The blue arrows on the display had attacked ahead of the gray tank symbols. As the Han forces began to pull back, the tanks provided the bearing surface on which the advancing Hindis ground in an increasingly desperate attempt to reach their planetary enemies.
"Fair question," Broglie said, but he didn't cue the holographic display. Symbolic events proceeded at their own pace.
Outside the Slammers' shelter, a multi-barreled machine gun broke the near silence by firing skyward. Loops of mauve tracers rose until the marking mixture burned out two thousand meters above the camp. Han officers went off again in their furious charade of authority.
Des Grieux sneered at the lethal fireworks on the other side of the one-way fabric. The bullets would be invisible when they fell; but they were going to fall, in or bloody close to the Han lines. Broglie was a fool if he thought
Red arrows forced their way forward over holographic rice paddies. The counterattack spread sideways as Han symbols accelerated their retreat. The gray pearls of the four tanks shifted back more quickly under threat of being overrun on both flanks. Orange arrows joined the red when the computer model estimated that Baffin would commit his far-more-mobile forces to exploit the Hindi victory.
"The rest of our people are here," Broglie said as lines and bars of gray light sprang into place to the north,south,and east of the enemy salient. "Waiting in low-observables mode until Baffin's got too much on his plate to worry about fine tuning his sensor data. Waiting to slam the door."
On either flank of the red-and-orange thrust was a four-tank platoon from H Company and a full company of combat cars. Gray arrows curving eastward indicated combat cars racing across rice paddies in columns of muddy froth, moving to rake the choke point just east of Morobad where enemy vehicles bunched as reinforcements collided with units attempting a panicked retreat.
The dug-in infantry of the Slammers' Echo Company blocked the Hindi eastward advance.On the holographic display, blue Han symbols halted their retreat, then moved again to attack their trapped opponents in concert with Hammer's infantry and the tanks of 2nd Platoon.
The display still showed 2nd to have four vehicles. Everybody in the shelter knew that rear-guard actions always meant casualties—and didn't always mean survivors.
Medrassi grunted into his hands.
