by David Drake
“Hey El-Tee?” Learoyd said. Huber looked at the diffidently waiting trooper and nodded.
“What about the panzers, El-Tee?” Learoyd asked. “Aircars can’t carry the barrel for a main gun, and even if they could it takes three hours and the presses on a wrenchmobile to switch barrels on a tank.”
“I don’t know, Learoyd,” Huber said. Fencing Master reentered the unbroken forest, the second vehicle in the column this leg. “I guess they’ll just make do like the rest of us.”
Or not, of course; but he didn’t say that aloud.
The trees in this stretch had thick trunks and wide-spread branches. That made the driving easier, especially now in deep darkness. Of course if a car hit one of them squarely, it wasn’t going to be the tree that was smashed to bits.
A red bead pulsing twice in the center of Huber’s faceshield gave him a minimal warning before Central crashed the task force net with, “Highball, this is Chaser Three-one. You will halt for an artillery fire mission in figures three-zero seconds. Mission data is being downloaded now. You will resume your march after firing a battery three. Chaser Three-one over.”
The voice on the other end of the transmission was broken and attenuated to the verge of being inaudible. Central was bouncing the message in micropackets off cosmic ray ionization tracks, the Regiment’s normal expedient on planets where security was the first priority or there weren’t communications satellites. Even so—and despite interference from the foliage overhead, a screen if not a solid ceiling—the transmission would normally have been crisper than this.
What the hell was going on at Base Alpha?
But like the A Company sergeant said, it wasn’t Arne Huber’s job to worry about Base Alpha. Nor to ask questions when Central’s orders were brusque because there was no time to give any other kind.
“Roger, Chaser Three-one,” Huber said. “Highball Six out.”
“Chaser Three-one out,” the voice said, fading to nothingness in the middle of the final syllable.
“Highball, this is Six,” Huber said. Deseau had turned to look at him. “Halt at Michael Foxtrot Four-one-six, Five-one-four. Fox elements will provide security while Rocker elements—”
The artillery.
“—carry out their fire mission. Break. Rocker One-six, I want to be moving again as soon as possible. Copy? Six over.”
“Roger, Highball Six,” Lieutenant Basingstoke replied crisply. He had more time in grade as well as more time in the Regiment than Huber. Huber suspected that Basingstoke thought he should’ve been task force commander in Huber’s place, which was just another piece of evidence as to why a redleg lieutenant didn’t have sufficient judgment to command a mobile force. “You don’t want us to reload the gun vehicles before proceeding, then? Rocker One-six over.”
“Negative!” Huber responded. He bit off the words, “You bloody fool!” but he suspected his tone implied them, which was just fine with him. “Rocker, I don’t want to be halted in enemy-controlled territory an instant longer than we have to be, especially after we’ve been shooting artillery so they know exactly where we are. Six out.”
Learoyd pulled Fencing Master into the halt location the AI had chosen for them. Huber looked up, frowning. The patches of sky overhead weren’t sufficient for the Automatic Air Defense System to burst incoming shells a safe distance away. So long as the task force kept moving they were probably all right, but now, halted—
Well, Central knew the score; and anyway, the Regiment wasn’t a democracy. Ours not to reason why …
The hogs swung into position, their turrets rotating and launch tubes rising while the vehicles were still in motion. The ammunition haulers pulled off to either side of the guns. The F-2 combat cars tried to keep outside the scattered trucks, but this wasn’t a defensive position in any sense of the term. The Lord save Highball’s souls if any Solace forces were close enough to take advantage of the situation.
“Lieutenant?” said Padova, leaning close to shout over the idling fans. “I didn’t think we were going to hear anything from Central on this run. That we were on our own?”
Huber shrugged. His shoulders ached from the weight of his armor, but that was nothing new. “The operation was pretty spur of the moment, Rita,” he said. “I guess they’re flying it by the seat of their pants, just like we are.”
