THE POLITICAL PROCESS

The air above Fencing Master sizzled just beyond the visual range; some of the farm's defenders were using lasers that operated in the low-ultraviolet. Lieutenant Arne Huber sighted his tribarrel through his visor's thirty percent mask of the battlefield terrain and the units engaged. He swung the muzzles forward to aim past Sergeant Deseau's left elbow and gunshield.

If Huber fired at the present angle, the powerful 2-cm bolts would singe Deseau's sleeve and his neck below the flare of his commo helmet. He wouldn't do that unless the risk to his sergeant was worth it—though worse things had happened to Deseau during his fifteen years in Hammer's Slammers.

"Fox Three-one," Huber said; his helmet's artificial intelligence cued Foghorn, another of the four combat cars in platoon F-3. "Ready to go? Fox Six over."

A rocket gun from somewhere in the Solace defenses fired three times, its coughing ignition followed an instant later by the snap-p-p! of the multiple projectiles going supersonic. At least one of the heavy-metal slugs punched more than a hole in the air: the clang against armor would have been audible kilometers away. No way to tell who'd been hit or how badly; and no time to worry about it now anyway.

"Roger, Six, we're ready!" cried Sergeant Nagano, Foghorn's commander. He didn't sound scared, but his voice was an octave higher than usual with excitement. "Three-one out!"

Huber figured Nagano had a right to be excited. Via, he had a right to be scared.

"Costunna, pull forward," Huber ordered his own driver, a newbie who'd replaced the man whom a buzzbomb had decapitated. "Three-one, rush 'em!"

The Northern Star Farm was a network of corn fields crisscrossed by concrete-lined irrigation canals. In the center were more than twenty single-story buildings: barns, equipment sheds, and barracks for the work force. The layout was typical of the large agricultural complexes with which the nation of Solace produced food not only for her own citizens but for all the residents of Plattner's World—when Solace wasn't at war with the Outer States, at any rate.

Technically, only the United Cities were at war with Solace at the moment. Everybody knew that the other five Outer States were helping fund the cost of hiring Hammer's Regiment, but Solace couldn't afford not to look the other way.

The civilians had fled, driving off in wagons pulled by the farm's tractors. The buildings and canals remained as a strongpoint where a battalion of Solace Militia and a company of off-planet mercenaries defended howitzers with the range to loft shells deep into the UC. Colonel Hammer had sent Task Force Sangrela, one platoon each of tanks, combat cars, and infantry, to eliminate the problem.

Fencing Master began to vibrate as Costunna brought up the speed of the eight powerful fans which pressurized the plenum chamber and lifted the combat car for frictionless passage over the ground. The thirty-tonne vehicle didn't slide forward, however. "Go, Costunna!" Huber screamed. "Go! Go! G—"

Finally Fencing Master pulled up from the swale in which she'd sheltered during her approach to the target. Huber's helmet careted movement all along the canal slanting across their front at thirty degreesto their course: Solace Militiamen rising to fire at Foghorn, which was already in plain sight.

If the two cars had broken cover together as Huber planned, Foghorn wouldn't have looked like the lone target in a shooting gallery. Swearing desperately, he hosed the lip of the canal with his tribarrel. Deseau, Learoyd at Fencing Master's right wing gun, and Foghorn's three gunners fired also, but the other car sparkled like a short circuit as slugs struck her iridium armor.

In Huber's holographic sight picture, dark-uniformed Militiamen turned with horrified looks as they tried to shift the heavy rocket guns they wore harnessed to their shoulders. They'd been so focused on Foghorn that the appearance of another combat car two hundred meters away took them completely by surprise.

Fencing Master's forward motion and the angle of the canal helped Huber traverse the target simply by holding his thumbs on the tribarrel's trigger. The 2-centimeter weapon's barrel cluster rotated as it sent copper ions blasting at the speed of light down each iridium bore in turn. The bolts burned metal, shattered concrete in flares of glass and white-hot quicklime, and blew humans apart in gushes of steam. An arm spun thirty meters into the air, trailing smoke from its burning sleeve.

One of the D Company tanks on overwatch to the west fired its main gun twice, not toward the canal but into the interior of the farm where anti-armor weapons were showing themselves to engage the combat cars. An orange flash blew out the sidewalls of a barn; three seconds later, the shock of that enormous secondary explosion made water dance in the irrigation canals.

The surviving Militiamen ducked to cover. Foghorn had stalled for a moment, but she was bucking forward again now. Huber cleared the terrain mask from his faceshield to let his eyes and the helmet AI concentrate on nearby motion, his potential targets. He didn't worry about the heavier weapons that might be locking in on Fencing Master from long range; that was the business of the tanks—and of the Gods, if you believed in them, which right at the moment Huber couldn't even pretend to do.

A slug penetrated the plenum chamber on the right side of the bow, struck a nacelle inside—the fan howled momentarily, then died; blue sparks sprayed from a portside intake duct and the hair on Huber's arm stood up—and punched out from the left rear in a flash of burning steel. Costunna screamed, "Port three's out!"

The air was sharp with ozone. Huber's nose filters kept the ions from searing his lungs, but the skin of his throat and wrists prickled.

"Drive on!" Huber shouted.

You didn't have to believe in Gods to believe in Hell.

Instead of a square grid, Northern Star's canal system formed a honeycomb of hexagons three hundred meters across each flat. Fencing Master slid to where three canals joined and halted as planned. Costunna had adequate mechanical skills and took orders well enough, he just seemed to lack an instinct for what was important. Huber had a straight view down the length of the shallow trough slanting north-northeast from his side. Solace Militiamen—some of them dead, some of them hunching in terror; a few raising weapons to confront the howling monster that had driven down on them—were dark blurs against the white concrete and the trickle of sunbright water.

Huber fired, his bolts shredding targets and glancing from the canal walls in white gouts. Deseau was firing also, and from Fencing Master's starboard wing Learoyd ripped the canal intersecting at a southeastern angle. Foghorn's left gun was raking that canal in the opposite direction.

It was dangerous having two cars firing pretty much toward one another—if either of the gunners raised his muzzles too far, he'd blow divots out of the friendly vehicle—but this was a battle. If safety'd been the Slammers' first concern, they'd all have stayed in bed this morning.

A bullet from the central complex ricocheted off Fencing Master's bow slope, denting the armor and impact-heating it to a shimmering rainbow. Further rounds clipped cornstalks and spewed up little geysers of black dirt.

Sergeant Deseau shouted a curse and grabbed his right wrist momentarily, but he had his hands back on the tribarrel's spade grips before Huber could ask if he was all right. The slug that hit the bow had probably sprayed him with bits of white-hot iridium; nothing serious.

The two automatic mortars accompanying the infantry chugged a salvo of white phosphorus from the swale where Fencing Master had waited among the knee-high corn. The Willy Pete lifted in ragged mushrooms above the courtyard building where the farm's workforce ate and gathered for social events.

The roofs slanted down toward the interior; Militiamen with automatic weapons had been using the inner slopes as firing positions. The shellbursts trailed tendrils up, then downward. From a distance they had a glowing white beauty, but Huber knew what a rain of blazing phosphorous did where it landed. Bits continued burning all the way through a human body unless somebody picked them out of the flesh one at a time.

Solace troops leaped to their feet, desperate to escape the shower of death. The other two-car section of Huber's platoon, Floosie and Flame Farter under Platoon Sergeant Jellicoe, were waiting to the south of the complex for those targets to appear. Their tribarrels lashed the Militiamen, killing most and completely breaking the survivors' will to resist.

"Costunna, get us across the canal!" Huber ordered. He didn't feel the instant response he'd expected—the driver should've been tense on his throttles, ready to angle the car down this side of the channel and up the other with his fans on emergency power—so he added in a snarl, "Move it, man! Move it now!"

The tanks were firing methodically, punching holes in the sides of buildings with each 20-cm bolt from their main guns. Walls blew up and inward at every cyan impact, leaving openings more than a meter in diameter. The tanks weren't trying to destroy the structures—a pile of broken concrete made a better nest for enemy snipers than a standing building—but they were providing entrances for infantry assault.

The infantry, twenty-seven troopers under Captain Sangrela himself—the task force commander wasn't going to hang back when his own people were at the sharp end—were belly-down on their one-man skimmers, making the final rush toward the complex from the south,. A heavy laser lifted above the wall of a cow byre to the southeast and started to track them. Two D Company tanks on overwatch had been waiting for it. The laser vanished in a cyan crossfire before it could rake the infantry line.

Costunna shoved his control yoke forward. Fencing Master scraped and sparked her skirts over the lip of the canal, then down into the watercourse, spraying water in a fog to either side. Instead of building speed and quickly angling up the opposite wall, the driver continued to roar along the main channel.

"Costunna!" Huber screamed. He leaned forward, trying to see the man, but the driver's hatch was closed. "Via, man! Cut right! Get us up out of here!"

Foghorn was stalled, unable to climb up from the canal. Her fans and skirts had taken a serious hammering while she advanced alone toward the Solace position. Fencing Master was nowhere near that badly damaged, but Costunna seemed unwilling or emotionally unable to turn back toward the guns that'd targeted him before.

And until he did, neither of the cars in Huber's section could support the infantry at the moment they needed it most. The tribarrels were unable to shoot through the haze surrounding Fencing Master; the water droplets would absorb the bolts as surely as a brick wall or a meter of armor plate could do.

Captain Sangrela was bellowing furious orders over the command channel, but Huber didn't need to be told there was a problem. He opened his mouth to shout at Costunna again because he couldn't think of anything else to do. Before he got the words out, Deseau snarled over the intercom, "Costunna, get us the fuck outa this ditch or I'll stick my gun up your ass before I pull the trigger!" 

Maybe it was the threat, maybe it was realizing that the car's bumping was its skirts hitting the bodies of Militiamen before smearing them into the concrete. Whatever the reason, Costunna twisted his yoke convulsively. Fencing Master lurched from the canal, her plenum chamber shrieking over the concrete coping.

Three white flares burst over the central complex, a signal that the surviving mercenaries wanted to surrender. They were probably broadcasting on one of the general purpose frequencies as well, but you couldn't trust radio in a battle. Powerguns and drive fans both kicked out seas of RF trash, so even commands could be lost or distorted in the middle of a battle. A moment after the flares went up, four soldiers in mottled battledress came out of a smoldering barn with their hands in the air.

"Fox Three elements cease fire!" Huber ordered. He didn't raise the muzzles of his tribarrel, but he took his hands off the grips. If some trooper got trigger happy now with those easy targets, it'd be the difference between peaceful surrender and a last-ditch defense that meant a lot more Slammers' casualties before it was over. "Stop shooting now! Three-six out."

Captain Sangrela was shouting much the same thing over the common task force push also, and Huber figured Lieutenant Mitzi Trogon echoed the words to her four D Company tanks. A powergun snapped a single shot into the bright sky: an infantryman trying to put his weapon on safe while he steered his tiny skimmer had managed to shoot instead.

No serious harm done: the rest of the mercenary company emerged from dugouts and the concrete buildings. They'd been armed with crew-served lasers, bulky weapons but effective even against tanks when they were close enough. Rather than bull straight in, Captain Sangrela had used F-3's combat cars to draw the lasers into sight where the tanks could vaporize them from a safe three kilometers away. Arne Huber understood the logic and he trusted the skill of Mitzi's gunners about as far as he trusted anybody, but he'd known who was going to catch it if something went wrong.

"Costunna, pull around to the tramhead," he ordered, frowning. The main thing that'd gone wrong this time had been with Fencing Master's driver, and that was Arne Huber's responsibility.

Most of the single continent of Plattner's World was accessible only by aircar or dirigible. The trees covering the coastal lowlands were parasitized by "Moss," a fungus which in turn was the source of an anti-aging drug. The forests were therefore more valuable than almost anything that would have replaced them on other planets, highways and railroads included.

The exception was Solace, the state comprising the central highlands. There the soil supported Terran grains and produce, but native trees which grew in the drier climate were stunted and free of the Moss. Solace had become the granary of Plattner's World, and its bedrock supported the only starport on the planet which could accept the largest interstellar freighters.

A network of monorail tramways connected Solace's collective farms with Bezant, the capital, from which giant dirigibles distributed food and manufactured goods to the Outer States. They brought back Moss, Pseudofistus thalopsis, which factories on Solace turned into Thalderol base and shipped off-planet for final processing.

In theory one might have thought that the huge profits from Thalderol meant that the inhabitants of Plattner's World lived with one another in wealthy harmony. Mercenary soldiers, even Academy-trained officers like Arne Huber, learned about human nature in a practical school: the riches of Plattner's World just meant people could hire better talent to fight for them. When Solace raised port dues by five percent and the buyers refused to pay more for Thalderol base, the Outer States had hired Hammer's Slammers to reverse the increase.

"Fox Three-six, this is Charlie Six!" Captain Sangrela called abruptly. "The mercs have surrendered but the locals are planning to break out to the north in their aircars. Cut 'em off, will you? I don't want a massacre, but I'm curst if I want to fight 'em again either! Six out." 

Sangrela was obviously using signals intelligence; it was probably forwarded to him as task force commander by Central, Slammers headquarters at Base Alpha far to the rear. The locals didn't understand what they were up against, of course. The tanks on high ground to the south could track and vaporize even fast-moving aircars at a greater distance than the eye could see: there was no escape from a battlefield they overwatched.

But a volley of 20-cm bolts wasn't a threat, it was a massacre just as Sangrela had said. The Slammers took prisoners wherever possible: that encouraged their opponents to do the same. Needlessly converting several hundred locals into steam and carbonized bone, on the other hand, was likely to have a bad result the next time a trooper got in over his head and wanted to surrender.

"Cancel that, Costunna!" Huber said, setting his faceshield left-handed to caret the electromagnetic signatures of aircar fans revving up. Two equipment sheds on the north side of the complex became a forest of red highlights as the AI obeyed. If they were as full of vehicles as the carets implied, there was a score of large aircars in each. "Get us around north of the buildings—but stay away from the canal, right? Goose it!"

The sheds were aligned east-west and had overhead doors the length of both long sides. As Huber spoke, all twelve of the north-side doors began to rise.

