by David Drake
"—remains here to provide security for the X-Ray element. Any questions? Over."
"Let's do it, El-Tee," Sergeant Nagano said. He raised his gauntleted left hand from Foghorn, the thumb up.
"Roger that," Huber said, after a ten-second pause to be sure that nobody had anything substantive to add. "Move out, troopers. Keep it slow till we're in position, and nobody crosses the start line till it's time. Six out."
Fencing Master started forward, barely ambling. The other cars—particularly Messeman's trio from the east arc of the circle—had farther to go to get into position. Padova wasn't letting eagerness make her screw up.
The bone-shaking roar of the rocket howitzers paused on a long snarl as the last of the six rounds in the ready magazines streaked westward. Another battery took up the bombardment as Basingstoke's Hogs cycled missiles from their storage magazines in the rear hull into their turrets to resume firing.
The Hogs were launching firecracker rounds, anti-personnel cargo shells designed to dump thousands of bomblets each. Powerguns from the port's air defenses stabbed the sky for several seconds, bursting all the incoming rounds before they could open over the target. Then one got through.
Huber knew what it was like on the ground—and what it would've been like for Task Force Huber if the Firelords had gotten lucky with their less-sophisticated equivalents. When the bomblets swept over the defenses as a sea of white fire, shrapnel would kill the crews and disable gun mechanisms. Then the next round—and the next twenty rounds—would get through.
The cars aligned themselves to the right of Fencing Master at twenty-meter intervals. The eighteen infantrymen were twenty meters behind, their skimmers bobbling in the wake of the cars. They looked hopelessly vulnerable to Huber, but he knew from conversations that most infantrymen regarded combat cars as big targets, and tanks as bigger targets yet. They'd come in handy for clearing the terminal building, if they got that far.
Padova raised her speed to ten kph but didn't accelerate further. Huber frowned with instinctive impatience, then understood. "Highball," he said, "we're timing—"
Padova was timing.
"—our approach so we'll reach our attack positions at exactly the time to go over the crest. That way we'll already have forward inertia instead of lifting from a halt. Six out, break."
His frown deepened as he continued, "Trooper Padova, using initiative is fine, but don't play games or you'll be playing them in another unit. Tell me what you're planning the next time, all right?"
"Sorry, sir," the driver said, sounding like she meant it. "I wasn't . . . sorry, it won't happen again."
The cars and skimmers passed to the south of the grain elevators and their clustered dwellings. Deseau looked back over his shoulder, his hand resting lightly on the butt of his 2-cm weapon. If a sniper or Solace artillery observer appeared among the buildings now, the forward tribarrel wouldn't bear on it.
Huber smiled wryly. Frenchie was an optimistic man, in his way.
A line of posts supported plastic netting and a top strand of barbed wire, fencing to keep pastured cattle from straying into the railhead. All six cars hit it within an eyeblink of one another, smashing the fence down with no more trouble than they took with the spiky bushes which dotted the cropped grassland on the other side. Huber had been ready to duck if the wire flew toward him, but instead it curled around the next post to the left.
Learoyd was singing, mostly under his breath so it didn't trip the intercom. Occasional phrases buzzed in Huber's ears: " . . . and best . . . lost sinners was slain. . . ."
Fencing Master accelerated smoothly despite the increasing slope. The fans were biting deeper, but their note didn't change because Padova matched her blade incidence flawlessly against the increased power she was dialing in. The cars were nearing the crest. On the other side, sparkling explosions backlit stubble and the thicket of brush which grew from exposed rocks where mowers couldn't reach.
A salvo from Battery Alpha shrieked overhead, so deafeningly close that Fencing Master shimmied. Huber's exposed skin prickled and he heard an abrasive snarl against his helmet. He didn't know whether he was feeling debris from the exhaust or grit swept up from the ground by the shells' passage. Deseau shouted in angry surprise, though there was no real harm done.
It would've been a bad time to cross the ridge ahead of orders, though. A really bad time.
"Highball . . ." Huber said, judging the time by Fencing Master's speed, not the clock he could call onto his faceshield if he wanted to.
"Execute!"
