Panchin heard Sergeant-Commander Jonas swear softly as he tried to coax anything more than a splutter from the ionization-track communicator. The wind blew a hiss of sand against Hula Girl's iridium armor.
On a map of any practical scale this swatch of desert would look as flat as a mirror, but brush and rocky knobs limited Reg Panchin's view to a hundred meters in any direction from the combat car's right wing gun. Night stripped the terrain of all color but grays and purple grays. Panchin could have added false color to the light-amplified view through the faceshield of his commo helmet, but that would have made the landscape even more alien—and Panchin more lonely.
"I'm curst if I know what they're fighting over," muttered the driver, Trooper Rita Cortezar, over Hula Girl's intercom channel. "I sure don't see anything here worth getting killed over."
Frosty Ericssen chuckled from the left gun. "Did you ever see a stretch of country that looked much better than this does, Tits?" he asked. "At least after we got through blowing it inside out, I mean."
Panchin was a Clerk/Specialist with G Company's headquarters section. He rode Hula Girl during the change of base because the combat car was short a crewman and HQ's command car was overloaded. You had to know Cortezar better than he did to call her "Tits" to her face.
Hula Girl carried three tribarreled powerguns—left wing, right wing, and the commander's weapon mounted on the forward bulkhead to fire over the driver's head. Space in the rear fighting compartment was always tight, but the change of base made the situation even worse than it would have been on a normal combat patrol.
A beryllium fishnet hung on steel stakes a meter above the bulkheads. It was meant to catch mortar bombs and similar low-velocity projectiles before they landed in the fighting compartment, but inevitably it swayed with the weight of the crew's personal baggage. More gear was slung to the outside of the armor, and the deck of the compartment was covered with a layer of ammo cans.
"They're fighting about power, not territory," Panchin said. Spiky branches quivered as wind swept a hillock, then danced toward Hula Girl in a dust devil that quickly dispersed. "Everybody on Sulewesi's a Malay, but they came in two waves—original colonists and the batch brought in three generations afterwards. The first lot claims to own everything, including the folks who came later. Eventually the other guys decided to do something about it."
Reg Panchin wasn't so much frightened as empty: he'd never expected to be out in the middle of a hostile nowhere like this. He supposed the line troopers were used to it. Talking about something he knew didn't help Panchin a lot, but it helped.
"We're working for the old guys, right?" Frosty said.
"Right," Panchin said. "Hammer's Slammers support the Sulewesi government. The rebels have a Council. I don't guess there's a lot to choose except who's paying who."
Sgt. Jonas straightened and patted the communicator. "Well, this thing's fucked," he said in a conversational tone. "I can't get more than three words at a time from Scepter Base. If they've got a better fix on the missing column than we do, they can't send it so I hear it."
Hula Girl's crew knew exactly where they were. Sulewesi had been mapped by satellite before the war broke out, and the combat car's inertial navigation system was accurate to within a meter in a day's travel. That didn't tell the Slammers where the missing platoon of local troops was, though.
"So let's go home," Frosty said. He relaxed a catch of his clamshell body armor to scratch his armpit. "I'm not thrilled being out alone in Injun Country like this."
"It might be the transmitter at Scepter Base," Panchin said. He squeezed the edge of the bulkhead between thumb and forefinger to remind himself of how thick the armor was between him and hostile guns. "Goldman was working on it before the move. She said the traverse was getting wonky."
"Fucking wonderful," Cortezar said. "Just wonderful."
Long-distance communications for Hammer's Slammers on Sulewesi were by microwaves bounced off the momentary ionization tracks meteors drew in the upper atmosphere. The commo bursts were tight-beam and couldn't be either jammed or intercepted by hostile forces.
That same directionality was the problem now. Unless the bursts were precisely aligned, they didn't reach their destination. Hula Girl's crew had been out of communication with the remainder of the force ever since Captain Stenhuber sent them off to find a column that had gotten separated from the main body during the change of base.
"Rita, ease us forward a half klick on this heading," Jonas said. "We'll check again there. If that doesn't work we'll head for the barn."
He gave Ericssen a gloomy nod, then lifted his commo helmet with one hand to rub his scalp with the other. The sergeant was completely bald, though his eyebrows were unusually thick for a man of African ancestry.
