by David Drake
Tranter straightened, stretched, and then turned enough to meet Huber’s eyes. He ventured a weak grin; Huber clasped Tranter’s arm, closing the file on their previous short exchange.
From the driver’s compartment Deseau called, “Hey El-Tee? See if you can find us something t’ shoot at, will you? I don’t want my tribarrel growing shut like an old maid’s cunt.”
He laughed.
Before Huber could speak, Central broke in with, “Six rounds incoming from vector oh-nine-three. Fox Three-six respond. Over.”
A terrain display appeared on the upper left quadrant of his faceshield with a short, crooked red line reaching left toward the spot Central had picked for Fencing Master’s firing position.
“Roger, Central,” Huber said, swaying as Deseau pulled into a ravine. It was filled with feathery bushes that crumpled beneath Fencing Master’s bow skirts. The car rocked violently on the rough climb.
“Well, it’s a start,” said Frenchie. He kept his voice bright, but Huber could hear the strain; this wasn’t easy driving, not for anybody. “But you know, it’s been a bitch of a run. I’m looking forward to getting back behind my gun where I can maybe kill some of the bastards who put us through it.”
Deseau laughed. Huber didn’t join him, but he noticed that Captain Orichos wore a broad, grim smile.
“Sierra, we got buildings up here!” called an unfamiliar voice. Huber’s AI slugged the speaker as one of the scouting infantry. “By the Lord, we do! There’s more of ’em! We finally made it!”
“Ermanez, get off the push!” Captain Sangrela snapped. They were all punchy, fatigued in mind and body alike. “White Section, hold in place. Blue Section, close up as soon as you can without running any civilians down. These’re friendlies, remember! Six out.”
“Six, this is Fox Three-six,” Huber said. He twisted and leaned sideways to look off the stern of the car, past Captain Orichos. As he expected, the commander’s jeep was on its way forward. The light vehicle wobbled furiously in the turbulent air spurting beneath the skirts of the wrenchmobiles and tanks it was passing. “I’m moving into the lead in place of Sergeant Nagano. All right? Over.”
“Roger, Three-six,” Sangrela said. Huber watched the jeep lift airborne and plop down again hard enough to pogo on its flexible skirts. The message paused for a grunt. Sangrela went on, “Three-six, I’m dismounting all the infantry. I’m putting two squads up front with you for outriders. Out.”
“Fox Three-one,” Huber said, cueing Foghorn ahead of him with the scouts, “halt at a wide spot and let me in ahead of you. Three-six out.”
He could see Foghorn. For nearly eight hundred kilometers the column had been picking its way through trees. Suddenly they’d exited the forest onto a boulevard broad enough that even the wide recovery vehicles could’ve driven down it two abreast. The buildings to either side were three- and four-story wood-framed structures, but they had much wider street frontage than those of the United Cities. In the UC, Huber’d had the feeling he was standing in a field of towers rather than houses.
A few pedestrians walked between buildings and a scattering of high-wheeled jitneys bounced and wavered along the street. There was no other traffic. Despite its width the road wasn’t surfaced. At the moment it was rutted and dusty, but a rainstorm would turn it into a sea of mud.
Captain Orichos took a hand-held communicator from a belt pouch, stuck a throat mike against her larynx—it adhered to the skin of her neck, but it hadn’t clung to her fingers—and lifted the commo helmet enough to slip earphones under. As she entered codes on the handset, her eyes remained on the road ahead.
The scouts waited as ordered, the four infantrymen beside their skimmers to the left of Foghorn. They looked ragged and filthy— Huber glanced down at himself, his jacket sleeves a rusty color from the road grime, and grinned wearily—but they held their weapons with the easy care of veterans ready for whatever happened next.
Tranter throttled back and adjusted his nacelles to slow gently to a halt. He steered to bring Fencing Master up on Foghorn’s starboard side without fishtailing or dragging a jolting dust storm with the skirts.
