“Roger that,” Sangrela said, rubbing his chin with the knuckles of his left fist. “Anti-tank specialists, aren’t they?”
“Right, and they’re good,” Hammer agreed. The only time Huber’d seen the small, stocky man without his helmet, he’d been surprised that the sandy hair was thinning; nothing else about the Colonel’s face and smooth, muscular movements hinted at age. “They’re tasked to set up a hedge of gunpits across our route.”
Imagery on the plotting table—a holographic representation of a holographic representation, indistinct but adequate for this moment—showed a terrain map. Red dots blinked across a ten-kilometer stretch to form a serrated line: a rank of interlocking strong points.
Hammer smiled grimly. “We couldn’t have broken the Wolverines’ encryption any more than they could break ours,” he said. “But they passed the information to the Solace authorities, and that’s a different matter.”
The smile—and it’d never been one of enthusiastic joy—froze back into the previous hard lines. “Which doesn’t solve our problem. Your problem in particular, since each of those positions is a 5-cm high intensity weapon with ten men for crew and close-in defense. They aren’t mobile—the teams’re being lifted in by air, two to a cargo hauler. The trucks have light armor but they won’t dare come anywhere close to point of contact. I’m doing the briefing because Operations is looking for alternative routes so you can skirt them. Shooting your way through would take too long and cost too much.”
“Sir?” said Huber. His mind was working on a glacially smooth surface divorced from the vibration he still felt through his separated body. “They’re still en route, aren’t they?”
“Roger,” the Colonel said, his eyes pinning Huber like a pair of calipers. He had a presence, even in virtual reality, far beyond what his small form should’ve projected.
“If I put one or two of my cars on high ground, the hostiles’ll have to land short of where they plan to set up,” Huber said. “We can hold ’em down until the rest of Sierra’s clear, then catch up.”
Without poring over a terrain map Huber couldn’t have determined where to site his cars, and even then there were plenty of people better at that sort of thing than he was. The principle of it, though, and the certainty that there was a way to do it—that he had. His tribarrels would be effective against thin-skinned aircars at twenty klicks or even greater range. The hostiles wouldn’t dare try to bull through the combat cars.
What the Wolverines would do, almost certainly, was surround the detached cars and eliminate them in default of the bigger catch they’d hoped to make. They’d be willing to accept the detachment’s surrender, but Huber figured he’d try to break out. He could hope that at least one of the two cars—he had to use two, he couldn’t be sure of driving the hostiles to the ground with only one—would get clear.
A 5-cm high-intensity round could penetrate even a tank’s frontal armor. A hit on a combat car would vaporize the front half of the vehicle.
“No!” said Mitzi Trogon unexpectedly. “Huber’s got a good idea, but we don’t want to send his little fellows to do the job. Sir, find a firing position for my panzers and screw this business of scaring the hostiles to ground. I’ll blow ’em to hell ’n gone before they know they’ve been targeted!”
“By the Lord,” Colonel Hammer said in a tone of rasping delight. “Roger that! Go back to your duties, troopers. I’ll be back with you as soon as I’ve brought Operations up to speed.”
The virtual conference room vanished so suddenly that Huber jumped with the shock. The change made him feel as though he’d dropped into ice water instead of just returning to the world in which his body rode a combat car toward a powerful enemy.
“What’s the word, El-Tee?” Deseau said, his voice sharp. He sat cross-legged at Huber’s feet with his 2-cm weapon upright, its butt on his left knee. His eyes were on the sensor display.
“Fox Three, this is Fox Three-six,” Huber said, cueing the platoon push instead of answering Frenchie on the intercom channel. “There’s an anti-tank battalion headed out to block us. They probably figure to hold us while Solace Command comes up with a way to do a more permanent job. Lieutenant Trogon and Central between ’em are planning to put the hostiles in touch with some 20-cm bolts before they get anywhere close to the rest of us. Hold what you got for now, and keep your fingers crossed. Out.”
“Is there going to be a battle, then, Lieutenant?” a voice asked. Gears slipped a moment before meshing in Huber’s mind. Captain Orichos had spoken; she was standing upright with her eyes on him, her faceshield raised. Orichos looked calm but alert. Vibrant as her face now was, she seemed brightly attractive instead of the haggard, aged derelict she’d looked before the alarm.
Learoyd stood at his tribarrel, scanning the scattered forest to starboard. None of the trees were more than wrist-thick, though the tufts of flowers at the tips of some branches showed they were adults. The leading vehicles, the tanks and especially the broad-beamed recovery vehicles, had to break a path where the stunted forest was densest.
Closer to the coast where the soil and rainfall were better, the overarching canopy would keep the understory clear. The task force’d have to skirt the trees there, however; not even a tank could smash down a meter-thick trunk without damaging itself in the process….
“Not a battle, no,” Huber said over the intercom. “If things work out, the hostiles won’t get anywhere near us. If things don’t, we’ll still go around them rather than shooting our way through. That may mean worse problems down the road, but we’ll deal with that when it happens.”
As Huber spoke, he cued his AI to project a terrain and status map in a seventy percent mask across the upper left quadrant of his faceshield. His helmet with all Central’s resources on tap could provide him with whatever information he might need. What electronics couldn’t do was to stop time while he tried to absorb all that maybe-necessary information.
In a crisis, making no decision is the worst possible decision. A shrunken map that he could see through to shoot if he had to was a better choice than trying to know everything.
“Is it gonna work, El-Tee?” Deseau asked, still watching the sensor display. He cocked his head to the left so that he could scratch his neck with his right little finger.
Instead of saying, “Who the fuck knows?” which a sudden rush of fatigue brought to his mind, Huber treated the question as a classroom exercise at the Academy.
“Yeah,” he said, “I think it maybe will, Frenchie. The Wolverines, that’s who’s coming, they know what a big powergun can do as well as we do—but knowing it and knowing it, that’s different. If Sierra just keeps rolling along, they’re going to forget that a tank can hit ’em any time there’s a line of sight between them and a main gun’s bore. A surprise like that’s likely to make the survivors sit tight and take stock for long enough that we can get by the place they planned to hold us.”
“That’s good,” Deseau said. “Because I saw what a battery of the Wolverines did to a government armored regiment on Redwood. Bugger me if I want to fight ’em if we can get by without it.”
“Sierra, this is Sierra Six,” said Captain Sangrela, sounding hoarse but animated. “Delta elements, execute the orders downloaded to you from Central. Remaining Sierra elements, hold to the march plan. We’re not going to do anything to alert the other side. Estimated time to action is thirty-nine, that’s three-niner, minutes. Six out.”
“Fox Three-six, roger,” Huber said, his words merging with the responses of Sierra’s other two platoon leaders.