved to the right, up the slope the column was paralleling. “Roger.”
Instead of throttling back when Sangrela ordered them to cut speed, Learoyd adjusted his nacelles toward the vertical. The fans’ sonic signature remained the same, but the blades were spending most of their effort in lifting Fencing Master’s skirts off the ground instead of driving her forward. The car slowed without informing the listening enemy of the change.
Huber rose to his feet and gripped the tribarrel. The task force commander had taken operational control of White Section, so Huber’s primary task was to lay fire on any hostiles who showed themselves in his sector.
“Fox Three-one, come up to my starboard side,” he ordered. Sergeant Tranter was a fine driver and a first-rate mechanic, but he may never have fired a tribarrel since his basic combat qualification course in recruit school. Huber wanted more than two guns on line if they were about to go into action against an infantry company.
“Roger, Three-six,” Sergeant Nagano responded. The display icon indicating his combat car disengaged from the front of the main body and began to close the kilometer gap separating it from Fencing Master.
Captain Sangrela must have seen Foghorn move as well as overhearing Huber’s order on the command channel; he chose to say nothing. Sensibly, he was leaving the immediate tactical disposition to the man on the ground.
Mauricia Orichos stood erect, her back against the rear coaming of the fighting compartment. She didn’t ask questions when the troopers around her obviously needed to focus on other things, but she looked about her alertly, like a grackle in a grain field.
Huber noticed that she didn’t draw the pistol from her belt holster. To Orichos’ mind it was an insignia of rank, not a weapon.
Huber switched his faceshield to thermal imaging. It wouldn’t give him as good a general picture of his surroundings, but it was better for targeting at night than light amplification would be. He couldn’t see the cold light of the holographic display, so he projected the data as a thirty percent mask over the faceshield’s ghostly infrared landscape.
The dots representing the mounted infantrymen approached the upper end of a ravine in which the combat car’s sensors saw more than a dozen hostiles waiting under cover. From their angle, the four Slammers would be able to rake the gully and turn it into an abattoir. The enemy gave no indication of being aware of the troopers.
When Fencing Master slowed, the dust her fans had been raising caught up with her. Yellow-gray grit swirled down the intake gratings on top of the plenum chamber and settled over the troops in the fighting compartment; the back of Huber’s neck tickled.
He felt taut. He wasn’t nervous, but he was trying to spread his mind to cover everything around him. The task was beyond human ability, as part of Arne Huber’s soap-bubble thin consciousness was well aware.
The fire team leader started laughing over the command push. The sound was wholly unexpected—and because of that, more disconcerting than a burst of shots.
“Charlie Four-six, report!” Captain Sangrela snarled. He sounded angry enough to have slapped his subordinate if she’d been within arm’s length. Huber wouldn’t have blamed him….
“Imagery coming, sir,” the sergeant replied; suppressing her laughter, but only barely.
Huber raised his visor and used the Command and Control box to project the view from the sergeant’s helmet where everybody in the car could see it. The hologram of a sheep stared quizzically at him. Behind the nearest animal stretched a hillside panorama of sheep turning their heads and a startled boy holding a long bamboo pole.
“Sierra Six to Sierra,” Captain Sangrela said in a neutral tone. “Resume previous order of march. Out.”
Fencing Master lurched as Learoyd adjusted his nacelles again. The bow skirts gouged a divot of the loose soil, but the car’s forward motion blew it behind them.
“Blood and Martyrs!” said Sergeant Deseau. “Curst if I’m not ready to blast a few a’ them sheep just for the fright they give me!”
“Save your ammo, Frenchie,” Huber said. “I guess we’ll have plenty of things to kill before this mission’s over.”
The sun was an hour above the horizon, Task Force Sangrela had been in the fringe forest for longer than that. Fencing Master was in the trail position, last of the ten vehicles. Foghorn was a hundred meters ahead where Huber could’ve caught glimpses of her iridium hull if he’d tried.
He didn’t bother. His job was to check the sensor suite, oriented now to the rear, and that was more than enough to occupy the few brain cells still working in his numb mind.
Tranter was driving again; the ride was noticeably smoother than either of the troopers could’ve managed, even when they were fresh. Learoyd was curled beneath his tribarrel, asleep and apparently as comfortable as he’d have been back in barracks.
Because they were in the drag position in the column, Deseau wasn’t at his forward-facing tribarrel. Instead he crouched in the corner behind Huber, cradling a 2-cm shoulder weapon in the crook of his arm. It fired the same round as the tribarrels, but it was self-loading instead of being fully automatic. A single 2-cm charge in the right place was enough to put paid to most targets.
Mauricia Orichos had sunk into herself, seated between Learoyd’s head and Deseau across the rear of the fighting compartment. She didn’t look any more animated than a lichen on a rock. Huber knew how she felt: the constant vibration reduced mind and body alike to jelly.
This run’d get over, or Arne Huber would die. Either’d be an acceptable change.
A red light pulsed at the upper left corner of the display. Fully alert, Huber straightened and locked his faceshield down. “Frenchie,” he snapped. “Take over on the sensors!”
Huber cued the summons, turning his faceshield into a virtual conference room. He sat at a holographic plotting table with the other task force officers—Mitzi Trogon blinked into the net an instant after Huber did; Myers and Captain Sangrela were already there—and Colonel Hammer himself.
The imagery wavered. It was never fuzzy, but often it had a certain over-sharpness as the computer called up stock visuals when the transmitted data were insufficient.
To prevent jamming and possible corruption, Central was communicating with the task force in tight-beam transmissions bounced from cosmic ray ionization tracks. The Regiment’s signals equipment used the most advanced processors and algorithms in the human universe to adjust for breaks and distortion. Even so, links to vehicles moving at speed beneath scattered vegetation were bound to be flawed.
“There’s a battalion of the Wolverines on the way to block you,” the Colonel said without preamble. “We operated alongside them once—Sangrela, you probably remember on Redwood?”