by David Drake
“Any word on when we’ll be moving?” he demanded. “We are moving, aren’t we? We’re not going to have to nursemaid the artillery while the rest of the Regiment attacks?”
Basingstoke stiffened. Before he could speak—and they were all tired, but Blood and Martyrs, didn’t Messeman have any sense at all?—Huber snapped, “We’re going to leave the two combat cars which I determine to be sufficient for air defense, Lieutenant. That’s one from each platoon. Personally, I expect to be thankful for all the artillery support we can get when we attack.”
Messeman grimaced but shrugged. “Yeah, I’ll leave Two-four. The patch we put on the plenum chamber after the breakout’s starting to crack. They can use the time to weld it properly.”
“Seven kilometers,” Basingstoke said, glancing to the west. The crest showed up more sharply against the port lighting as the sky darkened. “That’s closer to the target than I care to be, but—”
He gave the other officers another skull smile.
“—I’ve been glad to have the combat cars’ company for as long as possible, and I realize that means following you to your attack positions.”
Tranter crawled out of an access hatch in the hog’s plenum chamber. He was a big, red-haired man who moved so gracefully that you generally forgot that his right leg was a biomechanical replacement for the one severed when a tank fell off a jack.
“Got it, Lieutenant!” he called cheerfully to Basingstoke. “They pinched a cable when they replaced your Starboard Three, so when the nacelles’re canted hard right you get a short. The wrenches’ll have it rerouted in ten minutes.”
“Three-eight’ll be staying here with the hogs, Sergeant,” Huber said, looking over his shoulder. The combat cars faced outward around the artillery vehicles. The circuit was too open for defense against serious ground attack but admirably suited to stop incoming shells and possible Solace infiltrators. If the Waldheim Dragoons and the scattering of Militiamen and other mercenaries in Port Plattner mounted an attack before the Regiment was ready to strike, the cars’ sensor suites would give Huber sufficient warning to change his dispositions.
“Roger,” Tranter said, nodding. “Ah, El-Tee? Can I swap out Chisum on Three-eight for Stoddard on my car? Stoddard pukes every time he takes a popper, so he’s pretty washed out after this run.”
“Right, the cars here’ll be in air defense mode unless a lot of wheels fall off,” Huber said, frowning to hear that Stoddard couldn’t take stimulants. That didn’t handicap a trooper quite as badly as blindness would, but it wasn’t something a platoon leader wanted to hear about a useful man. “Want me to …?”
“I’ll tell him,” Tranter said, throwing Huber a brilliant smile again as he strode off to inform Chisum and Gabinus, Three-eight’s commander. Tranter wore a slip-over shoe on his right foot to raise it to the height of the boot on his left, giving his leg movements an unbalanced look.
The excavator started on a fifth gun pit. Messeman watched a hog slide into the one just completed with the delicacy required by tight quarters. He said, “Ah, Six? Will we be getting a view of the target before we go in?”
“What I’ve been told,” Huber said, “is that they’ll launch a commo and observation constellation just before we drop the hammer. They’re estimating that the new satellites will survive two minutes, certainly no more than five. That’s why they’re saving it till everything’s ready.”
Messeman sighed. “Sure, makes sense,” he said. “I like to tell my people what we’re getting into, that’s all.”
“Tell them there’s nobody on the planet as good as they are, Lieutenant,” Huber said. His glance took in Lieutenant Basingstoke as well. “We proved that getting here. Tell them one more push and we’ll be able to stand down.”
Messeman and Basingstoke nodded agreement; Huber gave them a thumbs-up and headed back to Fencing Master.
It was true, as far as it went: one push and a stand-down.
If they survived.
And until the next time.
Automatic weapons had been firing from the port area at intervals ever since sunset three hours ago. Occasional tracers ricocheted high enough to be seen over the hills. Less often, a tribarrel flickered across the cloud bases like distant cyan lightning. That’d be another task force splashing an aircar or something equally insignificant …except for the poor bastards on the receiving end.