"Guns!" Huber shouted over the intercom to the men with him in the fighting compartment. "Aim low, don't kill anybody you don't have to! Costunna, get on it!"

Fencing Master finally started to accelerate. The car was five hundred meters from the west sidewall of the nearer shed, almost twice that from the far end of the other one. The tribarrels were effective at many times that distance, but it was beyond the range at which you could expect delicate shooting from a moving vehicle. It'd be what it'd be.

An aircar with room for twenty soldiers or two tonnes of cargo nosed out of the nearer shed. Huber laid his holographic sights on it, letting the aircar's forward motion pull it through his rope of vividly cyan bolts. The plastic quarterpanel exploded in a red fireball, flipping the car onto its right side in the path of the identical vehicle pulling out of the adjacent bay. They collided, and the second car also overturned.

A third truck started from the near end of the shed and pitched nose-high as the driver tried to vault the line of powergun bolts. He didn't have enough speed. The bow slammed back into the ground, breaking the vehicle's frame and hurling passengers twenty meters from the wreck.

If Costunna had known his job better, he'd have slewed Fencing Master so that her bow pointed thirty degrees to starboard of her axis of movement. Because he didn't—and Via! Sure he was a newbie but didn't he know any cursed thing?—Huber stopped firing when Sgt Deseau's gunshield masked his point of aim.

Deseau and Learoyd didn't need help anyway. The gunners punched three-round bursts into each truck that showed its bow past the side of the sheds. Though the bolts couldn't penetrate even an aircar's light body, the energy they liberated vaporized the sheathing in blasts with the impact of falling anvils, slamming the targets in the opposite direction. Aircars skidded, bounced, and overturned. None of them got properly airborne.

Huber swung his tribarrel onto the canal half a klick to the north, intending to cover the troops who'd been using it as a trench like their fellows in the stretch Huber's section had overrun. None of them showed themselves, let alone fired at Fencing Master.

A pair of gleaming troughs reaching from the south to just short of the canal's inner lip indicated why: while Huber concentrated on the equipment sheds, two D Company tanks had warned the hidden Militiamen of what'd happen to them if they continued to make a fight of it. The main-gun bolts had converted all the silica in the ground they struck to molten glass, spraying it over those huddled in the canal. The flashes and concussion must have been enormous, but Huber hadn't been aware of it while it was happening.

Huber glanced to his right, past the two gunners hunched over their tribarrels. The crown of red markers on his faceshield collapsed as he looked. The surviving vehicles were shutting down; the only fan motors still racing were in the wrecks whose drivers weren't able to obey the order to switch off.

Deseau fired into the bow of a motionless truck, visible now because Fencing Master was crossing the front of the nearer shed. The molded plastic flared red, blooming into a meters-wide bubble that hung shimmering for several seconds in front of the building.

"Guns, cease fire!" Huber ordered. "They're surrendering, boys. Cease fire!"

Via! He hoped he was right because there was the Lord's own plenty of locals, coming out of the equipment sheds and rising from the canals on the other side of Fencing Master. The troops in the sheds must've been the crews for the howitzers dug into pits in the center of the complex. There the guns were safe from the sniping tanks, but they hadn't been able to threaten the assault force with direct fire either. The commander must have pulled the crews under cover, knowing the artillerymen would've been no better than targets if he'd tried to use them as infantry against the oncoming mercenaries.

The nearest friendly unit was Foghorn, just managing to work out of the channel where she'd been stuck. Maybe some of Captain Sangrela's troopers were still advancing from the south, but Huber guessed most of those figured to let Fencing Master learn what the locals intended before putting themselves in the middle of things. Huber couldn't say he blamed them.

Costunna slowed the car, then brought it to a halt with the fans idling. Huber'd been about to order him to do that, but the driver shouldn't have made the decision on his own. Well, Costunna was business for another time—though the time was going to come pretty cursed soon.

A middle-aged man limped toward Fencing Master with his helmet in his left hand. He looked haggard, and the left side of his face and shoulder were covered with soot. A younger man hovered at his side. The glowing muzzles of Learoyd's tribarrel terrified the aide, but the older officer didn't appear to notice the gun aimed point blank at them.

"I am Colonel Apollonio Priamedes," he said. His voice was raw with emotion and the mix of ozone and combustion products that fouled the atmosphere; the Solace Militia didn't have nose filters or gas masks that Huber could see. "I was in command here. I have ordered my men to lay down their weapons and surrender. May I expect that we will be treated honorably as prisoners of war?"

Huber raised his faceshield. His fingers were claws, cramping from their grip on his tribarrel.

"Yes sir," Huber said, "you sure can."

And the Solace colonel couldn't possibly be more relieved by the end of this business than Lieutenant Arne Huber was.

When the resupply and maintenance convoy radioed, they'd estimated they were still fifteen minutes out from Northern Star. If they'd get on the stick they could cut their arrival time by two-thirds. Huber supposed the commander was afraid stragglers from the garrison would ambush his mostly soft-skinned vehicles. That was a reasonable concern—if you hadn't seen how completely the assault had broken the Solace Militiamen.

When the convoy arrived Task Force Sangrela could stand down and let the newcomers take care of security, but right now everybody was on alert. The eight combat vehicles were just west of the building complex, laagered bows-outward so that their weapons threatened all points of the compass. The jeep-mounted mortars were dug in at the center. Two infantry squads were in pits between the vehicles, while the remainder of the platoon was spread in fire teams around the two relatively-undamaged buildings into which the prisoners had been herded.

Sangrela had ordered each car to send a man to help guard the prisoners. Normally Huber would've complained—F-3 had carried out the assault pretty much by itself, after all—but he was just as glad for an excuse to send Costunna off. Learoyd was in the driver's compartment now with the fans on idle. The squat, balding trooper wasn't the Regiment's best driver, but you never had to worry about his instincts in a firefight.

Nights here on the edge of the highlands were clearer than under the hazy atmosphere of the United Cities. Arne Huber could see the stars for the first time since he'd landed on Plattner's World.

They made him feel more lonely, of course. The one thing that hadn't changed during Huber's childhood on Nieuw Friesland was the general pattern of the night sky. Since he'd joined the Slammers, he couldn't even count on that.

He smiled wryly. "El-Tee?" Sergeant Deseau said, catching the expression.

"Change is growth, Frenchie," Huber said. "Have you ever been told that?"

"Not so's I recall," the sergeant said, rubbing the side of his neck with his knuckles. "Think they're going to leave us here to garrison the place?"

The slug that splashed the bow slope had peppered Deseau between the bottom of his faceshield and the top of his clamshell body armor. He knew that a slightly bigger chunk might have ripped his throat out, just as he knew that he was going to be sweating in the plenum chamber tomorrow, when he helped Maintenance replace the fan that'd been shot away. Both facts were part of the job.

Huber could hear the convoy now over Fencing Master's humming nacelles. The incoming vehicles, mostly air-cushion trucks but with a section of combat cars for escort, kept their fans spinning at high speed in case they had to move fast.

"Charlie Six to all units," said a tense voice on the common task force channel. "Eleven vehicles, I repeat one-one vehicles, entering the perimeter at vector one-seven-zero. They will show—" 

A pause during which the signals officer waited for Captain Sangrela's last-instant decision.

"—blue. Charlie Six out."

As he spoke, the darkness to the southeast of the laager lit with quivering azure spikes: static discharges from the antennas of the incoming convoy. Huber didn't bother to count them: there'd be eleven. Electronic identification was foolproof or almost foolproof; but soldiers were humans, not machines, and they liked to have confirmation from their own eyes as well as from a readout.

Captain Sangrela walked forward, holding a blue marker wand in his left hand. The troops between the armored vehicles rose and moved to the center of the laager where they wouldn't be driven over. The newcomers would be parking between the vehicles of Task Force Sangrela.

If the units spent the night in two separate laagers they risked a mutal firefight, especially if the enemy was smart enough to slip into the gap and shoot toward both camps in turn. The Solace Militia probably didn't have that standard of skill, but some of mercenaries Solace had hired certainly did. Soldiers, even the Slammers, could get killed easily enough without taking needless chances.

The convoy came in, lighted only by its static discharges. Huber could've switched his faceshield to thermal imaging or light-amplification if he'd wanted to see clearly—that's how the drivers were maneuvering their big vehicles into place—but he was afraid he'd drop into a reverie if he surrounded himself with an electronic cocoon. He still felt numb from reaction to the assault.

"El-Tee, that combat car's from A Company," Deseau said, one hand resting idly on the grip of his tribarrel. He was using helmet intercom because the howls of incoming vehicles would've overwhelmed his voice even if he'd shouted at the top of his lungs. "So's the infantry riding on the back of them wrenchmobiles. When did the White Mice start pulling convoy security?" 

Huber's mind kept playing back the moment Fencing Master had lurched into position above the canal so he could rake it with his tribarrel. In his memory there was only equipment and empty uniforms in the sun-struck channel. No men at all . . . 

"You've got me, Frenchie," Huber said. He should've noticed that himself.

A Company—the White Mice, though Huber didn't know where the name came from—was the Regiment's field police, under the command of Major Joachim Steuben. The White Mice weren't all murderous sociopaths; but Major Steuben was, and the troopers of A Company who still had consciences didn't let them get in the way of carrying out the orders Steuben gave.

"Officers to the command car ASAP," a female voice ordered without bothering to identify herself. "All units shut down, maintaining sensor watch and normal guard rosters. Regiment Three-three out." 

Huber felt his face freeze. Regiment Three-three was the signalman for the Slammers' S-3, the operations officer. What was Major Pritchard doing out here?

Though his presence explained why the White Mice were escorting the convoy, that was for sure.

Resupply was aboard six air-cushion trucks. They could keep up with the combat vehicles on any terrain, but their only armor was thin plating around the cab. Besides them the convoy included two combat cars for escort and two recovery vehicles—wrenchmobiles—which could lift a crippled car in the bed between their fore and aft nacelles. For this run the beds had been screened with woven-wire fencing, so that the twenty A Company infantrymen aboard each wouldn't bounce out no matter how rough the ride.

The last member of the convoy was a command vehicle. Its high, thinly armored box replaced the fighting compartment and held more signal and sensor equipment than would fit in a standard combat car. It backed between Fencing Master and the tank to Huber's left, then shut down; the rear wall lowered to form a ramp with a whine of hydraulic pumps.

"Well, you don't got far to go, El-Tee," Deseau said judiciously. He rubbed his neck again. "What d'ye suppose is going on?"

"I'll let you know," Huber said as he swung his legs out of the fighting compartment and stood for a moment on the bulge of the plenum chamber. He gripped the frame of the bustle rack left-handed, then slid down the steel skirt with the skill of long practice.

His right hand held a sub-machine gun, the butt resting on his pelvis. It fired the same 1-cm charges as the Slammers pistols, but it was fully automatic.

Deseau sounded like he didn't expect to like the answer his lieutenant came back with. That was fair, because Huber didn't think he was going to like it either.

Captain Sangrela, looking older than Huber remembered him being at the start of the operation, had just shaken hands with Pritchard at the bottom of the ramp. Mitzi Trogon, built like one of her tanks and at least as hard, was climbing down from Dinkybob on the other side of the command track from Fencing Master. She was a good officer to serve with—if you were able to do your job to her standards.

"Lieutenant Myers's on the way from the prisoner guard in the farm buildings," Sangrela explained to Pritchard as Huber joined them. The buzz of a skimmer was faintly audible, wavering with the breeze but seeming to come closer. "I moved us half a klick out before laagering for the night so we wouldn't have hostiles in the middle of us if they got loose or some curst thing."

This was the first time Huber had seen Major Danny Pritchard in the field; body armor made the S-3 seem bigger than he did addressing the Regiment from a podium. His normal expression was a smile, so he looked younger than his probable real age of thirty-eight or so Standard Years. He'd come up through the ranks, and the pistol he wore over his clamshell in a shoulder rig wasn't just for show.

A woman wearing a jumpsuit uniform of a style Huber hadn't seen before—it wasn't United Cities garb, and it sure wasn't Slammers—had arrived in the car with Pritchard but now waited at the top of the ramp. She responded to Huber's grin with a guarded nod. She was trimly attractive, very alert, and—if Arne Huber was any judge of people—plenty tough as well.

Pritchard looked to his right and said, "Good to see you again, Mitzi," in a cheerful voice. Turning to Huber he went on, warmly enough but with the touch of reserve proper between near strangers, "Lieutenant Huber? Good to meet you."

Lieutenant Myers' skimmer buzzed to a halt beside them, kicking dirt over everybody's feet. Sangrela glared at the infantry platoon leader who now acted as the task force's executive officer.

"Sorry," Myers muttered as he got to his feet. He was a lanky, nervous man who seemed to do his job all right but never would let well enough alone. "I was, I mean—"

"Can it, Lieutenant!" Sangrela said in a tone Huber wouldn't have wanted anyone using to him. To Pritchard he continued apologetically, "Sir, all my officers are now present."

Pritchard quirked a smile. "I guess we'll fit inside," he said, stepping back into the command car and gesturing the others to follow. The roof hatch forward was open; from the inside, all Huber could see of Pritchard's signals officer was the lower half of her body standing on the full-function seat now acting as a firing step. "Not for privacy, but the imagery's going to be sharper if we use the car."

Huber unlatched his body armor and shrugged it off before he climbed into the compartment. Mitzi wasn't wearing hers anyway—she said she bumped often enough in a tank turret as it was. Lieutenant Myers saw Huber strip, started to follow suit, then froze for a moment with the expression of a bunny in the headlights. He was the last to enter, and even then only when Sangrela gestured him angrily forward.

The compartment was smaller than it looked from the outside because the sidewalls were fifteen centimeters thick with electronics. There were fold-down seats at the three touchplate consoles on each side, blandly neutral at this moment because nobody'd chosen the function they were to control.

"Right," said Pritchard when they were all inside. "Officially the government of United Cities has hired the Regiment to support it in its tariff discussions with the government of Solace. Unofficially, everybody on the planet knows that the other five of the Outer States are helping the UC pay our hire."

