Huber touched Tranter’s shoulder to get his attention, then leaned close to shout into his ear instead of using the intercom circuit and including Deseau: “Don’t worry, Sarge—you and Frenchie will switch positions when we form up for the attack.”
Tranter nodded gratefully. He might or might not understand that Huber was even more interested in getting Deseau behind the forward tribarrel than he was to have Tranter’s expertise in the driver’s compartment. Horses for courses …
“Vandals!” Mauricia Orichos repeated as she stared across the flame-ravaged bleakness. Sparks whirled from the skirts and spun down again into the fan intakes, dusting those in the fighting compartment. Slammers’ uniforms were flame resistant, but Huber stuck his hands under the opposite armpits and wished he had gauntlets.
Did Orichos think that Colonel Hammer cared about trees when the lives of his troopers were at stake? And if there’d been a thousand civilians in the corridor before the incendiaries fell, that wouldn’t have changed the Colonel’s plan either.
This was war. If the government of the Point hadn’t known what it meant to hire the Slammers to do their fighting for them, then they were in the process of learning.
Fencing Master slowed, wobbled drunkenly, and finally came to rest on a south-facing backslope with her fans at idle. Deseau rotated the driver’s hatch open; Tranter was already climbing off the right side of the fighting compartment.
Huber raised his faceshield, then lifted the commo helmet for a moment to scratch his scalp. He grinned at Captain Orichos and said, “We’re getting ready for the final run-up, Captain. If there’s anything you need to do while we’re halted, do it now. We won’t stop again until the shooting’s over.”
He smiled more broadly and added, “At least over for us, I mean.”
Huber was keyed up, but it was in a good way. The drive had been physically and mentally fatiguing. It had blotted out the past and future, turning even his immediate surroundings into a gray blur. Now adrenaline coursed through him, bringing the fire-swept wasteland into bright focus and shuffling a series of possible outcomes through his mind.
Arne Huber was alive again. He might die in the next ten minutes, but a lot of people never really lived for even that short time.
“No, I’m ready,” Orichos said. She rubbed her hands together, then wiped her palms on the breast of her jumpsuit. If she was trying to clean the ash and grit off them, she failed. “What do you want me to do? In the battle, that is.”
Frenchie climbed into the fighting compartment past his tribarrel; Tranter was walking forward on the steel bulge of the plenum chamber. The thirty-degree slope was awkwardly steep for the exchange, but the relatively sparse vegetation here had left fewer smoldering remains than the flatter, better-watered stretches the task force had been crossing.
“Keep out of the way,” Huber said. “Keep your head down unless one of us buys it. If that happens, take over his gun and try not to shoot friendlies.”
He grinned, feeling a degree of genuine amusement to talk about his own death in such a matter-of-fact way. He’d chosen the line of work, of course.
Huber really would’ve preferred to get the Gendarmery officer off his combat car, but that wasn’t a practical solution in this landscape. Orichos was smart and quick both, so he could at least hope that she’d jump clear if he or a trooper needed one of the ammo boxes stacked behind her.
Frenchie slid behind his gun and spun the mechanism, ejecting the round from the loaded chamber in a spurt of liquid nitrogen. As he did so, Tranter spun the idling fans up one at a time so that he could listen to the note of each individually. Both men were veterans and experts; they didn’t trust their tools to be the way they’d left them until they’d made sure for themselves.
Barely visible eighty meters eastward, Foghorn’s crew were giving their car and weapons a final check. Sierra’s remaining six combat vehicles waited still further to the east, out of sight from Fencing Master behind undulations of the ground.
Despite hotspots in the terrain, the infantry had deployed from the wrenchmobiles; they’d advance on their skimmers to avoid the risk of losing two squads to a single lucky hit. Besides, the recovery vehicles might shortly be needed for their original purpose.
“Central, this is Sierra Six,” Captain Sangrela reported over the command channel. “Sierra is in position. Over.”
“Roger, Sierra,” Base Alpha replied. Despite the compression and stuttering created when the transmission bounced from one ionization track to another, Huber would’ve been willing to swear the voice was Major Pritchard’s. “Hold two, I repeat, figures two, minutes while we prepare things for you from this end. Central out.”
Though the transmission closed, an icon on the corner of Huber’s faceshield indicated there was view-only information available if he wanted to tap it. He did, tonguing the controller instead of voice-activating the helmet AI.
A crystalline, satellite-relayed voice announced, “Freedom command, this is Solace Intelligence! Emergency! Emergency! Slammers artillery is launching a maximum effort barrage on your positions! We will relay shell trajectories to you as they leave the guns!”
The voice transmission ended without a signoff. A data feed which the AI courteously translated into a schematic of lines curving from south to north across the continent replaced it. The tracks shown as emanating from all three of the Regiment’s six-gun batteries were initially blue but turned red at a rate scaled to 880 meters per second: the velocity of 200-mm shells launched from the Slammers’ rocket howitzers.
Learoyd clicked the loading tube into his backup weapon, a sub-machine gun, and turned to Huber. “Are we just mopping up again, El-Tee?” he said.
“No, Learoyd,” Huber said. He was explaining to Captain Orichos as well. Deseau’d been on the net and would’ve understood the implications of the way the artillery smashed the Volunteer ambush. Learoyd hadn’t understood, and Orichos hadn’t heard. “Central’s broken into the Solace net to send a false transmission to make the Volunteers think our enemies are helping them. There isn’t really any artillery—”
As he spoke, the Regiment’s Signals Section followed the graph of “shell trajectories” with computer-generated images of hogs firing at their maximum rate of ten rounds per minute. The gun carriages jounced from the backblast of each heavy rocket. Doughnuts of dust lifted around the self-propelled chassis and a bright spark of exhaust spiked skyward for the seven seconds before burnout. Real shells would ignite sustainer motors in the stratosphere to range from firebases in the UC to the northern tip of the Point, but there was no need to simulate that here.
“—but if the Volunteers think there is, they’ll switch their calliopes to high-angle use. They won’t be waiting to hit us when we come into sight.”
“This’s what we’ve been waiting for, Learoyd,” Deseau said, murderously cheerful. “We get to blow away a bunch of civilians in uniform!”
“Oh,” said Learoyd. He turned again and swung his tribarrel stop to stop, just making sure it’d work when he needed it. Huber didn’t recall ever hearing the trooper sound enthusiastic. “All right.”
Herbert Learoyd wasn’t the brightest trooper in the Regiment, but you could do worse than have him manning the right wing gun of your combat car. In fact Huber wasn’t sure he could’ve done better.
It was time to be a platoon leader again. Huber cleared his faceshield and replaced the phony transmission with a fifty-degree mask of the terrain map. It showed the planned routes that would take the four combat cars toward the outlying Volunteer positions and Fort Freedom itself. Colored bands connected each course to the segment of hostile terrain for which that car’s guns were responsible.