Except that it obviously was a concern, if Hammer himself took time to meet with the fellow while the war was going to hell in a handbasket. Huber chuckled.
“You find something funny in this, Lieutenant?” Lindeyar said in a voice that could’ve frozen a pond.
“I’d been thinking earlier this morning that things can always get worse, sir,” Huber said calmly. When you’ve spent a significant fraction of your life with other people shooting at you, it’s easy to stay calm in situations where the potential downside doesn’t include a bullet in your guts. “I won’t say I’m glad to’ve been right, but I guess I do find it amusing, yes.”
Lindeyar didn’t reply, not so that he could be heard over the fans at any rate. Huber’d called up a topo map as a thirty percent mask on his faceshield. Base Alpha lay just beyond the city’s eastern outskirts. The driver was holding them on a direct course toward it, the only variations being those imposed by traffic regulations which were completely opaque to an outsider like Huber.
As well as five dirigibles hauling heavy cargoes, there were hundreds of aircars in sight. That in itself was a good reason to leave the driving to a local.
Base Alpha was a scar on the landscape, a twelve-hectare tract scraped bare of forest. There was nothing else like it in the Outer States. Even the dirigible fields where starships now landed were smaller. The soil had a yellow tinge and was already baking to coarse limestone. A two-meter berm of dirt stabilized with a plasticizer surrounded the perimeter; the TOC complex was a cruciform pattern dug in at the center.
The clearing wasn’t just to house the vehicles and temporary buildings required for the headquarters of an armored regiment: Hammer also demanded sight distances for the powerguns that defended the base against incoming aircraft and artillery fire. The UC government had protested, but that didn’t matter. The Colonel didn’t compromise on military necessities; he and his troops were the sole judges of what war made necessary.
One or more guns had been tracking the aircar ever since it came over the horizon on a course for the base. An icon quivered in the right corner of Huber’s faceshield, indicating that his AI had received and replied to Central’s authentication signal.
A kilometer from the base, the driver slowed her vehicle to a hover. Lindeyar leaned forward and said, “Why are we stopping?” in a louder voice than the fan roar demanded.
Huber tapped the green light on top of the navigational pod and said to the driver, “Go on in, we’re cleared.”
“No, I’ve got to call in,” the driver said. “Otherwise they’ll shoot us out of the air. It’s happened!”
“I told you, we’re cleared!” Huber said. “Do as I tell you or I’ll shoot you myself!”
Most of that was for Lindeyar’s benefit—but he wasn’t in a good mood, that was the bloody truth. Not that he’d have shot the woman while they were a hundred meters in the air and she was driving . . .
The driver obeyed with a desperate look, though they flew into the compound at a noticeably slower pace than they’d crossed Benjamin proper. The navigation pod directed her to a ten-by-ten meter square just outside the gate through the razor ribbon surrounding the TOC. The troopers on guard in a gun jeep watched with bored interest rather than concern, but their tribarrel tracked the car all the way in.
Huber hopped out immediately and offered Lindeyar his arm for support; the open truck didn’t have doors in back, though the sidewalls weren’t high. The civilian ignored the offer with the studied discourtesy that Huber’d expected.
A staff lieutenant—an aide, Huber supposed, but he didn’t know the fellow—trotted up the ramp from the TOC entrance as Huber and the civilian got out of the aircar. The driver kept her fans spinning, so grit swirled around their ankles and made Huber blink. He didn’t bother snarling at her.
“Mr. Lindeyar?” the aide called as he swung open the wire-wrapped gate. “Please step this way. The Colonel’s waiting for you.”
Well, I guess that’s “mission accomplished” for me, Huber thought. He turned to get back into the aircar. His helmet filters slapped down as the driver took off without him in a spray of dust. Some of it got under his collar, sticking to the sweat and making the cloth feel like sandpaper when he moved.