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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 degrees to 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 degrees for 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!"

"You'll come with me into the Freedom Party headquarters, Lieutenant," Orichos murmured as they watched Melinda Grayle and her henchmen stride out of the chamber. Their bodyguards were trampling down the stairs from the gallery to join them. The remaining assemblymen were either rigid in their seats or whispering in small cliques.

"All right," said Huber. "Sierra, this is Fox Three-six. I'll be accompanying the liaison officer into the red buildings across the way. If anything pops, you'll know where to come and get me. Three-six out."

"Roger that, Three-six," growled Captain Sangrela. "Six out."

Huber looked at the Gendarmery captain. "Why me?" he said.

"Let's go," Orichos said, nodding to the doorway. "A recording team from the Speaker's staff is joining us outside."

They went out. The ushers were backed against the walls, watching Huber and Orichos with silent concern.

"I want you rather than someone from the Point . . ." Orichos said, showing that she wasn't ignoring Huber's question after all. "Because Grayle knows that her Volunteers outnumber the Gendarmery by several times. Your regiment's an unknown quantity, so she'll be less inclined to resort to violence."

Huber noticed that she said, " . . .  the Gendarmery . . ." rather than " . . .  from my organization. . . ." Orichos was a member of the police force only as a matter of administrative convenience. In their own self-image, intelligence personnel are a breed apart—and generally a law unto themselves as well.

Two black-haired young women waited on the porch with lens wands and satchels of recording equipment. One technician was plumpish with a broad mouth, the other razor thin with three vertical blue lines on her right cheek. Huber couldn't tell whether the marks were tattoos or makeup.

Grayle and her entourage were walking back across the Axis to their compound. The older male was speaking into a hand communicator as he gestured forcefully with the other arm. The compound gates were open; the squad waiting there wore red headbands and carried carbines openly.

"Come along," Orichos said to the recording technicians as she strode past and started down the steps. They fell in behind obediently, looking excited but not frightened. They obviously didn't have any conception of what they were about to get into.

Trooper Learoyd waved from Fencing Master; Huber nodded in response. He was operating on trained reflex now. His intellect had dug itself a hole from which it viewed its surroundings in puling terror, but the part of him that was a soldier remained fully functional.

If things broke wrong, Task Force Sangrela couldn't get Huber out of the Freedom Party headquarters. The whole Regiment in line couldn't do that, though it could pulverize the buildings and everybody in them easily enough.

That wouldn't help Huber while he was inside. He wasn't going to fight his way out through the hundreds—at least—of armed Volunteers inside with him, either. Well, it'd be what it'd be. . . . 

On the lowest of the three terrace landings, Orichos turned her head and said, "This is of course dangerous, Lieutenant; but I don't want you to imagine that it's a suicide mission."

Huber shrugged. "It doesn't matter what I think," he said. "It's my job."

Oddly enough, the words brought him a degree of comfort. They reminded him that he was here by choice, however dangerous "here" turned out to be. And by the Lord—Arne Huber couldn't clear out the compound alone, but if push came to shove the Volunteers who took him down'd know they'd been in a fight.

The road surface was more irregular than it'd seemed while Huber was riding over it in a combat car; repeatedly his foot slipped in a rut or scuffed a ridge he hadn't noticed because his attention was where it belonged, on the armed guards waiting for him in the gateway. He imagined taking this same route while mounted on Fencing Master. The thought made him grin, and maybe because of that expression the solid phalanx of Volunteers parted to let Huber and his companions through without jostling.

Orichos looked over her shoulder and said, "Begin recording now," to the technicians.

The thin one sniffed and replied tartly, "We've been recording since you came out of the building, ma'am. We have orders from our supervisor."

Orichos nodded without evident emotion. Huber wondered if she were nervous or if like him she was following by rote the path she'd planned while there was time for cool reflection.

They entered the compound. Melinda Grayle stood with the older male assemblyman in the doorway of the building ten meters ahead of them. Grayle was still in the white and red outfit she'd come from the Assembly with, but her companion had changed into black battledress set off by a red headband; he carried a carbine and wore a powergun in a belt holster.

Huber didn't see the blond assemblyman. He might be inside the building, of course. Aircars, mostly battered-looking private vehicles—the large trucks were garaged in an annex outside the walls—filled the grounds within the compound. They were parked so tightly that except for the path between the gate and the central building, anyone walking across the tract would have to worm his way through and sometimes over cars.

The people they'd flown into the city watched Orichos and her companions from the buildings and from the cars themselves. Everyone Huber saw was armed, and they were trying to look tough. For most of them, that didn't require a great deal of effort.

"All right, madam snoop," Grayle said to Orichos. "You're here now. How do you intend to proceed?"

"We'll go directly to the file room adjacent to your personal office on the fourth floor, Assemblyman Grayle," Orichos said calmly. "If there's no record of wrongdoing there, you'll have my apologies and we'll leave immediately."

Grayle's eyes narrowed; she looked angry but not, if Huber read her correctly, afraid. "I'll have your apology and your resignation, Captain," she said. "And you'll be lucky if there's not a libel suit as well!"

"Just as you please," Orichos said. She didn't look concerned either.

Grayle turned on her heel and strode into the building. Orichos followed immediately instead of waiting for the permission that wasn't going to come. Huber gestured the recorders ahead of him and brought up the rear. He didn't bother trying to watch behind him; he knew he'd see an armed mob, and it wasn't going to make him feel any more comfortable.

The two girls now looked nervous. They were walking so close together so that they occasionally bumped elbows. They'd started to understand. . . . 

There were two elevators in the wall to the right of the doorway. Grayle gestured to them with her left hand and said sardonically, "Take your pick, snooper."

"We'll take the one that goes to the fourth floor," Orichos replied in a mild tone, stepping in front of Grayle and pressing the call button for the cage farther from the door.

Grayle's face went carefully neutral, but the male assemblyman with her said, "Hey, how does she—"

"Shut up, Fewsett!" Grayle said. Her voice didn't rise, but the snarl in it brought a look of surprise and anger to her subordinate's face. He cocked his right hand back, then gaped in blank horror at what he'd been about to do.

Grayle ignored him, pushing past Orichos to enter the elevator before the delegation from the Assembly could do so. Fewsett followed; other Volunteers would have done so as well, but there simply wasn't room on what was meant as a private car for the highest officials.

Huber grinned without humor. He didn't doubt that there'd be a sufficiency of gunmen already waiting for them upstairs.

The elevator rose smoothly but with a repetitive squeak to which the plump recording technician winced in synchrony. The thinner girl took her hand and squeezed it tightly. The contact seemed to help; at any rate, the twitches immediately became less pronounced.

The elevator stopped. What had been the back of the cage opened into an office appointed like a throne room. A large stuffed chair with gilt upholstery stood on a dais behind an agate-topped desk. Behind it was a wood-framed triptych of heroic figures created not by an artist but by a technician using stock imagery. Highlights on the pictures' glossy surface veiled them; a good result.

Even urban structures on Plattner's World tended to be tall and narrow, slipped in among the trees that were the source of the planet's considerable income. This high-ceilinged office was half the building's top floor; even so, another dozen people besides the six waiting gunmen would've filled the space left over by the desk and throne. They'd have had to stand, because there was no other chair in the room.

Grayle and her henchman got out first as they had entered. Fewsett immediately began to talk in a guttural whisper to the leader of the waiting squad, a slender man with tattoos and a serpentine copper bracelet.

Captain Orichos led the way to the small door at the side of the throne room; Huber brought up the rear. Through it was a paneled hallway with a stairwell at the far end and a doorway on the left side. Another squad of guards waited in the hall.

"Back, if you please!" Orichos said, gesturing at the guards. She opened the side door and entered the file room beyond.

Huber gave the gunmen a wry smile. They didn't know what was going on any better than he himself did. That didn't make him and the Volunteers brothers, but it was a good enough illustration of a soldier's life to amuse him.

There was no one in the file room; five-drawer cabinets circled the walls, leaving only an aisle in the middle. Though the Freedom Party was as technically advanced as the rest of Plattner's World, hardcopy remained a necessary backup to electronic files and ultimately more secure than any form of information linked directly to the outside world.

"Assemblyman Grayle?" Orichos said to the woman watching from the doorway. "Would you or a deputy please join us before I begin examining your files? Although the whole nation is witness to the proceedings—"

The thin technician's face was frozen, her mouth slightly open; she held her wand rigidly upright where it recorded events in a sphere around her. The other technician huddled against a back corner, leaning on her wand as though it were a cane. Huber supposed it was doing an adequate job of recording the parts of the file room that were blocked from her companion's lenses.

"—I'd like someone in whom you have confidence to be present to ensure that I'm merely examining files, not adding anything to them."

"By the Lord, you'd better not be adding stuff!" Fewsett growled. He added, presumably to some of the gunmen, "Come on, boys."

Grayle stepped in herself. Huber squeezed against the cabinets behind him to allow her to get by if she wanted, but she merely gave him a sneer. "Go ahead!" she said. "You'll find nothing because there's nothing to find."

Fewsett crowded in behind Grayle and touched her shoulder to move her back. She slapped his hand without looking around. More Volunteers stacked into the doorway; those in front pushed back against their fellows to the rear to keep from being shoved into Fewsett's massive figure.

Orichos nodded, then turned to a cabinet midway down the row. "Let the record show that I am at a cabinet marked Finance," she said, and opened the second drawer from the top.

Huber stood with his head cocked so that though he mainly faced the Freedom Party officials, he could still watch Orichos out of the corner of his eye. Grayle's expression was one of iron disdain; Fewsett glared past her with a mixture of anger and frustration.

"Bring the wand closer," Orichos snapped to the plump recorder. When there was no reaction, Orichos lifted the girl's arm and placed the lens wand on the edge of the drawer. In a dry, mechanical voice Orichos continued, "I am removing a file marked Special."

"What is this?" Grayle said on a rising note. She tried to look behind her but the way was filled with gunmen. "Where's Patronus? Why isn't he here?"

Orichos displayed her empty right hand to the lens wand, then reached into the drawer and brought out a folder with a red tab. She spread her left hand in plain sight also, then opened the folder.

Fewsett turned and bellowed, "Get that bastard Patronus here now! He's the fucking party treasurer. We need him now!"

Huber didn't move except to slide his finger into the trigger guard. He'd figured how the business was going to play out, but he didn't know quite the exact time.

Or whether he'd survive it.

"The folder holds a list of amounts and dates," Orichos said. "It purports to be records—"

The lens wand slipped off the drawer; the plump technician had curled her arms around herself, sunk into a personal world light-years away from this terror. In a sudden break from her detached calm, Orichos looked at the girl and screamed, "Hold that bloody thing up or I'll have you executed for treason!"

The thin technician tilted her wand closer to the open drawer. She didn't look toward Orichos.

"This is fake!" Grayle said. "It's been planted! There's no—"

"Purports to be a record," Orichos resumed in a louder voice, "of payments—"

"—truth in it at all!"

"—by the Interior Ministry of the Government of Solace to the Freedom Party!"

Grayle turned to get out of the file room. Fewsett knocked her back accidentally as he raised his carbine. Huber fired from the hip. His 2-cm bolt hit Fewsett in the upper chest, vaporizing most of the big man's torso in a thunderclap. The shockwave slammed Huber against a file cabinet and knocked the Volunteers in the doorway off their feet.

A Volunteer tried to aim his carbine, or maybe he was just flailing his arms for support. The powergun's cyan flash would've blinded anybody seeing it close-up without the protection of a polarizing faceshield like Huber's. He fired twice more, clearing the doorway save for a scatter of body parts. A blast-severed head flew past Huber, driven by vaporized body fluids.

The thin technician screamed and flung down her wand. It wobbled behind her on its flex as she sprang through the doorway Huber was trying to slam shut with his left hand. Two or more gunmen riddled her before she took a second step into the hallway. She thrashed backward, but Huber threw all his weight against the panel. It latched despite the obstructions.

A burst of shots whanged into the door from the outside. The panel was metal-cored, but concentrated gunfire would peck through it before long. For that matter there must be somebody in the gang outside with the key to the door's snap lock.

"Don't shoot, you idiots!" Melinda Riker Grayle screamed. "Don't shoot or you'll kill me!"

Huber glanced behind him. Grayle sprawled on the floor. Captain Orichos lay on top of her, twisting back her left arm and holding a pistol to Grayle's neck.

The plump technician sat on the floor with her legs splayed, crying uncontrollably. The room was hot—oven hot, heated by the three heavy-caliber powergun discharges in its narrow confines.

When a bolt liberated its energy in a human body, it turned the tissues to steam with explosive suddenness. The file room's walls, the ceiling, and the people within were all covered with a mist of blood. Huber's hands were red, and there was a sticky film across his faceshield that the static charge hadn't been able to repel. He flipped the shield up and out of the way.

The stench of cooked flesh and of the wastes voided when Fewsett's sphincters spasmed in death was stomach-churning, even for Huber who'd smelled it before. Some things you never get used to. . . . 

Captain Orichos raised herself to her knees, still pointing her pistol at the assemblyman. She patted the floor with her left hand till she found the lens wand and raised it vertical again. Grayle twisted to look back into the bore of the pistol.

"Assemblyman Grayle!" Orichos said. "You stand convicted of treason by your own records and by your failed attempt to use force against the agents of the Assembly!"

"That's a lie!" Grayle said in a hoarse voice. "You planted that file!"

Several voices were jabbering at Huber through his commo helmet; at least one of them seemed to be from Base Alpha. He locked out all incoming channels and concentrated on the door in case the Volunteers tried to rush it. The muzzle of his powergun was cooling from yellow to bright orange.

"In order to prevent bloodshed among citizens . . ." Orichos continued as though her prisoner hadn't spoken. She was facing Grayle over the gunsights, but Huber noted that her eyes weren't focused anywhere in this world. "I'm offering you, in the name of the citizens of the Point, a chance to go into exile. You and all your fellow conspirators will have one hour to leave Midway and six hours to leave the Point. After that time, you will be considered criminals and dealt with according to law."

"You faked that so-called evidence," Grayle said, "and you faked the vote count to steal the last election from the Freedom Party! You're the criminals! You're thieves, and you're bankrupting the state by hiring these mercenaries!"

"Assemblyman Grayle!" Orichos said. She jerked her weight backward to balance her as she stood. She held the wand in her left hand like a torch, and the pistol slanted down toward her prisoner's face. "Do you accept my offer, made in the presence of the entire citizenry of the Point?"

"Better take the offer, lady," Huber said. Ozone from the 2-cm bolts had flayed his throat, making his voice a rasp that he wouldn't have recognized himself. "Whatever else happens, I guarantee you're not going to leave here alive any other way."

Grayle looked at him. Her eyes slid downward to the floor on which she lay. Fewsett's head, severed when his chest exploded, stared back at her from a hand's breadth away. She jumped to her feet, forgetting the threat of Orichos' pistol.

"It's all a lie!" Grayle said. She got control of her breathing and went on, "But I don't have any choice. All right—we'll leave Midway, but I'm agreeing under duress. You have no legal right to expel us!"

"You out there in the hall?" Huber shouted. He figured the Volunteers, a lot of them anyway, would be watching the broadcast along with the rest of the citizens, but the gunmen just outside the door might be an exception. "I'm going to open the door. The first one through it's going to be your leader, Assemblyman Grayle. But be clear on this—you've got a deal with your government and your Gendarmery. You don't have a deal with me personally. If anybody sticks his head into this room, I'm going to blow him to atoms just like I did a lot of his buddies a moment ago. Got it?"

Nobody answered. Huber thought he heard the sound of boots running down the staircase. Grayle was poised like a roach caught by the light, momentarily frozen.

"Captain Orichos?" Huber said.

"Yes, open the door," Orichos said.

Instead of reaching, Huber kicked out with his right boot and sprung the latch. The panel bounced open. The hallway was empty.

Grayle jumped through so quickly that she slid on the blood pooling from the dead technician's body. She caught herself on the wall and ran toward the stairs, leaving a handprint on the wall behind her.

Nothing else moved for over a minute.

Huber let out his breath. He switched his helmet back to receive mode and said, "Fox Three-six to Sierra. We're holding our present position on the fourth floor of the Freedom Party headquarters until somebody comes to fetch us out. And give me plenty of warning before you show yourselves, people, because I'm as jumpy as I've ever been in my life!"

Captain Sangrela's driver had bounced his jeep up the Assembly Building steps and parked it under the porch. The officers and senior sergeants of Task Force Sangrela stood on the patterned stone, listening to the holographic image of Danny Pritchard speaking from Base Alpha.

Around them the citizens of Midway noisily celebrated their release from Freedom Party domination. In the street below whirled a round dance with hundreds of participants. A fiddler stood on a raised platform in the middle of the circle; beside him, occasionally crowding his elbow, gyrated a young woman wearing only briefs. Huber didn't think she was professional—just exuberant and very happy. As far up and down the Axis as Huber could see there were similar dances as well as free buffets, speakers on makeshift podiums, and crowds of people drinking and singing in good fellowship.

"The Volunteers are gathering at their base on Bulstrode Bay on the northern coast," said Danny Pritchard's holographic image. "They call it Fort Freedom, and it's going to be a tough nut to crack."

Aircars spun and swooped overhead, often with sirens blaring. The drivers were as excited and as generally drunk as the people in the street. Huber had seen two collisions and heard a worse one that sent a car crashing to the ground on the other side of the Mound.

"Why us, sir?" Captain Sangrela asked. His voice was calm, but the way his hands tightly gripped the opposite elbows indicated his tension.

"Because you can, Captain," Pritchard said simply. "Because we can't leave ten thousand armed enemies in a state whose support we need. And because the locals can't do it themselves—"

He grinned harshly.

"—which is generally why people hire the Slammers, right?"

The Gendarmery had been conspicuous by its absence during the events of the afternoon. Now the Point's gray-uniformed police were out in force, though they seemed more to be showing themselves than making an effort to control the good-natured partying that was going on. The Gendarmes on foot patrol carried only pistols; those in the cruising aircars may have had carbines but they weren't showing them.

"Ten thousand of 'em, sir?" said C-1's platoon sergeant, a rangy man named Dunsterville. He sounded incredulous rather than afraid at what he'd heard. "You mean the guys with red sweatbands?"

"The Volunteers, yes," Pritchard agreed with a grim nod. "You won't have to deal with all of them—indeed, that's why we've decided to move on Fort Freedom immediately. We expect that at least half of Grayle's Volunteers will decide to stay home in the woods if they know that joining her means facing tanks. If we withdraw from the Point and the Volunteers don't have anybody to worry about except the locals, then they'll everyone of them march back into Midway and this time loot the place."

When Pritchard said, "we've decided," he meant Colonel Hammer and his regimental command group. The "we" who'd be carrying out the operation meant Call-Sign Sierra, ten vehicles and less than a hundred troopers under Captain Sangrela. Huber was a volunteer, and he knew that the senior officers had all been at the sharp end in their day too . . . but Via! Fifty to one was curst long odds!

"Here's a plan of Fort Freedom," Pritchard continued. The image of his body disappeared, leaving his head hovering above a sharply circular embayment viewed from the south at an apparent downward angle of forty-five degrees. The sea had cut away the northern third of the rock walls and filled the interior. "Bulstrode Bay's an ancient volcano. The walls average a hundred meters high and are about that thick at the base. There's normal housing inside of the crater, but the Volunteers have also tunneled extensively into the walls."

"Have they got artillery?" Huber asked. He was still trying to get his head around the notion of going up against five thousand armed hostiles . . . or maybe ten thousand after all, because staff estimates were just that, estimates, and Sierra would be facing real guns.

"The Volunteers don't have an indirect fire capacity so far as we can tell," Pritchard said, nodding at a good question. "Not even mortars. What they do have—"

The holographic image transformed itself into a gun carriage mounting eight stubby iridium barrels locked together in two banks; each tube had its own ammo feed. The chassis was on two wheels with a trail for towing the weapon rather than being self-powered.

"—are calliopes. We've traced a lot of twenty purchased by Grayle's agents nine months ago, and it's possible that there've been others besides."

Calliopes, multi-barreled 2- or 3-cm powerguns, provided many mercenary units with the air defense that the Slammers handled through their own armored vehicles. The weapons were extremely effective against ground targets as well. A short burst from a calliope could shred a combat car and turn its crew into cat's meat. . . . 

Pritchard's full figure replaced the image of the calliope. "I'm not making light of the job you face," he said. "But I do want to emphasize that the Volunteers are not soldiers. Most of them have only small arms, they aren't disciplined, and they've never faced real firepower. If you hit them hard and fast they'll break, troopers. You'll break them to pieces."

"Calliopes cost money," Mitzi Trogon said. "More money than I'd expect from a bunch of hicks in the sticks."

Pritchard nodded again. "Whatever you think of the documents the Point security police found," he said with a grin, "we have evidence that the government of Solace is indeed supporting the Freedom Party."

Solace would be insane not to, Huber thought. Arming the internal enemies of a hostile government was about the cheapest way to reduce its threat.

In the street and sky, the citizens of Midway danced and sang. They were the rulers, the people who split among themselves the wealth and the status and the political power of the Point. They were right to fear Melinda Grayle, a demagogue who'd united the Moss rangers against the urban elite who lorded it over them.

Captain Sangrela rubbed the back of his neck. "We're going cross-country, I suppose?" he said. "There isn't much but cross-country on this bloody planet."

"Not exactly," Pritchard said as the image of a terrain map replaced that of his body. "The direct route'd take you through ancient forest. The trees are too thick and grow too densely for your vehicles to push through or maneuver through either one. We've plotted you a course down the valley of the River Fiorno. It won't be fast, but the vegetation there's thin enough that even the cars can break trail."

The red line of the planned course dotted its way along the solid blue of a watercourse. Not far from the coast, the red diverged straight northward for some fifty kilometers to reach Bulstrode Bay.

"The last part of the route, we'll clear for you with incendiary rounds. We estimate it'll take you nearly two days to reach the point you'll leave the Fiorno. The fire should've burned itself out by then, so you can make the last part of your run relatively quickly."

Pritchard smiled again. "The fire should also limit the risk of ambush," he said; then he sobered and added, "But that'll be a very real possibility while you're following the river. We'll do what we can from Base Alpha, but you'll have to proceed with scouts and a full sensor watch the same as you did on the way here."

Pritchard's image looked around the gathering. "Any questions?" he asked.

"I don't like to complain, Major . . ." said Sergeant Jellicoe, lacing her fingers in front of her. "But do you suppose after this, somebody else in the bloody regiment can get a little action too?"

Everybody laughed; but everybody, Pritchard included, knew that the comment hadn't entirely been a joke. "I'll see what I can do," he said.

On the fiddler's platform below, the woman dancing had stripped off her panties as well. Huber glanced down at her . . . and turned his head away.

He was going to need his rest. The next part of the operation sounded like it was going to be even rougher than what it'd taken to get Task Force Sangrela this far.

Huber called up a remote from Flame Farter, on the move with White Section for the past ten minutes. The Fiorno River was only thirty meters wide and almost shallow enough to wade where it curved around the north and east of Midway. The scouts' skimmers danced in rainbows of spray out in the channel to avoid the reeds along the margins; the combat car was chuffing down the bank, spewing mud and fragments of soft vegetation from beneath her skirts.

"Red Section, move out!" Captain Sangrela ordered. The main body with Jellicoe's Floosie in the lead was already lined up on the Axis north of the Assembly Building. Dust puffed beneath their skirts as they lifted from the gravel. One at a time, carefully because objects so powerful must move carefully if they're not to destroy themselves and everything around them, the seven vehicles of the main body started down the avenue. The doughnuts of dust spread into wakes on either side.

Sergeant Nagano glanced over from Foghorn's fighting compartment; Huber was keeping his section on the Mound till the main body had cleared the road beneath. Huber gave Nagano a thumb's up. Nagano hadn't commanded a car before the operations against Northern Star, and he was doing a good job.

"How'd you make out last night, El-Tee?" Sergeant Deseau asked, stretching like a cat behind the forward gun.

"I slept like a baby," Huber said. "I never sleep that well on leave when I'm in a bed."

The Assembly had offered the Slammers any kind of billets they wanted, but Captain Sangrela had decided to keep his troopers beside their vehicles for the night. Nobody'd argued with him. The weather wasn't unpleasant, and chances were some Freedom Party supporters had stayed in Midway. The risks of going off by yourself were a lot greater than any benefit a bed in an unfamiliar room was going to bring.

"Not me," said Deseau, grinning even broader. "The people here are real grateful, let me tell you."

Learoyd looked around from his gun. Shyly he said, "The girls didn't charge nothing, El-Tee. I never been a place before that the girls didn't charge."

A Gendarmery aircar came up the Axis from the south, flying low and slow. Huber caught the motion in the corner of his eye, then cranked the image up to x32 as an inset on his faceshield. As he'd thought, Captain Orichos was in the passenger seat.

The fourth D company tank pulled out at the back of the main body, accelerating with the slow majesty that its mass demanded. Floosie was out of sight beyond the northern end of the Axis, into the mixture of forest and scattered houses that constituted the city's suburbs.

"Fox Three-six to Three-one," Huber said to Sergeant Nagano. "Move into the street. We'll follow you down and bring up the rear. Three-six out."

Foghorn lurched from its berth and ground through a hedge that'd survived Task Force Sangrela's arrival. Whoever was driving for Nagano today must be keyed tighter than a lute string, Huber thought; he grinned faintly. Which showed the driver understands what we're about to get into.

"Sir, shall I shift us now?" Sergeant Tranter prodded from the driver's compartment.

"Give me a moment, Tranter," Huber replied. "I think I've got a visitor."

"Hey, it's your girlfriend, El-Tee," Deseau said cheerfully. He waved at the aircar swinging in along Fencing Master's port side.

