“Courage Command, this is Echo One-six,” Ruthven repeated, keeping his voice calm but wondering if showing his irritation would help get the Royalists’ attention. “Respond ASAP to arrange linkup, if you please. Over.”
The car shifted back to level from its strongly nose-up attitude, though it continued to rock side to side. Ruthven had a real-time panorama at the top of his display, but he didn’t bother checking it. His responsibility was the whole platoon, not the problems of weaving the car through woodland.
“Echo One-six, my colonel say, ‘Who are you?’” replied a voice from the firebase. “We must know who you are, over!”
Ruthven sighed. It could’ve been worse. Of course, it might still get worse.
“Unit, hold in place till I sort this,” he said aloud. Rennie’s squad, now in the lead, must be nearly in sight of the firebase by now. “Break. Courage Command, this is Echo One-six. We’re the unit sent to reinforce you. Please confirm that your troops are expecting us and won’t open fire.”
He hesitated three long heartbeats while deciding whether to say what was going through his mind, then said it: “Courage, we’re the Slammers. If we’re shot at, we’ll shoot back. With everything we’ve got. Over.”
Third Squad was in sight of the Royalists: the feed from Rennie’s skimmer showed the firebase as a scar of felled trees on the hill 700 meters from him. Ruthven frowned; he was looking down into the firebase. The ridge by which E/1 had approached was a good fifty meters higher than the knoll where the Royalists had sited their guns.
“You must not shoot!” squealed a new voice from the Royalist firebase; a senior officer had apparently taken over from the radioman. “We will not shoot! You must come in and help us at once!”
Ruthven grinned faintly. “Courage, I’ll give you three minutes to make sure all your bunkers get the word,” he said. “We don’t want any mistakes. Echo One-six out.”
“Hey El-Tee?” said Sergeant Wegelin on the command push; he was crewing the tribarrel at the end of the column. “What d’ye mean, come in shooting with everything we got? We’re not exactly a tank company, you know, over.”
“They don’t know that, Wegs,” Ruthven said, smiling more broadly as he examined the real-time visuals. “And anyway, I don’t think we’d need panzers to put paid to this lot, over.”
Fire Support Base Courage housed four 120-mm howitzers with an infantry battalion for protection. Treetrunks had been bulldozed into a wall around the camp, but they wouldn’t stop light cannon shells as effectively as an earthen berm. The Slammers’ powerguns would turn the wood into a huge bonfire.
“Why in hell did they set up with this ridge above them, d’ye suppose?” asked Hassel. Though the platoon sergeant had his own line of sight to the firebase, the display indicated he was using Wegelin’s higher vantage point. “We could put the guns out of action with four shots, over.”
“Because I never met nobody wearing a uniform here who knows how to pour piss outa a boot, Top,” said Wegelin. “Over.”
“The ridge’s too narrow for a battalion and the guns,” said Ruthven. He was using text crawls to monitor the panicked orders flying across the firebase, but he didn’t see any reason to wait in respectful silence for the Royalists to get their act in order. “They should’ve left a detachment …”
“Echo One-six, you must come in now,” Lieutenant-Colonel Carrera said sharply. “Quickly, before the Dogs take advantage! Quick! Quick!”
“Break,” said Ruthven, closing his conversation with his squad leaders. “Rennie, take your squad in. Wegelin, stay on overwatch. I’ll follow Rennie, then Sellars, Wegelin, and you bring up the rear, Hassel. Six Out.”
Again green blips signaled Received and Understood. Sergeant Rennie knelt on his skimmer to lead the way down and up the wooded saddle to the firebase. His troopers were lying flat with their control sticks folded down. That wasn’t a good way to drive, but it made them very difficult targets in case somebody in the garrison hadn’t gotten the word after all.
Rennie wasn’t the brightest squad leader in the Regiment, but he was reflexively brave and never hesitated to take a personal risk to spare his troopers. They’d have followed him to Hell.
Melisant was sending power to the fans before Ruthven’d finished giving his orders, but the command car lifted awkwardly and only slowly started to wallow forward. The grace with which the troopers flitted around him made Ruthven feel like a hog surrounded by flies, but the skimmers’d run out of juice in a matter of hours without the car’s fusion bottle to recharge them. He knew he was doing his proper job here inside the vehicle, though he didn’t feel like he was.
The gun jeep that’d been reinforcing the lead squad didn’t follow Rennie’s troopers. The driver/assistant gunner waved as the combat car swept past; the jeep was hunkered down in a notch on the reverse slope that gave it a line of fire to the four howitzers and most of the interior of the firebase.
Sergeant Wegelin’d probably ordered the crew to keep under cover till he came up with the other gun and mortar. That wasn’t precisely disobeying Ruthven’s instructions, but it came bloody close; and Wegelin was probably right in his caution, so the El-Tee would keep his mouth shut. That was a lot of what a junior lieutenant did when he had good non-coms….
The infantry moved toward the firebase through the stumps and brush in a skirmish line, but Melisant swung the car onto the road as soon as she reached the swale connecting the knolls. The track’d been cut with a bulldozer rather than properly graded, but the car’s air cushion smoothed the ride nicely. The deep ruts from wheeled vehicles were frozen now and had snow on their southern edges.
Royalists cheered from the top of the wall. The soldiers were male but there were scores of women and children in the compound as well, some of them waving garments.
Ruthven grimaced, thinking of what’d happen if the Lord’s Army overran the place. His job was to prevent that, but if the rebels were in the strength Intelligence thought they were …well, one platoon, even a bloody good platoon like E/1, wasn’t going to be able to do the job without help that the Royalists might not be able to provide.
The firebase entrance was a simple gap in the wall, but bulldozers had scraped a pile of trunks and dirt as a screen ten meters in front of it. Semi-trailers bringing in supplies would have a hard time with the angle, but Melisant should be able to guide the combat car through without trouble.
There were three strands of barbed wire in front of the wall. That gave negligible protection against assault, but maybe it’d hearten the defenders: placebo effects were real in more areas than medicine.
Ruthven grinned. It wasn’t much of a joke, but in a situation like this you took any chance for a laugh that you got.
Rennie parked his skimmer beside the entrance and hopped up the front of the wall like a baboon with a 2-cm gun; he stood facing inward. His troopers split to either side, four of them joining him on the main wall while the other two mounted the screen and looked back to cover the rest of the column.
“Melisant, ease off a bit,” Ruthven said over the intercom as he opened the roof hatch. “We don’t want to spook our allies, over.”
“You mean they’ll mess their pants, El-Tee?” Melisant said. “Yeah, we don’t want that. Out.”
The fan note didn’t change, but the driver let gravity slow the heavy vehicle as they started up the slope toward the entrance. Ruthven thumbed the lift button and a hydraulic jack raised his seat until his head and shoulders were above the hatch coaming. This way the Royalists could see him instead of watching forty tonnes of steel and iridium growl toward them impassively.
Ruthven tried to keep his face impassive as he eyed the barrier. It was a tangle of protruding roots and branches, no harder to climb than a ladder. Defenders firing over the top from the other side would have very little advantage over an attacking force. The common soldiers carried locally made automatic rifles, but the three blockhouses spaced around the wall mounted pulsed lasers; each weapon had its own fusion bottle.