“Cease fire!” Huber ordered. “Don’t waste ammo, troopers, we’ve worked ourselves out of a job.”
He took a deep breath; his nose filters released now that the air was fit to breathe again. Plasma bolts burned oxygen to ozone, and the matrix holding the copper atoms in alignment broke down into unpleasant compounds when the energy was released. Huber’s faceshield had blocked the direct intensity of the bolts to save his retinas, but enough cyan light had reflected into the corners of his eyes that shimmers of purple and orange filtered his vision.
“Reform in march order,” Huber concluded hoarsely. “Six out.”
“They didn’t have a chance,” Padova said. She sounded as though she was on the verge of collapse. “They couldn’t shoot back, they were helpless!”
“It’s better when they don’t shoot back,” Learoyd said from the front compartment. He’d buttoned up before they went into action; now the hatch opened and the driver’s seat rose on its hydraulic jack, lifting his head back into the open. “They might’ve got lucky, even at this range.”
“Some a’ them caught us with our pants down when we landed here,” Frenchie Deseau said harshly. “We weren’t so fucking helpless! Ain’t that so, El-Tee?”
Huber flipped up his faceshield and rubbed his eyes, remembering unwillingly the ratfuck when a Solace commando ambushed F-3 disembarking from the starship that had just brought them to Plattner’s World. A buzzbomb trailing gray exhaust smoke as it curved for Arne Huber’s head …
And afterward, the windrow of bodies scythed down by a touch of Huber’s thumb to the close-in defense system.
“No,” he said in a husky whisper. “We weren’t helpless. We’re Hammer’s Slammers.”
Task Force Huber continued to slice its way north, moving at an even hundred kph across the treeless fields.
“Highball Six, this is Flasher Six,” the voice said faintly. The signal wobbled and was so attenuated that Huber could barely make out the words. “Do you copy, over?”
Ionization track transmissions could carry video under the proper circumstances, but communications between moving vehicles were another matter. Huber would’ve said it was impossible without a precise location for the recipient, but apparently that wasn’t quite true.
“Flasher Six, this is Highball Six,” he said, shutting his mind to the present circumstances though his eyes remained open. Deseau and Learoyd glanced over when he replied to the transmission, then returned to their guns with the extra alertness of men who know something unseen is likely to affect them. “Go ahead, over.”
Huber had no idea who Flasher Six was nor what he commanded. The AI could probably tell him, but right now Huber had too little brain to clutter it up with needless detail.
Fencing Master’s sending unit had the reference signal from the original transmission to go on, so Huber could reasonably expect his reply to get through. It must have done so, because a moment later the much clearer voice responded, “Highball, you’re in position to anchor a Solace artillery regiment. I need you to adjust your course to follow the Masterton River, a few degrees east of the original plot. I’m downloading the course data—”
A pause. An icon blinked in the lower left corner of Huber’s faceshield, then became solid green when the AI determined that the transmission was complete and intelligible.
“—now. Central delegated control to me because they haven’t been able to get through to you directly. Flasher over.”
Task Force Huber was winding through slopes too steep and rocky to be easily cultivated. Shrubs and twisted trees with small leaves were the only vegetation they’d seen for ten kilometers. That was why they’d been routed this way, of course: the chance of somebody accurately reporting their location and course to Solace Command was very slight.
Huber was behind schedule, and the notion of further delay irritated him more than it might’ve done if he hadn’t been so tired. He glared at the transmitted course he’d projected onto a terrain overlay and said, “Flasher, what is it that you want us to do? We’re to attack an artillery regiment? Highball over.”
“Negative, Highball, negative!” Flasher Six snapped. “These are the Firelords! There’s an eight-gun battery of calliopes with each battalion and they’d cut you to pieces. Your revised course will take you through a town with a guardpost that’ll alert Solace Command. That’ll give the Firelords enough warning to block the head of the valley with their calliopes and take you under fire with their rockets. We’ll handle it from there. Over.”
Huber called up the Firelords from Fencing Master’s data bank; his frown grew deeper. They were one of several regiments fielded from the Hackabe Cluster. Their truck-mounted bombardment rockets were relatively unsophisticated and short ranged but they could put down a huge volume of fire in a short time.
“Flasher,” Huber said, switching his faceshield back to the course display, “the Firelords’ll be able to saturate our defenses if they try hard enough. I’ll have to put all my tribarrels on air defense, and even then it’s going to be close. Are you sure about this? Over.”
“Roger, Highball!” Flasher said in a tone of obvious irritation. “Your infantry component will have to handle local security. Are you able to comply, over?”
“Roger, Flasher,” Huber said. It wasn’t the first time he’d gotten orders he didn’t like. It wouldn’t be the last, either—if he survived this one. “Highball Six out.”
He paused a moment to collect his mind. The AI was laying out courses and plotting fields of fire; doing its job, as happy as a machine could be. And Arne Huber was a soldier, so he’d do his job also. If it didn’t make him happy, sometimes, he and all the other troopers in the Regiment had decided—if only by default—that it made them happier than other lines of work.
“Trouble, El-Tee?” Deseau asked without looking up from his sight picture. He’d been covering the left front while Huber was getting their orders.
“Hey, we’re alive, Frenchie,” Huber said. “That’s something, right?”
He looked at the new plot on the C&C display, took a deep breath, and said over the briefing channel, “Highball, this is Six. There’s been a change of plan. We’re to proceed up the valley of the Masterton River, through a place called Millhouse Crossing. There’s a Militia guardpost there.”
In briefing mode, the unit commanders could respond directly and lower-ranking personnel could caret Huber’s display for permission to speak. Nobody said anything for the moment.
He continued, “We’ll shoot up the post on the move, but be aware that they may shoot back. We’ll continue another fifteen klicks to where the road drops down into the plains around Hundred Hectare Lake. We’ll halt short of there because an artillery regiment is set up beside the lake, the Firelords. We’re to keep their attention while a friendly unit takes care of them. Any questions? Over.”
“If they’re so fucking friendly,” Deseau said over Fencing Master’s intercom, “then let them draw fire and we’ll shoot up the redlegs. How about that?”
There was a pause as the rest of the task force stared at the transmitted map; at least the unit commanders would also check out the Firelords. The first response was from Lieutenant Basingstoke, saying, “Highball Six, this is Rocker One-six. The Firelords can launch nearly fifteen hundred fifteen-centimeter rockets within five seconds. You can’t—the task force cannot, I believe—defend against a barrage like that. Over.”
Huber sighed, though he supposed it was just as well that somebody’d raised the point directly. “One-six,” he said, “I agree with your calculations, but we have our orders. We’re going to do our best and hope that the Firelords don’t think it’s worth emptying their racks all in one go. Over.”