"That won't be too soon for me," Frosty muttered.
Cortezar switched on the fans and let them spin for a moment before she flared the blades to lift the car. Even on idle the drive fans roared as they sucked air through the armored intake vents. There was no chance of hearing the missing column while the fans were running, though the acoustics of a landscape baffled with gullies, knolls, and clumps of brush up to four meters high made sound a doubtful guide here.
Hula Girl lifted with a greasy shudder. Sand sprayed through the narrow gap between the ground and the lower edge of the steel skirts enclosing the air cushion on which the combat car rode. A fusion bottle powered the eight drive fans. They in turn raised the pressure in the plenum chamber high enough to support the vehicle's thirty tonnes on ground effect. A combat car couldn't fly, but it could dance across quicksand or bodies of still water because the bubble of air spread the car's weight evenly over any surface.
"What did the locals do before they had us for guide dogs?" Cortezar asked as she took Hula Girl down one of the channels winding though the desert. The car wasn't moving much faster than a man could walk.
Wind and the occasional flash flood scoured away the soil here except where it was bound by rocks or the roots of plants. The desert vegetation stood on pedestals of its own making.
"They used positioning satellites," Panchin said. "The whole constellation got blasted as soon as the shooting started."
He'd read up on the planet when the Slammers took the Sulewesi Government contract. Mostly the line troopers didn't bother with the briefing materials. The information usually didn't affect mercenaries enough to matter more than a poker game did, but Panchin was interested.
"That puts both sides in the same leaky boat, don't it?" Frosty asked. "You'd think they could've figured that out and left the satellites up so that we could get some sleep."
"In a few minutes we'll head for Scepter Base," Jonas said in a reasonable tone. "I'll see if I can't keep us off perimeter watch for tonight. What's left of it."
The sergeant obviously didn't like the situation either, but his rank kept him from grumbling about orders. Ericssen would have probably acted the same as Jonas if their positions had been reversed. Mercenary soldiering had never been the easiest way to earn a living. People who didn't know that when they signed on with the Slammers learned it quick enough thereafter.
Hula Girl's intakes made the brush to either side wobble toward the vehicle. Gossamer fuzz as long as a man's fingers hung from the branches. The tendrils sucked moisture from the air at night when the relative humidity rose, though the vegetation only flowered after a rain.
It might not rain here for years.
"If they'd left the satellites up to begin with," Panchin said, "then one side or the other would've knocked them down when they thought that gave them an advantage. Maybe before an attack, when they had their people in position already. We'd still be out here."
War is a costly business. Importing mercenaries and their specialist equipment from off-planet is devastatingly expensive, but at least in the short run it costs less than losing. Both sides on Sulewesi had hired a few of the best and most expensive troops in the human universe. Hammer's Slammers were paid by the government, while the rebels had three comparable armored battalions from Brazil on Earth.
Four or five thousand soldiers, no matter how well equipped, weren't enough to fight a war across the whole surface of a planet; locally-raised forces could only be trained as mechanized infantry because time was so short. To bridge the gap between the general mass and the highly-paid cutting edge, the government and rebels both used less-sophisticated mercenaries. The mid-range troops provided weapons and communications of a higher order than those produced on Sulewesi, but at a tenth the cost of outfits like the Slammers and the Brazilians.
A tenth as effective too, the Slammers thought; but a pipe gun throwing a chunk of lead was still enough to splash your brains across the deck of a tank if you happened to be in the wrong place. War didn't stop being a dangerous business just because you were good at it.
Cortezar goosed the fans to take Hula Girl onto a ridge whose rocks had resisted the wind better than the light soil to either side. The skirts rubbed stones, clanking and throwing sparks. Ball-shaped vegetation flattened and shivered away from the gale that squirted under the plenum chamber.
Panchin held firmly onto the twin spade grips of his tribarrel as the deck slanted beneath his boots. "I don't see why they had to split the Regiment up this way," he said. "You can't blame Captain Stenhuber sending us out alone when all he's got to work with is seven combat cars and the G Company command vehicle."
"Yeah," Frosty agreed. "If we were all together we'd go through everything else on this planet like a spike through an eyeball."
