Mauricia Orichos saw Huber come out of the command car. She stepped away from the group she was with and waved to him.
Huber looked at her, then slipped his faceshield down and quickened his stride in the direction of Fencing Master. As he’d told Major Steuben, he could find his own company. And he wasn’t going to find it there.
Neck or Nothing
“Red Section, pull back two hundred meters!” Lieutenant Arne Huber ordered over the platoon channel. A laser from one of the hostile hovertanks touched a tree to the right, blasting a ten-meter strip off the trunk. Fragments of bark and sapwood stung Huber and the two gunners with him in the combat car’s open fighting compartment. “Blue, we’ll hold till Red’s in position! Six out.”
The artificial intelligence in Huber’s commo helmet imposed a translucent red caret on his faceshield, warning of movement to the left. Huber was Fencing Master’s left wing gunner as well as commander of platoon F-3. At the moment, swinging his tribarrel onto the threat took precedence over controlling the platoon’s other five cars.
The motion was the hull of a hovertank from a mercenary unit hired by Solace in its war with the Outer States. The vehicle was three hundred meters away, much farther than you could generally see in the forests of Plattner’s World, and the tank’s two crewmen probably weren’t aware of Fencing Master as they drove across the battlefront hoping to take F-3 in the flank.
The target quivered in Huber’s holographic sight picture. He settled his weapon and squeezed the butterfly trigger with both thumbs. The cluster of iridium barrels rotated as they fired, giving each tube a moment to cool after spewing a bolt of ionized copper downrange at the speed of light.
The narrow window didn’t allow Huber to choose a particular spot on his target, but the energy a 2-cm powergun packed made most things vulnerable. The compartment holding the hovertank’s crew was armored with ceramic layered in ablative sheets, proof against single bolts or even a short burst, but the skirts enclosing the plenum chamber were light plastic to keep the weight down. Huber raked the bulge where the two joined.
A fireball erupted from the tank’s port side: the cyan plasma had converted the plastic into its constituent elements—which recombined explosively. The flash ignited even the loam of the forest floor.
“I can’t see it!” screamed Frenchie Deseau at Fencing Master’s bow gun. “Padova, pull up, for Hell’s sake! I can’t see the target!”
The hostile was directly ahead of Fencing Master, so by rights it should’ve been Deseau’s target while Huber watched the left flank the way Trooper Learoyd was doing the right from the other wing gun. It was a chance of visibility that made the tank Huber’s prey while the trees concealed it from Deseau.
The tank rocked to the right, then slewed to a halt because Huber’d ripped its skirts wide open. The tank’s gunner tried to rotate his roof-mounted laser, but Huber’s tribarrel blew the weapon to fiery slag an instant before rupturing the crew compartment itself.
What mattered was that somebody got the tank before it took F-3 from the rear; but if F-3 didn’t fall back quickly, another tank or tanks were going to circle them. There were too many hostiles for a single platoon of combat cars to deal with for long. Where the bloody hell was Ander’s Legion, the combined arms battalion that was supposed to follow when F-3 seized the knoll in the face of the advancing Solace column?
“Three-six, this is Three-three!” crackled the voice of Platoon Sergeant Jellicoe, commanding the three cars of Red Section. For this operation Huber would rather have operated in three two-car sections, but two of his vehicles were crewed with replacements. The newbies had been trained and may well have been veterans of other units before they joined Hammer’s Slammers, but Huber didn’t want to risk anybody operating alone until he’d personally seen how they held up in combat. “We’re in position! Over!”
“Blue Section,” Huber ordered, “pull—”
Fencing Master was already starting to reverse. Although she’d just been transferred to F-3, Padova’d already shown an ability to anticipate orders—sometimes the difference between life and death in combat. As the car grunted backward, Deseau and Learoyd fired simultaneously.
For an instant, saplings ranging from thumb-thick to thigh-thick blazed. When the blue-green bolts had sawn through the undergrowth, they flashed and cascaded from the sloping armor of the hovertank coming up from a swale less than twenty meters away.
“Via!” Huber shouted. The tank was well to starboard, but Fencing Master shimmied as Padova backed so there was a chance the stern would swing enough to give Huber a shot. He tried to bring his tribarrel to bear as he cursed himself for not keeping better tabs on the sensor readouts. Because Huber was the platoon leader, Fencing Master carried a Command and Control box whose holographic display would show the heat, noise, and radio-frequency signatures of a fifty-tonne tank charging to within stone’s throw. He just hadn’t taken—hadn’t had—time to glance at it.
The tank’s sloping armor reflected a portion of the bolts’ energy as a haze of cyan light, searing the leaves from overhanging trees. The glare was so intense that Huber’s faceshield blacked it out to save his eyesight.
Despite the hits, capacitors feeding the tank’s laser screamed twice. The first pulse fried the air close enough overhead that Huber might’ve lost his hand if he’d raised it at the wrong time. That was probably a chance shot, though, because the second charge ripped empty forest twenty meters to the left, and then the tank’s ceramic armor failed under the tribarrels’ hammering.
At the temperature of copper plasma, almost everything burns. The gulp of orange flame from the tank’s interior was partly plastic, partly fabric, and partly the flesh of the crew.
Padova kept backing away from the line of contact. Flat-screen displays provided a combat car’s driver with just as good a view to the rear as forward, but driving through dense woodland in reverse required considerable skill. Fencing Master’s skirts struck only one tree too thick to shear off. Even that was a glancing blow, though it threw the troopers hard against the fighting compartment’s armor.
“Blue Section, pull back!” Huber said, completing the interrupted order as he checked his display. The other two cars were already retreating up the forested ridgeline; their commanders must have filled in the obvious if their drivers had needed the prodding. You didn’t have to be a military genius to know that F-3’s position wasn’t survivable for long, when at least a company of hostile tanks was advancing and there was no bloody sign of Ander’s Legion.
The woods were afire in a dozen places, ignited by energy weapons and the violent destruction of several vehicles—all of them hostile so far, the Lord be thanked, but that couldn’t last forever. Besides the wall of trees, smoke obscured normal vision. That gave F-3 an advantage because the Slammers’ sensors were better than those of their opponents, but in the confusion of battle there were too many inputs for anybody to use them all. Quick reactions, not technology, had saved Fencing Master when the hovertank roared up at them from less than pistol range.
Red Section waited hull-down over the reverse slope of the ridge from which F-3 had advanced twenty minutes before. Huber had expected to form a skirmish line while Ander’s Legion dug in to ambush the oncoming Solace column. Ander hadn’t come and the hostiles had—very aggressively.
Padova brought Fencing Master back to where they’d started their advance, in the shelter of smooth-barked trees whose foliage was a golden contrast to the deep green of most of the species around them. The economy of Plattner’s World was based on gathering the so-called Moss, a fungus that parasitized the native trees and which could be processed into the anti-aging drug Thalderol. In normal times here, the wanton destruction of forest was a serious crime.