Jonas tilted the muzzles of his tribarrel skyward and tapped out three spaced rounds on the butterfly trigger between the grips. Each bolt of copper plasma lit the night cyan. Heated air cracked shut behind each hissing discharge.
“Head for the flare, Rita,” the sergeant ordered. “But take it easy—I want to raise them with the laser communicator before we go barreling in.”
Frosty nodded. “There’s no such thing as friendly fire,” he agreed. “And if they’re not trigger happy, they ought to be with as many rebels as there are operating in this sandbox.”
Three flares and at least a dozen bursts of automatic gunfire lofted skyward from the previous location northeast of Hula Girl. Distance thinned the muzzleblasts to a nervous rustling, like brushes stroking a drumhead. The tracers were the white used by local forces and a strobing pink that Panchin hadn’t seen before.
He switched through the UHF and VHF bands on his commo helmet but only picked up static. He couldn’t tell whether the problem was the helmet—even intercom was scratchy; this desert, where mineral deposits and temperature inversions played hell with everything in the electro-optical spectrum—or most likely, that nobody in the missing column was transmitting on any push that Hula Girl’s crew had been given for the operation.
The combat car ambled toward the flares as Sergeant Jonas bent over the multifunction display fixed to the bulkhead beside his tribarrel. Panchin echoed the display for a moment on his faceshield but cut back quickly to light amplification of his normal viewpoint. If he’d been in the Tactical Operations Center at Scepter Base where he belonged, it might have been interesting to watch blurs resolve into icons against a terrain map as the car processed sensor data on the column Hula Girl was approaching. Out here it might mean that Reg Panchin, right wing gunner, didn’t see the hostile who was aiming a buzzbomb at Hula Girl.
Ericssen must have been thinking the same thing. He touched a button on the tribarrel’s pintle. The barrel group rotated a third of a turn; a flat 2-cm disk clucked from the ejection slot. The disk was a polyurethane matrix holding an alignment of copper atoms which, when stripped in a powergun’s chamber, streamed downrange as a ravening cyan plasma. Frosty was checking—again—to make sure that his weapon was loaded and ready.
There was nothing on Panchin’s side of the car. Nothing but wind and desert.
“Hold here, Rita,” Jonas ordered. He started to raise the communications mast even before Hula Girl settled on idling fans.
Panchin helped set the bracing wires of the telescoping five-meter mast; this was something he’d done before. Jonas used a joystick to align the transceiver head and began to speak into the separate microphone. The lens on top of the mast directed his words over the intervening brush and sand to the local column in the form of a modulated laser beam.
After a moment the sergeant straightened. “All right, they’re expecting us,” he said. “Take us in, Rita.”
To save time he collapsed the mast without undoing the wires; they wound like spiderweb across the fighting compartment. Panchin coiled them quickly on their spools, smoothing kinks with his left hand.
Hula Girl wallowed over another crest. The column they’d been searching for was halted in the broad gully below. That was probably part of the reason they’d been out of communications for so long. Panchin had been a soldier too long to be surprised that nobody’d had sense enough to drive one of the working vehicles onto a ridge for a better signal.
There were four Sulewesi-built 6-wheeled armored personnel carriers and a command vehicle that was similar but slightly larger than the APCs; it had four axles instead of three. The recovery/repair vehicle with a crane and parts lockers used the longer chassis as well.
Besides the locals, the column contained three medium tanks with caterpillar tracks, ceramic armor, and a long coil gun in the hull. The tanks’ turbine engines whined, but power for the coil guns must come from another source—probably magneto-hydrodynamic generators. A small cupola offset on the hull contained an automatic weapon.
One tank towed another. The third tank was towing an APC. The recovery vehicle towed a second APC; and, judging by the removed cover plates, the command vehicle had broken down also. Troops in a variety of uniforms stood around the vehicles. Some of them waved.