by David Drake
Under other circumstances, Huber might’ve considered taking his combat cars in a balls-to-the-wall charge across the farmland south of the lake. The Firelords’ calliopes, emplaced on the escarpment and manned by professionals, made that notion suicide.
Another option—the one Huber would’ve picked—was to have halted well beyond the twenty-kilometer range of the Firelords’ bombardment rockets and let Battery Alpha clear the problem. Again the calliopes were the difficulty. Saturating the Firelords’ air defenses would require much of the ammunition the battery was carrying, and there wouldn’t be any resupply until after—and if— the Regiment captured Port Plattner.
Which left the third option, Flasher Six dealing with the Firelords in his own good time and fashion, while Task Force Huber took whatever was thrown at them. Maybe next time his troopers’d be dishing it out while somebody else drew fire. . . .
The sensor display gave Huber the warning: not movement but a radio signal from the hills overlooking the broad pass to the north. A Solace lookout was signaling back to headquarters near the lakeside.
“Highball!” Huber called. He didn’t aim his own gun; he had other duties. “Tar—”
Deseau must’ve expected an outpost and set his AI to caret RF sources. Most civilians would be using land lines, but a mercenary unit would generally depend on its own communications system. While Huber was still speaking, Frenchie acted. A three-round ranging burst hiss/CRACKed from his tribarrel, vivid even in sunlight.
“—get at vector zero-seven degrees, radio trans—”
Nobody was good enough to hit a target ten kilometers away with his first shot. Deseau adjusted his aim, dialed up the magnification on his holographic sights, and engaged the gun’s stabilizer. Learoyd leaned over his own gun, importing the target information from Deseau’s weapon instead of duplicating the effort.
“—mitter. Fire at—”
Deseau and Learoyd fired together. Their tribarrels spat streams in near parallel, merging optically as they snapped through the sunlight ahead of the task force.
“—will!”
The distant slope winked—cyan from the impacting plasma, red and gushing gray steam where brush burned explosively. There was a burp of orange and the radio signal cut off.
“Got ’em!” Deseau shouted as he and Learoyd took their thumbs from their triggers. He wasn’t on intercom, but Huber could easily hear his excited voice. “Got the bastards!”
Fancy Pants and Three-eight ripped ropes of blue-green hellfire toward the pass. A stretch of hillside where the vegetation was dry began to burn with some enthusiasm. Another gun, this one from F-2 aiming past the X-Ray vehicles, joined in.
“Cease fire!” Huber ordered. “Six to Highball, cease fire! Save your gunbarrels, troopers, because we’re going to need them bad. Out!”
“Here it comes,” Deseau said, reading the flicker of saffron from beyond the mouth of the valley. “For what we are about to receive, the Lord make us thankful.”
The sensor suite analyzed the sound some ten seconds after Frenchie had correctly identified the exhaust flashes reflected from clouds of dust: rocket motors igniting, sixty of them rippling in groups of six every second. A Firelord battery had just launched half the rockets on its six trucks.
“Fox elements,” Huber said, “put all your guns, I repeat all your guns in air defense mode. Have your backup weapons ready to deal with ground threats.”
He pressed his hands against his armored chest to keep from balling them into fists till they cramped.
“Troopers,” he went on, “this is going to be hard but we’re going to do it. Hold station on Three-six, watch for problems on the ground, and let our gunnery computers do their job. They can handle it if anything can. Six out. Break.”
The armored vehicles bucked through the muck of the paddies, throwing up curtains of spray to the rear and sides. The mid-afternoon sun struck it into rainbows, dazzlingly beautiful over the bright green rice plants.
“Padova,” Huber continued, “keep picking up the pace as long as the rest of Highball can stay with us. Don’t let ’em string out, but the Firelords may not have us under direct observation. I’d like to be somewhere other than where they calculate. Out.”
“Roger,” the driver said. She sounded focused but not concerned. Huber couldn’t tell without checking whether Fencing Master’s speed increased, but he figured he’d delegated the decision to the person best able to make it.
