by David Drake
Huber sat cross-legged beside the left gun, watching the shimmering holographic display. He was too low to look out of the fighting compartment from here, but the range of inputs from Fencing Master’s sensors should provide more warning than his eyes could even during daylight.
Body heat, CO2 exhalations, and even the bioelectrical field which every living creature created were grist for the sensors to process. They scanned the gullied slopes a full three kilometers ahead, noting small animals sleeping in burrows and the scaly, warm-blooded night-flyers of Plattner’s World which curvetted in the skies above.
Tranter was sleeping—was curled up, anyway—under the right wing gun on a layer of ammo boxes. Orichos squatted behind him with her back to the armor, looking as miserable as a drenched kitten. Learoyd had just taken over the driving chores from Deseau, awake but barely as he hunched over the forward tribarrel. Huber didn’t worry about how the sergeant’d react to an alarm— Deseau was enough of a veteran and a warrior both to lay fire on a target in a sound sleep—but he certainly wasn’t going to raise the alarm.
That would be Arne Huber’s job. As platoon leader he wasn’t taking a turn driving, but neither did he catch catnaps like the rest of the crew between stints in the driver’s compartment. Fencing Master was the combat car in White Section during this leg, so Huber had the sensor suite on high sensitivity.
Task Force Sangrela was running the part of the route which Solace forces might have been able to reach for an ambush. Central hadn’t warned of enemy movement, but there could’ve been troops already in place in the region. Technically they were still within Solace territory, not that anybody was likely to stand on a technicality during wartime.
“Bloody fuckin’ hell,” Sergeant Deseau growled over the intercom. He clung to the grips of his tribarrel as though he’d have fallen without them to hold onto …which he might well have done. High-speed driving over rough terrain at night was a ten-tenths activity, many times worse than the grueling business of surviving the ride in the fighting compartment. “I wish somebody’d just shoot at us for a break from this bloody grind.”
“There’s nobody around to shoot, Frenchie,” Huber said; and as he spoke, he saw he was wrong.
Keying the emergency channel with the manual controller he’d been using to switch between sensor modes, Huber said, “White Six to Sierra, we’ve got locals waiting for us ahead. It’s six-three, repeat six-three—” the display threw up the numbers in the corner; he sure wasn’t going to have counted the blips overlaying the terrain map that fast “—personnel, no equipment signatures. Looks like dispersed infantry with personal weapons only.”
A company of infantry with small arms would be plenty to wipe out White Section if they’d driven straight into the ambush. Mind, knowing about the ambush didn’t mean there was no risk remaining, especially to the scouts on point.
“Sierra, this is Sierra Six,” Captain Sangrela snapped. His voice sounded sleep-strangled, but he’d responded instantly to the alert. “Throttle back to twenty, repeat two-zero, kay-pee-aitch. Charlie Four-six—” The sergeant commanding the infantry of White Section “—take your team ahead while they’re listening to the cars and see if you can get a sight of what we’re dealing with. Six out.”
Deseau, now wakeful as a stooping hawk, stretched his right leg backward without looking. He kicked Tranter hard on the buttocks, bringing him out of the fetal doze as the alarm call had failed to do.
Swaying, drunk with fatigue, Tranter took his place behind the right gun. He didn’t look confident there.
“Charlie Four-six,” responded a female voice without a lot of obvious enthusiasm. On Huber’s display, the four beads of the skimmer-mounted fire team curved to the right, up the slope the column was paralleling. “Roger.”
Instead of throttling back when Sangrela ordered them to cut speed, Learoyd adjusted his nacelles toward the vertical. The fans’ sonic signature remained the same, but the blades were spending most of their effort in lifting Fencing Master’s skirts off the ground instead of driving her forward. The car slowed without informing the listening enemy of the change.
Huber rose to his feet and gripped the tribarrel. The task force commander had taken operational control of White Section, so Huber’s primary task was to lay fire on any hostiles who showed themselves in his sector.
“Fox Three-one, come up to my starboard side,” he ordered. Sergeant Tranter was a fine driver and a first-rate mechanic, but he may never have fired a tribarrel since his basic combat qualification course in recruit school. Huber wanted more than two guns on line if they were about to go into action against an infantry company.
“Roger, Three-six,” Sergeant Nagano responded. The display icon indicating his combat car disengaged from the front of the main body and began to close the kilometer gap separating it from Fencing Master.
