“How to operate that,” Lieutenant Stahl says, and points behind us, where an armored vehicle is rolling toward us across the tarmac in complete silence.
The Eurocorps scout vehicle is the coolest piece of military hardware I’ve ever seen, with the possible exception of the Blackfly drop ships we used for our commando raid on Arcadia two months ago. It’s a four-wheeled, light-armored car, roughly similar in shape to the multipurpose assault vehicles used by the Spaceborne Infantry, but it looks somewhat bigger and much more imposing. In fact, it looks like a miniature version of the Blackfly put on all-terrain wheels. The armor is faceted everywhere, not a straight line in sight, and the windshield is so tiny that it looks like a pair of squinty eyes in the face of a predator about to jump. There’s a weapons module on top and a sensor system on an extendable mast. As the vehicle pulls up to us and comes to a stop, the armor seems to ripple before our eyes, and the entire vehicle practically disappears, a vague outline that shows a slightly distorted view of the area behind the armored car.
“I will be in the command seat and drive,” Lieutenant Stahl says. “You will be operating the weapons and the sensor array. Do not worry; it is very easy. But you will have to wear our helmets, because yours will not interface with the vehicle.”
“Friggin’ German engineering,” I say. “This is a German design, right?”
“Yes,” the lieutenant replies, with no small measure of pride in his voice. “It is called the LGS Wiesel.”
“Weasel,” I say. “What’s LGS stand for?”
“Leichter Gepanzerter Sp?hwagen,” Lieutenant Stahl says. “Light armored scout car.”
“Very fancy,” Dmitry says. He runs his hand over the side of the Weasel, and the polychromatic armor shimmers under his armor’s glove, like he’s putting his hand into an oil slick.
The driver turns the polychromatic armor off, and the vehicle becomes defined again. The hatch on the side of the Weasel opens, and the driver exits and salutes Lieutenant Stahl. They exchange a few sentences in German, and the driver salutes again and walks off.
“Please,” Lieutenant Stahl says. He gestures toward the open hatch. Dmitry and I look at each other and file into the vehicle. The rooftop is lower than our heads, and we have to bend down to keep our helmets from knocking into the flanges of the steel hatch.
Inside, there are three chairs. One is up front and is obviously the driver’s seat. The two seats in the back are arranged side by side. They have helmets sitting on them, which Lieutenant Stahl tells us to put on. He closes the hatch and climbs into the driver’s seat. I wait until the air-quality display of my own helmet shows a green light before I pull it off my head and put on the Euro helmet instead.
“Where’s the data-link jack?” I ask Lieutenant Stahl.
“There isn’t one. It’s a wireless system,” he replies.
I don’t know if the Weasel uses hydrogen or electric engines, but whatever is under the power-pack hatch, it’s whisper quiet. When the German lieutenant hits the throttle, we roll off the landing pad with barely a sound. We cross over into a different part of the base, where a line of Euro drop ships is assembled.
“I have switched the control languages for the screens to English and Russian, respectively,” Lieutenant Stahl says. “Please activate your screens and familiarize yourselves with the sensor system before we board the drop ship.”
I turn on the control screen next to my armrest. The menu is different from the ones in NAC vehicles, but translated into English I have no problem finding my way to the sensor submenu. I turn on my helmet, and the view in my helmet’s targeting monocle instantly changes.
“Whoa,” I say. “It’s a DAS array.”
“What is DAS?” Lieutenant Stahl asks.
“Distributed aperture system. You have optical sensors all over the outer armor.”
“That is correct. The monocle will ignore the vehicle around it so the operator can see the surroundings.”
Wherever I look with the helmet monocle, it’s like the armored car isn’t even there, and I’m floating above the ground at fifteen klicks per hour. When I look down, I see the rough texture of the airfield concrete rolling past underneath the Weasel.
“You can switch to the feed from the sensor mast. It extends up to twenty-five meters and has two hundred magnification levels. You can read the name on a uniform from a kilometer away.”
Dmitry looks around with his own Euro helmet, and from the little grin on his face, I know that he has tapped into the DAS feed as well.
“This is not so bad,” he says. “Better than walking.”
“Much better than walking,” I agree.
Lieutenant Stahl does a few rounds on the tarmac in front of the Eurocorps ships. Then he rolls up to one of the drop ships and lets the crew chief guide him into the cargo hold, which has been cleared of seat slings. The hold is just wide enough for the Weasel, and it looks big enough to maybe hold two of them nose-to-butt. We watch with the DAS system as the Euro crew tie down the vehicle with remote quick-release clamps so we don’t roll forward and crash through the bulkhead, or backward through the tail ramp, if the ship maneuvers hard.
We’re in the air a minute later. The Euro drop ship doesn’t have a DAS setup, so we can’t make its hull disappear to our monocles as well. I turn the system off and familiarize myself with the recon setup of the Weasel. The Euros have a small military, but they love to use tech as a force multiplier, and their engineering is probably the best out there. With one of these babies, we could do the job of an entire podhead recon team and cover the ground in a fifth of the time. Of course, the Weasel is much too big to fit into a bio-pod, so it wouldn’t be of any use against Lankies at all unless we had air superiority, which has only happened twice in our history—in the Fomalhaut system during the joint rescue mission of the SRA colonists, and today.