“Blue element,” Huber said, “the batteries in Jonesburg and Simpliche’ll be scratching our backs in about eighty seconds. You’ve all got the plan, you all know your jobs. In and out, shake ’em up but don’t stick around, then reform on at grid Yankee-Tango-Four-four-three, Two-one-four where the Red element will be waiting.”
Red element was Messeman with F-2 and the artillery. The guns couldn’t move till they’d fired the salvo that would rip the Solace units which threatened Simpliche.
Besides the Slammers’ Battery Alpha, there were ten mercenary batteries in Benjamin. It would’ve been simpler to delegate the preparatory barrage to the others so that Battery Alpha could move instantly, but there was the risk the orders would be intercepted—or ignored.
Central chose to add a minute and a half delay to the Red element rather than chance much worse problems. Huber’s combat cars would be delayed much longer than that while they shot up the firebase that anchored the Solace forces facing Benjamin.
“On the word,” Huber said, “we’ll—”
The sky to the east and west popped minusculely. If Huber had been looking in just the right direction, he might have seen tiny red flashes as bursting charges opened cargo shells several kilometers short of their targets. Calliopes, multi-barreled powerguns, began to raven from the Solace positions. They directed their cyan lightning toward the sub-munitions incoming from both Jonesburg and Simpliche.
The initial shells were packed with jammers—chaff and active transmitters across the electro-optical spectrum. The second and third salvos burst much closer, spewing thousands of anti-personnel bomblets with contact fuses and a time back-up to explode duds three minutes after they left the cargo shell.
“Blue element, execute!” Huber ordered, feeling Fencing Master lift beneath him as Padova anticipated the order by an eyelash.
The six combat cars reversed out of the semi-circular berms protecting them from direct fire and advanced through the open woodland in line abreast. Solace troops weren’t in contact with the Benjamin defenses anywhere that the Slammers stiffened the line. Hostiles couldn’t conceal themselves from the Regiment’s sensors, and anybody who could be seen vanished in a fireball in the time it took a trooper to squeeze the thumb trigger of his tribarrel.
Nevertheless Learoyd fired as Fencing Master rounded its fighting position, his blue-green bolts raking trees and leaf-litter forty meters from the car. Flames blazed yellow-orange from a shattered treetrunk. If anybody else had shot, Huber would’ve thought they were jumpy; Learoyd was as unlikely to be jumpy as he was to start lecturing on quantum mechanics.
The artillery impact zone was out of Huber’s sight, but the sky flickered white with reflected hellfire. At least one round of the second salvo escaped the calliopes’ desperate attempt to sweep the cargo shells out of the sky before they opened. The calliopes stopped firing when the glass-fiber shrapnel scythed down the gunners who hadn’t thrown themselves under cover.
As the crackling snarl of the single previous round reached Huber, all six shells of the third salvo burst over the target. The sky beyond the branches was bright as daylight, and the blast remained louder than the car’s intake howl for nearly a minute.
The bomblets were anti-personnel, but several must have hit fuel or munitions. Secondary explosions, red and orange and once the cyan dazzle of ionized copper, punctuated the ongoing white glare.
Huber swore softly. He knew he should’ve felt pleased. The firecracker rounds were landing on the enemy, clearing a path so that Task Force Huber had a chance of surviving the next ten minutes. Sometimes, though, Huber found it hard to forget that the hostiles were human beings also, soldiers very like his own troopers.
And maybe Huber wasn’t alone in his reaction. Frenchie Deseau, nobody’s choice for Mr. Sensitive, pounded the coaming with the edge of his left hand. His right was still on the grip of his tribarrel, though.
Stray bomblets had lit scores of small fires outside the main impact area. That and the continuing roar had confused the troops in the ring of Solace bunkers outside the firebase berm. Huber’s faceshield alerted him for the oncoming target for thirty seconds before Fencing Master wheeled around a giant tree and got a clear view of a low log-covered bunker some sixty meters away. The defenders had cut three firing lanes through the undergrowth to give them several hundred meters of range along those axes, but Padova had split a pair of them and Foghorn to Fencing Master’s right had done the same.