Arne Huber swayed in the rumbling fighting compartment of his combat car, thinking about what the Colonel had just said. Promotion—maybe.
But if they didn’t complete the mission, very probably death. Well, the Slammers were all volunteers. . . .
* * *
The muzzle of Dinkybob’s main gun had cooled from white to a red so deep it was mostly a shimmer in the air around the hot metal. Mitzi’s turret hatch was open, dribbling a trail of gray haze. A plastic matrix held the copper atoms in alignment for release as plasma down the powergun’s bore; the smoke was the last of the breakdown products from the recent shooting.
An alert wobbled on the upper right corner of Huber’s faceshield. He crooked his left little finger, one of six ways he could cue the icon. It was a download-only channel, information from Central for Sierra Six. Huber and the other task force officers were brought into the circuit to listen but not to comment.
“Sierra, this is Operations Three-four-one,” said the voice from somewhere back in Base Alpha. “Solace command is pissed about what you did to the Wolverines. They’ve ordered a fire mission by all batteries that can range you. You’ll have to take care of your own air defense. Any questions? Over.”
Though voice-only, the increasingly thick foliage overhead attenuated the transmission to sexlessness. On this side of the ridge, the task force was descending into healthy coastal forest.
“What do you mean ‘all batteries’?” Captain Sangrela asked. He sounded more irritable than concerned. “Is this a real problem? Over.”
“Negative on a real problem,” Central replied calmly. It was easy to be calm in Base Alpha, of course. “There’s two, maybe three off-planet batteries with rocket howitzers and carrier shells. We’ll get you time and vector data as soon as they fire, but you’ll have plenty of room to pop them before the carriers separate. Besides that, the Solace Militia has thirty or forty conventional tubes that can range you with rocket assisted rounds, but they won’t have any payload to speak of after what the booster rocket requires. I repeat, you’ll have full data soonest. Over”
“Roger, Sierra out,” Sangrela said. “Break, Fox Three-six—”
The signal now was coming through the task force command channel.
“—that puts it on your cars. Is there going to be any problem? Over.”
“No problem, Six,” Huber said curtly. “Just give me a minute to plan. Out.”
He raised his faceshield and brought up a terrain display through the Command and Control box. On cue the AI highlighted the locations on or near Sierra’s forward track which provided a line of sight toward the arc of territory where the hostile guns might be sited.
The display used a violet overlay to mark ranges of thirty klicks and above; the hue moved down the spectrum as the range closed. Points from which a tribarrel could reach out five kilometers—as close as Huber was willing to let the sophisticated carrier shells get—were green.
A single carrier shell held a load of between three and several scores of bomblets, each with its own target-seeking head. When the carrier round opened to release them, the difficulties of defense went up by an order of magnitude.
Sergeant Tranter had traded jobs with Deseau. He turned from the forward tribarrel and asked, “Whatcha got, El-Tee?”
“Watch your sector!” Huber snapped in a blaze of frustration.
He’d apologize later. Tranter was a good driver and a great man to have on your team, but he was a technician and not—till this run—a combat crewman. He didn’t know by reflex that Huber was busy with something that likely meant all their lives if he did it wrong. Had Tranter realized that, he’d have kept his mouth shut.
The display showed what Huber expected but didn’t like to see: there were very few places along Sierra’s planned route that would let the tribarrels range out ten klicks, and even those were points. The combat cars wouldn’t be able to protect the column on the fly. They’d have to set up on the few patches where the ground was higher and relatively clear of vegetation.
Huber straightened. Learoyd scanned the car’s starboard flank with the bored certainty of a machine; Sergeant Tranter was as rigid as a statue at the forward gun—Via! I didn’t mean to bite his head off—and Captain Orichos was trying to watch all directions like a bird who’s heard a cat she can’t see.