by David Drake
“Orichos did that?” Huber said.
“She asked us for technical help so it could be done without detection,” Steuben said, looking up at the panorama with a faint smile. “I provided someone from my signals section. It would’ve been extremely awkward if Grayle had become Speaker and tried to take the Point out of the war.”
As Steuben spoke Patronus turned slowly toward him, like a rat hypnotized by the slowly waving hood of a cobra. Steuben focused his ice-colored eyes on the traitor and said, “I believe I told you—”
He broke off in the middle of the passionless threat for another giggle. “But then,” he continued, “with Mistress Grayle in hand, we don’t have to worry about other threats to hold over our friends, do we? I suppose we could just dismiss the rest of the prisoners . . . though I don’t believe we will for the moment.”
He gestured Patronus back to the screen and the line of prisoners resuming their procession through the chute. Patronus obeyed with the slow, jerky motion of an ill-made automaton.
“Was the rest of it true too?” Huber asked harshly. His throat hadn’t recovered from the ozone he’d breathed during the battle, but he and the major both knew there was more to his tone than that. “About the costs being higher than they know?”
Steuben shrugged. “In a manner of speaking,” he said. “The governments of the Outer States believe the Regiment’s price is only about twenty percent of the real figure. . . . But don’t worry: our fees are being paid, and line lieutenants don’t have to worry about where the money comes from.”
“I suppose not,” Huber said. He tried to make his mind go blank, but he couldn’t manage it. “Sir, if you don’t have any further duties for me here . . .?”
“You don’t like our company?” Steuben said, his smile flashing on and off like a strobe light. “All right, Lieutenant. You’re free to leave.”
Major Steuben rotated his chair toward Huber again. His face, too pretty to be handsome in a man, was suddenly as hard as chilled steel. “The offer remains open, Lieutenant,” he said. “You should feel flattered, you know.”
“I appreciate your confidence, sir,” Huber said. He turned to the hatch; it opened before he could touch the control plate.
Huber stepped into the gathering darkness. Grenade launchers continued to work, the choonk/wham! choonk/wham! punctuating the sound of drive fans and power tools. Troopers were pulling maintenance on their vehicles with spares the column had brought from Base Alpha. The white flashes of the bombs were quick speckles through the fabric of tents bulging outward before they collapsed.
Mauricia Orichos saw Huber come out of the command car. She stepped away from the group she was with and waved to him.
Huber looked at her, then slipped his faceshield down and quickened his stride in the direction of Fencing Master. As he’d told Major Steuben, he could find his own company. And he wasn’t going to find it there.
Neck or Nothing
“Red Section, pull back two hundred meters!” Lieutenant Arne Huber ordered over the platoon channel. A laser from one of the hostile hovertanks touched a tree to the right, blasting a ten-meter strip off the trunk. Fragments of bark and sapwood stung Huber and the two gunners with him in the combat car’s open fighting compartment. “Blue, we’ll hold till Red’s in position! Six out.”
The artificial intelligence in Huber’s commo helmet imposed a translucent red caret on his faceshield, warning of movement to the left. Huber was Fencing Master’s left wing gunner as well as commander of platoon F-3. At the moment, swinging his tribarrel onto the threat took precedence over controlling the platoon’s other five cars.
The motion was the hull of a hovertank from a mercenary unit hired by Solace in its war with the Outer States. The vehicle was three hundred meters away, much farther than you could generally see in the forests of Plattner’s World, and the tank’s two crewmen probably weren’t aware of Fencing Master as they drove across the battlefront hoping to take F-3 in the flank.
The target quivered in Huber’s holographic sight picture. He settled his weapon and squeezed the butterfly trigger with both thumbs. The cluster of iridium barrels rotated as they fired, giving each tube a moment to cool after spewing a bolt of ionized copper downrange at the speed of light.
The narrow window didn’t allow Huber to choose a particular spot on his target, but the energy a 2-cm powergun packed made most things vulnerable. The compartment holding the hovertank’s crew was armored with ceramic layered in ablative sheets, proof against single bolts or even a short burst, but the skirts enclosing the plenum chamber were light plastic to keep the weight down. Huber raked the bulge where the two joined.