Deseau set the tribarrels on air defense; the guns lifted their triple muzzles toward the northern sky like hounds casting for a distant scent. He took his 2-cm weapon out of the clip that held it to his gun’s pintle; Learoyd held his sub-machine gun in his right hand as he snapped the loading tube out of the receiver, then in again to make sure it had locked home. Huber grinned tightly and drew his own 2-cm weapon from its muzzle-down nest between ammo boxes at the rear of the compartment.
All the tribarrels in the task force opened fire, their barrel clusters rotating as they slashed the northern sky. The Command and Control box coordinated the cars’ individual AIs so that all the incoming missiles were hit without duplication. Red flashes and soot-black smoke filled the air beyond the mouth of the valley. A rocket, gutted but not destroyed, spun in a vertical helix and plunged back the way it had come.
The guns fell silent; then Deseau’s weapon stuttered another four-round burst. A final rocket exploded, much closer than the smoky graveyard of its fellows. The tribarrel originally tasked with that target must have jammed before it finished the job, so Frenchie’s gun was covering.
“Hold for a jolt!” Padova called, her voice rising.
The sky ahead flashed yellow-gray again, silhouetting the hills. For a moment Huber, focused on the C&C display, thought the driver also meant the next inbound salvo.
Fencing Master’s bow lifted, spilling pressure. The combat car hurtled onward on inertia, its skirts skimming but not slamming straight into the cross dike which had just appeared at the end of the paddy.
Fencing Master came down like a dropped plate. The Lord’s Blood! but they hit. Padova’d executed the maneuver perfectly, but there was no way you could sail thirty tonnes of iridium into watery muck and the passengers have a good time. Huber had the coaming in his left hand and his tribarrel’s gunshield in his right; otherwise he’d have hurtled out of the compartment.
“Padova, slow down!” Huber bellowed, though the driver had already cut back on the car’s speed by bringing the fan nacelles closer to vertical. “Highball, watch for the fucking dike here! Six out!”
He glanced to the right to see how the other cars of the platoon had handled the obstruction. Three-eight’s driver had negotiated it flawlessly and was still parallel to Fencing Master. Sergeant Tranter must’ve seen the dike coming and warned his driver, because Fancy Pants had slowed to climb it in rulebook fashion and was now lurching down the other side.
Foghorn had tried to plow straight through. The dike was only a hand’s breadth above the water and some forty centimeters down to the floor of the paddy. It was a meter thick, though, and over the width of a combat car’s skirts even mud weighed several tonnes. The crew in the fighting compartment were all down, though the left wing gunner was trying to lift himself with a hand on the coaming. The car wallowed; the driver’d lost control when the shock curtains deployed automatically to save his life.
All the tribarrels fired again, those mounted on Foghorn along with the rest; the impact hadn’t affected the gunnery computer. That was a good thing, because this time the Firelords had launched 240 rounds, a battalion half-emptying its racks.
Plasma bolts stabbed home. Flame and dirty smoke spread across the sky in a solid mass, replacing the dispersing rags of the previous salvo.
“Sir, I didn’t see the wall!” Padova said. “Via, sir, I’m sorry!”
“Roger that,” Huber said. F-3 had gotten straightened out and was cautiously accelerating across the second paddy. Nagano and both his wing gunners
were on their feet again, though Foghorn’s guns pecked the sky in short bursts regardless of what the crew was doing. The X-Ray element had reached the dike and was crossing in good order, in part because of the holes the combat cars had torn. “Drive on.”
The crackling roar of the first salvo’s destruction rolled over Task Force Huber as the second flashed and spurted a little nearer. The tribarrels continued to fire, switching from target to fresh target as the rockets curved downward. The math was easy—two hundred and forty incoming projectiles, twenty-four guns to sweep them out of the sky—
Or not.
The left wing gun spun and stopped. It was properly Huber’s weapon, but Deseau was at it before Huber could react. Without even a pause to check the gun’s diagnostics, Deseau snatched open the feed trough and used his knifeblade to lever out the disk that’d kinked and jammed. Grinning at Huber, he charged the gun and stepped back as it resumed blasting cyan bolts through barrels already white hot.