Captain Sangrela must have seen Foghorn move as well as overhearing Huber’s order on the command channel; he chose to say nothing. Sensibly, he was leaving the immediate tactical disposition to the man on the ground.
Mauricia Orichos stood erect, her back against the rear coaming of the fighting compartment. She didn’t ask questions when the troopers around her obviously needed to focus on other things, but she looked about her alertly, like a grackle in a grain field.
Huber noticed that she didn’t draw the pistol from her belt holster. To Orichos’ mind it was an insignia of rank, not a weapon.
Huber switched his faceshield to thermal imaging. It wouldn’t give him as good a general picture of his surroundings, but it was better for targeting at night than light amplification would be. He couldn’t see the cold light of the holographic display, so he projected the data as a thirty percent mask over the faceshield’s ghostly infrared landscape.
The dots representing the mounted infantrymen approached the upper end of a ravine in which the combat car’s sensors saw more than a dozen hostiles waiting under cover. From their angle, the four Slammers would be able to rake the gully and turn it into an abattoir. The enemy gave no indication of being aware of the troopers.
When Fencing Master slowed, the dust her fans had been raising caught up with her. Yellow-gray grit swirled down the intake gratings on top of the plenum chamber and settled over the troops in the fighting compartment; the back of Huber’s neck tickled.
He felt taut. He wasn’t nervous, but he was trying to spread his mind to cover everything around him. The task was beyond human ability, as part of Arne Huber’s soap-bubble thin consciousness was well aware.
The fire team leader started laughing over the command push. The sound was wholly unexpected—and because of that, more disconcerting than a burst of shots.
“Charlie Four-six, report!” Captain Sangrela snarled. He sounded angry enough to have slapped his subordinate if she’d been within arm’s length. Huber wouldn’t have blamed him….
“Imagery coming, sir,” the sergeant replied; suppressing her laughter, but only barely.
Huber raised his visor and used the Command and Control box to project the view from the sergeant’s helmet where everybody in the car could see it. The hologram of a sheep stared quizzically at him. Behind the nearest animal stretched a hillside panorama of sheep turning their heads and a startled boy holding a long bamboo pole.
“Sierra Six to Sierra,” Captain Sangrela said in a neutral tone. “Resume previous order of march. Out.”
Fencing Master lurched as Learoyd adjusted his nacelles again. The bow skirts gouged a divot of the loose soil, but the car’s forward motion blew it behind them.
“Blood and Martyrs!” said Sergeant Deseau. “Curst if I’m not ready to blast a few a’ them sheep just for the fright they give me!”
“Save your ammo, Frenchie,” Huber said. “I guess we’ll have plenty of things to kill before this mission’s over.”
The sun was an hour above the horizon, Task Force Sangrela had been in the fringe forest for longer than that. Fencing Master was in the trail positi
on, last of the ten vehicles. Foghorn was a hundred meters ahead where Huber could’ve caught glimpses of her iridium hull if he’d tried.
He didn’t bother. His job was to check the sensor suite, oriented now to the rear, and that was more than enough to occupy the few brain cells still working in his numb mind.
Tranter was driving again; the ride was noticeably smoother than either of the troopers could’ve managed, even when they were fresh. Learoyd was curled beneath his tribarrel, asleep and apparently as comfortable as he’d have been back in barracks.
Because they were in the drag position in the column, Deseau wasn’t at his forward-facing tribarrel. Instead he crouched in the corner behind Huber, cradling a 2-cm shoulder weapon in the crook of his arm. It fired the same round as the tribarrels, but it was self-loading instead of being fully automatic. A single 2-cm charge in the right place was enough to put paid to most targets.
Mauricia Orichos had sunk into herself, seated between Learoyd’s head and Deseau across the rear of the fighting compartment. She didn’t look any more animated than a lichen on a rock. Huber knew how she felt: the constant vibration reduced mind and body alike to jelly.
This run’d get over, or Arne Huber would die. Either’d be an acceptable change.
A red light pulsed at the upper left corner of the display. Fully alert, Huber straightened and locked his faceshield down. “Frenchie,” he snapped. “Take over on the sensors!”
Huber cued the summons, turning his faceshield into a virtual conference room. He sat at a holographic plotting table with the other task force officers—Mitzi Trogon blinked into the net an instant after Huber did; Myers and Captain Sangrela were already there—and Colonel Hammer himself.
The imagery wavered. It was never fuzzy, but often it had a certain over-sharpness as the computer called up stock visuals when the transmitted data were insufficient.