A fireball erupted from the tank’s port side: the cyan plasma had converted the plastic into its constituent elements—which recombined explosively. The flash ignited even the loam of the forest floor.
“I can’t see it!” screamed Frenchie Deseau at Fencing Master’s bow gun. “Padova, pull up, for Hell’s sake! I can’t see the target!”
The hostile was directly ahead of Fencing Master, so by rights it should’ve been Deseau’s target while Huber watched the left flank the way Trooper Learoyd was doing the right from the other wing gun. It was a chance of visibility that made the tank Huber’s prey while the trees concealed it from Deseau.
The tank rocked to the right, then slewed to a halt because Huber’d ripped its skirts wide open. The tank’s gunner tried to rotate his roof-mounted laser, but Huber’s tribarrel blew the weapon to fiery slag an instant before rupturing the crew compartment itself.
What mattered was that somebody got the tank before it took F-3 from the rear; but if F-3 didn’t fall back quickly, another tank or tanks were going to circle them. There were too many hostiles for a single platoon of combat cars to deal with for long. Where the bloody hell was Ander’s Legion, the combined arms battalion that was supposed to follow when F-3 seized the knoll in the face of the advancing Solace column?
“Three-six, this is Three-three!” crackled the voice of Platoon Sergeant Jellicoe, commanding the three cars of Red Section. For this operation Huber would rather have operated in three two-car sections, but two of his vehicles were crewed with replacements. The newbies had been trained and may well have been veterans of other units before they joined Hammer’s Slammers, but Huber didn’t want to risk anybody operating alone until he’d personally seen how they held up in combat. “We’re in position! Over!”
“Blue Section,” Huber ordered, “pull—”
Fencing Master was already starting to reverse. Although she’d just been transferred to F-3, Padova’d already shown an ability to anticipate orders—sometimes the difference between life and death in combat. As the car grunted backward, Deseau and Learoyd fired simultaneously.
For an instant, saplings ranging from thumb-thick to thigh-thick blazed. When the blue-green bolts had sawn through the undergrowth, they flashed and cascaded from the sloping armor of the hovertank coming up from a swale less than twenty meters away.
“Via!” Huber shouted. The tank was well to starboard, but Fencing Master shimmied as Padova backed so there was a chance the stern would swing enough to give Huber a shot. He tried to bring his tribarrel to bear as he cursed himself for not keeping better tabs on the sensor readouts. Because Huber was the platoon leader, Fencing Master carried a Command and Control box whose holographic display would show the heat, noise, and radio-frequency signatures of a fifty-tonne tank charging to within stone’s throw. He just hadn’t taken—hadn’t had—time to glance at it.
The tank’s sloping armor reflected a portion of the bolts’ energy as a haze of cyan light, searing the leaves from overhanging trees. The glare was so intense that Huber’s faceshield blacked it out to save his eyesight.
Despite the hits, capacitors feeding the tank’s laser screamed twice. The first pulse fried the air close enough overhead that Huber might’ve lost his hand if he’d raised it at the wrong time. That was probably a chance shot, though, becaus
e the second charge ripped empty forest twenty meters to the left, and then the tank’s ceramic armor failed under the tribarrels’ hammering.
At the temperature of copper plasma, almost everything burns. The gulp of orange flame from the tank’s interior was partly plastic, partly fabric, and partly the flesh of the crew.
Padova kept backing away from the line of contact. Flat-screen displays provided a combat car’s driver with just as good a view to the rear as forward, but driving through dense woodland in reverse required considerable skill. Fencing Master’s skirts struck only one tree too thick to shear off. Even that was a glancing blow, though it threw the troopers hard against the fighting compartment’s armor.
“Blue Section, pull back!” Huber said, completing the interrupted order as he checked his display. The other two cars were already retreating up the forested ridgeline; their commanders must have filled in the obvious if their drivers had needed the prodding. You didn’t have to be a military genius to know that F-3’s position wasn’t survivable for long, when at least a company of hostile tanks was advancing and there was no bloody sign of Ander’s Legion.