Battery Alpha's salvo of cargo shells opened just on the other side of the ridge. This close, the red flashes of the charges that expelled the contents were startlingly visible. The bomblets scattered on separate ballistic courses toward the terminal, detonating like so many thousand grenades just as the combat cars came over the rise. From where Huber watched, three kilometers away, the sea of glittering white radiance was beautiful.
His helmet gave him targets, first a calliope dug into the ground at the edge of the meters-thick concrete pad which supported starships as they landed and lifted off. Huber put a burst into it, his plasma glancing from the iridium gunbarrels but vaporizing the steel frame and trunnion. The gun was silent, its barrels already cooled to red heat: bomblets had killed its crew or driven it to cover.
Powerguns slashed the port's flat concrete expanse from all directions, tribarrels and the tanks' 20-cm main guns. Buildings, vehicles, and stacks of cargo on the immense concrete pad were burning.
There were over twenty starships on the pad. They weren't deliberate targets, but bolts splashed them with cyan highlights.
As Huber switched his aim to a wheeled vehicle racing away from the terminal, a last salvo struck the temporary buildings being erected next to the starship in the northwest. Nothing happened for a moment because instead of bomblets the rounds carried fuel-air warheads.
The delayed blast spilled air from Fencing Master's plenum chamber and slammed the car down hard. Huber shouted, instinctively afraid that he'd been flung out of the fighting compartment. He bashed his chest into the grips of his tribarrel. The clamshell armor saved his ribs, but he'd have bruises in the morning.
Padova got them under weigh again, straightening their course; the blast had slewed the car a quarter-turn clockwise while shock curtains deployed around the driver. A column of kinked black smoke rose from where the shells had landed.
The pad wasn't cratered: the explosive had spread in a thin smooth sheet before it went off, and concrete has great compression strength. The structures which had covered more than a thousand square meters of the pad were gone except for twisted fragments which had fallen back after the blast blew everything skyward. The starship, thick-hulled and weighing over 150,000 tonnes, appeared undamaged. The valves had been wrenched off the two open cargo hatches, however.
Huber found the truck he'd been aiming at; the shockwave had shoved it into the loading dock which extended from the back of the terminal building. He gave it a three-round burst from reflex, watching it burst into flames as his AI found him something more useful to shoot at.
Deseau and Learoyd were firing at gun positions on the roof of the terminal, though nothing moved there except the haze of smoke from the anti-personnel bomblets which had gone off seconds before. Instead of a nearby target, Huber's helmet targeted a line of vehicles on the northern edge of the pad. At least a company of the Waldheim Dragoons were using blast deflectors as breastworks against the Slammers attacking from that side. Tribarrels on the Waldheim APCs and 10-cm powerguns on their tanks stabbed the distant hills.
The walls now raised from the pad were meant to deflect a giant starship's full takeoff thrust skyward so it wouldn't knock down everything within a kilometer. The structures were sufficient to stop even a 20-cm bolt, but the cars approaching from southeast had a clear shot at the sheltering vehicles.
Huber set the target and brought up his sight's magnification. He was using light amplicatio
n rather than thermal viewing; the many fires dotting the port's flat expanse provided more than enough illumination. When his pipper centered on a tank's turret ring, he thumbed the trigger and let the stabilizer hold his bolts on target. The tank's own ammunition blew it up in a cyan flash.
Huber shifted to the next target over, an APC rocking in the shockwave of the tank's destruction. Before he could fire, a 20-cm bolt hit the lightly armored vehicle and sprayed molten blobs of it a hundred meters away.
Fencing Master continued to advance. The ten-story terminal building blocked Huber's line of sight to the Dragoons; his faceshield careted windows instead. He squeezed, slewing the tribarrel to help the car's forward motion draw his burst across the seventh floor from left to right. The rooms were dark till the bolts hit, but gulps of orange flame followed each cyan flash as plasma ignited the furnishings.
An equipment park on the southwest side of the pad had taken a pasting from incendiaries. Hundreds of vehicles were alight. Every so often one erupted with greater enthusiasm like a bubble rising in a caldera to scatter blazing rock high in the air. Eight combat cars skirted the park to the south, moving fast. Their tribarrels raked the back side of the terminal building.
