“You wanted to know what?” Coke shouted over the wail of the siren. He gestured to the screen which glowed with the light of the scenes it displayed. “That’s what, General, and there’s a lot more Association units out there tonight than those.”

An automatic cannon opened fire from a bunker on the perimeter of Fortress Auerstadt. The gunners probably didn’t have a real target. They were shooting at shadows or livestock.

That was the right response to the present circumstances. With the base fully alerted, any attack Association troops made would be fragmentary instead of coordinated and overwhelming. In all likelihood there would be no attack. At daybreak the National Army would be able to concentrate on scattered companies of their opponents.

“Why that’s …” the Marquis said, staring at the console display. “That’s a massacre!”

Coke was surprised that his nominal superior had enough military knowledge to make that perfectly accurate assessment of what was happening in Parcotch.

As soon as the shooting started, the combat cars’ drivers fed full power to the lift fans. Howling like banshees as the fans sucked in vast quantities of air to pressurize the plenum chambers, spraying water and soupy mud in all directions from beneath their skirts, the fifty-tonne behemoths accelerated toward Parcotch Hamlet 3 from two directions.

While her wing gunners destroyed the rocket launcher, Sergeant Lennox had opened fire on the community itself. Lennox didn’t have a line of sight to the vehicles leaving the hamlet eastward from The Facts of Life’s starting position half a klick distant. Instead she shot up the buildings.

The structures had thatch walls and roofs of corrugated plastic sheeting, supported by wood or plastic frames. All the construction materials were flammable at the temperature of copper plasma. Houses, the school building, and the community center all burst into flame, spreading panic and confusing the enemy.