A thought struck him, almost too late, and he added, “And make sure your guns aren’t in Air Defense Mode! Put your guns on manual, for the Lord’s sake! Six out.”
The cars’ gunnery computers couldn’t be programmed to miss. If a gun was on air defense—and one on each combat car normally would be while the column was in march order—then the Solace scouts were going to vanish as quickly as they appeared. That’d almost certainly be before they could report back.
Frenchie and Learoyd lifted the muzzles of their tribarrels, tracking blips on the inside of their faceshields. Fencing Master was now weaving through forest that hadn’t been cleared by plasma bolts and the fires they ignited. The gunners were tracking on the basis of sensor data because the low-flying aircars were screened by bluffs and undamaged treeboles. When metal finally showed through a gap in the foliage, they were going to be ready.
The Hog immediately ahead wobbled through the forest, moving at about twenty kph but seeming even slower than that. The leading vehicles had rubbed the bark to either side of the route, leaving white blazes a meter high on the treetrunks. Often their skirts had gouged brushes of splinters from deep into the sapwood.
Tribarrels volleyed from the tail of the column; an instant later Deseau and Learoyd fired together, their guns startling Huber out of his concentration on the display of sensor data overlaid on a terrain map. He jerked his head up as the upper half of a tree thirty meters toward the northwest burst into red-orange flames. The blasts of plasma had shattered the trunk, blowing it into spheres of superheated organic fragments which exploded when they mixed with oxygen-rich air a few meters distant.
In the sky a kilometer away, a diving aircar flashed its belly toward the column. Deseau sent another burst into empty sky; some of the artillerymen were firing sub-machine guns from the cabs of their Hogs.
Huber checked his display again. Three of the scouts had flattened themselves close to the Salamanca’s surface. The fourth—
“Six, this is Two-six,” Lieutenant Messeman reported in a clipped, cold voice. “I regret to report that we hit one of the aircars. The other should’ve gotten a good look at us before it escaped, though. Two-six over.”
“Roger, Two-six,” Huber said. “Proceed as planned.”
This was even better than if all the scouts had gotten away: it made the Slammers’ response look real. Messeman would be talking to the shooter when things had quieted down, though. Hitting the car had been a screw-up, and a battle at these odds was dangerous enough even when all your people executed perfectly.
Huber’s gunners had blown apart a tree in order not to hit their pretended target. It now finished toppling to the ground with a crash and ball of flaming debris. Undergrowth ignited immediately, reminding Huber that his cars would be driving back through a full-fledged forest fire. That couldn’t be helped.
And a forest fire was a hell of a lot less dangerous than what came next, anyway.
“All Highball elements,” Huber said, “reverse and hold until ordered to take assault positions.”
He’d have liked to put his cars under the hillcrest right now, but he didn’t dare do so with the fire so bad on the slope where they’d have to wait. It was one thing to drive through the inferno at speed, trusting nose filters and the temperature-stable fabric of the Slammers’ uniforms. Those weren’t enough protection that troopers could twiddle their thumbs in Hell and still be ready for action, though.
“And troopers?” he added. “Those scouts had their only free pass. If they come back for another look at us, shoot fast and shoot to kill! Six out.”
Fencing Master slowed to a halt, then rotated deliberately on its axis without touching the ground. Huber wasn’t sure whether Padova was showing off or if she was simply so good that she executed the difficult maneuver without thinking about it.
“Six, this is Two-six!” Lieutenant Messeman said excitedly on the command channel. “They took the bait! They’re coming, it looks like four waves! Two-six over!”
Messeman’s Fandancer was a half kilometer closer to the enemy than Fencing Master, so its sensors provided a sharper picture than Huber’s of what was going on across the river. The Command and Control unit synthesized inputs from every vehicle in the task force, though, so Messeman’s report—while proper—wasn’t news to Highball Six.