The timing worked the way Huber’d hoped and prayed. The Solace gunners, confused and half-disarmed by the number of rounds they’d fired into emptiness, couldn’t react to the sudden appearance of real targets; and the Slammers didn’t miss.
Fencing Master continued forward and over the hill. An armored car was stalled ten meters ahead, its guns traversed to the right. The gunner had tried to reply to the pair of troopers with shoulder weapons lying belly-down on the slope as they blew holes in the thin-walled plenum chamber. The vehicle’s cannon couldn’t depress low enough to hit them, and the five Solace infantrymen who’d leaped out of the rear compartment lay in a bloody tangle just beyond the hatch. This close, a 2-cm bolt vaporized a human torso and flung the head and limbs in separate parabolas.
Huber put a three-round burst into the car’s barbette; 3-cm ammunition in the loading tray gang-fired, devouring the breeches and mountings.
The cannon barrels tilted down. He didn’t bother firing into the hull. The Solace driver and gunner might well be unharmed, but they were no longer a danger to the task force.
Arne Huber didn’t kill people for pleasure: that was simply an aspect of his business.
His faceshield careted the smoke-shrouded net of air roots supporting a copse of thin trunks. He didn’t see a target—maybe he would’ve in infrared—but he mashed his trigger with both thumbs. His chain of cyan bolts reached out, spinning eddies in the white haze. A Solace armored car drove out, its hatches blown open and spewing oily black smoke. Huber’s nose filters were in place, but he nonetheless smelled cooking flesh as Fencing Master passed downwind of the target.
The smoke grew thicker. He switched from normal optics to thermal imaging.
An armored car stood broadside and motionless; had its crew already bailed out, hoping to be ignored and to survive? The AI called the vehicle a target, so Huber’s bolts punched at the forward compartment until something shorted and the car started to burn.
A man in a black Solace uniform ran in front of Fencing Master. Huber didn’t shoot him but somebody did, a single bolt; probably an infantryman who didn’t see any reason to quit just because the combat cars had joined the fight. Vehicles blew up, some of them so violently that the smoke now covering the valley surged and rippled like a pond in a hailstorm.
Fencing Master reached the river, its bank broken down by the armored cars which had recently crossed. At least a dozen were burning in the water or just beyond it. Huber’s faceshield cued the far slope. He elevated his tribarrel, noticing that the muzzles glowed white though he’d been trying to keep his bursts short.
Some of the Solace command vehicles were trying to escape. They couldn’t be allowed to. This battle had been a victory for Task Force Huber by anybody’s standards, but the fragments of the Solace squadron were still sufficient to do serious damage to the artillery vehicles if anybody got them organized.
Fencing Master plunged into the Salamanca, bucking forward in a rainbow of mist. Even drops of water could dissipate a powergun’s jet of plasma. Huber waited for the car to lift, concurrently flattening the curtain of spray, before he squeezed the trigger.
His burst struck the squared rear end of a communications van. The plating was so thin that the second round ignited the interior through the hole the first had blown; the three bolts that followed were probably overkill.
There was still shooting, some of it probably at real targets, but Huber’s faceshield didn’t highlight anything for his gun. Strung out to the right of the commo van, other headquarters vehicles belched smoke and flame. Tribarrels had ripped them open even more easily than they did the armored cars.
Via! That one was an ambulance. Well, worse things happen in wartime. . . .
“X-Ray elements, proceed across the ford at your best speed,” Huber ordered. He was panting and for a moment his vision blurred. “Fox Three elements, take overwatch positions on the north ridge. Fox Two elements, wait on the south side and escort X-Ray. India elements, recover to the X-Ray vehicles and mount up. You did a hell of a job.”