“Via!” Huber shouted. The tank was well to starboard, but Fencing Master shimmied as Padova backed so there was a chance the stern would swing enough to give Huber a shot. He tried to bring his tribarrel to bear as he cursed himself for not keeping better tabs on the sensor readouts. Because Huber was the platoon leader, Fencing Master carried a Command and Control box whose holographic display would show the heat, noise, and radio-frequency signatures of a fifty-tonne tank charging to within stone’s throw. He just hadn’t taken—hadn’t had—time to glance at it.
The tank’s sloping armor reflected a portion of the bolts’ energy as a haze of cyan light, searing the leaves from overhanging trees. The glare was so intense that Huber’s faceshield blacked it out to save his eyesight.
Despite the hits, capacitors feeding the tank’s laser screamed twice. The first pulse fried the air close enough overhead that Huber might’ve lost his hand if he’d raised it at the wrong time. That was probably a chance shot, though, because the second charge ripped empty forest twenty meters to the left, and then the tank’s ceramic armor failed under the tribarrels’ hammering.
At the temperature of copper plasma, almost everything burns. The gulp of orange flame from the tank’s interior was partly plastic, partly fabric, and partly the flesh of the crew.
Padova kept backing away from the line of contact. Flat-screen displays provided a combat car’s driver with just as good a view to the rear as forward, but driving through dense woodland in reverse required considerable skill. Fencing Master’s skirts struck only one tree too thick to shear off. Even that was a glancing blow, though it threw the troopers hard against the fighting compartment’s armor.
“Blue Section, pull back!” Huber said, completing the interrupted order as he checked his display. The other two cars were already retreating up the forested ridgeline; their commanders must have filled in the obvious if their drivers had needed the prodding. You didn’t have to be a military genius to know that F-3’s position wasn’t survivable for long, when at least a company of hostile tanks was advancing and there was no bloody sign of Ander’s Legion.
The woods were afire in a dozen places, ignited by energy weapons and the violent destruction of several vehicles—all of them hostile so far, the Lord be thanked, but that couldn’t last forever. Besides the wall of trees, smoke obscured normal vision. That gave F-3 an advantage because the Slammers’ sensors were better than those of their opponents, but in the confusion of battle there were too many inputs for anybody to use them all. Quick reactions, not technology, had saved Fencing Master when the hovertank roared up at them from less than pistol range.
Red Section waited hull-down over the reverse slope of the ridge from which F-3 had advanced twenty minutes before. Huber had expected to form a skirmish line while Ander’s Legion dug in to ambush the oncoming Solace column. Ander hadn’t come and the hostiles had—very aggressively.
Padova brought Fencing Master back to where they’d started their advance, in the shelter of smooth-barked trees whose foliage was a golden contrast to the deep green of most of the species around them. The economy of Plattner’s World was based on gathering the so-called Moss, a fungus that parasitized the native trees and which could be processed into the anti-aging drug Thalderol. In normal times here, the wanton destruction of forest was a serious crime.
War imposed different standards. The recent engagement had turned a kilometer of woodland into a spreading blaze where munitions occasionally exploded. The hostiles, elements of the West Riding Yeomanry hired by Solace, had halted to regroup to the west of the fiery barrier. The tanks would come on in a moment, buttoned up and using their numbers to envelope the Slammers on both flanks even though Huber had stretched F-3 with forty meters between combat cars.
That was far too great an interval in forest where normal sight distance was only half that. Foghorn, immediately to the right of Fencing Master, was an occasional glint of iridium through the foliage. Skilled infantry could slip through the line to do all manner of damage before the troopers knew what was happening.