"You bet we would," Jonas said in grim disapproval. "And while we were doing that, the rebels'd smash the rest of the government army, putting a platoon or two of Brazilian armor on point each time. The people who hired us want to win the war, not just one battle."
"The odometer says this is half a kilometer, sarge," Cortezar said with an edge in her voice. Reg Panchin felt alone, but really he was elbow to elbow with two fellow troopers. Cortezar sat by herself in the driver's compartment, and she was a meter closer to the most likely direction for a first shot besides.
"Yeah, all right," Jonas agreed. "I make Scepter Base forty-two degrees from here, but we'll want to dodge—"
A hand flare popped against the heavens and drained back to the desert floor as a shower of silver droplets. Panchin wasn't an expert at judging distances at night, but he didn't imagine the signal could have been launched from more than half a kilometer away.
"Bloody hell," said Ericssen. "We found them after all."
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.
"Typical ratfuck," Jonas muttered. "Ninety klicks is too far for a change of base even when everybody knows what he's doing."
Hula Girl started down the slope. Cortezar deliberately broke away the gully rim to ease the angle. Sand and pebbles, some of them big enough to whang like bullets against the skirts, blasted ahead of the car in a spreading cloud.
"We going to be able to talk to these people?" Frosty asked. He had to use helmet intercom for Jonas to hear the question over the fan noise.
"The CO, Major Lebusan, spoke good Standard," Jonas said. "The rest of them, I dunno. Probably not."
Most rich people on Sulewesi were well educated and spoke Standard, the interstellar commercial language. Most rich people also managed to stay out of the military, at least the part of the military that might have to do some fighting. A few of the Slammers learned languages for fun, but nobody aboard Hula Girl knew more Malay than was necessary to ask for sex or a drink.
Cortezar slowed to a halt beside the command vehicle and cut the fans. A small man covered his face with a spotted bandanna until the dust had settled, then stepped forward. He wore a saucer hat with gold braid and his uniform was tailored; he'd probably been dapper some twenty hours earlier at the start of the march.
"I am Major Lebusan," the local said. "Can you fix my vehicle? That would be best."
"We're not mechanics, major," Sergeant Jonas said. He swung a leg over the bulkhead.
"I've worked on diesels," Cortezar said as she climbed out of the driver's compartment.
"We'll take a look then," Jonas said. He jumped to the ground. "Frosty, you keep an eye on the sensors, will you?"
Panchin took that as clearance for him to leave Hula Girl also. The ground would feel good for a change, and it'd be nice to have more elbow room than there was in the fighting compartment.
A burly man with a full black beard walked over to Panchin. He wore a ripple-camouflaged uniform of a style Panchin hadn't seen before. The holster across the center of his chest held a heavy sidearm with a folding stock.
"I Dolgov," the man said, extending a big hand to Panchin. Panchin took it, expecting—correctly—that Dolgov would squeeze hard as they shook. "Zaporoskiye Brigade. Tanks!"
Dolgov pointed to the tank being towed. "Electrics all go out, poof! Kaput. These Sulewesi monkeys, they not real mechanics. Good for nothing monkeys!"
Panchin wondered how well the Zaporoskiye maintenance section would do with Hula Girl if she broke down. The range in sophistication was no greater. Of course, the locals didn't seem able to repair their own command vehicle. Aloud he said, "We'll guide you to the firebase. Somebody there can fix you up, right?"
"Yah, monkeys," Dolgov said, shaking his head morosely. He spat into the night.
Before Panchin could figure out whether that was a "yes" or a "no," Jonas called, "Hey Panchin! Get over here, will you?"
He nodded to Dolgov and joined the group around the command vehicle. Cortezar had stepped away and the locals were closing the engine compartment again. A gas lantern hanging from a cable hook on a fender threw white light across the ground and nearby personnel from their waists down.
"You double-checked the base coordinates, didn't you?" Jonas asked bluntly. "The major here says it's grid A27, 4-4-9, 1-3-0."
"Negative!" Panchin said, feeling cold inside. He had checked the coordinates in the TOC before Hula Girl left Trident Base, though. "A-2-7, that's a roger, but the block was 6-2-1, 5-2-5."
