by David Drake
“Is there going to be a battle, then, Lieutenant?” a voice asked. Gears slipped a moment before meshing in Huber’s mind. Captain Orichos had spoken; she was standing upright with her eyes on him, her faceshield raised. Orichos looked calm but alert. Vibrant as her face now was, she seemed brightly attractive instead of the haggard, aged derelict she’d looked before the alarm.
Learoyd stood at his tribarrel, scanning the scattered forest to starboard. None of the trees were more than wrist-thick, though the tufts of flowers at the tips of some branches showed they were adults. The leading vehicles, the tanks and especially the broad-beamed recovery vehicles, had to break a path where the stunted forest was densest.
Closer to the coast where the soil and rainfall were better, the overarching canopy would keep the understory clear. The task force’d have to skirt the trees there, however; not even a tank could smash down a meter-thick trunk without damaging itself in the process. . . .
“Not a battle, no,” Huber said over the intercom. “If things work out, the hostiles won’t get anywhere near us. If things don’t, we’ll still go around them rather than shooting our way through. That may mean worse problems down the road, but we’ll deal with that when it happens.”
As Huber spoke, he cued his AI to project a terrain and status map in a seventy percent mask across the upper left quadrant of his faceshield. His helmet with all Central’s resources on tap could provide him with whatever information he might need. What electronics couldn’t do was to stop time while he tried to absorb all that maybe-necessary information.
In a crisis, making no decision is the worst possible decision. A shrunken map that he could see through to shoot if he had to was a better choice than trying to know everything.
“Is it gonna work, El-Tee?” Deseau asked, still watching the sensor display. He cocked his head to the left so that he could scratch his neck with his right little finger.
Instead of saying, “Who the fuck knows?” which a sudden rush of fatigue brought to his mind, Huber treated the question as a classroom exercise at the Academy.
“Yeah,” he said, “I think it maybe will, Frenchie. The Wolverines, that’s who’s coming, they know what a big powergun can do as well as we do—but knowing it and knowing it, that’s different. If Sierra just keeps rolling along, they’re going to forget that a tank can hit ’em any time there’s a line of sight between them and a main gun’s bore. A surprise like that’s likely to make the survivors sit tight and take stock for long enough that we can get by the place they planned to hold us.”
“That’s good,” Deseau said. “Because I saw what a battery of the Wolverines did to a government armored regiment on Redwood. Bugger me if I want to fight ’em if we can get by without it.”
“Sierra, this is Sierra Six,” said Captain Sangrela, sounding hoarse but animated. “Delta elements, execute the orders downloaded to you from Central. Remaining Sierra elements, hold to the march plan. We’re not going to do anything to alert the other side. Estimated time to action is thirty-nine, that’s three-niner, minutes. Six out.”
“Fox Three-six, roger,” Huber said, his words merging with the responses of Sierra’s other two platoon leaders.
He stretched his arms, over his head and then behind him, bending forward at the waist. It was going to feel good to get the clamshell off; it itched like an ant colony had taken up residence.
Always assuming he lived long enough to get to a place he didn’t need body armor, of course. But he did assume that, soldiers always assumed that.
Arne Huber grinned behind his faceshield. And it was always true—until the day it wasn’t true.
The task force had slowed again to switch assignments. Fencing Master was now at the head of the main body, Foghorn and a fire team of infantry who’d jumped their skimmers off the maintenance vehicle where they’d been resting were scouting a klick in the lead, and Sergeant Jellicoe’s section trailed to the rear.
Huber smiled grimly behind the anonymity of his faceshield. “Resting” wasn’t a good word to describe what the infantry was going through, jolting around in the back of a wrenchmobile. Though this was a hard ride for the troops in the armored vehicles, it was a lot worse for the infantry. But Via! every soul in the Slammers was a volunteer.
They were climbing a slope of harder rock than most of the surroundings—a spine of sandstone from which time had worn away the limestone overburden. The top was bald except for patches of wiry grass and a few saplings whose roots had found purchase in a crack. A fresh scar across the stone showed where Foghorn had dragged her skirts.