"Not my girlfriend," Huber said as he lifted himself out of the fighting compartment to stand on the plenum chamber. And probably not even a friend, to Arne Huber or to any member of the Slammers. Orichos had other priorities, and Huber had only the vaguest notion of what they might be.

As the aircar hovered beside them, the Gendarmery captain tossed Huber a satchel no larger than the personal kit of a trooper on active deployment. "I hope you don't mind, Lieutenant . . ." she called over the thrum of the aircar and the whine of Fencing Master's idled fans. "But I'm going to join you again."

Huber thrust the satchel behind him for Deseau to take. He extended his right hand while his left anchored him to the fighting compartment's coaming.

"Welcome aboard, Captain," he said, swinging Orichos across to the combat car. She was surprisingly light; his subconscious expected the weight of a figure wearing body armor, of course.

Mauricia Orichos wasn't welcome, but she was part of Huber's job so he'd make the best of it. And he really had more important things on his mind just now. . . . 

Huber heard a coarse ripping as three more rounds from batteries far to the south streaked overhead. To give the shells sufficient range from the Slammers' gun positions in the UC, a considerable part of what would normally be payload was given over to the booster rockets.

"What's that?" asked Mauricia Orichos, pointing upward. The shells' boron fluoride exhaust unrolled broad, poisonous ribbons at high altitude, spreading as she watched. "Are we under attack?"

"No, that's outgoing," Huber explained, mildly surprised that their passenger had picked up the sound of artillery over Fencing Master's intake howl. Orichos noticed quite a lot, he realized, and she had the knack for absorbing what was normal in a new situation so that she could quickly identify change. "They're prepping the route for us."

He wasn't sure how much Orichos knew about the plan, and he wasn't going to be the one to tell her anything Base Alpha hadn't already explained. If it'd been up to Arne Huber, he'd have told the Point authorities an amount precisely equal to the part Point forces were taking in the reduction of Fort Freedom: zip.

He glanced up at the path the shells had taken northward. For this use, the reduced payloads didn't matter. The shells would spill their incendiary bomblets at very high altitude to get maximum dispersion. The target wasn't a single facility but rather a fifty-kilometer swathe of forest, and there was plenty of time for the widely-spread ignition points to grow together into a massive firestorm.

Which wasn't the sort of thing a local from Plattner's World, where the forest was preserved with almost religious fervor, could be expected to like. Colonel Hammer put his troopers' lives first, though, and Colonel Hammer was calling the shots on this one.

The vehicles ahead of Fencing Master had mown and gouged the riverbank into a muddy wasteland. Wherever possible the lead car had chosen a route that kept its skirts on solid ground, but occasionally an outcrop or a deep inlet forced the column partly into the water. Each thrum! as plenum-chamber pressure beat the river echoed for kilometers up and down the channel.

Huber grinned. Orichos misread his expression, for she smiled back ruefully and said, "I suppose I do sound like a Nervous Nellie. Sorry."

"What?" said Huber. "Oh, not at all. I was just thinking that there's never been an armored column in human history that sneaked up on anybody, and this time isn't going to be the exception."

"El-Tee?" said Learoyd, staring dutifully into the holographic display. "Take a look at this, will you?"

Huber'd put his right wing gunner on the first sensor watch of the run because he hadn't expected anything to show up so early. He'd manually notched out Fencing Master and the other vehicles in the column during the run from Northern Star, so that they wouldn't hide the more distant, hostile, signals. Unlike a quicker mind, Learoyd's wouldn't be lulled into daydreams by the minute changes in pearly emptiness that was probably all that he'd see in the display, but Huber feared that Learoyd might not notice subtleties that really had meaning.

Except that the trooper'd done just that. Huber frowned at the display in dawning comprehension, then said, "Sierra Six, this is Fox Three-six. We've got an aircar, probably a small one, following us about a kilometer back. I figure if it was just civilian sightseers, they'd be, well, in sight. Over."

"Roger, Three-six," Captain Sangrela said. "We leave a broad enough track that the Volunteers figure they can follow us without coming so close we spot them. Good work, Huber. I'll drop off a fire team to take care of it. Six out." 

"Three-six out," Huber said. "Break. Blue Section, some infantry's staying behind to clean off our tail. Don't run 'em over, and get ready to back 'em up when the music starts. Three-six out."

"We gonna get a chance to pop somebody, El-Tee?" Deseau asked, turning hopefully to meet Huber's eyes.

"Not a chance, Frenchie," Huber said. "But we're going to follow the drill anyway."

A thought struck him and he went on, "Captain Orichos? Is there any chance that a Gendarmery aircar is trailing the column? If there is, tell me now. You won't get a second chance."

Orichos frowned. "One of ours?" she said. "Not unless somebody's disregarded my clear instructions. And if that's happened, Lieutenant—"

She smiled. Frenchie Deseau couldn't have bettered the cruel surmise in her expression.

"—then the sort of lesson I assume you propose will bring the survivors to a better appreciation of the authority granted me by the Assembly." 

Huber nodded and returned his attention to his tribarrel's sector forward. He didn't have a problem with ruthlessness, but he found disquieting the gusto with which people like the Gendarmery captain did what was necessary.

"Three-six, watch the pedestrians!" Nagano warned from Foghorn fifty meters ahead. Four infantrymen had hopped their skimmers off one of the maintenance vehicles; now they were positioning themselves behind treeboles where they'd have good fields of fire for their 2-cm weapons as soon as the aircar came in sight above the water. Huber nodded in salute, but the infantrymen were wholly focused on what was about to happen.

The ambush team had shut down their skimmers immediately upon hitting the ground. The Volunteers weren't likely to have sensors that'd pick up a skimmer's small fans more than a stone's throw away, but Regimental training emphasized that you didn't assume any more than you had to. Plenty of stuff that you couldn't control was going to go wrong, so you made doubly sure on the rest.

"How long, Lieutenant?" Orichos asked. Not what: how long. She was a sharp one, no mistake.

"About a minute and a half," Huber explained. "We're travelling at about forty kph in this salad—"

He gestured to the soft vegetation just outside the track, where the previous vehicles hadn't ground it to green slime.

"—and our Volunteer friends back there'll be holding to the same speed. The last thing they want's to fly up on our tail."

He smiled. Which was just what they were about to do.

Orichos nodded and turned to watch the route behind Fencing Master. There wasn't anything to see but mud and muddy water, of course. Sight distances close to the ground were at most a hundred meters in the few places the river flowed straight, and generally much less where vegetation arched over the curving banks.

Huber imported to the lower left quadrant of his faceshield the view from the sergeant commanding the ambush team; it wouldn't interfere with his sight picture in the unlikely event that Fencing Master ran into trouble. After a moment's hesitation, he touched Orichos' shoulder. When she turned, he linked their helmets as he had while Floosie raked incoming shells from the sky. Orichos nodded appreciatively.

It took ten seconds longer than Huber'd estimated before an open aircar with four men aboard loitered into sight. Sangrela had chosen the ambush site well: the car slowed, dipping beneath a branch draped with air plants which crossed the river only three meters above the purling surface.

The lift fans flung a rainbow of spray through the sunlight, momentarily blinding the two men in the front. As the car started to rise again, three cyan bolts hit the driver, vaporizing his torso, and a fourth took off the head of the gunman in the passenger seat.

The driver jerked the control yoke convulsively, throwing the car belly forward and spilling the remaining gunman off the stern. The sergeant shot the falling man before he hit the water; the three troopers blew the car's underside into fireballs of plastic paneling superheated into a mixture that exploded in the air.

"Blue Section, reverse!" Huber screamed. Sergeant Tranter was a trifle slower to spin Fencing Master than he should've been; Huber'd forgotten the driver didn't have reflexes ingrained by combat like the rest of them did. "Move it! Move it! Move it!"

The ambush team didn't need help. The aircar crashed edgewise onto a spine of rock sticking up from the water; it broke apart. The fourth Volunteer had been concentrating on detector apparatus feeding through a bulky helmet. He must've been strapped in; his arms flailed, but he didn't get out of the car even when the wreckage slipped off the rocks and started to sink.

The river geysered as at least four and maybe twice that many 2-cm bolts hit the man and the water nearby. A bolt hit an upthrust rock; it burst like a grenade, shredding foliage on the bank with sharp fragments.

I guess the poor bastard's not going to drown after all, Huber thought.

When Fencing Master reached the ambush site a few seconds later, the infantrymen had remounted their skimmers. Huber gestured them forward to put the combat car in drag position again.

"You were right, El-Tee," said Deseau regretfully. "Not a bloody thing for us."

One of the infantrymen waved back as he passed Fencing Master. He was now wearing a helical copper bracelet, its ends shaped like snakeheads.

Apparently the leader of the squad Huber shot it out with in Freedom Party headquarters hadn't learned from that experience. Huber smiled coldly. The Slammers didn't give anybody a third chance.

The alert signal brought Huber out of a doze; it was like swimming upward through hot sand. He'd jumped to his feet and had the tribarrel's grips in his hands, straining for a target in his faceshield's light-amplified imagery, before his conscious mind took over and he realized why he'd awakened.

Learoyd was driving. Sergeant Deseau was at the forward gun, as rested as anybody could be after eighteen hours of slogging through river-bottom vegetation. Huber wouldn't have been able to drop off if he hadn't been sure Frenchie was there to take up the slack. He'd needed the mental down-time badly, though. The shoot-out in Freedom Party headquarters had drained him more than he'd realized right after it happened.

But that was part of the past, a different world, and now the present was calling. "Fox Three-six acknowledging!" Huber said, and his helmet dropped him into the virtual meeting room with Colonel Hammer himself and the other officers of Task Force Sangrela. He'd been the last to arrive, but from the look of Mitzi Trogon—her mouth was half-open and her eyes looked like they were staring into oncoming headlights—she was in at least as bad a shape as he was.

"Troopers," Hammer said, acknowledging his four subordinates with a glance that swept the table. The imagery was sharper than it'd been in the forest south of Midway; the sky above the Fiorno was fairly open. "There's Volunteers setting up a blocking position on an island three hours ahead of you. There's about two hundred men with buzzbombs and six calliopes if they're not further reinforced."

Hammer's torso vanished into a slant view of a roughly oval island; it covered about as much of the river valley as the channels flowing to north and south of it. From the scale at the bottom of the image, the heavily wooded surface between the streams was on the order of a square kilometer.

"They've been flying in from Bulstrode Bay over the past hour," Hammer said with a disbelieving shake of his head. "They apparently don't realize that here at Base Alpha we can follow everything they're doing, right down to who had grits for breakfast."

Icons of red light marked hostile positions: calliopes on the forward curve of the island, and squads of infantry both on the island itself and on the north bank of the floodway. The Volunteers probably intended the mainland element to halt the task force in line along the shore where the calliopes could rake the Slammers from the flank.

Sangrela laughed in derision. "You want us to go through 'em or around 'em, sir?" he asked. "For choice we'll go through."

"Neither," said Hammer with a spreading smile. "I'm just telling you what the situation is. We're going to handle it from here with artillery."

"Why in hell would you want to do that?" Mitzi Trogon snarled. She must've heard her own tone; she snapped fully awake at last. "Ah, sir, that is," she added with a grimace of embarrassment.

Hammer looked at Trogon without expression for a moment, then lifted his chin minutely to show that the incident was closed—if not forgotten. "Right," he said with a mildness that deceived nobody. "This ambush isn't a problem, but Fort Freedom is likely to be more of one. Here the Volunteers have their calliopes tasked for ground use, waiting for your column to come into their killing zone. They aren't professional enough to redirect the guns for artillery defense in the amount of time they'll have. Follow?"

Because Huber understood and none of his fellow officers were in a hurry to speak after Mitzi'd stepped on her dick, he said, "When a salvo takes out the whole ambush party, Volunteer command is going to decide it's our shells they ought to be worrying about. When we get to Bulstrode Bay, their calliopes are going to be aimed up for artillery defense and we'll take 'em with direct fire."

"Roger that, troopers," Hammer said, his face minusculely softer than it'd been a moment before. "This won't be a milk run for you, there's no way it's going to be that. But I told you from the beginning that you'd have all the support we could give you. Any questions?"

"Support" this time didn't mean the artillery, not really, Huber realized. It was the planning, the misdirection; the thinking two steps ahead of his own troops and at least six steps ahead of the enemy, that the Colonel was providing here.

"What orders do you have for us, sir?" Captain Sangrela asked, the burr of warmth in his tone suggesting that he was thinking along the same lines as Huber was.

"Keep on with what you're doing, that's all," Hammer said. His grin spread. "Which is plenty, I know that. We'll time the stonk for thirty seconds before you come into sight of the target. Hit anybody that shows himself, but keep going as fast as you can. That'll make more of an impression on what passes for a Volunteer command group than we would by digging out a couple shell-shocked wogs and blasting them. Clear?"

"Clear," said Sangrela, nodding, and Huber added his "Clear" to the muttered "Roger," and "Clear," from his fellow lieutenants.

That'd save gun bores for the real fight at Bulstrode Bay as well. Maintenance had replaced the barrels burned out at Northern Star, but there probably wouldn't be time for another refit before Sierra slammed into Fort Freedom and the Volunteer's main body. . . . 

Hammer gave a crisp nod. "Let me stick it to the bastards this time, troopers," he said. "There'll be plenty of opportunity for you up north."

The Colonel's image dissolved, returning Huber to Fencing Master's jouncing fighting compartment. His mind and senses were as sharp as they'd ever been in his life. To the watchful expressions of his troopers and Captain Orichos, he began, "In about three hours . . ."

What looked like a streak of sparse vegetation at right angles to the river was a dike of impermeable clay channeling water into the softer soil beyond. The scout section infantry slid across without being aware of the change, but Fencing Master came down on algae-covered soup instead of the expected solid ground. A gout of mud spewed higher than the armored sides, drenching Huber and the others in the fighting compartment.

Tranter boosted power and adjusted the nacelles vertical for maximum lift. Fencing Master pogoed back onto an even keel and wallowed slowly across the basin.

"Fox Three-six to Sierra," Huber warned. "There's quicksand here. The panzers had better swing wide or they'll sink to wherever the bottom turns out to be. Three-six out."

By rights, Foghorn would've been the leading car if they'd gone by the preplanned rotation. Sergeant Nagano hadn't been pleased when Huber exercised his command prerogative to put Fencing Master in the lead as the column prepared to run the Volunteer ambush, but Huber was doubly glad he'd done it now. Only a driver as able as Sergeant Tranter would've kept from bogging or simply sinking out of sight in this soft spot, and there were bloody few drivers that good.

"Roger Three-six," Captain Sangrela said. "Delta units, follow the contour lines north. Looks to me like two hundred meters will let you cross safely. Six out." 

Fencing Master lifted itself with a jerk onto higher, harder ground. Tranter paused a moment before readjusting the fans, checking to be sure that mud and water plants hadn't choked any of the intake ducts. The combat car built up speed again, shedding weed and watery mud like a dog emerging from a pond.

Mauricia Orichos dabbed at the muck staining her uniform, managing only to spread the stain until she gave up the pointless exercise. She noticed Huber's glance and smiled faintly.

"I suppose it doesn't matter," she said. "I'm used to thinking in . . . urban terms, I suppose." 

"It doesn't matter," Huber agreed. Especially if we're all dead in the next thirty seconds, but he didn't let that last thought reach his tongue.

He heard the incoming shells at first as a distant friction in the sky. With shocking suddenness their howl filled the whole world and still grew louder. Sergeant Deseau hunched over the forward gun, aware that it was friendly fire aimed to impact half a klick ahead of Fencing Master; aware also that mistakes happen, that even the most technologically advanced shells land short occasionally, and that no fire is friendly when it's coming in on your position.

The Gendarmery captain's face went blank; her eyes opened wide. For a moment Huber thought she was going to throw herself as close to flat as she could get in the crowded fighting compartment, but she recovered her composure when she noticed he wasn't taking any action.

"It's all right," he explained. "This is the prep that's—"

The shells burst directly overhead with four distinct pops. The opened casings spilled the separate white streaks of over a thousand bomblets toward the ground ahead of Fencing Master. They whistled like a symphony for chalk on blackboards.

"—going to land on the—"

The timing was slightly off: Fencing Master tore through the last screen of feather-fronded vegetation a second before instead of a few seconds after the bomblets struck the Volunteer positions. The mid-channel island was a green mass against the tannin-black water. Near the shore the foliage was the same sort of lush shrubbery that Task Force Sangrela had ground through on the route from Midway, but there were some sizeable trees a hundred meters back from the bank.

The landscape disintegrated in crackling white flashes, snarling and sparkling for almost five seconds. A pall of mud and shredded greenery lifted several meters high, then settled back on a barren wasteland. Only memory could say that eastern half of the island and the spit of riverbank to the north of it had been covered by dense vegetation a moment before.

A cyan flash blew a temporary crater in the mud: a calliope's ammunition had detonated. A wheel spun skyward, then fell back and splashed into the river.

The scout infantry had grounded their skimmers at the moment of impact. Now they lifted again and resumed their course, four fingers feeling Sierra's path across the trackless terrain. Fencing Master snorted a hundred meters behind, the iridium fist ready to punch if the infantry touched anything.

"Not a bloody thing for us, El-Tee," Deseau said. "Not a bloody thing." 

The firecracker rounds had left a haze of explosive residue and finely divided soil above the island, blurring its shape, but Huber knew there'd have been little more to see even without that blanket. The rolling blasts had pulped everything in the impact area. Except for the single wheel, there'd been no sign of two hundred enemy soldiers and their equipment.

His nose wrinkled. That wasn't quite true. Besides the prickle of ozone and the sickening sweetness of explosive, the air had a tinge of burned flesh.

Fencing Master bucked into the undisturbed vegetation beyond the line which shell fragments had scythed. When the professionals sat down to the table, war stopped being a game for street thugs wearing uniforms. The Volunteers at ground zero here hadn't had time to learn that, but the folks who'd given them their orders must be thinking hard about the future by now.

Because the prevailing winds were from the northwest, Huber had been smelling the fire for almost three hours before the infantry sergeant with the scouting section called over the command channel, "Blood and Martyrs, Captain! This is Charlie One-three-four. Are we supposed to go through this on skimmers? Over."

Huber switched a quadrant of his faceshield to the view from Floosie, the combat car attached to White Section at the moment. It was like looking into the maw of Hell.

Regimental rocket howitzers hundreds of kilometers to the south in United Cities' territory had seeded the forest with incendiaries. Each time-fuzed zirconium pellet was capable of burning though light armor. When one landed in old growth forest, the likelihood of it igniting even green timber was three out of five . . . and there were tens of thousands of pellets in the shells, raining down over hundreds of square kilometers. The myriad simultaneous fires had spread till they joined in a firestorm, a towering conflagration that drove its column of smoke through the stratosphere and sucked air to feed it from all sides in a torrent at hurricane velocities.

Everything combustible within the core of the blaze had burned, including the loam. Silica in the clay substrate ran liquid before cooling into slabs of glass colored like the rainbow by trace minerals.

Though the first flush of the fire had burned to a glowing shadow of itself, what remained still shimmered. The boles of the largest trees smoldered, stripped to pillars of carbonized heartwood. Monstrous pythons of smoke and ash eddied, the ghosts of a forest dancing among its bones.

"One-three-four, recover to your carrier vehicle," Sangrela responded without hesitation. "ASAP, troopers, don't get into that! There won't be an ambush in that stuff, not from anything these Volunteers have available."

He paused, then resumed, "Break. Sierra, button up all hatches. Drivers switch to microwave radar, and exposed personnel lock down your faceshields. Make sure your filters are working before we get into it. We'll form an echelon perpendicular to the prevailing winds so—"

A route map clicked as an imposed overlay on the lower right corner of Huber's faceshield. Every trooper in the task force had the same image.

"—that we're not all driving through the trash the leaders stir up. Six out."

Floosie must've entered the burned area just as Sangrela spoke, because a plume of ash shot skyward two kilometers ahead of Fencing Master. It was like watching the first puff of a volcano gathering its strength.

The fire'd been set to clear the forest between Fort Freedom and the Fiorno Valley at its closest approach, some twenty klicks west of where the river entered the Northern Sea. The tract was well-watered and the foliage was in the green lushness of late spring, so the fire had generally burned itself out to either side of the kilometer-wide swathe seeded with incendiaries. Nothing organic could've resisted that dense rain of exothermic metal.

Deseau was driving; Huber heard the hatch cover close over him. Learoyd checked his faceshield and filters with his left hand, then drew up the throat closure of his blouse to get the maximum protection possible without donning an environmental suit.

Tranter was curled up asleep under the forward gun; his head rested on his commo helmet. Huber shook him awake and leaned close to shout, "Get your gear on and locked down, Sarge. There's going to be a lot of ash and sparks for the next hour or so."

As Tranter slipped his helmet on with a grin of embarrassment, Huber turned to Captain Orichos. She'd been watching the troopers, but she wasn't on the Sierra net and didn't know what was happening. Her expression was neutral, with just enough quirk to the lips to prevent it from being grim.

"We're going to be going through a burned-out area," he explained to Orichos over the intercom. He mimed locking down his faceshield rather than touch hers, at present raised. "Your nose filters ought to come down automatically when we hit the smoke, but you might want to push this button here—"

He touched the hinge of his faceshield; the filters dropped over his nostrils.

"—and deploy them manually right now."

"Burned area?" Orichos said. Her hand stopped halfway to her faceshield, then finished the movement. "Have those animals set the forest on fire?"

All the vehicles of the main body were out of the floodway now, striking north toward their goal. Eight separate ribbons of smoke and ash trailed downwind, spreading till they merged into a broad miasma that settled slowly back to the ravaged forest.

"Whatever happened," Huber said, "it's going to be hot going till we reach the marshes this side of Bulstrode Bay. Get your filters in place now, all right?"

Fencing Master had reached the point at which Sierra's route left the river; Deseau boosted fan speed and adjusted his nacelle angles. The previous vehicles, particularly the tanks, had battered the bank into a slope of glistening mud. Skirts had dragged chunks of buried quartz up with them in deep gouges through the clay.

Fencing Master roared, bursting over the top of the bank at over thirty kph. Huber realized what was about to happen in time to brace his left hand against the coaming and clasp Orichos to his chest with the other arm. The Gendarmery officer didn't have the instincts to react correctly even if he'd had a chance to warn her instead of acting.

The car's nose skirts spilled air and dropped, slamming down onto the charred soil. Despite being prepared, Huber's own weight and that of Captain Orichos threw him hard against the coaming. The rigid clamshell armor spread the shock, but he'd still have bruises along the side of his ribcage by the morning.

If he was alive in the morning, of course. Well, civilians could die at any moment too.

Deseau took them into the hell-lit wasteland. Smoke was a gray pall; sometimes dense enough to seem solid, sometimes hiding objects that were solid in all truth. Huber tried light-amplified viewing but decided the lack of depth perception would be too dangerous at their present high speed. Infrared—thermal imaging—wasn't ideal at the ambient temperatures of the burning forest, but the helmet AI had enough discrimination to make it the choice.

"Vandals!" snarled Captain Orichos. "Stupid vandal bastards! What did they think they'd accomplish by this destruction?" 

There was no point in telling her how the blaze had really started. Not when she and Arne Huber shared a crowded combat car on the verge of action with an entrenched enemy.

Hot spots—open flames and sparks the skirts plowed up from fires banked in the ashes—were white highlights in the faceshield. The AI coded cooler objects through the spectrum from violet to dark reds that verged on black, though little in this expanse was colored below green. A suited human would be visible in outline against the brighter background, but nobody expected to find Volunteers waiting here in ambush.

Fencing Master bumped and racketed across the landscape, scraping its skirts frequently and often hurling up gouts of fire. Deseau was being careful—too careful. He was trying to avoid every possible stump and cavity instead of taking a line and holding it till a major obstacle interposed. The combat car repeatedly sideswiped the skeletons of fallen trees, blasting them into sparks, or grounded when the skirts swayed over the edge of a pit left when a toppling giant had dragged its root ball out of the soil. Sergeant Tranter gripped the coaming to either side of his gun pintle with a set look on his face.

Huber touched Tranter's shoulder to get his attention, then leaned close to shout into his ear instead of using the intercom circuit and including Deseau: "Don't worry, Sarge—you and Frenchie will switch positions when we form up for the attack."

Tranter nodded gratefully. He might or might not understand that Huber was even more interested in getting Deseau behind the forward tribarrel than he was to have Tranter's expertise in the driver's compartment. Horses for courses . . . 

"Vandals!" Mauricia Orichos repeated as she stared across the flame-ravaged bleakness. Sparks whirled from the skirts and spun down again into the fan intakes, dusting those in the fighting compartment. Slammers' uniforms were flame resistant, but Huber stuck his hands under the opposite armpits and wished he had gauntlets.

Did Orichos think that Colonel Hammer cared about trees when the lives of his troopers were at stake? And if there'd been a thousand civilians in the corridor before the incendiaries fell, that wouldn't have changed the Colonel's plan either.

This was war. If the government of the Point hadn't known what it meant to hire the Slammers to do their fighting for them, then they were in the process of learning.

Fencing Master slowed, wobbled drunkenly, and finally came to rest on a south-facing backslope with her fans at idle. Deseau rotated the driver's hatch open; Tranter was already climbing off the right side of the fighting compartment.

Huber raised his faceshield, then lifted the commo helmet for a moment to scratch his scalp. He grinned at Captain Orichos and said, "We're getting ready for the final run-up, Captain. If there's anything you need to do while we're halted, do it now. We won't stop again until the shooting's over."

He smiled more broadly and added, "At least over for us, I mean."

Huber was keyed up, but it was in a good way. The drive had been physically and mentally fatiguing. It had blotted out the past and future, turning even his immediate surroundings into a gray blur. Now adrenaline coursed through him, bringing the fire-swept wasteland into bright focus and shuffling a series of possible outcomes through his mind.

