He stretched his arms, over his head and then behind him, bending forward at the waist. It was going to feel good to get the clamshell off; it itched like an ant colony had taken up residence.
Always assuming he lived long enough to get to a place he didn’t need body armor, of course. But he did assume that, soldiers always assumed that.
Arne Huber grinned behind his faceshield. And it was always true—until the day it wasn’t true.
The task force had slowed again to switch assignments. Fencing Master was now at the head of the main body, Foghorn and a fire team of infantry who’d jumped their skimmers off the maintenance vehicle where they’d been resting were scouting a klick in the lead, and Sergeant Jellicoe’s section trailed to the rear.
Huber smiled grimly behind the anonymity of his faceshield. “Resting” wasn’t a good word to describe what the infantry was going through, jolting around in the back of a wrenchmobile. Though this was a hard ride for the troops in the armored vehicles, it was a lot worse for the infantry. But Via! every soul in the Slammers was a volunteer.
They were climbing a slope of harder rock than most of the surroundings—a spine of sandstone from which time had worn away the limestone overburden. The top was bald except for patches of wiry grass and a few saplings whose roots had found purchase in a crack. A fresh scar across the stone showed where Foghorn had dragged her skirts.
“Sierra, thirty seconds to execute!” snapped Captain Sangrela over the general push.
Huber rested his left hand on the receiver of his tribarrel and looked over his shoulder. Fifty meters behind Fencing Master, Dinkybob, a massive iridium tortoise, snorted up the slight rise. The tank’s hatches were buttoned up; as Huber watched, the turret swung to starboard. The squat 20-cm main gun elevated very slightly.
Mauricia Orichos raised her faceshield to watch the tank. Huber reached over her shoulder and clicked the protection back over her eyes. “Not now!” he said sharply. “Aide—”
As Huber voice-cued his AI, he manually keyed the pad over Orichos’ right ear to link her helmet to his.
“—import targeting from Delta Two-six.”
With the final word, Huber viewed not his immediate surroundings but the sight picture from the gunnery screen of the huge tank just behind him. It was at high magnification, so high that it had the glassy smoothness of images heavily retouched by the computer to sharpen them.
Five waves of large aircars skimmed undulating, almost barren, terrain. There were four vehicles in the leading ranks and three in the final, all echeloned right. They’d just crossed a ridgeline and were nosing down to cross a shallow valley.
Dinkybob’s sight pipper settled over the lead vehicle in the left file. Instead of being a solid orange ball, the reticle was crosshatched to indicate that the fire-control computer was auto-targeting just as it would do in air defense mode.
The cyan flash of the main gun stabbed across Huber’s bare skin like a separate needle every millimeter. It would’ve been instantly blinding to anyone looking toward it without a faceshield’s polarizing protection. The crash of heated air—louder than an equally close thunderbolt—shook Fencing Master. Deseau, jounced from his squat, sprawled across Huber’s feet.
The center of the targeted aircar erupted in blue flame. The bow and a fragment of the stern tumbled out of the sky, spilling such of the contents as hadn’t been carbonized by the blast.
Dinkybob continued to fire, ripping the formation as quickly as her gun mechanism could cycle fresh loads into the chamber. Trogon was burning out her barrel by shooting without giving the bore time to cool between rounds. For the people in Fencing Master’s fighting compartment, the volley was like being whipped by a scorpion’s tail.
For the Wolverines at the other end, it was a brief glimpse of Hell.
A tank hit at that range—eighty-one kilometers distant—might have shrugged off the bolt with damage only to its external sensors and its running gear. It was impossible for a vehicle that had to fly with a heavy cargo the way the Wolverines’ trucks did to be armored like a tank. Each bolt scattered its target in a fireball of its own burning structure.
Dinkybob was nearing the edge of the bald patch, but Doomsayer was immediately behind. For an instant both 20-cm guns fired in tight syncopation; then Fencing Master drove into heavy forest, Dinkybob passed out of its targeting window, and even Doomsayer’s main gun ceased firing. Huber’s heartbeat throbbed in the silence.
The summons wobbled at the corner of Huber’s faceshield. He cued it, dropping into the virtual conference room again.
Colonel Hammer looked around the circle of Sierra officers. “That’s fourteen out of nineteen trucks destroyed,” he said, “and two of the others grounded hard enough to break as best we can tell by satellite.”
Hammer grinned like a shark. “Task accomplished, troopers. Complete the rest of the mission the same way and there’ll be a lot of promotions out of this business. Dismissed!”
Arne Huber swayed in the rumbling fighting compartment of his combat car, thinking about what the Colonel had just said. Promotion—maybe.
But if they didn’t complete the mission, very probably death. Well, the Slammers were all volunteers….
The muzzle of Dinkybob’s main gun had cooled from white to a red so deep it was mostly a shimmer in the air around the hot metal. Mitzi’s turret hatch was open, dribbling a trail of gray haze. A plastic matrix held the copper atoms in alignment for release as plasma down the powergun’s bore; the smoke was the last of the breakdown products from the recent shooting.
An alert wobbled on the upper right corner of Huber’s faceshield. He crooked his left little finger, one of six ways he could cue the icon. It was a download-only channel, information from Central for Sierra Six. Huber and the other task force officers were brought into the circuit to listen but not to comment.
“Sierra, this is Operations Three-four-one,” said the voice from somewhere back in Base Alpha. “Solace Command is pissed about what you did to the Wolverines. They’ve ordered a fire mission by all batteries that can range you. You’ll have to take care of your own air defense. Any questions? Over.”
Though voice-only, the increasingly thick foliage overhead attenuated the transmission to sexlessness. On this side of the ridge, the task force was descending into healthy coastal forest.
“What do you mean ‘all batteries’?” Captain Sangrela asked. He sounded more irritable than concerned. “Is this a real problem? Over.”
“Negative on a real problem,” Central replied calmly. It was easy to be calm in Base Alpha, of course. “There’s two, maybe three off-planet batteries with rocket howitzers and carrier shells. We’ll get you time and vector data as soon as they fire, but you’ll have plenty of room to pop them before the carriers separate. Besides that, the Solace Militia has thirty or forty conventional tubes that can range you with rocket assisted rounds, but they won’t have any payload to speak of after what the booster rocket requires. I repeat, you’ll have full data soonest. Over”
“Roger, Sierra out,” Sangrela said. “Break, Fox Three-six—”
The signal now was coming through the task force command channel.
“—that puts it on your cars. Is there going to be any problem? Over.”
“No problem, Six,” Huber said curtly. “Just give me a minute to plan. Out.”
He raised his faceshield and brought up a terrain display through the Command and Control box. On cue the AI highlighted the locations on or near Sierra’s forward track which provided a line of sight toward the arc of territory where the hostile guns might be sited.
The display used a violet overlay to mark ranges of thirty klicks and above; the hue moved down the spectrum as the range closed. Points from which a tribarrel could reach out five kilometers—as close as Huber was willing to let the sophisticated carrier shells get—were green.