Major Lebusan took off his fancy hat and slapped it angrily against his thigh. His uniform was green with a touch of mustard yellow. Though the major wore short-sleeved field kit except for the hat, an array of medal ribbons spilled from his left breast to his right.
"That is not right!" he said. "Look, I show you!"
He snapped his fingers. An aide handed him a clipboard holding a map covered in clear plastic. Panchin and the sergeant both bent to read it. The crayon markings on the plastic were in cursive Malay script, but the circle drawn over Knoll 45/13 on the printed map was clear enough.
"Sarge," Frosty said over the intercom, "I'll bet they're in one of the outlying companies. I never saw those tanks at any of the firebases we've operated out of."
"I'll bet he's right," Panchin said. He wasn't sure if Zaporoskiye was a place or just the name of a freelance unit raised on some Slavic planet.
Sergeant Jonas lifted his helmet and rubbed his bare scalp again. "All right," he said tiredly. "Scepter Base is ten klicks away. I wasn't willing to tow this pig—"
He nodded at the command vehicle.
"—that far. But I guess we can manage three. Panchin, give me a hand. We'll use our own towlines."
Under his breath to Panchin as they walked to Hula Girl, the sergeant added, "Because their bloody cables won't be worth any more than any of the other bloody equipment on this bloody planet!"
"And you will carry me in your tank, please," Major Lebusan called after them.
Major Lebusan's presence made Hula Girl's fighting compartment a little more cramped, but he was a small man and didn't wear body armor like the three Slammers. Panchin couldn't blame the major for riding with them. The broken-down command vehicle had no power for its communication devices, and Hula Girl's fans kicked a quite astounding amount of sand and dust over it besides.
The grip of the Sulewesan vehicle's wheels meant that sometimes it jerked Hula Girl unexpectedly, even though the combat car was heavier and had plenty of excess power for the tow. Friction with the soil was a more efficient means of braking than the vectored thrust of an air-cushion vehicle like Hula Girl.
For three kilometers it was bearable. There were rebels all over this stretch of desert. Abandoning a broken-down vehicle could mean making the other side a gift of it.
"Are there going to be any friendlies at this outpost?" Cortezar asked over the intercom. "Slammers, I mean."
"Negative," Panchin said. "I'd have handled their supply requests if there were."
That was his job: supply clerk for the 1st and 2nd Platoons of G Company, Hammer's Slammers; assigned to the government's Desert Dragons combat group, a motley assortment of locals and off-planet mercenaries in roughly regimental strength. The Slammers' combat cars had been perimeter security for the main body during the change of base. It was Hula Girl's bad luck that she was the nearest car to where the missing column was supposed to be; and Reg Panchin's bad luck that he happened to be riding her instead of another vehicle.
The column was echeloned back to the left of Hula Girl and her tow to avoid the worst of the dust. The personnel of broken-down vehicles were all packed onto others. A rebel ambush would mean a massacre; but again, Panchin understood why the weary locals wanted to escape choking discomfort even at the risk of their lives.
"Sarge, we ought to have a sight of them from the next rise," Cortezar said. Her compartment had a multifunction display like the commander's, so she didn't have to echo the terrain map on her faceshield as Panchin could have done.
"Right, I'm getting their signatures already," Jonas said. He sounded a little concerned. "Keep us hull down and I'll let the major talk us in on the laser. We don't have any of the codes for this laager."
Cortezar slowed Hula Girl carefully, then cut her steering yoke to the left so that the Sulewesan command vehicle didn't slam them from behind as it rolled off the last of its inertia. Flares were the only way to signal the remainder of the column, and Jonas wasn't willing to target Hula Girl that way. The other vehicles, local and Zaporoskiye alike, stopped anyway without command. Their crews didn't know how close the laager was, and they didn't want to be leading a trek through the desert. Both sides had troops scattered throughout the region.
Sergeant Jonas deployed the mast. Panchin stared at the desert, switching his faceshield repeatedly from thermal viewing to light amplification and back again. He thought one enhancement technique might disclose something that he'd missed using the other. Rebels could be lurking just outside the laager, their electromagnetic signatures hidden by those of the friendly vehicles; waiting to ambush late-comers like Hula Girl and the column she was shepherding in.