Arne Huber was alive again. He might die in the next ten minutes, but a lot of people never really lived for even that short time.

"No, I'm ready," Orichos said. She rubbed her hands together, then wiped her palms on the breast of her jumpsuit. If she was trying to clean the ash and grit off them, she failed. "What do you want me to do? In the battle, that is."

Frenchie climbed into the fighting compartment past his tribarrel; Tranter was walking forward on the steel bulge of the plenum chamber. The thirty-degree slope was awkwardly steep for the exchange, but the relatively sparse vegetation here had left fewer smoldering remains than the flatter, better-watered stretches the task force had been crossing.

"Keep out of the way," Huber said. "Keep your head down unless one of us buys it. If that happens, take over his gun and try not to shoot friendlies."

He grinned, feeling a degree of genuine amusement to talk about his own death in such a matter-of-fact way. He'd chosen the line of work, of course.

Huber really would've preferred to get the Gendarmery officer off his combat car, but that wasn't a practical solution in this landscape. Orichos was smart and quick both, so he could at least hope that she'd jump clear if he or a trooper needed one of the ammo boxes stacked behind her.

Frenchie slid behind his gun and spun the mechanism, ejecting the round from the loaded chamber in a spurt of liquid nitrogen. As he did so, Tranter spun the idling fans up one at a time so that he could listen to the note of each individually. Both men were veterans and experts; they didn't trust their tools to be the way they'd left them until they'd made sure for themselves.

Barely visible eighty meters eastward, Foghorn's crew were giving their car and weapons a final check. Sierra's remaining six combat vehicles waited still further to the east, out of sight from Fencing Master behind undulations of the ground.

Despite hotspots in the terrain, the infantry had deployed from the wrenchmobiles; they'd advance on their skimmers to avoid the risk of losing two squads to a single lucky hit. Besides, the recovery vehicles might shortly be needed for their original purpose.

"Central, this is Sierra Six," Captain Sangrela reported over the command channel. "Sierra is in position. Over."

"Roger, Sierra," Base Alpha replied. Despite the compression and stuttering created when the transmission bounced from one ionization track to another, Huber would've been willing to swear the voice was Major Pritchard's. "Hold two, I repeat, figures two, minutes while we prepare things for you from this end. Central out."

Though the transmission closed, an icon on the corner of Huber's faceshield indicated there was view-only information available if he wanted to tap it. He did, tonguing the controller instead of voice-activating the helmet AI.

A crystalline, satellite-relayed voice announced, "Freedom command, this is Solace Intelligence! Emergency! Emergency! Slammers artillery is launching a maximum effort barrage on your positions! We will relay shell trajectories to you as they leave the guns!"

The voice transmission ended without a signoff. A data feed which the AI courteously translated into a schematic of lines curving from south to north across the continent replaced it. The tracks shown as emanating from all three of the Regiment's six-gun batteries were initially blue but turned red at a rate scaled to 880 meters per second: the velocity of 200-mm shells launched from the Slammers' rocket howitzers.

Learoyd clicked the loading tube into his backup weapon, a sub-machine gun, and turned to Huber. "Are we just mopping up again, El-Tee?" he said.

"No, Learoyd," Huber said. He was explaining to Captain Orichos as well. Deseau'd been on the net and would've understood the implications of the way the artillery smashed the Volunteer ambush. Learoyd hadn't understood, and Orichos hadn't heard. "Central's broken into the Solace net to send a false transmission to make the Volunteers think our enemies are helping them. There isn't really any artillery—"

As he spoke, the Regiment's Signals Section followed the graph of "shell trajectories" with computer-generated images of Hogs firing at their maximum rate of ten rounds per minute. The gun carriages jounced from the backblast of each heavy rocket. Doughnuts of dust lifted around the self-propelled chassis and a bright spark of exhaust spiked skyward for the seven seconds before burnout. Real shells would ignite sustainer motors in the stratosphere to range from firebases in the UC to the northern tip of the Point, but there was no need to simulate that here.

"—but if the Volunteers think there is, they'll switch their calliopes to high-angle use. They won't be waiting to hit us when we come into sight."

"This's what we've been waiting for, Learoyd," Deseau said, murderously cheerful. "We get to blow away a bunch of civilians in uniform!"

"Oh," said Learoyd. He turned again and swung his tribarrel stop to stop, just making sure it'd work when he needed it. Huber didn't recall ever hearing the trooper sound enthusiastic. "All right."

Herbert Learoyd wasn't the brightest trooper in the Regiment, but you could do worse than have him manning the right wing gun of your combat car. In fact Huber wasn't sure he could've done better.

It was time to be a platoon leader again. Huber cleared his faceshield and replaced the phony transmission with a fifty degree mask of the terrain map. It showed the planned routes that would take the four combat cars toward the outlying Volunteer positions and Fort Freedom itself. Colored bands connected each course to the segment of hostile terrain for which that car's guns were responsible.

"Fox Three-six to Fox," Huber said. "We'll be executing in a minute or less. If there's any questions, let's hear them now, troopers. Three-six over."

None of his vehicle commanders responded. He'd have been amazed if one had. Four green beads along the top of his faceshield indicated that the cars themselves were within field-service parameters. That could've meant they'd have been deadlined for maintenance on stand-down, but unless there'd been serious damage since the last halt Huber figured they'd all pass even rear-area inspection.

"Central to Sierra Six," the command channel announced. "You're clear to go. Out."

"Sierra Six to Sierra," said Captain Sangrela. "Execute, troopers!"

"Go, Tranter!" Huber shouted, thinking that the former technician was waiting for his direct superior to relay the force commander's order.

Fencing Master was already moving. Tranter had fooled him by the skill with which he coaxed the nacelles into a smooth delivery of power, balancing acceleration against blade angle so perfectly that the speed of the eight fans didn't drop below optimum. Fencing Master lifted from the clay and climbed the hillside as slickly as a raindrop slides down a windowpane.

They shot over the brow of the hill. Bright verticals on Huber's faceshield framed the sector Fencing Master was responsible for, the left post on the western spur of the ancient cinder cone fifteen kilometers away.

To the right Foghorn blasted into view measurable seconds later, its bow skirts nearly a meter above the ground for the instant before gravity reasserted itself. That'll rattle their back teeth, Huber thought, but he had more immediate problems of his own.

A cyan bolt split the smoke-streaked gloom, whirling helices of ash as it snapped toward the volcano. A gout of white-hot rock spurted from a cave mouth prepared as a firing position.

Two tanks were hanging back on overwatch while the infantry and the other six armored vehicles charged Fort Freedom at the best speed their fans could drive them. The second tank's bolt lit a secondary explosion, munitions detonating at the ravening touch of a 20-cm powergun. Even at this range, the main guns were capable of destroying anything short of another tank.

Fencing Master's path across the terrain was as smooth as a flowing river—not straight, but never diverging much from the line Tranter had chosen. The other cars and the two advancing tanks were plumes of ash streaking the sky to eastward; they were falling behind Fencing Master, though not by so much that Huber worried about it. Somebody had to lead the advance, after all, and he guessed that was what he was being paid for.

The tanks on overwatch, now well to the rear, continued firing, one and then the other. They could hit on the move, but they'd halted so that irregularities of terrain wouldn't mask their fire at some instant it was critically needed. Even the best soldiers and best equipment in the universe—and most of Hammer's troopers would say that meant the Slammers—couldn't keep things from going wrong in battle, but good planning limited the number of opportunities Fate got to screw things up.

Floosie raked the volcano's eastern margin with two tribarrels. The streams of 2-cm bolts interlaced like jets from a fountain—now crossing, now fanning apart. The impacts sparkled against the lava like dustmotes caught in a shaft of sunlight. At twelve kilometers' range the tribarrels weren't likely to be effective, but Jellicoe always claimed that keeping the other guy's head down was the first rule of survival.

The platoon sergeant was a twenty-year veteran so she must know something, but Huber didn't want to burn out his barrels now when in a matter of minutes he'd be at knife range with several thousand hostiles. There wasn't a right way to do it. If suppressing fire was the rabbit's foot Jellicoe used to get through hard times, Huber wasn't going to order her to stop.

Not that he thought she'd obey him anyway.

A geyser of cyan light—powergun ammunition gang-firing—lit the side of the volcano. Blast-gouged rock gleamed white, fading toward red in the instant before the shattered slope caved in to hide it. The tanks were first hitting positions which Central believed were occupied, though they'd shortly hammer the locations where the Volunteers planned to move their guns after the first exchange of fire.

The bloody civilians didn't understand that none of their guns would survive its first shot at the Slammers.

A calliope opened up, one of those dug so deep into the forward slope that Volunteer command couldn't retask it to air defense. Its dense volley of 30-mm bolts was probably aimed at Flame Farter, which'd already raced past the narrow window through which the calliope fired. The rounds instead came dangerously close to the infantry following. Calcium in the clay soil blazed white in the center of gouting ash; the skimmers maneuvered wildly to avoid the track of shots.

Two 20-cm bolts hit the firing slit in quick succession. The calliope might have been deep enough that neither tank had a direct line on the weapon itself, but the amount of energy the main guns liberated in the tunnel would be enough to cook the crew in a bath of gaseous rock. The hillside burped, then slumped as it rearranged itself.

Fort Freedom loomed above the plain five klicks ahead like a sullen monument. Where the eastern sun angled across ravines, shadows streaked the cinder cone. Speckles against the lava indicated a few Volunteers were firing their personal weapons. At this range the electromagnetic carbines were harmless; the slugs probably wouldn't carry to the oncoming Slammers. Though the attempt showed bad fire discipline, it also meant that not all—not quite all—of the enemy were cowed by the sight of the iridium hammers about to fall on them.

The ground rose slightly into a ridge paralleling the base of the cone and changed from clay to a friable soil that must have been mostly volcanic ash. The forest here had been of tall trees spaced more widely than those of the stretch the task force had just traversed, but the firestorm had reduced them to much the same litter of ash and cinders.

The two tanks accompanying the combat cars halted on the ridge; the wake of debris they'd raised during their passage continued to roll outward under its own inertia. They immediately began punching Volunteer positions with their main guns. The panzers now far to the rear began to advance, accelerating as quickly as their mass allowed. They'd each shot off the twenty round basic load in their ready magazines and couldn't use their main guns until a fresh supply had cycled up from storage in their bellies.

Mercenary artillery in Solace might weigh in at any time. The tanks' tribarrels were tasked to air defense. With the wide sight distances here, that should be a sufficient deterrent. If it wasn't, well, Huber had more pressing concerns right now.

His faceshield careted movement at the top of the cinder cone: the Volunteers were shifting calliopes from air defense sites in the interior of the ancient volcano to notches cut in the rim from which they could bear on the advancing armored vehicles. Huber adjusted his sight picture onto the leftmost caret, enlarging the central portion around the pipper while the surrounding field remained one-to-one so that he wouldn't be blindsided by an unglimpsed danger.

The gun crew had rolled their multi-barrel weapon into position and were depressing their eight muzzles at the mechanism's maximum rate. Huber locked his tribarrel's stabilizer on the glinting target and squeezed the trigger.

Huber's AI blacked out the 2-cm bolts from the magnified image to save his retinas. Instead of a smooth Thump! Thump! Thump! as the tribarrel cycled at 500 rounds per minute, it stuttered Thump! and a moment later Thump! Thump! again. The stabilizer adjusted the weapon within broad parameters, but Fencing Master was jolting over broken terrain with a violence beyond what the servos were meant to control. The software simply interrupted the burst until the gun bore again on its assigned target.

The calliope in the holographic sight picture—its iridium barrels gleaming against the frame of baked-finish steel and the taut-faced Volunteers crewing it—slumped like a sand castle in the tide. The impacts were smears of emptiness, but the image cleared in snapshots of destruction, headless bodies falling and white-glowing cavities eaten from the carriage and gun-tubes.

The target's magazines detonated. The flash scooped the square-bottomed firing notch into a crescent five meters across. A mushroom of vaporized rock lifted from the site. Nothing remained of the calliope and its crew.

Blasts and gouts of lava spurted from a dozen places on the crater's rim as combat cars raked the enemy with their tribarrels. Deseau and Learoyd both fired at the turret of an armored car which the Volunteers had held beneath the crater rim until the Slammers were within range of whatever weapon it mounted. Satellite imagery from Central cued the troopers' AIs, so they were waiting with their thumbs on their triggers at the instant the armored car's crew drove up a ramp into firing position.

The turret of high maraging steel blazed in a red inferno before its gun could swing on target. Internal explosions must have killed the whole crew, because they didn't attempt to back the vehicle or bail out of it.

Deseau and Learoyd continued firing, eating away the rock to get to the car's hull. They didn't have a better target—other tribarrels had cleared the rest of the Volunteer positions—and they saw no reason to stop shooting at something that might possibly be useful to the enemy. A fireball of exploding fuel finally ended their fun.

Fencing Master bucked onto humped, barren ridges of hard rock. Layers of ash blown from the vent had formed most of the nearby landscape, but here magma had rolled out of cracks in the base of the cone and solidified. The steel skirts clanged and squealed, scraping showers of red sparks.

Huber grabbed the coaming with his left hand. Captain Orichos shouted as the car bounced her forward into Deseau. Frenchie snarled a vivid curse, but he didn't lose his grip on the tribarrel.

"They're running!" somebody shouted over the general channel. From the voice and the way the AI let it cut through the chatter of a dozen or more excited soldiers, Huber figured it was Captain Sangrela. "Get the bastards! Get 'em all!"

The Volunteers had spent years building Fort Freedom. In addition to tunnels carved through the cone, they'd dug hundreds of bunkers on the volcano's outer face. The squads and fire teams placed there hadn't run earlier because there was no way out except up a bare slope; by the time they'd had a good enough look at what was coming toward them, they were more afraid to show themselves than they were to stay.

The shriek as combat cars crossed rock and the nearing intake howl of the fans changed the equation. First a few, then many scores of Militiamen clambered out of their holes to dash for the rim and what they hoped was safety. It was near suicide, but with the tanks continuing methodically to pulverize bunkers, running may still have been the better option even so.

The Volunteers' black uniforms would've blended well with the slopes of compacted ash, but the Slammers' helmets keyed on motion. A forest of translucent red carets lit on Huber's faceshield. All he had to do was swing his sight picture onto the thickest clumps and squeeze his trigger, letting Fencing Master's movement hose the burst across running victims. Bodies and severed limbs bounced against the rock, shrouded in smoke from burning uniforms.

"Get the bastards before they grow their spines back!" Captain Sangrela screamed. "Get 'em all!"

Some Volunteers fired from their bunkers or turned to fight like cornered rats as cyan bolts slaughtered their comrades. A burst hit Fencing Master's bow slope and ricocheted in dazzling violet streaks. The car's armor rang like a trip hammer working, but that was just a fact of life. Huber's skin prickled and his throat was as raw as if he'd drunk lye.

Fencing Master reached the cone. It was steep, forty degrees on average and occasionally almost vertical where weather had sheared the concreted ash. Tranter fought his controls, fishtailing the car so that they mounted the slope in a series of switchbacks instead of fighting gravity head on. The combat cars had a higher power to weight ratio than the massively armored tanks did so they could climb the cone, but it still took finesse to do it well.

A powergun bolt stabbed over the rim of the fighting compartment's armor, splashing the interior. The cyan brilliance blew a chunk of iridium into a white-hot bubble between Huber and Deseau.

The gas flung Huber backward, tearing his hands from the tribarrel. He felt as though he'd been slammed in the crotch by a medicine ball.

Heat penetrated a moment later. The fabric of his uniform was temperature resistant, but the metal resolidifying as a black crust over the khaki had vaporized at something over 4800 degrees. I'll worry about it later. . . . 

Frenchie'd gone down also. He was still holding his tribarrel's left grip, but that was the way a drowning man clutches flotsam. Litter on the floor of the compartment had ignited, twigs and leaves which had whirled into the vehicle during the march as well as plastic wrappers and similar human trash.

Learoyd ripped short bursts toward what was now blank hillside above them: the Volunteer sniper had ducked into his foxhole after firing, and the slope itself concealed the opening. The shooter must've been lucky to hit a target he couldn't see till he showed himself, but he was also good. If he thought he was safe because he was out of sight again, though—

The rock Learoyd's 2-cm bolts was splashing into fist-sized divots of glass suddenly erupted as though the volcano had gone active again. Two tanks hit it, then doubled the initial impacts as soon as their main guns could cycle. Each bolt lifted a truck-sized volume of compacted ash which strinkled down again on the breeze.

There was no sign of the shooter. If his ammunition had gone off, its flash was lost in the immense violence of 20-cm bolts.

Huber's legs were splayed before him; his hands waved in the air. Captain Orichos caught his right wrist and bent close. "Should I take your gun?" she shouted. "Can you—"

"I'm all right," Huber said, forcing the words out. The shock had numbed his diaphragm; breathing was one agony among many. He braced his left arm against the side armor, then let the car's lurch help Orichos lift him to his feet again.

On his feet but not upright; he was still half doubled over and he was pretty sure that he'd vomit if he tried to straighten fully. Via! but he hurt.

Deseau's gun thumped a burst toward the top of the cone. Huber didn't see a target there; Frenchie was probably just proving to himself and others that he was alive and functioning . . . which is what Huber was doing, after all.

"I'm all right!" he repeated, forcefully and with more truth this time. He took his tribarrel's grips in his hands as Fencing Master lurched to the top of the ridge, the western battlements of the Volunteer fortress. Below was the interior of the partial cone, and beyond that the sea.

Aircars ranging from the big trucks that could haul twenty or more armed men to hoppers with one seat and room for a sack of groceries were mixed indiscriminately on the crater floor. The drivers had squeezed in wherever they'd seen a place to set down. The Volunteers had left Midway in a near panic; they probably hadn't landed here in much better emotional condition.

There wasn't room in the tunnels to conceal so many vehicles, so the calliopes had been the Volunteers' only means of protecting their hope of escape if things went wrong—as they were certainly going wrong now. Those calliopes were molten ruin, but there was no need to waste shells on the aircars. They were perfect targets for Fencing Master's tribarrels.

A few minutes ago there'd have been only a handful of Volunteers in the open. The maze of tunnels would've seemed safety until those inside realized that the Slammers would with certainty penetrate the outer defenses and so control the tunnel entrances. Now several of the armored doors had swung back; black-uniformed figures were running for vehicles. Huber's view was like a child's of a stirred-up anthill.

A Volunteer drew a holstered powergun and fired in the direction of Fencing Master as he ran. One of the bolts snapped only twenty meters overhead, but that was dumb luck: nobody was that good, not with a pistol. Learoyd's short burst vaporized everything between the Volunteer's neck and his knees without any need for luck. He was an expert using a stabilized weapon with holographic sights. Learoyd could've put a round into his target's left nostril if he'd wanted to.

The accompanying infantry squads spaced out to either side of Fencing Master, taking firing positions along the ridge. Foghorn still labored a hundred meters down the slope. Huber didn't have leisure to see how Jellicoe's section was doing on the eastern edge of the cone where a deep gully complicated the approach, but he knew she'd get them into action as quick as anybody could.

An aircar lifted. Huber fired as he tracked it, his bolts splashing behind the accelerating vehicle for a moment before three flashes walked up the fuselage from the back. The car, a luxury model, flipped over and crashed under power. Ruptured fuel cells sprayed their contents over a dozen other vehicles, some of which also started to burn.

"Cue aircar motors!" Huber shouted, shifting his AI to mark the electromagnetic rhythms of fan motors spinning. "Gunners—"

Going to intercom.

"—hit the moving cars, not the men!"

Three more vehicles tried to take off. One didn't have enough altitude and collided immediately with the truck parked ahead of it. As it tumbled, Learoyd's burst chopped the car's belly open.

The infantry were shooting at individual targets. Though their weapons were semi-automatic, a single 2-cm bolt was enough to disable an aircar—let alone kill the driver.

One and then both cars of Jellicoe's section opened fire from the other side of the crater. Foghorn finally not only mounted the rim but started down the steeper inner slope, wreathed in the grit its steel skirts rasped from the soft rock. Solid cyan streams lashed from its guns.

Deseau either didn't hear Huber's order or ignored it, instead laying his sights onto an entrance. He squeezed his trigger till a blast within spurted a cloud of smoke and yellow flame into the sunlight; the tunnel collapsed.

Three Volunteers rose together behind the bed of a truck, aiming at Foghorn for the split second before Huber shot them down. One's carbine fired skyward as his head exploded. Huber'd been swinging his gun onto the car behind the men; its driver leaped out and flattened on the ground. The empty vehicle started to loop before falling sideways and crashing.

Fuel fires and the foul black plumes of burning plastic rose from dozens of vehicles. Nobody was coming out of the tunnels any more, and the Volunteers surviving on the crater floor either huddled beside cars—there was no "behind" to the crossfire from the rim—or raised their hands in surrender. Many of the latter had their eyes closed as if they were afraid they'd see death coming for them.

"Sierra, cease fire!" Captain Sangrela called. "The enemy's radioed to surrender! Cease fire!"

A carbine fired. The whack of the electromagnetic coils might've gone unnoticed in the chaos, but the clang! of the slug ricocheting from Foghorn's armor was unmistakable. Some Volunteer hadn't gotten the word. . . . 

Huber hadn't seen the shooter, but Deseau did: his tribarrel was one of five or six guns which spiked the closed cab of an aircar. That car and three more nearby erupted in fireballs. A body panel fluttered skyward, deforming in the heat of the blast that lifted it.

"Cease fire!" Sangrela repeated angrily. His jeep was so heavy with electronics that he hadn't been able to reach the rim, so he didn't know the reason for the additional gunfire. "Cease fire!"

The shooting stopped. Arne Huber took his hands from the tribarrel grips and flexed them cautiously, afraid they'd cramp. He might need to use them if things got hot again. The underside of his chin was as stiff and painful as if it'd been flayed. The skin there'd caught some of the iridium vaporized when the bolt hit inside the fighting compartment.

"Cease fire!" said Captain Sangrela, but nobody was firing any more.

"Blood and Martyrs!" Deseau wheezed, raising his faceshield. "I'm as dry as that rock out there!"

Huber'd had the same thought. In turning toward the cooler that still should have a few beers in it, he caught sight of Captain Orichos' expression: she looked as though she'd just been told she was Master of the Universe.

It shouldn't have disturbed Huber, but it did.

It'd been pouring rain. Now that the afternoon sun was out, the tents steamed and the clay had already started to bake to laterite. Ash lay as a slimy gray coating over ridges in the soil, but the sides of the rain-carved gullies were the color of rust. Dead tree trunks stood like tombstones for the forest that had once grown here.

"What a bloody fucking awful fucking place!" Deseau snarled, flipping up the front of his poncho without taking it off; the rain could resume any moment. "Learoyd, did you ever see such a bloody fucking awful fucking place?"

"Sure, Frenchie," Learoyd said, frowning as he tried to puzzle sense out of the question. "Remember Passacaglia, where the dust got in everything and we kept burning out drive fans? And that swamp the place before that? And where was it everybody got skin fungus if they didn't wear their gas suits all the time? Was that—"

"Yeah, well, this's still a crummy place," Deseau muttered. He saw Huber smiling and grimaced, turning his head away. Frenchie'd been around Learoyd long enough to know the trooper had too much trouble with the literal truth to make a good audience for a figure of speech—even a figure as simple as rhetorical exaggeration.

Looking eastward toward a dirigible unloading what seemed to be empty shipping containers, Deseau went on, "I wish to hell they'd let us go when the local cops arrived. They can handle anything that's left, can't they?"

Dirigibles full of Gendarmes and the supplies needed for an open-air prison had begun arriving within a few hours of the collapse of Volunteer resistance. Huber, and Captain Sangrela, and probably every other trooper in the task force, had thought Sierra would be released immediately. The optimists had even hoped they'd be sent back by way of Midway, with a few days of leave as a reward.

Surviving a major engagement like the one just completed made even level-headed troopers optimistic.

Central hadn't felt that way. Sierra had stayed where it was for the three days it took for a column from Base Alpha to reach them.

"It won't be long, Frenchie," Huber said. He quirked a smile. "It shouldn't be long, anyhow."

There were worse places, just as Learoyd said, but this was bad enough in all truth. The Slammers had snagged tents from the loads brought in to house the prisoners, but they didn't help much. You could keep the rain from falling on you, but the ditches the troopers dug around the tents hadn't been enough to stop streams of ash-clogged water from finding their way in from below and soaking everything.

Huber looked over at the POW camp which lay between Task Force Sangrela's defensive circle and the slopes of what had for a short time been Fort Freedom; it was now Mount Bulstrode again. The prisoners had it worse than the troopers did, of course. There wouldn't have been enough tents to go around even if the Slammers hadn't imposed their tax on defeat, but accommodations weren't what was probably worrying the former Volunteers. The Slammers knew they'd be leaving within a few days, maybe even a few hours. The prisoners weren't sure they'd be alive in a few hours.

"Sierra," said Huber's commo helmet in the voice of the signals officer of the approaching column, "this is Flamingo Six-three. We'll be in sight in figures two, I say again, two, minutes. Don't get anxious. Flamingo out." 

"Stupid bitch," Deseau muttered. "The only thing I'm anxious about is getting away from this bloody place. And if they'd got the lead outa their pants, that could've happened yesterday."

Huber's opinion was similar enough that he didn't bother telling Frenchie to cool it. You never get relieved as quickly as you want to be. . . . 

He wondered if Sierra would be allowed to pick its own route back through the unburned forest, or if in the interests of speed they'd have to return across the fire-swept wasteland. The downpour would've quenched the hotspots, but the filthy sludge the vehicles'd be kicking up in its place wouldn't be much of an improvement.

