Huber looked at her, then slipped his faceshield down and quickened his stride in the direction of Fencing Master. As he’d told Major Steuben, he could find his own company. And he wasn’t going to find it there.
NECK OR NOTHING
“Red Section, pull back two hundred meters!” Lieutenant Arne Huber ordered over the platoon channel. A laser from one of the hostile hovertanks touched a tree to the right, blasting a ten-meter strip off the trunk. Fragments of bark and sapwood stung Huber and the two gunners with him in the combat car’s open fighting compartment. “Blue, we’ll hold till Red’s in position! Six out.”
The artificial intelligence in Huber’s commo helmet imposed a translucent red caret on his faceshield, warning of movement to the left. Huber was Fencing Master’s left wing gunner as well as commander of platoon F-3. At the moment, swinging his tribarrel onto the threat took precedence over controlling the platoon’s other five cars.
The motion was the hull of a hovertank from a mercenary unit hired by Solace in its war with the Outer States. The vehicle was three hundred meters away, much farther than you could generally see in the forests of Plattner’s World, and the tank’s two crewmen probably weren’t aware of Fencing Master as they drove across the battlefront hoping to take F-3 in the flank.
The target quivered in Huber’s holographic sight picture. He settled his weapon and squeezed the butterfly trigger with both thumbs. The cluster of iridium barrels rotated as they fired, giving each tube a moment to cool after spewing a bolt of ionized copper downrange at the speed of light.
The narrow window didn’t allow Huber to choose a particular spot on his target, but the energy a 2-cm powergun packed made most things vulnerable. The compartment holding the hovertank’s crew was armored with ceramic layered in ablative sheets, proof against single bolts or even a short burst, but the skirts enclosing the plenum chamber were light plastic to keep the weight down. Huber raked the bulge where the two joined.
A fireball erupted from the tank’s port side: the cyan plasma had converted the plastic into its constituent elements—which recombined explosively. The flash ignited even the loam of the forest floor.
“I can’t see it!” screamed Frenchie Deseau at Fencing Master’s bow gun. “Padova, pull up, for Hell’s sake! I can’t see the target!”
The hostile was directly ahead of Fencing Master, so by rights it should’ve been Deseau’s target while Huber watched the left flank the way Trooper Learoyd was doing the right from the other wing gun. It was a chance of visibility that made the tank Huber’s prey while the trees concealed it from Deseau.
The tank rocked to the right, then slewed to a halt because Huber’d ripped its skirts wide open. The tank’s gunner tried to rotate his roof-mounted laser, but Huber’s tribarrel blew the weapon to fiery slag an instant before rupturing the crew compartment itself.
What mattered was that somebody got the tank before it took F-3 from the rear; but if F-3 didn’t fall back quickly, another tank or tanks were going to circle them. There were too many hostiles for a single platoon of combat cars to deal with for long. Where the bloody hell was Ander’s Legion, the combined arms battalion that was supposed to follow when F-3 seized the knoll in the face of the advancing Solace column?
“Three-six, this is Three-three!” crackled the voice of Platoon Sergeant Jellicoe, commanding the three cars of Red Section. For this operation Huber would rather have operated in three two-car sections, but two of his vehicles were crewed with replacements. The newbies had been trained and may well have been veterans of other units before they joined Hammer’s Slammers, but Huber didn’t want to risk anybody operating alone until he’d personally seen how they held up in combat. “We’re in position! Over!”
“Blue Section,” Huber ordered, “pull—”
Fencing Master was already starting to reverse. Although she’d just been transferred to F-3, Padova’d already shown an ability to anticipate orders—sometimes the difference between life and death in combat. As the car grunted backward, Deseau and Learoyd fired simultaneously.
For an instant, saplings ranging from thumb-thick to thigh-thick blazed. When the blue-green bolts had sawn through the undergrowth, they flashed and cascaded from the sloping armor of the hovertank coming up from a swale less than twenty meters away.
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