His voice caught. He thought for a moment that he was going to vomit over the inside of his faceshield, but the spasm passed. There’d been too much; too much stress and pain and stench, even for a veteran.
“—Padova, throttle back so that we stay on the crest after the rest are clear. We may need the sensor range.”
The Solace commander had reacted fast by sending part of the Yeomanry around the Slammers’ left flank at the same time as the mechanized company circled their right. Huber’d held F-3 too long as he waited for supports that never came, but there was still a chance. The crews of the hovertanks wouldn’t be in a hurry to come to close quarters with the cars that had bloodied their vanguard so badly at the first shock.
Fencing Master growled onto the ridge line. The rise would separate the combat cars from the units they’d already engaged, though the tanks approaching from the south were in the same shallow valley. The forest was somewhat of a shield for F-3, maybe enough of one.
Learoyd was on the forward gun now, swaying as though the grips were all that kept him upright. Deseau scanned the trees to the right, the direction the tanks would come from. Undergrowth was sparse here, but the treeboles allowed only occasional glimpses of anything as much as a hundred meters away.
F-3 was in line with the flanks echeloned back. The four cars in the center were across the ridge and proceeding downslope, but Jellicoe had slowed Floosie also. The additional ten seconds of sensor data hadn’t brought any new surprises, so Huber said, “Padova, goose it and—”
The clang of a slug penetrating iridium echoed through the forest. The icon for Fox Three-three went cross-hatched and stopped moving across the holographic terrain of the C&C display.
“Padova, get us to Floosie soonest!” Huber shouted. “Break! Fox Three, follow the plotted course. Three-one, you’re in charge till I rejoin with the crew of Three-five! Three-six out!”
Huber hadn’t thought, hadn’t had time to think, but he knew as Padova jerked Fencing Master hard left that instinct had led him to the right decision. Though two other combat cars were nearer Floosie than Fencing Master was, they’d have to reverse and climb the slope to reach the disabled vehicle. Gravity was more of a handicap than an extra hundred meters on level ground when you were riding a thirty-tonne mass.
Sergeant Nagano—Fox Three-one—was a few months junior in grade to Three-seven’s Sergeant Mullion, but Nagano’d been in F-3 when Huber took command a year ago while Mullion had been posted into the platoon only a few days before. Mullion might turn out to be a real crackerjack, and if so Huber would apologize to him at a suitable time. Right now there was enough else going wrong that Huber wasn’t about to trust his troopers to an unknown quantity besides.
Fencing Master wove between the trunks of massive trees. Learoyd slid the fingers of his left hand under his helmet to rub his scalp and forehead, but his right never left the grip of his tribarrel. He seemed to be back to normal now, or anyway what passed as normal for a trooper in the middle of a firefight.
Chatter filled the platoon push, but none of it came from Jellicoe and her crew. Huber tuned out the empty noise—anybody was likely to babble in the stress of a battle, no matter how well-trained and experienced they might be—and concentrated on what wasn’t there.
The icon for Three-three continued to pulse sullenly. Huber imported a remote image from Jellicoe’s gunsight to the corner of his faceshield. He got only a motionless view of treetops, but at least that was better than the black emptiness of an open channel.
“There’s Floosie!” Learoyd said. “El-Tee, they been hit from your side!”
Floosie was tilted against the west side of a huge tree, spun there by the first of the two rounds which’d hit her. The slug had struck the back of the fighting compartment and penetrated cleanly, angling slightly left to right and exiting above the driver’s hatch.
Floosie’d stalled at the impact. The second shot had slammed into the plenum chamber before the driver could restart his vehicle. That wasn’t his fault: the combined shock of the slug and collision with a three-meter-thick treebole was more anybody could’ve shrugged off instantly, even protected by the automatic restraint system of the driver’s compartment. The follow-up round had put paid to Floosie: there was a gaping hole in the skirts and at least half the fan nacelles would’ve been damaged or destroyed.
The tank that had knocked out the combat car was sited on the high ground a kilometer to the west. The hostile gunner had been lucky to get a sight line through the trees, but he’d been bloody good to react to the unexpected target and then to punch out a second round to finish the job. With so many shots ripping through the forest, one of them was bound to connect with something….
“Padova, get us—” Huber said, but his driver was already slewing Fencing Master to the right, putting the tree and the bulk of the disabled car between them and the Solace gunner. The tank might’ve moved forward after it fired; but its commander just might have decided that he was better off where he was than he’d be if he came to close quarters with the Slammers’ tribarrels.
Deseau braced himself against the coaming beside Huber, cursing a blue streak. He’d grabbed Learoyd’s backup 1-cm sub-machine gun from its sling on a tie-down beside the right tribarrel. It wasn’t much of a weapon to threaten tanks with, but at least Deseau could point it toward the probable dangers.
Fencing Master slewed around the tree and grounded hard, its port quarter almost in contact with Floosie’s damaged bow skirt. The ragged exit hole was bigger than an access port.
Jellicoe’s driver climbed out of his hatch. He’d lost his helmet and his mouth hung open. A bitter haze of burned insulation lay over the fighting compartment, but as Fencing Master stopped, Huber saw a hand reach up to grip the coaming: Sergeant Jellicoe was still alive, if only just.
“Get aboard!” Huber screamed to the driver. As he spoke, he lifted his right foot to the top of Fencing Master’s armor and leaped into the disabled car. If anybody’d asked him a moment before, he’d have said he was so exhausted he had trouble just breathing. Deseau, continuing to curse, took over the left wing gun.
Floosie’s fighting compartment was an abattoir. The guns that hit her fired frangible shot that broke into a hypersonic spray on the other side of the penetration. Jellicoe had been manning the left wing gun and out of the direct blast, but the sleet of heavy-metal granules had splashed the thighs and torsos of her crewmen across the interior of the armor. Huber’s boots slipped when they hit the floor.
He fell with a dizzying shock. He was up again in a moment, but his right side was numb.
He lifted Sergeant Jellicoe. She was a stocky woman, still wearing the body armor that’d saved her life. Huber didn’t try to strip the ceramic clamshell off her now because he wasn’t sure his fingers could manipulate the catches. He stepped back and bent, throwing Jellicoe’s torso over his shoulders, then stumbled forward.
Learoyd and Deseau fired past Huber to either side; his faceshield blacked out the vivid cyan of their bolts. Via! there was no way in hell he was going to get aboard Fencing Master. He couldn’t carry Jellicoe and he sure couldn’t throw her into—
“Gotcha, El-Tee!” Frenchie said, bracing his left hand on the tribarrel’s receiver as he prepared to cross to help. “We’re golden!”
Huber didn’t hear the shot that struck Floosie’s bow slope, but he felt the car buck upward in the middle of a white flash.
Then he felt nothing. Nothing at all.
…he should be coming around very shortly …some part of the cosmos said to some other part of the cosmos.
Awareness—not consciousness, not yet—returned with the awkward jerkiness of a butterfly opening its wings as it poises on the edge of its cocoon. My name is Arne Huber. I’m—