Huber tensed, waiting for the third salvo; possibly more than a thousand rockets, launched against combat cars whose guns were dangerously hot from dealing with the previous hundreds of projectiles. Instead, cyan light flickered behind the hills. Moments later, rolling orange fireballs mushroomed in response.
“Highball, this is Flasher Six,” the unfamiliar voice called. The tone of crowing triumph was evident despite the compressed and tenuous transmission. “Thanks for your help, troopers. We’ve got it from now. Flasher out.”
“The hell he says!” Deseau snarled, turning a furious face toward Huber. “El-Tee, are you going to let them tankers have all the fun? We’re not, are we?”
Another volley of 20-cm bolts speared into the plains from higher ground somewhere to the northeast. Again whole truckloads of bombardment rockets exploded, the fuel and warheads going off in split seconds. Flasher Six commanded at least a company of tanks; their main guns were raking the Firelords, probably from beyond the distance an unaided human eye could see.
Tribarrels didn’t have that range . . . but the combat cars weren’t nearly that far away, either. Huber checked the terrain display and made an instant decision. Like Frenchie says, why should the tankers have all the fun?
“Highball, this is Six,” he said. He might get in trouble for this in the after-action debriefing, but that would be a long time coming— if he survived. “X-Ray elements will halt inside the valley at point Delta Michael Four-one, Three-seven. India elements will dismount to provide security. Fox elements will take hull-down positions in the valley mouth—”
The C&C display obligingly detailed firing positions west of the river for each of the eight combat cars.
“—and engage the enemy. Hit the calliopes first, troopers, and any vehicles that aren’t running—but my guess is that with the panzers shooting them up they’re going to have forgotten about us till we give ’em reason to remember. Six out.”
Padova tilted her fans for greater forward thrust. Lieutenant Messeman’s cars were passing through the X-Ray element, slewing from side to side in the wakes of the big vehicles. The terraces narrowed on the steeper slopes above the cataracts; the C&C box had set their course along the road in line ahead now that air defense was no longer the primary concern.
Huber hadn’t taken the guns out of air defense mode, though, because there was still a chance that the Firelords would try to carry their enemies with them to Hell. A slim chance. They were all mercenaries; their war was a business, not a holy crusade.
Sensor suites gave the task force few details of what to expect in the plains below. At this distance electronic and sonic signatures couldn’t pinpoint targets, and the cars didn’t have a line of sight.
Obviously Flasher had the enemy under direct observation, but the link between the tank unit and Highball was too marginal for complex data transmission.
There shouldn’t be a big problem. The artillerymen were so busy getting out of the frying pan that they weren’t going to worry about the fire.
Because of the angle, F-2’s cars were in position before Fencing Master tore through the stunted nut trees on the upper slope. Messeman’s gunners opened fire while Deseau screamed angry curses at Padova. She ignored him, swinging them with necessary caution around a spur of rock into the position the AI had chosen. Here they’d be sheltered from possible snipers higher up the hill.
The plains beyond were full of targets. After a volley into their rocket-laden trucks had put the Firelords off-balance, Flasher concentrated on the calliopes in firing positions on the lip of the escarpment. The multi-barreled 3-cm powerguns could be dangerous even to tanks at long range. Main gun bolts had blown all of the calliopes to shimmering vapor before the combat cars nosed over the rise, but there were enough other things to shoot at.
Huber swung his tribarrel onto a ten-wheeled truck trying to flee through a field of sorghum. He squeezed and watched his plasma snap in cyan brilliance across the bed loaded with bombardment rockets in five forward-slanting racks. Before the third bolt hit, the vehicle erupted into rolling orange fury, searing a black circle from the crops.
The Firelords had set up between the ridge and the lakeside, shielded from the task force. When the tanks began to rake them from the flank and rear, some of the hundreds of vehicles—not just rocket trucks but also the command, service, and transportation vehicles that an artillery regiment requires—tried to escape west along the lake’s margin. Others—the truck Huber hit was one—had climbed out of the bowl and spread out across the fields.