The thought made Huber look over his shoulder. He trusted Sergeant Tranter to be able to drive safely, no matter how tired. The tank immediately behind them weighed 170 tonnes and its driver had probably had less rest than the car crewmen. Some of the infantry could drive and had been spelling the two-man crews of the tanks, but there was still a real chance that whoever was at Dinkybob’s control yoke wouldn’t notice that the vehicles ahead were stopped.
Orichos lowered her communicator and looked at Huber. “You’ll be camping on the grounds of the Assembly Building straight ahead,” she said over the intercom. “I informed my superiors that you were on the way. We can proceed immediately.”
Can we indeed? Huber thought. He didn’t let the irritation reach his face; it’d been a hard run for all of them. Instead of responding to Orichos, he said, “Sierra Six, this is Fox Three-six. The indig officer riding with me says that that we can go straight on in to the Assembly Building and set up around it. Do you have any direction for me? Over.”
The jeep pulled alongside Fencing Master. Captain Sangrela sat braced in the passenger seat, his holographic display a shimmer before him as he looked up at Huber. “Via, yes!” he snarled. “Let’s get to where we’re going so we can bloody dismount! Move out, Three-six. Sierra Six out.”
Dinkybob had managed to slow to a halt. So did the vehicles following, though as Huber looked back he noticed one of the later tanks swing wide to the left when its driver awoke to the fact that he was in danger of overrunning whoever was stopped ahead of him.
“Roger, Six,” Huber said, keeping his tone even. “Three-six out. Break. Tranter, start on up the street. Keep it at twenty kph and—”
“And don’t run over any locals,” he’d started to say, but there wasn’t any risk of that. The words would’ve done nothing but shown his own ill-temper.
“—and maybe we’ll have a chance to rest pretty quick.”
Huber’s muscles were so wobbly that he wasn’t sure he’d be able to walk any distance when he got down from the combat car. The clamshell had chafed him over the shoulders, his hip bones, and at several points on his rib cage. He itched everywhere, especially the skin of his hands and throat; they’d been exposed to the ozone, cartridge gases, and iridium vaporized from the gunbores when the tribarrels raked incoming shells from the sky.
Fencing Master lifted and started forward, building speed to an easy lope. The roadway was smooth, a welcome relief from the slopes and outcrops they’d been navigating for the last long while. Dust billowed from beneath the skirts, a vast gulp initially but settling into a wake that rolled out to either side.
Even before the recovery vehicles had halted, the infantrymen pitched off to port and starboard on their skimmers. The infantry platoon, C-1, had left the jeep-mounted tribarrels of its Heavy Weapons Squad behind in Base Alpha. The gun jeeps weren’t needed for the original mission, the capture of Northern Star Farm, because there the infantry was to operate in close conjunction with combat cars in open country. The soft-skinned jeeps would be easy targets for an enemy and wouldn’t add appreciably to the firepower of the task force.
Here in a city, gun jeeps would look a lot more useful than the pair of automatic mortars Sierra did have along; but they’d make do. They always did.
More aircars appeared, circling above the column instead of buzzing from place to place across the sky. The Slammers’ sudden appearance had taken the city by surprise, but now the citizens were reacting like wasps around an opened hive.
Deseau looked up and muttered a curse. His hand tightened on his tribarrel’s grip, raising the muzzles minutely before Huber touched his arm.
Huber leaned close and said, “They’re friendly, Frenchie.”
“Says you!” Deseau snarled, but he lowered the big gun again.
Huber coughed. “I’m surprised the streets here a
re so wide, Captain Orichos,” he said, looking at the local officer again. With Fencing Master idling along like this he could’ve spoken to her also without using the intercom, but he didn’t see any reason to. “In the United Cities, even the boulevards twist around under the trees.”
“This street—the Axis—is wide,” Orichos explained. “We don’t have a separate landing ground here at Midway. The warehouses where the rangers sell their Moss are on both sides—”
She gestured.
“—here, so the dirigibles from Solace set down in front of the establishment they’re trading with. They unload goods, mostly from the spaceport, of course—then they lift off again with the bales of Moss.”
Now that Orichos had told him the adjacent buildings were warehouses, Huber could see the outside elevators on each one and the doors at each story wide enough to take corrugated steel shipping containers which would then be shifted within by an overhead suspension system. The windows were narrow, providing light and ventilation, but with no concern for the view out them.