Huber chuckled. Deseau gave him a sour look.

"Don't mind me, Frenchie," he said. "I'm just thinking that I went into the wrong line of work if I wanted luxury travel arrangements."

"Guess they had to keep us," Learoyd said, nodding toward the waste of mud and tents and captured Volunteers. "I mean, if them guys tried to break out, what was the cops gonna do about it?"

Learoyd was right, as he usually was when he offered an opinion. Squads of Gendarmes patrolled the perimeter of the vast razor-ribbon cage. Six or eight strands of wire were strung on flimsy poles only two meters out of the ground; all things considered, it wasn't much of a barrier. The Point didn't have the resources to deal with the sudden influx of over five thousand prisoners.

The Gendarmes had carbines and pistols. If they'd hoped to supplement those with automatic weapons captured from the Volunteers, they were out of luck. Every crew-served weapon in Fort Freedom had been brought out to face the Slammers, and none of them had survived. For the most part, the sharp-shooting tanks had destroyed the emplacements before the Slammers were in range of the defenders' return fire.

If the prisoners, many of whom were rightly desperate, made a concerted rush on the fence, a few hundred Gendarmes weren't going to stop them. The Slammers' massed fire would, and the certainty the powerguns would hose the camp indiscriminately meant that prisoners who didn't want to try a breakout were going to be bloody determined to keep their wilder fellows in line also.

"Via, where's there to run to?" Deseau said. He spat toward the camp a hundred meters away, then started to shrug out of his poncho after all.

"Back into the tunnels, for one thing," Huber said. "There might be enough guns down there to equip a division. It won't be safe till the support column comes up with the gas cylinders."

"That what they're doing, El-Tee?" Deseau said, his tone bright with interest. "Pump the place full of gas?"

Huber shrugged. "Nobody's appointed me to the staff," he said, "but that'd be standard operating procedure: fill the tunnels with KD1 or another of the persistent agents and forget about 'em."

Sledges had been ringing on iron posts as prisoners constructed a narrow chute from the eastern end of the camp. An off-key whang indicated a hammer'd hit skew and broken the helve. A Gendarme shouted in a tone of anger tinged with fear, drawing the three troopers' attention.

"Naw, nothing," Deseau muttered, lifting the muzzles of his tribarrel a safe fifteen degrees again so that the weapon wouldn't hit anything in the vicinity if it fired accidentally. "Them cops, they're ready to piss their pants they're so scared."

Twenty Gendarmes guarded a crew of no more than fifty prisoners driving posts and stringing the wire. They seemed nervous to Huber, also. Maybe they knew what was planned and were afraid of what would happen when the prisoners learned also.

"Sierra, this is Flamingo Six-three," the voice said. "We're coming into sight. Flamingo out."

The vehicles of the task force were bows-out in a defensive circle, though the formation was looser than it'd have been if there were a real likelihood of attack. Instead of turning his head, Huber switched the upper left quadrant of his faceshield to the view from Floosie at the opposite side of the formation.

A combat car slid over the ridgeline where Sierra had launched its assault on Fort Freedom. Three similar vehicles followed, then a dozen air-cushion trucks, and after them two wrenchmobiles modified to carry troops. The last vehicle in line was a command car.

"It's the White Mice," Deseau said. From the tone of his voice, Huber thought he might be about to spit. "You know, I was kinda hoping I wouldn't see them again for a while."

"If they're relieving us," Learoyd said, "I don't care who they are."

"Yeah, I guess that's right," Deseau said; but Huber wasn't sure he agreed.

Some prisoners drifted toward the south edge of their camp, interested in the column as a break in their miserable routine and probably also concerned about what it might mean. Huber noticed that others of the former Volunteers were disappearing into tents. He didn't know what they expected to gain by that, but he understood the impulse.

A dozen civilians had come in by aircar a few hours before. They wore hooded raincapes even now that the sun was out, but Huber had raised his faceshield's magnification until he was sure of what he'd suspected: one of the newcomers was Speaker Nestilrode, and he recognized two others as cabinet ministers he'd seen when he entered the Assembly with Captain Orichos.

Now they came out of Orichos' tent. She and the Speaker shook hands; then the civilians strode quickly to their car without a backward glance.

Orichos sauntered toward the chute of razor ribbon. Perhaps she felt Huber's eyes on her because she turned her head and waved before she walked on.

Deseau snickered. "She fancies you, El-Tee," he said.

"Balls," Huber muttered. Orichos had been running the operation ever since enough Gendarmes had arrived to take primary responsibility from Task Force Sierra. The route march had been just as hard on her as on the Slammers, and so far as Huber'd seen she hadn't had a moment's downtime since. Despite that, Orichos looked as coolly fresh as she'd been the night a lifetime ago when Joachim Steuben introduced her at Northern Star.

Learoyd looked over his shoulder at Huber. "He's right, El-Tee," he said. "She does."

Huber shrugged rather than speaking. He didn't know what to say because he didn't know what he thought. He figured if he pretended not to care, they'd drop the subject.

There was motion in the near distance eastward. "Hey, what d'ye suppose that's all about?" Frenchie said, swinging his tribarrel both as a pointer and out of judicious concern.

Six dirigibles hovered a half kilometer east of the enclosure. Slung beneath them were bar-sided containers like those Huber had seen transporting livestock from the feedlots of Solace to the United Cities where they'd be slaughtered. The props of one of the big airships began to turn at a slightly faster rate than what was necessary to hold position against the breeze. It crawled closer to the camp, its empty containers bonging occasionally when they touched the ground.

Instead of halting to coordinate with Task Force Sangrela, the A Company combat cars drove past the defensive circle and continued around the east side of the prisoner cage. Their skirts squirted water and gray sludge in jets punctuated by the furrows in the soil. Prisoners putting the finishing touches on the chute dropped their tools and scuttled away from the spray.

"Fox Three-six to Sierra Six," Huber said. "Any word what we're supposed to be doing? Over."

The cars' passage splashed the guards as well. A Gendarme officer retrieved the hat that'd been blown into a puddle and shook his fist at the big vehicles. Deseau snickered and said, "Bad move. Could've been a real bad move if the dumb bastard'd decided to wave his gun instead."

"Sierra, this is Six," Captain Sangrela said, replying to the whole unit. "I've been told we're to hold ourselves in readiness to support Flamingo as required. If that sounds to you like, 'Go play, kiddies, while the big boys get on with business,' then you've got company thinking that. Six out!"

The incoming infantry drove their skimmers off while the wrenchmobiles were still slowing. Huber noticed with some amusement that they didn't perform the operation as smoothly as Captain Sangrela's troopers had. The White Mice were real soldiers as well as being the Regiment's police and enforcers, but they didn't use skimmers nearly as much as the line infantry did.

The newcomers began to deploy along the southern length of the cage. There were only forty of them, so that meant almost ten meters between individuals. They carried 1-cm sub-machine guns rather than a mix of the automatic weapons with 2-cm shoulder weapons.

Deseau must've been thinking along the same lines as Huber was, because he said, "Blow apart the first man who moves with one a' these—"

He patted the receiver of the 2-cm weapon wedged muzzle-down beside his position between two ammo boxes and the armor.

"—and you quiet a mob a lot faster than spraying it with a buzz-gun."

Learoyd looked at him. "Did you ever do that, Frenchie?" he said. "To a mob?"

Huber kept his frown inside his head. You didn't generally ask another trooper about his past. Learoyd had an utter, undoubted innocence that allowed him to say things nobody else could get away with . . . and a lack of mental wattage that made it very likely he would.

Deseau said nothing for a moment, then shrugged. He nodded to Huber, explicitly including him, and said, "Naw, that was back on Helpmeet when I was a kid, Learoyd. I was on the other side of the powergun, you see. So when things quieted down, I joined the Regiment before they shipped out again."

The moving dirigible settled so that all three containers dragged, then detached them. The center box stuck momentarily. The airship bounced upward when the weight of the other two released, so the third clanged loudly to the ground when it finally dropped. It hit on a corner which bent upward, kinking the bars.

"Good thing it wasn't full of cattle," Huber muttered, frowning at the thought of broken legs and beasts bellowing in pain and terror. Now that he'd seen dirigibles in operation, he realized that they were about as unwieldy a form of transportation as humans had come up with. Useful here on Plattner's World, though.

"The cows're gonna be killed anyway, El-Tee," Deseau said. "It don't matter much, right?"

"Maybe not," Huber said; not agreeing, just ending a discussion that didn't have anywhere useful to go. Maybe nothing at all mattered, but on a good day Arne Huber didn't feel that way.

The command car pulled up alongside the chute, making a half turn so that its bow angled toward the camp proper. Though it was an hour short of sunset and the clouds had cleared, the driver switched on his headlights. In their beams the strands of razor ribbon glittered like jagged icicles. Two troopers with sub-machine guns got out of the vehicle and walked over to the wire.

"Prisoners of Hammer's Regiment!" a voice boomed through the command car's loudspeakers. "You will walk in line through the passage at the southeast corner of this camp. As you pass my vehicle—"

The whip antenna on top of the car glowed, becoming a wand of soft red light.

"—you will turn to face it. Then you will walk on to the containers in which you'll be transported to Midway. There you'll be released."

The words were being repeated on the north side of the POW encampment. It wasn't an echo from the volcano, as Huber thought for a moment. The A Company combat cars were relaying the speech through their public address systems.

"Who's that in the car?" Deseau said. From the way his eyes were narrowed, he already knew the answer to his question.

"It sounds like Major Steuben," Huber said. "As you'd expect."

A full company of Gendarmes stood by the shipping containers. Mauricia Orichos was among them, her hands linked behind her back. Huber had been watching her as Steuben spoke. Orichos hadn't been best pleased at the words, "Prisoners of Hammer's Regiment."

That was tough. She knew she'd been the only member of the Point forces present when Fort Freedom fell. The Slammers had taken these prisoners, and if the Gendarmery wanted to get snooty about it, the Slammers could take the prisoners away from their present guards any time they wanted to.

A prisoner bellowed something toward the car. Though he made a megaphone of his hands, Huber couldn't catch the word or brief phrase.

Steuben did, however. The loudspeakers boomed, "A gentleman has expressed doubt that you will actually be released. Let me assure you, mesdames and sirs, that if I wished to kill you all I would not bother with play acting. When you get to Midway, you will be told to sin no more and be released."

The trucks had unloaded their pallets of black-banded gas cylinders. Five of them shut down. The sixth lifted and lumbered past Task Force Sangrela to settle again beside the command car. The driver opened the cab door and stood on his mounting step, looking at the camp. Another squad of White Mice dismounted from the back and walked over to the chute.

"Very well," the PA system thundered. Amplification softened Steuben's clipped tones, making his words sound pompous. Huber found the contrast with the real man chilling. "Start coming through. The sooner you get moving, the sooner we can all get on to more congenial tasks."

A prisoner near the front looked around, then shambled into the chute. One of the White Mice reached an arm over the wire to halt the man in the headlights. His head rose in surprise and sudden fear.

"Keep going!" the amplified voice ordered.

The trooper's arm dropped; the prisoner jogged the rest of the way to where Gendarmes herded him into the first container. Several more prisoners followed, shuffling forward in a mixture of desperation and apathy.

"I suggest reconsideration on the part of anyone who thinks he'll remain in the tents," Steuben continued, the catlike humor of his tone coming through despite mechanical distortion. "We're going to destroy the entire site, starting at the north side. We can see you through cloth as surely as we'll be able to see you in the dead of night, so don't be foolish."

There was a hollow boop, then a second later a white flash and a shattering crash. A second boop, Wham! followed immediately. Troopers in the combat cars on the north side were firing grenade launchers into the tents.

Thermal viewing would show any holdouts, so there was no need for the grenades. Major Steuben was just making a point, to the Gendarmes as surely as to the captive Volunteers.

"Sierra, this is Flamingo Six-three," said the A Company signals officer. "Fox Three-six is to report to the command car ASAP. Out."

Deseau and Learoyd both looked at Huber. From the driver's compartment, Sergeant Tranter said over the intercom, "El-Tee? What's going on?"

Huber cued his intercom and said, "Curst if I know, Sarge. I'll tell you when I get back. Assuming."

He swung his left leg over the armor, then paused. He unclipped the sling of his 2-cm weapon from the epaulet and offered the big gun to Learoyd, saying, "Trade me, will you, Herbert?"

"Sure, sir," the trooper said. He took the 2-cm weapon and slapped the butt of his sub-machine gun into Huber's palm.

Deseau cackled like a demon. "Handier inside a car, eh, El-Tee?" he said.

Huber climbed the rest of the way out of the fighting compartment, then hopped from the plenum chamber to the ground. He started grinning also. You might as well see the humor in the screwed-up way things worked. It didn't change things; but then, nothing did change them.

He started toward the command car, his boots squelching and tossing mud up his pants leg with each stride. He didn't look over his shoulder to see the troopers of Task Force Sangrela watching him, but the Gendarmes watched and the driver of the big air-cushion truck stared down from the cab with a puzzled expression.

Grenades continued to crash on the north side of the camp. They'd started several fires; the sluggish flames gave off curls of black smoke.

Enough prisoners had passed through the chute that the cage meant for twenty cattle was what Huber would've called full. The Gendarmes seemed happy to pack more in. Well, if the former Volunteers had nothing worse in their future than an uncomfortable airship ride, they were luckier than they deserved to be.

"That one," the loudspeaker ordered crisply. A low-intensity laser stabbed from the mount of the command car's tribarrel. Its yellow dot quivered like a suppurating boil on the cheek of the bald-headed man nearing the end of the chute.

The fellow looked up in startled horror. One of the waiting troopers grabbed him left-handed by the shoulder, holding the sub-machine gun back like a pistol in his right where the prisoner couldn't reach it.

The trooper walked the fellow out of the chute. Instead of leaving him for the Gendarmes, he handed him over to another of the White Mice who led him in turn to the back of the air-cushion truck.

The prisoners had been moving with something like the docility of the cattle normally loaded into the shipping containers. Now they paused; the woman two places behind the fellow who'd been taken away tried to go back.

"Move it!" the other trooper at the chute snarled, waggling his weapon.

The woman resumed her way down the chute—and out the other end to the Gendarmes, ignored by the voice from the command car. A man who'd been waiting in the crowd turned and started to force his way back through his fellows.

"Halt!" called the trooper nearest to him along the fenceline as he leveled his sub-machine gun. The prisoner tried to run, pushing at others who were trying desperately to get out of the line of fire. The sub-machine gun stuttered a short burst into the man's legs, one bolt into the left calf and two more at the back of the right knee.

The prisoner fell, screaming with surprise. It was too soon yet for the pain to have reached him; though that'd come, it'd surely come. Only a tag of skin and one tendon connected his right thigh and lower leg.

"Two of you carry him through," ordered the loudspeaker. "Make sure to turn his face toward me."

The wounded man continued to scream. He tried to stand but slipped onto his right side.

From the command car, Joachim Steuben giggled. Amplified, the sound was even more gut-wrenching than it'd seemed when Huber heard it from across the major's desk.

The prisoners nearest the fallen man stood frozen till the trooper waggled the glowing muzzle of his sub-machine gun. Then they grabbed his arms convulsively and stumbled through the chute as he screamed even louder. One brushed the razor ribbon, leaving much of his sleeve on the wire and blood dripping from his torn arm. The wounded man's legs didn't bleed; the powergun bolts had cauterized the wounds.

"A moment of your time, Lieutenant Huber," said Captain Orichos. He jumped. She'd walked over to him while his attention was on the byplay in the camp.

"Ma'am?" he said. Without thinking about it, he stiffened to Parade Rest. "That is, Captain?"

"Mauricia, I hope," Orichos said. After the battle she'd resumed wearing her beret instead of a Slammers commo helmet. She took it off now and shook her short hair loose before replacing the cap. "I suppose you know your unit will be routed back with a stopover in Midway?"

"No ma'am," Huber said with a faint grin. "There were rumors, but we're line soldiers. Nobody tells us anything."

"Well, I'm telling you," Orichos said with a mixture of crispness and challenge. "I'll be flying back by car shortly; there are some things to clear up in in the capital now that the threat's been dealt with."

She cleared her throat and looked away. "What I'm saying, Arne, is that I hope when you arrive in Midway, you'll get in touch with me. I'll have some free time by then, and I'd really like to repay you for all you've done for the Point and for me."

Orichos smiled. It softened and transformed her face to a remarkable degree.

"I think I can guarantee you a good time," she said. She touched the back of Huber's wrist, then turned and went back to her fellows.

Huber rubbed his wrist with the fingers of his other hand as he walked on, thinking about Orichos and about the shooting he'd just watched.

It'd taken skill to hit the running man and not nail a couple of the bystanders. Though it could as easily have been dumb luck: he didn't suppose either the trooper or Major Steuben would've cared if some of the other prisoners had lost limbs.

Huber reached the hatch in the rear of the command car. It opened before he rapped it with the barrel of his powergun. The two men inside had their backs to him as they watched a high-resolution image of prisoners moving steadily through the chute to the shipping containers.

Joachim Steuben was as dapper as if he'd spent the past three days in Base Alpha instead of making a thousand kilometer run over difficult terrain. His companion was blond and in his thirties; Grayle's chief civil aide, Huber recalled, the one who'd disappeared between the Assembly meeting and the time Captain Orichos found incriminating papers in the files that had been under the aide's control.

"That one!" the aide said. What was his name? Patronus; that was it. "He's Gerd Danilew. He was in charge of off-planet weapons purchases!"

"That one," Steuben said, his amplified voice damped to silence when the hatch closed behind Huber. The pipper of the cab-mounted tribarrel framed the face of the sallow, moustached prisoner walking nervously between the barriers of razor ribbon.

The man looked up. Instead of trying to run, he fell in a faint as limp as if the tribarrel had decapitated him—as the slightest additional pressure of Steueben's finger on the trigger control would've made it do.

"Well, carry him, then," Steuben ordered into the pickup for the external speakers. He looked over his shoulder at Huber and raised an eyebrow in delighted amusement, then turned back and added, "Now!"

The procession resumed. Patronus kept his face rigidly forward as if he thought that by refusing to acknowledge Huber, he could deny what was going on.

Steuben rotated his full-function chair to smile at Huber. "So, Lieutenant," he said. "I thought I'd use this opportunity to see if you're still happy with a line command."

Instead of the slot in the White Mice that he offered me three weeks ago, Huber thought. He shrugged and said, "Yeah, I'm happy. We did a good job here."

He guessed he'd made that sound like a challenge, which wasn't the smartest sort of attitude to show when you were talking to a weasel like Joachim Steuben. Huber didn't care much at the moment.

"Indeed you did," Steuben said, nothing in his tone but mild approval. "Both the task force and you personally . . . which is why my offer is still open."

He cocked an eyebrow.

"I said I was happy!" Huber said. Via, he was going to have to watch himself. It'd be a hell of a note to come through a mission like this one and then be shot because he mouthed off to a stone killer like Joachim Steuben.

He smiled—at himself, but it was probably the right thing to do because the major giggled in response.

"That one!" Patronus said, pointing at the image. His hands were clean but he'd chewed his fingernails ragged.

Major Steuben's right hand moved minutely, then clicked the switch that controlled the laser marker. Huber didn't see him look around, not even a quick glance, but the pipper was centered on the forehead of the grim-looking man who'd brushed his full moustache in an attempt to cover the scar on his cheek. "That one," Steuben repeated into the PA system.

In a quick voice, bobbing his head to his words, Patronus continued, "That's Commander Halcleides, he took over after Commander Fewsett—that is, when he died."

"What happens next?" Huber asked. He didn't exactly care, but he knew Deseau'd ask when he got back to Fencing Master and he wanted to have an answer. "You'll shoot them?"

Patronus turned with a furious expression. "They're traitors!" he snarled. "They deserve to die!"

Steuben made a peremptory gesture with his left hand. His head didn't turn, but Huber saw his eyes flick toward the former aide.

"Master Patronus," Steuben said without raising his voice, "I'd appreciate it if you'd attend to your duties while the lieutenant and I speak like the gentlemen we are. I don't want the bother of replacing you."

He giggled again. To Huber he added, "Though shooting him would be no bother at all, eh, Lieutenant? For either of us, I suspect."

Patronus was on a seat that folded down from the sidewall. He turned again to face the screen across the front of the compartment, pointedly concentrating on the prisoners shambling through the identification parade. His face flushed, then went white.

Huber looked at the man who'd first planted evidence on his friends and now was fingering his closest colleagues for probable execution. In a good cause, of course: the Regiment's cause. But still . . . 

"No, Major," Huber said. "It wouldn't be much bother."

"But to answer your question," Steuben continued, "no, we're not going to shoot them, Lieutenant. They'll be shipped off-planet to a detention center; an asteroid in the Nieuw Friesland system, as a matter of fact. The Colonel believes they'll be a useful . . . reminder, shall we say, to the government of the Point as to what might happen if it suddenly decided to back away from its support for the war with Solace."

"Th-the-there," Patronus said, pointing at the strikingly attractive woman going through the chute. His outstretched hand trembled. "Talia Mandrakora, she was in charge of propaganda."

"That one," Steuben said, highlighting the woman. To Huber he added, "Do you fancy her, Lieutenant? I dare say you could convince her that the only chance she has to survive would involve pleasing you."

Huber felt his lip curl. "No thanks," he said. "I don't have trouble finding company for the night."

"I'm sure that's true," Steuben said with a smirk. He rotated his chair toward the screen again. His posture didn't change in any definable way, but he was no longer the man who'd been joking with catlike cruelty. "And now, I think, we have the personage we've been waiting for."

The prisoners waiting to walk through the chute parted, glancing over their shoulders and then lowering their faces as they pushed clear. Melinda Riker Grayle strode through the gap which fear rather than respect had opened for her. She was no longer the woman who'd cowed her colleagues in the Assembly. She wore a white uniform but the right sleeve had been singed and at least some of the stain on her trousers was blood. Nonetheless she walked with her back straight, glaring toward the command car.

"Invite Assemblyman Grayle to join her associates in our van, if you please, Sergeant Kuiper," Steuben said into the pickup.

Grayle walked alone into the chute. The trooper there hesitated, his arm raised but not fully extended.

"Keep your filthy hands off me!" Grayle said. Steuben must've switched on the external microphones, for the assemblyman's voice sounded as clear as if she'd been in the compartment with them.

She turned to face the car and shouted, "You in there, whoever you are! Hired killers! You know the election was rigged! And you know that you're charging ten times what the citizens think they're paying for your services! Tell them!"

"Take her away, Kuiper," Steuben said, sounding vaguely bored. "I'd rather you not shoot her in the legs so that she has to be carried, but do that if she won't come peaceably."

"You know it's true!" Grayle screamed. When the trooper reached for her shoulder she slapped his hand away, but instead of resisting further she marched down the chute and turned toward the truck where her aides were being held. Her head was high, and she didn't look around.

Steuben smirked at Huber. "She's right, you know," he said conversationally. "The election was rigged. The Freedom Party would've taken forty-four percent of the seats if your friend Captain Orichos hadn't manipulated the vote count."

Huber looked sharply at the smaller display above the big screen, a 360-degree panorama from the command car. Mauricia Orichos stood watching the parade with three other Gendarmery officers, a few meters behind the White Mice who did the sorting. They followed Grayle with their eyes until she'd disappeared into the box of the truck.

"Orichos did that?" Huber said.

"She asked us for technical help so it could be done without detection," Steuben said, looking up at the panorama with a faint smile. "I provided someone from my signals section. It would've been extremely awkward if Grayle had become Speaker and tried to take the Point out of the war."

As Steuben spoke Patronus turned slowly toward him, like a rat hypnotized by the slowly waving hood of a cobra. Steuben focused his ice-colored eyes on the traitor and said, "I believe I told you—"

He broke off in the middle of the passionless threat for another giggle. "But then," he continued, "with Mistress Grayle in hand, we don't have to worry about other threats to hold over our friends, do we? I suppose we could just dismiss the rest of the prisoners . . . though I don't believe we will for the moment."

He gestured Patronus back to the screen and the line of prisoners resuming their procession through the chute. Patronus obeyed with the slow, jerky motion of an ill-made automaton.

"Was the rest of it true too?" Huber asked harshly. His throat hadn't recovered from the ozone he'd breathed during the battle, but he and the major both knew there was more to his tone than that. "About the costs being higher than they know?"

Steuben shrugged. "In a manner of speaking," he said. "The governments of the Outer States believe the Regiment's price is only about twenty percent of the real figure. . . .  But don't worry: our fees are being paid, and line lieutenants don't have to worry about where the money comes from."

"I suppose not," Huber said. He tried to make his mind go blank, but he couldn't manage it. "Sir, if you don't have any further duties for me here . . . ?"

"You don't like our company?" Steuben said, his smile flashing on and off like a strobe light. "All right, Lieutenant. You're free to leave."

Major Steuben rotated his chair toward Huber again. His face, too pretty to be handsome in a man, was suddenly as hard as chilled steel. "The offer remains open, Lieutenant," he said. "You should feel flattered, you know."

"I appreciate your confidence, sir," Huber said. He turned to the hatch; it opened before he could touch the control plate.

Huber stepped into the gathering darkness. Grenade launchers continued to work, the choonk/wham! choonk/wham! punctuating the sound of drive fans and power tools. Troopers were pulling maintenance on their vehicles with spares the column had brought from Base Alpha. The white flashes of the bombs were quick speckles through the fabric of tents bulging outward before they collapsed.

Mauricia Orichos saw Huber come out of the command car. She stepped away from the group she was with and waved to him.

Huber looked at her, then slipped his faceshield down and quickened his stride in the direction of Fencing Master. As he'd told Major Steuben, he could find his own company. And he wasn't going to find it there.