There was nothing but sand and bushes bending in the night wind. In the false-color thermal display, dew-gathering tendrils were a cool blue against the warmer orange of the branches from which they hung.
Major Lebusan talked animatedly on the communicator, waving his arms. Jonas watched the night ahead, his hands on his tribarrel's grip. The line troopers knew even better than a clerk like Panchin that this was a dangerous location.
Troops on the other halted vehicles called questions. When that brought no response, an officer in a less-ornate version of Lebusan's uniform jumped from the nearest APC and ran over to Hula Girl. He spoke in quick Malay beside the combat car. The skirts and bulkhead were so high that the small man close to the vehicle couldn't see the major in the fighting compartment.
Frosty Ericssen looked down from his gun. "We're talking to the laager, buddy," he said to the local in Standard. "Do you understand? Your friends are right over the hill there."
"Ah!" said the local. He ran back to the APC, chattering loudly.
Lebusan turned from the microphone fixed at the base of the mast. "Yes, yes, we're clear to enter," he said angrily to Jonas. "Where was I? they ask! They abandon me in the desert and they claim I'm at fault?"
Jonas telescoped the mast. Moving stresses would break the raised wand. Panchin helped the sergeant coil the braces as he had before.
An engine roared. The nearer APC started forward, spraying gravel from all six wheels. The remainder of the column followed a moment later. It was like watching the starting grid of a race. Two routes over the low ridge merged beyond a grove of shrubs with intertwined branches. Panchin expected to see a collision, but the recovery vehicle gave way at the last moment to the tank towing an APC.
Jonas shook his head in disgust as he locked the mast in place. "Take us in, Rita," he said. "I guess we eat dust for the last half klick."
Hula Girl accelerated slowly: a quick jerk against the inertia of the command vehicle would snap the tow cables. Dust from the rest of the column was almost a wall rather than a cloud. Panchin breathed through his helmet filters. An electrostatic charge was supposed to keep his faceshield clear, but some of the grit was too large to be repelled. Lebusan covered his face with his bandanna again.
This ridge was a slightly lower step of Knoll 45/13. When Hula Girl topped it, the laager was in view just ahead. APCs and Zaporoskiye tanks faced out from a circle so that their thicker bow armor and main weapons were toward a potential enemy.
There were many more vehicles than Panchin had expected to see.
"Via, sarge!" Ericssen said. "That's the firebase, not an outpost. Did they give us the wrong coordinates?"
So quietly that his crew could barely hear him over the intercom, Sergeant Jonas said, "Those are Brazilian free-launch artillery vehicles. They aren't ours."
Major Lebusan bobbed his head enthusiastically. "I used to complain because the Council spent so much money on you Brazilians but didn't pay its own officers properly," he shouted through the bandanna. "Now I know you're worth the expense!"
Panchin looked over his shoulder. The locals still aboard the command vehicle were inside with the hatches closed; dust turned all the surfaces white, armor and vision blocks alike. Nobody could see what was happening aboard Hula Girl.
He smiled at Major Lebusan and kneed him in the groin.
The rebel officer doubled up with a squeal. His hat fell off. Ericssen chopped Lebusan on the back of the head with the butt of a grenade launcher.
Panchin felt cold and sick to his stomach. He had to consciously force his lips to straighten out of the frozen smile.
Ericssen tossed the rebel major over the side. Lebusan was a small man, but it was still an impressive one-handed lift by the gunner. Hysterical strength, very likely.
"Awaiting instructions!" Cortezar said urgently.
"Keep going," Sergeant Jonas said. He sounded calm. "We'll never get away if we turn around a hundred meters from them. We'll proceed till they notice us, then bull straight in and raise so much hell that maybe we'll be able to get out the other side."
"I make it four Brazilian launchers and a calliope," Cortezar said. Her voice was an octave higher than normal, but she didn't speak any faster than usual. "The rest of the hardware's local or Zaporoskiye like the folks in the column. That what you've got too, sarge?"
"There ought to be a second calliope with a battery of artillery," Jonas said. "Maybe it's deadlined, but don't count on that."
