“We’re working for the old guys, right?” Frosty said.
“Right,” Panchin said. “Hammer’s Slammers support the Sulewesi government. The rebels have a Council. I don’t guess there’s a lot to choose except who’s paying who.”
Sgt. Jonas straightened and patted the communicator. “Well, this thing’s fucked,” he said in a conversational tone. “I can’t get more than three words at a time from Scepter Base. If they’ve got a better fix on the missing column than we do, they can’t send it so I hear it.”
Hula Girl’s crew knew exactly where they were. Sulewesi had been mapped by satellite before the war broke out, and the combat car’s inertial navigation system was accurate to within a meter in a day’s travel. That didn’t tell the Slammers where the missing platoon of local troops was, though.
“So let’s go home,” Frosty said. He relaxed a catch of his clamshell body armor to scratch his armpit. “I’m not thrilled being out alone in Injun Country like this.”
“It might be the transmitter at Scepter Base,” Panchin said. He squeezed the edge of the bulkhead between thumb and forefinger to remind himself of how thick the armor was between him and hostile guns. “Goldman was working on it before the move. She said the traverse was getting wonky.”
“Fucking wonderful,” Cortezar said. “Just wonderful.”
Long-distance communications for Hammer’s Slammers on Sulewesi were by microwaves bounced off the momentary ionization tracks meteors drew in the upper atmosphere. The commo bursts were tight-beam and couldn’t be either jammed or intercepted by hostile forces.
That same directionality was the problem now. Unless the bursts were precisely aligned, they didn’t reach their destination. Hula Girl’s crew had been out of communication with the remainder of the force ever since Captain Stenhuber sent them off to find a column that had gotten separated from the main body during the change of base.
“Rita, ease us forward a half klick on this heading,” Jonas said. “We’ll check again there. If that doesn’t work we’ll head for the barn.”
He gave Ericssen a gloomy nod, then lifted his commo helmet with one hand to rub his scalp with the other. The sergeant was completely bald, though his eyebrows were unusually thick for a man of African ancestry.
“That won’t be too soon for me,” Frosty muttered.
Cortezar switched on the fans and let them spin for a moment before she flared the blades to lift the car. Even on idle the drive fans roared as they sucked air through the armored intake vents. There was no chance of hearing the missing column while the fans were running, though the acoustics of a landscape baffled with gullies, knolls, and clumps of brush up to four meters high made sound a doubtful guide here.
Hula Girl lifted with a greasy shudder. Sand sprayed through the narrow gap between the ground and the lower edge of the steel skirts enclosing the air cushion on which the combat car rode. A fusion bottle powered the eight drive fans. They in turn raised the pressure in the plenum chamber high enough to support the vehicle’s thirty tonnes on ground effect. A combat car couldn’t fly, but it could dance across quicksand or bodies of still water because the bubble of air spread the car’s weight evenly over any surface.
“What did the locals do before they had us for guide dogs?” Cortezar asked as she took Hula Girl down one of the channels winding though the desert. The car wasn’t moving much faster than a man could walk.
Wind and the occasional flash flood scoured away the soil here except where it was bound by rocks or the roots of plants. The desert vegetation stood on pedestals of its own making.
“They used positioning satellites,” Panchin said. “The whole constellation got blasted as soon as the shooting started.”
He’d read up on the planet when the Slammers took the Sulewesi Government contract. Mostly the line troopers didn’t bother with the briefing materials. The information usually didn’t affect mercenaries enough to matter more than a poker game did, but Panchin was interested.
“That puts both sides in the same leaky boat, don’t it?” Frosty asked. “You’d think they could’ve figured that out and left the satellites up so that we could get some sleep.”