Another option—the one Huber would’ve picked—was to have halted well beyond the twenty-kilometer range of the Firelords’ bombardment rockets and let Battery Alpha clear the problem. Again the calliopes were the difficulty. Saturating the Firelords’ air defenses would require much of the ammunition the battery was carrying, and there wouldn’t be any resupply until after—and if—the Regiment captured Port Plattner.
Which left the third option, Flasher Six dealing with the Firelords in his own good time and fashion, while Task Force Huber took whatever was thrown at them. Maybe next time his troopers’d be dishing it out while somebody else drew fire. . . .
The sensor display gave Huber the warning: not movement but a radio signal from the hills overlooking the broad pass to the north. A Solace lookout was signaling back to headquarters near the lakeside.
“Highball!” Huber called. He didn’t aim his own gun; he had other duties. “Tar—”
Deseau must’ve expected an outpost and set his AI to caret RF sources. Most civilians would be using land lines, but a mercenary unit would generally depend on its own communications system. While Huber was still speaking, Frenchie acted. A three-round ranging burst hiss/CRACKed from his tribarrel, vivid even in sunlight.
“—get at vector zero-seven degrees, radio trans—”
Nobody was good enough to hit a target ten kilometers away with his first shot. Deseau adjusted his aim, dialed up the magnification on his holographic sights, and engaged the gun’s stabilizer. Learoyd leaned over his own gun, importing the target information from Deseau’s weapon instead of duplicating the effort.
“—mitter. Fire at—”
Deseau and Learoyd fired together. Their tribarrels spat streams in near parallel, merging optically as they snapped through the sunlight ahead of the task force.
“—will!”
The distant slope winked—cyan from the impacting plasma, red and gushing gray steam where brush burned explosively. There was a burp of orange and the radio signal cut off.
“Got ’em!” Deseau shouted as he and Learoyd took their thumbs from their triggers. He wasn’t on intercom, but Huber could easily hear his excited voice. “Got the bastards!”
Fancy Pants and Three-eight ripped ropes of blue-green hellfire toward the pass. A stretch of hillside where the vegetation was dry began to burn with some enthusiasm. Another gun, this one from F-2 aiming past the X-Ray vehicles, joined in.
“Cease fire!” Huber ordered. “Six to Highball, cease fire! Save your gunbarrels, troopers, because we’re going to need them bad. Out!”
“Here it comes,” Deseau said, reading the flicker of saffron from beyond the mouth of the valley. “For what we are about to receive, the Lord make us thankful.”
The sensor suite analyzed the sound some ten seconds after Frenchie had correctly identified the exhaust flashes reflected from clouds of dust: rocket motors igniting, sixty of them rippling in groups of six every second. A Firelord battery had just launched half the rockets on its six trucks.
“Fox elements,” Huber said, “put all your guns, I repeat all your guns in air defense mode. Have your backup weapons ready to deal with ground threats.”
He pressed his hands against his armored chest to keep from balling them into fists till they cramped.
“Troopers,” he went on, “this is going to be hard but we’re going to do it. Hold station on Three-six, watch for problems on the ground, and let our gunnery computers do their job. They can handle it if anything can. Six out. Break.”
The armored vehicles bucked through the muck of the paddies, throwing up curtains of spray to the rear and sides. The mid-afternoon sun struck it into rainbows, dazzlingly beautiful over the bright green rice plants.
“Padova,” Huber continued, “keep picking up the pace as long as the rest of Highball can stay with us. Don’t let ’em string out, but the Firelords may not have us under direct observation. I’d like to be somewhere other than they calculate. Out.”
“Roger,” the driver said. She sounded focused but not concerned. Huber couldn’t tell without checking whether Fencing Master’s speed increased, but he figured he’d delegated the decision to the person best able to make it.
Deseau set the tribarrels on air defense; the guns lifted their triple muzzles toward the northern sky like hounds casting for a distant scent. He took his 2-cm weapon out of the clip that held it to his gun’s pintle; Learoyd held his sub-machine gun in his right hand as he snapped the loading tube out of the receiver, then in again to make sure it had locked home. Huber grinned tightly and drew his own 2-cm weapon from its muzzle-down nest between ammo boxes at the rear of the compartment.