“Sierra, thirty seconds to execute!” snapped Captain Sangrela over the general push.
Huber rested his left hand on the receiver of his tribarrel and looked over his shoulder. Fifty meters behind Fencing Master, Dinkybob, a massive iridium tortoise, snorted up the slight rise. The tank’s hatches were buttoned up; as Huber watched, the turret swung to starboard. The squat 20-cm main gun elevated very slightly.
Mauricia Orichos raised her faceshield to watch the tank. Huber reached over her shoulder and clicked the protection back over her eyes. “Not now!” he said sharply. “Aide—”
As Huber voice-cued his AI, he manually keyed the pad over Orichos’ right ear to link her helmet to his.
“—import targeting from Delta Two-six.”
With the final word, Huber viewed not his immediate surroundings but the sight picture from the gunnery screen of the huge tank just behind him. It was at high magnification, so high that it had the glassy smoothness of images heavily retouched by the computer to sharpen them.
Five waves of large aircars skimmed undulating, almost barren, terrain. There were four vehicles in the leading ranks and three in the final, all echeloned right. They’d just crossed a ridgeline and were nosing down to cross a shallow valley.
Dinkybob’s sight pipper settled over the lead vehicle in the left file. Instead of being a solid orange ball, the reticle was crosshatched to indicate that the fire-control computer was auto-targeting just as it would do in air defense mode.
The cyan flash of the main gun stabbed across Huber’s bare skin like a separate needle every millimeter. It would’ve been instantly blinding to anyone looking toward it without a faceshield’s polarizing protection. The crash of heated air—louder than an equally close thunderbolt—shook Fencing Master. Deseau, jounced from his squat, sprawled across Huber’s feet.
The center of the targeted aircar erupted in blue flame. The bow and a fragment of the stern tumbled out of the sky, spilling such of the contents as hadn’t been carbonized by the blast.
Dinkybob continued to fire, ripping the formation as quickly as her gun mechanism could cycle fresh loads into the chamber. Trogon was burning out her barrel by shooting without giving the bore time to cool between rounds. For the people in Fencing Master’s fighting compartment, the volley was like being whipped by a scorpion’s tail.
For the Wolverines at the other end, it was a brief glimpse of Hell.
A tank hit at that range—eighty-one kilometers distant—might have shrugged off the bolt with damage only to its external sensors and its running gear. It was impossible for a vehicle that had to fly with a heavy cargo the way the Wolverines’ trucks did to be armored like a tank. Each bolt scattered its target in a fireball of its own burning structure.
Dinkybob was nearing the edge of the bald patch, but Doomsayer was immediately behind. For an instant both 20-cm guns fired in tight syncopation; then Fencing Master drove into heavy forest, Dinkybob passed out of its targeting window, and even Doomsayer’s main gun ceased firing. Huber’s heartbeat throbbed in the silence.
The summons wobbled at the corner of Huber’s faceshield. He cued it, dropping into the virtual conference room again.
Colonel Hammer looked around the circle of Sierra officers. “That’s fourteen out of nineteen trucks destroyed,” he said, “and two of the others grounded hard enough to break as best we can tell by satellite.”
Hammer grinned like a shark. “Task accomplished, troopers. Complete the rest of the mission the same way and there’ll be a lot of promotions out of this business. Dismissed!”
Arne Huber swayed in the rumbling fighting compartment of his combat car, thinking about what the Colonel had just said. Promotion—maybe.
But if they didn’t complete the mission, very probably death. Well, the Slammers were all volunteers. . . .
****
The muzzle of Dinkybob’s main gun had cooled from white to a red so deep it was mostly a shimmer in the air around the hot metal. Mitzi’s turret hatch was open, dribbling a trail of gray haze. A plastic matrix held the copper atoms in alignment for release as plasma down the powergun’s bore; the smoke was the last of the breakdown products from the recent shooting.