The woods were afire in a dozen places, ignited by energy weapons and the violent destruction of several vehicles—all of them hostile so far, the Lord be thanked, but that couldn’t last forever. Besides the wall of trees, smoke obscured normal vision. That gave F-3 an advantage because the Slammers’ sensors were better than those of their opponents, but in the confusion of battle there were too many inputs for anybody to use them all. Quick reactions, not technology, had saved Fencing Master when the hovertank roared up at them from less than pistol range.
Red Section waited hull-down over the reverse slope of the ridge from which F-3 had advanced twenty minutes before. Huber had expected to form a skirmish line while Ander’s Legion dug in to ambush the oncoming Solace column. Ander hadn’t come and the hostiles had—very aggressively.
Padova brought Fencing Master back to where they’d started their advance, in the shelter of smooth-barked trees whose foliage was a golden contrast to the deep green of most of the species around them. The economy of Plattner’s World was based on gathering the so-called Moss, a fungus that parasitized the native trees and which could be processed into the anti-aging drug Thalderol. In normal times here, the wanton destruction of forest was a serious crime.
War imposed different standards. The recent engagement had turned a kilometer of woodland into a spreading blaze where munitions occasionally exploded. The hostiles, elements of the West Riding Yeomanry hired by Solace, had halted to regroup to the west of the fiery barrier. The tanks would come on in a moment, buttoned up and using their numbers to envelop the Slammers on both flanks even though Huber had stretched F-3 with forty meters between combat cars.
That was far too great an interval in forest where normal sight distance was only half that. Foghorn, immediately to the right of Fencing Master, was an occasional glint of iridium through the foliage. Skilled infantry could slip through the line to do all manner of damage before the troopers knew what was happening.
The long burst had heated Fencing Master’s right tribarrel till it jammed. A smear of the plastic matrix that held copper atoms in alignment in the chamber clogged the ejection port instead of spitting out cleanly. Learoyd was chipping at the mess with his knife while Deseau covered both front and starboard with quick jerks of his head and a tense expression.
“Fox Three,” Huber ordered; it was time and past time to cut and run. “We’ll withdraw in line behind Three-six on the plotted track.”
As he spoke, he entered Execute on the manual controller of the C&C box, transmitting to all the troopers of his platoon the course the AI had chosen to his directions. They’d retreat parallel to the line on which they’d advanced, but not over the same track in case Solace forces had laid artillery on it in the interim.
“I’m going to start at forty kph and I’ll raise our speed if I can,” Huber continued. “If you’ve got trouble keeping interval let me know, but I don’t want these bloody tanks up our ass. Over.”
“Three-six, this is Three-three!” Jellicoe called from the north end of the line. “I’ve got movement to my rear, El-Tee! D’ye suppose Ander’s got his thumb outa his butt finally? Over.”
“Fox Three,” Huber ordered as he switched his display to give the readout from Floosie, Jellicoe’s car. “Hold in place! Three-six out.”
Everything takes time. . . . F-3 couldn’t sit long on a hillside in the face of flames and a hostile armored column, but Huber had to process information before he made a decision on which turned a battle and the lives of all his troopers. Beside him, Learoyd spun his barrel cluster a third of a turn to charge the weapon. Deseau slewed his tribarrel to the left; the bearing squealed faintly. Now Frenchie was covering the port side while his lieutenant concentrated on sensor readouts.
For a moment Huber thought they might pull this off after all: Ander’s Legion was late, but the delay would’ve convinced the hostiles that the Slammers had been left hanging. When F-3 pulled back, the Yeomanry were likely to follow without keeping a proper lookout. With any kind of luck, Ander’s force could take them in the flank and hammer them good while Huber brought his cars around to block the Solace line of retreat.
Except—
“Bloody fucking Hell!” Huber shouted.
He didn’t want it to be true, but there was no question in the world that it was. Sergeant Jellicoe wasn’t at fault: all the cars carried the same sensor pack, but the additional sorting power in Fencing Master’s Command and Control box made the difference.