Another volley of 20-cm bolts lashed the milling chaos, setting off further secondary explosions. The billowing flames and blast-flung debris curtained the survivors to some degree from the tanks fifty, eighty—maybe over a hundred kilometers distant, but the combat cars had good visibility.
Huber ripped a tank truck. It turned out to be a water purification vehicle, not a fuel tanker, but it gushed steam and began to burn anyway.
Three white flares burst over the center of the encampment. A man jumped onto the TOC, a cluster of sandbagged trailers, waving a towel—beige, but Huber understood—over his head. All around him was blazing wreckage, but apart from a few hits by 2-cm bolts the TOC had been spared. The Slammers had concentrated on targets that’d give the greatest value in terms of secondary explosions, and there was no lack of those in an artillery regiment.
“Enemy commander!” said a hoarse voice. Huber’s AI noted that the fellow was broadcasting on several frequencies, desperately hoping that one would get through to the gunners shooting his troops like ducks in a barrel. “The Firelords surrender on standard terms. I repeat, we surrender on terms. Cease fire! Cease fire!”
“Highball, cease fire!” Huber repeated, and as he did so another volley of tank bolts lanced into the lakeside with fresh mushroomings of flame. Flasher couldn’t pick up the radio signal—a truckload of exploding rockets had knocked down the transmitter masts—and the white flares could be easily overlooked in the general fiery destruction.
“Flasher Six!” Huber shouted, the AI switching his transmission to the ionization track system. “Cease fire! All Flasher units, cease fire! They’re surrendering!”
Explosions continued to rumble in the plains below, but the ice-pick sharpness of plasma bolts no longer added to it. Even before they got Huber’s warning, the Flasher gunners would’ve noticed that Highball had stopped firing. A blast had knocked the officer with the towel to his knees, but he kept his hand high and waving.
“Firelords, this is Slammers command,” Huber said, responding on the highest of the frequencies the Firelords had used. He wasn’t in command, of course, Flasher Six was, but the tanker couldn’t communicate with the poor bastards down below. “We accept your parole. Hold in place until my superiors can make arrangements for your exchange. Ah, that may be several days. We will not, I repeat not, be halting at this location. Slammers over.”
“Roger, Slammers,” the enemy commander said, relief and weariness both evident in his voice. “We�
�ve got enough to occupy us here for longer than a few fucking days. Can you spare us medical personnel? Over.”
“Negative, Firelords,” Huber said. “I hope your next contract works out better for you. Slammers out.”
He lifted off his commo helmet and closed his eyes, letting reaction wash over him. He was exhausted, not from physical exertion—though there’d been plenty of that, jolting around in the fighting compartment during the run—but from the adrenaline blazing in him as shells rained down and he could do nothing but watch and pray his equipment worked.
He settled the helmet back in place and said, “Booster,” to activate the C&C box, “plot our course north from this location.”
On the plains below, fuel and munitions continued to erupt. It didn’t make Huber feel much better to realize that the destruction would’ve been just as bad if those rockets had landed on Task Force Huber instead of going off in their racks.
It was an hour short of full darkness, but stars showed around the eastern horizon; stars, and perhaps one or more of the planet’s seven small moons. Sunset silhouetted the three grain elevators a kilometer to the west where monorail lines merged at a railhead. Timers had turned on the mercury vapor lights attached to the service catwalks as the task force arrived, but there was no sign of life in the huge structures or the houses at their base.
“Suppose we oughta do a little reconnaissance by fire, El-Tee?” Deseau said hopefully. He patted his tribarrel’s receiver.
Padova and Learoyd slept on the ground beside Fencing Master. They hadn’t strung the tarp, just spread it over the stubble as a ground cloth. The car’s idling drive fans whispered a trooper’s lullaby.
“Do I think you should use up another set of barrels just because you like to see things burn, Frenchie?” Huber said, smiling faintly. “No, I don’t. We’ll have plenty to shoot at for real in a few hours, don’t worry.”