An alert wobbled on the upper right corner of Huber’s faceshield. He crooked his left little finger, one of six ways he could cue the icon. It was a download-only channel, information from Central for Sierra Six. Huber and the other task force officers were brought into the circuit to listen but not to comment.
“Sierra, this is Operations Three-four-one,” said the voice from somewhere back in Base Alpha. “Solace Command is pissed about what you did to the Wolverines. They’ve ordered a fire mission by all batteries that can range you. You’ll have to take care of your own air defense. Any questions? Over.”
Though voice-only, the increasingly thick foliage overhead attenuated the transmission to sexlessness. On this side of the ridge, the task force was descending into healthy coastal forest.
“What do you mean ‘all batteries’?” Captain Sangrela asked. He sounded more irritable than concerned. “Is this a real problem? Over.”
“Negative on a real problem,” Central replied calmly. It was easy to be calm in Base Alpha, of course. “There’s two, maybe three off-planet batteries with rocket howitzers and carrier shells. We’ll get you time and vector data as soon as they fire, but you’ll have plenty of room to pop them before the carriers separate. Besides that, the Solace Militia has thirty or forty conventional tubes that can range you with rocket assisted rounds, but they won’t have any payload to speak of after what the booster rocket requires. I repeat, you’ll have full data soonest. Over”
“Roger, Sierra out,” Sangrela said. “Break, Fox Three-six—”
The signal now was coming through the task force command channel.
“—that puts it on your cars. Is there going to be any problem? Over.”
“No problem, Six,” Huber said curtly. “Just give me a minute to plan. Out.”
He raised his faceshield and brought up a terrain display through the Command and Control box. On cue the AI highlighted the locations on or near Sierra’s forward track which provided a line of sight toward the arc of territory where the hostile guns might be sited.
The display used a violet overlay to mark ranges of thirty klicks and above; the hue moved down the spectrum as the range closed. Points from which a tribarrel could reach out five kilometers—as close as Huber was willing to let the sophisticated carrier shells get—were green.
A single carrier shell held a load of between three and several scores of bomblets, each with its own target-seeking head. When the carrier round opened to release them, the difficulties of defense went up by an order of magnitude.
Sergeant Tranter had traded jobs with Deseau. He turned from the forward tribarrel and asked, “Whatcha got, El-Tee?”
“Watch your sector!” Huber snapped in a blaze of frustration.
He’d apologize later. Tranter was a good driver and a great man to have on your team, but he was a technician and not—till this run—a combat crewman. He didn’t know by reflex that Huber was busy with something that likely meant all their lives if he did it wrong. Had Tranter realized that, he’d have kept his mouth shut.
The display showed what Huber expected but didn’t like to see: there were very few places along Sierra’s planned route that would let the tribarrels range out ten klicks, and even those were points. The combat cars wouldn’t be able to protect the column on the fly. They’d have to set up on the few patches where the ground was higher and relatively clear of vegetation.
Huber straightened. Learoyd scanned the car’s starboard flank with the bored certainty of a machine; Sergeant Tranter was as rigid as a statue at the forward gun—Via! I didn’t mean to bite his head off—and Captain Orichos was trying to watch all directions like a bird who’s heard a cat she can’t see.
“Sierra, this is Fox Three-six,” Huber said. “When Central gives us an alert, the C&C box’ll choose the best overwatch position and direct the nearest car to it. The rest of Sierra’ll bypass that car, which’ll leapfrog forward when it comes out of air defense mode. It may be that there’ll be more than one car at a time out of the column. Three-six out.”
There was a series of Rogers from the other officers. Huber hadn’t bothered to run the plan by Sierra Six before delivering it to the whole unit. Sangrela’d tasked him with the solution of the problem, and it was something that an infantry officer didn’t have much experience with anyway.
“What happens if the bad guys’re waiting out in the woods, El-Tee?” Deseau asked over the intercom from the driver’s compartment. He had the hatch open so that he could drive with his head out in the breeze. “With the guns locked on air defense, a lone car’s pretty much dead meat, right?”
