He felt taut. He wasn’t nervous, but he was trying to spread his mind to cover everything around him. The task was beyond human ability, as part of Arne Huber’s soap-bubble thin consciousness was well aware.
The fire team leader started laughing over the command push. The sound was wholly unexpected—and because of that, more disconcerting than a burst of shots.
“Charlie Four-six, report!” Captain Sangrela snarled. He sounded angry enough to have slapped his subordinate if she’d been within arm’s length. Huber wouldn’t have blamed him. . . .
“Imagery coming, sir,” the sergeant replied; suppressing her laughter, but only barely.
Huber raised his visor and used the Command and Control box to project the view from the sergeant’s helmet where everybody in the car could see it. The hologram of a sheep stared quizzically at him. Behind the nearest animal stretched a hillside panorama of sheep turning their heads and a startled boy holding a long bamboo pole.
“Sierra Six to Sierra,” Captain Sangrela said in a neutral tone. “Resume previous order of march. Out.”
Fencing Master lurched as Learoyd adjusted his nacelles again. The bow skirts gouged a divot of the loose soil, but the car’s forward motion blew it behind them.
“Blood and Martyrs!” said Sergeant Deseau. “Curst if I’m not ready to blast a few a’ them sheep just for the fright they give me!”
“Save your ammo, Frenchie,” Huber said. “I guess we’ll have plenty of things to kill before this mission’s over.”
The sun was an hour above the horizon, Task Force Sangrela had been in the fringe forest for longer than that. Fencing Master was in the trail position, last of the ten vehicles. Foghorn was a hundred meters ahead where Huber could’ve caught glimpses of her iridium hull if he’d tried.
He didn’t bother. His job was to check the sensor suite, oriented now to the rear, and that was more than enough to occupy the few brain cells still working in his numb mind.
Tranter was driving again; the ride was noticeably smoother than either of the troopers could’ve managed, even when they were fresh. Learoyd was curled beneath his tribarrel, asleep and apparently as comfortable as he’d have been back in barracks.
Because they were in the drag position in the column, Deseau wasn’t at his forward-facing tribarrel. Instead he crouched in the corner behind Huber, cradling a 2-cm shoulder weapon in the crook of his arm. It fired the same round as the tribarrels, but it was self-loading instead of being fully automatic. A single 2-cm charge in the right place was enough to put paid to most targets.
Mauricia Orichos had sunk into herself, seated between Learoyd’s head and Deseau across the rear of the fighting compartment. She didn’t look any more animated than a lichen on a rock. Huber knew how she felt: the constant vibration reduced mind and body alike to jelly.
This run’d get over, or Arne Huber would die. Either’d be an acceptable change.
A red light pulsed at the upper left corner of the display. Fully alert, Huber straightened and locked his faceshield down. “Frenchie,” he snapped. “Take over on the sensors!”
Huber cued the summons, turning his faceshield into a virtual conference room. He sat at a holographic plotting table with the other task force officers—Mitzi Trogon blinked into the net an instant after Huber did; Myers and Captain Sangrela were already there—and Colonel Hammer himself.
The imagery wavered. It was never fuzzy, but often it had a certain over-sharpness as the computer called up stock visuals when the transmitted data were insufficient.
To prevent jamming and possible corruption, Central was communicating with the task force in tight-beam transmissions bounced from cosmic ray ionization tracks. The Regiment’s signals equipment used the most advanced processors and algorithms in the human universe to adjust for breaks and distortion. Even so, links to vehicles moving at speed beneath scattered vegetation were bound to be flawed.
“There’s a battalion of the Wolverines on the way to block you,” the Colonel said without preamble. “We operated alongside them once—Sangrela, you probably remember on Redwood?”
“Roger that,” Sangrela said, rubbing his chin with the knuckles of his left fist. “Anti-tank specialists, aren’t they?”