The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Because they were in the drag position in the column, Deseau wasn’t at his forward-facing tribarrel. Instead he crouched in the corner behind Huber, cradling a 2-cm shoulder weapon in the crook of his arm. It fired the same round as the tribarrels, but it was self-loading instead of being fully automatic. A single 2-cm charge in the right place was enough to put paid to most targets.

Mauricia Orichos had sunk into herself, seated between Learoyd’s head and Deseau across the rear of the fighting compartment. She didn’t look any more animated than a lichen on a rock. Huber knew how she felt: the constant vibration reduced mind and body alike to jelly.

This run’d get over, or Arne Huber would die. Either’d be an acceptable change.

A red light pulsed at the upper left corner of the display. Fully alert, Huber straightened and locked his faceshield down. “Frenchie,” he snapped. “Take over on the sensors!”

Huber cued the summons, turning his faceshield into a virtual conference room. He sat at a holographic plotting table with the other task force officers—Mitzi Trogon blinked into the net an instant after Huber did; Myers and Captain Sangrela were already there—and Colonel Hammer himself.

The imagery wavered. It was never fuzzy, but often it had a certain over-sharpness as the computer called up stock visuals when the transmitted data were insufficient.

To prevent jamming and possible corruption, Central was communicating with the task force in tight-beam transmissions bounced from cosmic ray ionization tracks. The Regiment’s signals equipment used the most advanced processors and algorithms in the human universe to adjust for breaks and distortion. Even so, links to vehicles moving at speed beneath scattered vegetation were bound to be flawed.

“There’s a battalion of the Wolverines on the way to block you,” the Colonel said without preamble. “We operated alongside them once—Sangrela, you probably remember on Redwood?”

“Roger that,” Sangrela said, rubbing his chin with the knuckles of his left fist. “Anti-tank specialists, aren’t they?”

“Right, and they’re good,” Hammer agreed. The only time Huber’d seen the small, stocky man without his helmet, he’d been surprised that the sandy hair was thinning; nothing else about the Colonel’s face and smooth, muscular movements hinted at age. “They’re tasked to set up a hedge of gunpits across our route.”

Imagery on the plotting table—a holographic representation of a holographic representation, indistinct but adequate for this moment—showed a terrain map. Red dots blinked across a ten-kilometer stretch to form a serrated line: a rank of interlocking strong points.

Hammer smiled grimly. “We couldn’t have broken the Wolverines’ encryption any more than they could break ours,” he said. “But they passed the information to the Solace authorities, and that’s a different matter.”

The smile—and it’d never been one of enthusiastic joy—froze back into the previous hard lines. “Which doesn’t solve our problem. Your problem in particular, since each of those positions is a 5-cm high intensity weapon with ten men for crew and close-in defense. They aren’t mobile—the teams’re being lifted in by air, two to a cargo hauler. The trucks have light armor but they won’t dare come anywhere close to point of contact. I’m doing the briefing because Operations is looking for alternative routes so you can skirt them. Shooting your way through would take too long and cost too much.”

“Sir?” said Huber. His mind was working on a glacially smooth surface divorced from the vibration he still felt through his separated body. “They’re still en route, aren’t they?”

“Roger,” the Colonel said, his eyes pinning Huber like a pair of calipers. He had a presence, even in virtual reality, far beyond what his small form should’ve projected.

“If I put one or two of my cars on high ground, the hostiles’ll have to land short of where they plan to set up,” Huber said. “We can hold ’em down until the rest of Sierra’s clear, then catch up.”

Without poring over a terrain map Huber couldn’t have determined where to site his cars, and even then there were plenty of people better at that sort of thing than he was. The principle of it, though, and the certainty that there was a way to do it—that he had. His tribarrels would be effective against thin-skinned aircars at twenty klicks or even greater range. The hostiles wouldn’t dare try to bull through the combat cars.

What the Wolverines would do, almost certainly, was surround the detached cars and eliminate them in default of the bigger catch they’d hoped to make. They’d be willing to accept the detachment’s surrender, but Huber figured he’d try to break out. He could hope that at least one of the two cars—he had to use two, he couldn’t be sure of driving the hostiles to the ground with only one—would get clear.

A 5-cm high-intensity round could penetrate even a tank’s frontal armor. A hit on a combat car would vaporize the front half of the vehicle.