Huber suspected that not all the Slammers—and not even all the officers here in the S-3's command car—knew or cared who was paying the Slammers. It wasn't their job to know, and a lot of the troopers didn't want to clutter up their minds with things that didn't matter. It might get in the way of stuff that helped them stay alive. . . . 

"The government of the Point," Pritchard continued, "that's the state on the north of the continent—"

A map of the sole continent of Plattner's World bloomed in front of Huber. Everyone in the compartment would see an identical image, no matter where they stood. Though an air-projected hologram, it was as sharp as if it had been carved from agate.

A pale beige overlay identified UC territory on the contour display; as Pritchard spoke, an elongated diamond of the map went greenish: a promontory in the north balanced by a southward-tapering wedge which ended at the central mass of Solace. The Point and the United Cities were directly across the continent from one another.

"—is fully supportive of the UC position. Melinda Riker Grayle, a politician who's not in the government but who has a considerable following among the Moss rangers who collect the raw material for the anti-aging drug—"

The image of a stern-looking woman, well into middle age, replaced the map. She wouldn't have been beautiful even thirty years before, but she was handsome in her way and she glared out at the world with a strength that was evident even in hologram.

"—opposes the government in this. She argues that supporting the Regiment lays the Point open to Solace attack, and that the Regiment couldn't do anything to help the Point in such an event."

Huber nodded. It seemed to him that the only thing protecting the "neutral" Outer States from Solace attack was the fact that Solace needed both the Moss they shipped to Solace for processing and the market they provided for Solace produce. For that matter, everybody knew that part of the Moss shipped from the neutral states came from the UC, and that food and manufactures from Solace found their way back to the UC by the same route.

Pritchard grinned. He had a pleasant face, but his expression now made Huber realize that Colonel Hammer's operations officer had to be just as ruthless as Joachim Steuben in his different way.

"Task Force Sangrela's going to prove Grayle's wrong," he said. "You're going to run from here straight to the Point and be in the capital, Midway, before any civilians even know you're coming."

His grin tightened fractionally. "I wish I could say the same about the Solace military," he added, "but their surveillance equipment's better than that. We're all leaving the satellites up because our employers need them. We can hope they won't have time to mount a real counter to the move, though."

"Blood and Martyrs!" Lieutenant Myers muttered.

"How's my infantry supposed to keep up?" asked Captain Sangrela in a more reasoned version of what was probably the same concern. "That's fourteen hundred kilometers by the shortest practical route—"

Either he'd cued his helmet AI with the question, or he was a better off-the-cuff estimator than Huber ever thought of being.

"—and we're not going to do that in skimmers without taking breaks the cars 'n panzers won't need."

Slammers infantry could travel long distances on their skimmers, recharging their batteries on the move by hooking up to the fusion bottles of the armored fighting vehicles. What they couldn't do was change off drivers the way their heavy brethren would.

Pritchard nodded. "The recovery vehicles that just arrived will go along with you on the run," he said. "Off-duty troops'll ride in the boxes the A Company infantry arrived in. There'll be a convoy of wheeled trucks here tomorrow for the prisoners; the White Mice will ride back in them as guards and escort."

Huber frowned. "What happens if a car's too badly damaged to move under its own power, though?" he asked. Battle damage wasn't the only thing that could cripple a vehicle on a long run over rough country, but a montage of explosions and dazzling flashes danced through Huber's memory as he spoke the words. "The wrenchmobiles can't carry twenty troops and a car besides."

"If a car's damaged that bad," Pritchard said, "you blow her in place, report a combat loss, and move on."

He turned to Mitzi Trogon and continued, "You do the same thing if it's a tank. No hauling cripples along, no leaving other units behind to guard the ones that have to drop out. This mission is more important than the hardware. Understood?"

Everybody nodded grimly.

What Arne Huber understood was that on a mission of this priority, the troops involved were items of hardware also. Colonel Hammer wouldn't throw them away, but their personal wellbeing and survival weren't his first concern either.

"My people plotted a route for you," the S-3 resumed. The electronics projected a yellow line—more jagged than snaky—across the holographic continent. More than a third of the route was within the russet central block of Solace territory, though that probably didn't matter: the task force was going to be a target anywhere the enemy could catch it, whether or not that was in theoretically neutral territory.

Captain Sangrela's face went even bleaker than it'd been a moment before. Pritchard saw the expression and grinned reassuringly. "No, you're not required to follow it," he said. "I know as well as the next guy that what looks like a good idea from satellite imagery isn't necessarily something I want to drive a tank over. Make any modifications you see fit to—but this is a starting point, in more ways than one."

Sangrela nodded, relaxing noticeably. Huber did too, though he was only fully conscious of the momentary knot in his guts when it released. It was good to know that despite the political importance of this mission, the troops on the ground wouldn't have Regimental Command trying to run things from Base Alpha. That'd have been a sure way to get killed.

Mind, if Solace reacted as quickly as the Slammers themselves would respond to a similar opportunity, the mission was still a recipe for disaster.

"What're we going to find when we get to the Point?" Lieutenant Myers asked. "You say there's opposition in the backwoods. Are we going to have to look out for local snipers when we get to—"

He grinned harshly.

"—friendly territory?"

"I'll let our guest field that one," Pritchard said with a tip of his hand toward the woman in the jumpsuit beside him. "Troops, this is Captain Mauricia Orichos of the Point Gendarmery, their army. Captain Orichos?"

"We're not an army," Orichos said. Her pleasant, throaty voice complemented her cheerfully cynical smile. "The job of the Gendarmery is primarily to prevent outsiders from harvesting our Moss. Without paying taxes on it, that is."

She let that sink in for a moment, then continued, "My own job is a little different, however. You might say that I'm head of the state security section. I contacted my opposite number in your regiment—"

Which means Joachim Steuben. Huber hoped he kept his reaction from reaching his facial muscles.

"—and asked for help. The situation is beyond what the Gendarmery, what the Point, can handle by itself."

The map had vanished when Orichos began to speak. Now in its place the car projected first the close-up of Melinda Grayle speaking, then drew back to an image of her audience—a long plaza holding several thousand people: mostly male, mostly armed. Mostly drunk as well, or Huber missed his bet.

"Generally," Orichos continued, "Grayle's supporters—they call themselves the Freedom Party—have stayed in the backlands. They've got a base and supposedly stores of heavy weapons on Bulstrode Bay—"

The map returned briefly, this time with a caret noting an indentation on the west coast of the peninsula, near the tip.

"—which is completely illegal, of course, but we—the government—weren't in any position to investigate it thoroughly." Her smile quirked again. "It seemed to me that most members of the government were concerned that we'd find the rumors were true and they wouldn't be able to stick their heads in the sand any more."

Huber and the other Slammers smiled back at her. Cynicism about official cowardice was cheap, but mercenary soldiers gathered more supporting evidence for the belief than many people did.

The image of Grayle appeared again, but this time the point of view drew back even farther than before. The crowd itself shrank to the center of the field. On all sides were the two- and three-story buildings typical of Plattner's World, set within a forest which had been thinned but not cleared. This was a city. It was larger by far than Benjamin, the administrative capital of the UC.

"Two weeks ago," Orichos said, "Grayle ordered her followers to join her in Midway—and come armed. Her Freedom Party has its headquarters directly across the Axis, Midway's central boulevard, from the Assembly Building. They've been holding rallies every day in the street. This was the first, but they've gotten bigger."

"And you can't stop them?" Captain Sangrela asked. He tried to keep his voice neutral, but Huber could hear the tone of disapproval.

Orichos had probably heard it also, because she replied with noticeable sharpness, "Apart from the ordinary members of the Freedom Party, Captain, there are some ten thousand so-called Volunteers who train in military tactics and who're considerably better armed than the Gendarmery—as well as outnumbering us two to one. I am doing something about them: I'm calling in your Regiment to aid the Point with a show of force."

"Captain Sangrela was merely curious, Mauricia," Pritchard said mildly, though his smile wasn't so much mild as dismissive of anything as trivial as status and honor. "Task Force Sangrela's arrival in Midway will prove Mistress Grayle was wrong about the Slammers being unable to reach the Point in a hurry . . . and if a more robust show turns out to be necessary, that's possible as well."

The imagery vanished. Pritchard looked across the arc of officers, his eyes meeting those of each in turn. In that moment he reminded Huber of a bird of prey.

"Troopers," he said, "route and intelligence assessments have been downloaded to all members of your force. The resupply convoy brought a full maintenance platoon; they'll be working on your equipment overnight so you can get some sleep. I recommend you brief your personnel and turn in immediately. You've got quite a run ahead of you starting tomorrow."

"Blood and Martyrs!" Lieutenant Myers repeated. "That's not half the truth!"

Huber waited for Sangrela and Myers to clear the doorway, then started out. Offering politely to let Mitzi precede him would've at best been a joke—at worst she'd have kicked him in the balls—and he didn't feel much like joking.

"Lieutenant Huber?" Pritchard called. He turned his head. "Walk with me for a moment, will you?"

"Sir," Huber said in muted agreement. He stepped down the ramp and put his clamshell on as he waited for the major to follow Mitzi out of the command car. For a moment his eyes started to adapt to darkness; then the first of several banks of lights lit the Night Defensive Position. The scarred iridium hulls reflected ghostly shadows in all directions.

Huber didn't know why the S-3 wanted to talk to him out of Captain Orichos' hearing; the thought made him uncomfortable. Things a soldier doesn't know are very likely to kill him.

Pritchard gestured them into the passage between his command car and Mitzi's tank, Dinkybob. He didn't speak till they were past the bows of the outward-facing blowers. A crew was already at work on Fencing Master; across the laager, a recovery vehicle had winched Foghorn's bow up at a thirty-degree angle so that a squad of mechanics could start switching out the several damaged nacelles for new ones. Power wrenches and occasionally a diamond saw tore the night like sonic lightning.

"Two things, Lieutenant," Pritchard said when they were beyond the bright pool from the floodlights. He faced the night, his back to the NDP. "First, I was surprised to see you were back with F-3. I had the impression that you'd applied for a transfer?"

Ah. "No sir," Huber said, looking toward the horizon instead of turning toward the major. "Major Steuben offered me a position in A Company. I considered it, but I decided to turn him down."

"I see," said Pritchard. "May I ask why? Because I'll tell you frankly, I don't know of a single case in which Joachim offered an officer's slot to someone who didn't prove capable of doing the job."

"I'm not surprised, sir," Huber said, smiling faintly. "It was because I was pretty sure I could handle the work that I passed. I decided that I didn't want to live with the person I'd be then."

Pritchard laughed. "I can't say I'm sorry to hear that, Huber," he said. "What are your ambitions then? Because I've looked at your record—"

He faced Huber, drawing the younger man's eyes toward him. They couldn't see one another's expressions in the darkness, but the gesture was significant.

"—and I don't believe you're not ambitious."

"Sir . . ." Huber said. He was willing to tell the truth, but right in this moment he wasn't sure what the truth was. "Sir, I figure to stay with F-3 and do a good job until a captaincy opens up in one of the line companies. Or I buy the farm, of course. And after that, we'll see."

Pritchard laughed again. Huber thought there was wistfulness in the sound along with the humor, but he didn't know the S-3 well enough to judge his moods. "Let's go back to your car and get you settled in," he said.

"Yes, sir," Huber said, turning obediently. "But you said there were two things, sir?"

"Hey, there you are, El-Tee!" Sergeant Deseau bellowed as he saw Huber reentering the haze of light. "Come look what the cat dragged in! It's Tranter, and he says he's back with us for the operation!"

"I saw from the after-action review that you were going to need a replacement driver," Pritchard said in a low voice. "You've worked with Sergeant Tranter before and I believe you found him a satisfactory driver—"

"Frenchie says he's the best driver he ever served with," Huber said. "I say that too, but Frenchie's got a hell of a lot more experience than I do."

"—so I had him transferred from Logistics Section to F-3."

Huber strode forward to greet the red-haired sergeant he knew from his brief stint in Log Section. Suddenly remembering where he was—and who he'd just turned his back on—he stopped and faced the major again.

"Sorry, sir," he muttered. "I—I mean, I've been sweating making the run tomorrow short a crewman, and there was no way I was going to have Costunna on my car or in my platoon. I was . . . Well, thank you, I really appreciate it."

"Colonel Hammer and I are asking you and the rest of the task force to do a difficult job, Lieutenant," Major Danny Pritchard said. This time his smile was simple and genuine. "I hope you can depend on us to do whatever we can to help you."

He clasped Huber's right hand and added, "Now, go give your troopers a pep talk and then get some rest. It's going to be your last chance to do that for a bloody long time."

Unless I buy the farm, Huber repeated mentally; but he didn't worry near as much about dying as he had about carrying out tomorrow's operation with his car a crewman short.

The Command and Control module housed in the box welded to Huber's gun mount projected ten holographic beads above Fencing Master's fighting compartment. Call-Sign Sierra—the four tanks, four combat cars, and two recovery vehicles of Task Force Sangrela—was ready to roll.

If Huber'd wanted to go up an increment, the display would've added separate dots for the vehicle crews, the infantry platoon, and the air-cushion jeep carrying the task force commander with additional signals and sensor equipment. He didn't need that now, though he'd raise the sensitivity when the scout section—one car and a fire-team of infantry on skimmers—moved out ahead.

Huber gestured to the display and said over the two-way link he'd set with Captain Orichos' borrowed commo helmet, "We're on track, Captain. Another two minutes."

Sergeant Tranter ran up his fans, keeping the blade incidence fine so that they didn't develop any lift. Huber heard the note change minusculely as the driver adjusted settings, bringing the replacement nacelle into perfect balance with the other seven.

Sergeant Deseau nodded approvingly, chopping the lip of the armor with his hand and then pointing forward to indicate the driver's compartment. Trooper Learoyd didn't react. He usually didn't react, except to do his job; which he did very well, though Huber had met cocker spaniels he guessed had greater intellectual capacity than Learoyd.

The fighting compartment was crowded with Orichos sharing the space with the three men of the combat crew, but Via! it was always crowded. A slim woman who wasn't wearing body armor—her choice, and Huber thought it was a bad one—didn't take up as much room as the cooler of beer they'd strapped onto the back of the bustle rack when they took her aboard. They weren't using overhead cover for the combat cars here on Plattner's World because they were generally operating in heavy forest.

