He grinned through his visor and added, “Sometimes it’s more important that I’m Fencing Master’s left wing gunner than that I command Platoon F-3.”
The scouts patrolled a klick ahead of whichever vehicle was leading the main body. The combat cars and infantry would rotate through White Section every hour under the present conditions, more frequently if the terrain got challenging.
Huber had picked Sergeant Nagano’s car to start out in the lead because it’d been so badly battered at Northern Star. If last night’s massive repairs weren’t going to hold up, Huber wanted to know about it now—by daylight and long before the enemy started reacting to Task Force Sangrela.
“Sierra Six to Sierra,” Sangrela ordered in a hoarsely taut voice. “Red Section—” the main body, with Fencing Master leading two tanks, followed by the recovery vehicles and the last two tanks “—move out. Over.”
“That’s us, Tranter,” Huber ordered on the intercom channel. “Hold us at thirty kph until the whole section’s under way, got that?”
They planned to average sixty kph on the run, putting them in Midway exactly twenty-four hours from this moment, including breaks to switch drivers and the stretches of bad terrain that’d hold down their speed. Ordinarily on this sort of smooth ground they’d have belted along at the best speed the infantry could manage on skimmers, close to 100 kph. Sierra had to build speed gradually, however, or the vehicles would scatter themselves too widely to support each other in event of enemy action.
Which was certain to come; more certain than any trooper in Task Force Sangrela could be of seeing the next sunrise.
Sergeant Tranter brought Fencing Master up from a dead halt as smoothly as if he were twisting a rheostat. He’d been a maintenance technician, so he’d learned to drive armored vehicles by shifting them—frequently badly damaged—around one another in the tight confines of maintenance parks. He’d stopped being a tech when a hydraulic jack blew out, dropping a tank’s skirts to a concrete pad and pinching his right leg off as suddenly as lightning.
The mechanical leg was in most respects as good as the original one, but in serious cold the organic/electrical interface degraded enough to send the limb into spasms. The Regiment had offered Tranter the choice of retirement on full pay or a rear-echelon job he could do in a heated building. He’d chosen the latter, a berth in Logistics Section.
Summer temperatures on Plattner’s World never dropped below the level of mildly chilly. If Regimental command was willing to make an exception, there was nobody Arne Huber would’ve preferred driving his car than Tranter.
Huber looked over his shoulder, twisting his body at the waist because the clamshell armor stiffened his neck and upper torso. The lead tank, Dinkybob, lifted to follow thirty meters behind Fencing Master. Mitzi’s driver echeloned the big vehicle slightly to the right of Tranter’s line to stay out of the combat car’s dust. That was fine on a grain-field like this, but pretty soon Task Force Sangrela would be winding through hillside scrub where the big vehicles’d feel lucky to have one route.
Well, troopers got used to dust pretty quick. The only thing they knew better was mud. . . . The commo helmets had nose filters that dropped down automatically and static charges to keep their faceshields clear, but on a run like this Huber knew to expect a faintly gritty feeling every time he blinked. The ration bars he ate on the move would crunch, too.
The tribarrels were sealed against dust—until you had to use them. It didn’t take much grit seeping down the ejection port to jam mechanisms as precise as those in the interior of an automatic weapon.
Captain Orichos swayed awkwardly, uncertain of what she could safely grab or sit on. She was familiar with aircars and thought this would be the same. She hadn’t realized that terrain affected the ride of air cushion vehicles—not as much as it affected wheels and treads, but still a great deal.
She caught Huber’s glance and waved a hand in frustration. “I’d expected the floor to vibrate,” she said. “But the jolting—what does that? I didn’t feel anything like that when I rode here with Major Pritchard.”