“Enemy commander!” said a hoarse voice. Huber’s AI noted that the fellow was broadcasting on several frequencies, desperately hoping that one would get through to the gunners shooting his troops like ducks in a barrel. “The Firelords surrender on standard terms. I repeat, we surrender on terms. Cease fire! Cease fire!”
“Highball, cease fire!” Huber repeated, and as he did so another volley of tank bolts lanced into the lakeside with fresh mushroomings of flame. Flasher couldn’t pick up the radio signal—a truckload of exploding rockets had knocked down the transmitter masts—and the white flares could be easily overlooked in the general fiery destruction.
“Flasher Six!” Huber shouted, the AI switching his transmission to the ionization track system. “Cease fire! All Flasher units, cease fire! They’re surrendering!”
Explosions continued to rumble in the plains below, but the ice-pick sharpness of plasma bolts no longer added to it. Even before they got Huber’s warning, the Flasher gunners would’ve noticed that Highball had stopped firing. A blast had knocked the officer with the towel to his knees, but he kept his hand high and waving.
“Firelords, this is Slammers command,” Huber said, responding on the highest of the frequencies the Firelords had used. He wasn’t in command, of course, Flasher Six was, but the tanker couldn’t communicate with the poor bastards down below. “We accept your parole. Hold in place until my superiors can make arrangements for your exchange. Ah, that may be several days. We will not, I repeat not, be halting at this location. Slammers over.”
“Roger, Slammers,” the enemy commander said, relief and weariness both evident in his voice. “We’ve got enough to occupy us here for longer than a few fucking days. Can you spare us medical personnel? Over.”
“Negative, Firelords,” Huber said. “I hope your next contract works out better for you. Slammers out.”
He lifted off his commo helmet and closed his eyes, letting reaction wash over him. He was exhausted, not from physical exertion—though there’d been plenty of that, jolting around in the fighting compartment during the run—but from the adrenaline blazing in him as shells rained down and he could do nothing but watch and pray his equipment worked.
He settled the helmet back in place and said, “Booster,” to activate the C&C box, “plot our course north from this location.”
On the plains below, fuel and munitions continued to erupt. It didn’t make Huber feel much better to realize that the destruction would’ve been just as bad if those rockets had landed on Task Force Huber instead of going off in their racks.
It was an hour short of full darkness, but stars showed around the eastern horizon; stars, and perhaps one or more of the planet’s seven small moons. Sunset silhouetted the three grain elevators a kilometer to the west where monorail lines merged at a railhead. Timers had turned on the mercury vapor lights attached to the service catwalks as the task force arrived, but there was no sign of life in the huge structures or the houses at their base.
“Suppose we oughta do a little reconnaissance by fire, El-Tee?” Deseau said hopefully. He patted his tribarrel’s receiver.
Padova and Learoyd slept on the ground beside Fencing Master. They hadn’t strung the tarp, just spread it over the stubble as a ground cloth. The car’s idling drive fans whispered a trooper’s lullaby.
“Do I think you should use up another set of barrels just because you like to see things burn, Frenchie?” Huber said, smiling faintly. “No, I don’t. We’ll have plenty to shoot at for real in a few hours, don’t worry.”
A tribarrel across the perimeter snarled a short burst. Huber jerked his head around, following the line of fire to a flash in the distant sky.
“Highball, Fox Two-six,” Lieutenant Messeman reported. “Air defense splashed an aircar, that’s all. Out.”
Probably civilians who hadn’t gotten the word that a Slammers task force had driven into the heart of their country. Huber’d lost count of the number of aircars they’d shot down on this run; thirty-odd, he thought, but poppers always washed the past out of his mind. He needed the stimulant a lot more than he needed to remember what was over and done with, that was for sure.
The tracked excavator whined thunderously as it dug in the second of the six hogs. The note of its cutting head dopplered up and down, its speed depending on the depth of the cut and the number of rocks in the soil.
The task force was carrying minimal supplies, so the excavator didn’t have plasticizer to add to the earth it spewed in an arc forward of the cut. The berm would still stop small arms and shell fragments. If Battery Alpha needed more than that, the Colonel had lost his gamble and the troopers of Task Force Huber were probably dead meat.
Lieutenant Basingstoke, half a dozen of his people, and three techs from the recovery vehicle, stood beside the hog whose starboard fans had cut out twice during the run. Sergeant Tranter had joined them. He wasn’t in Maintenance anymore, but neither was he a man to ignore a problem he could help with just because it’d stopped being his job.
Huber looked westward. Lights were on in the spaceport seven klicks away, backlighting the smooth hillcrest between it and Task Force Huber.
He could imagine the panic at Port Plattner, military and civilians reacting to the unexpected threat in as many ways as there were officials involved. They’d be trying to black out the facilities, not that it would make much difference to the Slammers’ optics, but they hadn’t yet succeeded. The port was designed to be illuminated for round-the-clock ship landings. Nobody’d planned for what to do when a hostile armored regiment drove a thousand kilometers to attack from all sides.
The sky continued to darken. Huber always felt particularly lonely at night; in daytime he could pretend almost any landscape was a part of Nieuw Friesland that he just hadn’t seen before, but the stars were inescapably alien.
Grinning wryly at himself, he said, “Frenchie, hold the fort till I’m back. I’m going to talk to the redlegs.”
Another thought struck him and he said, “Fox Two-six, this is Six. Join me and Rocker One-six. Out.”
He lifted himself from the fighting compartment as Messeman responded with a laconic, “Roger.”
The cutting head hummed to idle as the excavator backed up the ramp from the gun position it’d just dug. Waddling like a bulldog, it followed the sergeant from the engineer section as he walked backward to guide it to the next pit. A hog drove into the just-completed gun position and shut down its fans. The hull was below the original surface level, and the howitzer’s barrel slanted up at twenty degrees to clear the berm.
Huber nodded to the munitions trucks loaded with 200-mm rockets. He said to Lieutenant Basingstoke, “I hope the engineers have time to dig those in too, Lieutenant. After watching what happened to the Firelords when their ammo started going off.”
“If we begin firing at maximum rate …” Basingstoke said. He was a tall, hollow-cheeked man. His pale blond hair made him look older than he was, but Huber suspected he’d never really been young. “We’ll expend all the ammunition we’ve carried in less than ten minutes. No doubt that will reduce the risk.”
He smiled like a skull. Huber smiled back when he realized that the artillery officer had made a joke.
Lieutenant Messeman trotted over, looking back toward his cars and speaking into his commo helmet on the F-2 frequency. He turned and glared at Huber, not really angry but the sort of little man who generally sounded as though he was.