Captain Orichos took a hand-held communicator from a belt pouch, stuck a throat mike against her larynx—it adhered to the skin of her neck, but it hadn’t clung to her fingers—and lifted the commo helmet enough to slip earphones under. As she entered codes on the handset, her eyes remained on the road ahead.
The scouts waited as ordered, the four infantrymen beside their skimmers to the left of Foghorn. They looked ragged and filthy—Huber glanced down at himself, his jacket sleeves a rusty color from the road grime, and grinned wearily—but they held their weapons with the easy care of veterans ready for whatever happened next.
Tranter throttled back and adjusted his nacelles to slow gently to a halt. He steered to bring Fencing Master up on Foghorn’s starboard side without fishtailing or dragging a jolting dust storm with the skirts.
The thought made Huber look over his shoulder. He trusted Sergeant Tranter to be able to drive safely, no matter how tired. The tank immediately behind them weighed 170 tonnes and its driver had probably had less rest than the car crewmen. Some of the infantry could drive and had been spelling the two-man crews of the tanks, but there was still a real chance that whoever was at Dinkybob’s control yoke wouldn’t notice that the vehicles ahead were stopped.
Orichos lowered her communicator and looked at Huber. “You’ll be camping on the grounds of the Assembly Building straight ahead,” she said over the intercom. “I informed my superiors that you were on the way. We can proceed immediately.”
Can we indeed? Huber thought. He didn’t let the irritation reach his face; it’d been a hard run for all of them. Instead of responding to Orichos, he said, “Sierra Six, this is Fox Three-six. The indig officer riding with me says that that we can go straight on in to the Assembly Building and set up around it. Do you have any direction for me? Over.”
The jeep pulled alongside Fencing Master. Captain Sangrela sat braced in the passenger seat, his holographic display a shimmer before him as he looked up at Huber. “Via, yes!” he snarled. “Let’s get to where we’re going so we can bloody dismount! Move out, Three-six. Sierra Six out.”
Dinkybob had managed to slow to a halt. So did the vehicles following, though as Huber looked back he noticed one of the later tanks swing wide to the left when its driver awoke to the fact that he was in danger of overrunning whoever was stopped ahead of him.
“Roger, Six,” Huber said, keeping his tone even. “Three-six out. Break. Tranter, start on up the street. Keep it at twenty kph and—”
“And don’t run over any locals,” he’d started to say, but there wasn’t any risk of that. The words would’ve done nothing but shown his own ill-temper.
“—and maybe we’ll have a chance to rest pretty quick.”
Huber’s muscles were so wobbly that he wasn’t sure he’d be able to walk any distance when he got down from the combat car. The clamshell had chafed him over the shoulders, his hip bones, and at several points on his rib cage. He itched everywhere, especially the skin of his hands and throat; they’d been exposed to the ozone, cartridge gases, and iridium vaporized from the gunbores when the tribarrels raked incoming shells from the sky.
Fencing Master lifted and started forward, building speed to an easy lope. The roadway was smooth, a welcome relief from the slopes and outcrops they’d been navigating for the last long while. Dust billowed from beneath the skirts, a vast gulp initially but settling into a wake that rolled out to either side.
Even before the recovery vehicles had halted, the infantrymen pitched off to port and starboard on their skimmers. The infantry platoon, C-1, had left the jeep-mounted tribarrels of its Heavy Weapons Squad behind in Base Alpha. The gun jeeps weren’t needed for the original mission, the capture of Northern Star Farm, because there the infantry was to operate in close conjunction with combat cars in open country. The soft-skinned jeeps would be easy targets for an enemy and wouldn’t add appreciably to the firepower of the task force.