Orichos’ face blanked. She turned her head away from Huber and began talking into her communicator again.
Huber locked his faceshield down and concentrated on the terrain to the left front of his vehicle. That was the area his tribarrel’d be responsible for if the task force was suddenly ambushed …which they wouldn’t be, of course, but his irritation with the local officer cooled when he thought about a hose of cyan bolts lashing the buildings Fencing Master slid past.
Chances were Orichos would inform him of whatever crisis had called her attention away. Besides, it was a near certainty that the signals equipment in Sangrela’s jeep could break whatever encryption system the Point Gendarmery was using if Huber really thought the task force needed to know….
Which he didn’t. He was just in a bad mood from the long run.
Captain Orichos lowered the communicator and said, “Lieutenant Huber, there’s a problem. Grayle’s gotten word of your arrival. She’s ordered her supporters to gather in the Axis in front of the Freedom Party offices. There’s already hundreds of them there, blocking the street. There may be thousands by the time we arrive.”
Even if there’d been no previous contact between Solace and the Freedom Party, somebody there had certainly given Grayle a heads-up when they realized where Task Force Sangrela was bound. Grayle probably wasn’t pro-Solace, but they were both opposed to the Point’s present government.
At the word “problem,” Huber had cut Sierra Six into the intercom channel. Orichos looked startled when Sangrela rather than Huber replied, “Are they armed, then? Do we have to shoot our way through? Six over.”
“Via, no!” Orichos cried in horror. “A bloodbath would do exactly what Grayle hopes! Everybody’d turn against you mercenaries and the government! These are just people standing in the street!”
In the distance ahead of Fencing Master stood the stone Assembly Building on a terraced hillside. A quick flash of Huber’s map display showed him that the Axis circled the building and continued its broad way northward.
Huber’s eyes narrowed. The map also emphasized that Midway was a large city compared to most of the places the Slammers operated. A company-sized task force would drown in a place this big if it turned hostile. And gunning down a few hundred citizens in the street would be a good way to make the hundreds of thousands of survivors hostile….
“Well, bloody Hell, woman!” Captain Sangrela said. His jeep had pulled alongside Fencing Master and he was glaring up at Orichos. “If it’s a job for the police, get your bloody police on it, will you? You don’t expect us to idle here in the middle of the bloody street, do you? Or do you? Six over.”
“Captain Sangrela, I’m very sorry for the delay but we’re working on it,” Orichos said. Fencing Master continued to rumble on, twenty meters behind the screen of skimmer-mounted infantry. “We didn’t expect Grayle to react so quickly. Most of the crowd in the street are the Freedom Volunteers, the party’s militia, and there’s too many of them for the Gendarmery manpower we’ve got available at the moment. Over.”
She realizes she’s on a net, not the car’s intercom, and she’s following proper commo protocol, Huber noticed with a grin.
“Well, what use will waiting do, Captain?” Sangrela demanded. “Look, is there a back way around? Because if the idea was for the Regiment to make a show of force, having a bunch of yahoos stop us in our tracks is going to send a bloody wrong signal! What about us putting a few shots over their heads? Six over.”
Huber touched Orichos’ arm to silence her before she could answer. He said, “Six, this is Fox Three-six. Put me out front and the panzers right behind me. Get the infantry outa the way, back on the recovery vehicles’d be the best place—they can’t do any good without shooting and that’s what we’re trying to avoid. Three-six over.”
“You can handle this, Three-six?” Sangrela said. Captain Orichos was searching Huber’s face, her expression blankly concerned. “Because if you can, go with it. Six over.”
“I’ve got a driver who can handle it, sir,” Huber said. “Three-six out. Break—” cutting Captain Sangrela out of the circuit again “—Tranter, on a road surface like this, I’ll bet my left nut you can spray enough rock and grit off the bow to clear us a path and still keep us moving forward. What d’ye say?”
“I’d say you needn’t worry about disappointing your girlfriend, El-Tee,” Tranter replied cheerfully. He laughed. “Just watch our dust!”
The infantry ahead of Fencing Master turned and circled back, obeying Sangrela’s command on the C-1 unit push. Lieutenant Myers was on one of the skimmers; he looked at Huber as he slid past. Dinkybob closed up so that the gap between the tank and Fencing Master’s rear skirt was only about five meters. That’d probably be safe when both vehicles were moving at a slow walk— but if something did go wrong, the tank’d send Huber’s car cannoning forward like a billiard ball.
Huber could easily see the mob filling the street without raising his faceshield’s magnification. He didn’t want to do that: he needed all the peripheral vision he had and probably then some.
Aircars kept arriving at the back of the crowd, adding to the numbers already present. Many were big vehicles marked in red with the logo of a broken chain, capable of carrying twenty passengers. It looked to Huber as though they were ferrying people from outlying locations and going back empty for more.
Sergeant Deseau must’ve thought the same thing, because he leaned back from his tribarrel and shouted, “Hey El-Tee? I bet I could scatter those jokers right fast if I popped a couple of trucks while they was overhead.”
“That’s a big negative, Sergeant,” Huber said, hoping he sounded sufficiently disapproving. He’d been thinking the same thing himself, and Deseau probably knew him well enough to be sure of that.
Though that did raise another thought. The sky above Task Force Sangrela was full of aircars jockeying for position. So far as Huber could tell they were simply civilians who wanted to watch what was going on, but some might be members of Grayle’s militia with guns or grenades.
Besides, there was a fair chance that cars might collide and crash down on the column. The trees bordering the Axis constrained the aerial spectators into a relatively narrow channel, so they kept dropping lower to get a good view.
“Captain Orichos,” Huber said. “I understand you can’t deal with the mob on the ground, but can’t you Gendarmes do something about the idiots buzzing around overhead? ASAP.”
Orichos gave him a hard look, then nodded and spoke into her communicator. A pair of gun-metal gray aircars with blue triangles bow and stern had been paralleling the column at the fringes of the civilian vehicles. They immediately began bellowing through loudspeakers. The words were unintelligible over the intake roar of Fencing Master’s fans, but the aircars overhead edged away reluctantly.
Apparently to speed the process, a Gendarme aimed his electromagnetic carbine skyward and fired a burst. The civilian cars dived away in a panic.
That was bad enough, though the actual collisions were minor and didn’t knock anybody out of the air. It would’ve been much worse if Huber hadn’t caught Deseau as the sergeant reacted to shots fired in the fashion any bloody fool should’ve expected, by swinging his tribarrel onto the threat.
“Captain Orichos?” Huber said. “Shooting is a really bad idea. No matter who’s doing it. All right?”
Orichos nodded with a guarded expression; she didn’t like the implied reprimand, but it was obviously well-founded. She snapped a further series of orders into the communicator.