His nose wrinkled. That wasn’t quite true. Besides the prickle of ozone and the sickening sweetness of explosive, the air had a tinge of burned flesh.
Fencing Master bucked into the undisturbed vegetation beyond the line which shell fragments had scythed. When the professionals sat down to the table, war stopped being a game for street thugs wearing uniforms. The Volunteers at ground zero here hadn’t had time to learn that, but the folks who’d given them their orders must be thinking hard about the future by now.
Because the prevailing winds were from the northwest, Huber had been smelling the fire for almost three hours before the infantry sergeant with the scouting section called over the command channel, “Blood and Martyrs, Captain! This is Charlie One-three-four. Are we supposed to go through this on skimmers? Over.”
Huber switched a quadrant of his faceshield to the view from Floosie, the combat car attached to White Section at the moment. It was like looking into the maw of Hell.
Regimental rocket howitzers hundreds of kilometers to the south in United Cities’ territory had seeded the forest with incendiaries. Each time-fuzed zirconium pellet was capable of burning though light armor. When one landed in old growth forest, the likelihood of it igniting even green timber was three out of five …and there were tens of thousands of pellets in the shells, raining down over hundreds of square kilometers. The myriad simultaneous fires had spread till they joined in a firestorm, a towering conflagration that drove its column of smoke through the stratosphere and sucked air to feed it from all sides in a torrent at hurricane velocities.
Everything combustible within the core of the blaze had burned, including the loam. Silica in the clay substrate ran liquid before cooling into slabs of glass colored like the rainbow by trace minerals.
Though the first flush of the fire had burned to a glowing shadow of itself, what remained still shimmered. The boles of the largest trees smoldered, stripped to pillars of carbonized heartwood. Monstrous pythons of smoke and ash eddied, the ghosts of a forest dancing among its bones.
“One-three-four, recover to your carrier vehicle,” Sangrela responded without hesitation. “ASAP, troopers, don’t get into that! There won’t be an ambush in that stuff, not from anything these Volunteers have available.”
He paused, then resumed, “Break. Sierra, button up all hatches.
Drivers switch to microwave radar, and exposed personnel lock down your faceshields. Make sure your filters are working before we get into it. We’ll form an echelon perpendicular to the prevailing winds so—”
A route map clicked as an imposed overlay on the lower right corner of Huber’s faceshield. Every trooper in the task force had the same image.
“—that we’re not all driving through the trash the leaders stir up. Six out.”
Floosie must’ve entered the burned area just as Sangrela spoke, because a plume of ash shot skyward two kilometers ahead of Fencing Master. It was like watching the first puff of a volcano gathering its strength.
The fire’d been set to clear the forest between Fort Freedom and the Fiorno Valley at its closest approach, some twenty klicks west of where the river entered the Northern Sea. The tract was well-watered and the foliage was in the green lushness of late spring, so the fire had generally burned itself out to either side of the kilometer-wide swathe seeded with incendiaries. Nothing organic could’ve resisted that dense rain of exothermic metal.
Deseau was driving; Huber heard the hatch cover close over him. Learoyd checked his faceshield and filters with his left hand, then drew up the throat closure of his blouse to get the maximum protection possible without donning an environmental suit.
Tranter was curled up asleep under the forward gun; his head rested on his commo helmet. Huber shook him awake and leaned close to shout, “Get your gear on and locked down, Sarge. There’s going to be a lot of ash and sparks for the next hour or so.”
As Tranter slipped his helmet on with a grin of embarrassment, Huber turned to Captain Orichos. She’d been watching the troopers, but she wasn’t on the Sierra net and didn’t know what was happening. Her expression was neutral, with just enough quirk to the lips to prevent it from being grim.
“We’re going to be going through a burned-out area,” he explained to Orichos over the intercom. He mimed locking down his faceshield rather than touch hers, at present raised. “Your nose filters ought to come down automatically when we hit the smoke, but you might want to push this button here—”
He touched the hinge of his faceshield; the filters dropped over his nostrils.
“—and deploy them manually right now.”
“Burned area?” Orichos said. Her hand stopped halfway to her faceshield, then finished the movement. “Have those animals set the forest on fire?”
All the vehicles of the main body were out of the floodway now, striking north toward their goal. Eight separate ribbons of smoke and ash trailed downwind, spreading till they merged into a broad miasma that settled slowly back to the ravaged forest.
“Whatever happened,” Huber said, “it’s going to be hot going till we reach the marshes this side of Bulstrode Bay. Get your filters in place now, all right?”
Fencing Master had reached the point at which Sierra’s route left the river; Deseau boosted fan speed and adjusted his nacelle angles. The previous vehicles, particularly the tanks, had battered the bank into a slope of glistening mud. Skirts had dragged chunks of buried quartz up with them in deep gouges through the clay.
Fencing Master roared, bursting over the top of the bank at over thirty kph. Huber realized what was about to happen in time to brace his left hand against the coaming and clasp Orichos to his chest with the other arm. The Gendarmery officer didn’t have the instincts to react correctly even if he’d had a chance to warn her instead of acting.
The car’s nose skirts spilled air and dropped, slamming down onto the charred soil. Despite being prepared, Huber’s own weight and that of Captain Orichos threw him hard against the coaming. The rigid clamshell armor spread the shock, but he’d still have bruises along the side of his ribcage by the morning.
If he was alive in the morning, of course. Well, civilians could die at any moment too.
Deseau took them into the hell-lit wasteland. Smoke was a gray pall; sometimes dense enough to seem solid, sometimes hiding objects that were solid in all truth. Huber tried light-amplified viewing but decided the lack of depth perception would be too dangerous at their present high speed. Infrared—thermal imaging—wasn’t ideal at the ambient temperatures of the burning forest, but the helmet AI had enough discrimination to make it the choice.
“Vandals!” snarled Captain Orichos. “Stupid vandal bastards! What did they think they’d accomplish by this destruction?”
There was no point in telling her how the blaze had really started. Not when she and Arne Huber shared a crowded combat car on the verge of action with an entrenched enemy.
Hot spots—open flames and sparks the skirts plowed up from fires banked in the ashes—were white highlights in the faceshield. The AI coded cooler objects through the spectrum from violet to dark reds that verged on black, though little in this expanse was colored below green. A suited human would be visible in outline against the brighter background, but nobody expected to find Volunteers waiting here in ambush.
Fencing Master bumped and racketed across the landscape, scraping its skirts frequently and often hurling up gouts of fire. Deseau was being careful—too careful. He was trying to avoid every possible stump and cavity instead of taking a line and holding it till a major obstacle interposed. The combat car repeatedly sideswiped the skeletons of fallen trees, blasting them into sparks, or grounded when the skirts swayed over the edge of a pit left when a toppling giant had dragged its root ball out of the soil. Sergeant Tranter gripped the coaming to either side of his gun pintle with a set look on his face.