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Framed

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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 degrees to 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 degrees for 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!"

"You'll come with me into the Freedom Party headquarters, Lieutenant," Orichos murmured as they watched Melinda Grayle and her henchmen stride out of the chamber. Their bodyguards were trampling down the stairs from the gallery to join them. The remaining assemblymen were either rigid in their seats or whispering in small cliques.

"All right," said Huber. "Sierra, this is Fox Three-six. I'll be accompanying the liaison officer into the red buildings across the way. If anything pops, you'll know where to come and get me. Three-six out."

"Roger that, Three-six," growled Captain Sangrela. "Six out."

Huber looked at the Gendarmery captain. "Why me?" he said.

"Let's go," Orichos said, nodding to the doorway. "A recording team from the Speaker's staff is joining us outside."

They went out. The ushers were backed against the walls, watching Huber and Orichos with silent concern.

"I want you rather than someone from the Point . . ." Orichos said, showing that she wasn't ignoring Huber's question after all. "Because Grayle knows that her Volunteers outnumber the Gendarmery by several times. Your regiment's an unknown quantity, so she'll be less inclined to resort to violence."

Huber noticed that she said, " . . .  the Gendarmery . . ." rather than " . . .  from my organization. . . ." Orichos was a member of the police force only as a matter of administrative convenience. In their own self-image, intelligence personnel are a breed apart—and generally a law unto themselves as well.

Two black-haired young women waited on the porch with lens wands and satchels of recording equipment. One technician was plumpish with a broad mouth, the other razor thin with three vertical blue lines on her right cheek. Huber couldn't tell whether the marks were tattoos or makeup.

Grayle and her entourage were walking back across the Axis to their compound. The older male was speaking into a hand communicator as he gestured forcefully with the other arm. The compound gates were open; the squad waiting there wore red headbands and carried carbines openly.

"Come along," Orichos said to the recording technicians as she strode past and started down the steps. They fell in behind obediently, looking excited but not frightened. They obviously didn't have any conception of what they were about to get into.

Trooper Learoyd waved from Fencing Master; Huber nodded in response. He was operating on trained reflex now. His intellect had dug itself a hole from which it viewed its surroundings in puling terror, but the part of him that was a soldier remained fully functional.

If things broke wrong, Task Force Sangrela couldn't get Huber out of the Freedom Party headquarters. The whole Regiment in line couldn't do that, though it could pulverize the buildings and everybody in them easily enough.

That wouldn't help Huber while he was inside. He wasn't going to fight his way out through the hundreds—at least—of armed Volunteers inside with him, either. Well, it'd be what it'd be. . . . 

On the lowest of the three terrace landings, Orichos turned her head and said, "This is of course dangerous, Lieutenant; but I don't want you to imagine that it's a suicide mission."

Huber shrugged. "It doesn't matter what I think," he said. "It's my job."

Oddly enough, the words brought him a degree of comfort. They reminded him that he was here by choice, however dangerous "here" turned out to be. And by the Lord—Arne Huber couldn't clear out the compound alone, but if push came to shove the Volunteers who took him down'd know they'd been in a fight.

The road surface was more irregular than it'd seemed while Huber was riding over it in a combat car; repeatedly his foot slipped in a rut or scuffed a ridge he hadn't noticed because his attention was where it belonged, on the armed guards waiting for him in the gateway. He imagined taking this same route while mounted on Fencing Master. The thought made him grin, and maybe because of that expression the solid phalanx of Volunteers parted to let Huber and his companions through without jostling.

Orichos looked over her shoulder and said, "Begin recording now," to the technicians.

The thin one sniffed and replied tartly, "We've been recording since you came out of the building, ma'am. We have orders from our supervisor."

Orichos nodded without evident emotion. Huber wondered if she were nervous or if like him she was following by rote the path she'd planned while there was time for cool reflection.

They entered the compound. Melinda Grayle stood with the older male assemblyman in the doorway of the building ten meters ahead of them. Grayle was still in the white and red outfit she'd come from the Assembly with, but her companion had changed into black battledress set off by a red headband; he carried a carbine and wore a powergun in a belt holster.

Huber didn't see the blond assemblyman. He might be inside the building, of course. Aircars, mostly battered-looking private vehicles—the large trucks were garaged in an annex outside the walls—filled the grounds within the compound. They were parked so tightly that except for the path between the gate and the central building, anyone walking across the tract would have to worm his way through and sometimes over cars.

The people they'd flown into the city watched Orichos and her companions from the buildings and from the cars themselves. Everyone Huber saw was armed, and they were trying to look tough. For most of them, that didn't require a great deal of effort.

"All right, madam snoop," Grayle said to Orichos. "You're here now. How do you intend to proceed?"

"We'll go directly to the file room adjacent to your personal office on the fourth floor, Assemblyman Grayle," Orichos said calmly. "If there's no record of wrongdoing there, you'll have my apologies and we'll leave immediately."

Grayle's eyes narrowed; she looked angry but not, if Huber read her correctly, afraid. "I'll have your apology and your resignation, Captain," she said. "And you'll be lucky if there's not a libel suit as well!"

"Just as you please," Orichos said. She didn't look concerned either.

Grayle turned on her heel and strode into the building. Orichos followed immediately instead of waiting for the permission that wasn't going to come. Huber gestured the recorders ahead of him and brought up the rear. He didn't bother trying to watch behind him; he knew he'd see an armed mob, and it wasn't going to make him feel any more comfortable.

The two girls now looked nervous. They were walking so close together so that they occasionally bumped elbows. They'd started to understand. . . . 

There were two elevators in the wall to the right of the doorway. Grayle gestured to them with her left hand and said sardonically, "Take your pick, snooper."

"We'll take the one that goes to the fourth floor," Orichos replied in a mild tone, stepping in front of Grayle and pressing the call button for the cage farther from the door.

Grayle's face went carefully neutral, but the male assemblyman with her said, "Hey, how does she—"

"Shut up, Fewsett!" Grayle said. Her voice didn't rise, but the snarl in it brought a look of surprise and anger to her subordinate's face. He cocked his right hand back, then gaped in blank horror at what he'd been about to do.

Grayle ignored him, pushing past Orichos to enter the elevator before the delegation from the Assembly could do so. Fewsett followed; other Volunteers would have done so as well, but there simply wasn't room on what was meant as a private car for the highest officials.

Huber grinned without humor. He didn't doubt that there'd be a sufficiency of gunmen already waiting for them upstairs.

The elevator rose smoothly but with a repetitive squeak to which the plump recording technician winced in synchrony. The thinner girl took her hand and squeezed it tightly. The contact seemed to help; at any rate, the twitches immediately became less pronounced.

The elevator stopped. What had been the back of the cage opened into an office appointed like a throne room. A large stuffed chair with gilt upholstery stood on a dais behind an agate-topped desk. Behind it was a wood-framed triptych of heroic figures created not by an artist but by a technician using stock imagery. Highlights on the pictures' glossy surface veiled them; a good result.

Even urban structures on Plattner's World tended to be tall and narrow, slipped in among the trees that were the source of the planet's considerable income. This high-ceilinged office was half the building's top floor; even so, another dozen people besides the six waiting gunmen would've filled the space left over by the desk and throne. They'd have had to stand, because there was no other chair in the room.

Grayle and her henchman got out first as they had entered. Fewsett immediately began to talk in a guttural whisper to the leader of the waiting squad, a slender man with tattoos and a serpentine copper bracelet.

Captain Orichos led the way to the small door at the side of the throne room; Huber brought up the rear. Through it was a paneled hallway with a stairwell at the far end and a doorway on the left side. Another squad of guards waited in the hall.

"Back, if you please!" Orichos said, gesturing at the guards. She opened the side door and entered the file room beyond.

Huber gave the gunmen a wry smile. They didn't know what was going on any better than he himself did. That didn't make him and the Volunteers brothers, but it was a good enough illustration of a soldier's life to amuse him.

There was no one in the file room; five-drawer cabinets circled the walls, leaving only an aisle in the middle. Though the Freedom Party was as technically advanced as the rest of Plattner's World, hardcopy remained a necessary backup to electronic files and ultimately more secure than any form of information linked directly to the outside world.

"Assemblyman Grayle?" Orichos said to the woman watching from the doorway. "Would you or a deputy please join us before I begin examining your files? Although the whole nation is witness to the proceedings—"

The thin technician's face was frozen, her mouth slightly open; she held her wand rigidly upright where it recorded events in a sphere around her. The other technician huddled against a back corner, leaning on her wand as though it were a cane. Huber supposed it was doing an adequate job of recording the parts of the file room that were blocked from her companion's lenses.

"—I'd like someone in whom you have confidence to be present to ensure that I'm merely examining files, not adding anything to them."

"By the Lord, you'd better not be adding stuff!" Fewsett growled. He added, presumably to some of the gunmen, "Come on, boys."

Grayle stepped in herself. Huber squeezed against the cabinets behind him to allow her to get by if she wanted, but she merely gave him a sneer. "Go ahead!" she said. "You'll find nothing because there's nothing to find."

Fewsett crowded in behind Grayle and touched her shoulder to move her back. She slapped his hand without looking around. More Volunteers stacked into the doorway; those in front pushed back against their fellows to the rear to keep from being shoved into Fewsett's massive figure.

Orichos nodded, then turned to a cabinet midway down the row. "Let the record show that I am at a cabinet marked Finance," she said, and opened the second drawer from the top.

Huber stood with his head cocked so that though he mainly faced the Freedom Party officials, he could still watch Orichos out of the corner of his eye. Grayle's expression was one of iron disdain; Fewsett glared past her with a mixture of anger and frustration.

"Bring the wand closer," Orichos snapped to the plump recorder. When there was no reaction, Orichos lifted the girl's arm and placed the lens wand on the edge of the drawer. In a dry, mechanical voice Orichos continued, "I am removing a file marked Special."

"What is this?" Grayle said on a rising note. She tried to look behind her but the way was filled with gunmen. "Where's Patronus? Why isn't he here?"

Orichos displayed her empty right hand to the lens wand, then reached into the drawer and brought out a folder with a red tab. She spread her left hand in plain sight also, then opened the folder.

Fewsett turned and bellowed, "Get that bastard Patronus here now! He's the fucking party treasurer. We need him now!"

Huber didn't move except to slide his finger into the trigger guard. He'd figured how the business was going to play out, but he didn't know quite the exact time.

Or whether he'd survive it.

"The folder holds a list of amounts and dates," Orichos said. "It purports to be records—"

The lens wand slipped off the drawer; the plump technician had curled her arms around herself, sunk into a personal world light-years away from this terror. In a sudden break from her detached calm, Orichos looked at the girl and screamed, "Hold that bloody thing up or I'll have you executed for treason!"

The thin technician tilted her wand closer to the open drawer. She didn't look toward Orichos.

"This is fake!" Grayle said. "It's been planted! There's no—"

"Purports to be a record," Orichos resumed in a louder voice, "of payments—"

"—truth in it at all!"

"—by the Interior Ministry of the Government of Solace to the Freedom Party!"

Grayle turned to get out of the file room. Fewsett knocked her back accidentally as he raised his carbine. Huber fired from the hip. His 2-cm bolt hit Fewsett in the upper chest, vaporizing most of the big man's torso in a thunderclap. The shockwave slammed Huber against a file cabinet and knocked the Volunteers in the doorway off their feet.

A Volunteer tried to aim his carbine, or maybe he was just flailing his arms for support. The powergun's cyan flash would've blinded anybody seeing it close-up without the protection of a polarizing faceshield like Huber's. He fired twice more, clearing the doorway save for a scatter of body parts. A blast-severed head flew past Huber, driven by vaporized body fluids.

The thin technician screamed and flung down her wand. It wobbled behind her on its flex as she sprang through the doorway Huber was trying to slam shut with his left hand. Two or more gunmen riddled her before she took a second step into the hallway. She thrashed backward, but Huber threw all his weight against the panel. It latched despite the obstructions.

A burst of shots whanged into the door from the outside. The panel was metal-cored, but concentrated gunfire would peck through it before long. For that matter there must be somebody in the gang outside with the key to the door's snap lock.

"Don't shoot, you idiots!" Melinda Riker Grayle screamed. "Don't shoot or you'll kill me!"

Huber glanced behind him. Grayle sprawled on the floor. Captain Orichos lay on top of her, twisting back her left arm and holding a pistol to Grayle's neck.

The plump technician sat on the floor with her legs splayed, crying uncontrollably. The room was hot—oven hot, heated by the three heavy-caliber powergun discharges in its narrow confines.

When a bolt liberated its energy in a human body, it turned the tissues to steam with explosive suddenness. The file room's walls, the ceiling, and the people within were all covered with a mist of blood. Huber's hands were red, and there was a sticky film across his faceshield that the static charge hadn't been able to repel. He flipped the shield up and out of the way.

The stench of cooked flesh and of the wastes voided when Fewsett's sphincters spasmed in death was stomach-churning, even for Huber who'd smelled it before. Some things you never get used to. . . . 

Captain Orichos raised herself to her knees, still pointing her pistol at the assemblyman. She patted the floor with her left hand till she found the lens wand and raised it vertical again. Grayle twisted to look back into the bore of the pistol.

"Assemblyman Grayle!" Orichos said. "You stand convicted of treason by your own records and by your failed attempt to use force against the agents of the Assembly!"

"That's a lie!" Grayle said in a hoarse voice. "You planted that file!"

Several voices were jabbering at Huber through his commo helmet; at least one of them seemed to be from Base Alpha. He locked out all incoming channels and concentrated on the door in case the Volunteers tried to rush it. The muzzle of his powergun was cooling from yellow to bright orange.

"In order to prevent bloodshed among citizens . . ." Orichos continued as though her prisoner hadn't spoken. She was facing Grayle over the gunsights, but Huber noted that her eyes weren't focused anywhere in this world. "I'm offering you, in the name of the citizens of the Point, a chance to go into exile. You and all your fellow conspirators will have one hour to leave Midway and six hours to leave the Point. After that time, you will be considered criminals and dealt with according to law."

"You faked that so-called evidence," Grayle said, "and you faked the vote count to steal the last election from the Freedom Party! You're the criminals! You're thieves, and you're bankrupting the state by hiring these mercenaries!"

"Assemblyman Grayle!" Orichos said. She jerked her weight backward to balance her as she stood. She held the wand in her left hand like a torch, and the pistol slanted down toward her prisoner's face. "Do you accept my offer, made in the presence of the entire citizenry of the Point?"

"Better take the offer, lady," Huber said. Ozone from the 2-cm bolts had flayed his throat, making his voice a rasp that he wouldn't have recognized himself. "Whatever else happens, I guarantee you're not going to leave here alive any other way."

Grayle looked at him. Her eyes slid downward to the floor on which she lay. Fewsett's head, severed when his chest exploded, stared back at her from a hand's breadth away. She jumped to her feet, forgetting the threat of Orichos' pistol.

"It's all a lie!" Grayle said. She got control of her breathing and went on, "But I don't have any choice. All right—we'll leave Midway, but I'm agreeing under duress. You have no legal right to expel us!"

"You out there in the hall?" Huber shouted. He figured the Volunteers, a lot of them anyway, would be watching the broadcast along with the rest of the citizens, but the gunmen just outside the door might be an exception. "I'm going to open the door. The first one through it's going to be your leader, Assemblyman Grayle. But be clear on this—you've got a deal with your government and your Gendarmery. You don't have a deal with me personally. If anybody sticks his head into this room, I'm going to blow him to atoms just like I did a lot of his buddies a moment ago. Got it?"

Nobody answered. Huber thought he heard the sound of boots running down the staircase. Grayle was poised like a roach caught by the light, momentarily frozen.

"Captain Orichos?" Huber said.

"Yes, open the door," Orichos said.

Instead of reaching, Huber kicked out with his right boot and sprung the latch. The panel bounced open. The hallway was empty.

Grayle jumped through so quickly that she slid on the blood pooling from the dead technician's body. She caught herself on the wall and ran toward the stairs, leaving a handprint on the wall behind her.

Nothing else moved for over a minute.

Huber let out his breath. He switched his helmet back to receive mode and said, "Fox Three-six to Sierra. We're holding our present position on the fourth floor of the Freedom Party headquarters until somebody comes to fetch us out. And give me plenty of warning before you show yourselves, people, because I'm as jumpy as I've ever been in my life!"

Captain Sangrela's driver had bounced his jeep up the Assembly Building steps and parked it under the porch. The officers and senior sergeants of Task Force Sangrela stood on the patterned stone, listening to the holographic image of Danny Pritchard speaking from Base Alpha.

Around them the citizens of Midway noisily celebrated their release from Freedom Party domination. In the street below whirled a round dance with hundreds of participants. A fiddler stood on a raised platform in the middle of the circle; beside him, occasionally crowding his elbow, gyrated a young woman wearing only briefs. Huber didn't think she was professional—just exuberant and very happy. As far up and down the Axis as Huber could see there were similar dances as well as free buffets, speakers on makeshift podiums, and crowds of people drinking and singing in good fellowship.

"The Volunteers are gathering at their base on Bulstrode Bay on the northern coast," said Danny Pritchard's holographic image. "They call it Fort Freedom, and it's going to be a tough nut to crack."

Aircars spun and swooped overhead, often with sirens blaring. The drivers were as excited and as generally drunk as the people in the street. Huber had seen two collisions and heard a worse one that sent a car crashing to the ground on the other side of the Mound.

"Why us, sir?" Captain Sangrela asked. His voice was calm, but the way his hands tightly gripped the opposite elbows indicated his tension.

"Because you can, Captain," Pritchard said simply. "Because we can't leave ten thousand armed enemies in a state whose support we need. And because the locals can't do it themselves—"

He grinned harshly.

"—which is generally why people hire the Slammers, right?"

The Gendarmery had been conspicuous by its absence during the events of the afternoon. Now the Point's gray-uniformed police were out in force, though they seemed more to be showing themselves than making an effort to control the good-natured partying that was going on. The Gendarmes on foot patrol carried only pistols; those in the cruising aircars may have had carbines but they weren't showing them.

"Ten thousand of 'em, sir?" said C-1's platoon sergeant, a rangy man named Dunsterville. He sounded incredulous rather than afraid at what he'd heard. "You mean the guys with red sweatbands?"

"The Volunteers, yes," Pritchard agreed with a grim nod. "You won't have to deal with all of them—indeed, that's why we've decided to move on Fort Freedom immediately. We expect that at least half of Grayle's Volunteers will decide to stay home in the woods if they know that joining her means facing tanks. If we withdraw from the Point and the Volunteers don't have anybody to worry about except the locals, then they'll everyone of them march back into Midway and this time loot the place."

When Pritchard said, "we've decided," he meant Colonel Hammer and his regimental command group. The "we" who'd be carrying out the operation meant Call-Sign Sierra, ten vehicles and less than a hundred troopers under Captain Sangrela. Huber was a volunteer, and he knew that the senior officers had all been at the sharp end in their day too . . . but Via! Fifty to one was curst long odds!

"Here's a plan of Fort Freedom," Pritchard continued. The image of his body disappeared, leaving his head hovering above a sharply circular embayment viewed from the south at an apparent downward angle of forty-five degrees. The sea had cut away the northern third of the rock walls and filled the interior. "Bulstrode Bay's an ancient volcano. The walls average a hundred meters high and are about that thick at the base. There's normal housing inside of the crater, but the Volunteers have also tunneled extensively into the walls."

"Have they got artillery?" Huber asked. He was still trying to get his head around the notion of going up against five thousand armed hostiles . . . or maybe ten thousand after all, because staff estimates were just that, estimates, and Sierra would be facing real guns.

"The Volunteers don't have an indirect fire capacity so far as we can tell," Pritchard said, nodding at a good question. "Not even mortars. What they do have—"

The holographic image transformed itself into a gun carriage mounting eight stubby iridium barrels locked together in two banks; each tube had its own ammo feed. The chassis was on two wheels with a trail for towing the weapon rather than being self-powered.

"—are calliopes. We've traced a lot of twenty purchased by Grayle's agents nine months ago, and it's possible that there've been others besides."

Calliopes, multi-barreled 2- or 3-cm powerguns, provided many mercenary units with the air defense that the Slammers handled through their own armored vehicles. The weapons were extremely effective against ground targets as well. A short burst from a calliope could shred a combat car and turn its crew into cat's meat. . . . 

Pritchard's full figure replaced the image of the calliope. "I'm not making light of the job you face," he said. "But I do want to emphasize that the Volunteers are not soldiers. Most of them have only small arms, they aren't disciplined, and they've never faced real firepower. If you hit them hard and fast they'll break, troopers. You'll break them to pieces."

"Calliopes cost money," Mitzi Trogon said. "More money than I'd expect from a bunch of hicks in the sticks."

Pritchard nodded again. "Whatever you think of the documents the Point security police found," he said with a grin, "we have evidence that the government of Solace is indeed supporting the Freedom Party."

Solace would be insane not to, Huber thought. Arming the internal enemies of a hostile government was about the cheapest way to reduce its threat.

In the street and sky, the citizens of Midway danced and sang. They were the rulers, the people who split among themselves the wealth and the status and the political power of the Point. They were right to fear Melinda Grayle, a demagogue who'd united the Moss rangers against the urban elite who lorded it over them.

Captain Sangrela rubbed the back of his neck. "We're going cross-country, I suppose?" he said. "There isn't much but cross-country on this bloody planet."

"Not exactly," Pritchard said as the image of a terrain map replaced that of his body. "The direct route'd take you through ancient forest. The trees are too thick and grow too densely for your vehicles to push through or maneuver through either one. We've plotted you a course down the valley of the River Fiorno. It won't be fast, but the vegetation there's thin enough that even the cars can break trail."

The red line of the planned course dotted its way along the solid blue of a watercourse. Not far from the coast, the red diverged straight northward for some fifty kilometers to reach Bulstrode Bay.

"The last part of the route, we'll clear for you with incendiary rounds. We estimate it'll take you nearly two days to reach the point you'll leave the Fiorno. The fire should've burned itself out by then, so you can make the last part of your run relatively quickly."

Pritchard smiled again. "The fire should also limit the risk of ambush," he said; then he sobered and added, "But that'll be a very real possibility while you're following the river. We'll do what we can from Base Alpha, but you'll have to proceed with scouts and a full sensor watch the same as you did on the way here."

Pritchard's image looked around the gathering. "Any questions?" he asked.

"I don't like to complain, Major . . ." said Sergeant Jellicoe, lacing her fingers in front of her. "But do you suppose after this, somebody else in the bloody regiment can get a little action too?"

Everybody laughed; but everybody, Pritchard included, knew that the comment hadn't entirely been a joke. "I'll see what I can do," he said.

On the fiddler's platform below, the woman dancing had stripped off her panties as well. Huber glanced down at her . . . and turned his head away.

He was going to need his rest. The next part of the operation sounded like it was going to be even rougher than what it'd taken to get Task Force Sangrela this far.

Huber called up a remote from Flame Farter, on the move with White Section for the past ten minutes. The Fiorno River was only thirty meters wide and almost shallow enough to wade where it curved around the north and east of Midway. The scouts' skimmers danced in rainbows of spray out in the channel to avoid the reeds along the margins; the combat car was chuffing down the bank, spewing mud and fragments of soft vegetation from beneath her skirts.

"Red Section, move out!" Captain Sangrela ordered. The main body with Jellicoe's Floosie in the lead was already lined up on the Axis north of the Assembly Building. Dust puffed beneath their skirts as they lifted from the gravel. One at a time, carefully because objects so powerful must move carefully if they're not to destroy themselves and everything around them, the seven vehicles of the main body started down the avenue. The doughnuts of dust spread into wakes on either side.

Sergeant Nagano glanced over from Foghorn's fighting compartment; Huber was keeping his section on the Mound till the main body had cleared the road beneath. Huber gave Nagano a thumb's up. Nagano hadn't commanded a car before the operations against Northern Star, and he was doing a good job.

"How'd you make out last night, El-Tee?" Sergeant Deseau asked, stretching like a cat behind the forward gun.

"I slept like a baby," Huber said. "I never sleep that well on leave when I'm in a bed."

The Assembly had offered the Slammers any kind of billets they wanted, but Captain Sangrela had decided to keep his troopers beside their vehicles for the night. Nobody'd argued with him. The weather wasn't unpleasant, and chances were some Freedom Party supporters had stayed in Midway. The risks of going off by yourself were a lot greater than any benefit a bed in an unfamiliar room was going to bring.

"Not me," said Deseau, grinning even broader. "The people here are real grateful, let me tell you."

Learoyd looked around from his gun. Shyly he said, "The girls didn't charge nothing, El-Tee. I never been a place before that the girls didn't charge."

A Gendarmery aircar came up the Axis from the south, flying low and slow. Huber caught the motion in the corner of his eye, then cranked the image up to x32 as an inset on his faceshield. As he'd thought, Captain Orichos was in the passenger seat.

The fourth D company tank pulled out at the back of the main body, accelerating with the slow majesty that its mass demanded. Floosie was out of sight beyond the northern end of the Axis, into the mixture of forest and scattered houses that constituted the city's suburbs.

"Fox Three-six to Three-one," Huber said to Sergeant Nagano. "Move into the street. We'll follow you down and bring up the rear. Three-six out."

Foghorn lurched from its berth and ground through a hedge that'd survived Task Force Sangrela's arrival. Whoever was driving for Nagano today must be keyed tighter than a lute string, Huber thought; he grinned faintly. Which showed the driver understands what we're about to get into.

"Sir, shall I shift us now?" Sergeant Tranter prodded from the driver's compartment.

"Give me a moment, Tranter," Huber replied. "I think I've got a visitor."

"Hey, it's your girlfriend, El-Tee," Deseau said cheerfully. He waved at the aircar swinging in along Fencing Master's port side.