The Slammers depended on the 2-cm tribarrels of their tanks and combat cars to sweep incoming shells and missiles from the sky. Most other high-end mercenary units used specialized equipment to protect themselves from artillery. Calliopes, eight- or nine-tube fixed powergun arrays, could blast incoming even if one or more of the individual guns jammed.
They could also shred a combat car the way a shark tears a man.
"Brigadier Vijanta's going to be pleased to know where to find the rebel main body," Ericssen said sourly. "If we get to Scepter Base to tell him, that is."
Panchin was suddenly thankful for the dust. His sweaty hands wouldn't slip from the grips of his tribarrel.
"Rita, when I give the word, break the tow lines," Jonas said. "We won't have time to do it any other way. Wing guns shoot at everything on your side. Try to get the launchers and any reload vehicles. Remember, we need to confuse them for long enough to get away."
The Slammers' own rocket howitzers fired individual rounds from a tube with a closed breech. The Brazilians launched from open troughs, a less efficient technique. In exchange for needing more fuel to reach a given range, the Brazilians were able to mount their artillery on much lighter chassis than the Slammers' massive Hogs.
Ericssen turned his head. "You okay with this, Panchin?" he asked.
Panchin nodded. "I'm okay," he said. His mouth was dry and his soul was already trying to squeeze free. He knew in a moment his body would be ripped and burned.
The rebels hadn't raised a dirt berm around the encampment for protection, but the air-cushion artillery vehicles were dug in hull deep. Soldiers were filling sandbags under artificial light. The layout was at least as professional as that of a government firebase.
A pair of female soldiers lounged against a sandbag bunker near the entrance, drinking from a bottle they passed back and forth. They wore chameleon-weave uniforms whose fabric adjusted to match the background patterns.
One of the soldiers straightened and spoke to her companion. They both stared at Hula Girl, now only forty meters away.
"Hit it!" Sergeant Jonas shouted as his tribarrel lashed the night. His cyan bolts missed the Brazilian women, but he blew the side of the bunker in. The metal-plank roof buried the gun position.
Hula Girl lurched forward on the full thrust of her fans. The right tow cable parted. The combat car and the command vehicle whipsawed on the remaining cable. Hula Girl sideswiped the Zaporoskiye tank being towed by its fellow ahead of them. The impact helped Cortezar fight her controls straight. She continued to accelerate, pulling the command vehicle into the pair of tanks in a crash that finally broke the cable.
Panchin pressed his trigger with both thumbs, blinking reflexively. The barrel group spun at 500 rpm. Each stubby iridium tube fired with a hissCRACK when it rotated into the top position, then ejected the spent matrix from the port in a spurt of liquid nitrogen before loading a fresh round in the third station on the receiver.
He aimed at a parked APC but shot high, raking the roof of a tent in the center of the encampment. The sidewalls were heavily sandbagged, but the centerpole shattered and dropped blazing canvas into the interior.
Frosty Ericssen's bolts glanced crazily from the turtle-backed hull of a Zaporoskiye tank. When the ceramic armor finally failed, the tank exploded in a mushroom of flame—fuel for the turbine and the main gun's MHD generator.
Hula Girl drove into the crowded firebase at 40 kph and still accelerating. Panchin squeezed the butterfly trigger, remembering to fire short bursts. His faceshield blanked the bolts' intense blue-green glare to save his vision. He didn't hit what he aimed at—he was constantly behind his targets even though he tried to allow for the combat car's acceleration. He'd lowered his muzzles, and there were too many targets to miss everything.
When he shot at the three crew members running for a Zaporoskiye tank, his bolts slapped the flank of their vehicle instead. The cyan reflection threw the men down anyway, their clothing afire.
Hula Girl skidded. Panchin aimed at the open rear hatch of an APC close enough to spit into but punched the side of a carrier twenty meters away. The steel armor burned white in the heat of the plasma; then the whole vehicle erupted. The commander's cupola spun out of the fireball.
Cortezar was dodging obstacles as best she could, but Hula Girl repeatedly brushed a vehicle or a sandbag wall. The skirts were sturdy, but they weren't a bulldozer blade. If the plenum chamber was too damaged to hold high-pressure air, the car became a sitting duck for everything a regimental firebase could throw at her.
