Huber smiled grimly behind the anonymity of his faceshield. “Resting” wasn’t a good word to describe what the infantry was going through, jolting around in the back of a wrenchmobile. Though this was a hard ride for the troops in the armored vehicles, it was a lot worse for the infantry. But Via! every soul in the Slammers was a volunteer.
They were climbing a slope of harder rock than most of the surroundings—a spine of sandstone from which time had worn away the limestone overburden. The top was bald except for patches of wiry grass and a few saplings whose roots had found purchase in a crack. A fresh scar across the stone showed where Foghorn had dragged her skirts.
“Sierra, thirty seconds to execute!” snapped Captain Sangrela over the general push.
Huber rested his left hand on the receiver of his tribarrel and looked over his shoulder. Fifty meters behind Fencing Master, Dinkybob, a massive iridium tortoise, snorted up the slight rise. The tank’s hatches were buttoned up; as Huber watched, the turret swung to starboard. The squat 20-cm main gun elevated very slightly.
Mauricia Orichos raised her faceshield to watch the tank. Huber reached over her shoulder and clicked the protection back over her eyes. “Not now!” he said sharply. “Aide—”
As Huber voice-cued his AI, he manually keyed the pad over Orichos’ right ear to link her helmet to his.
“—import targeting from Delta Two-six.”
With the final word, Huber viewed not his immediate surroundings but the sight picture from the gunnery screen of the huge tank just behind him. It was at high magnification, so high that it had the glassy smoothness of images heavily retouched by the computer to sharpen them.
Five waves of large aircars skimmed undulating, almost barren, terrain. There were four vehicles in the leading ranks and three in the final, all echeloned right. They’d just crossed a ridgeline and were nosing down to cross a shallow valley.
Dinkybob’s sight pipper settled over the lead vehicle in the left file. Instead of being a solid orange ball, the reticle was crosshatched to indicate that the fire-control computer was auto-targeting just as it would do in air defense mode.
The cyan flash of the main gun stabbed across Huber’s bare skin like a separate needle every millimeter. It would’ve been instantly blinding to anyone looking toward it without a faceshield’s polarizing protection. The crash of heated air—louder than an equally close thunderbolt—shook Fencing Master. Deseau, jounced from his squat, sprawled across Huber’s feet.
The center of the targeted aircar erupted in blue flame. The bow and a fragment of the stern tumbled out of the sky, spilling such of the contents as hadn’t been carbonized by the blast.
Dinkybob continued to fire, ripping the formation as quickly as her gun mechanism could cycle fresh loads into the chamber. Trogon was burning out her barrel by shooting without giving the bore time to cool between rounds. For the people in Fencing Master’s fighting compartment, the volley was like being whipped by a scorpion’s tail.
For the Wolverines at the other end, it was a brief glimpse of Hell.
A tank hit at that range—eighty-one kilometers distant—might have shrugged off the bolt with damage only to its external sensors and its running gear. It was impossible for a vehicle that had to fly with a heavy cargo the way the Wolverines’ trucks did to be armored like a tank. Each bolt scattered its target in a fireball of its own burning structure.
Dinkybob was nearing the edge of the bald patch, but Doomsayer was immediately behind. For an instant both 20-cm guns fired in tight syncopation; then Fencing Master drove into heavy forest, Dinkybob passed out of its targeting window, and even Doomsayer’s main gun ceased firing. Huber’s heartbeat throbbed in the silence.
The summons wobbled at the corner of Huber’s faceshield. He cued it, dropping into the virtual conference room again.
Colonel Hammer looked around the circle of Sierra officers. “That’s fourteen out of nineteen trucks destroyed,” he said, “and two of the others grounded hard enough to break as best we can tell by satellite.”
Hammer grinned like a shark. “Task accomplished, troopers. Complete the rest of the mission the same way and there’ll be a lot of promotions out of this business. Dismissed!”