There was an armored column coming up fast from F-3’s rear, all right, but it wasn’t Ander’s Legion which rode on tracked armored personnel carriers. These twenty-three vehicles, a mix of APCs and gun carriers, ran on six or eight wheels. The AI gave a ninety-three percent probability that they were a company of the Apex Dragoons, another of the units in Solace pay.
F-3 was trapped.
“Fox Three, this is Three-six,” Huber said, his voice calm. He was speaking noticeably slower than he usually would have. Every syllable was precise, a reaction to stress rather than a conscious attempt to be clear in a crisis. “The vehicles approaching from the east are hostile also. We’ll charge through them in line abreast instead of withdrawing to the southeast as planned.”
As Huber spoke, his right hand laid out routes and targets in the C&C display for immediate transmission to the helmets of his troopers. There were more enemy vehicles than there were guns in F-3, almost four targets per car, so he had to overlap the assignments.
That was if everything went right, of course. As soon as F-3 started taking casualties, its suppressing firepower went down and with it everybody’s chance of survival.
“Hit anything you see, troopers, but remember job one is to save our asses,” Huber said. “Drivers, keep your foot in it. Don’t slow for anything, get through and get out, that’s the only way we’re going to be around to talk about this afterward.”
Beneath Huber, Padova was rotating Fencing Master on its axis to align its bow for the coming attack. Huber was conscious of the change only as vibration and a blur in his peripheral vision; his focus was utterly on the holographic landscape of six blue dots and the hornet’s nest of red hostiles through which F-3’s commander had to lead them.
“We’ll execute on the command,” Huber said, giving the display a last searching glance as he prepared to exchange it for the view through his tribarrel’s sights. “And the Lord help us, troopers, because there sure as hell isn’t anybody else on our side today. Fox Three, execute!”
Padova had Fencing Master’s drive fans whining at full power. Instead of setting the blades to zero incidence, she’d chosen to cock the nacelles against one another in pairs so that they were already flowing maximum air and wouldn’t have to accelerate against a fluid mass when it came time to move. Fencing Master pogoed minusculely as it slid downhill through the undergrowth. The Dragoons, appro
aching in line abreast, were within half a klick but still on the other side of rising ground.
Fencing Master’s skirts crumbled a low overhang into a flat-bottomed swale. There must’ve been a watercourse here in season, but now the leaves the fans stirred were dust-dry. Huber watched his sector, his tribarrel slanted slightly upward to cover the crest of the ridge beyond the concealing undergrowth.
The soil on the slope must not have been as good as that in most of the region, because the trees were sparser and averaged twenty meters in height instead of the twenty-five or thirty normal for adult specimens of the same species elsewhere. More light reached the understory and low brush grew thicker.
Huber ignored the C&C display to focus on the portion of Fencing Master’s surroundings for which he was personally responsible. The Slammers’ faceshields used sensor data to caret the most probable vectors from which targets might appear. He’d directed the AI to screen out hostiles to the rear. In the unlikely event the pursuing tanks caught up with F-3, Huber and his troopers were dead with absolute certainty: there was no point in worrying about what couldn’t be changed.
The vehicles’ electronics suites meant the Slammers had a huge amount of information. Unless they were careful, they could drown in information instead of making the instant decisions a battle demanded of anyone who hoped to survive.
Arne Huber wouldn’t allow his mind to lose itself in data instead of action, but the sensors’ warning had saved F-3 from stumbling unaware into a superior enemy. The Apex Dragoons were a respectable force, but they didn’t have electronics of comparable discrimination and might not even know the combat cars were heading toward them. Though Huber couldn’t kid himself that the Solace forces had mousetrapped his platoon by pure accident. . . .
“Wait for it . . .” Deseau warned over the intercom; talking to himself mostly, because they were all veterans and knew what was about to happen.
Padova tweaked her fan nacelles expertly, lifting Fencing Master over the crest on nearly an even keel. Below, zigzagging because their power-to-weight ratio didn’t allow them to climb the steeper reverse slope straight on, were three armored personnel carriers with a pair of anti-tank missiles on a cupola mounting an automatic cannon. Far to Fencing Master’s right was a larger vehicle with a long electrochemical cannon in its turret. Huber squeezed his trigger as his tribarrel settled on the nearer of the two APCs on his side.