"Wouldn't your helmet show that information?" Orichos asked, tapping the side of the one Huber had borrowed for her from a mechanic when he learned she'd be travelling in his car. She didn't need it so much for communications as for the sound damping it provided. A run like the one planned would jelly the brains of anybody making it without protection from all the shrieks, hums and roars they'd get in an open combat car.

"Sierra Six to Sierra," Captain Sangrela. "White Section—" the scouts "—move out. Over."

The lead car, Foghorn, was already off the ground on fan thrust. Its driver nudged his control yoke forward, sending the thirty-tonne vehicle toward the northwest in a billow of dust. Foghorn's skirts plowed a broad path through the young corn.

Four infantrymen on skimmers lifted when the combat car moved. For a moment they flew parallel to the bigger vehicle, just out of the turbulent air squirting beneath the plenum chamber; then they moved out ahead by 150 meters, spreading to cover a half-klick frontage. Foghorn's sensor suite covered the infantry while they ranged ahead on their light mounts to discover the sort of terrain problems that didn't show up on satellite.

"I can access everything Central's got in its data banks here on my faceshield," Huber replied to Orichos, thinking about her gray eyes behind her faceshield. She'd smiled at him when he offered her the helmet. "I like to keep it for stuff with immediate combat significance, though."

He grinned through his visor and added, "Sometimes it's more important that I'm Fencing Master's left wing gunner than that I command Platoon F-3."

The scouts patrolled a klick ahead of whichever vehicle was leading the main body. The combat cars and infantry would rotate through White Section every hour under the present conditions, more frequently if the terrain got challenging.

Huber had picked Sergeant Nagano's car to start out in the lead because it'd been so badly battered at Northern Star. If last night's massive repairs weren't going to hold up, Huber wanted to know about it now—by daylight and long before the enemy started reacting to Task Force Sangrela.

"Sierra Six to Sierra," Sangrela ordered in a hoarsely taut voice. "Red Section—" the main body, with Fencing Master leading two tanks, followed by the recovery vehicles and the last two tanks "—move out. Over."

"That's us, Tranter," Huber ordered on the intercom channel. "Hold us at thirty kph until the whole section's under way, got that?"

They planned to average sixty kph on the run, putting them in Midway exactly twenty-four hours from this moment, including breaks to switch drivers and the stretches of bad terrain that'd hold down their speed. Ordinarily on this sort of smooth ground they'd have belted along at the best speed the infantry could manage on skimmers, close to 100 kph. Sierra had to build speed gradually, however, or the vehicles would scatter themselves too widely to support each other in event of enemy action.

Which was certain to come; more certain than any trooper in Task Force Sangrela could be of seeing the next sunrise.

Sergeant Tranter brought Fencing Master up from a dead halt as smoothly as if he were twisting a rheostat. He'd been a maintenance technician, so he'd learned to drive armored vehicles by shifting them—frequently badly damaged—around one another in the tight confines of maintenance parks. He'd stopped being a tech when a hydraulic jack blew out, dropping a tank's skirts to a concrete pad and pinching his right leg off as suddenly as lightning.

The mechanical leg was in most respects as good as the original one, but in serious cold the organic/electrical interface degraded enough to send the limb into spasms. The Regiment had offered Tranter the choice of retirement on full pay or a rear-echelon job he could do in a heated building. He'd chosen the latter, a berth in Logistics Section.

Summer temperatures on Plattner's World never dropped below the level of mildly chilly. If Regimental command was willing to make an exception, there was nobody Arne Huber would've preferred driving his car than Tranter.

Huber looked over his shoulder, twisting his body at the waist because the clamshell armor stiffened his neck and upper torso. The lead tank, Dinkybob, lifted to follow thirty meters behind Fencing Master. Mitzi's driver echeloned the big vehicle slightly to the right of Tranter's line to stay out of the combat car's dust. That was fine on a grain-field like this, but pretty soon Task Force Sangrela would be winding through hillside scrub where the big vehicles'd feel lucky to have one route.

Well, troopers got used to dust pretty quick. The only thing they knew better was mud. . . .  The commo helmets had nose filters that dropped down automatically and static charges to keep their faceshields clear, but on a run like this Huber knew to expect a faintly gritty feeling every time he blinked. The ration bars he ate on the move would crunch, too.

The tribarrels were sealed against dust—until you had to use them. It didn't take much grit seeping down the ejection port to jam mechanisms as precise as those in the interior of an automatic weapon.

Captain Orichos swayed awkwardly, uncertain of what she could safely grab or sit on. She was familiar with aircars and thought this would be the same. She hadn't realized that terrain affected the ride of air cushion vehicles—not as much as it affected wheels and treads, but still a great deal.

She caught Huber's glance and waved a hand in frustration. "I'd expected the floor to vibrate," she said. "But the jolting—what does that? I didn't feel anything like that when I rode here with Major Pritchard."

Huber grinned. "You rode here in a convoy travelling at the speed of heavily loaded supply vehicles, with the number two man in the Slammers aboard. Sierra has different priorities. Even on these fields, the front skirt digs in every time there's a little dip or rise in the ground. It'll get a lot worse when we start working along the sides of the foothills we're scheduled to hit pretty soon."

"Then it's always like this?" she asked. Deliberately she lifted her faceshield, squinting slightly against the wind blast. She quirked the wry smile he'd seen the night before as she discussed the moral courage of elected officials.

"No, not always," Huber said, raising his own shield to give Orichos a much broader smile than the one he'd been wearing before. "Sometimes they're shooting at us, Captain."

"Sierra Six to Sierra," Captain Sangrela said. "Blue Section, move out."

Blue Section was the two remaining combat cars under Platoon Sergeant Jellicoe. They'd follow the main body at a kilometer's distance, extending the column's sensor range to the rear by that much. There wasn't a high likelihood that the enemy would sweep up on the task force from behind, but some of the mercenary units Solace was known to have hired had equipment with sufficient performance to manage it.

The cars in Blue Section would rotate at the same intervals as the scouts did. Either Huber or Jellicoe would be at the front or rear of the column—but never both at the same end.

"Then I guess I'd better get used to it, hadn't I?" Orichos said. She spread her left hand over her eyes to shield them as she surveyed the terrain. She added, "Have you been with Hammer's Slammers long, Lieutenant?" 

"Five years," Huber said, facing forward and lowering his faceshield so that Orichos could do the same. "I entered the Military Academy on Nieuw Friesland with the intention of enlisting in the Regiment when I graduated . . . and I did."

The scouts were already into the gullied scrubland that the task force would grind through for the first half of the route. Central had timed the departure from Northern Star so that Sierra would be in pitch darkness while it navigated the last of the foothills south of Point territory where forests resumed.

Until the task force set off, the enemy would assume the Slammers intended to return to UC territory after capturing Northern Star. It'd take the Solace command time to react when they realized the Slammers' real intent. The most dangerous ambush sites were in the foothills; by waiting till noon to set off, the task force would have the advantage of the Regiment's more sophisticated night vision equipment in that last stretch which the enemy might reach in time to block them.

Huber hoped the Colonel was right; but then, he hoped a lot of things, and his tribarrel was ready to take care of whatever reality threw at them. You couldn't always blast your way through problems, but the ability to out-slug the other fellow never stopped being an advantage.

"Do you know much about the political structure of the Point, Lieutenant?" Orichos asked. Since her voice came through the commo helmet, she could've been standing anywhere on the planet—but Huber was very much aware of her presence beside and just behind him.

"Not a thing, ma'am," he admitted. "I studied the United Cities some from the briefing cubes because they were hiring us, but I didn't look at the rest of you folks."

He touched the controller with his left hand, projecting an image remoted from Foghorn into the air before him. The scout car was bulling through brush already. The stems were wiry enough to spring back after Foghorn passed, but they were too thin to be a barrier to a thirty-tonne vehicle.

He hoped what he'd just said didn't sound too much like, "I'm not interested in you dumb wogs;" which wasn't true for Arne Huber himself but pretty well summed up the attitude of a lot of Slammers, officers as well as line troopers like Sergeant Deseau. Trooper Learoyd wasn't likely to have thoughts so abstract.

"Midway's the only city in the Point," Orichos said. "We're not like Trenchard or the UC where there's half a dozen places each as big as the next. There's a quarter million people in Midway, and no town as big as a thousand in all the rest of the country." 

"So about a third of your population's in the one city," Huber said. He hadn't studied the Point, not like you'd really mean studied; but he'd checked the basic statistics on Plattner's World, sure. "I guess there's a lot of trouble between people in Midway and the rest of the country, then?"

"There wasn't any trouble at all before Melinda Grayle came along!" snapped Captain Orichos, her very vehemence proving that she was lying. "She started stirring up the Moss rangers ten years ago. All she's interested in is power for herself."

Not unlikely, Arne Huber thought. Of course, Melinda Grayle wasn't the only politician you could say that about; and she maybe wasn't the only politician in the Point you could say it about, either.

"Grayle claims that the votes in the last election were falsified and that she should've been elected Speaker of the Assembly," Orichos went on. "She's threatening to take by force what she claims her Freedom Party lost by fraud. Everybody knows that the reason most Assemblymen are residents of Midway is because Moss rangers can't be bothered to vote!"

"Ma'am," said Arne Huber, "I wouldn't know about that. But if the lady thinks she's going to use force while we're in Midway—"

He turned his head toward her again and patted the receiver of his tribarrel.

"—then she'll have another think coming. Because force is something I do know about."

"Amen to that, El-Tee," said Frenchie Deseau. He didn't raise his voice on the intercom, but his words had the timbre of feeding time in the lion house.

It was four hours to dawn; the sky was a hazy overcast through which only the brightest stars winked. The car's vibration and buffeting wind of passage—seventy kph, a little more or a little less—drew the strength out of the troopers who'd been subjected to it for the past half day.

Huber sat cross-legged beside the left gun, watching the shimmering holographic display. He was too low to look out of the fighting compartment from here, but the range of inputs from Fencing Master's sensors should provide more warning that than his eyes could even during daylight.

Body heat, CO₂ exhalations, and even the bioelectrical field which every living creature created were grist for the sensors to process. They scanned the gullied slopes a full three kilometers ahead, noting small animals sleeping in burrows and the scaly, warm-blooded night-flyers of Plattner's World which curvetted in the skies above.

Tranter was sleeping—was curled up, anyway—under the right wing gun on a layer of ammo boxes. Orichos squatted behind him with her back to the armor, looking as miserable as a drenched kitten. Learoyd had just taken over the driving chores from Deseau, awake but barely as he hunched over the forward tribarrel. Huber didn't worry about how the sergeant'd react to an alarm—Deseau was enough of a veteran and a warrior both to lay fire on a target in a sound sleep—but he certainly wasn't going to raise the alarm.

That would be Arne Huber's job. As platoon leader he wasn't taking a turn driving, but neither did he catch catnaps like the rest of the crew between stints in the driver's compartment. Fencing Master was the combat car in White Section during this leg, so Huber had the sensor suite on high sensitivity.

Task Force Sangrela was running the part of the route which Solace forces might have been able to reach for an ambush. Central hadn't warned of enemy movement, but there could've been troops already in place in the region. Technically they were still within Solace territory, not that anybody was likely to stand on a technicality during wartime.

"Bloody fuckin' hell," Sergeant Deseau growled over the intercom. He clung to the grips of his tribarrel as though he'd have fallen without them to hold onto . . . which he might well have done. High-speed driving over rough terrain at night was a ten-tenths activity, many times worse than the grueling business of surviving the ride in the fighting compartment. "I wish somebody'd just shoot at us for a break from this bloody grind."

"There's nobody around to shoot, Frenchie," Huber said; and as he spoke, he saw he was wrong.

Keying the emergency channel with the manual controller he'd been using to switch between sensor modes, Huber said, "White Six to Sierra, we've got locals waiting for us ahead. It's six-three, repeat six-three—" the display threw up the numbers in the corner; he sure wasn't going to have counted the blips overlaying the terrain map that fast "—personnel, no equipment signatures. Looks like dispersed infantry with personal weapons only."

A company of infantry with small arms would be plenty to wipe out White Section if they'd driven straight into the ambush. Mind, knowing about the ambush didn't mean there was no risk remaining, especially to the scouts on point.

"Sierra, this is Sierra Six," Captain Sangrela snapped. His voice sounded sleep-strangled, but he'd responded instantly to the alert. "Throttle back to twenty, repeat two-zero, kay-pee-aitch. Charlie Four-six—" The sergeant commanding the infantry of White Section "—take your team ahead while they're listening to the cars and see if you can get a sight of what we're dealing with. Six out." 

Deseau, now wakeful as a stooping hawk, stretched his right leg backwards without looking. He kicked Tranter hard on the buttocks, bringing him out of the fetal doze as the alarm call had failed to do.

Swaying, drunk with fatigue, Tranter took his place behind the right gun. He didn't look confident there.

"Charlie Four-six," responded a female voice without a lot of obvious enthusiasm. On Huber's display, the four beads of the skimmer-mounted fire team curved to the right, up the slope the column was paralleling. "Roger."

Instead of throttling back when Sangrela ordered them to cut speed, Learoyd adjusted his nacelles toward the vertical. The fans' sonic signature remained the same, but the blades were spending most of their effort in lifting Fencing Master's skirts off the ground instead of driving her forward. The car slowed without informing the listening enemy of the change.

Huber rose to his feet and gripped the tribarrel. The task force commander had taken operational control of White Section, so Huber's primary task was to lay fire on any hostiles who showed themselves in his sector.

"Fox Three-one, come up to my starboard side," he ordered. Sergeant Tranter was a fine driver and a first-rate mechanic, but he may never have fired a tribarrel since his basic combat qualification course in recruit school. Huber wanted more than two guns on line if they were about to go into action against an infantry company.

"Roger, Three-six," Sergeant Nagano responded. The display icon indicating his combat car disengaged from the front of the main body and began to close the kilometer gap separating it from Fencing Master.

Captain Sangrela must have seen Foghorn move as well as overhearing Huber's order on the command channel; he chose to say nothing. Sensibly, he was leaving the immediate tactical disposition to the man on the ground.

