Made more vivid by Huber’s own sudden vision of being cast out of the Slammers.
“—that it’s because he’s grown to like being around other professionals, other people who do their job because it’s their job. You don’t find a lot of that in the outside world.”
She looked at him without expression. “No,” she said, “you don’t. Well, Lieutenant Huber, again I’m glad for your arrival. And if it’s agreeable to you, I prefer ‘Hera’ to ‘ma’am’ or ‘Deputy Graciano.’ But of course it’s up to you as section head to decide on the etiquette.”
“Hera’s fine and so’s Arne,” Huber said in relief. “And ah—Hera? About Captain Cassutt?”
She gestured to affect disinterest.
“No, you deserve to hear,” Huber said, “after the way I got up on my haunches. Cassutt had a bad time the deployment before this one. It wasn’t his fault, mostly at any rate, but he got pulled out of the line.”
The same way I did, but Huber didn’t say that.
“He’s off on leave, now,” he continued. “He’ll either dry out or he’ll be out. If he’s forcibly retired, his pension will keep him in booze as long as his liver lasts—but he won’t be anywhere he’s going to screw up the business of the Regiment.”
“I . . .” Hera said. There was no way of telling what the thought she’d smothered unspoken was. “I see that. Ah, here’s the transport that I’ve either purchased or contracted for, based on volume requirements sent me by the regimental prep section. If you’d like to go over them . . . ?”
She’d set her holographic projector on a 360-degree display so that they both could read the data from their different angles. Huber checked the list of tonnage per unit per day, in combat and in reserve, then the parallel columns giving vehicles and payloads. Those last figures floored him.
“Ma’am?” he said, careting the anomaly with his light wand. “Hera, I mean, these numbers—oh! They’re dirigibles?”
She nodded warily. “Yes, we use dirigibles for most heavy lifting,” she explained. “They’re as fast as ground vehicles even on good roads, and we don’t have many good surface roads on Plattner’s World.”
She frowned and corrected herself, “In the Outer States, that is. Solace has roads and a monorail system for collecting farm produce.”
“I don’t have anything against dirigibles in general,” Huber said, then said with the emphasis of having remembered, “Hera. But in a war zone they’re—”
He kept his voice steady with effort as his mind replayed a vision of the dirigible crashing into Rhodesville’s brick-faced terminal building and erupting like a volcano.
“—too vulnerable. We’ll need ground transport, or—how about surface effect cargo carriers? Do you have them here? They look like airplanes, but their wings just compress the air between them and the ground instead of really flying.”
“I don’t see how that could work over a forest,” Hera said tartly—and neither did Huber, when he thought about it. “And as for vulnerable, trucks are vulnerable too if they’re attacked, aren’t they?”
“A truck isn’t carrying five hundred tonnes for a single powergun bolt to light up,” Huber said, careful to keep his voice neutral. “And it’s not chugging along fifty or a hundred meters in the air where it’s a target for a gunner clear in the next state if he knows what he’s doing.”
He shook his head in memory. “Which some of them will,” he added. “If Solace hired Harris’s Commando, they’ll get a good outfit for air defense too.”
Hera didn’t move for a moment. Her hands on the display controller in her lap could’ve been carved from a grainless wood. Then she said, “Yes, if we . . .”
Her fingers caressed the controller. The display shifted like a waterfall; Huber could watch the data, but they meant nothing to him at the speed they cascaded across the air-projected holograms.
“Yes . . .” Hera repeated, then looked up beaming. “There isn’t anything like enough ground transport available in the UC alone, but if the other Outer States send us what they have, we should be able to meet your needs. Though roads . . .”