The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 (52 page)

Specifically, fired from Huber’s pistol.

“Sir, I don’t have anything useful to say about this,” Huber said. The bastard across the desk could only kill him once, so there wasn’t any point in going back now. “If it came from the scene of the fight, it must have been fired after we left there.”

“It’s old news, Lieutenant,” Steuben said, “and we won’t worry about it. If there had been a shooting incident . . . let’s say, if you’d shot one or more citizens of the UC, you’d have been dismissed from the Regiment. It’s very possible that you’d have been turned over to the local authorities for trial. Our contract with the UC really is in the balance as a result of what happened at Rhodesville.”

“Then I’m glad there wasn’t any shooting, sir,” Huber said. “I intend to stay inside the Liaison Office for the foreseeable future so that there won’t be a repetition.”

The holographic scenes on the major’s wall weren’t still images as Huber had thought the first time he’d seen them. What had initially been a tiny dot above the horizon had grown during the interview to a creature flying at a great height above the snowfields.

Steuben giggled. Huber felt his face freeze in a rictus of horror.

“Aren’t you going to tell me it isn’t fair, Lieutenant?” the major said. “Or perhaps you’d like to tell me that you’re an innocent victim whom I’m making the scapegoat for political reasons?”

For the first time since the ambush at Rhodesville, Huber felt angry instead of being frightened or sick to his stomach. “Sir, you know it’s not fair,” he said, much louder than he’d allowed his voice to range before in this room. “Why should I waste my breath or your time? And why should you waste my time?”

“I take your point, Lieutenant,” the major said. He rose to his feet; gracefully as everything he did was graceful. He was a small man, almost childlike; he was smiling now with the same curved lips as a serpent’s. “You’re dismissed to your duties—unless perhaps there’s something you’d like to ask me?”

Huber started to turn to the door, then paused with a frown. “Sir?” he said. “How many people could have given Harris’s Commando—given Solace—accurate information as to when a single platoon was landing at Rhodesville?”

“Besides members of the Regiment itself?” Steuben said, his reptilian smile a trifle wider. Huber nodded tersely. He wasn’t sure if the question was serious, so he treated it as though it was.

“A handful of people within the UC government certainly knew,” the major said. “A larger number, also people within the government or with connections to it, could probably have gotten the information unattributably. But it wasn’t something that was being discussed on the streets of Rhodesville, if that’s what you meant.”

“Yes sir,” said Huber. “That’s what I meant.”

He went out the door, closing it behind him as he’d been told to do the first time he’d left Major Steuben’s presence. It was good to have the heavy panel between him and the man in that room.

He walked quickly. There was a lot of work waiting in Log Section; and there was another job as well, a task for the officer who’d been commanding platoon F-3 when it landed at Rhodesville.

Huber hadn’t forgotten Kolbe or the crew of Foghorn; and he hadn't forgotten what he owed their memory.

Hera Graciano arrived at Log Section half an hour after Huber and the sergeant got back from Base Alpha, well before the staff was expected to show up for work. She stepped in, looking surprised to find the Slammers at their consoles.

“I rearranged things a bit.” Huber said with a grin. “I moved my desk into the main office here; I figure we can use Captain Cassutt’s office for a break room or something, hey?”

“Well, if you like . . .” Hera said. “But I don’t think . . .”

“If they see me . . .” Huber explained quietly. Sergeant Tranter watched with the care of an enlisted man who knows that the whims of his superiors may mean his job or his life. “Then it’s easier for them to believe we’re all part of the same team. Given the number of factions in the UC right at the moment, I’d like there to be a core of locals who figure I’m on whatever their side is.”

“I’m very sorry about last night!” Hera said, bowing her head in the first real confusion Huber had noticed in her demeanor. She crossed the room quickly without glancing at Tranter by the door. “That isn’t normal, even for my brother. I think something’s gone wrong with him, badly wrong.”

“Any one you walk away from,” Huber said brightly. He was immensely relieved to learn that Hera was all right, but he really didn’t want to discuss either last night or the wider situation with her. “I’m paid to take risks, after all. Let’s let it drop, shall we?”

“Yes,” she said, settling herself behind her desk. Her expression was a mixture of relief and puzzlement. “Yes, of course.”

Hera hadn’t powered up the privacy shield as yet, so Huber could add smilingly, “By the way—does the UC have a central population registry? An office that tracks everybody?”

“What?” Hera said in amazement. “No, of course not! I mean, do other planets have that sort of thing? We have a voter’s list, is that what you mean?”

“Some places are more centralized, yeah,” Huber said, thinking of the cradle to grave oversight that the Frisian government kept on its citizens. Those who stayed on the planet, at least; which was maybe a reason to join a mercenary company, though the Colonel

kept a pretty close eye on his troopers as well.

Through the White Mice . . .

“No matter,” he continued. “Would you download a list of all the Regiment’s local employees and their home addresses to me before you get onto your own work, Hera? It may be in this console I inherited from the good captain, but I sure haven’t been able to locate it.”

“Yes, of course . . .” she said, bringing her console live. She seemed grateful for an excuse to look away from Huber. Last night had been a real embarrassment to her.

One more thing to thank her brother for. It was pretty minor compared to the rest of what Huber suspected Patroklos was involved in, though.

Other clerks were coming in to the office; perhaps merely to make a good impression on the new director, but maybe they’d heard about the business last night and hoped to get more gossip. Huber grinned blandly and set to work with the file that appeared in his transfer box.

