“Red Section, move out!” Captain Sangrela ordered. The main body with Jellicoe’s Floosie in the lead was already lined up on the Axis north of the Assembly Building. Dust puffed beneath their skirts as they lifted from the gravel. One at a time, carefully because objects so powerful must move carefully if they’re not to destroy themselves and everything around them, the seven vehicles of the main body started down the avenue. The doughnuts of dust spread into wakes on either side.
Sergeant Nagano glanced over from Foghorn’s fighting compartment; Huber was keeping his section on the Mound till the main body had cleared the road beneath. Huber gave Nagano a thumbs-up. Nagano hadn’t commanded a car before the operations against Northern Star, and he was doing a good job.
“How’d you make out last night, El-Tee?” Sergeant Deseau asked, stretching like a cat behind the forward gun.
“I slept like a baby,” Huber said. “I never sleep that well on leave when I’m in a bed.”
The Assembly had offered the Slammers any kind of billets they wanted, but Captain Sangrela had decided to keep his troopers beside their vehicles for the night. Nobody’d argued with him. The weather wasn’t unpleasant, and chances were some Freedom Party supporters had stayed in Midway. The risks of going off by yourself were a lot greater than any benefit a bed in an unfamiliar room was going to bring.
“Not me,” said Deseau, grinning even broader. “The people here are real grateful, let me tell you.”
Learoyd looked around from his gun. Shyly he said, “The girls didn’t charge nothing, El-Tee. I never been a place before that the girls didn’t charge.”
A Gendarmery aircar came up the Axis from the south, flying low and slow. Huber caught the motion in the corner of his eye, then cranked the image up to x32 as an inset on his faceshield. As he’d thought, Captain Orichos was in the passenger seat.
The fourth D Company tank pulled out at the back of the main body, accelerating with the slow majesty that its mass demanded. Floosie was out of sight beyond the northern end of the Axis, into the mixture of forest and scattered houses that constituted the city’s suburbs.
“Fox Three-six to Three-one,” Huber said to Sergeant Nagano. “Move into the street. We’ll follow you down and bring up the rear. Three-six out.”
Foghorn lurched from its berth and ground through a hedge that’d survived Task Force Sangrela’s arrival. Whoever was driving for Nagano today must be keyed tighter than a lute string, Huber thought; he grinned faintly. Which showed the driver understands what we’re about to get into.
“Sir, shall I shift us now?” Sergeant Tranter prodded from the driver’s compartment.
“Give me a moment, Tranter,” Huber replied. “I think I’ve got a visitor.”
“Hey, it’s your girlfriend, El-Tee,” Deseau said cheerfully. He waved at the aircar swinging in along Fencing Master’s port side.
“Not my girlfriend,” Huber said as he lifted himself out of the fighting compartment to stand on the plenum chamber. And probably not even a friend, to Arne Huber or to any member of the Slammers. Orichos had other priorities, and Huber had only the vaguest notion of what they might be.
As the aircar hovered beside them, the Gendarmery captain tossed Huber a satchel no larger than the personal kit of a trooper on active deployment. “I hope you don’t mind, Lieutenant …” she called over the thrum of the aircar and the whine of Fencing Master’s idled fans. “But I’m going to join you again.”
Huber thrust the satchel behind him for Deseau to take. He extended his right hand while his left anchored him to the fighting compartment’s coaming.
“Welcome aboard, Captain,” he said, swinging Orichos across to the combat car. She was surprisingly light; his subconscious expected the weight of a figure wearing body armor, of course.
Mauricia Orichos wasn’t welcome, but she was part of Huber’s job so he’d make the best of it. And he really had more important things on his mind just now….
Huber heard a coarse ripping as three more rounds from batteries far to the south streaked overhead. To give the shells sufficient range from the Slammers’ gun positions in the UC, a considerable part of what would normally be payload was given over to the booster rockets.
“What’s that?” asked Mauricia Orichos, pointing upward. The shells’ boron fluoride exhaust unrolled broad, poisonous ribbons at high altitude, spreading as she watched. “Are we under attack?”
“No, that’s outgoing,” Huber explained, mildly surprised that their passenger had picked up the sound of artillery over Fencing Master’s intake howl. Orichos noticed quite a lot, he realized, and she had the knack for absorbing what was normal in a new situation so that she could quickly identify change. “They’re prepping the route for us.”
He wasn’t sure how much Orichos knew about the plan, and he wasn’t going to be the one to tell her anything Base Alpha hadn’t already explained. If it’d been up to Arne Huber, he’d have told the Point authorities an amount precisely equal to the part Point forces were taking in the reduction of Fort Freedom: zip.
He glanced up at the path the shells had taken northward. For this use, the reduced payloads didn’t matter. The shells would spill their incendiary bomblets at very high altitude to get maximum dispersion. The target wasn’t a single facility but rather a fifty-kilometer swathe of forest, and there was plenty of time for the widely-spread ignition points to grow together into a massive firestorm.
Which wasn’t the sort of thing a local from Plattner’s World, where the forest was preserved with almost religious fervor, could be expected to like. Colonel Hammer put his troopers’ lives first, though, and Colonel Hammer was calling the shots on this one.
The vehicles ahead of Fencing Master had mown and gouged the riverbank into a muddy wasteland. Wherever possible the lead car had chosen a route that kept its skirts on solid ground, but occasionally an outcrop or a deep inlet forced the column partly into the water. Each thrum! as plenum-chamber pressure beat the river echoed for kilometers up and down the channel.
Huber grinned. Orichos misread his expression, for she smiled back ruefully and said, “I suppose I do sound like a Nervous Nellie. Sorry.”
“What?” said Huber. “Oh, not at all. I was just thinking that there’s never been an armored column in human history that sneaked up on anybody, and this time isn’t going to be the exception.”
“El-Tee?” said Learoyd, staring dutifully into the holographic display. “Take a look at this, will you?”
Huber’d put his right wing gunner on the first sensor watch of the run because he hadn’t expected anything to show up so early. He’d manually notched out Fencing Master and the other vehicles in the column during the run from Northern Star, so that they wouldn’t hide the more distant, hostile, signals. Unlike a quicker mind, Learoyd’s wouldn’t be lulled into daydreams by the minute changes in pearly emptiness that was probably all that he’d see in the display, but Huber feared that Learoyd might not notice subtleties that really had meaning.
Except that the trooper’d done just that. Huber frowned at the display in dawning comprehension, then said, “Sierra Six, this is Fox Three-six. We’ve got an aircar, probably a small one, following us about a kilometer back. I figure if it was just civilian sightseers, they’d be, well, in sight. Over.”
“Roger, Three-six,” Captain Sangrela said. “We leave a broad enough track that the Volunteers figure they can follow us without coming so close we spot them. Good work, Huber. I’ll drop off a fire team to take care of it. Six out.”
“Three-six out,” Huber said. “Break. Blue Section, some infantry’s staying behind to clean off our tail. Don’t run ’em over, and get ready to back ’em up when the music starts. Three-six out.”