The howitzers fired, rippling with a half-second between discharges so that the shockwaves from the shells didn’t interfere with other rounds in the salvo. The nearest gun was within ten meters of Fencing Master. Huber’s helmet damped the blasts so they didn’t break his eardrums, but the pressure of 200-mm shells tearing skyward squeezed his whole body like loads of sand.
The hogs weighed forty tonnes apiece, and the steel skirts of their plenum chambers stabilized them better than conventional trails and recoil spades could do. Despite that the big vehicles jounced so hard when they fired that puffs of dirt and leaf litter spurted out of their fan intakes.
The rounds didn’t reach terminal velocity for seven seconds, but the crack! of each going supersonic stabbed through the deeper, world-filling snarl of the rocket motors. Overhead, branches whipped and shredded leaves swirled in roaring eddies.
Huber’d wondered how the guns would fire through dense foliage, but that obviously wasn’t a problem. The shells could course correct if they had to, but the disparity between the massive projectiles and the leaves made Huber grimace at the foolishness of his concern.
The first howitzer launched a second round immediately after Gun Six fired its first; the third followed three seconds later. As the launch tube sank back to its travel position, the hog’s driver began spinning up his fans: they’d been shut down while the gun was firing lest the blades whip into their housings and wreck the nacelle.
“Highball Six!” Lieutenant Basingstoke said, his voice crackling with the effort of Huber’s commo helmet to make it audible over the thunderous conclusion of the fire mission. “Rocker elements are ready to move. Rock—”
Gun Six fired its third and final round. The shriek of the shells arching southward seemed like silence after the cacophony of the preceding seconds.
“—er One-six over.”
“All Highball units,” Huber said. The whole operation had taken less time than switching drivers; a minute at the outside. “Resume march order. Six out.”
He grinned wryly. While he didn’t suppose Lieutenant Basingstoke was going to become a bosom buddy, at least he knew his job.
And because he was thinking that, Huber said, “Rocker One-six, this is Highball Six. It’s a pleasure to serve with real professionals, Lieutenant. Please convey my congratulations to your troopers. Six over.”
Foghorn slid out of sight among the trees. Learoyd brought Fencing Master up, following thirty meters behind the lead car. That was a greater interval than they’d maintain when the task force had reached a constant speed.
“Highball Six, this is Rocker One-six,” Basingstoke said. “I’ve passed on your congratulations to my gunners.” After a pause he added, “I’m glad we were able to perform to the standard the infantry and your combat car crews have demonstrated in order to get us this far. Rocker One-six out.”
Huber looked up at branches whipping past against a dark sky. He grinned faintly. “Thank you, Rocker One-six,” he said. “Six out.”
He wondered how much farther Task Force Huber was going to get. Who knows? Maybe all the way.
And then what? Huber added to himself; but that was a problem for another day.
Huber awakened from a doze. He’d been hunched into the back corner of the fighting compartment, held upright by ammo boxes and a carton of rations. Fields of dark green soybeans rolled to either horizon beyond the iridium walls, punctuated by stretches of native vegetation.
According to the briefing cubes, Solace was several times as populous as all the Outer States put together. Those people were heavily concentrated in the center of the country around Bezant and Port Plattner, however, w
ith the remainder of the country given over to the collective farms which produced food for the entire planet.
Huber frowned as he thought about the rations. He’d swallowed a tube of something a little after dawn as they negotiated the foothills of the Solace Highlands, but he’d had nothing since. He didn’t feel hungry but supposed he ought to eat something.
It was an effort to get anything down because he was so fatigued by the constant vibration. Besides, the poppers made food taste like it’d been scraped from the bottom of a latrine. That wasn’t much of a change from what ration tubes ordinarily tasted like, of course.
He jolted alert, suddenly aware of why he’d awakened. Padova’d been on duty with the C&C display while he rested. She was trained but she didn’t have the sixth sense for what wasn’t right that’d come with a year or two of combat operations.
“I’ve got the watch,” Huber said. He took the controller from Padova’s hand as he spoke, lurching upright. She jumped aside, startled and maybe a little snappish at the lack of ceremony. The reaction passed before it got to her tongue, which was just as well.