Mauricia Orichos stood erect, her back against the rear coaming of the fighting compartment. She didn't ask questions when the troopers around her obviously needed to focus on other things, but she looked about her alertly, like a grackle in a grain field.

Huber noticed that she didn't draw the pistol from her belt holster. To Orichos' mind it was an insignia of rank, not a weapon.

Huber switched his faceshield to thermal imaging. It wouldn't give him as good a general picture of his surroundings, but it was better for targeting at night than light amplification would be. He couldn't see the cold light of the holographic display, so he projected the data as a thirty percent mask over the faceshield's ghostly infrared landscape.

The dots representing the mounted infantrymen approached the upper end of a ravine in which the combat car's sensors saw more than a dozen hostiles waiting under cover. From their angle, the four Slammers would be able to rake the gully and turn it into an abattoir. The enemy gave no indication of being aware of the troopers.

When Fencing Master slowed, the dust her fans had been raising caught up with her. Yellow-gray grit swirled down the intake gratings on top of the plenum chamber and settled over the troops in the fighting compartment; the back of Huber's neck tickled.

He felt taut. He wasn't nervous, but he was trying to spread his mind to cover everything around him. The task was beyond human ability, as part of Arne Huber's soap-bubble thin consciousness was well aware.

The fire team leader started laughing over the command push. The sound was wholly unexpected—and because of that, more disconcerting than a burst of shots.

"Charlie Four-six, report!" Captain Sangrela snarled. He sounded angry enough to have slapped his subordinate if she'd been within arm's length. Huber wouldn't have blamed him. . . . 

"Imagery coming, sir," the sergeant replied; suppressing her laughter, but only barely.

Huber raised his visor and used the Command and Control box to project the view from the sergeant's helmet where everybody in the car could see it. The hologram of a sheep stared quizzically at him. Behind the nearest animal stretched a hillside panorama of sheep turning their heads and a startled boy holding a long bamboo pole.

"Sierra Six to Sierra," Captain Sangrela said in a neutral tone. "Resume previous order of march. Out." 

Fencing Master lurched as Learoyd adjusted his nacelles again. The bow skirts gouged a divot of the loose soil, but the car's forward motion blew it behind them.

"Blood and Martyrs!" said Sergeant Deseau. "Curst if I'm not ready to blast a few a' them sheep just for the fright they give me!"

"Save your ammo, Frenchie," Huber said. "I guess we'll have plenty of things to kill before this mission's over."

 

The sun was an hour above the horizon, Task Force Sangrela had been in the fringe forest for longer than that. Fencing Master was in the trail position, last of the ten vehicles. Foghorn was a hundred meters ahead where Huber could've caught glimpses of her iridium hull if he'd tried.

He didn't bother. His job was to check the sensor suite, oriented now to the rear, and that was more than enough to occupy the few brain cells still working in his numb mind.

Tranter was driving again; the ride was noticeably smoother than either of the troopers could've managed, even when they were fresh. Learoyd was curled beneath his tribarrel, asleep and apparently as comfortable as he'd have been back in barracks.

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.

"No!" said Mitzi Trogon unexpectedly. "Huber's got a good idea, but we don't want to send his little fellows to do the job. Sir, find a firing position for my panzers and screw this business of scaring the hostiles to ground. I'll blow 'em to hell 'n gone before they know they've been targeted!"

"By the Lord," Colonel Hammer said in a tone of rasping delight. "Roger that! Go back to your duties, troopers. I'll be back with you as soon as I've brought Operations up to speed."

The virtual conference room vanished so suddenly that Huber jumped with the shock. The change made him feel as though he'd dropped into ice water instead of just returning to the world in which his body rode a combat car toward a powerful enemy.

"What's the word, El-Tee?" Deseau said, his voice sharp. He sat cross-legged at Huber's feet with his 2-cm weapon upright, its butt on his left knee. His eyes were on the sensor display.

"Fox Three, this is Fox Three-six," Huber said, cueing the platoon push instead of answering Frenchie on the intercom channel. "There's an anti-tank battalion headed out to block us. They probably figure to hold us while Solace command comes up with a way to do a more permanent job. Lieutenant Trogon and Central between 'em are planning to put the hostiles in touch with some 20-cm bolts before they get anywhere close to the rest of us. Hold what you got for now, and keep your fingers crossed. Out."

"Is there going to be a battle, then, Lieutenant?" a voice asked. Gears slipped a moment before meshing in Huber's mind. Captain Orichos had spoken; she was standing upright with her eyes on him, her faceshield raised. Orichos looked calm but alert. Vibrant as her face now was, she seemed brightly attractive instead of the haggard, aged derelict she'd looked before the alarm.

Learoyd stood at his tribarrel, scanning the scattered forest to starboard. None of the trees were more than wrist-thick, though the tufts of flowers at the tips of some branches showed they were adults. The leading vehicles, the tanks and especially the broad-beamed recovery vehicles, had to break a path where the stunted forest was densest.

Closer to the coast where the soil and rainfall were better, the overarching canopy would keep the understory clear. The task force'd have to skirt the trees there, however; not even a tank could smash down a meter-thick trunk without damaging itself in the process. . . . 

"Not a battle, no," Huber said over the intercom. "If things work out, the hostiles won't get anywhere near us. If things don't, we'll still go around them rather than shooting our way through. That may mean worse problems down the road, but we'll deal with that when it happens."

As Huber spoke, he cued his AI to project a terrain and status map in a seventy percent mask across the upper left quadrant of his faceshield. His helmet with all Central's resources on tap could provide him with whatever information he might need. What electronics couldn't do was to stop time while he tried to absorb all that maybe-necessary information.

In a crisis, making no decision is the worst possible decision. A shrunken map that he could see through to shoot if he had to was a better choice than trying to know everything.

"Is it gonna work, El-Tee?" Deseau asked, still watching the sensor display. He cocked his head to the left so that he could scratch his neck with his right little finger.

Instead of saying, "Who the fuck knows?" which a sudden rush of fatigue brought to his mind, Huber treated the question as a classroom exercise at the Academy.

"Yeah," he said, "I think it maybe will, Frenchie. The Wolverines, that's who's coming, they know what a big powergun can do as well as we do—but knowing it and knowing it, that's different. If Sierra just keeps rolling along, they're going to forget that a tank can hit 'em any time there's a line of sight between them and a main gun's bore. A surprise like that's likely to make the survivors sit tight and take stock for long enough that we can get by the place they planned to hold us."

"That's good," Deseau said. "Because I saw what a battery of the Wolverines did to a government armored regiment on Redwood. Bugger me if I want to fight 'em if we can get by without it." 

"Sierra, this is Sierra Six," said Captain Sangrela, sounding hoarse but animated. "Delta elements, execute the orders downloaded to you from Central. Remaining Sierra elements, hold to the march plan. We're not going to do anything to alert the other side. Estimated time to action is thirty-nine, that's three-niner, minutes. Six out." 

"Fox Three-six, roger," Huber said, his words merging with the responses of Sierra's other two platoon leaders.

He stretched his arms, over his head and then behind him, bending forward at the waist. It was going to feel good to get the clamshell off; it itched like an ant colony had taken up residence.

Always assuming he lived long enough to get to a place he didn't need body armor, of course. But he did assume that, soldiers always assumed that.

Arne Huber grinned behind his faceshield. And it was always true—until the day it wasn't true.

The task force had slowed again to switch assignments. Fencing Master was now at the head of the main body, Foghorn and a fire team of infantry who'd jumped their skimmers off the maintenance vehicle where they'd been resting were scouting a klick in the lead, and Sergeant Jellicoe's section trailed to the rear.

Huber smiled grimly behind the anonymity of his faceshield. "Resting" wasn't a good word to describe what the infantry was going through, jolting around in the back of a wrenchmobile. Though this was a hard ride for the troops in the armored vehicles, it was a lot worse for the infantry. But Via! every soul in the Slammers was a volunteer.

They were climbing a slope of harder rock than most of the surroundings—a spine of sandstone from which time had worn away the limestone overburden. The top was bald except for patches of wiry grass and a few saplings whose roots had found purchase in a crack. A fresh scar across the stone showed where Foghorn had dragged her skirts.

"Sierra, thirty seconds to execute!" snapped Captain Sangrela over the general push.

Huber rested his left hand on the receiver of his tribarrel and looked over his shoulder. Fifty meters behind Fencing Master, Dinkybob, a massive iridium tortoise, snorted up the slight rise. The tank's hatches were buttoned up; as Huber watched, the turret swung to starboard. The squat 20-cm main gun elevated very slightly.

Mauricia Orichos raised her faceshield to watch the tank. Huber reached over her shoulder and clicked the protection back over her eyes. "Not now!" he said sharply. "Aide—"

As Huber voice-cued his AI, he manually keyed the pad over Orichos' right ear to link her helmet to his.

"—import targeting from Delta Two-six."

With the final word, Huber viewed not his immediate surroundings but the sight picture from the gunnery screen of the huge tank just behind him. It was at high magnification, so high that it had the glassy smoothness of images heavily retouched by the computer to sharpen them.

Five waves of large aircars skimmed undulating, almost barren, terrain. There were four vehicles in the leading ranks and three in the final, all echeloned right. They'd just crossed a ridgeline and were nosing down to cross a shallow valley.

Dinkybob's sight pipper settled over the lead vehicle in the left file. Instead of being a solid orange ball, the reticle was crosshatched to indicate that the fire-control computer was auto-targeting just as it would do in air defense mode.

The cyan flash of the main gun stabbed across Huber's bare skin like a separate needle every millimeter. It would've been instantly blinding to anyone looking toward it without a faceshield's polarizing protection. The crash of heated air—louder than an equally close thunderbolt—shook Fencing Master. Deseau, jounced from his squat, sprawled across Huber's feet.

The center of the targeted aircar erupted in blue flame. The bow and a fragment of the stern tumbled out of the sky, spilling such of the contents as hadn't been carbonized by the blast.

Dinkybob continued to fire, ripping the formation as quickly as her gun mechanism could cycle fresh loads into the chamber. Trogon was burning out her barrel by shooting without giving the bore time to cool between rounds. For the people in Fencing Master's fighting compartment, the volley was like being whipped by a scorpion's tail.

For the Wolverines at the other end, it was a brief glimpse of Hell.

A tank hit at that range—eighty-one kilometers distant—might have shrugged off the bolt with damage only to its external sensors and its running gear. It was impossible for a vehicle that had to fly with a heavy cargo the way the Wolverines' trucks did to be armored like a tank. Each bolt scattered its target in a fireball of its own burning structure.

Dinkybob was nearing the edge of the bald patch, but Doomsayer was immediately behind. For an instant both 20-cm guns fired in tight syncopation; then Fencing Master drove into heavy forest, Dinkybob passed out of its targeting window, and even Doomsayer's main gun ceased firing. Huber's heartbeat throbbed in the silence.

The summons wobbled at the corner of Huber's faceshield. He cued it, dropping into the virtual conference room again.

Colonel Hammer looked around the circle of Sierra officers. "That's fourteen out of nineteen trucks destroyed," he said, "and two of the others grounded hard enough to break as best we can tell by satellite."

Hammer grinned like a shark. "Task accomplished, troopers. Complete the rest of the mission the same way and there'll be a lot of promotions out of this business. Dismissed!"

Arne Huber swayed in the rumbling fighting compartment of his combat car, thinking about what the Colonel had just said. Promotion—maybe.

But if they didn't complete the mission, very probably death. Well, the Slammers were all volunteers. . . . 

The muzzle of Dinkybob's main gun had cooled from white to a red so deep it was mostly a shimmer in the air around the hot metal. Mitzi's turret hatch was open, dribbling a trail of gray haze. A plastic matrix held the copper atoms in alignment for release as plasma down the powergun's bore; the smoke was the last of the breakdown products from the recent shooting.

An alert wobbled on the upper right corner of Huber's faceshield. He crooked his left little finger, one of six ways he could cue the icon. It was a download-only channel, information from Central for Sierra Six. Huber and the other task force officers were brought into the circuit to listen but not to comment.

"Sierra, this is Operations Three-four-one," said the voice from somewhere back in Base Alpha. "Solace command is pissed about what you did to the Wolverines. They've ordered a fire mission by all batteries that can range you. You'll have to take care of your own air defense. Any questions? Over." 

Though voice-only, the increasingly thick foliage overhead attenuated the transmission to sexlessness. On this side of the ridge, the task force was descending into healthy coastal forest.

"What do you mean 'all batteries'?" Captain Sangrela asked. He sounded more irritable than concerned. "Is this a real problem? Over."

"Negative on a real problem," Central replied calmly. It was easy to be calm in Base Alpha, of course. "There's two, maybe three off-planet batteries with rocket howitzers and carrier shells. We'll get you time and vector data as soon as they fire, but you'll have plenty of room to pop them before the carriers separate. Besides that, the Solace Militia has thirty or forty conventional tubes that can range you with rocket assisted rounds, but they won't have any payload to speak of after what the booster rocket requires. I repeat, you'll have full data soonest. Over" 

"Roger, Sierra out," Sangrela said. "Break, Fox Three-six—"

The signal now was coming through the task force command channel.

"—that puts it on your cars. Is there going to be any problem? Over."

"No problem, Six," Huber said curtly. "Just give me a minute to plan. Out."

He raised his faceshield and brought up a terrain display through the Command and Control box. On cue the AI highlighted the locations on or near Sierra's forward track which provided a line of sight toward the arc of territory where the hostile guns might be sited.

The display used a violet overlay to mark ranges of thirty klicks and above; the hue moved down the spectrum as the range closed. Points from which a tribarrel could reach out five kilometers—as close as Huber was willing to let the sophisticated carrier shells get—were green.

A single carrier shell held a load of between three and several scores of bomblets, each with its own target-seeking head. When the carrier round opened to release them, the difficulties of defense went up by an order of magnitude.

Sergeant Tranter had traded jobs with Deseau. He turned from the forward tribarrel and asked, "Whatcha got, El-Tee?"

"Watch your sector!" Huber snapped in a blaze of frustration.