The alert signal at the upper left corner of Huber’s faceshield was the first message he’d gotten from Central since the fire mission before they’d reached the Solace Highlands. He let out his breath in a gasp.
There might not have been a Central anymore. Base Alpha might have fallen and the Solace forces begun mopping up the Slammers task force by task force, bringing to bear as much weight as they needed to crush each hard nut. Huber’d kept his fear below the surface of his mind, but it’d been there nonetheless.
“All units, prepare to receive orders and target information,” said a voice as emotionless as the surf on a rocky shore. “Don’t get ahead of your start times, and once you commit don’t, I repeat do not, stop shooting until you’re told to. Regiment One out.”
The data dump started at once, progressing for thirty seconds instead of concluding instantaneously. Satellite reconnaissance was updating the information at the same time those satellites transmitted it to the Regiment’s scattered elements. Port Plattner, an oval five kilometers by three, expanded on the Command and Control display. There’d been six warehouse complexes spaced about the perimeter when the satellites shut down thirty-six hours before; now there was a seventh beside the huge starship on northwest edge, twelve large temporary buildings with more under construction.
“Regiment One? That’s Major Steuben,” Deseau muttered, unusually worried for him. “Is he in fucking charge now?”
“Shut up, Frenchie,” Huber snapped as he scrolled through the download. He was more irritated than he’d have been if a newbie like Padova had made the comment. Deseau should’ve known they didn’t have enough data to guess what was going on. Steuben might be in command of Base Alpha because his White Mice were defending it, but that didn’t mean the Colonel and Major Pritchard were casualties.
It didn’t mean they weren’t casualties, either.
“Right!” Huber muttered when he had the situation clear. At least it was clear enough that he knew staring at it longer wasn’t going to
change anything in a good way. “Red and Blue elements—”
F-2 and F-3 respectively, each with a squad of infantry in support.
“—will proceed to designated positions on the reverse slope—”
The download from Central set out the east side of the terminal building as the general objective for Highball’s action elements, but Central hadn’t known what strength Huber would have available for the attack. Huber’s C&C box had broken the assignment into individual targets. Losing two cars and six infantry was probably better than Operations had calculated, though under normal circumstances twenty percent was a horrendous casualty rate.
“—and hold there till two-two-three-seven hours, when—”
Battery Alpha opened fire, loosing thunder and the long crackling lightning of sustainer motors as the missiles streaked west so low that they barely cleared the ridgeline. The hogs rocked from the backblasts, slamming their skirts against the hard clay substrate.
“—we’ll cross the crest and attack our objectives at forty kph. White element under Sergeant Marano—”
The remaining two combat cars and eleven infantry—some of whom were walking wounded only if they didn’t have to walk very far.
“—remains here to provide security for the X-Ray element. Any questions? Over.”
“Let’s do it, El-Tee,” Sergeant Nagano said. He raised his gauntleted left hand from Foghorn, the thumb up.
“Roger that,” Huber said, after a ten-second pause to be sure that nobody had anything substantive to add. “Move out, troopers. Keep it slow till we’re in posi
tion, and nobody crosses the start line till it’s time. Six out.”
Fencing Master started forward, barely ambling. The other cars—particularly Messeman’s trio from the east arc of the circle—had farther to go to get into position. Padova wasn’t letting eagerness make her screw up.
The bone-shaking roar of the rocket howitzers paused on a long snarl as the last of the six rounds in the ready magazines streaked westward. Another battery took up the bombardment as Basingstoke’s hogs cycled missiles from their storage magazines in the rear hull into their turrets to resume firing.
The hogs were launching firecracker rounds, anti-personnel cargo shells designed to dump thousands of bomblets each. Powerguns from the port’s air defenses stabbed the sky for several seconds, bursting all the incoming rounds before they could open over the target. Then one got through.
Huber knew what it was like on the ground—and what it would’ve been like for Task Force Huber if the Firelords had gotten lucky with their less-sophisticated equivalents. When the bomblets swept over the defenses as a sea of white fire, shrapnel would kill the crews and disable gun mechanisms. Then the next round—and the next twenty rounds—would get through.
