The column got moving in fits and starts; a combat car did run into the back of the tank preceding it. Huber’s helmet damped the sound, but the whole fabric of Fencing Master shivered in sympathy to the impact of a thirty-tonne hammer hitting a hundred-and-seventy-tonne anvil.
“Via, that’ll hold us up for the next three hours!” Sergeant Deseau snarled. “We’ll be lucky if we get away before bloody dawn!”
Huber thought the same. Instead the detachment commander just growled, “Unit, hold your intervals,” as his vehicle proceeded down the road on the set course.
“Dumb bastard,” Deseau muttered. “Dicked around all that time for nothing, and now he’s going to put the hammer down and string the column out to make up the time he lost.”
That was close enough to Huber’s appreciation of what was going on that he didn’t bother telling the sergeant to shut up. He grinned beneath his faceshield. Under the circumstances, a lieutenant couldn’t claim to have any authority over the enlisted men with him except what they chose to give him freely.
The tank got moving again smoothly; its driver at least knew how to handle his massive vehicle. Tanks weren’t really clumsy, and given the right terrain and enough time they were hellaciously fast; but the inertia of so many tonnes of metal required the driver to plan her maneuvers a very long way ahead.
The collision hadn’t sprung the skirts of the following combat car, so it was able to proceed also. Its driver kept a good hundred and fifty meters between his vehicle’s dented bow slope and the tank’s stern. The rest of the column trailed the three leaders out of Central Repair and into the nighted city beyond.
Tranter lifted Fencing Master’s skirts with a greasy wobble, then set the car sliding forward. They passed the guard blower at the gate and turned left. Huber waved at the trooper in the fighting compartment; he—or she—waved back, more bored than not.
“Tranter, when we make the corner up ahead,” Huber ordered, “cut your headlights and running lights. Can you drive using just your visor’s enhancement?”
“Roger,” the driver said calmly. Behind them the guard vehicle was pulling back across the compound’s gateway; ahead, the last of the cars in the detachment proper slid awkwardly around an elbow in the broad freight road leading west and eventually out of Benjamin.
Even here in the center of the administrative capital of the UC, there were more trees than houses. The locals built narrow structures three or four stories high, with parking for aircars either beneath the support pilings or on rooftop landing pads. Most of the windows were dark, but occasionally they lighted as armored vehicles howled slowly by on columns of air.
Even without lights, Fencing Master wasn’t going to pass unnoticed in Senator Graciano’s neighborhood of expensive residences. This’d have to be a quick in and out; or at least a quick in.
Tranter was keeping a rock-solid fifty-meter interval between him and the stern of Red Eight. He seemed to judge what the driver ahead would do well before that fellow acted.
“Start opening the distance, Tranter,” Huber said, judging their position on the terrain display against the quivering running lights of Red Eight. “We’ll peel off to the right at the intersection half a kay west of our present position. As soon as Red Eight’s out of sight, goose it hard. We’ve got eighteen hundred meters to cover, and I want to be there before they have time to react to the sound of our fans.”
“Roger,” Tranter said. He still didn’t sound nervous; maybe he was concentrating on his driving.
And maybe the technician didn’t really understand what was about to happen. Well, there were a lot of cases where intellectual understanding fell well short of emotional realities.
Fencing Master slowed almost imperceptibly; the fan note didn’t change, but Tranter cocked the nacelles toward the vertical so that their thrust was spent more on lifting the car than driving it forward. Red Eight ahead had gained another fifty meters by the time its lights shifted angle, then glittered randomly through the trees of a grove that the road twisted behind.