Somebody swore softly. It could’ve been any of the platoon leaders. Blood and Martyrs, it could’ve been Huber himself muttering the words that were dancing through his mind.
“All right, troopers,” Huber said to the fraught silence. “You’ve got your orders. We’ve all got our orders. Car Three-six leads from here till we’re through this. Highball Six out.”
Padova obediently increased speed by five kph, pulling around Foghorn as Sergeant Nagano’s driver swung to the left in obedience to the directions from the C&C box. As soon as they were into the broader part of the valley, they’d form with the combat cars in line abreast by platoons at the front and rear of the task force. The X-Ray vehicles would crowd as tightly together between the cars as movement safety would allow.
Bombardment rockets had a wide footprint but they weren’t individually accurate, so reducing the target made the tribarrels’ task of defense easier. Not easy, but an old soldier was one who’d learned to take every advantage there was.
Padova took them up a swale cutting into the ridge to the right. Deseau looked at the landscape. By crossing the ridge, they’d enter a better-watered valley where the data bank said the locals grew crops on terraces.
“Ever want to be a farmer, Bert?” Deseau asked.
“No, Frenchie,” Learoyd said.
Deseau shrugged. “Yeah, me neither,” he said. “Besides, I like shooting people.”
He laughed, but Huber wasn’t sure he was joking.
Fencing Master nosed through the spike-leafed trees straggling along the crest. They were similar to giants Huber’d seen in the lowland forests, but here the tallest were only ten meters high and their leaves had a grayish cast.
Limestone scraped beneath Fencing Master’s skirts as they started down the eastern slope. The landscape immediately became greener, and after less than a minute they’d snorted out of wasteland into a peanut field.
A man—no, a woman—was cultivating the far end of the field with a capacitor-powered tractor. The farmer saw Fencing Master and stood up on her seat. As Foghorn slid out of the scrub with the rest of the column following, she leaped into the field and began crawling away while the tractor continued its original course. The peanut bushes wobbled, marking her course. Deseau laughed.
“It’s like a different planet,” Padova said, taking them down the path to the next terrace, a meter lower. Fencing Master was wider than the farm machinery, so they jolted as their skirts plowed the retaining wall and upper terrace into a broader ramp. The valley opened into more fields interspersed with the roofs of houses and sheds. “All green and pretty.”
An aircar heading south a kilometer away suddenly turned in the air and started back the way it’d come. Learoyd and Deseau fired. Half the vehicle including the rear fan disintegrated. The forward portion spun into the ground and erupted in flames.
“Just wait a bit, Rita,” Frenchie said with a chuckle.
The Solace Militia used civilian vehicles with no markings that’d show at a quick glimpse through a gunsight. That aircar might’ve been a farm couple coming home with all their children, but Huber would’ve fired also if he hadn’t been concentrating on other business. He had to cover the sensor readouts as well as the position of his task force.
Killing civilians—maybe civilians—wasn’t a part of the work that Huber much cared for, but you’d go crazy if you let yourself worry about the things you couldn’t change. Go crazy or shoot yourself.
In the interests of command, Fencing Master should’ve been farther back in the column with Foghorn or Fancy Pants leading …but Huber was making the choice, and he knew that afterward the CO had less to explain to the survivors if he’d been leading from the front. He had less to explain to himself, too, if he was one of those survivors.
Padova increased speed, crossing the fields at forty kph and using the extra inertia to help break down the retaining walls before accelerating again. Huber frowned, but the rest of the column kept station. Since Fencing Master was widening the ramps, the following vehicles didn’t have to slow as much to negotiate the terraces.
The valley’s lower levels were planted in rice, a green much brighter than the leaves of the peanut bushes. The paddies were flooded; showers of spray, muck, and young plants erupted as the Slammers drove through. Upper fields began to drain as the column’s passage opened the dikes.
Occasionally someone stepped out of a wood-framed dwelling or glanced up in a field to see what the noise was. Some continued to stare as the column howled by, perhaps thinking they were mercenaries under contract to the Solace government.
Twice an aircar appeared in the far distance. A tribarrel in air defense mode ripped each out of the sky.
The Masterton River here was twenty meters wide, too narrow to rate as a river back on Friesland. Even so, it carried more tumbling water than Huber’d have wanted to take his combat cars over without being sure of a ford.
No need to cross, of course. There was plenty of room on the broad bottom terrace to form on a platoon front. Foghorn came up on the right of Fencing Master, with Gabinus’ Three-eight and Fancy Pants falling in alongside.
Funnel-mouthed fish weirs lined both banks. The small boys tipping them up to check the catch turned to watch the passing armored vehicles. Fencing Master still set the pace. Padova continued to accelerate now that they were no longer descending the slope.
The town, Millhouse Crossing, was two rows of buildings which began as a straggle of shacks with board walls and roofs of corrugated plastic. Further on the houses were masonry and two or three stories high. The road was barely wide enough for the recovery vehicle, and even the combat cars would have to go through one at a time.
A black-and-yellow Solace flag flew over the cupola of a building in the center of town. All the F-3 vehicles fired as soon as the guardpost came in view, shattering the stuccoed limestone in dazzles of cyan and white.
Chickens were running in nervous circles in the street. A cart and small tractor stood forlorn beside a roofed marketplace on the inland side. The cart was half-loaded, but its owner and every other human in Millhouse Crossing was trying to hide.
“Highball, form on Three-six in line ahead,” Huber said. “We’ll go back to platoon front on the—”
As Fencing Master drew ahead again, Deseau decided he had a fair shot at the facade of the guardpost—and took it. He was more right than not, placing most of his ten-round burst in the ground floor of the government building, though a pair of 2-cm bolts blew in the arched entryway of the private house next door.
“—other side of town. Six out.”
Huber swiveled his gun so that it covered building fronts a hundred meters ahead on his side. Padova brushed a pair of shacks that’d been built closer to the road than most of the row, knocking them to scrap. A sheet of plywood flipped outward and slapped down over a screened intake on Fencing Master’s port side; it clung there, partially blocking the duct, till Padova deliberately swerved through another shack and swept the debris off. A brief snowstorm of chicken feathers sprayed from beneath the skirts.
They howled past a house painted pale green. In the corner of his eye Huber saw a white face staring from the interior. The spectator was no threat, and besides Huber’s attention was focused on the magnified image of buildings well in the distance. A sniper directly alongside would be for Foghorn’s gunners to deal with.
Learoyd’s gun hammered, the bolts’ intense cyan reflecting from the soft pastels of the building fronts. His burst fanned the interior of the government building which Deseau’s gun had already set alight. As Fencing Master passed, orange flame whuffed! from the window openings, a gas stove adding its note to the ongoing destruction.