An equipment park on the southwest side of the pad had taken a pasting from incendiaries. Hundreds of vehicles were alight. Every so often one erupted with greater enthusiasm like a bubble rising in a caldera to scatter blazing rock high in the air. Eight combat cars skirted the park to the south, moving fast. Their tribarrels raked the back side of the terminal building.
At the beginning of the war, Solace had started building concrete-roofed dugouts at intervals around the perimeter of Port Plattner. The work had stopped when Solace command realized that the Outer States were barely capable of defense, and even those completed—three of them in the sector Central had assigned to Huber’s troops—appeared to be unmanned.
Deseau and Learoyd had burned the firing slit of the southernmost to twice its original size. Now as Fencing Master swept around the squat structure, Learoyd depressed his tribarrel and fired a long burst down the entrance ramp at the back. The steel door gushed red sparks and ruptured inward, but there was no secondary explosion.
White flares popped from the roof of the terminal building. More flares followed from a dozen points across Port Plattner, including the northern perimeter where the Waldheim Dragoons had been fighting. “UC forces, we surrender!” a woman’s voice cried. “Terminal control surrenders, by the Lord’s mercy we surrender!”
She must have been using the port’s starship communications system because her high-output transmission blanketed all frequencies. Every floor of the terminal building was ablaze, but those were merely administrative offices. The actual control room was in a sub-basement, armored against the chance of a starship crash.
Fencing Master turned left, away from the base of the terminal. Padova dropped the car twice onto the sodded lawn to scrub off inertia that wanted to carry them into the burning building. The other Highball cars were braking in roostertails of red sparks as their skirts skidded on concrete. The terminal was a tower of flame, lashing the ground with pulses of heat.
“Sir, what should I do!” Padova said. They were moving slowly south along the face of the building, crushing ornamental shrubs under their skirts. Foghorn and Fancy Pants followed, while Lieutenant Messeman’s cars had halted on the other side of a wing-shaped entrance marquee which extended twenty meters from the front entrance.
“All Slammers units,” a familiar voice growled. “This is Regiment Six, troopers. Cease fire unless you’re fired on. Under no circumstances fire on the starships that’ll start landing shortly. Hammer out.”
Deseau tracked a man running across the pad to the left. He didn’t shoot, but he was touching the trigger. Huber hooked a thumb to back him off, then said, “Highball, we’ll laager a hundred meters back the way we came. Infantry in the center of the circle.”
He looked at the plot the C&C box suggested, approved it, and concluded, “Six out.”
That was far enough from the terminal building that they wouldn’t broil, though Huber wanted to keep Highball reasonably close to its objective until somebody got around to ordering them to move. The Lord knew when that’d be, given what the Colonel and his staff had on their plate right now.
The eight vehicles crossing the pad from the west slowed as they approached the terminal. Huber’s eyes narrowed: one was a command car, a high-sided box built on the chassis of a combat car to hold far more communications and display options than could be fitted into a C&C box. Mostly they were staff vehicles, though Huber knew a couple of line company commanders preferred them to combat cars.
The shooting had probably stopped, though it was hard to say because munitions continued to explode. That wouldn’t end for days, not with the number of fires burning across the huge port. You could get killed just as dead when a truck blew up as you could by somebody aiming at you. . . .
That reminded Huber of casualties. He checked the readout on his faceshield and saw to his pleased surprise that all the personnel were green—infantry included—except for a cross-hatched icon on Foghorn. “Three-one, what’s your casualty?” he said.
“Six, the right gun blew back and burned Quincy both arms,” Sergeant Nagano replied. “We got him sedated and covered in SpraySeal. He’ll be all right, I guess, but he won’t be much good in the field for a few months. Over.”