“Roger Three-six,” Captain Sangrela said. “Delta units, follow the contour lines north. Looks to me like two hundred meters will let you cross safely. Six out.”
Fencing Master lifted itself with a jerk onto higher, harder ground. Tranter paused a moment before readjusting the fans, checking to be sure that mud and water plants hadn’t choked any of the intake ducts. The combat car built up speed again, shedding weed and watery mud like a dog emerging from a pond.
Mauricia Orichos dabbed at the muck staining her uniform, managing only to spread the stain until she gave up the pointless exercise. She noticed Huber’s glance and smiled faintly.
“I suppose it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m used to thinking in . . . urban terms, I suppose.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Huber agreed. Especially if we’re all dead in the next thirty seconds, but he didn’t let that last thought reach his tongue.
He heard the incoming shells at first as a distant friction in the sky. With shocking suddenness their howl filled the whole world and still grew louder. Sergeant Deseau hunched over the forward gun, aware that it was friendly fire aimed to impact half a klick ahead of Fencing Master; aware also that mistakes happen, that even the most technologically advanced shells land short occasionally, and that no fire is friendly when it’s coming in on your position.
The Gendarmery captain’s face went blank; her eyes opened wide. For a moment Huber thought she was going to throw herself as close to flat as she could get in the crowded fighting compartment, but she recovered her composure when she noticed he wasn’t taking any action.
“It’s all right,” he explained. “This is the prep that’s—”
The shells burst directly overhead with four distinct pops. The opened casings spilled the separate white streaks of over a thousand bomblets toward the ground ahead of Fencing Master. They whistled like a symphony for chalk on blackboards.
“—going to land on the—”
The timing was slightly off: Fencing Master tore through the last screen of feather-fronded vegetation a second before instead of a few seconds after the bomblets struck the Volunteer positions. The mid-channel island was a green mass against the tannin-black water. Near the shore the foliage was the same sort of lush shrubbery that Task Force Sangrela had ground through on the route from Midway, but there were some sizeable trees a hundred meters back from the bank.
The landscape disintegrated in crackling white flashes, snarling and sparkling for almost five seconds. A pall of mud and shredded greenery lifted several meters high, then settled back on a barren wasteland. Only memory could say that eastern half of the island and the spit of riverbank to the north of it had been covered by dense vegetation a moment before.
A cyan flash blew a temporary crater in the mud: a calliope’s ammunition had detonated. A wheel spun skyward, then fell back and splashed into the river.
The scout infantry had grounded their skimmers at the moment of impact. Now they lifted again and resumed their course, four fingers feeling Sierra’s path across the trackless terrain. Fencing Master snorted a hundred meters behind, the iridium fist ready to punch if the infantry touched anything.
“Not a bloody thing for us, El-Tee,” Deseau said. “Not a bloody thing.”
The firecracker rounds had left a haze of explosive residue and finely divided soil above the island, blurring its shape, but Huber knew there’d have been little more to see even without that blanket. The rolling blasts had pulped everything in the impact area. Except for the single wheel, there’d been no sign of two hundred enemy soldiers and their equipment.
His nose wrinkled. That wasn’t quite true. Besides the prickle of ozone and the sickening sweetness of explosive, the air had a tinge of burned flesh.
Fencing Master bucked into the undisturbed vegetation beyond the line which shell fragments had scythed. When the professionals sat down to the table, war stopped being a game for street thugs wearing uniforms. The Volunteers at ground zero here hadn’t had time to learn that, but the folks who’d given them their orders must be thinking hard about the future by now.