“I did believe it, Frenchie,” he said. “But that’s all right—I’m just a line lieutenant. So long as I do my job, I can leave the rest to the Colonel.”
The Hogs lit the night with flaring backblasts, beginning to shower 200-mm missiles on the enemy. The roar shook the ground. Moving as smoothly as water swirling down a drain, 1st Squadron’s tanks and combat cars slid from the firebase, advancing toward Port Plattner twenty klicks away.
* * *
“Target!” said a machine voice in Huber’s ear as Fencing Master led the rest of F-3 out of the angled passage through the berm. His faceshield gave him a vector.
So far as Huber could tell, the careted point on the crest ten kilometers distant was a few meters of brush and low trees, no different from everything for a klick to either side, but you didn’t argue when Central told you to shoot. He laid his tribarrel on, careful not to overcorrect as the stabilizer fought with the combat car’s motion, and dialed up magnification as the sight picture slewed toward the target. Huber was using a false-color infrared display, so the caret was a black wedge thrusting down from the top of the image.
He actually saw them in the instant his thumbs squeezed: three soldiers wearing drapes that almost erased their thermal signature, pointing a passive observation device toward Firebase One. They’d remained hidden till now, so they must have just attempted to send information back to Port Plattner.
Huber grinned with fierce pride that the hiss/CRACK! of his tribarrel’s first round preceded the sound of Fencing Master’s other two guns by a fraction of a second. He didn’t often beat Frenchie and Learoyd to the punch, and neither did anybody else.
The eleven tanks of D Company—two more, deadlined for repairs but able to shoot, remained behind in the firebase for defense—had been first through the berm and were deploying across the wheat in line abreast. Colonel Hammer’s combat car and that of the S-3—Huber wondered whether Major Pritchard was in it, as he certainly would choose to be, or if he’d been forced to remain in the TOC to coordinate the attack—followed, taking the right of the tanks along with two five-car platoons of G Company; the remaining platoon and the command cars of Regimental HQ Section remained behind as base defense. Captain Gillig and the sergeant major were next out, followed by F-1, F-2, and finally F-3.
The engineers had sited the firebase on a low rise, so Fencing Master in the entrance was slightly above the vehicles already spreading out to the northwest. Central tasked Huber and his crew because they had the best line on the target. Huber’d chafed to wait for everybody else to get under weigh before his cars did, but it’d worked out after all.
There’s a lot of chance in life and especially in battle. Arne Huber just happened to be in the right place at the right time to send a burst of plasma bolts snapping straight as a plumb line into what till that instant was three enemy soldiers. His faceshield blocked their cyan core, but dazzle reflecting from the landscape quivered across his retinas.
Huber’s first round hit the observation device, probably a high-resolution thermal imager. It contained enough metal to erupt into a blaze of white and green sparks. After that it was hard to say who hit what, because the three tribarrels put ten or a dozen rounds apiece into the target.
Huber switched his gunsight back to its normal seven-point-five-degree field. The freshly-lit fire on the ridgeline was only a quiver at this distance. In the magnified image Huber had seen an arm fly from an exploding torso and white-hot fragments blasted from the granite outcrop behind the scouts.
His gunbarrels shimmered, sinking back from yellow heat. The cluster continued to spin, pulling air through the open breeches to cool the bores.
Padova followed the course Captain Gillig’s C&C box had programed. She didn’t ask about the shooting. Huber supposed she was scared—as the good Lord knew he was himself—but she’d shaken down just fine. She’d be driving Fencing Master until she got a promotion, which at the rate she was going wouldn’t be long.