"Not my girlfriend," Huber said as he lifted himself out of the fighting compartment to stand on the plenum chamber. And probably not even a friend, to Arne Huber or to any member of the Slammers. Orichos had other priorities, and Huber had only the vaguest notion of what they might be.

As the aircar hovered beside them, the Gendarmery captain tossed Huber a satchel no larger than the personal kit of a trooper on active deployment. "I hope you don't mind, Lieutenant . . ." she called over the thrum of the aircar and the whine of Fencing Master's idled fans. "But I'm going to join you again."

Huber thrust the satchel behind him for Deseau to take. He extended his right hand while his left anchored him to the fighting compartment's coaming.

"Welcome aboard, Captain," he said, swinging Orichos across to the combat car. She was surprisingly light; his subconscious expected the weight of a figure wearing body armor, of course.

Mauricia Orichos wasn't welcome, but she was part of Huber's job so he'd make the best of it. And he really had more important things on his mind just now. . . . 

Huber heard a coarse ripping as three more rounds from batteries far to the south streaked overhead. To give the shells sufficient range from the Slammers' gun positions in the UC, a considerable part of what would normally be payload was given over to the booster rockets.

"What's that?" asked Mauricia Orichos, pointing upward. The shells' boron fluoride exhaust unrolled broad, poisonous ribbons at high altitude, spreading as she watched. "Are we under attack?"

"No, that's outgoing," Huber explained, mildly surprised that their passenger had picked up the sound of artillery over Fencing Master's intake howl. Orichos noticed quite a lot, he realized, and she had the knack for absorbing what was normal in a new situation so that she could quickly identify change. "They're prepping the route for us."

He wasn't sure how much Orichos knew about the plan, and he wasn't going to be the one to tell her anything Base Alpha hadn't already explained. If it'd been up to Arne Huber, he'd have told the Point authorities an amount precisely equal to the part Point forces were taking in the reduction of Fort Freedom: zip.

He glanced up at the path the shells had taken northward. For this use, the reduced payloads didn't matter. The shells would spill their incendiary bomblets at very high altitude to get maximum dispersion. The target wasn't a single facility but rather a fifty-kilometer swathe of forest, and there was plenty of time for the widely-spread ignition points to grow together into a massive firestorm.

Which wasn't the sort of thing a local from Plattner's World, where the forest was preserved with almost religious fervor, could be expected to like. Colonel Hammer put his troopers' lives first, though, and Colonel Hammer was calling the shots on this one.

The vehicles ahead of Fencing Master had mown and gouged the riverbank into a muddy wasteland. Wherever possible the lead car had chosen a route that kept its skirts on solid ground, but occasionally an outcrop or a deep inlet forced the column partly into the water. Each thrum! as plenum-chamber pressure beat the river echoed for kilometers up and down the channel.

Huber grinned. Orichos misread his expression, for she smiled back ruefully and said, "I suppose I do sound like a Nervous Nellie. Sorry."

"What?" said Huber. "Oh, not at all. I was just thinking that there's never been an armored column in human history that sneaked up on anybody, and this time isn't going to be the exception."

"El-Tee?" said Learoyd, staring dutifully into the holographic display. "Take a look at this, will you?"

Huber'd put his right wing gunner on the first sensor watch of the run because he hadn't expected anything to show up so early. He'd manually notched out Fencing Master and the other vehicles in the column during the run from Northern Star, so that they wouldn't hide the more distant, hostile, signals. Unlike a quicker mind, Learoyd's wouldn't be lulled into daydreams by the minute changes in pearly emptiness that was probably all that he'd see in the display, but Huber feared that Learoyd might not notice subtleties that really had meaning.

Except that the trooper'd done just that. Huber frowned at the display in dawning comprehension, then said, "Sierra Six, this is Fox Three-six. We've got an aircar, probably a small one, following us about a kilometer back. I figure if it was just civilian sightseers, they'd be, well, in sight. Over."

"Roger, Three-six," Captain Sangrela said. "We leave a broad enough track that the Volunteers figure they can follow us without coming so close we spot them. Good work, Huber. I'll drop off a fire team to take care of it. Six out." 

"Three-six out," Huber said. "Break. Blue Section, some infantry's staying behind to clean off our tail. Don't run 'em over, and get ready to back 'em up when the music starts. Three-six out."

"We gonna get a chance to pop somebody, El-Tee?" Deseau asked, turning hopefully to meet Huber's eyes.

"Not a chance, Frenchie," Huber said. "But we're going to follow the drill anyway."

A thought struck him and he went on, "Captain Orichos? Is there any chance that a Gendarmery aircar is trailing the column? If there is, tell me now. You won't get a second chance."

Orichos frowned. "One of ours?" she said. "Not unless somebody's disregarded my clear instructions. And if that's happened, Lieutenant—"

She smiled. Frenchie Deseau couldn't have bettered the cruel surmise in her expression.

"—then the sort of lesson I assume you propose will bring the survivors to a better appreciation of the authority granted me by the Assembly." 

Huber nodded and returned his attention to his tribarrel's sector forward. He didn't have a problem with ruthlessness, but he found disquieting the gusto with which people like the Gendarmery captain did what was necessary.

"Three-six, watch the pedestrians!" Nagano warned from Foghorn fifty meters ahead. Four infantrymen had hopped their skimmers off one of the maintenance vehicles; now they were positioning themselves behind treeboles where they'd have good fields of fire for their 2-cm weapons as soon as the aircar came in sight above the water. Huber nodded in salute, but the infantrymen were wholly focused on what was about to happen.

The ambush team had shut down their skimmers immediately upon hitting the ground. The Volunteers weren't likely to have sensors that'd pick up a skimmer's small fans more than a stone's throw away, but Regimental training emphasized that you didn't assume any more than you had to. Plenty of stuff that you couldn't control was going to go wrong, so you made doubly sure on the rest.

"How long, Lieutenant?" Orichos asked. Not what: how long. She was a sharp one, no mistake.

"About a minute and a half," Huber explained. "We're travelling at about forty kph in this salad—"

He gestured to the soft vegetation just outside the track, where the previous vehicles hadn't ground it to green slime.

"—and our Volunteer friends back there'll be holding to the same speed. The last thing they want's to fly up on our tail."

He smiled. Which was just what they were about to do.

Orichos nodded and turned to watch the route behind Fencing Master. There wasn't anything to see but mud and muddy water, of course. Sight distances close to the ground were at most a hundred meters in the few places the river flowed straight, and generally much less where vegetation arched over the curving banks.

Huber imported to the lower left quadrant of his faceshield the view from the sergeant commanding the ambush team; it wouldn't interfere with his sight picture in the unlikely event that Fencing Master ran into trouble. After a moment's hesitation, he touched Orichos' shoulder. When she turned, he linked their helmets as he had while Floosie raked incoming shells from the sky. Orichos nodded appreciatively.

It took ten seconds longer than Huber'd estimated before an open aircar with four men aboard loitered into sight. Sangrela had chosen the ambush site well: the car slowed, dipping beneath a branch draped with air plants which crossed the river only three meters above the purling surface.

The lift fans flung a rainbow of spray through the sunlight, momentarily blinding the two men in the front. As the car started to rise again, three cyan bolts hit the driver, vaporizing his torso, and a fourth took off the head of the gunman in the passenger seat.

The driver jerked the control yoke convulsively, throwing the car belly forward and spilling the remaining gunman off the stern. The sergeant shot the falling man before he hit the water; the three troopers blew the car's underside into fireballs of plastic paneling superheated into a mixture that exploded in the air.

"Blue Section, reverse!" Huber screamed. Sergeant Tranter was a trifle slower to spin Fencing Master than he should've been; Huber'd forgotten the driver didn't have reflexes ingrained by combat like the rest of them did. "Move it! Move it! Move it!"

The ambush team didn't need help. The aircar crashed edgewise onto a spine of rock sticking up from the water; it broke apart. The fourth Volunteer had been concentrating on detector apparatus feeding through a bulky helmet. He must've been strapped in; his arms flailed, but he didn't get out of the car even when the wreckage slipped off the rocks and started to sink.

The river geysered as at least four and maybe twice that many 2-cm bolts hit the man and the water nearby. A bolt hit an upthrust rock; it burst like a grenade, shredding foliage on the bank with sharp fragments.

I guess the poor bastard's not going to drown after all, Huber thought.

When Fencing Master reached the ambush site a few seconds later, the infantrymen had remounted their skimmers. Huber gestured them forward to put the combat car in drag position again.

"You were right, El-Tee," said Deseau regretfully. "Not a bloody thing for us."

One of the infantrymen waved back as he passed Fencing Master. He was now wearing a helical copper bracelet, its ends shaped like snakeheads.

Apparently the leader of the squad Huber shot it out with in Freedom Party headquarters hadn't learned from that experience. Huber smiled coldly. The Slammers didn't give anybody a third chance.

The alert signal brought Huber out of a doze; it was like swimming upward through hot sand. He'd jumped to his feet and had the tribarrel's grips in his hands, straining for a target in his faceshield's light-amplified imagery, before his conscious mind took over and he realized why he'd awakened.

Learoyd was driving. Sergeant Deseau was at the forward gun, as rested as anybody could be after eighteen hours of slogging through river-bottom vegetation. Huber wouldn't have been able to drop off if he hadn't been sure Frenchie was there to take up the slack. He'd needed the mental down-time badly, though. The shoot-out in Freedom Party headquarters had drained him more than he'd realized right after it happened.

But that was part of the past, a different world, and now the present was calling. "Fox Three-six acknowledging!" Huber said, and his helmet dropped him into the virtual meeting room with Colonel Hammer himself and the other officers of Task Force Sangrela. He'd been the last to arrive, but from the look of Mitzi Trogon—her mouth was half-open and her eyes looked like they were staring into oncoming headlights—she was in at least as bad a shape as he was.

"Troopers," Hammer said, acknowledging his four subordinates with a glance that swept the table. The imagery was sharper than it'd been in the forest south of Midway; the sky above the Fiorno was fairly open. "There's Volunteers setting up a blocking position on an island three hours ahead of you. There's about two hundred men with buzzbombs and six calliopes if they're not further reinforced."

Hammer's torso vanished into a slant view of a roughly oval island; it covered about as much of the river valley as the channels flowing to north and south of it. From the scale at the bottom of the image, the heavily wooded surface between the streams was on the order of a square kilometer.

"They've been flying in from Bulstrode Bay over the past hour," Hammer said with a disbelieving shake of his head. "They apparently don't realize that here at Base Alpha we can follow everything they're doing, right down to who had grits for breakfast."

Icons of red light marked hostile positions: calliopes on the forward curve of the island, and squads of infantry both on the island itself and on the north bank of the floodway. The Volunteers probably intended the mainland element to halt the task force in line along the shore where the calliopes could rake the Slammers from the flank.

Sangrela laughed in derision. "You want us to go through 'em or around 'em, sir?" he asked. "For choice we'll go through."

"Neither," said Hammer with a spreading smile. "I'm just telling you what the situation is. We're going to handle it from here with artillery."

"Why in hell would you want to do that?" Mitzi Trogon snarled. She must've heard her own tone; she snapped fully awake at last. "Ah, sir, that is," she added with a grimace of embarrassment.

Hammer looked at Trogon without expression for a moment, then lifted his chin minutely to show that the incident was closed—if not forgotten. "Right," he said with a mildness that deceived nobody. "This ambush isn't a problem, but Fort Freedom is likely to be more of one. Here the Volunteers have their calliopes tasked for ground use, waiting for your column to come into their killing zone. They aren't professional enough to redirect the guns for artillery defense in the amount of time they'll have. Follow?"

Because Huber understood and none of his fellow officers were in a hurry to speak after Mitzi'd stepped on her dick, he said, "When a salvo takes out the whole ambush party, Volunteer command is going to decide it's our shells they ought to be worrying about. When we get to Bulstrode Bay, their calliopes are going to be aimed up for artillery defense and we'll take 'em with direct fire."

"Roger that, troopers," Hammer said, his face minusculely softer than it'd been a moment before. "This won't be a milk run for you, there's no way it's going to be that. But I told you from the beginning that you'd have all the support we could give you. Any questions?"

"Support" this time didn't mean the artillery, not really, Huber realized. It was the planning, the misdirection; the thinking two steps ahead of his own troops and at least six steps ahead of the enemy, that the Colonel was providing here.

"What orders do you have for us, sir?" Captain Sangrela asked, the burr of warmth in his tone suggesting that he was thinking along the same lines as Huber was.

"Keep on with what you're doing, that's all," Hammer said. His grin spread. "Which is plenty, I know that. We'll time the stonk for thirty seconds before you come into sight of the target. Hit anybody that shows himself, but keep going as fast as you can. That'll make more of an impression on what passes for a Volunteer command group than we would by digging out a couple shell-shocked wogs and blasting them. Clear?"

"Clear," said Sangrela, nodding, and Huber added his "Clear" to the muttered "Roger," and "Clear," from his fellow lieutenants.

That'd save gun bores for the real fight at Bulstrode Bay as well. Maintenance had replaced the barrels burned out at Northern Star, but there probably wouldn't be time for another refit before Sierra slammed into Fort Freedom and the Volunteer's main body. . . . 

Hammer gave a crisp nod. "Let me stick it to the bastards this time, troopers," he said. "There'll be plenty of opportunity for you up north."

The Colonel's image dissolved, returning Huber to Fencing Master's jouncing fighting compartment. His mind and senses were as sharp as they'd ever been in his life. To the watchful expressions of his troopers and Captain Orichos, he began, "In about three hours . . ."

What looked like a streak of sparse vegetation at right angles to the river was a dike of impermeable clay channeling water into the softer soil beyond. The scout section infantry slid across without being aware of the change, but Fencing Master came down on algae-covered soup instead of the expected solid ground. A gout of mud spewed higher than the armored sides, drenching Huber and the others in the fighting compartment.

Tranter boosted power and adjusted the nacelles vertical for maximum lift. Fencing Master pogoed back onto an even keel and wallowed slowly across the basin.

"Fox Three-six to Sierra," Huber warned. "There's quicksand here. The panzers had better swing wide or they'll sink to wherever the bottom turns out to be. Three-six out."

By rights, Foghorn would've been the leading car if they'd gone by the preplanned rotation. Sergeant Nagano hadn't been pleased when Huber exercised his command prerogative to put Fencing Master in the lead as the column prepared to run the Volunteer ambush, but Huber was doubly glad he'd done it now. Only a driver as able as Sergeant Tranter would've kept from bogging or simply sinking out of sight in this soft spot, and there were bloody few drivers that good.

"Roger Three-six," Captain Sangrela said. "Delta units, follow the contour lines north. Looks to me like two hundred meters will let you cross safely. Six out." 

Fencing Master lifted itself with a jerk onto higher, harder ground. Tranter paused a moment before readjusting the fans, checking to be sure that mud and water plants hadn't choked any of the intake ducts. The combat car built up speed again, shedding weed and watery mud like a dog emerging from a pond.

Mauricia Orichos dabbed at the muck staining her uniform, managing only to spread the stain until she gave up the pointless exercise. She noticed Huber's glance and smiled faintly.

"I suppose it doesn't matter," she said. "I'm used to thinking in . . . urban terms, I suppose." 

"It doesn't matter," Huber agreed. Especially if we're all dead in the next thirty seconds, but he didn't let that last thought reach his tongue.

He heard the incoming shells at first as a distant friction in the sky. With shocking suddenness their howl filled the whole world and still grew louder. Sergeant Deseau hunched over the forward gun, aware that it was friendly fire aimed to impact half a klick ahead of Fencing Master; aware also that mistakes happen, that even the most technologically advanced shells land short occasionally, and that no fire is friendly when it's coming in on your position.

The Gendarmery captain's face went blank; her eyes opened wide. For a moment Huber thought she was going to throw herself as close to flat as she could get in the crowded fighting compartment, but she recovered her composure when she noticed he wasn't taking any action.

"It's all right," he explained. "This is the prep that's—"

The shells burst directly overhead with four distinct pops. The opened casings spilled the separate white streaks of over a thousand bomblets toward the ground ahead of Fencing Master. They whistled like a symphony for chalk on blackboards.

"—going to land on the—"

The timing was slightly off: Fencing Master tore through the last screen of feather-fronded vegetation a second before instead of a few seconds after the bomblets struck the Volunteer positions. The mid-channel island was a green mass against the tannin-black water. Near the shore the foliage was the same sort of lush shrubbery that Task Force Sangrela had ground through on the route from Midway, but there were some sizeable trees a hundred meters back from the bank.

The landscape disintegrated in crackling white flashes, snarling and sparkling for almost five seconds. A pall of mud and shredded greenery lifted several meters high, then settled back on a barren wasteland. Only memory could say that eastern half of the island and the spit of riverbank to the north of it had been covered by dense vegetation a moment before.

A cyan flash blew a temporary crater in the mud: a calliope's ammunition had detonated. A wheel spun skyward, then fell back and splashed into the river.

The scout infantry had grounded their skimmers at the moment of impact. Now they lifted again and resumed their course, four fingers feeling Sierra's path across the trackless terrain. Fencing Master snorted a hundred meters behind, the iridium fist ready to punch if the infantry touched anything.

"Not a bloody thing for us, El-Tee," Deseau said. "Not a bloody thing." 

The firecracker rounds had left a haze of explosive residue and finely divided soil above the island, blurring its shape, but Huber knew there'd have been little more to see even without that blanket. The rolling blasts had pulped everything in the impact area. Except for the single wheel, there'd been no sign of two hundred enemy soldiers and their equipment.

His nose wrinkled. That wasn't quite true. Besides the prickle of ozone and the sickening sweetness of explosive, the air had a tinge of burned flesh.

Fencing Master bucked into the undisturbed vegetation beyond the line which shell fragments had scythed. When the professionals sat down to the table, war stopped being a game for street thugs wearing uniforms. The Volunteers at ground zero here hadn't had time to learn that, but the folks who'd given them their orders must be thinking hard about the future by now.

Because the prevailing winds were from the northwest, Huber had been smelling the fire for almost three hours before the infantry sergeant with the scouting section called over the command channel, "Blood and Martyrs, Captain! This is Charlie One-three-four. Are we supposed to go through this on skimmers? Over."

Huber switched a quadrant of his faceshield to the view from Floosie, the combat car attached to White Section at the moment. It was like looking into the maw of Hell.

Regimental rocket howitzers hundreds of kilometers to the south in United Cities' territory had seeded the forest with incendiaries. Each time-fuzed zirconium pellet was capable of burning though light armor. When one landed in old growth forest, the likelihood of it igniting even green timber was three out of five . . . and there were tens of thousands of pellets in the shells, raining down over hundreds of square kilometers. The myriad simultaneous fires had spread till they joined in a firestorm, a towering conflagration that drove its column of smoke through the stratosphere and sucked air to feed it from all sides in a torrent at hurricane velocities.

Everything combustible within the core of the blaze had burned, including the loam. Silica in the clay substrate ran liquid before cooling into slabs of glass colored like the rainbow by trace minerals.

Though the first flush of the fire had burned to a glowing shadow of itself, what remained still shimmered. The boles of the largest trees smoldered, stripped to pillars of carbonized heartwood. Monstrous pythons of smoke and ash eddied, the ghosts of a forest dancing among its bones.

"One-three-four, recover to your carrier vehicle," Sangrela responded without hesitation. "ASAP, troopers, don't get into that! There won't be an ambush in that stuff, not from anything these Volunteers have available."

He paused, then resumed, "Break. Sierra, button up all hatches. Drivers switch to microwave radar, and exposed personnel lock down your faceshields. Make sure your filters are working before we get into it. We'll form an echelon perpendicular to the prevailing winds so—"

A route map clicked as an imposed overlay on the lower right corner of Huber's faceshield. Every trooper in the task force had the same image.

"—that we're not all driving through the trash the leaders stir up. Six out."

Floosie must've entered the burned area just as Sangrela spoke, because a plume of ash shot skyward two kilometers ahead of Fencing Master. It was like watching the first puff of a volcano gathering its strength.

The fire'd been set to clear the forest between Fort Freedom and the Fiorno Valley at its closest approach, some twenty klicks west of where the river entered the Northern Sea. The tract was well-watered and the foliage was in the green lushness of late spring, so the fire had generally burned itself out to either side of the kilometer-wide swathe seeded with incendiaries. Nothing organic could've resisted that dense rain of exothermic metal.

Deseau was driving; Huber heard the hatch cover close over him. Learoyd checked his faceshield and filters with his left hand, then drew up the throat closure of his blouse to get the maximum protection possible without donning an environmental suit.

Tranter was curled up asleep under the forward gun; his head rested on his commo helmet. Huber shook him awake and leaned close to shout, "Get your gear on and locked down, Sarge. There's going to be a lot of ash and sparks for the next hour or so."

As Tranter slipped his helmet on with a grin of embarrassment, Huber turned to Captain Orichos. She'd been watching the troopers, but she wasn't on the Sierra net and didn't know what was happening. Her expression was neutral, with just enough quirk to the lips to prevent it from being grim.

"We're going to be going through a burned-out area," he explained to Orichos over the intercom. He mimed locking down his faceshield rather than touch hers, at present raised. "Your nose filters ought to come down automatically when we hit the smoke, but you might want to push this button here—"

He touched the hinge of his faceshield; the filters dropped over his nostrils.

"—and deploy them manually right now."

"Burned area?" Orichos said. Her hand stopped halfway to her faceshield, then finished the movement. "Have those animals set the forest on fire?"

All the vehicles of the main body were out of the floodway now, striking north toward their goal. Eight separate ribbons of smoke and ash trailed downwind, spreading till they merged into a broad miasma that settled slowly back to the ravaged forest.

"Whatever happened," Huber said, "it's going to be hot going till we reach the marshes this side of Bulstrode Bay. Get your filters in place now, all right?"

Fencing Master had reached the point at which Sierra's route left the river; Deseau boosted fan speed and adjusted his nacelle angles. The previous vehicles, particularly the tanks, had battered the bank into a slope of glistening mud. Skirts had dragged chunks of buried quartz up with them in deep gouges through the clay.

Fencing Master roared, bursting over the top of the bank at over thirty kph. Huber realized what was about to happen in time to brace his left hand against the coaming and clasp Orichos to his chest with the other arm. The Gendarmery officer didn't have the instincts to react correctly even if he'd had a chance to warn her instead of acting.

The car's nose skirts spilled air and dropped, slamming down onto the charred soil. Despite being prepared, Huber's own weight and that of Captain Orichos threw him hard against the coaming. The rigid clamshell armor spread the shock, but he'd still have bruises along the side of his ribcage by the morning.

If he was alive in the morning, of course. Well, civilians could die at any moment too.

Deseau took them into the hell-lit wasteland. Smoke was a gray pall; sometimes dense enough to seem solid, sometimes hiding objects that were solid in all truth. Huber tried light-amplified viewing but decided the lack of depth perception would be too dangerous at their present high speed. Infrared—thermal imaging—wasn't ideal at the ambient temperatures of the burning forest, but the helmet AI had enough discrimination to make it the choice.

"Vandals!" snarled Captain Orichos. "Stupid vandal bastards! What did they think they'd accomplish by this destruction?" 

There was no point in telling her how the blaze had really started. Not when she and Arne Huber shared a crowded combat car on the verge of action with an entrenched enemy.

Hot spots—open flames and sparks the skirts plowed up from fires banked in the ashes—were white highlights in the faceshield. The AI coded cooler objects through the spectrum from violet to dark reds that verged on black, though little in this expanse was colored below green. A suited human would be visible in outline against the brighter background, but nobody expected to find Volunteers waiting here in ambush.

Fencing Master bumped and racketed across the landscape, scraping its skirts frequently and often hurling up gouts of fire. Deseau was being careful—too careful. He was trying to avoid every possible stump and cavity instead of taking a line and holding it till a major obstacle interposed. The combat car repeatedly sideswiped the skeletons of fallen trees, blasting them into sparks, or grounded when the skirts swayed over the edge of a pit left when a toppling giant had dragged its root ball out of the soil. Sergeant Tranter gripped the coaming to either side of his gun pintle with a set look on his face.

Huber touched Tranter's shoulder to get his attention, then leaned close to shout into his ear instead of using the intercom circuit and including Deseau: "Don't worry, Sarge—you and Frenchie will switch positions when we form up for the attack."

Tranter nodded gratefully. He might or might not understand that Huber was even more interested in getting Deseau behind the forward tribarrel than he was to have Tranter's expertise in the driver's compartment. Horses for courses . . . 

"Vandals!" Mauricia Orichos repeated as she stared across the flame-ravaged bleakness. Sparks whirled from the skirts and spun down again into the fan intakes, dusting those in the fighting compartment. Slammers' uniforms were flame resistant, but Huber stuck his hands under the opposite armpits and wished he had gauntlets.

Did Orichos think that Colonel Hammer cared about trees when the lives of his troopers were at stake? And if there'd been a thousand civilians in the corridor before the incendiaries fell, that wouldn't have changed the Colonel's plan either.

This was war. If the government of the Point hadn't known what it meant to hire the Slammers to do their fighting for them, then they were in the process of learning.

Fencing Master slowed, wobbled drunkenly, and finally came to rest on a south-facing backslope with her fans at idle. Deseau rotated the driver's hatch open; Tranter was already climbing off the right side of the fighting compartment.

Huber raised his faceshield, then lifted the commo helmet for a moment to scratch his scalp. He grinned at Captain Orichos and said, "We're getting ready for the final run-up, Captain. If there's anything you need to do while we're halted, do it now. We won't stop again until the shooting's over."

He smiled more broadly and added, "At least over for us, I mean."

Huber was keyed up, but it was in a good way. The drive had been physically and mentally fatiguing. It had blotted out the past and future, turning even his immediate surroundings into a gray blur. Now adrenaline coursed through him, bringing the fire-swept wasteland into bright focus and shuffling a series of possible outcomes through his mind.

