“We gonna get a chance to pop somebody, El-Tee?” Deseau asked, turning hopefully to meet Huber’s eyes.
“Not a chance, Frenchie,” Huber said. “But we’re going to follow the drill anyway.”
A thought struck him and he went on, “Captain Orichos? Is there any chance that a Gendarmery aircar is trailing the column? If there is, tell me now. You won’t get a second chance.”
Orichos frowned. “One of ours?” she said. “Not unless somebody’s disregarded my clear instructions. And if that’s happened, Lieutenant—”
She smiled. Frenchie Deseau couldn’t have bettered the cruel surmise in her expression.
“—then the sort of lesson I assume you propose will bring the survivors to a better appreciation of the authority granted me by the Assembly.”
Huber nodded and returned his attention to his tribarrel’s sector forward. He didn’t have a problem with ruthlessness, but he found disquieting the gusto with which people like the Gendarmery captain did what was necessary.
“Three-six, watch the pedestrians!” Nagano warned from Foghorn fifty meters ahead. Four infantrymen had hopped their skimmers off one of the maintenance vehicles; now they were positioning themselves behind treeboles where they’d have good fields of fire for their 2-cm weapons as soon as the aircar came in sight above the water. Huber nodded in salute, but the infantrymen were wholly focused on what was about to happen.
The ambush team had shut down their skimmers immediately upon hitting the ground. The Volunteers weren’t likely to have sensors that’d pick up a skimmer’s small fans more than a stone’s throw away, but regimental training emphasized that you didn’t assume any more than you had to. Plenty of stuff that you couldn’t control was going to go wrong, so you made doubly sure on the rest.
“How long, Lieutenant?” Orichos asked. Not what: how long. She was a sharp one, no mistake.
“About a minute and a half,” Huber explained. “We’re traveling at about forty kph in this salad—”
He gestured to the soft vegetation just outside the track, where the previous vehicles hadn’t ground it to green slime.
“—and our Volunteer friends back there’ll be holding to the same speed. The last thing they want’s to fly up on our tail.”
He smiled. Which was just what they were about to do.
Orichos nodded and turned to watch the route behind Fencing Master. There wasn’t anything to see but mud and muddy water, of course. Sight distances close to the ground were at most a hundred meters in the few places the river flowed straight, and generally much less where vegetation arched over the curving banks.
Huber imported to the lower left quadrant of his faceshield the view from the sergeant commanding the ambush team; it wouldn’t interfere with his sight picture in the unlikely event that Fencing Master ran into trouble. After a moment’s hesitation, he touched Orichos’ shoulder. When she turned, he linked their helmets as he had while Floosie raked incoming shells from the sky. Orichos nodded appreciatively.
It took ten seconds longer than Huber’d estimated before an open aircar with four men aboard loitered into sight. Sangrela had chosen the ambush site welclass="underline" the car slowed, dipping beneath a branch draped with air plants which crossed the river only three meters above the purling surface.
The lift fans flung a rainbow of spray through the sunlight, momentarily blinding the two men in the front. As the car started to rise again, three cyan bolts hit the driver, vaporizing his torso, and a fourth took off the head of the gunman in the passenger seat.
The driver jerked the control yoke convulsively, throwing the car belly forward and spilling the remaining gunman off the stern. The sergeant shot the falling man before he hit the water; the three troopers blew the car’s underside into fireballs of plastic paneling superheated into a mixture that exploded in the air.
“Blue Section, reverse!” Huber screamed. Sergeant Tranter was a trifle slower to spin Fencing Master than he should’ve been; Huber’d forgotten the driver didn’t have reflexes ingrained by combat like the rest of them did. “Move it! Move it! Move it!”
The ambush team didn’t need help. The aircar crashed edgewise onto a spine of rock sticking up from the water; it broke apart. The fourth Volunteer had been concentrating on detector apparatus feeding through a bulky helmet. He must’ve been strapped in; his arms flailed, but he didn’t get out of the car even when the wreckage slipped off the rocks and started to sink.
The river geysered as at least four and maybe twice that many 2-cm bolts hit the man and the water nearby. A bolt hit an upthrust rock; it burst like a grenade, shredding foliage on the bank with sharp fragments.
I guess the poor bastard’s not going to drown after all, Huber thought.
When Fencing Master reached the ambush site a few seconds later, the infantrymen had remounted their skimmers. Huber gestured them forward to put the combat car in drag position again.
“You were right, El-Tee,” said Deseau regretfully. “Not a bloody thing for us.”
One of the infantrymen waved back as he passed Fencing Master. He was now wearing a helical copper bracelet, its ends shaped like snakeheads.
Apparently the leader of the squad Huber shot it out with in Freedom Party headquarters hadn’t learned from that experience. Huber smiled coldly. The Slammers didn’t give anybody a third chance.
The alert signal brought Huber out of a doze; it was like swimming upward through hot sand. He’d jumped to his feet and had the tribarrel’s grips in his hands, straining for a target in his faceshield’s light-amplified imagery, before his conscious mind took over and he realized why he’d awakened.
Learoyd was driving. Sergeant Deseau was at the forward gun, as rested as anybody could be after eighteen hours of slogging through river-bottom vegetation. Huber wouldn’t have been able to drop off if he hadn’t been sure Frenchie was there to take up the slack. He’d needed the mental down-time badly, though. The shoot-out in Freedom Party headquarters had drained him more than he’d realized right after it happened.
But that was part of the past, a different world, and now the present was calling. “Fox Three-six acknowledging!” Huber said, and his helmet dropped him into the virtual meeting room with Colonel Hammer himself and the other officers of Task Force Sangrela. He’d been the last to arrive, but from the look of Mitzi Trogon—her mouth was half-open and her eyes looked like they were staring into oncoming headlights—she was in at least as bad a shape as he was.
“Troopers,” Hammer said, acknowledging his four subordinates with a glance that swept the table. The imagery was sharper than it’d been in the forest south of Midway; the sky above the Fiorno was fairly open. “There’s Volunteers setting up a blocking position on an island three hours ahead of you. There’s about two hundred men with buzzbombs and six calliopes if they’re not further reinforced.”
Hammer’s torso vanished into a slant view of a roughly oval island; it covered about as much of the river valley as the channels flowing to north and south of it. From the scale at the bottom of the image, the heavily wooded surface between the streams was on the order of a square kilometer.
“They’ve been flying in from Bulstrode Bay over the past hour,” Hammer said with a disbelieving shake of his head. “They apparently don’t realize that here at Base Alpha we can follow everything they’re doing, right down to who had grits for breakfast.”
Icons of red light marked hostile positions: calliopes on the forward curve of the island, and squads of infantry both on the island itself and on the north bank of the floodway. The Volunteers probably intended the mainland element to halt the task force in line along the shore where the calliopes could rake the Slammers from the flank.
Sangrela laughed in derision. “You want us to go through ’em or around ’em, sir?” he asked. “For choice we’ll go through.”