At the beginning of the war, Solace had started building concrete-roofed dugouts at intervals around the perimeter of Port Plattner. The work had stopped when Solace command realized that the Outer States were barely capable of defense, and even those completed—three of them in the sector Central had assigned to Huber's troops—appeared to be unmanned.
Deseau and Learoyd had burned the firing slit of the southernmost to twice its original size. Now as Fencing Master swept around the squat structure, Learoyd depressed his tribarrel and fired a long burst down the entrance ramp at the back. The steel door gushed red sparks and ruptured inward, but there was no secondary explosion.
White flares popped from the roof of the terminal building. More flares followed from a dozen points across Port Plattner, including the northern perimeter where the Waldheim Dragoons had been fighting. "UC forces, we surrender!" a woman's voice cried. "Terminal control surrenders, by the Lord's mercy we surrender!"
She must have been using the port's starship communications system because her high-output transmission blanketed all frequencies. Every floor of the terminal building was ablaze, but those were merely administrative offices. The actual control room was in a sub-basement, armored against the chance of a starship crash.
Fencing Master turned left, away from the base of the terminal. Padova dropped the car twice onto the sodded lawn to scrub off inertia that wanted to carry them into the burning building. The other Highball cars were braking in roostertails of red sparks as their skirts skidded on concrete. The terminal was a tower of flame, lashing the ground with pulses of heat.
"Sir, what should I do!" Padova said. They were moving slowly south along the face of the building, crushing ornamental shrubs under their skirts. Foghorn and Fancy Pants followed, while Lieutenant Messeman's cars had halted on the other side of a wing-shaped entrance marquee which extended twenty meters from the front entrance.
"All Slammers units," a familiar voice growled. "This is Regiment Six, troopers. Cease fire unless you're fired on. Under no circumstances fire on the starships that'll start landing shortly. Hammer out."
Deseau tracked a man running across the pad to the left. He didn't shoot, but he was touching the trigger. Huber hooked a thumb to back him off, then said, "Highball, we'll laager a hundred meters back the way we came. Infantry in the center of the circle."
He looked at the plot the C&C box suggested, approved it, and concluded, "Six out."
That was far enough from the terminal building that they wouldn't broil, though Huber wanted to keep Highball reasonably close to its objective until somebody got around to ordering them to move. The Lord knew when that'd be, given what the Colonel and his staff had on their plate right now.
The eight vehicles crossing the pad from the west slowed as they approached the terminal. Huber's eyes narrowed: one was a command car, a high-sided box built on the chassis of a combat car to hold far more communications and display options than could be fitted into a C&C box. Mostly they were staff vehicles, though Huber knew a couple of line company commanders preferred them to combat cars.
The shooting had probably stopped, though it was hard to say because munitions continued to explode. That wouldn't end for days, not with the number of fires burning across the huge port. You could get killed just as dead when a truck blew up as you could by somebody aiming at you. . . .
That reminded Huber of casualties. He checked the readout on his faceshield and saw to his pleased surprise that all the personnel were green—infantry included—except for a cross-hatched icon on Foghorn. "Three-one, what's your casualty?" he said.
"Six, the right gun blew back and burned Quincy both arms," Sergeant Nagano replied. "We got him sedated and covered in SpraySeal. He'll be all right, I guess, but he won't be much good in the field for a few months. Over."
"Highball Six," broke in another voice before Huber could reply, "this is Regiment Six. We're joining your laager but leaving you in local control. Out."
Huber felt a momentary jolt, but that was ingrained reflex; his conscious mind was far too exhausted to be concerned. "Roger, Six," he said. "Break. Highball, spread the laager to accommodate eight more cars. The command group's joining us. Highball Six out."
The eight vehicles with Colonel Hammer, five of them from K Company, idled toward Highball. The cars of Huber's original command reformed as the eastern half of circle instead of the complete circuit. Instead of steering Fencing Master straight to its new location and rotating the bow out, Padova drove the car sideways. She was bragging, but Huber was too wrung out to call her down for it.