As Huber adjusted the display to make explicit what instinct already told him, he said, “Highball, we’re going to have to adjust course to the left by thirty degrees. There’s a monorail line eighteen klicks ahead, and if we continue as planned we’ll be spotted by a train headed southward. We’ll—”
He stopped because he’d caught the fine overtone to the sensor data, the descant he’d ignored for the moment while he focused on the electronic signature of a six-car train heading south at 120 kph. Task Force Huber could avoid observation from a train at ground level, but—
“Bloody Hell!” Huber snarled, interrupting himself. “This is going to take a moment, troopers. There’s aircars scouting for the train and they’ll spot us sure!”
“Six, this is Two-six,” Lieutenant Messeman said on the command channel. “I suggest it’s a troop train and the aircars are escorts. Over.”
“Roger,” said Huber, because it couldn’t be anything else once Messeman had stated the obvious. He shook his head angrily. He must still be waking up. He couldn’t afford to miss cues; he couldn’t, and the troopers who were his responsibility couldn’t afford him missing them either.
“Roger,” Huber repeated, but with a note of decision. There was nothing wrong with his tactical appreciation once he got his mind in gear. “Highball, we can’t avoid them so we’ll engage and keep moving. Fox will attack on a company front—”
That was a bit of an overstatement, given that the Fox elements under Huber’s command were two understrength platoons, but it’d do.
“—from point Echo Michael Four-two, Six-one. X-Ray elements continue in march order. Fox elements form to the right on Three-six in line abreast with five, I repeat five, meter intervals. Execute! Six out.”
Padova looked at him wonderingly. It was too bad Learoyd wasn’t on the right gun, but the newbie was going to have to get her feet wet some time. This was probably as safe a place to do it as any.
“Crew,” Huber said, switching his helmet to intercom. Foghorn was moving up on their right with the other cars of F-3 slanted farther back as they drove through the soybeans to their stations.
Lieutenant Messeman’s platoon would take longer to join from the middle and rear of the column, but it’d be in line by the time it needed to be. “Frenchie, set our guns to take out the scouts when we’re sure of getting them both.”
The aircars were keeping station to either side of the track, five hundred meters up and a kilometer ahead of the train. They were looking for trouble on the line rather than scouting more generally, but even so from their altitude they were bound to notice the Slammers’ vehicles.
Deseau keyed the command into the pad on his tribarrel’s receiver. Instead of executing immediately he said, “You don’t think it’ll warn them, El-Tee?”
“It’s a train,” Huber snapped. “They’re not going to turn around, they won’t even be able to slow down.”
Deseau grimaced and pushed execute. Fencing Master’s tribarrels slewed to the right and elevated under the control of the gunnery computer.
“The C&C box’ll divide our fire so that the whole train’s covered,” Huber continued, deliberately speaking to his whole crew over the intercom rather than embarrassing Padova by singling her out for the explanation. “We’ll shoot it up on the fly, not because that’ll damage the enemy but—”
Fencing Master’s tribarrels fired, six-round bursts from the paired wing guns and about ten from Deseau’s as it destroyed an aircar by itself. Padova jumped, instinct telling her that the gun’d gone off by accident. She blushed and scowled when she realized what had happened.
Above the horizon to the north, a cottony puff bloomed and threw out glittering sparks. The flash of the explosion had been lost in the distance, even to Huber who’d been looking for it.
“—because if we don’t, we’ll have whatever military force is aboard that train chasing us,” Huber continued, giving no sign that he’d noticed Padova’s mistake. “We’re going to have enough to do worrying about what’s in front without somebody catching us from behind.”
The gunnery computer returned the tribarrels to their previous alignment. Huber and Deseau touched their grips, swiveling their weapons slightly to make sure that a circuitry glitch hadn’t locked them; Padova quickly copied the veterans. Yeah, she’ll do.
A column of black smoke twisted skyward near where the white puff had appeared in the sky. The second Solace scout hadn’t blown up in the air, but its wreckage had ignited the brush when it hit the ground.