He'd apologize later. Tranter was a good driver and a great man to have on your team, but he was a technician and not—till this run—a combat crewman. He didn't know by reflex that Huber was busy with something that likely meant all their lives if he did it wrong. Had Tranter realized that, he'd have kept his mouth shut.

The display showed what Huber expected but didn't like to see: there were very few places along Sierra's planned route that would let the tribarrels range out ten klicks, and even those were points. The combat cars wouldn't be able to protect the column on the fly. They'd have to set up on the few patches where the ground was higher and relatively clear of vegetation.

Huber straightened. Learoyd scanned the car's starboard flank with the bored certainty of a machine; Sergeant Tranter was as rigid as a statue at the forward gun—Via! I didn't mean to bite his head off—and Captain Orichos was trying to watch all directions like a bird who's heard a cat she can't see.

"Sierra, this is Fox Three-six," Huber said. "When Central gives us an alert, the C and C box'll choose the best overwatch position and direct the nearest car to it. The rest of Sierra'll bypass that car, which'll leapfrog forward when it comes out of air defense mode. It may be that there'll be more than one car at a time out of the column. Three-six out."

There was a series of Rogers from the other officers. Huber hadn't bothered to run the plan by Sierra Six before delivering it to the whole unit. Sangrela'd tasked him with the solution of the problem, and it was something that an infantry officer didn't have much experience with anyway.

"What happens if the bad guys're waiting out in the woods, El-Tee?" Deseau asked over the intercom from the driver's compartment. He had the hatch open so that he could drive with his head out in the breeze. "With the guns locked on air defense, a lone car's pretty much dead meat, right?"

"The same thing that happens if you fall out a window drunk, Frenchie," Huber said with a quiver of irritation. Did Deseau think that hadn't occurred to him? But there wasn't any choice. With only four cars, he couldn't detach a second unit to guard the one on air defense. "Either you get up and go on, or you don't."

"Yeah, that's about what I figured," Deseau said. He sighed. "You don't suppose me 'n Tranter could trade off again, do you?"

"Negative," said Huber. "We've got to keep moving."

He too would like to have Frenchie in the fighting compartment, watching their surroundings with his shoulder weapon while the gunnery computer aimed the tribarrels skyward. Huber'd like a lot of things, but he was a veteran. He'd make do with what he had.

The alert from Central overrode F-3's helmet AIs, filling ninety percent of each faceshield with fire control data and relegating previous tasks to a box in the center. Huber flicked his helmet back to Sierra status in a thirty percent mask over the forest around him and ordered, "Fox Three-three, execute."

Not that Sergeant Jellicoe needed his okay. Her car, Floosie, had already steered to the right of the column's track and was pulling up a rise. Flame Farter would be alone in the drag position until Floosie rejoined, and Floosie would be very much alone.

"A Rangemaster battery's sent us a salvo of 200-mm shells," Huber explained over the intercom. "The battery's sited at one-thirty degrees from us, so Jellicoe's breaking out of line for a moment to take care of the incoming. The Rangemasters're a good enough outfit, but there's next to no chance that anything'll get past Floosie."

He was speaking mostly for Orichos' benefit; Fencing Master's crew probably understood the situation as well as their lieutenant did. Well, Deseau and Tranter understood; Learoyd understood the little he needed to understand.

Mauricia Orichos nodded appreciatively, then quirked Huber a smile. "It's like being a baby again," she said. "I know there's a lot going on, but I don't understand any of it."

Her smile grew marginally harder; she no longer looked haggard. She added, "We'll be back in my element soon."

Huber switched his helmet to remote, importing fire control imagery from Floosie. As an afterthought, he restored the link to Orichos' helmet also.

The display was blank until Huber stuttered up three orders of magnitude. At such high gain there was a tiny quiver that even the Slammers' electronics couldn't fully damp.

The shell, twenty centimeters in diameter and almost two meters long, was a blurred dash in the four-bar reticle to which Jellicoe had set her sights. The image jumped minusculely as a tribarrel's recoil jiggled the platform. Several cyan dots, vivid even at that range, intersected the shell.

The target ruptured in a red flash and a puff of dirty black smoke. Two more shells exploded into black rags in the sky around it; a fourth followed an instant later as one of the car's tribarrels made a double. Bomblets from the last shell detonated around the initial burst in a white sparkle.

Huber thought he heard the distance-delayed thumping of Floosie's guns, but he was probably wrong. Loud though they were up close, the sound of 2-cm discharges several klicks away would've been lost in Fencing Master's intake roar. As for the shellbursts, they wouldn't have been visible to unaided eyes even if the column had a clear view of the sky to the southeast.

Huber cleared his and Orichos' faceshield. "They'll keep on firing for a while," he said, speaking through the intercom but keeping eye contact with the local, the only person in the car who'd be interested. "The thing is, cargo shells're expensive to make and they have to be brought in from off-planet. If Solace command wants to waste them like this, they can be our guests. There could be a time the tribarrels'd have their usual work to do, and we wouldn't want to worry then about firecracker rounds going off overhead."

"Fox Three-three rejoining column," Jellicoe said in a tone of mild satisfaction. Sure it was shooting fish in a barrel; and true, neither she nor her crew had touched their triggers while the gunnery computer took care of business . . . but it was still a nice bag of fish. "Out."

"Three indig batteries have opened fire," Central announced. "Seventeen tubes. None of the rounds are going to come close enough to worry about, so proceed on course as planned. Over."

Tranter straightened, stretched, and then turned enough to meet Huber's eyes. He ventured a weak grin; Huber clasped Tranter's arm, closing the file on their previous short exchange.

From the driver's compartment Deseau called, "Hey El-Tee? See if you can find us something t' shoot at, will you? I don't want my tribarrel growing shut like an old maid's cunt."

He laughed.

Before Huber could speak, Central broke in with, "Six rounds incoming from vector oh-nine-three. Fox Three-six respond. Over."

A terrain display appeared on the upper left quadrant of his faceshield with a short, crooked red line reaching left toward the spot Central had picked for Fencing Master's firing position.

"Roger, Central," Huber said, swaying as Deseau pulled into a ravine. It was filled with feathery bushes that crumpled beneath Fencing Master's bow skirts. The car rocked violently on the rough climb.

"Well, it's a start," said Frenchie. He kept his voice bright, but Huber could hear the strain; this wasn't easy driving, not for anybody. "But you know, it's been a bitch of a run. I'm looking forward to getting back behind my gun where I can maybe kill some of the bastards who put us through it."

Deseau laughed. Huber didn't join him, but he noticed that Captain Orichos wore a broad, grim smile.

"Sierra, we got buildings up here!" called an unfamiliar voice. Huber's AI slugged the speaker as one of the scouting infantry. "By the Lord, we do! There's more of 'em! We finally made it!" 

"Ermanez, get off the push!" Captain Sangrela snapped. They were all punchy, fatigued in mind and body alike. "White Section, hold in place. Blue Section, close up as soon as you can without running any civilians down. These're friendlies, remember! Six out."

"Six, this is Fox Three-six," Huber said. He twisted and leaned sideways to look off the stern of the car, past Captain Orichos. As he expected, the commander's jeep was on its way forward. The light vehicle wobbled furiously in the turbulent air spurting beneath the skirts of the wrenchmobiles and tanks it was passing. "I'm moving into the lead in place of Sergeant Nagano. All right? Over."

"Roger, Three-six," Sangrela said. Huber watched the jeep lift airborne and plop down again hard enough to pogo on its flexible skirts. The message paused for a grunt. Sangrela went on, "Three-six, I'm dismounting all the infantry. I'm putting two squads up front with you for outriders. Out."

"Fox Three-one," Huber said, cueing Foghorn ahead of him with the scouts, "halt at a wide spot and let me in ahead of you. Three-six out."

He could see Foghorn. For nearly eight hundred kilometers the column had been picking its way through trees. Suddenly they'd exited the forest onto a boulevard broad enough that even the wide recovery vehicles could've driven down it two abreast. The buildings to either side were three and four story wood-framed structures, but they had much wider street frontage than those of the United Cities. In the UC, Huber'd had the feeling he was standing in a field of towers rather than houses.

A few pedestrians walked between buildings and a scattering of high-wheeled jitneys bounced and wavered along the street. There was no other traffic. Despite its width the road wasn't surfaced. At the moment it was rutted and dusty, but a rainstorm would turn it into a sea of mud.

Captain Orichos took a hand-held communicator from a belt pouch, stuck a throat mike against her larynx—it adhered to the skin of her neck, but it hadn't clung to her fingers—and lifted the commo helmet enough to slip earphones under. As she entered codes on the handset, her eyes remained on the road ahead.

The scouts waited as ordered, the four infantrymen beside their skimmers to the left of Foghorn. They looked ragged and filthy—Huber glanced down at himself, his jacket sleeves a rusty color from the road grime, and grinned wearily—but they held their weapons with the easy care of veterans ready for whatever happened next.

Tranter throttled back and adjusted his nacelles to slow gently to a halt. He steered to bring Fencing Master up on Foghorn's starboard side without fishtailing or dragging a jolting dust storm with the skirts.

The thought made Huber look over his shoulder. He trusted Sergeant Tranter to be able to drive safely, no matter how tired. The tank immediately behind them weighed 170 tonnes and its driver had probably had less rest than the car crewmen. Some of the infantry could drive and had been spelling the two-man crews of the tanks, but there was still a real chance that whoever was at Dinkybob's control yoke wouldn't notice that the vehicles ahead were stopped.

Orichos lowered her communicator and looked at Huber. "You'll be camping on the grounds of the Assembly Building straight ahead," she said over the intercom. "I informed my superiors that you were on the way. We can proceed immediately."

Can we indeed? Huber thought. He didn't let the irritation reach his face; it'd been a hard run for all of them. Instead of responding to Orichos, he said, "Sierra Six, this is Fox Three-six. The indig officer riding with me says that that we can go straight on in to the Assembly Building and set up around it. Do you have any direction for me? Over."

The jeep pulled alongside Fencing Master. Captain Sangrela sat braced in the passenger seat, his holographic display a shimmer before him as he looked up at Huber. "Via, yes!" he snarled. "Let's get to where we're going so we can bloody dismount! Move out, Three-six. Sierra Six out."

Dinkybob had managed to slow to a halt. So did the vehicles following, though as Huber looked back he noticed one of the later tanks swing wide to the left when its driver awoke to the fact that he was in danger of overrunning whoever was stopped ahead of him.

"Roger, Six," Huber said, keeping his tone even. "Three-six out. Break. Tranter, start on up the street. Keep it at twenty kph and—"

"And don't run over any locals," he'd started to say, but there wasn't any risk of that. The words would've done nothing but shown his own ill-temper.

"—and maybe we'll have a chance to rest pretty quick."

Huber's muscles were so wobbly that he wasn't sure he'd be able to walk any distance when he got down from the combat car. The clamshell had chafed him over the shoulders, his hip bones, and at several points on his rib cage. He itched everywhere, especially the skin of his hands and throat; they'd been exposed to the ozone, cartridge gases, and iridium vaporized from the gunbores when the tribarrels raked incoming shells from the sky.

Fencing Master lifted and started forward, building speed to an easy lope. The roadway was smooth, a welcome relief from the slopes and outcrops they'd been navigating for the last long while. Dust billowed from beneath the skirts, a vast gulp initially but settling into a wake that rolled out to either side.

Even before the recovery vehicles had halted, the infantrymen pitched off to port and starboard on their skimmers. The infantry platoon, C-1, had left the jeep-mounted tribarrels of its Heavy Weapons Squad behind in Base Alpha. The gun jeeps weren't needed for the original mission, the capture of Northern Star Farm, because there the infantry was to operate in close conjunction with combat cars in open country. The soft-skinned jeeps would be easy targets for an enemy and wouldn't add appreciably to the firepower of the task force.

Here in a city, gun jeeps would look a lot more useful that the pair of automatic mortars Sierra did have along; but they'd make do. They always did.

More aircars appeared, circling above the column instead of buzzing from place to place across the sky. The Slammers' sudden appearance had taken the city by surprise, but now the citizens were reacting like wasps around an opened hive.

Deseau looked up and muttered a curse. His hand tightened on his tribarrel's grip, raising the muzzles minutely before Huber touched his arm.

Huber leaned close and said, "They're friendly, Frenchie."

"Says you!" Deseau snarled, but he lowered the big gun again.

Huber coughed. "I'm surprised the streets here are so wide, Captain Orichos," he said, looking at the local officer again. With Fencing Master idling along like this he could've spoken to her also without using the intercom, but he didn't see any reason to. "In the United Cities, even the boulevards twist around under the trees."

"This street—the Axis—is wide," Orichos explained. "We don't have a separate landing ground here at Midway. The warehouses where the rangers sell their Moss are on both sides—"

She gestured.

"—here, so the dirigibles from Solace set down in front of the establishment they're trading with. They unload goods, mostly from the spaceport, of course—then they lift off again with the bales of Moss." 

Now that Orichos had told him the adjacent buildings were warehouses, Huber could see the outside elevators on each one and the doors at each story wide enough to take corrugated steel shipping containers which would then be shifted within by an overhead suspension system. The windows were narrow, providing light and ventilation, but with no concern for the view out them.

Orichos' face blanked. She turned her head away from Huber and began talking into her communicator again.

Huber locked his faceshield down and concentrated on the terrain to the left front of his vehicle. That was the area his tribarrel'd be responsible for if the task force was suddenly ambushed . . . which they wouldn't be, of course, but his irritation with the local officer cooled when he thought about a hose of cyan bolts lashing the buildings Fencing Master slid past.

Chances were Orichos would inform him of whatever crisis had called her attention away. Besides, it was a near certainty that the signals equipment in Sangrela's jeep could break whatever encryption system the Point Gendarmery was using if Huber really thought the task force needed to know. . . . 

Which he didn't. He was just in a bad mood from the long run.

Captain Orichos lowered the communicator and said, "Lieutenant Huber, there's a problem. Grayle's gotten word of your arrival. She's ordered her supporters to gather in the Axis in front of the Freedom Party offices. There's already hundreds of them there, blocking the street. There may be thousands by the time we arrive."

