Cooter laughed. “If the Yokels killed anybody, it was when one of ’em fell out a window and landed on ‘im. We got maybe three hundred.”
“Stepped on?” demanded the image of Hammer’s executive officer—and some said, heir.
“Stepped on and gun camera, maybe two hundred,” Ranson said. “But there’s a lot of stuff won’t show up till they start sifting the ashes. Cooter’s right, maybe three. It was a line battalion, and it won’t be bothering anybody else for a while.”
The command car was crowded. Besides Ranson herself, it held a commo tech named Bestwick at the console, ready if the artificial intelligence monitoring the other bands needed a human decision; Cooter, second in command of the detachment; and Master Sergeant Wylde, who’d been a section leader before, and would be again as soon as his burns healed.
Wylde was lucky to be alive after the first buzzbomb hit his car. He shouldn’t have been present now; but he’d insisted, and Ranson didn’t have the energy to argue with him. Anyway, between pain and medications, Wylde was too logy to be a problem except for the room his bandaged form took up.
“Hey?” said Cooter. He lifted his commo helmet slightly with one hand so that he could knuckle the line of his sweat-darkened auburn hair. “Major? What the hell’s happening, anyway? Is this all over?”
Danny Pritchard smiled a great deal; usually it was a pleasant expression.
Not this smile.
“They hit the three firebases and all but one of the line companies,” the major said. “We told everybody hold what they got; and then the hogs—” Pritchard nodded; a howitzer slashed the sky again from beyond the field of view “—scratched everybody’s back with firecracker rounds. Each unit swept its circuit before the dust settled from the shellbursts.”
The smile hardened still further. “Kinda nice of them to concentrate that way for us.”
Ranson nodded, visualizing the white flare of precisely-directed cluster bomblets going off. The interlocking fields of fire from Firebases Red, Blue, and Purple covered the entire Strip. Guerrillas rising in panic, to be hosed down by the tribarrels in the armored vehicles. . . .
“Yeah,” said Sergeant Wylde in a husky whisper. The wounded man’s face didn’t move and his eyes weren’t focused on the hologram. “But how about the Yokels? Or is this a private fight fer us ‘n the Consies?”
“Right,” said Pritchard with something more than agreement in his tone of voice. “Hold one, Junebug.”
The sound cut off abruptly as somebody hit the muting switch of the console at HQ. Major Pritchard turned his head. Ranson could see Pritchard’s lips moving in profile as he talked to someone out of the projection field. She was in a dream, watching the bust of a man who spoke silently. . . .
What’s your present strength in vehicles and trained crews?
Junebug?
Captain Ranson?
Ranson snapped alert. Cooter had put his big arm around her shoulders to give her a shake.
“Right,” she said, feeling the red prickly flush cover her, as though she’d just fainted and come around. She couldn’t remember where she was, but in her dream somebody had been asking—
“We’ve got—” Cooter said.
“We’re down a blower,” Ranson said, facing Pritchard’s worried expression calmly. “A combat car.”
“Mine,” said Wylde to his bandaged hands. Ranson wasn’t sure whether or not the sergeant was within the hologram pick-up.
“My crews, two dead,” Ranson continued. “Three out for seven days or more. Sergeant Wylde, my section leader, he’s out.”
“Oh-yew-tee,” Wylde muttered. “Out.”
“Can you pick anybody up from the Blue side?” Pritchard asked.
“There’s the three panzers,” Ranson said. “Only one’s got a trained crew, but they came through like gangbusters last night.”
She frowned, trying to concentrate. “Personnel, though . . . Look, you know, we’re talking newbies and people who’re rear echelon for a reason.”
People even farther out of it than Captain June Ranson, who nodded off while debriefing to Central. . . .
“Look, sir,” Cooter interjected. “We shot the cop outta the Consies. I don’t know about no ‘five thousand dead’ cop, but if they’d had more available, they’d a used it last night. They bloody sure don’t have enough left to try anytime soon.”