Arne Huber was alive again. He might die in the next ten minutes, but a lot of people never really lived for even that short time.

"No, I'm ready," Orichos said. She rubbed her hands together, then wiped her palms on the breast of her jumpsuit. If she was trying to clean the ash and grit off them, she failed. "What do you want me to do? In the battle, that is."

Frenchie climbed into the fighting compartment past his tribarrel; Tranter was walking forward on the steel bulge of the plenum chamber. The thirty-degree slope was awkwardly steep for the exchange, but the relatively sparse vegetation here had left fewer smoldering remains than the flatter, better-watered stretches the task force had been crossing.

"Keep out of the way," Huber said. "Keep your head down unless one of us buys it. If that happens, take over his gun and try not to shoot friendlies."

He grinned, feeling a degree of genuine amusement to talk about his own death in such a matter-of-fact way. He'd chosen the line of work, of course.

Huber really would've preferred to get the Gendarmery officer off his combat car, but that wasn't a practical solution in this landscape. Orichos was smart and quick both, so he could at least hope that she'd jump clear if he or a trooper needed one of the ammo boxes stacked behind her.

Frenchie slid behind his gun and spun the mechanism, ejecting the round from the loaded chamber in a spurt of liquid nitrogen. As he did so, Tranter spun the idling fans up one at a time so that he could listen to the note of each individually. Both men were veterans and experts; they didn't trust their tools to be the way they'd left them until they'd made sure for themselves.

Barely visible eighty meters eastward, Foghorn's crew were giving their car and weapons a final check. Sierra's remaining six combat vehicles waited still further to the east, out of sight from Fencing Master behind undulations of the ground.

Despite hotspots in the terrain, the infantry had deployed from the wrenchmobiles; they'd advance on their skimmers to avoid the risk of losing two squads to a single lucky hit. Besides, the recovery vehicles might shortly be needed for their original purpose.

"Central, this is Sierra Six," Captain Sangrela reported over the command channel. "Sierra is in position. Over."

"Roger, Sierra," Base Alpha replied. Despite the compression and stuttering created when the transmission bounced from one ionization track to another, Huber would've been willing to swear the voice was Major Pritchard's. "Hold two, I repeat, figures two, minutes while we prepare things for you from this end. Central out."

Though the transmission closed, an icon on the corner of Huber's faceshield indicated there was view-only information available if he wanted to tap it. He did, tonguing the controller instead of voice-activating the helmet AI.

A crystalline, satellite-relayed voice announced, "Freedom command, this is Solace Intelligence! Emergency! Emergency! Slammers artillery is launching a maximum effort barrage on your positions! We will relay shell trajectories to you as they leave the guns!"

The voice transmission ended without a signoff. A data feed which the AI courteously translated into a schematic of lines curving from south to north across the continent replaced it. The tracks shown as emanating from all three of the Regiment's six-gun batteries were initially blue but turned red at a rate scaled to 880 meters per second: the velocity of 200-mm shells launched from the Slammers' rocket howitzers.

Learoyd clicked the loading tube into his backup weapon, a sub-machine gun, and turned to Huber. "Are we just mopping up again, El-Tee?" he said.

"No, Learoyd," Huber said. He was explaining to Captain Orichos as well. Deseau'd been on the net and would've understood the implications of the way the artillery smashed the Volunteer ambush. Learoyd hadn't understood, and Orichos hadn't heard. "Central's broken into the Solace net to send a false transmission to make the Volunteers think our enemies are helping them. There isn't really any artillery—"

As he spoke, the Regiment's Signals Section followed the graph of "shell trajectories" with computer-generated images of Hogs firing at their maximum rate of ten rounds per minute. The gun carriages jounced from the backblast of each heavy rocket. Doughnuts of dust lifted around the self-propelled chassis and a bright spark of exhaust spiked skyward for the seven seconds before burnout. Real shells would ignite sustainer motors in the stratosphere to range from firebases in the UC to the northern tip of the Point, but there was no need to simulate that here.

"—but if the Volunteers think there is, they'll switch their calliopes to high-angle use. They won't be waiting to hit us when we come into sight."

"This's what we've been waiting for, Learoyd," Deseau said, murderously cheerful. "We get to blow away a bunch of civilians in uniform!"

"Oh," said Learoyd. He turned again and swung his tribarrel stop to stop, just making sure it'd work when he needed it. Huber didn't recall ever hearing the trooper sound enthusiastic. "All right."

Herbert Learoyd wasn't the brightest trooper in the Regiment, but you could do worse than have him manning the right wing gun of your combat car. In fact Huber wasn't sure he could've done better.

It was time to be a platoon leader again. Huber cleared his faceshield and replaced the phony transmission with a fifty degree mask of the terrain map. It showed the planned routes that would take the four combat cars toward the outlying Volunteer positions and Fort Freedom itself. Colored bands connected each course to the segment of hostile terrain for which that car's guns were responsible.

"Fox Three-six to Fox," Huber said. "We'll be executing in a minute or less. If there's any questions, let's hear them now, troopers. Three-six over."

None of his vehicle commanders responded. He'd have been amazed if one had. Four green beads along the top of his faceshield indicated that the cars themselves were within field-service parameters. That could've meant they'd have been deadlined for maintenance on stand-down, but unless there'd been serious damage since the last halt Huber figured they'd all pass even rear-area inspection.

"Central to Sierra Six," the command channel announced. "You're clear to go. Out."

"Sierra Six to Sierra," said Captain Sangrela. "Execute, troopers!"

"Go, Tranter!" Huber shouted, thinking that the former technician was waiting for his direct superior to relay the force commander's order.

Fencing Master was already moving. Tranter had fooled him by the skill with which he coaxed the nacelles into a smooth delivery of power, balancing acceleration against blade angle so perfectly that the speed of the eight fans didn't drop below optimum. Fencing Master lifted from the clay and climbed the hillside as slickly as a raindrop slides down a windowpane.

They shot over the brow of the hill. Bright verticals on Huber's faceshield framed the sector Fencing Master was responsible for, the left post on the western spur of the ancient cinder cone fifteen kilometers away.

To the right Foghorn blasted into view measurable seconds later, its bow skirts nearly a meter above the ground for the instant before gravity reasserted itself. That'll rattle their back teeth, Huber thought, but he had more immediate problems of his own.

A cyan bolt split the smoke-streaked gloom, whirling helices of ash as it snapped toward the volcano. A gout of white-hot rock spurted from a cave mouth prepared as a firing position.

Two tanks were hanging back on overwatch while the infantry and the other six armored vehicles charged Fort Freedom at the best speed their fans could drive them. The second tank's bolt lit a secondary explosion, munitions detonating at the ravening touch of a 20-cm powergun. Even at this range, the main guns were capable of destroying anything short of another tank.

Fencing Master's path across the terrain was as smooth as a flowing river—not straight, but never diverging much from the line Tranter had chosen. The other cars and the two advancing tanks were plumes of ash streaking the sky to eastward; they were falling behind Fencing Master, though not by so much that Huber worried about it. Somebody had to lead the advance, after all, and he guessed that was what he was being paid for.

The tanks on overwatch, now well to the rear, continued firing, one and then the other. They could hit on the move, but they'd halted so that irregularities of terrain wouldn't mask their fire at some instant it was critically needed. Even the best soldiers and best equipment in the universe—and most of Hammer's troopers would say that meant the Slammers—couldn't keep things from going wrong in battle, but good planning limited the number of opportunities Fate got to screw things up.

Floosie raked the volcano's eastern margin with two tribarrels. The streams of 2-cm bolts interlaced like jets from a fountain—now crossing, now fanning apart. The impacts sparkled against the lava like dustmotes caught in a shaft of sunlight. At twelve kilometers' range the tribarrels weren't likely to be effective, but Jellicoe always claimed that keeping the other guy's head down was the first rule of survival.

The platoon sergeant was a twenty-year veteran so she must know something, but Huber didn't want to burn out his barrels now when in a matter of minutes he'd be at knife range with several thousand hostiles. There wasn't a right way to do it. If suppressing fire was the rabbit's foot Jellicoe used to get through hard times, Huber wasn't going to order her to stop.

Not that he thought she'd obey him anyway.

A geyser of cyan light—powergun ammunition gang-firing—lit the side of the volcano. Blast-gouged rock gleamed white, fading toward red in the instant before the shattered slope caved in to hide it. The tanks were first hitting positions which Central believed were occupied, though they'd shortly hammer the locations where the Volunteers planned to move their guns after the first exchange of fire.

The bloody civilians didn't understand that none of their guns would survive its first shot at the Slammers.

A calliope opened up, one of those dug so deep into the forward slope that Volunteer command couldn't retask it to air defense. Its dense volley of 30-mm bolts was probably aimed at Flame Farter, which'd already raced past the narrow window through which the calliope fired. The rounds instead came dangerously close to the infantry following. Calcium in the clay soil blazed white in the center of gouting ash; the skimmers maneuvered wildly to avoid the track of shots.

Two 20-cm bolts hit the firing slit in quick succession. The calliope might have been deep enough that neither tank had a direct line on the weapon itself, but the amount of energy the main guns liberated in the tunnel would be enough to cook the crew in a bath of gaseous rock. The hillside burped, then slumped as it rearranged itself.

Fort Freedom loomed above the plain five klicks ahead like a sullen monument. Where the eastern sun angled across ravines, shadows streaked the cinder cone. Speckles against the lava indicated a few Volunteers were firing their personal weapons. At this range the electromagnetic carbines were harmless; the slugs probably wouldn't carry to the oncoming Slammers. Though the attempt showed bad fire discipline, it also meant that not all—not quite all—of the enemy were cowed by the sight of the iridium hammers about to fall on them.

The ground rose slightly into a ridge paralleling the base of the cone and changed from clay to a friable soil that must have been mostly volcanic ash. The forest here had been of tall trees spaced more widely than those of the stretch the task force had just traversed, but the firestorm had reduced them to much the same litter of ash and cinders.

The two tanks accompanying the combat cars halted on the ridge; the wake of debris they'd raised during their passage continued to roll outward under its own inertia. They immediately began punching Volunteer positions with their main guns. The panzers now far to the rear began to advance, accelerating as quickly as their mass allowed. They'd each shot off the twenty round basic load in their ready magazines and couldn't use their main guns until a fresh supply had cycled up from storage in their bellies.

Mercenary artillery in Solace might weigh in at any time. The tanks' tribarrels were tasked to air defense. With the wide sight distances here, that should be a sufficient deterrent. If it wasn't, well, Huber had more pressing concerns right now.

His faceshield careted movement at the top of the cinder cone: the Volunteers were shifting calliopes from air defense sites in the interior of the ancient volcano to notches cut in the rim from which they could bear on the advancing armored vehicles. Huber adjusted his sight picture onto the leftmost caret, enlarging the central portion around the pipper while the surrounding field remained one-to-one so that he wouldn't be blindsided by an unglimpsed danger.

The gun crew had rolled their multi-barrel weapon into position and were depressing their eight muzzles at the mechanism's maximum rate. Huber locked his tribarrel's stabilizer on the glinting target and squeezed the trigger.

Huber's AI blacked out the 2-cm bolts from the magnified image to save his retinas. Instead of a smooth Thump! Thump! Thump! as the tribarrel cycled at 500 rounds per minute, it stuttered Thump! and a moment later Thump! Thump! again. The stabilizer adjusted the weapon within broad parameters, but Fencing Master was jolting over broken terrain with a violence beyond what the servos were meant to control. The software simply interrupted the burst until the gun bore again on its assigned target.

The calliope in the holographic sight picture—its iridium barrels gleaming against the frame of baked-finish steel and the taut-faced Volunteers crewing it—slumped like a sand castle in the tide. The impacts were smears of emptiness, but the image cleared in snapshots of destruction, headless bodies falling and white-glowing cavities eaten from the carriage and gun-tubes.

The target's magazines detonated. The flash scooped the square-bottomed firing notch into a crescent five meters across. A mushroom of vaporized rock lifted from the site. Nothing remained of the calliope and its crew.

Blasts and gouts of lava spurted from a dozen places on the crater's rim as combat cars raked the enemy with their tribarrels. Deseau and Learoyd both fired at the turret of an armored car which the Volunteers had held beneath the crater rim until the Slammers were within range of whatever weapon it mounted. Satellite imagery from Central cued the troopers' AIs, so they were waiting with their thumbs on their triggers at the instant the armored car's crew drove up a ramp into firing position.

The turret of high maraging steel blazed in a red inferno before its gun could swing on target. Internal explosions must have killed the whole crew, because they didn't attempt to back the vehicle or bail out of it.

Deseau and Learoyd continued firing, eating away the rock to get to the car's hull. They didn't have a better target—other tribarrels had cleared the rest of the Volunteer positions—and they saw no reason to stop shooting at something that might possibly be useful to the enemy. A fireball of exploding fuel finally ended their fun.

Fencing Master bucked onto humped, barren ridges of hard rock. Layers of ash blown from the vent had formed most of the nearby landscape, but here magma had rolled out of cracks in the base of the cone and solidified. The steel skirts clanged and squealed, scraping showers of red sparks.

Huber grabbed the coaming with his left hand. Captain Orichos shouted as the car bounced her forward into Deseau. Frenchie snarled a vivid curse, but he didn't lose his grip on the tribarrel.

"They're running!" somebody shouted over the general channel. From the voice and the way the AI let it cut through the chatter of a dozen or more excited soldiers, Huber figured it was Captain Sangrela. "Get the bastards! Get 'em all!"

The Volunteers had spent years building Fort Freedom. In addition to tunnels carved through the cone, they'd dug hundreds of bunkers on the volcano's outer face. The squads and fire teams placed there hadn't run earlier because there was no way out except up a bare slope; by the time they'd had a good enough look at what was coming toward them, they were more afraid to show themselves than they were to stay.

The shriek as combat cars crossed rock and the nearing intake howl of the fans changed the equation. First a few, then many scores of Militiamen clambered out of their holes to dash for the rim and what they hoped was safety. It was near suicide, but with the tanks continuing methodically to pulverize bunkers, running may still have been the better option even so.

The Volunteers' black uniforms would've blended well with the slopes of compacted ash, but the Slammers' helmets keyed on motion. A forest of translucent red carets lit on Huber's faceshield. All he had to do was swing his sight picture onto the thickest clumps and squeeze his trigger, letting Fencing Master's movement hose the burst across running victims. Bodies and severed limbs bounced against the rock, shrouded in smoke from burning uniforms.

"Get the bastards before they grow their spines back!" Captain Sangrela screamed. "Get 'em all!"

Some Volunteers fired from their bunkers or turned to fight like cornered rats as cyan bolts slaughtered their comrades. A burst hit Fencing Master's bow slope and ricocheted in dazzling violet streaks. The car's armor rang like a trip hammer working, but that was just a fact of life. Huber's skin prickled and his throat was as raw as if he'd drunk lye.

Fencing Master reached the cone. It was steep, forty degrees on average and occasionally almost vertical where weather had sheared the concreted ash. Tranter fought his controls, fishtailing the car so that they mounted the slope in a series of switchbacks instead of fighting gravity head on. The combat cars had a higher power to weight ratio than the massively armored tanks did so they could climb the cone, but it still took finesse to do it well.

A powergun bolt stabbed over the rim of the fighting compartment's armor, splashing the interior. The cyan brilliance blew a chunk of iridium into a white-hot bubble between Huber and Deseau.

The gas flung Huber backward, tearing his hands from the tribarrel. He felt as though he'd been slammed in the crotch by a medicine ball.

Heat penetrated a moment later. The fabric of his uniform was temperature resistant, but the metal resolidifying as a black crust over the khaki had vaporized at something over 4800 degrees. I'll worry about it later. . . . 

Frenchie'd gone down also. He was still holding his tribarrel's left grip, but that was the way a drowning man clutches flotsam. Litter on the floor of the compartment had ignited, twigs and leaves which had whirled into the vehicle during the march as well as plastic wrappers and similar human trash.

Learoyd ripped short bursts toward what was now blank hillside above them: the Volunteer sniper had ducked into his foxhole after firing, and the slope itself concealed the opening. The shooter must've been lucky to hit a target he couldn't see till he showed himself, but he was also good. If he thought he was safe because he was out of sight again, though—

The rock Learoyd's 2-cm bolts was splashing into fist-sized divots of glass suddenly erupted as though the volcano had gone active again. Two tanks hit it, then doubled the initial impacts as soon as their main guns could cycle. Each bolt lifted a truck-sized volume of compacted ash which strinkled down again on the breeze.

There was no sign of the shooter. If his ammunition had gone off, its flash was lost in the immense violence of 20-cm bolts.

Huber's legs were splayed before him; his hands waved in the air. Captain Orichos caught his right wrist and bent close. "Should I take your gun?" she shouted. "Can you—"

"I'm all right," Huber said, forcing the words out. The shock had numbed his diaphragm; breathing was one agony among many. He braced his left arm against the side armor, then let the car's lurch help Orichos lift him to his feet again.

On his feet but not upright; he was still half doubled over and he was pretty sure that he'd vomit if he tried to straighten fully. Via! but he hurt.

Deseau's gun thumped a burst toward the top of the cone. Huber didn't see a target there; Frenchie was probably just proving to himself and others that he was alive and functioning . . . which is what Huber was doing, after all.

"I'm all right!" he repeated, forcefully and with more truth this time. He took his tribarrel's grips in his hands as Fencing Master lurched to the top of the ridge, the western battlements of the Volunteer fortress. Below was the interior of the partial cone, and beyond that the sea.

Aircars ranging from the big trucks that could haul twenty or more armed men to hoppers with one seat and room for a sack of groceries were mixed indiscriminately on the crater floor. The drivers had squeezed in wherever they'd seen a place to set down. The Volunteers had left Midway in a near panic; they probably hadn't landed here in much better emotional condition.

There wasn't room in the tunnels to conceal so many vehicles, so the calliopes had been the Volunteers' only means of protecting their hope of escape if things went wrong—as they were certainly going wrong now. Those calliopes were molten ruin, but there was no need to waste shells on the aircars. They were perfect targets for Fencing Master's tribarrels.

A few minutes ago there'd have been only a handful of Volunteers in the open. The maze of tunnels would've seemed safety until those inside realized that the Slammers would with certainty penetrate the outer defenses and so control the tunnel entrances. Now several of the armored doors had swung back; black-uniformed figures were running for vehicles. Huber's view was like a child's of a stirred-up anthill.

A Volunteer drew a holstered powergun and fired in the direction of Fencing Master as he ran. One of the bolts snapped only twenty meters overhead, but that was dumb luck: nobody was that good, not with a pistol. Learoyd's short burst vaporized everything between the Volunteer's neck and his knees without any need for luck. He was an expert using a stabilized weapon with holographic sights. Learoyd could've put a round into his target's left nostril if he'd wanted to.

The accompanying infantry squads spaced out to either side of Fencing Master, taking firing positions along the ridge. Foghorn still labored a hundred meters down the slope. Huber didn't have leisure to see how Jellicoe's section was doing on the eastern edge of the cone where a deep gully complicated the approach, but he knew she'd get them into action as quick as anybody could.

An aircar lifted. Huber fired as he tracked it, his bolts splashing behind the accelerating vehicle for a moment before three flashes walked up the fuselage from the back. The car, a luxury model, flipped over and crashed under power. Ruptured fuel cells sprayed their contents over a dozen other vehicles, some of which also started to burn.

"Cue aircar motors!" Huber shouted, shifting his AI to mark the electromagnetic rhythms of fan motors spinning. "Gunners—"

Going to intercom.

"—hit the moving cars, not the men!"

Three more vehicles tried to take off. One didn't have enough altitude and collided immediately with the truck parked ahead of it. As it tumbled, Learoyd's burst chopped the car's belly open.

The infantry were shooting at individual targets. Though their weapons were semi-automatic, a single 2-cm bolt was enough to disable an aircar—let alone kill the driver.

One and then both cars of Jellicoe's section opened fire from the other side of the crater. Foghorn finally not only mounted the rim but started down the steeper inner slope, wreathed in the grit its steel skirts rasped from the soft rock. Solid cyan streams lashed from its guns.

Deseau either didn't hear Huber's order or ignored it, instead laying his sights onto an entrance. He squeezed his trigger till a blast within spurted a cloud of smoke and yellow flame into the sunlight; the tunnel collapsed.

Three Volunteers rose together behind the bed of a truck, aiming at Foghorn for the split second before Huber shot them down. One's carbine fired skyward as his head exploded. Huber'd been swinging his gun onto the car behind the men; its driver leaped out and flattened on the ground. The empty vehicle started to loop before falling sideways and crashing.

Fuel fires and the foul black plumes of burning plastic rose from dozens of vehicles. Nobody was coming out of the tunnels any more, and the Volunteers surviving on the crater floor either huddled beside cars—there was no "behind" to the crossfire from the rim—or raised their hands in surrender. Many of the latter had their eyes closed as if they were afraid they'd see death coming for them.

"Sierra, cease fire!" Captain Sangrela called. "The enemy's radioed to surrender! Cease fire!"

A carbine fired. The whack of the electromagnetic coils might've gone unnoticed in the chaos, but the clang! of the slug ricocheting from Foghorn's armor was unmistakable. Some Volunteer hadn't gotten the word. . . . 

Huber hadn't seen the shooter, but Deseau did: his tribarrel was one of five or six guns which spiked the closed cab of an aircar. That car and three more nearby erupted in fireballs. A body panel fluttered skyward, deforming in the heat of the blast that lifted it.

"Cease fire!" Sangrela repeated angrily. His jeep was so heavy with electronics that he hadn't been able to reach the rim, so he didn't know the reason for the additional gunfire. "Cease fire!"

The shooting stopped. Arne Huber took his hands from the tribarrel grips and flexed them cautiously, afraid they'd cramp. He might need to use them if things got hot again. The underside of his chin was as stiff and painful as if it'd been flayed. The skin there'd caught some of the iridium vaporized when the bolt hit inside the fighting compartment.

"Cease fire!" said Captain Sangrela, but nobody was firing any more.

"Blood and Martyrs!" Deseau wheezed, raising his faceshield. "I'm as dry as that rock out there!"

Huber'd had the same thought. In turning toward the cooler that still should have a few beers in it, he caught sight of Captain Orichos' expression: she looked as though she'd just been told she was Master of the Universe.

It shouldn't have disturbed Huber, but it did.

It'd been pouring rain. Now that the afternoon sun was out, the tents steamed and the clay had already started to bake to laterite. Ash lay as a slimy gray coating over ridges in the soil, but the sides of the rain-carved gullies were the color of rust. Dead tree trunks stood like tombstones for the forest that had once grown here.

"What a bloody fucking awful fucking place!" Deseau snarled, flipping up the front of his poncho without taking it off; the rain could resume any moment. "Learoyd, did you ever see such a bloody fucking awful fucking place?"

"Sure, Frenchie," Learoyd said, frowning as he tried to puzzle sense out of the question. "Remember Passacaglia, where the dust got in everything and we kept burning out drive fans? And that swamp the place before that? And where was it everybody got skin fungus if they didn't wear their gas suits all the time? Was that—"

"Yeah, well, this's still a crummy place," Deseau muttered. He saw Huber smiling and grimaced, turning his head away. Frenchie'd been around Learoyd long enough to know the trooper had too much trouble with the literal truth to make a good audience for a figure of speech—even a figure as simple as rhetorical exaggeration.

Looking eastward toward a dirigible unloading what seemed to be empty shipping containers, Deseau went on, "I wish to hell they'd let us go when the local cops arrived. They can handle anything that's left, can't they?"

Dirigibles full of Gendarmes and the supplies needed for an open-air prison had begun arriving within a few hours of the collapse of Volunteer resistance. Huber, and Captain Sangrela, and probably every other trooper in the task force, had thought Sierra would be released immediately. The optimists had even hoped they'd be sent back by way of Midway, with a few days of leave as a reward.

Surviving a major engagement like the one just completed made even level-headed troopers optimistic.

Central hadn't felt that way. Sierra had stayed where it was for the three days it took for a column from Base Alpha to reach them.

"It won't be long, Frenchie," Huber said. He quirked a smile. "It shouldn't be long, anyhow."

There were worse places, just as Learoyd said, but this was bad enough in all truth. The Slammers had snagged tents from the loads brought in to house the prisoners, but they didn't help much. You could keep the rain from falling on you, but the ditches the troopers dug around the tents hadn't been enough to stop streams of ash-clogged water from finding their way in from below and soaking everything.

Huber looked over at the POW camp which lay between Task Force Sangrela's defensive circle and the slopes of what had for a short time been Fort Freedom; it was now Mount Bulstrode again. The prisoners had it worse than the troopers did, of course. There wouldn't have been enough tents to go around even if the Slammers hadn't imposed their tax on defeat, but accommodations weren't what was probably worrying the former Volunteers. The Slammers knew they'd be leaving within a few days, maybe even a few hours. The prisoners weren't sure they'd be alive in a few hours.

"Sierra," said Huber's commo helmet in the voice of the signals officer of the approaching column, "this is Flamingo Six-three. We'll be in sight in figures two, I say again, two, minutes. Don't get anxious. Flamingo out." 

"Stupid bitch," Deseau muttered. "The only thing I'm anxious about is getting away from this bloody place. And if they'd got the lead outa their pants, that could've happened yesterday."

Huber's opinion was similar enough that he didn't bother telling Frenchie to cool it. You never get relieved as quickly as you want to be. . . . 

He wondered if Sierra would be allowed to pick its own route back through the unburned forest, or if in the interests of speed they'd have to return across the fire-swept wasteland. The downpour would've quenched the hotspots, but the filthy sludge the vehicles'd be kicking up in its place wouldn't be much of an improvement.