Even if there'd been no previous contact between Solace and the Freedom Party, somebody there had certainly given Grayle a heads-up when they realized where Task Force Sangrela was bound. Grayle probably wasn't pro-Solace, but they were both opposed to the Point's present government.

At the word "problem," Huber had cut Sierra Six into the intercom channel. Orichos looked startled when Sangrela rather than Huber replied, "Are they armed, then? Do we have to shoot our way through? Six over."

"Via, no!" Orichos cried in horror. "A bloodbath would do exactly what Grayle hopes! Everybody'd turn against you mercenaries and the government! These are just people standing in the street!"

In the distance ahead of Fencing Master stood the stone Assembly Building on a terraced hillside. A quick flash of Huber's map display showed him that the Axis circled the building and continued its broad way northward.

Huber's eyes narrowed. The map also emphasized that Midway was a large city compared to most of the places the Slammers operated. A company-sized task force would drown in a place this big if it turned hostile. And gunning down a few hundred citizens in the street would be a good way to make the hundreds of thousands of survivors hostile. . . . 

"Well, bloody Hell, woman!" Captain Sangrela said. His jeep had pulled alongside Fencing Master and he was glaring up at Orichos. "If it's a job for the police, get your bloody police on it, will you? You don't expect us to idle here in the middle of the bloody street, do you? Or do you? Six over."

"Captain Sangrela, I'm very sorry for the delay but we're working on it," Orichos said. Fencing Master continued to rumble on, twenty meters behind the screen of skimmer-mounted infantry. "We didn't expect Grayle to react so quickly. Most of the crowd in the street are the Freedom Volunteers, the party's militia, and there's too many of them for the Gendarmery manpower we've got available at the moment. Over."

She realizes she's on a net, not the car's intercom, and she's following proper commo protocol, Huber noticed with a grin.

"Well, what use will waiting do, Captain?" Sangrela demanded. "Look, is there a back way around? Because if the idea was for the Regiment to make a show of force, having a bunch of yahoos stop us in our tracks is going to send a bloody wrong signal! What about us putting a few shots over their heads? Six over."

Huber touched Orichos' arm to silence her before she could answer. He said, "Six, this is Fox Three-six. Put me out front and the panzers right behind me. Get the infantry outa the way, back on the recovery vehicles'd be the best place—they can't do any good without shooting and that's what we're trying to avoid. Three-six over."

"You can handle this, Three-six?" Sangrela said. Captain Orichos was searching Huber's face, her expression blankly concerned. "Because if you can, go with it. Six over."

"I've got a driver who can handle it, sir," Huber said. "Three-six out. Break—" cutting Captain Sangrela out of the circuit again "—Tranter, on a road surface like this, I'll bet my left nut you can spray enough rock and grit off the bow to clear us a path and still keep us moving forward. What d'ye say?"

"I'd say you needn't worry about disappointing your girlfriend, El-Tee," Tranter replied cheerfully. He laughed. "Just watch our dust!"

The infantry ahead of Fencing Master turned and circled back, obeying Sangrela's command on the C-1 unit push. Lieutenant Myers was on one of the skimmers; he looked at Huber as he slid past. Dinkybob closed up so that the gap between the tank and Fencing Master's rear skirt was only about five meters. That'd probably be safe when both vehicles were moving at a slow walk—but if something did go wrong, the tank'd send Huber's car cannoning forward like a billiard ball.

Huber could easily see the mob filling the street without raising his faceshield's magnification. He didn't want to do that: he needed all the peripheral vision he had and probably then some.

Aircars kept arriving at the back of the crowd, adding to the numbers already present. Many were big vehicles marked in red with the logo of a broken chain, capable of carrying twenty passengers. It looked to Huber as though they were ferrying people from outlying locations and going back empty for more.

Sergeant Deseau must've thought the same thing, because he leaned back from his tribarrel and shouted, "Hey El-Tee? I bet I could scatter those jokers right fast if I popped a couple of trucks while they was overhead."

"That's a big negative, Sergeant," Huber said, hoping he sounded sufficiently disapproving. He'd been thinking the same thing himself, and Deseau probably knew him well enough to be sure of that.

Though that did raise another thought. The sky above Task Force Sangrela was full of aircars jockeying for position. So far as Huber could tell they were simply civilians who wanted to watch what was going on, but some might be members of Grayle's militia with guns or grenades.

Besides, there was a fair chance that cars might collide and crash down on the column. The trees bordering the Axis constrained the aerial spectators into a relatively narrow channel, so they kept dropping lower to get a good view.

"Captain Orichos," Huber said. "I understand you can't deal with the mob on the ground, but can't you Gendarmes do something about the idiots buzzing around overhead? ASAP."

Orichos gave him a hard look, then nodded and spoke into her communicator. A pair of gun-metal gray aircars with blue triangles bow and stern had been paralleling the column at the fringes of the civilian vehicles. They immediately began bellowing through loudspeakers. The words were unintelligible over the intake roar of Fencing Master's fans, but the aircars overhead edged away reluctantly.

Apparently to speed the process, a Gendarme aimed his electromagnetic carbine skyward and fired a burst. The civilian cars dived away in a panic.

That was bad enough, though the actual collisions were minor and didn't knock anybody out of the air. It would've been much worse if Huber hadn't caught Deseau as the sergeant reacted to shots fired in the fashion any bloody fool should've expected, by swinging his tribarrel onto the threat.

"Captain Orichos?" Huber said. "Shooting is a really bad idea. No matter who's doing it. All right?"

Orichos nodded with a guarded expression; she didn't like the implied reprimand, but it was obviously well-founded. She snapped a further series of orders into the communicator.

Two men in jumpsuits like the one Orichos wore—hers was now gray/yellow/red from grit it'd picked up during the run—looked over the side of the aircar to the right of the column. Deseau gave them the finger. The face of the cop who'd fired the carbine went black with anger. Orichos shouted into her communicator and the police vehicle rose quickly to a hundred meters.

"Sorry," Orichos muttered over the intercom. Huber shrugged noncommittally.

Fencing Master's bow slope was well within half a klick of the mob. Looking forward, his left hand on the tribarrel's receiver and his right at his side instead of on the spade grip, Deseau said, "Some a' them got guns, El-Tee. What do we do if they start shooting? Just take it?"

"Crew," Huber said, "Nobody shoots till I do. Break. Six, this is Fox Three-six. If we start taking serious fire, my people aren't going to stand here and be targets. Are we clear on that? Over."

"Roger Three-six," Sangrela said. "Delta Two-six—" Lieutenant Trogon "—if Fox Three-six opens fire, put a couple main gun rounds at his point of aim. Break. Sierra, Fox Three-six and Delta Two-six will do all the shooting till I tell you otherwise. Six out."

"Roger, Three-six out," Huber said. He was keyed up and felt as though he should be standing on the balls of his feet. Myers and Mitzi Trogon responded curtly as well.

Dinkybob slid to the left of Fencing Master's track. Trogon was buttoned up in the turret. She'd elevated the 20-cm main gun to forty-five degreesfor safety when the column entered an inhabited area; now she lowered it in line with the mob ahead. A crust of iridium redeposited from the bore made the muzzle look grimy.

If Dinkybob fired from close behind, the side-scatter from the burned-out gun was going to be curst uncomfortable in Fencing Master's fighting compartment. But then, it was going to be curst uncomfortable regardless if this turned into a firefight.

The mob watched the column come on. Tranter closed the driver's hatch. He'd been throttling back gradually, so by now Fencing Master was advancing no faster than a promenading couple. Huber and the troopers with him in the fighting compartment looked out through polarized faceshields as they aimed their forward-facing tribarrels. Normally the wing gunners'd be covering the flanks—and the good Lord knew, there might be snipers in the buildings, tall dwellings now instead of warehouses, to either side. The rest of the task force was going to have to deal with that threat, because Fencing Master had really immediate problems to her front.

Huber'd hoped the crowd'd scatter when the shouting civilians saw the huge vehicles coming at them, but they were holding steady. The front rank was of rough-looking men—almost all of them were men—with clubs. They didn't have uniforms, but each of them and many of those behind wore red sweatbands. Banners with the red logo on a black ground waved from several places in the midst of the group.

Huber's eyes narrowed. Those in front didn't have guns, but many of the ones standing at the back of the crowd carried short-barreled slugthrowers much like the Gendarmery's. You wouldn't often have call for a long-range weapon in the forests of Plattner's World, but at anything up to two hundred meters those carbines were as deadly as a powergun.

The trucks which'd been ferrying people in now landed in line across the Axis, forming a barrier behind the crowd. Grayle was doing everything she could to prevent her demonstration from melting away before the roaring bulk of the armored vehicles.

A good half of the mob was shouting and waving their fists in the air, often holding a club or a bludgeon. The other half seemed more scared than not, but they were in it now and knew there was no easy way out.

"What d'ye guess, El-Tee?" Deseau said. "Maybe three thousand of 'em?"

"Maybe more," Huber said. "Just stay calm and let Tranter do the work. Ready, Sarge?"

"Roger that, sir," Sergeant Tranter said, brightly cheerful. "Any time you say."

It'd been a worse run for Tranter than for the line troopers—they were used to the hammering, or at least to some degree of it. Now at last Tranter was in his element, moving a combat car in precise, minuscule increments. As a repair technician, he'd regularly shifted cars and tanks in crowded maintenance parks where the tolerances were much tighter than anything combat troops dealt with in the field.

"Execute, then!" Huber said.

Huber felt the fans speed up through the soles of his feet; Fencing Master shivered. The crowd was shouting in unison, "Free-dom! Free-dom!" Compared to the intake roar, the sound of so many voices was no more than bird cries against the boom of the surf.

A dozen meters from the crowd, Tranter tilted the nacelles vertical and brought the fans up to maximum output so that the car drifted to a quivering halt. Dinkybob continued sliding forward till its bow slope overlapped Fencing Master's stern. If they'd been directly in line, there'd have been a collision.

While Fencing Master balanced in place, dust and grit billowed out all around beneath her lifted skirts. Some flew toward the crowd, forcing the thugs in the front rank to cover their faces or turn their heads away.

"Watch the guys in the back!" Huber ordered, gripping the tribarrel with his thumbs deliberately lifted clear of the butterfly trigger. "Watch for anybody aiming at us!"

With the skill of a ballerina, Tranter cocked the two bow nacelles forward at the same time as he angled the six other fans slightly to the rear. The blast from the bow nacelles dug like a firehose into the gravel roadway, then sprayed the spoil into the crowd with the energy required to float thirty tonnes of combat vehicle.

The crowd broke. Those in the direct blast could no more stand against it than they could've swum through an avalanche. Spun away, battered away—some of the gravel was the size of a clenched fist—frightened away; blind from the dust and deafened by the howling air, they drove against those behind them.

The rout was as sudden and certain as the collapse of a house of cards. Tranter adjusted his throttles with the care of a chemist titrating a solution. The thugs at the front and the gunmen at the rear were no threat compared to the iridium sandstorm that ground forward, minutely but inexorably.

Dinkybob held station at Fencing Master's left flank, her mass even more of a threat than the gape of her main gun's pitted bore. She and the tank echeloned to the right behind her, Doomsayer, were buttoned up. There was nothing human about any of them, not even the mirrored facelessness of the gunners behind the combat car's tribarrels.

When panic started the crowd running, it continued till there was nothing left but the sort of detritus a flood throws up at the edge of its channel: clothing, clubs, papers of all manner and fashions, whirling in the wind from beneath Fencing Master's steel skirts. A few bodies lay in the street as well: people who'd been trampled, people who'd been squeezed breathless; probably a few who'd fainted.

Tranter cut his fan speed, adjusting the nacelles in parallel again to bring Fencing Master back into normal operation. They resumed forward movement at a walking pace.

Arne Huber relaxed for the first time in . . . well, he wasn't sure how long. He raised his faceshield and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.

"Good job, Tranter," he said. "Now, park us in the grounds of that building up there on the mound."

"Roger, El-Tee," the driver said. "Ah, how about the landscaping, sir?"

"Fuck the landscaping!" said Sergeant Deseau.

Huber looked over his shoulder at Captain Orichos. She stood with the communicator in her hand but she wasn't speaking into it. Huber grinned and said, "Frenchie's right, Tranter. The bushes can take their chances."

He took a deep breath and looked at the dust and debris in front of them. "The good Lord knows the rest of us just did," he added.

The second recovery vehicle backed carefully into position between Fencing Master and a tank, grunting and whining through her intake ducts. Her rear skirts pinched up turf which her fans fired forward out of the plenum chamber in a black spray. The driver shut down, and for the first time since Task Force Sangrela's arrival there was relative peace in the center of Midway.

"Can we stand down now, El-Tee?" Deseau asked, turning to face Huber. People in the street were staring up at the mercenaries while others looked down from circling aircars, but they were simply interested spectators. Some onlookers might have belonged to the mob that scattered half an hour earlier, but if so they'd thrown away their weapons and hidden their red headbands. Certainly they were no present threat.

"Fox, this is Fox Three-six," Huber said, making a general answer to Frenchie's personal question. "Stand down, troopers. One man in the fighting compartment, the rest on thirty second standby. I don't know how long we'll be halting here, but at least break out the shelter tarps. Three-six out."

"Learoyd, you've got first watch," Frenchie said. "In two hours I'll relieve you. Tranter, give me a hand with the tarp and the coolers."

Captain Orichos had vanished into the Assembly Building as soon as Fencing Master settled onto the terraced mound. To Huber's surprise, a stream of chauffeured aircars had begun to arrive while Task Force Sangrela was setting up a defensive position around the pillared stone building. The civilian vehicles landed in the street and disgorged one or two expensively dressed passengers apiece, then lifted away in a flurry of dust.

The new arrivals walked up the steps—three flights with landings between on the terraces—and entered the building. Some eyed the armored vehicles with obvious interest; others, just as obviously, averted their eyes as if from dung or a corpse.

Captain Sangrela had spaced his vehicles bows outward like spokes on a wheel. Because there were only ten vehicles, they had to back onto the uppermost terrace in order to be close enough for mutual support; even so there was a twenty-meter gap between the flank of one unit and the next. The infantry were using power augers to dig two-man pits above and behind the armored circle.

