“Three-five clear!” Tranter shouted as Fancy Pants shifted away from the wrecked vehicle, accelerating as fast as fans could push its thirty tonnes. Ropes of 2-cm bolts snapped past Fencing Master to either side, other cars keeping the defenders’ heads down.
“Blue element, withdraw!” Huber shouted as he raked the camp. “Go! Go! Go!”
Padova fell in behind Fancy Pants; Deseau’d reloaded and was leaning out the back of the fighting compartment, punching the night dead astern. The tunnel mouth burped a red fireball. It hung in the air for measurable seconds before sucking in as the bunker collapsed.
Fancy Pants drove through a waste of shelters destroyed when F-3 entered the camp; the car’s fans whirled smoldering canvas and scantlings into a sea of flame. Preceding vehicles had scraped the berm to a low hump for which Tranter’s driver didn’t bother to slow. Fancy Pants lifted, then vanished into the night with Fencing Master close behind her.
Huber took his thumbs off the trigger as they crossed the berm. Shooting now would call attention to the escaping cars for any of the defenders who’d kept their composure.
That wasn’t a serious danger. Huber took a last view of the firebase as Fencing Master returned to the forest’s concealment. Scores of fires within the compound silhouetted the furrowed berm. Another explosion flung sparks a hundred meters into the sky.
Huber took a deep breath and almost choked. Struggling not to vomit in reaction to the adrenaline that had burned through his body for the past several minutes, he said, “Red element, this is Highball Six. Blue element will rendezvous as planned in—”
His AI prompted him with a time display on the upper left quadrant of his faceshield.
“—three, that’s figures three, minutes. Six out.”
Deseau had his tribarrel’s receiver open to chip at the buildup of matrix material. It was a wonder that Huber’s gun hadn’t jammed also: its iridium barrels still glowed yellow. They’d been white hot when Fencing Master crossed the berm.
Frenchie glanced back. “Not bad, El-Tee,” he said over the intercom. “About time we showed ’em who’s boss!”
Another explosion rocked the night. Solace forces around Benjamin weren’t going to be worrying any time soon about the breakout from the city.
But there was a long road still ahead, for the Slammers and especially for Task Force Huber. . . .
* * *
Sergeant Nagano in Foghorn led the column. Huber’d decided to run without a scouting element a kilometer in the lead. He was more afraid that Solace units would stumble onto Task Force Huber by accident than he was of driving into hostiles with their signatures masked against the Slammers’ sensors.
Even with the drivers trying to keep minimum separations, the line of twenty-seven vehicles stretched nearly half a klick back through the forest. A single aircar flying between Solace positions could see the column and end the secrecy that was their greatest protection.
Deseau slept curled up on the floor of the fighting compartment. The surest mark of a veteran was that he could sleep any time, any place. On Estoril Huber had awakened one night only when the level of cold rainwater in his bunker had risen to his nose and he started to drown. Soldiering was a hell of a life, a Hell of a life, and Arne Huber and every other trooper in the Regiment was a volunteer.
Learoyd braced his right boot on an ammo box to raise his crotch over the coaming of the fighting compartment, then emptied his bladder into the night. He stepped down again, sealing his fly, and said, “Is Frenchie going to take the next shift driving, El-Tee, or d’ye want me to do it?”
He’d spoken directly instead of using the intercom that might’ve awakened Deseau. Fencing Master was driving between the massive trees at a steady, moderate pace, and experienced troopers could hear one another over the intake noise.
Bert Learoyd sometimes made Huber think of a social insect: he seemed to have almost no intellectual capacity, but through rote learning alone he’d become capable of quite complex activities. It was bad to wake up your buddies unnecessarily, so Learoyd didn’t do that.