The cars aligned themselves to the right of Fencing Master at twenty-meter intervals. The eighteen infantrymen were twenty meters behind, their skimmers bobbling in the wake of the cars. They looked hopelessly vulnerable to Huber, but he knew from conversations that most infantrymen regarded combat cars as big targets, and tanks as bigger targets yet. They’d come in handy for clearing the terminal building, if they got that far.
Padova raised her speed to ten kph but didn’t accelerate further. Huber frowned with instinctive impatience, then understood. “Highball,” he said, “we’re timing—”
Padova was timing.
“—our approach so we’ll reach our attack positions at exactly the time to go over the crest. That way we’ll already have forward inertia instead of lifting from a halt. Six out, break.”
His frown deepened as he continued, “Trooper Padova, using initiative is fine, but don’t play games or you’ll be playing them in another unit. Tell me what you’re planning the next time, all right?”
“Sorry, sir,” the driver said, sounding like she meant it. “I wasn’t …sorry, it won’t happen again.”
The cars and skimmers passed to the south of the grain elevators and their clustered dwellings. Deseau looked back over his shoulder, his hand resting lightly on the butt of his 2-cm weapon. If a sniper or Solace artillery observer appeared among the buildings now, the forward tribarrel wouldn’t bear on it.
Huber smiled wryly. Frenchie was an optimistic man, in his way.
A line of posts supported plastic netting and a top strand of barbed wire, fencing to keep pastured cattle from straying into the railhead. All six cars hit it within an eyeblink of one another, smashing the fence down with no more trouble than they took with the spiky bushes which dotted the cropped grassland on the other side. Huber had been ready to duck if the wire flew toward him, but instead it curled around the next post to the left.
Learoyd was singing, mostly under his breath so it didn’t trip the intercom. Occasional phrases buzzed in Huber’s ears: “ …and best …lost sinners was slain….”
Fencing Master accelerated smoothly despite the increasing slope. The fans were biting deeper, but their note didn’t change because Padova matched her blade incidence flawlessly against the increased power she was dialing in. The cars were nearing the crest. On the other side, sparkling explosions backlit stubble and the thicket of brush which grew from exposed rocks where mowers couldn’t reach.
A salvo from Battery Alpha shrieked overhead, so deafeningly close that Fencing Master shimmied. Huber’s exposed skin prickled and he heard an abrasive snarl against his helmet. He didn’t know whether he was feeling debris from the exhaust or grit swept up from the ground by the shells’ passage. Deseau shouted in angry surprise, though there was no real harm done.
It would’ve been a bad time to cross the ridge ahead of orders, though. A really bad time.
“Highball …” Huber said, judging the time by Fencing Master’s speed, not the clock he could call onto his faceshield if he wanted to.
“Execute!”
Battery Alpha’s salvo of cargo shells opened just on the other side of the ridge. This close, the red flashes of the charges that expelled the contents were startlingly visible. The bomblets scattered on separate ballistic courses toward the terminal, detonating like so many thousand grenades just as the combat cars came over the rise. From where Huber watched, three kilometers away, the sea of glittering white radiance was beautiful.
His helmet gave him targets, first a calliope dug into the ground at the edge of the meters-thick concrete pad which supported starships as they landed and lifted off. Huber put a burst into it, his plasma glancing from the iridium gunbarrels but vaporizing the steel frame and trunnion. The gun was silent, its barrels already cooled to red heat: bomblets had killed its crew or driven it to cover.
Powerguns slashed the port’s flat concrete expanse from all directions, tribarrels and the tanks’ 20-cm main guns. Buildings, vehicles, and stacks of cargo on the immense concrete pad were burning.
There were over twenty starships on the pad. They weren’t deliberate targets, but bolts splashed them with cyan highlights.
As Huber switched his aim to a wheeled vehicle racing away from the terminal, a last salvo struck the temporary buildings being erected next to the starship in the northwest. Nothing happened for a moment because instead of bomblets the rounds carried fuel-air warheads.