“The same thing that happens if you fall out a window drunk, Frenchie,” Huber said with a quiver of irritation. Did Deseau think that hadn’t occurred to him? But there wasn’t any choice. With only four cars, he couldn’t detach a second unit to guard the one on air defense. “Either you get up and go on, or you don’t.”
“Yeah, that’s about what I figured,” Deseau said. He sighed. “You don’t suppose me ’n Tranter could trade off again, do you?”
“Negative,” said Huber. “We’ve got to keep moving.”
He too would like to have Frenchie in the fighting compartment, watching their surroundings with his shoulder weapon while the gunnery computer aimed the tribarrels skyward. Huber’d like a lot of things, but he was a veteran. He’d make do with what he had.
The alert from Central overrode F-3’s helmet AIs, filling ninety percent of each faceshield with fire control data and relegating previous tasks to a box in the center. Huber flicked his helmet back to Sierra status in a thirty percent mask over the forest around him and ordered, “Fox Three-three, execute.”
Not that Sergeant Jellicoe needed his okay. Her car, Floosie, had already steered to the right of the column’s track and was pulling up a rise. Flame Farter would be alone in the drag position until Floosie rejoined, and Floosie would be very much alone.
“A Rangemaster battery’s sent us a salvo of 200-mm shells,” Huber explained over the intercom. “The battery’s sited at one-thirty degrees from us, so Jellicoe’s breaking out of line for a moment to take care of the incoming. The Rangemasters’re a good enough outfit, but there’s next to no chance that anything’ll get past Floosie.”
He was speaking mostly for Orichos’ benefit; Fencing Master’s crew probably understood the situation as well as their lieutenant did. Well, Deseau and Tranter understood; Learoyd understood the little he needed to understand.
Mauricia Orichos nodded appreciatively, then quirked Huber a smile. “It’s like being a baby again,” she said. “I know there’s a lot going on, but I don’t understand any of it.”
Her smile grew marginally harder; she no longer looked haggard. She added, “We’ll be back in my element soon.”
Huber switched his helmet to remote, importing fire control imagery from Floosie. As an afterthought, he restored the link to Orichos’ helmet also.
The display was blank until Huber stuttered up three orders of magnitude. At such high gain there was a tiny quiver that even the Slammers’ electronics couldn’t fully damp.
The shell, twenty centimeters in diameter and almost two meters long, was a
blurred dash in the four-bar reticle to which Jellicoe had set her sights. The image jumped minusculely as a tribarrel’s recoil jiggled the platform. Several cyan dots, vivid even at that range, intersected the shell.
The target ruptured in a red flash and a puff of dirty black smoke. Two more shells exploded into black rags in the sky around it; a fourth followed an instant later as one of the car’s tribarrels made a double. Bomblets from the last shell detonated around the initial burst in a white sparkle.
Huber thought he heard the distance-delayed thumping of Floosie’s guns, but he was probably wrong. Loud though they were up close, the sound of 2-cm discharges several klicks away would’ve been lost in Fencing Master’s intake roar. As for the shellbursts, they wouldn’t have been visible to unaided eyes even if the column had a clear view of the sky to the southeast.
Huber cleared his and Orichos’ faceshield. “They’ll keep on firing for a while,” he said, speaking through the intercom but keeping eye contact with the local, the only person in the car who’d be interested. “The thing is, cargo shells’re expensive to make and they have to be brought in from off-planet. If Solace Command wants to waste them like this, they can be our guests. There could be a time the tribarrels’d have their usual work to do, and we wouldn’t want to worry then about firecracker rounds going off overhead.”
“Fox Three-three rejoining column,” Jellicoe said in a tone of mild satisfaction. Sure it was shooting fish in a barrel; and true, neither she nor her crew had touched their triggers while the gunnery computer took care of business . . . but it was still a nice bag of fish. “Out.”
“Three indig batteries have opened fire,” Central announced. “Seventeen tubes. None of the rounds are going to come close enough to worry about, so proceed on course as planned. Over.”