Huber chuckled. Deseau gave him a sour look.

"Don't mind me, Frenchie," he said. "I'm just thinking that I went into the wrong line of work if I wanted luxury travel arrangements."

"Guess they had to keep us," Learoyd said, nodding toward the waste of mud and tents and captured Volunteers. "I mean, if them guys tried to break out, what was the cops gonna do about it?"

Learoyd was right, as he usually was when he offered an opinion. Squads of Gendarmes patrolled the perimeter of the vast razor-ribbon cage. Six or eight strands of wire were strung on flimsy poles only two meters out of the ground; all things considered, it wasn't much of a barrier. The Point didn't have the resources to deal with the sudden influx of over five thousand prisoners.

The Gendarmes had carbines and pistols. If they'd hoped to supplement those with automatic weapons captured from the Volunteers, they were out of luck. Every crew-served weapon in Fort Freedom had been brought out to face the Slammers, and none of them had survived. For the most part, the sharp-shooting tanks had destroyed the emplacements before the Slammers were in range of the defenders' return fire.

If the prisoners, many of whom were rightly desperate, made a concerted rush on the fence, a few hundred Gendarmes weren't going to stop them. The Slammers' massed fire would, and the certainty the powerguns would hose the camp indiscriminately meant that prisoners who didn't want to try a breakout were going to be bloody determined to keep their wilder fellows in line also.

"Via, where's there to run to?" Deseau said. He spat toward the camp a hundred meters away, then started to shrug out of his poncho after all.

"Back into the tunnels, for one thing," Huber said. "There might be enough guns down there to equip a division. It won't be safe till the support column comes up with the gas cylinders."

"That what they're doing, El-Tee?" Deseau said, his tone bright with interest. "Pump the place full of gas?"

Huber shrugged. "Nobody's appointed me to the staff," he said, "but that'd be standard operating procedure: fill the tunnels with KD1 or another of the persistent agents and forget about 'em."

Sledges had been ringing on iron posts as prisoners constructed a narrow chute from the eastern end of the camp. An off-key whang indicated a hammer'd hit skew and broken the helve. A Gendarme shouted in a tone of anger tinged with fear, drawing the three troopers' attention.

"Naw, nothing," Deseau muttered, lifting the muzzles of his tribarrel a safe fifteen degrees again so that the weapon wouldn't hit anything in the vicinity if it fired accidentally. "Them cops, they're ready to piss their pants they're so scared."

Twenty Gendarmes guarded a crew of no more than fifty prisoners driving posts and stringing the wire. They seemed nervous to Huber, also. Maybe they knew what was planned and were afraid of what would happen when the prisoners learned also.

"Sierra, this is Flamingo Six-three," the voice said. "We're coming into sight. Flamingo out."

The vehicles of the task force were bows-out in a defensive circle, though the formation was looser than it'd have been if there were a real likelihood of attack. Instead of turning his head, Huber switched the upper left quadrant of his faceshield to the view from Floosie at the opposite side of the formation.

A combat car slid over the ridgeline where Sierra had launched its assault on Fort Freedom. Three similar vehicles followed, then a dozen air-cushion trucks, and after them two wrenchmobiles modified to carry troops. The last vehicle in line was a command car.

"It's the White Mice," Deseau said. From the tone of his voice, Huber thought he might be about to spit. "You know, I was kinda hoping I wouldn't see them again for a while."

"If they're relieving us," Learoyd said, "I don't care who they are."

"Yeah, I guess that's right," Deseau said; but Huber wasn't sure he agreed.

Some prisoners drifted toward the south edge of their camp, interested in the column as a break in their miserable routine and probably also concerned about what it might mean. Huber noticed that others of the former Volunteers were disappearing into tents. He didn't know what they expected to gain by that, but he understood the impulse.

A dozen civilians had come in by aircar a few hours before. They wore hooded raincapes even now that the sun was out, but Huber had raised his faceshield's magnification until he was sure of what he'd suspected: one of the newcomers was Speaker Nestilrode, and he recognized two others as cabinet ministers he'd seen when he entered the Assembly with Captain Orichos.

Now they came out of Orichos' tent. She and the Speaker shook hands; then the civilians strode quickly to their car without a backward glance.

Orichos sauntered toward the chute of razor ribbon. Perhaps she felt Huber's eyes on her because she turned her head and waved before she walked on.

Deseau snickered. "She fancies you, El-Tee," he said.

"Balls," Huber muttered. Orichos had been running the operation ever since enough Gendarmes had arrived to take primary responsibility from Task Force Sierra. The route march had been just as hard on her as on the Slammers, and so far as Huber'd seen she hadn't had a moment's downtime since. Despite that, Orichos looked as coolly fresh as she'd been the night a lifetime ago when Joachim Steuben introduced her at Northern Star.

Learoyd looked over his shoulder at Huber. "He's right, El-Tee," he said. "She does."

Huber shrugged rather than speaking. He didn't know what to say because he didn't know what he thought. He figured if he pretended not to care, they'd drop the subject.

There was motion in the near distance eastward. "Hey, what d'ye suppose that's all about?" Frenchie said, swinging his tribarrel both as a pointer and out of judicious concern.

Six dirigibles hovered a half kilometer east of the enclosure. Slung beneath them were bar-sided containers like those Huber had seen transporting livestock from the feedlots of Solace to the United Cities where they'd be slaughtered. The props of one of the big airships began to turn at a slightly faster rate than what was necessary to hold position against the breeze. It crawled closer to the camp, its empty containers bonging occasionally when they touched the ground.

Instead of halting to coordinate with Task Force Sangrela, the A Company combat cars drove past the defensive circle and continued around the east side of the prisoner cage. Their skirts squirted water and gray sludge in jets punctuated by the furrows in the soil. Prisoners putting the finishing touches on the chute dropped their tools and scuttled away from the spray.

"Fox Three-six to Sierra Six," Huber said. "Any word what we're supposed to be doing? Over."

The cars' passage splashed the guards as well. A Gendarme officer retrieved the hat that'd been blown into a puddle and shook his fist at the big vehicles. Deseau snickered and said, "Bad move. Could've been a real bad move if the dumb bastard'd decided to wave his gun instead."

"Sierra, this is Six," Captain Sangrela said, replying to the whole unit. "I've been told we're to hold ourselves in readiness to support Flamingo as required. If that sounds to you like, 'Go play, kiddies, while the big boys get on with business,' then you've got company thinking that. Six out!"

The incoming infantry drove their skimmers off while the wrenchmobiles were still slowing. Huber noticed with some amusement that they didn't perform the operation as smoothly as Captain Sangrela's troopers had. The White Mice were real soldiers as well as being the Regiment's police and enforcers, but they didn't use skimmers nearly as much as the line infantry did.

The newcomers began to deploy along the southern length of the cage. There were only forty of them, so that meant almost ten meters between individuals. They carried 1-cm sub-machine guns rather than a mix of the automatic weapons with 2-cm shoulder weapons.

Deseau must've been thinking along the same lines as Huber was, because he said, "Blow apart the first man who moves with one a' these—"

He patted the receiver of the 2-cm weapon wedged muzzle-down beside his position between two ammo boxes and the armor.

"—and you quiet a mob a lot faster than spraying it with a buzz-gun."

Learoyd looked at him. "Did you ever do that, Frenchie?" he said. "To a mob?"

Huber kept his frown inside his head. You didn't generally ask another trooper about his past. Learoyd had an utter, undoubted innocence that allowed him to say things nobody else could get away with . . . and a lack of mental wattage that made it very likely he would.

Deseau said nothing for a moment, then shrugged. He nodded to Huber, explicitly including him, and said, "Naw, that was back on Helpmeet when I was a kid, Learoyd. I was on the other side of the powergun, you see. So when things quieted down, I joined the Regiment before they shipped out again."

The moving dirigible settled so that all three containers dragged, then detached them. The center box stuck momentarily. The airship bounced upward when the weight of the other two released, so the third clanged loudly to the ground when it finally dropped. It hit on a corner which bent upward, kinking the bars.

"Good thing it wasn't full of cattle," Huber muttered, frowning at the thought of broken legs and beasts bellowing in pain and terror. Now that he'd seen dirigibles in operation, he realized that they were about as unwieldy a form of transportation as humans had come up with. Useful here on Plattner's World, though.

"The cows're gonna be killed anyway, El-Tee," Deseau said. "It don't matter much, right?"

"Maybe not," Huber said; not agreeing, just ending a discussion that didn't have anywhere useful to go. Maybe nothing at all mattered, but on a good day Arne Huber didn't feel that way.

The command car pulled up alongside the chute, making a half turn so that its bow angled toward the camp proper. Though it was an hour short of sunset and the clouds had cleared, the driver switched on his headlights. In their beams the strands of razor ribbon glittered like jagged icicles. Two troopers with sub-machine guns got out of the vehicle and walked over to the wire.

"Prisoners of Hammer's Regiment!" a voice boomed through the command car's loudspeakers. "You will walk in line through the passage at the southeast corner of this camp. As you pass my vehicle—"

The whip antenna on top of the car glowed, becoming a wand of soft red light.

"—you will turn to face it. Then you will walk on to the containers in which you'll be transported to Midway. There you'll be released."

The words were being repeated on the north side of the POW encampment. It wasn't an echo from the volcano, as Huber thought for a moment. The A Company combat cars were relaying the speech through their public address systems.

"Who's that in the car?" Deseau said. From the way his eyes were narrowed, he already knew the answer to his question.

"It sounds like Major Steuben," Huber said. "As you'd expect."

A full company of Gendarmes stood by the shipping containers. Mauricia Orichos was among them, her hands linked behind her back. Huber had been watching her as Steuben spoke. Orichos hadn't been best pleased at the words, "Prisoners of Hammer's Regiment."

That was tough. She knew she'd been the only member of the Point forces present when Fort Freedom fell. The Slammers had taken these prisoners, and if the Gendarmery wanted to get snooty about it, the Slammers could take the prisoners away from their present guards any time they wanted to.

A prisoner bellowed something toward the car. Though he made a megaphone of his hands, Huber couldn't catch the word or brief phrase.

Steuben did, however. The loudspeakers boomed, "A gentleman has expressed doubt that you will actually be released. Let me assure you, mesdames and sirs, that if I wished to kill you all I would not bother with play acting. When you get to Midway, you will be told to sin no more and be released."

The trucks had unloaded their pallets of black-banded gas cylinders. Five of them shut down. The sixth lifted and lumbered past Task Force Sangrela to settle again beside the command car. The driver opened the cab door and stood on his mounting step, looking at the camp. Another squad of White Mice dismounted from the back and walked over to the chute.

"Very well," the PA system thundered. Amplification softened Steuben's clipped tones, making his words sound pompous. Huber found the contrast with the real man chilling. "Start coming through. The sooner you get moving, the sooner we can all get on to more congenial tasks."

A prisoner near the front looked around, then shambled into the chute. One of the White Mice reached an arm over the wire to halt the man in the headlights. His head rose in surprise and sudden fear.

"Keep going!" the amplified voice ordered.

The trooper's arm dropped; the prisoner jogged the rest of the way to where Gendarmes herded him into the first container. Several more prisoners followed, shuffling forward in a mixture of desperation and apathy.

"I suggest reconsideration on the part of anyone who thinks he'll remain in the tents," Steuben continued, the catlike humor of his tone coming through despite mechanical distortion. "We're going to destroy the entire site, starting at the north side. We can see you through cloth as surely as we'll be able to see you in the dead of night, so don't be foolish."

There was a hollow boop, then a second later a white flash and a shattering crash. A second boop, Wham! followed immediately. Troopers in the combat cars on the north side were firing grenade launchers into the tents.

Thermal viewing would show any holdouts, so there was no need for the grenades. Major Steuben was just making a point, to the Gendarmes as surely as to the captive Volunteers.

"Sierra, this is Flamingo Six-three," said the A Company signals officer. "Fox Three-six is to report to the command car ASAP. Out."

Deseau and Learoyd both looked at Huber. From the driver's compartment, Sergeant Tranter said over the intercom, "El-Tee? What's going on?"

Huber cued his intercom and said, "Curst if I know, Sarge. I'll tell you when I get back. Assuming."

He swung his left leg over the armor, then paused. He unclipped the sling of his 2-cm weapon from the epaulet and offered the big gun to Learoyd, saying, "Trade me, will you, Herbert?"

"Sure, sir," the trooper said. He took the 2-cm weapon and slapped the butt of his sub-machine gun into Huber's palm.

Deseau cackled like a demon. "Handier inside a car, eh, El-Tee?" he said.

Huber climbed the rest of the way out of the fighting compartment, then hopped from the plenum chamber to the ground. He started grinning also. You might as well see the humor in the screwed-up way things worked. It didn't change things; but then, nothing did change them.

He started toward the command car, his boots squelching and tossing mud up his pants leg with each stride. He didn't look over his shoulder to see the troopers of Task Force Sangrela watching him, but the Gendarmes watched and the driver of the big air-cushion truck stared down from the cab with a puzzled expression.

Grenades continued to crash on the north side of the camp. They'd started several fires; the sluggish flames gave off curls of black smoke.

Enough prisoners had passed through the chute that the cage meant for twenty cattle was what Huber would've called full. The Gendarmes seemed happy to pack more in. Well, if the former Volunteers had nothing worse in their future than an uncomfortable airship ride, they were luckier than they deserved to be.

"That one," the loudspeaker ordered crisply. A low-intensity laser stabbed from the mount of the command car's tribarrel. Its yellow dot quivered like a suppurating boil on the cheek of the bald-headed man nearing the end of the chute.

The fellow looked up in startled horror. One of the waiting troopers grabbed him left-handed by the shoulder, holding the sub-machine gun back like a pistol in his right where the prisoner couldn't reach it.

The trooper walked the fellow out of the chute. Instead of leaving him for the Gendarmes, he handed him over to another of the White Mice who led him in turn to the back of the air-cushion truck.

The prisoners had been moving with something like the docility of the cattle normally loaded into the shipping containers. Now they paused; the woman two places behind the fellow who'd been taken away tried to go back.

"Move it!" the other trooper at the chute snarled, waggling his weapon.

The woman resumed her way down the chute—and out the other end to the Gendarmes, ignored by the voice from the command car. A man who'd been waiting in the crowd turned and started to force his way back through his fellows.

"Halt!" called the trooper nearest to him along the fenceline as he leveled his sub-machine gun. The prisoner tried to run, pushing at others who were trying desperately to get out of the line of fire. The sub-machine gun stuttered a short burst into the man's legs, one bolt into the left calf and two more at the back of the right knee.

The prisoner fell, screaming with surprise. It was too soon yet for the pain to have reached him; though that'd come, it'd surely come. Only a tag of skin and one tendon connected his right thigh and lower leg.

"Two of you carry him through," ordered the loudspeaker. "Make sure to turn his face toward me."

The wounded man continued to scream. He tried to stand but slipped onto his right side.

From the command car, Joachim Steuben giggled. Amplified, the sound was even more gut-wrenching than it'd seemed when Huber heard it from across the major's desk.

The prisoners nearest the fallen man stood frozen till the trooper waggled the glowing muzzle of his sub-machine gun. Then they grabbed his arms convulsively and stumbled through the chute as he screamed even louder. One brushed the razor ribbon, leaving much of his sleeve on the wire and blood dripping from his torn arm. The wounded man's legs didn't bleed; the powergun bolts had cauterized the wounds.

"A moment of your time, Lieutenant Huber," said Captain Orichos. He jumped. She'd walked over to him while his attention was on the byplay in the camp.

"Ma'am?" he said. Without thinking about it, he stiffened to Parade Rest. "That is, Captain?"

"Mauricia, I hope," Orichos said. After the battle she'd resumed wearing her beret instead of a Slammers commo helmet. She took it off now and shook her short hair loose before replacing the cap. "I suppose you know your unit will be routed back with a stopover in Midway?"

"No ma'am," Huber said with a faint grin. "There were rumors, but we're line soldiers. Nobody tells us anything."

"Well, I'm telling you," Orichos said with a mixture of crispness and challenge. "I'll be flying back by car shortly; there are some things to clear up in in the capital now that the threat's been dealt with."

She cleared her throat and looked away. "What I'm saying, Arne, is that I hope when you arrive in Midway, you'll get in touch with me. I'll have some free time by then, and I'd really like to repay you for all you've done for the Point and for me."

Orichos smiled. It softened and transformed her face to a remarkable degree.

"I think I can guarantee you a good time," she said. She touched the back of Huber's wrist, then turned and went back to her fellows.

Huber rubbed his wrist with the fingers of his other hand as he walked on, thinking about Orichos and about the shooting he'd just watched.

It'd taken skill to hit the running man and not nail a couple of the bystanders. Though it could as easily have been dumb luck: he didn't suppose either the trooper or Major Steuben would've cared if some of the other prisoners had lost limbs.

Huber reached the hatch in the rear of the command car. It opened before he rapped it with the barrel of his powergun. The two men inside had their backs to him as they watched a high-resolution image of prisoners moving steadily through the chute to the shipping containers.

Joachim Steuben was as dapper as if he'd spent the past three days in Base Alpha instead of making a thousand kilometer run over difficult terrain. His companion was blond and in his thirties; Grayle's chief civil aide, Huber recalled, the one who'd disappeared between the Assembly meeting and the time Captain Orichos found incriminating papers in the files that had been under the aide's control.

"That one!" the aide said. What was his name? Patronus; that was it. "He's Gerd Danilew. He was in charge of off-planet weapons purchases!"

"That one," Steuben said, his amplified voice damped to silence when the hatch closed behind Huber. The pipper of the cab-mounted tribarrel framed the face of the sallow, moustached prisoner walking nervously between the barriers of razor ribbon.

The man looked up. Instead of trying to run, he fell in a faint as limp as if the tribarrel had decapitated him—as the slightest additional pressure of Steueben's finger on the trigger control would've made it do.

"Well, carry him, then," Steuben ordered into the pickup for the external speakers. He looked over his shoulder at Huber and raised an eyebrow in delighted amusement, then turned back and added, "Now!"

The procession resumed. Patronus kept his face rigidly forward as if he thought that by refusing to acknowledge Huber, he could deny what was going on.

Steuben rotated his full-function chair to smile at Huber. "So, Lieutenant," he said. "I thought I'd use this opportunity to see if you're still happy with a line command."

Instead of the slot in the White Mice that he offered me three weeks ago, Huber thought. He shrugged and said, "Yeah, I'm happy. We did a good job here."

He guessed he'd made that sound like a challenge, which wasn't the smartest sort of attitude to show when you were talking to a weasel like Joachim Steuben. Huber didn't care much at the moment.

"Indeed you did," Steuben said, nothing in his tone but mild approval. "Both the task force and you personally . . . which is why my offer is still open."

He cocked an eyebrow.

"I said I was happy!" Huber said. Via, he was going to have to watch himself. It'd be a hell of a note to come through a mission like this one and then be shot because he mouthed off to a stone killer like Joachim Steuben.

He smiled—at himself, but it was probably the right thing to do because the major giggled in response.

"That one!" Patronus said, pointing at the image. His hands were clean but he'd chewed his fingernails ragged.

Major Steuben's right hand moved minutely, then clicked the switch that controlled the laser marker. Huber didn't see him look around, not even a quick glance, but the pipper was centered on the forehead of the grim-looking man who'd brushed his full moustache in an attempt to cover the scar on his cheek. "That one," Steuben repeated into the PA system.

In a quick voice, bobbing his head to his words, Patronus continued, "That's Commander Halcleides, he took over after Commander Fewsett—that is, when he died."

"What happens next?" Huber asked. He didn't exactly care, but he knew Deseau'd ask when he got back to Fencing Master and he wanted to have an answer. "You'll shoot them?"

Patronus turned with a furious expression. "They're traitors!" he snarled. "They deserve to die!"

Steuben made a peremptory gesture with his left hand. His head didn't turn, but Huber saw his eyes flick toward the former aide.

"Master Patronus," Steuben said without raising his voice, "I'd appreciate it if you'd attend to your duties while the lieutenant and I speak like the gentlemen we are. I don't want the bother of replacing you."

He giggled again. To Huber he added, "Though shooting him would be no bother at all, eh, Lieutenant? For either of us, I suspect."

Patronus was on a seat that folded down from the sidewall. He turned again to face the screen across the front of the compartment, pointedly concentrating on the prisoners shambling through the identification parade. His face flushed, then went white.

Huber looked at the man who'd first planted evidence on his friends and now was fingering his closest colleagues for probable execution. In a good cause, of course: the Regiment's cause. But still . . . 

"No, Major," Huber said. "It wouldn't be much bother."

"But to answer your question," Steuben continued, "no, we're not going to shoot them, Lieutenant. They'll be shipped off-planet to a detention center; an asteroid in the Nieuw Friesland system, as a matter of fact. The Colonel believes they'll be a useful . . . reminder, shall we say, to the government of the Point as to what might happen if it suddenly decided to back away from its support for the war with Solace."

"Th-the-there," Patronus said, pointing at the strikingly attractive woman going through the chute. His outstretched hand trembled. "Talia Mandrakora, she was in charge of propaganda."

"That one," Steuben said, highlighting the woman. To Huber he added, "Do you fancy her, Lieutenant? I dare say you could convince her that the only chance she has to survive would involve pleasing you."

Huber felt his lip curl. "No thanks," he said. "I don't have trouble finding company for the night."

"I'm sure that's true," Steuben said with a smirk. He rotated his chair toward the screen again. His posture didn't change in any definable way, but he was no longer the man who'd been joking with catlike cruelty. "And now, I think, we have the personage we've been waiting for."

The prisoners waiting to walk through the chute parted, glancing over their shoulders and then lowering their faces as they pushed clear. Melinda Riker Grayle strode through the gap which fear rather than respect had opened for her. She was no longer the woman who'd cowed her colleagues in the Assembly. She wore a white uniform but the right sleeve had been singed and at least some of the stain on her trousers was blood. Nonetheless she walked with her back straight, glaring toward the command car.

"Invite Assemblyman Grayle to join her associates in our van, if you please, Sergeant Kuiper," Steuben said into the pickup.

Grayle walked alone into the chute. The trooper there hesitated, his arm raised but not fully extended.

"Keep your filthy hands off me!" Grayle said. Steuben must've switched on the external microphones, for the assemblyman's voice sounded as clear as if she'd been in the compartment with them.

She turned to face the car and shouted, "You in there, whoever you are! Hired killers! You know the election was rigged! And you know that you're charging ten times what the citizens think they're paying for your services! Tell them!"

"Take her away, Kuiper," Steuben said, sounding vaguely bored. "I'd rather you not shoot her in the legs so that she has to be carried, but do that if she won't come peaceably."

"You know it's true!" Grayle screamed. When the trooper reached for her shoulder she slapped his hand away, but instead of resisting further she marched down the chute and turned toward the truck where her aides were being held. Her head was high, and she didn't look around.

Steuben smirked at Huber. "She's right, you know," he said conversationally. "The election was rigged. The Freedom Party would've taken forty-four percent of the seats if your friend Captain Orichos hadn't manipulated the vote count."

Huber looked sharply at the smaller display above the big screen, a 360-degree panorama from the command car. Mauricia Orichos stood watching the parade with three other Gendarmery officers, a few meters behind the White Mice who did the sorting. They followed Grayle with their eyes until she'd disappeared into the box of the truck.

"Orichos did that?" Huber said.

"She asked us for technical help so it could be done without detection," Steuben said, looking up at the panorama with a faint smile. "I provided someone from my signals section. It would've been extremely awkward if Grayle had become Speaker and tried to take the Point out of the war."

As Steuben spoke Patronus turned slowly toward him, like a rat hypnotized by the slowly waving hood of a cobra. Steuben focused his ice-colored eyes on the traitor and said, "I believe I told you—"

He broke off in the middle of the passionless threat for another giggle. "But then," he continued, "with Mistress Grayle in hand, we don't have to worry about other threats to hold over our friends, do we? I suppose we could just dismiss the rest of the prisoners . . . though I don't believe we will for the moment."

He gestured Patronus back to the screen and the line of prisoners resuming their procession through the chute. Patronus obeyed with the slow, jerky motion of an ill-made automaton.

"Was the rest of it true too?" Huber asked harshly. His throat hadn't recovered from the ozone he'd breathed during the battle, but he and the major both knew there was more to his tone than that. "About the costs being higher than they know?"

Steuben shrugged. "In a manner of speaking," he said. "The governments of the Outer States believe the Regiment's price is only about twenty percent of the real figure. . . .  But don't worry: our fees are being paid, and line lieutenants don't have to worry about where the money comes from."

"I suppose not," Huber said. He tried to make his mind go blank, but he couldn't manage it. "Sir, if you don't have any further duties for me here . . . ?"

"You don't like our company?" Steuben said, his smile flashing on and off like a strobe light. "All right, Lieutenant. You're free to leave."

Major Steuben rotated his chair toward Huber again. His face, too pretty to be handsome in a man, was suddenly as hard as chilled steel. "The offer remains open, Lieutenant," he said. "You should feel flattered, you know."

"I appreciate your confidence, sir," Huber said. He turned to the hatch; it opened before he could touch the control plate.

Huber stepped into the gathering darkness. Grenade launchers continued to work, the choonk/wham! choonk/wham! punctuating the sound of drive fans and power tools. Troopers were pulling maintenance on their vehicles with spares the column had brought from Base Alpha. The white flashes of the bombs were quick speckles through the fabric of tents bulging outward before they collapsed.

Mauricia Orichos saw Huber come out of the command car. She stepped away from the group she was with and waved to him.

Huber looked at her, then slipped his faceshield down and quickened his stride in the direction of Fencing Master. As he'd told Major Steuben, he could find his own company. And he wasn't going to find it there.

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