An explosion with three distinct pulses hammered the camp. Hula Girl spun ninety degrees before Cortezar got her under control again. The quivering yellow flare threw the shadows of men and equipment a kilometer across the desert. Jonas or Ericssen had hit an artillery vehicle, detonating some of the ready ammo.
Metal clanged discordantly. Pink tracers clipped one of the stakes holding Hula Girl's overhead screen and kicked smoldering dimples in the baggage.
Panchin tried to swing his tribarrel onto the Zaporoskiye tank firing at them with the automatic weapon in its cupola. Sergeant Jonas was faster, pounding the tank's mid-hull with a long burst that crumbled the ceramic. The tank didn't explode violently, but a red flash lifted all the hatches. The machine gun stopped firing.
Panchin shot at a supply truck and for once hit his target. Greasy flames enveloped the crates stacked on the bed. Men jumped off the other side of the vehicle and ran unharmed into the night.
Panchin's iridium barrels glowed so brightly that his faceshield had to gray out their glare. The long burst Sergeant Jonas fired to destroy the tank had jammed his tribarrel. He tilted his weapon up to chip with a knifeblade at the matrix material gumming his ejection port.
Cortezar swung Hula Girl hard left on the track within the outer ring of vehicles. Half a dozen rebel soldiers squatted behind their APC and the sandbag wall they'd started for a sleeping bunker. They fired at Hula Girl with automatic rifles. Panchin slewed his gun toward them. A bullet whanged Jonas' weapon. The impact spun the tribarrel on its pintle. Like a white-hot baseball bat, the lower muzzle knocked the sergeant down.
A second artillery vehicle blew up. This time at least four rounds detonated simultaneously. The blast threw Hula Girl ten meters sideways into a heavy tractor with an earthmoving blade. The combat car rotated a half turn and stalled because Cortezar had dropped the controls when her helmet bounced off the side of her compartment.
Panchin screamed in fear and clamped his trigger. There was a sound like water dropped into an ocean of hot grease, and the center of his faceshield became a shadow with cyan edges. The protective spot collapsed to show the ruin of an air-cushion vehicle, still glowing but no longer so bright that it could etch retinas.
"Drive!" Sergeant Jonas said. "Drive!"
Hula Girl shuddered, rose minusculy, and turned to lurch off the northern edge of the knoll between a pair of Sulewesan APCs. One burned sluggishly; the other was as still as a grave though apparently undamaged.
More Brazilian rockets exploded. Hula Girl pogoed twice even though this time high ground shielded them from the shockwave. Debris from a previous explosion must have set this one off because Frosty wasn't shooting and Panchin's tribarrel had jammed.
Hula Girl tore through the night. Tracers arched across the sky, but the rebel laager was out of direct sight. There was a risk that the car might hit a large boulder, but Cortezar was driving with a touch as deft as a brain surgeon's.
Panchin knelt with his hands clasped over the chestplate of his armor. He knew he ought to clear his tribarrel, but his whole body was shaking.
Ericssen worked on Sergeant Jonas' forearm. "It's just a bruise!" the sergeant said. His voice was tight with pain.
"So the medics at Scepter Base take the splint off," Ericssen said equably. "Where's the harm in that? Now, you just relax until the blue tab—" the analgesic injector built into Slammers body armor, beside the red tab which injected stimulant "—kicks in."
The night behind them belched yellow again. The shockwave was a dull thump instead of a world-devouring roar when it reached Hula Girl several seconds later.
"I never thought it'd work," Panchin whispered.
"Hey snake?" Ericssen said. "You did good to nail that second calliope before it waxed us. I didn't even see it till you lit the spics up."
"I'm glad," Panchin said. He closed his eyes, then opened them again very quickly. He'd throw up if he closed them.
"Blood and martyrs!" Cortezar said. "I don't get it. We were shaking hands with those bastards and we didn't even know they were the other side. And them too! It don't make sense that if everybody's the same they're all trying to kill each other."
The overhead net sagged. The bullet-damaged stake had bent and might break at any moment.
"Maybe in some universe there's got to be a difference before people kill each other," Panchin said to his clasped hands. "That's never been a requirement in the universe humans live in, though."