Huber set the target and brought up his sight’s magnification. He was using light amplification rather than thermal viewing; the many fires dotting the port’s flat expanse provided more than enough illumination. When his pipper centered on a tank’s turret ring, he thumbed the trigger and let the stabilizer hold his bolts on target. The tank’s own ammunition blew it up in a cyan flash.
Huber shifted to the next target over, an APC rocking in the shockwave of the tank’s destruction. Before he could fire, a 20-cm bolt hit the lightly armored vehicle and sprayed molten blobs of it a hundred meters away.
Fencing Master continued to advance. The ten-story terminal building blocked Huber’s line of sight to the Dragoons; his faceshield careted windows instead. He squeezed, slewing the tribarrel to help the car’s forward motion draw his burst across the seventh floor from left to right. The rooms were dark till the bolts hit, but gulps of orange flame followed each cyan flash as plasma ignited the furnishings.
An equipment park on the southwest side of the pad had taken a pasting from incendiaries. Hundreds of vehicles were alight. Every so often one erupted with greater enthusiasm like a bubble rising in a caldera to scatter blazing rock high in the air. Eight combat cars skirted the park to the south, moving fast. Their tribarrels raked the back side of the terminal building.
At the beginning of the war, Solace had started building concrete-roofed dugouts at intervals around the perimeter of Port Plattner. The work had stopped when Solace Command realized that the Outer States were barely capable of defense, and even those completed—three of them in the sector Central had assigned to Huber’s troops—appeared to be unmanned.
Deseau and Learoyd had burned the firing slit of the southernmost to twice its original size. Now as Fencing Master swept around the squat structure, Learoyd depressed his tribarrel and fired a long burst down the entrance ramp at the back. The steel door gushed red sparks and ruptured inward, but there was no secondary explosion.
White flares popped from the roof of the terminal building. More flares followed from a dozen points across Port Plattner, including the northern perimeter where the Waldheim Dragoons had been fighting. “UC forces, we surrender!” a woman’s voice cried. “Terminal control surrenders, by the Lord’s mercy we surrender!”
She must have been using the port’s starship communications system because her high-output transmission blanketed all frequencies. Every floor of the terminal building was ablaze, but those were merely administrative offices. The actual control room was in a sub-basement, armored against the chance of a starship crash.
Fencing Master turned left, away from the base of the terminal. Padova dropped the car twice onto the sodded lawn to scrub off inertia that wanted to carry them into the burning building. The other Highball cars were braking in roostertails of red sparks as their skirts skidded on concrete. The terminal was a tower of flame, lashing the ground with pulses of heat.
“Sir, what should I do!” Padova said. They were moving slowly south along the face of the building, crushing ornamental shrubs under their skirts. Foghorn and Fancy Pants followed, while Lieutenant Messeman’s cars had halted on the other side of a wing-shaped entrance marquee which extended twenty meters from the front entrance.
“All Slammers units,” a familiar voice growled. “This is Regiment Six, troopers. Cease fire unless you’re fired on. Under no circumstances fire on the starships that’ll start landing shortly. Hammer out.”
Deseau tracked a man running across the pad to the left. He didn’t shoot, but he was touching the trigger. Huber hooked a thumb to back him off, then said, “Highball, we’ll laager a hundred meters back the way we came. Infantry in the center of the circle.”
He looked at the plot the C&C box suggested, approved it, and concluded, “Six out.”
That was far enough from the terminal building that they wouldn’t broil, though Huber wanted to keep Highball reasonably close to its objective until somebody got around to ordering them to move. The Lord knew when that’d be, given what the Colonel and his staff had on their plate right now.
The eight vehicles crossing the pad from the west slowed as they approached the terminal. Huber’s eyes narrowed: one was a command car, a high-sided box built on the chassis of a combat car to hold far more communications and display options than could be fitted into a C&C box. Mostly they were staff vehicles, though Huber knew a couple of line company commanders preferred them to combat cars.
The shooting had probably stopped, though it was hard to say because munitions continued to explode. That wouldn’t end for days, not with the number of fires burning across the huge port. You could get killed just as dead when a truck blew up as you could by somebody aiming at you….
That reminded Huber of casualties. He checked the readout on his faceshield and saw to his pleasant surprise that all the personnel were green—infantry included—except for a cross-hatched icon on Foghorn. “Three-one, what’s your casualty?” he said.
“Six, the right gun blew back and burned Quincy both arms,” Sergeant Nagano replied. “We got him sedated and covered in SpraySeal. He’ll be all right, I guess, but he won’t be much good in the field for a few months. Over.”
“Highball Six,” broke in another voice before Huber could reply, “this is Regiment Six. We’re joining your laager but leaving you in local control. Out.”
Huber felt a momentary jolt, but that was ingrained reflex; his conscious mind was far too exhausted to be concerned. “Roger, Six,” he said. “Break. Highball, spread the laager to accommodate eight more cars. The command group’s joining us. Highball Six out.”
The eight vehicles with Colonel Hammer, five of them from K Company, idled toward Highball. The cars of Huber’s original command reformed as the eastern half of a circle instead of the complete circuit. Instead of steering Fencing Master straight to its new location and rotating the bow out, Padova drove the car sideways. She was bragging, but Huber was too wrung out to call her down for it.
“Guess they didn’t have a walkover like we did,” Deseau said as he gave the newcomers a professional once-over. Three of the combat cars had holes in their plenum chambers; one was shot up badly enough that its skirts dragged. It probably couldn’t have kept up with the rest of the unit if they hadn’t been crossing such a smooth, hard surface. “Nobody even shot at us that I saw.”
“They shot at us, Frenchie,” Learoyd said. He tapped the bulkhead beside him with the knife he was using to scrape his ejection port.
Huber leaned forward to look past the trooper. Three projectiles, each separated from the next by a hand’s breadth, had dimpled the iridium inward. The third was deep enough that the armor had started to crack.
“From the bunker when we got close,” Learoyd explained; he sounded apologetic. “I guess I shouldn’t’ve quit shooting when something blew up inside.”
The impacts must’ve been audible in the next county, but Huber hadn’t been aware of them, nor Deseau either it seemed. Aloud Huber said, “No harm done, Learoyd. Nobody’d guess their compartmentalization was that good, and it’s not like there wasn’t anything else needing attention.”
The laager was complete with two meters between adjacent cars: tight, but giving them room to maneuver fast if something unexpected happened. The right wing gunner of the car next to Fencing Master raised his faceshield and shouted over the idling fans, “How’s your leg, Lieutenant?”
“Sir!” Huber said. He’d expected Colonel Hammer to be in the command car. “Sir, my leg’s fine, I guess, but I haven’t been using it much except to stand on.”
Huber’s left leg ached like a wall was leaning on it, but the rest of his body wasn’t much better. His skin itched and the slickness where his clamshell rubbed over his hipbones was either popped blisters or blood. In the morning, that might matter; right now, Arne Huber was alive and that was good enough.