The delayed blast spilled air from Fencing Master’s plenum chamber and slammed the car down hard. Huber shouted, instinctively afraid that he’d been flung out of the fighting compartment. He bashed his chest into the grips of his tribarrel. The clamshell armor saved his ribs, but he’d have bruises in the morning.
Padova got them under weigh again, straightening their course; the blast had slewed the car a quarter-turn clockwise while shock curtains deployed around the driver. A column of kinked black smoke rose from where the shells had landed.
The pad wasn’t cratered: the explosive had spread in a thin smooth sheet before it went off, and concrete has great compression strength. The structures which had covered more than a thousand square meters of the pad were gone except for twisted fragments which had fallen back after the blast blew everything skyward. The starship, thick-hulled and weighing over 150,000 tonnes, appeared undamaged. The valves had been wrenched off the two open cargo hatches, however.
Huber found the truck he’d been aiming at; the shockwave had shoved it into the loading dock which extended from the back of the terminal building. He gave it a three-round burst from reflex, watching it burst into flames as his AI found him something more useful to shoot at.
Deseau and Learoyd were firing at gun positions on the roof of the terminal, though nothing moved there except the haze of smoke from the anti-personnel bomblets which had gone off seconds before. Instead of a nearby target, Huber’s helmet targeted a line of vehicles on the northern edge of the pad. At least a company of the Waldheim Dragoons were using blast deflectors as breastworks against the Slammers attacking from that side. Tribarrels on the Waldheim APCs and 10-cm powerguns on their tanks stabbed the distant hills.
The walls now raised from the pad were meant to deflect a giant starship’s full takeoff thrust skyward so it wouldn’t knock down everything within a kilometer. The structures were sufficient to stop even a 20-cm bolt, but the cars approaching from southeast had a clear shot at the sheltering vehicles.
Huber set the target and brought up his sight’s magnification. He was using light amplification rather than thermal viewing; the many fires dotting the port’s flat expanse provided more than enough illumination. When his pipper centered on a tank’s turret ring, he thumbed the trigger and let the stabilizer hold his bolts on target. The tank’s own ammunition blew it up in a cyan flash.
/>
Huber shifted to the next target over, an APC rocking in the shockwave of the tank’s destruction. Before he could fire, a 20-cm bolt hit the lightly armored vehicle and sprayed molten blobs of it a hundred meters away.
Fencing Master continued to advance. The ten-story terminal building blocked Huber’s line of sight to the Dragoons; his faceshield careted windows instead. He squeezed, slewing the tribarrel to help the car’s forward motion draw his burst across the seventh floor from left to right. The rooms were dark till the bolts hit, but gulps of orange flame followed each cyan flash as plasma ignited the furnishings.
An equipment park on the southwest side of the pad had taken a pasting from incendiaries. Hundreds of vehicles were alight. Every so often one erupted with greater enthusiasm like a bubble rising in a caldera to scatter blazing rock high in the air. Eight combat cars skirted the park to the south, moving fast. Their tribarrels raked the back side of the terminal building.
At the beginning of the war, Solace had started building concrete-roofed dugouts at intervals around the perimeter of Port Plattner. The work had stopped when Solace Command realized that the Outer States were barely capable of defense, and even those completed—three of them in the sector Central had assigned to Huber’s troops—appeared to be unmanned.
Deseau and Learoyd had burned the firing slit of the southernmost to twice its original size. Now as Fencing Master swept around the squat structure, Learoyd depressed his tribarrel and fired a long burst down the entrance ramp at the back. The steel door gushed red sparks and ruptured inward, but there was no secondary explosion.
White flares popped from the roof of the terminal building. More flares followed from a dozen points across Port Plattner, including the northern perimeter where the Waldheim Dragoons had been fighting. “UC forces, we surrender!” a woman’s voice cried. “Terminal control surrenders, by the Lord’s mercy we surrender!”
