Huber grinned. “You rode here in a convoy travelling at the speed of heavily loaded supply vehicles, with the number two man in the Slammers aboard. Sierra has different priorities. Even on these fields, the front skirt digs in every time there’s a little dip or rise in the ground. It’ll get a lot worse when we start working along the sides of the foothills we’re scheduled to hit pretty soon.”
“Then it’s always like this?” she asked. Deliberately she lifted her faceshield, squinting slightly against the wind blast. She quirked the wry smile he’d seen the night before as she discussed the moral courage of elected officials.
“No, not always,” Huber said, raising his own shield to give Orichos a much broader smile than the one he’d been wearing before. “Sometimes they’re shooting at us, Captain.”
“Sierra Six to Sierra,” Captain Sangrela said. “Blue Section, move out.”
Blue Section was the two remaining combat cars under Platoon Sergeant Jellicoe. They’d follow the main body at a kilometer’s distance, extending the column’s sensor range to the rear by that much. There wasn’t a high likelihood that the enemy would sweep up on the task force from behind, but some of the mercenary units Solace was known to have hired had equipment with sufficient performance to manage it.
The cars in Blue Section would rotate at the same intervals as the scouts did. Either Huber or Jellicoe would be at the front or rear of the column—but never both at the same end.
“Then I guess I’d better get used to it, hadn’t I?” Orichos said. She spread her left hand over her eyes to shield them as she surveyed the terrain. She added, “Have you been with Hammer’s Slammers long, Lieutenant?”
“Five years,” Huber said, facing forward and lowering his faceshield so that Orichos could do the same. “I entered the Military Academy on Nieuw Friesland with the intention of enlisting in the Regiment when I graduated . . . and I did.”
The scouts were already into the gullied scrubland that the task force would grind through for the first half of the route. Central had timed the departure from Northern Star so that Sierra would be in pitch darkness while it navigated the last of the foothills south of Point territory where forests resumed.
Until the task force set off, the enemy would assume the Slammers intended to return to UC territory after capturing Northern Star. It’d take the Solace command time to react when they realized the Slammers’ real intent. The most dangerous ambush sites were in the foothills; by waiting till noon to set off, the task force would have the advantage of the Regiment’s more sophisticated night vision equipment in that last stretch which the enemy might reach in time to block them.
Huber hoped the Colonel was right; but then, he hoped a lot of things, and his tribarrel was ready to take care of whatever reality threw at them. You couldn’t always blast your way through problems, but the ability to out-slug the other fellow never stopped being an advantage.
“Do you know much about the political structure of the Point, Lieutenant?” Orichos asked. Since her voice came through the commo helmet, she could’ve been standing anywhere on the planet—but Huber was very much aware of her presence beside and just behind him.
“Not a thing, ma’am,” he admitted. “I studied the United Cities some from the briefing cubes because they were hiring us, but I didn’t look at the rest of you folks.”
He touched the controller with his left hand, projecting an image remoted from Foghorn into the air before him. The scout car was bulling through brush already. The stems were wiry enough to spring back after Foghorn passed, but they were too thin to be a barrier to a thirty-tonne vehicle.
He hoped what he’d just said didn’t sound too much like, “I’m not interested in you dumb wogs;” which wasn’t true for Arne Huber himself but pretty well summed up the attitude of a lot of Slammers, officers as well as line troopers like Sergeant Deseau. Trooper Learoyd wasn’t likely to have thoughts so abstract.
“Midway’s the only city in the Point,” Orichos said. “We’re not like Trenchard or the UC where there’s half a dozen places each as big as the next. There’s a quarter million people in Midway, and no town as big as a thousand in all the rest of the country.”