“Roger,” Huber said, feeling a familiar curtain fall between him and his present surroundings. His hands were trembling, but that’d stop as soon as he placed them back on his tribarrel’s grips. “Break. All Highball units, reduce speed to ten kay-pee-aitch but continue on the plotted course. The wogs must have some kind of sensors, and I want any data they get to show we’re still moving southwest for as long as possible.”
He took a deep breath and continued, “They’re coming, troopers. India elements, we’re depending on you—but you can count on the rest of us to help as soon as you stick it to them. Six out.”
He grimaced and rubbed his palms on his body armor. He wanted to grab the tribarrel, but it wasn’t time yet. Lord! he was keyed up.
“Hey El-Tee,” Deseau said over the intercom. “Learoyd and me got a bet on who gets the most wogs this time. You want a piece of it? A case of beer to the winner.”
“Hell, yes!” Huber said, grinning with the release of tension. “Though one case isn’t going to cut the thirst I’m working up on this run.”
He turned his gaze back on the C&C display. Nineteen armored cars had driven down the slope and were crossing the Salamanca, in some confusion because the ford wasn’t wide enough to take them all in a single passage.
Huber’d expected the Solace hovercraft to be able to skitter across the water’s surface, but though they weighed much less than his combat cars, their power-to-weight ratio wasn’t as high either. They needed to be able to touch their skirts to the bottom. When two on the upstream end had gotten deeper than that, they’d stalled.
A second line of twenty-three armored cars had just pulled over the crest to follow. The remainder of the squadron, forty vehicles—a mixture of armored cars and headquarters vehicles—lined the far ridgeline with only a meter or two between their bulging skirts.
Under other circumstances Huber would’ve kept his combat cars where they were and delightedly called in artillery, but the target was too close for Battery Alpha and Central’s movement orders had made it clear that every task force was on its own. The operation was more important than the problems of any individual element.
The first wave of armored cars started up the southern slope. For the most part they advanced at the speed of a walking man, but several of the drivers seemed to think speed was protection and drew ahead. They were wrong, of course, but their timid fellows weren’t going to survive the morning either if things went the way Huber planned.
“All Fox units,” he ordered, “reverse course and take up attack positions. X-Ray units, reverse but hold in place till ordered. Execute. Six out!”
Fencing Master rotated smoothly. Padova dipped the skirts to the ground this time so that she wouldn’t run Fencing Master up the stern of Foghorn whose driver had bobbled the maneuver.
Huber wrung his hands together, wishing he had real-time imagery from the other side of the ridge. Red beads moving on a landscape of green contour lines didn’t give him the feel of big vehicles shouldering their way through the scrub, their fans whirling sluggish fires to new life as their paired 3-cm cannon probed the crest above them. The Solace gunners would be ready to shoot if a cloud blew across their sight picture; they’d remember the way a dozen cars like their own had been reduced to flaming wreckage a few minutes before.
Fencing Master began to accelerate, holding interval. Both platoons were returning to the positions they’d held on the reverse slope before the initial skirmish. Foghorn roared through what had been a burning treetop before the six cars ahead had driven over it. Now it was a swirl of sparks, eddying out from beneath her skirts and curling back through the intakes into the plenum chamber again. Sergeant Nagano and his crew hunched over their guns, their hands clamped into their armpits for protection.
Fencing Master followed into a surge of heat with occasional prickles where sparks found bare skin. It was like being in a swamp full of biting insects, frustrating and unpleasant but not life-threatening, not unless you let it drive the real dangers out of your mind. Beyond the first obstacle was what had been a glade and now was so many vertical pillars of flame; they drove through that also. In another thirty seconds, it would be time.