Huber unlatched his body armor to loosen it, but he didn't strip it off quite yet. Tranter and Deseau stood behind Fencing Master, releasing the tie-downs that held gear to the bustle rack. Huber leaned out of the fighting compartment to steady a beer cooler with his hand till the troopers on the ground were ready to take the weight.

Trooper Learoyd raised his helmet and rubbed his scalp; he was in his early twenties but already nearly bald. "Hey El-Tee?" he said. "Are all them people behind us friendlies? Because if they're not . . . ?"

"I don't think they're going to shoot at us, Learoyd," Huber said. "I won't say I think they're friendly, though."

That was particularly true of the group now walking across the Axis toward where Fencing Master was grounded. There were three principals, a woman with two men flanking her at a half step behind to either side. Each wore a white blouse and kilt with a bright red sash and cummerbund. Before and behind that trio were squads of toughs with red sweatbands, some of those who'd been at the front and rear of the mob half an hour before. Now they weren't carrying weapons, at least openly.

They'd come from a walled compound across the Axis where it circled the Assembly Building. The outer walls were plasticized earth cast with a dye that Huber supposed was meant to be bright red. Because the soil was yellowish, the mixture had the bilious color of a sunburned Han.

There were two four-story buildings within—wood-sheathed and painted red—and two more domed roofs which the three-meter walls would've hidden from ground level. Fencing Master had a good view down into the compound, however.

Mauricia Orichos came out of the Assembly Building, pausing briefly to speak with a man entering. His cape of gossamer fabric shimmered repeatedly up through the spectrum on a three-minute cycle.

The conversation over, Orichos walked purposefully toward Captain Sangrela who was bent over the commo unit on the back of his jeep. His driver was inflating a two-man tent.

"El-Tee?" Learoyd said. "Is that the woman who's making all the trouble?"

He meant the head of the three dignitaries in white and red, now climbing the steps. "Right," Huber said, a little surprised that Learoyd had volunteered what amounted to a political observation. "That's Melinda Riker Grayle."

Grayle moved with an athleticism that hadn't come through in the hologram of her haranguing the crowd. Those images must have been taken right here: Grayle speaking from the steps of the Assembly Building to a crowd larger than the one Fencing Master had just scattered.

"But I still shouldn't shoot her, that's right?" Learoyd said, his voice troubled.

"Blood and Martyrs!" Huber said. "Negative, don't shoot her, Learoyd!"

Grayle wasn't one of those who averted her eyes from the armored vehicles. She noticed Huber's attention and glared back at him like a bird of prey. Her hair was in short curls. Judging from Grayle's complexion she'd once been a redhead, but she'd let her hair go naturally gray.

She and her companions—including the escort—stalked through the tall doors of embossed bronze into the Assembly Building. Learoyd sighed and said, "Yeah, that's what I figured."

Huber looked at him hard. Nobody but Learoyd would've considered shooting the leader of the opposition dead in the middle of the city, with the whole country watching through video links. Nobody but simple-minded Herbert Learoyd; but you know, it might not have been such a bad idea after all. . . . 

"Fox Three-six to me ASAP!" Captain Sangrela ordered. Huber glanced over. Beside Sangrela stood Orichos, wearing a gray beret in place of the commo helmet she'd left behind on Fencing Master. She looked very cool and alert: her hands were crossed behind her at the waist. "Six out."

"No rest for the wicked," Huber murmured, but he couldn't say he was sorry for the summons. "Fox, this is Fox Three-six. Sergeant Jellicoe will take acting command of the platoon till I return. Three-six out."

Huber snugged the sling of his 2-cm weapon, then swung out of the fighting compartment. He balanced for a moment on the bulging plenum chamber before half jumping, half sliding to the ground. The landing was softer than he'd expected because his boots dug into the black loam of what had been a flowerbed.

"You gonna be all right, El-Tee?" Sergeant Tranter asked. Despite the hard run they'd just completed, Tranter managed to look as though he'd stepped off a recruiting poster.

"Sure he is!" said Deseau who'd by contrast be scruffy the day they buried him in an open coffin. Right now you might guess he'd been dragged behind Fencing Master instead of riding in her. "Hey, there's nobody around this place that the Slammers need to worry about, right?"

"I'll let you know, Frenchie," Huber said. He walked toward the captain wearing a grin, wry but genuine.

Now that Huber's world no longer quivered with the harmonics of the drive fans, he was coming alive again. He guessed he knew how a toad felt when the first rains of autumn allowed it to break out of the summer-baked clay of a water hole.

"Sir?" he said to Sangrela. Huber hadn't known the captain well before the operation began, but he'd been impressed by what he'd seen thus far. A lot of times infantry officers didn't have much feel for how to use armored vehicles. Officers from the vehicle companies probably didn't do any better with infantry, but that wasn't Huber's problem.

"Captain Orichos wants you with her inside there," Sangrela said, indicating the Assembly Building with a curt jerk of his head. He didn't look happy about the situation. "Our orders are to cooperate with the Point authorities, so that's what you're going to do."

"The Speaker's called an extraordinary meeting of the Assembly to deal with the crisis," Captain Orichos said, sounding conciliatory if not apologetic. "I'm to address them. I'd like you with me, Lieutenant, as a representative of Hammer's Regiment."

Me rather than Sangrela, Huber thought. "Sure," he said aloud. "Do I need to say anything?"

"No, Lieutenant," Orichos said. "Your presence really says all that's necessary. Your armed presence."

Well, that's clear enough, Huber thought. He said, "All right, I'm ready when you are."

Orichos turned, nodding him to follow. "When we get inside, the ushers will direct us to the gallery upstairs," she said. "Ignore them; we'll wait in the anteroom until Speaker Nestilrode recognizes me. When he does, you'll come with me to the podium."

Huber shrugged. Parliamentary procedure, especially on somebody else's planet, wasn't a matter of great concern to him. "Who all's going to be in there?" he said, gesturing left-handed to the approaching doorway. The stairway up from the street was limestone, but the building's plinth and the attached steps were of dense black granite.

"Most assemblymen will be present," Orichos said. "Many are afraid, but they've been warned that this is the government's only chance of safety and that they won't be allowed to compromise it. If necessary—"

She looked sidelong at Huber.

"—members of the Gendarmery would escort a sufficient number of assemblymen here to make up a quorum. Whether they wanted to come or not."

Huber grinned, then sobered again. It was easy—and satisfying—to mock cowardly politicians, but in fairness they weren't people who'd signed on for armed conflict. You could be brave enough in the ordinary sense and still not want to enter a building surrounded by tanks and professional killers.

"The only people in the gallery . . ." Orichos continued. "Will be the goons, the so-called Volunteers, who you saw enter with the Grayle and her Freedom Party colleagues. Those few are just bodyguards, but there'd have been hundreds packing the seats if it weren't for your arrival."

A porch of the same hard black stone as the plinth loomed above them. Just inside the doorway stood a man and a woman in embroidered tunics, presumably the ushers.

A mural on the wall of the semi-circular anteroom depicted an idealized Moss ranger on the right and an equally heroic female mechanic on the left. Stairs slanted upward from either side.

"We'll wait here," Orichos said curtly to the male usher. He and his colleague looked doubtful, but they didn't argue. Huber's big powergun drew their quick glances the way the view of a nude woman might have tempted a modest man, but they said nothing about the weapon.

Huber stood beside the jamb and looked through the inner doorway. Save for the anteroom, the ground floor of the Assembly Building was given over to a single chamber paneled in carved wood. Desks in ranks curved around three sides, each row rising above the one before it. It didn't look to Huber as though half of the places were occupied, but presumably enough assemblymen for the purpose were present.

The entrance was on the fourth side. Facing the desks to the right of the doorway was a railed enclosure with seats for a dozen members; all but one of them were filled. To the left was a raised lectern at which an old man in a black robe was saying, "By virtue of the powers granted me as Speaker, I have called this extraordinary session. . . ."

Orichos leaned close to Huber. "The cabinet," she whispered, nodding toward the enclosure.

The ordinary assemblymen sitting in the arcs of desks were staring at Huber and Orichos instead of watching the Speaker. Even some of the cabinet members stole furtive glances over their shoulders, though they faced front quickly when they caught Huber's eye.

Melinda Grayle and her two companions were almost alone on the Speaker's side of the room. The men appeared ill at ease, but Grayle's expression was sneeringly dismissive as she eyed the doorway.

Huber couldn't see the gallery from where he stood; that meant it must be directly overhead. The Volunteers'd be staring at his back if he went to the podium with Orichos. Staring at, and maybe aiming . . . 

Well, Huber hadn't joined the Slammers because he was looking for a risk-free life. He grinned; but he also latched his clamshell again.

The Speaker continued reading from a lighted screen set into the lectern before him. He stumbled frequently over the words. This may have been the first time he'd had occasion to invoke these emergency powers, and he was probably just as nervous as most of the assemblymen.

"I'd think some of the public would want to watch," Huber said into Captain Orichos' ear. "Is everybody in the Point afraid of his shadow?"

Orichos looked at him sharply. "Of course not!" she said. "The proceedings are broadcast to the whole country by satellite! The gallery only holds a few hundred people; it'd be full normally, but by citizens indulging their whim rather than because they needed to be present to know what the Assembly was doing. Half the population lives in individual households scattered throughout the forest anyway."

Huber nodded, his eyes on the Assembly beyond. He hadn't meant to step on the woman's toes, but he should've known his comment would do just that. He must be nervous too.

"Therefore . . ." the Speaker said, his voice gaining new life as he reached the end of the set formula; the constitutions of most colonies had been drafted by settlers with little education but a fierce desire to make things "sound right" by using high-flown language. "Invoking the special powers granted the Speaker in the present emergency, I hereby call Captain Mauricia Orichos of the Gendarmery to address the Assembly."

Melinda Riker Grayle rose to her feet. "I protest!" she said. She filled the hall as effectively with her unamplified voice as the Speaker had moments before using a concealed public address system. "This is a business for the citizens of the Point, not for the self-serving bureaucracy which rigged the last—"

Speaker Nestilrode stabbed a control on the lectern with his bony index finger.

"—elec—" Grayle said. Her voice cut off abruptly; her lips continued to move. The Assembly Building had a very sophisticated audio system. The Speaker had clamped a sonic distorter around Grayle, not for privacy as it'd be used for in an office but to shut her up.

"The member from Bulstrode Borough is out of order," Nestilrode said with a touch of venom in his dry voice. "The chair recognizes Captain Orichos."

Orichos stepped forward purposefully. Huber followed at her heel like a well-trained dog. The patrol sling held his 2-cm weapon muzzle-forward. His hand was on the grip, though his index finger lay along the receiver instead of through the trigger guard.

His faceshield was down. For the moment he left it clear instead of polarizing the surface to those trying to look at him.

Orichos mounted the podium. The Speaker edged sideways to let her by, but there wasn't even possibly room for Huber wearing his body armor. He stood below the Gendarmery officer instead, surveying the Assembly.

"Honored Personages," Orichos said in a tone that combined dignity with considerable forcefulness. "As many of you know, my department is responsible for information about our foreign enemies and potential enemies. While pursuing sources in the Solace government, we came upon conclusive proof that Assemblyman Grayle of Bulstrode Borough takes the pay of Solace in exchange for sowing discord within the Point."

Grayle jumped to her feet, shouting silently. The older of her male colleagues rose also, but the younger man—a blond fellow in his thirties with a neat moustache and goatee—was noticeably slower to get up. His eyes flicked from Orichos to Grayle, as nervous when they rested on his own leader as when he looked at the Gendarmery officer.

"Based on this report," Orichos continued as though oblivious of the capering Freedom Party officials, "I have applied for and been granted a warrant by the Chief Justice of the High Court to search the premises of the Freedom Party in order to corroborate our information. Due to the delicacy of the situation, I'm informing the Assembly before taking action."

Grayle's older colleague was a rougher sort than the handsome blond on her other side. She extended an arm to keep him from climbing over his desk to reach the floor. Grayle's blue eyes never left Orichos and the Speaker on the podium.

She sat down again, gesturing her colleagues with her. Her face was red, but she stared at Orichos with sneering contempt, not anger. She touched a button in her desk; a spiral of coherent orange light appeared above her head.

Orichos nodded meaningfully to the Speaker. Nestilrode leaned forward, touched the muting switch, and said, "The chair recognizes the member from Bulstrode."

Still seated, Grayle said, "That's not just a lie but a bloody lie. As Captain Orichos knows well, my party is funded entirely by the contributions of the Moss rangers on whom the nation's economy is based. There are no documents in our party headquarters or anywhere else to support these lies!"

Grayle turned so that her gaze swept the hostile assemblymen to her left and behind her. Some met her eyes; most did not. "I will not have the machinery of the law perverted to allow lying bureaucrats to plant false documents in our party offices. The so-called search has no other purpose. If that's what you intend, Captain, you'll have to shoot your way in—or use the mercenaries you've hired at a true cost equal to the national budget for three full years!"

Her eyes locked Huber's with almost physical force. The blond man to her left was cringing back in his chair, looking at an empty corner of the chamber with an anguished expression.

Captain Orichos gestured the Speaker aside again. "We have no desire to plant anything in the Freedom Party files," she said, "nor would we even need to disturb the normal office routine. Will the member from Bulstrode permit me and one aide to search her files in her presence, with the entire exercise being broadcast live to the citizens of the Point?"

The older man snarled something toward Grayle. She shushed him with a gesture, though the chamber's electronics had swallowed the words.

Grayle stood. She pointed her index finger at Orichos. "You'll be showing this live over the regular governmental channel?" she said. "And you'll search in the presence of me and my fellow party members?"

"Yes," said Orichos, nodding without expression. "The only concern I and my department have is that the truth come out. If our sources in Solace have misled us, then I will be the first to apologize to you and your colleagues."

Grayle slammed her fist down on her desk. "By the Lord's bleeding wounds!" she said. "That's just what you'll do."

She stepped sideways toward the aisle leading out. "Come on, then," she added. "We'll take care of that now—and then we'll discuss the cost of these alien murderers you've saddled the Point with!"