To prevent jamming and possible corruption, Central was communicating with the task force in tight-beam transmissions bounced from cosmic ray ionization tracks. The Regiment’s signals equipment used the most advanced processors and algorithms in the human universe to adjust for breaks and distortion. Even so, links to vehicles moving at speed beneath scattered vegetation were bound to be flawed.
“There’s a battalion of the Wolverines on the way to block you,” the Colonel said without preamble. “We operated alongside them once—Sangrela, you probably remember on Redwood?”
“Roger that,” Sangrela said, rubbing his chin with the knuckles of his left fist. “Anti-tank specialists, aren’t they?”
“Right, and they’re good,” Hammer agreed. The only time Huber’d seen the small, stocky man without his helmet, he’d been surprised that the sandy hair was thinning; nothing else about the Colonel’s face and smooth, muscular movements hinted at age. “They’re tasked to set up a hedge of gunpits across our route.”
Imagery on the plotting table—a holographic representation of a holographic representation, indistinct but adequate for this moment—showed a terrain map. Red dots blinked across a ten-kilometer stretch to form a serrated line: a rank of interlocking strong points.
Hammer smiled grimly. “We couldn’t have broken the Wolverines’ encryption any more than they could break ours,” he said. “But they passed the information to the Solace authorities, and that’s a different matter.”
The smile—and it’d never been one of enthusiastic joy—froze back into the previous hard lines. “Which doesn’t solve our problem. Your problem in particular, since each of those positions is a 5-cm high intensity weapon with ten men for crew and close-in defense. They aren’t mobile—the teams’re being lifted in by air, two to a cargo hauler. The trucks have light armor but they won’t dare come anywhere close to point of contact. I’m doing the briefing because Operations is looking for alternative routes so you can skirt them. Shooting your way through would take too long and cost too much.”
“Sir?” said Huber. His mind was working on a glacially smooth surface divorced from the vibration he still felt through his separated body. “They’re still en route, aren’t they?”
“Roger,” the Colonel said, his eyes pinning Huber like a pair of calipers. He had a presence, even in virtual reality, far beyond what his small form should’ve projected.
“If I put one or two of my cars on high ground, the hostiles’ll have to land short of where they plan to set up,” Huber said. “We can hold ’em down until the rest of Sierra’s clear, then catch up.”
Without poring over a terrain map Huber couldn’t have determined where to site his cars, and even then there were plenty of people better at that sort of thing than he was. The principle of it, though, and the certainty that there was a way to do it—that he had. His tribarrels would be effective against thin-skinned aircars at twenty klicks or even greater range. The hostiles wouldn’t dare try to bull through the combat cars.
What the Wolverines would do, almost certainly, was surround the detached cars and eliminate them in default of the bigger catch they’d hoped to make. They’d be willing to accept the detachment’s surrender, but Huber figured he’d try to break out. He could hope that at least one of the two cars—he had to use two, he couldn’t be sure of driving the hostiles to the ground with only one—would get clear.
A 5-cm high-intensity round could penetrate even a tank’s frontal armor. A hit on a combat car would vaporize the front half of the vehicle.
“No!” said Mitzi Trogon unexpectedly. “Huber’s got a good idea, but we don’t want to send his little fellows to do the job. Sir, find a firing position for my panzers and screw this business of scaring the hostiles to ground. I’ll blow ’em to hell ’n gone before they know they’ve been targeted!”
“By the Lord,” Colonel Hammer said in a tone of rasping delight. “Roger that! Go back to your duties, troopers. I’ll be back with you as soon as I’ve brought Operations up to speed.”
The virtual conference room vanished so suddenly that Huber jumped with the shock. The change made him feel as though he’d dropped into ice water instead of just returning to the world in which his body rode a combat car toward a powerful enemy.
“What’s the word, El-Tee?” Deseau said, his voice sharp. He sat cross-legged at Huber’s feet with his 2-cm weapon upright, its butt on his left knee. His eyes were on the sensor display.
“Fox Three, this is Fox Three-six,” Huber said, cueing the platoon push instead of answering Frenchie on the intercom channel. “There’s an anti-tank battalion headed out to block us. They probably figure to hold us while Solace Command comes up with a way to do a more permanent job. Lieutenant Trogon and Central between ’em are planning to put the hostiles in touch with some 20-cm bolts before they get anywhere close to the rest of us. Hold what you got for now, and keep your fingers crossed. Out.”
“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.
