“Neither,” said Hammer with a spreading smile. “I’m just telling you what the situation is. We’re going to handle it from here with artillery.”
“Why in hell would you want to do that?” Mitzi Trogon snarled. She must’ve heard her own tone; she snapped fully awake at last. “Ah, sir, that is,” she added with a grimace of embarrassment.
Hammer looked at Trogon without expression for a moment, then lifted his chin minutely to show that the incident was closed— if not forgotten. “Right,” he said with a mildness that deceived nobody. “This ambush isn’t a problem, but Fort Freedom is likely to be more of one. Here the Volunteers have their calliopes tasked for ground use, waiting for your column to come into their killing zone. They aren’t professional enough to redirect the guns for artillery defense in the amount of time they’ll have. Follow?”
Because Huber understood and none of his fellow officers were in a hurry to speak after Mitzi’d stepped on her dick, he said, “When a salvo takes out the whole ambush party, Volunteer Command is going to decide it’s our shells they ought to be worrying about. When we get to Bulstrode Bay, their calliopes are going to be aimed up for artillery defense and we’ll take ’em with direct fire.”
“Roger that, troopers,” Hammer said, his face minusculely softer than it’d been a moment before. “This won’t be a milk run for you, there’s no way it’s going to be that. But I told you from the beginning that you’d have all the support we could give you. Any questions?”
“Support” this time didn’t mean the artillery, not really, Huber realized. It was the planning, the misdirection; the thinking two steps ahead of his own troops and at least six steps ahead of the enemy, that the Colonel was providing here.
“What orders do you have for us, sir?” Captain Sangrela asked, the burr of warmth in his tone suggesting that he was thinking along the same lines as Huber was.
“Keep on with what you’re doing, that’s all,” Hammer said. His grin spread. “Which is plenty, I know that. We’ll time the stonk for thirty seconds before you come into sight of the target. Hit anybody that shows himself, but keep going as fast as you can. That’ll make more of an impression on what passes for a Volunteer Command group than we would by digging out a couple shell-shocked wogs and blasting them. Clear?”
“Clear,” said Sangrela, nodding, and Huber added his “Clear” to the muttered “Roger,” and “Clear,” from his fellow lieutenants.
That’d save gun bores for the real fight at Bulstrode Bay as well. Maintenance had replaced the barrels burned out at Northern Star, but there probably wouldn’t be time for another refit before Sierra slammed into Fort Freedom and the Volunteers’ main body….
Hammer gave a crisp nod. “Let me stick it to the bastards this time, troopers,” he said. “There’ll be plenty of opportunity for you up north.”
The Colonel’s image dissolved, returning Huber to Fencing Master’s jouncing fighting compartment. His mind and senses were as sharp as they’d ever been in his life. To the watchful expressions of his troopers and Captain Orichos, he began, “In about three hours …”
What looked like a streak of sparse vegetation at right angles to the river was a dike of impermeable clay channeling water into the softer soil beyond. The scout section infantry slid across without being aware of the change, but Fencing Master came down on algae-covered soup instead of the expected solid ground. A gout of mud spewed higher than the armored sides, drenching Huber and the others in the fighting compartment.
Tranter boosted power and adjusted the nacelles vertical for maximum lift. Fencing Master pogoed back onto an even keel and wallowed slowly across the basin.
“Fox Three-six to Sierra,” Huber warned. “There’s quicksand here. The panzers had better swing wide or they’ll sink to wherever the bottom turns out to be. Three-six out.”
By rights, Foghorn would’ve been the leading car if they’d gone by the preplanned rotation. Sergeant Nagano hadn’t been pleased when Huber exercised his command prerogative to put Fencing Master in the lead as the column prepared to run the Volunteer ambush, but Huber was doubly glad he’d done it now. Only a driver as able as Sergeant Tranter would’ve kept from bogging or simply sinking out of sight in this soft spot, and there were bloody few drivers that good.
“Roger Three-six,” Captain Sangrela said. “Delta units, follow the contour lines north. Looks to me like two hundred meters will let you cross safely. Six out.”
Fencing Master lifted itself with a jerk onto higher, harder ground. Tranter paused a moment before readjusting the fans, checking to be sure that mud and water plants hadn’t choked any of the intake ducts. The combat car built up speed again, shedding weed and watery mud like a dog emerging from a pond.
Mauricia Orichos dabbed at the muck staining her uniform, managing only to spread the stain until she gave up the pointless exercise. She noticed Huber’s glance and smiled faintly.
“I suppose it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m used to thinking in …urban terms, I suppose.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Huber agreed. Especially if we’re all dead in the next thirty seconds, but he didn’t let that last thought reach his tongue.
He heard the incoming shells at first as a distant friction in the sky. With shocking suddenness their howl filled the whole world and still grew louder. Sergeant Deseau hunched over the forward gun, aware that it was friendly fire aimed to impact half a klick ahead of Fencing Master; aware also that mistakes happen, that even the most technologically advanced shells land short occasionally, and that no fire is friendly when it’s coming in on your position.
The Gendarmery captain’s face went blank; her eyes opened wide. For a moment Huber thought she was going to throw herself as close to flat as she could get in the crowded fighting compartment, but she recovered her composure when she noticed he wasn’t taking any action.
“It’s all right,” he explained. “This is the prep that’s—”
The shells burst directly overhead with four distinct pops. The opened casings spilled the separate white streaks of over a thousand bomblets toward the ground ahead of Fencing Master. They whistled like a symphony for chalk on blackboards.
“—going to land on the—”
The timing was slightly off: Fencing Master tore through the last screen of feather-fronded vegetation a second before instead of a few seconds after the bomblets struck the Volunteer positions. The mid-channel island was a green mass against the tannin-black water. Near the shore the foliage was the same sort of lush shrubbery that Task Force Sangrela had ground through on the route from Midway, but there were some sizeable trees a hundred meters back from the bank.
The landscape disintegrated in crackling white flashes, snarling and sparkling for almost five seconds. A pall of mud and shredded greenery lifted several meters high, then settled back on a barren wasteland. Only memory could say that eastern half of the island and the spit of riverbank to the north of it had been covered by dense vegetation a moment before.
A cyan flash blew a temporary crater in the mud: a calliope’s ammunition had detonated. A wheel spun skyward, then fell back and splashed into the river.
The scout infantry had grounded their skimmers at the moment of impact. Now they lifted again and resumed their course, four fingers feeling Sierra’s path across the trackless terrain. Fencing Master snorted a hundred meters behind, the iridium fist ready to punch if the infantry touched anything.
“Not a bloody thing for us, El-Tee,” Deseau said. “Not a bloody thing.”
The firecracker rounds had left a haze of explosive residue and finely divided soil above the island, blurring its shape, but Huber knew there’d have been little more to see even without that blanket. The rolling blasts had pulped everything in the impact area. Except for the single wheel, there’d been no sign of two hundred enemy soldiers and their equipment.