She was wearing hospital slippers. Ruthven got up quickly and gripped her shoulder to keep her from stepping in the glass she probably couldn’t see. Axbird threw her arms around him.
“Oh, Lord, El-Tee!” she said. “There’s nobody who’ll understand! There’ll never be anybody!”
Ruthven held the sobbing woman. His eyes were closed. He was remembering E/1’s second and last night in Fire Support Base Courage. Nobody’ll ever understand.
“El-Tee!” said Rennie in a hoarse whisper. “Sir, wake up. The bastards’re bugging out!”
Ruthven jerked upright. He’d been sleeping in the rear compartment of the command car while Rennie sat at the console with the sensor readouts and commo gear. The squad leaders each took a two-hour watch, debriefing Ruthven when they were relieved or if anything significant appeared.
As it’d done, apparently.
Melisant’d been sleeping on top of the cab; her boots clunked against armor as she slid down behind the controls. The tone of Rennie’s voice through the open hatch had snapped her awake, so she was heading for her action station like the good trooper she was.
Rennie had the sensor display filling most of the holographic screen; commo was a narrow sidebar, unimportant for the time being. People …hundreds of people …were clustered at the firebase entrance. They were leaving on foot, heading eastward along the road. From the south, west, and north other groups of people were approaching.
Those coming toward the base were rebels of the Lord’s Army, armed to the teeth. Judging from the lack of metal for the magnetic sensors to pick up, the Royalists had left their weapons behind.
“Them wogs’re just walking outa the base!” Rennie said. “They musta been talking to the rebs, don’t you guess?”
“More to the point, they’re walking out on us,” Ruthven muttered. “Rouse the platoon …but quiet, don’t let the locals know we’ve tumbled to what’s going on.”
He uncaged and pressed the panic button that automatically copied all platoon communications to Base Hammer, through the satellite net if it was up or by bouncing off cosmic ray tracks if it wasn’t. It was faster than making a separate transmission to Regiment, and there was bloody little time. The rebels’d be climbing over the wall in a few minutes, and when that happened it’d all be over for E/1.
Ruthven raised the platform to put his head and shoulders through the roof hatch. Using his helmet’s thermal imaging, he could see that the howitzer crews were gone too. The guns hadn’t been disabled: explosions or the roar of thermite grenades would’ve warned the Slammers. In all likelihood, the Lord’s Army had offered the Royalists their lives, in exchange for all their arms and for the Slammers who’d been sent as reinforcements.
It was at best an open question as to whether the rebels intended to honor their bargain. They’d left the road clear for half a klick from the firebase entrance, but the figures concealed in the brush there to either side looked to Ruthven like a kill zone placed far enough out that the victims couldn’t run back to safety.
On the other hand, the Royalists hadn’t exactly delivered Platoon E/1 into the Prophet’s hands either.
“Unit, listen up,” Ruthven said. The troopers in the firebase were gathered close enough that his helmet intercom reached them unaided, but the command car’s powerful transceivers were relaying the signal to Sergeant Sellars’ squad on the knoll to the northeast. “We can’t hold this place, it’s too big, but we can break out and join Second Squad. All together in a tight perimeter we can hold till help comes.”
Via, what was the closest friendly unit? Maybe G Troop’s combat cars, based with a regimental howitzer battery at Firebase Groening? But that was forty klicks away, and it wouldn’t be safe for them to come direct by the road.
“I’m taking the car out by the entrance,” he continued aloud. “We can’t get over the wall or through it. Wegelin, your jeeps follow me.”
Maybe a tank could push a hole in the tangle of treetrunks, but a command car couldn’t and overloaded jeeps certainly couldn’t. Nor did they have enough excess power to climb the irregular surface.
“The rest of you lift over the wall in the zero to forty-five-degree quadrant,” Ruthven said. That’d spread the troopers enough that they wouldn’t get in each other’s way while awkwardly jumping the trees. “The skimmers can do it if you’re careful. I’ll call a fire mission on the rebs coming from the north. When it lands, that’s our signal to roll. Any questions?”
“El-Tee, I was a redleg on Andersholz before I joined the Regiment,” said Wegelin. “I can fire them one-twenties. The wogs keep’em loaded but powered down, you see.”
Ruthven tried to make sense of what Wegelin had just said. He hadn’t known the Heavy Weapons sergeant had been an artilleryman, but he didn’t see what difference it made now. They could startle the rebs and cause casualties by firing the Royalist guns in their faces as they climbed the wall, but it sure wouldn’t drive them away.
“What I mean, sir,” Wegelin continued, “is a charger of five HE rounds’ll give us a hole any bloody place you want to go through the wall. Not at the gate where they’ll be expecting us, I mean, over.”
“Can you manage that in two minutes, over?” Ruthven said as he dropped into the van’s interior. Rennie’d vacated the console and was on his way out of the compartment, returning to his squad.
Ruthven checked the display. Rennie’d prepped fire missions on each of the four rebel concentrations; three moved as the company-sized groups advanced on the firebase.
“We’re on our way, out,” the sergeant responded. As he spoke, icons on Ruthven’s display showed the jeeps sprinting to the northernmost howitzer; the sound of their fans burred faintly through the open hatches. The big gun wasn’t far from where Wegelin’s squad was to begin with, but he obviously wanted them all to be able to jump into the jeeps as soon as they’d set up the burst.
“Unit,” Ruthven said. He placed his right index finger on the terrain map image of the firebase wall, exporting the image to all his troopers. “Adjust the previous order. The car and jeeps will be leaving the firebase here. I don’t know what the shells are going to do …”
One possibility was that they’d blast the existing tangle into something worse, so that the skimmers couldn’t get over or through either one. It was still the best choice on offer.
“ …and if you want to follow me through what I hope’ll be a gap, that’s fine. But don’t get in the way, troopers, this car’s a pig. We’re going to be a full honk, and we won’t be able to dodge. Questions, over?”
Nobody spoke, but three green icons blipped onto the top of the display. Via, they’re pros, they’re the best platoon in the bloody regiment, they really are….
“Six, we got the tube ready!” Sergeant Wegelin said as his icon lit also. “Five rounds, HE, and I’ve programmed her to traverse right three mils at each round. We’re ready, over!”
The Royalist howitzers had their own power supplies to adjust elevation and traverse; they could even crawl across terrain by themselves, though very slowly. The northern weapon was now live, a bright image on Ruthven’s display and a whine through the hatch as its pumps pressurized the hydraulic system.
“Fire Central, this is Echo One-six,” Ruthven said, calling the Regiment’s artillery controller but distributing the exchange to his troopers on an output-only channel. “Request Fire Order One …”
Targeting the rebels approaching from the northeast. They were coming uphill by now. That plus the stumps and broken rocks of the roughly cleared terrain had slowed them.
“ …HE, repeat HE only, we’re too close for firecracker rounds, time of impact fifty-five, repeat five-five seconds from …”