"Guess they didn't have a walkover like we did," Deseau said as he gave the newcomers a professional once-over. Three of the combat cars had holes in their plenum chambers; one was shot up badly enough that its skirts dragged. It probably couldn't have kept up with the rest of the unit if they hadn't been crossing such a smooth, hard surface. "Nobody even shot at us that I saw."
"They shot at us, Frenchie," Learoyd said. He tapped the bulkhead beside him with the knife he was using to scrape his ejection port.
Huber leaned forward to look past the trooper. Three projectiles, each separated from the next by a hand's-breadth, had dimpled the iridium inward. The third was deep enough that the armor had started to crack.
"From the bunker when we got close," Learoyd explained; he sounded apologetic. "I guess I shouldn't've quit shooting when something blew up inside."
The impacts must've been audible in the next county, but Huber hadn't been aware of them, nor Deseau either it seemed. Aloud Huber said, "No harm done, Learoyd. Nobody'd guess their compartmentalization was that good, and it's not like there wasn't anything else needing attention."
The laager was complete with two meters between adjacent cars: tight, but giving them room to maneuver fast if something unexpected happened. The right wing gunner of the car next to Fencing Master raised his faceshield and shouted over the idling fans, "How's your leg, Lieutenant?"
"Sir!" Huber said. He'd expected Colonel Hammer to be in the command car. "Sir, my leg's fine, I guess, but I haven't been using it much except to stand on."
Huber's left leg ached like a wall was leaning on it, but the rest of his body wasn't much better. His skin itched and the slickness where his clamshell rubbed over his hipbones was either popped blisters or blood. In the morning, that might matter; right now, Arne Huber was alive and that was good enough.
Huber's AI pulsed a warning on his faceshield. The task force was still under combat conditions, and a pair of aircars were approaching from the northeast a thousand meters up. The cars' tribarrels weren't on air defense, and the AI thought maybe they ought to be.
"They got running lights on, El-Tee," Deseau said, swinging his gun onto the aircars manually. "They're not trying to sne
ak up on us, but maybe they're just too smart to try what wouldn't work."
"Put that gun on safe, trooper!" Colonel Hammer roared. Then he snapped his faceshield down and continued, "All Slammers units, do not shoot. Under no circumstances harm the incoming aircars. They're bringing Solace representatives to treat with us! Six out."
The aircars hovered a kilometer from the perimeter of Port Plattner. Hammer continued an animated conversation with someone on a push that didn't include Highball Six. After nearly a minute's discussion, the aircars mushed toward the laager together. The command car's rear door opened; Major Pritchard stepped out of the vehicle.
Colonel Hammer nodded approval and swung his legs over the coaming of his fighting compartment to stand on the plenum chamber. He looked at Huber, grinned, and said, "Come along with me, Lieutenant. We're going to take the surrender of the Republic of Solace.
* * *
The two squads of infantry tilted their skimmers on end and stacked them in groups of three between the combat cars of Highball section. Sergeant Tranter swung down a cooler from Fancy Pants since the infantry's supports were back with the Hogs.
The troopers looked more concerned with the Colonel and his operations officer in the center of the circle than they were with the crackling destruction that covered most of the near distance. They'd seen destruction more often than they'd been this close to the Colonel, after all.
The aircars hovered for a moment, then landed a hundred meters out from the laager. Hammer grimaced and snapped to Pritchard, "Get 'em in here, Major. Do they think we're going to walk over to them?"
Huber wasn't sure he could walk that far. His left leg had been numb till he dropped from the plenum chamber to the ground. That shock had seemed to drive a hot steel rod straight up from his heel to the hip joint. His knee didn't want to bend, and every time he moved the rod burned hotter.
Pritchard spoke into his commo helmet. He must have had a link to the aircars through his command vehicle, because after a moment they lifted and crawled toward the laager in ground effect. He smiled tightly to Hammer and Huber, saying, "The gentleman from Nonesuch was concerned that the terminal might fall in this direction. I assured him that the shell of a ferroconcrete building will remain standing after it's burned itself out."