“Six, this is Two-six,” Messeman said. “I’ll take my Two-zero car out of central control to cut the rail in front of the train. All right? Over.”
“Roger, Two-six,” Huber said. He thought Messeman was being overcautious, but that still left seven combat cars to deal with a six-car train.
Sunlight gleamed on the elevated rail and the line of pylons supporting it across the dark green fields. The train itself wasn’t in sight yet, but at their closing speed it wouldn’t be long. Huber settled behind his gun, staring into the holographic sight picture.
Fencing Master came over a rise too slight to notice on a contour map but all the difference in the world when you were using lineof-sight weapons. The train, a jointed tube of plastic and light metal, shimmered into view, slung beneath the elevated track.
“Open fire,” Huber said calmly. His thumbs squeezed the butterfly trigger.
Padova’s bolts were high—meters high, well above even the rail—but Huber and Deseau were both dead on the final car from their first rounds. Huber traversed his gun clockwise from the back of the target forward. Frenchie simply let the train’s own forward motion carry it through his three-second burst so that his bolts crossed with his lieutenant’s in the middle of the target. By that time Padova corrected her aim by sawing her muzzles downward.
The car fell apart, metal frame and thermoplastic paneling alike blazing at the touch of fifty separate hits, each a torch of plasma. The Solace mercenaries on the train carried grenades and ammunition, but those sparkling secondary explosions did little to increase the destruction which the powerguns had caused directly.
The second car back had something more impressive in it, perhaps a pallet of anti-armor missiles. When it detonated, the shockwave destroyed the whole front half of the train in a red flash so vivid that even daylight blanched. The low pressure that followed the initial wave front sucked topsoil into a dense black mushroom through which the rear cars cascaded as blazing debris.
“Cease fire!” Huber ordered. “Don’t waste ammo, troopers, we’ve worked ourselves out of a job.”
He took a deep breath; his nose filters released now that the air was fit to breathe again. Plasma bolts burned oxygen to ozone, and the matrix holding the copper atoms in alignment broke down into unpleasant compounds when the energy was released. Huber’s faceshield had blocked the direct intensity
of the bolts to save his retinas, but enough cyan light had reflected into the corners of his eyes that shimmers of purple and orange filtered his vision.
“Reform in march order,” Huber concluded hoarsely. “Six out.”
“They didn’t have a chance,” Padova said. She sounded as though she was on the verge of collapse. “They couldn’t shoot back, they were helpless!”
“It’s better when they don’t shoot back,” Learoyd said from the front compartment. He’d buttoned up before they went into action; now the hatch opened and the driver’s seat rose on its hydraulic jack, lifting his head back into the open. “They might’ve got lucky, even at this range.”
“Some a’ them caught us with our pants down when we landed here,” Frenchie Deseau said harshly. “We weren’t so fucking helpless! Ain’t that so, El-Tee?”
Huber flipped up his faceshield and rubbed his eyes, remembering unwillingly the ratfuck when a Solace commando ambushed F-3 disembarking from the starship that had just brought them to Plattner’s World. A buzzbomb trailing gray exhaust smoke as it curved for Arne Huber’s head …
And afterward, the windrow of bodies scythed down by a touch of Huber’s thumb to the close-in defense system.
“No,” he said in a husky whisper. “We weren’t helpless. We’re Hammer’s Slammers.”
Task Force Huber continued to slice its way north, moving at an even hundred kph across the treeless fields.
“Highball Six, this is Flasher Six,” the voice said faintly. The signal wobbled and was so attenuated that Huber could barely make out the words. “Do you copy, over?”
Ionization track transmissions could carry video under the proper circumstances, but communications between moving vehicles were another matter. Huber would’ve said it was impossible without a precise location for the recipient, but apparently that wasn’t quite true.
“Flasher Six, this is Highball Six,” he said, shutting his mind to the present circumstances though his eyes remained open. Deseau and Learoyd glanced over when he replied to the transmission, then returned to their guns with the extra alertness of men who know something unseen is likely to affect them. “Go ahead, over.”