Orichos’ face blanked. She turned her head away from Huber and began talking into her communicator again.
Huber locked his faceshield down and concentrated on the terrain to the left front of his vehicle. That was the area his tribarrel’d be responsible for if the task force was suddenly ambushed . . . which they wouldn’t be, of course, but his irritation with the local officer cooled when he thought about a hose of cyan bolts lashing the buildings Fencing Master slid past.
Chances were Orichos would inform him of whatever crisis had called her attention away. Besides, it was a near certainty that the signals equipment in Sangrela’s jeep could break whatever encryption system the Point Gendarmery was using if Huber really thought the task force needed to know. . . .
Which he didn’t. He was just in a bad mood from the long run.
Captain Orichos lowered the communicator and said, “Lieutenant Huber, there’s a problem. Grayle’s gotten word of your arrival. She’s ordered her supporters to gather in the Axis in front of the Freedom Party offices. There’s already hundreds of them there, blocking the street. There may be thousands by the time we arrive.”
Even if there’d been no previous contact between Solace and the Freedom Party, somebody there had certainly given Grayle a heads-up when they realized where Task Force Sangrela was bound. Grayle probably wasn’t pro-Solace, but they were both opposed to the Point’s present government.
At the word “problem,” Huber had cut Sierra Six into the intercom channel. Orichos looked startled when Sangrela rather than Huber replied, “Are they armed, then? Do we have to shoot our way through? Six over.”
“Via, no!” Orichos cried in horror. “A bloodbath would do exactly what Grayle hopes! Everybody’d turn against you mercenaries and the government! These are just people standing in the street!”
In the distance ahead of Fencing Master stood the stone Assembly Building on a terraced hillside. A quick flash of Huber’s map display showed him that the Axis circled the building and continued its broad way northward.
Huber’s eyes narrowed. The map also emphasized that Midway was a large city compared to most of the places the Slammers operated. A company-sized task force would drown in a place this big if it turned hostile. And gunning down a few hundred citizens in the street would be a good way to make the hundreds of thousands of survivors hostile. . . .
“Well, bloody Hell, woman!” Captain Sangrela said. His jeep had pulled alongside Fencing Master and he was glaring up at Orichos. “If it’s a job for the police, get your bloody police on it, will you? You don’t expect us to idle here in the middle of the bloody street, do you? Or do you? Six over.”
“Captain Sangrela, I’m very sorry for the delay but we’re working on it,” Orichos said. Fencing Master continued to rumble on, twenty meters behind the screen of skimmer-mounted infantry. “We didn’t expect Grayle to react so quickly. Most of the crowd in the street are the Freedom Volunteers, the party’s militia, and there’s too many of them for the Gendarmery manpower we’ve got available at the moment. Over.”
She realizes she’s on a net, not the car’s intercom, and she’s following proper commo protocol, Huber noticed with a grin.
“Well, what use will waiting do, Captain?” Sangrela demanded. “Look, is there a back way around? Because if the idea was for the Regiment to make a show of force, having a bunch of yahoos stop us in our tracks is going to send a bloody wrong signal! What about us putting a few shots over their heads? Six over.”
Huber touched Orichos’ arm to silence her before she could answer. He said, “Six, this is Fox Three-six. Put me out front and the panzers right behind me. Get the infantry outa the way, back on the recovery vehicles’d be the best place—they can’t do any good without shooting and that’s what we’re trying to avoid. Three-six over.”
“You can handle this, Three-six?” Sangrela said. Captain Orichos was searching Huber’s face, her expression blankly concerned. “Because if you can, go with it. Six over.”
“I’ve got a driver who can handle it, sir,” Huber said. “Three-six out. Break—” cutting Captain Sangrela out of the circuit again “—Tranter, on a road surface like this, I’ll bet my left nut you can spray enough rock and grit off the bow to clear us a path and still keep us moving forward. What d’ye say?”
“I’d say you needn’t worry about disappointing your girlfriend, El-Tee,” Tranter replied cheerfully. He laughed. “Just watch our dust!”
