Civilians weren’t his concern at the moment. His task was to defeat hostile troops….
The column blasted by a dozen farmers’ huts in fenced courtyards. Occasionally a shiver of movement indicated someone watching through the palings or from a shuttered window.
A squad of infantry dropped off to cover the community until the force was safely clear, but there was no real threat. A syndicate garrison might still occupy the loopholed stone building, but the flag was gone from the pole on the roof peak. Surviving gunmen didn’t want to be identified with either of the losing parties.
“If there’s ever to be peace on Cantilucca,” said Pilar Ortega with a harshness at variance with the soldiers’ professional calm, “it’ll come the way you’re bringing it. No other way.”
Coke’s eyes danced from the actual terrain to dots crawling across the combiner screen of his multifunction display. “Team One to Team elements,” he ordered. “Take preliminary attack positions with at least five meters of screening between you and the perimeter fence. Out.”
The south column was back in brush again, uncultivated country that was too dry to raise healthy gage. Vierziger slowed their car and pulled it off the general line of advance. The spaceport perimeter and all the structures within it were directly north of them but out of sight.
The local vegetation averaged three meters tall. A few trees rose half again as high before they flared out like golf tees. The trees had whippy, thin trunks, but their crowns were of straw-colored foliage which provided a complete visual screen. Someone in the spaceport tower could conceivably notice that the vegetation waved with the passage of the armored vehicles, but the chance of anybody being that alert was vanishingly slight.
Besides, the Frisians weren’t going to be waiting very long.
A squad of infantry dropped off its skimmers and wormed its individual way into the scrub. The infantry could get much closer to the start line than the combat cars without risk of being observed. The squad’s air-cushion gun jeep halted back with the cars.
The mortars were jeep-mounted also. By themselves they could keep up with the infantry easily, but the jeeps carried only two 4-round ammo chargers. The remainder of the ammunition supply rode in a wheeled caisson behind each jeep.
Pulling a trailer with an air-cushion vehicle wasn’t a great deal of fun on surfaced roads. Dragging wheels through brush and plowed fields, as this crew had been doing, was like trying to swim with a boat anchor. The company commander had wisely unloaded the pair of mortars as soon as she could.
“Charlie element in position,” Captain Garmin reported. His platoons had a shorter route than Coke’s, though there’d been a delay as many of the troops and cars crossed the road cautiously to reach their attack positions. “Charlie out.”
Coke frowned at his display. Eight Heliodoran vehicles were moving away from the terminal building. Twelve more were in the final stages of loading soldiers from an early landed transport. A battalion headed toward Potosi to reinforce the patrol engaged there. The squad of infantry he’d left in a blocking position could at best slow them with a hit-and-run ambush, and that would be extremely risky.
On the southern perimeter, three of the combat cars and their associated infantry were short of where he’d wanted them to be able to enfilade the westernmost of the Heliodoran transports. Coke gave the order anyway: “All Team elements. Move into final attack positions.”
Johann Vierziger eased Cutting Edge forward. His seat was raised so that he looked out of the hatch in the bow slope instead of through the vision displays within the driver’s compartment.
“Wait for my command to fire,” Coke continued, “unless the enemy engages you first. In the latter case, fire at will. Mortars, when the shooting starts, drop your rounds on concentrations shielded from direct fire. Team One out.”
Some troopers felt claustrophobic when they were buttoned up in a vehicle. Coke was pretty sure that Vierziger just wanted to be able to add his own increment to the skein of fire which would shortly enwrap the Heliodorus Regiment.
The bow of Cutting Edge nosed up to the perimeter fence. Beside the vehicle, an infantryman was slicing a hole in the fence so that the wire didn’t obstruct his line of fire.
The nearest starship—a freighter in the gage trade—was 200 meters away, northward and to the right. The terminal buildings were almost 800 meters distant.
The column of Heliodoran transport, lightly armored ten-wheeled trucks, drove toward the gate and Potosi beyond. Soldiers leaned on the waist-height panels of the cargo boxes, looking like sightseers rather than combat troops.
“Barbour says we’ve been seen!” Margulies shouted.
“Fire at will!” Coke ordered. He squeezed his thumb trigger as three red flares lifted from the terminal building.
Coke aimed at a detail of soldiers horsing crates from the cargo bay of a Heliodoran transport. The figures went down like bowling pins. A case ruptured, spewing out multicolored smoke from the marking grenades within.
Sten Moden launched one, then the other, of his missiles from the starboard wing of the fighting compartment toward targets far to the left. The backblast cleared swathes of empty scrub.
Coke needn’t have worried about the most distant transports. A missile detonated on the boarding ramp of each.
Coke shifted his point of aim to the cargo hold of his chosen freighter. The inertia of the spinning iridium barrels fought the weapon’s powered traverse, giving the motion a greasy dynamism.
The open hatch was a foreshortened trapezoid in his sight picture. Coke squeezed the butterfly again. The stream of 2-cm bolts reflected within the starship’s dark interior like the pulses of a short circuit.
Ammunition detonated in a series of quivering yellow puffs. The orange flash that followed ripped the vessel apart, blowing the middle third across the port as jagged shrapnel.
The blast hurled Coke back from his tribarrel. The concussion set off stacked munitions previously unloaded from other ships. The shock wave skidded the eight Heliodoran trucks, already racked and burning from the eastern element’s gunfire, into a single piled inferno.
Coke got up. He’d lost his helmet. Pilar, white and as stiff-featured as a skull, handed it to him.
A black mushroom mounted a thousand meters from the crater where the center of the starship had been. The two ends of the vessel lay crumpled, thirty meters from where they rested before the explosion.
Gunfire ceased for an instant. The shock had flattened potential targets as well as stunned the FDF gunners.
The initial eight-round salvo of mortar shells landed amidst the unloaded cargo. The white flashes and blasts would have seemed devastating had they not just followed a cataclysm.
Loudspeakers throughout the terminal buildings blared, “Invading forces, you have been surrounded by soldiers of the Marvelan Confederacy. Throw down your arms and surrender. You are surrounded by troops of the Marvelan Confederacy. There is no escape but surrender!”
Bob Barbour again, using the patches into the PA system he’d prepared weeks earlier. Coke had never doubted the value of intelligence and electronic warfare, but Barbour would make a believer of the most hardened grunt.
A Heliodoran crew-served weapon raked the southern perimeter from a position far enough to the west to have been shielded from the exploding starship. They were using a coil gun, a scaled-up version of the Heliodorans’ personal weapons. The gun managed to cough out a dozen half-kg shells. One round lifted a Frisian infantryman twenty meters in the air, shedding limbs as he tumbled.
A storm of fire erased the weapon and its crew. Some of the shots came from nearby Heliodorans who knew their best chance of survival lay in surrender.
Partial silence returned, striated by the crackle of flames and the screams of those injured too badly to crawl from the spreading fires. Bits of cloth fluttered above whatever sparse cover the Heliodoran survivors had found. Some of the makeshift flags were white, but the intention was clear regardless.