The driver jerked the control yoke convulsively, throwing the car belly forward and spilling the remaining gunman off the stern. The sergeant shot the falling man before he hit the water; the three troopers blew the car’s underside into fireballs of plastic paneling superheated into a mixture that exploded in the air.
“Blue Section, reverse!” Huber screamed. Sergeant Tranter was a trifle slower to spin Fencing Master than he should’ve been; Huber’d forgotten the driver didn’t have reflexes ingrained by combat like the rest of them did. “Move it! Move it! Move it!”
The ambush team didn’t need help. The aircar crashed edgewise onto a spine of rock sticking up from the water; it broke apart. The fourth Volunteer had been concentrating on detector apparatus feeding through a bulky helmet. He must’ve been strapped in; his arms flailed, but he didn’t get out of the car even when the wreckage slipped off the rocks and started to sink.
The river geysered as at least four and maybe twice that many 2-cm bolts hit the man and the water nearby. A bolt hit an upthrust rock; it burst like a grenade, shredding foliage on the bank with sharp fragments.
I guess the poor bastard’s not going to drown after all, Huber thought.
When Fencing Master reached the ambush site a few seconds later, the infantrymen had remounted their skimmers. Huber gestured them forward to put the combat car in drag position again.
“You were right, El-Tee,” said Deseau regretfully. “Not a bloody thing for us.”
One of the infantrymen waved back as he passed Fencing Master. He was now wearing a helical copper bracelet, its ends shaped like snakeheads.
Apparently the leader of the squad Huber shot it out with in Freedom Party headquarters hadn’t learned from that experience. Huber smiled coldly. The Slammers didn’t give anybody a third chance.
* * *
The alert signal brought Huber out of a doze; it was like swimming upward through hot sand. He’d jumped to his feet and had the tribarrel’s grips in his hands, straining for a target in his faceshield’s light-amplified imagery, before his conscious mind took over and he realized why he’d awakened.
Learoyd was driving. Sergeant Deseau was at the forward gun, as rested as anybody could be after eighteen hours of slogging through river-bottom vegetation. Huber wouldn’t have been able to drop off if he hadn’t been sure Frenchie was there to take up the slack. He’d needed the mental down-time badly, though. The shoot-out in Freedom Party headquarters had drained him more than he’d realized right after it happened.
But that was part of the past, a different world, and now the present was calling. “Fox Three-six acknowledging!” Huber said, and his helmet dropped him into the virtual meeting room with Colonel Hammer himself and the other officers of Task Force Sangrela. He’d been the last to arrive, but from the look of Mitzi Trogon—her mouth was half-open and her eyes looked like they were staring into oncoming headlights—she was in at least as bad a shape as he was.
“Troopers,” Hammer said, acknowledging his four subordinates with a glance that swept the table. The imagery was sharper than it’d been in the forest south of Midway; the sky above the Fiorno was fairly open. “There’s Volunteers setting up a blocking position on an island three hours ahead of you. There’s about two hundred men with buzzbombs and six calliopes if they’re not further reinforced.”
Hammer’s torso vanished into a slant view of a roughly oval island; it covered about as much of the river valley as the channels flowing to north and south of it. From the scale at the bottom of the image, the heavily wooded surface between the streams was on the order of a square kilometer.
“They’ve been flying in from Bulstrode Bay over the past hour,” Hammer said with a disbelieving shake of his head. “They apparently don’t realize that here at Base Alpha we can follow everything they’re doing, right down to who had grits for breakfast.”
Icons of red light marked hostile positions: calliopes on the forward curve of the island, and squads of infantry both on the island itself and on the north bank of the floodway. The Volunteers probably intended the mainland element to halt the task force in line along the shore where the calliopes could rake the Slammers from the flank.