The infantry ahead of Fencing Master turned and circled back, obeying Sangrela’s command on the C-1 unit push. Lieutenant Myers was on one of the skimmers; he looked at Huber as he slid past. Dinkybob closed up so that the gap between the tank and Fencing Master’s rear skirt was only about five meters. That’d probably be safe when both vehicles were moving at a slow walk— but if something did go wrong, the tank’d send Huber’s car cannoning forward like a billiard ball.
Huber could easily see the mob filling the street without raising his faceshield’s magnification. He didn’t want to do that: he needed all the peripheral vision he had and probably then some.
Aircars kept arriving at the back of the crowd, adding to the numbers already present. Many were big vehicles marked in red with the logo of a broken chain, capable of carrying twenty passengers. It looked to Huber as though they were ferrying people from outlying locations and going back empty for more.
Sergeant Deseau must’ve thought the same thing, because he leaned back from his tribarrel and shouted, “Hey El-Tee? I bet I could scatter those jokers right fast if I popped a couple of trucks while they was overhead.”
“That’s a big negative, Sergeant,” Huber said, hoping he sounded sufficiently disapproving. He’d been thinking the same thing himself, and Deseau probably knew him well enough to be sure of that.
Though that did raise another thought. The sky above Task Force Sangrela was full of aircars jockeying for position. So far as Huber could tell they were simply civilians who wanted to watch what was going on, but some might be members of Grayle’s militia with guns or grenades.
Besides, there was a fair chance that cars might collide and crash down on the column. The trees bordering the Axis constrained the aerial spectators into a relatively narrow channel, so they kept dropping lower to get a good view.
“Captain Orichos,” Huber said. “I understand you can’t deal with the mob on the ground, but can’t you Gendarmes do something about the idiots buzzing around overhead? ASAP.”
Orichos gave him a hard look, then nodded and spoke into her communicator. A pair of gun-metal gray aircars with blue triangles bow and stern had been paralleling the column at the fringes of the civilian vehicles. They immediately began bellowing through loudspeakers. The words were unintelligible over the intake roar of Fencing Master’s fans, but the aircars overhead edged away reluctantly.
Apparently to speed the process, a Gendarme aimed his electromagnetic carbine skyward and fired a burst. The civili
an cars dived away in a panic.
That was bad enough, though the actual collisions were minor and didn’t knock anybody out of the air. It would’ve been much worse if Huber hadn’t caught Deseau as the sergeant reacted to shots fired in the fashion any bloody fool should’ve expected, by swinging his tribarrel onto the threat.
“Captain Orichos?” Huber said. “Shooting is a really bad idea. No matter who’s doing it. All right?”
Orichos nodded with a guarded expression; she didn’t like the implied reprimand, but it was obviously well-founded. She snapped a further series of orders into the communicator.
Two men in jumpsuits like the one Orichos wore—hers was now gray/yellow/red from grit it’d picked up during the run—looked over the side of the aircar to the right of the column. Deseau gave them the finger. The face of the cop who’d fired the carbine went black with anger. Orichos shouted into her communicator and the police vehicle rose quickly to a hundred meters.
“Sorry,” Orichos muttered over the intercom. Huber shrugged noncommittally.
Fencing Master’s bow slope was well within half a klick of the mob. Looking forward, his left hand on the tribarrel’s receiver and his right at his side instead of on the spade grip, Deseau said, “Some a’ them got guns, El-Tee. What do we do if they start shooting? Just take it?”
“Crew,” Huber said, “Nobody shoots till I do. Break. Six, this is Fox Three-six. If we start taking serious fire, my people aren’t going to stand here and be targets. Are we clear on that? Over.”
“Roger Three-six,” Sangrela said. “Delta Two-six—” Lieutenant Trogon “—if Fox Three-six opens fire, put a couple main gun rounds at his point of aim. Break. Sierra, Fox Three-six and Delta Two-six will do all the shooting till I tell you otherwise. Six out.”
“Roger, Three-six out,” Huber said. He was keyed up and felt as though he should be standing on the balls of his feet. Myers and Mitzi Trogon responded curtly as well.