The business of the day proceeded. Log Section had been running perfectly well without Huber for the past three weeks, but as more starships landed—three in one mad hour at the relatively large field here in Benjamin, and four more during the day at other members of the United Cities—there were frequent calls to the Officer in Command of Log Section. None of the Slammers calling wanted to talk to a wog: they wanted a real officer wearing the lion rampant of the Regiment. They were fresh out of stardrive, with headaches and tempers to match.

Huber fielded the calls. He almost never knew the answer to the angry questions himself, but he dumped quick summaries to Hera through his console while holding the speaker on the line. As a general rule she had the answer for him—a vehicle dispatched, a storage warehouse located, or a staff member on the way to the scene—in a minute or less. When it was going to take longer, that warning appeared on Huber’s console and he calmed the caller down as best he could.

Not everybody wanted to calm down. An artillery lieutenant shouted, “Look, are you going to stop being a dickheaded pissant and get my bloody hog out of the marsh you had us land in?”

Huber shouted back, “Look, redleg, when my platoon drove out of the ship there was a kill-team from Harris’s Commando waiting for us. We managed. If you fools can’t avoid a hole in the ground, then don’t expect a lot of sympathy here! Now, I say again—there’s a maintenance and recovery platoon due in Youngblood’s Vale tomorrow and I’ll vector the recovery vehicle to you people in Henessey ASAP. If you’d prefer to keep saying you want me to drag heavy equipment out of my ass because your driver’s blind, you can talk to an open line!”

There was a pause, then, “Roger, we’ll wait. Two-Ay-Six out.”

One thing a soldier learns by surviving any length of time in a war zone is that you use whatever you’ve got available. Huber smiled grimly.

In between the work of the Log Section, he played with the data he was gathering on his other job. Huber didn’t have the sort of mind that leaped instantly to the right answer to complex questions. He worked things over mentally, turning the bits and fitting them first this way, then another. It was a lot like doing jigsaw puzzles. At the end of the process there was an answer, and he guessed he’d be working on it till he found what the answer was.

Hera left for lunch. She invited Huber but didn’t argue when he turned her down, and she didn’t argue either when he insisted she go on as she’d planned instead of staying in the office because he was staying. Huber knew as well as the next guy how important it was to get some time away from the place you were working; otherwise you could lock yourself down tighter than happened to most prisoners.

It didn’t apply to him, of course. He was too busy to worry about where his butt happened to be located at the moment.

The Regiment already employed more than three hundred UC citizens. There’d be over a thousand by the time the deployment was complete, and that was without counting the number of recreation personnel hired to deal with the off-duty requirements of the combat troopers. On a place like Plattner’s World most of that last group would be freelance, but the Colonel would set up and staff official brothels if the free market didn’t appear to him to be up to the job.

Central Repair was one of the larger employers of local personnel. CR was where heavily damaged vehicles were brought: for repair if possible, for stripping and scrapping if they weren’t. Line maintenance was mostly done at company level, but at battalion in the case of major drive-train components; Central Repair dealt with more serious or complex problems.

Fencing Master was thus far the Regiment’s only serious battle damage on Plattner’s World, but there were plenty of things that could go wrong with complex vehicles transiting between star systems. Furthermore, there were a dozen blowers deadlined from the previous contract. They’d been shipped to Plattner’s World for repair instead of being held behind and repaired in place.

Late in the day, Huber got around to checking addresses. There were many groupings of employees who gave the same home address. That didn’t concern him. Besides members of the same family all working in the booming new industry, war, many of the personnel came into Benjamin from outlying locations. Those transients lived in apartments or rooming houses here in the city.

Three of the mechanics in Central Repair lived at what the voter registration records—forwarded to Huber by Doll Basime; he didn’t go through Hera to get them—listed as the address of Senator Patroklos Graciano. That was a matter for concern.

Huber looked around the office. Hera was out of the room; off to the latrine, he supposed. That made things a little simpler. Kelso, the local who’d driven the rescue vehicle the night before, looked up and caught his eye. Huber gestured him over, into the area of the privacy screen.

“Sir?” Kelso said brightly. His thin blond hair made him look younger than he probably was; close up Huber guessed the fellow was thirty standard years old. Kelso dressed a little more formally than most of the staff and he seemed to want very much to please. Looking for a permanent billet with the Regiment, Huber guessed; which was all right with Huber, and just might work out.

“I’ve got three names and lists of former employers here,” Huber said, running hardcopy of the employment applications as he spoke. “I want you to check these out—just go around to the listed employers and ask about the people. I’m not looking for anything formal. If the boss isn’t in—”

He handed the three flimsies to Kelso.

“—but the desk clerk remembers them, that’s fine. Take one of the section jeeps, and I’d rather have the information sooner than later.”

“Sir, it’s pretty late . . .” Kelso said with a concerned expression. “Should I chase people down at their homes if the business is closed, or—”

Huber thought for a moment, then laughed. “No, nothing like that,” he said. “But if you can get me the data before tomorrow midday, I’d appreciate it.”

“You can count on me, sir!” the fellow said. Holding the hardcopy in his hand, he trotted past the consoles—some of them empty; it was getting late—and out the door just as Hera returned.

They passed; she glanced questioningly from the disappearing local and then to Huber. Huber waved cheerfully and immediately bent to his console, calling up information on the Officer in Charge of Central Repair. Hera might have asked what was going on with Kelso if Huber hadn’t made it pointedly clear that he was busy.

Which he was, of course, but it bothered him to treat her this way. Well, it’d bother her worse if he told her what he was doing; and there was also the risk that . . .

Say it: the risk that this bright, competent woman, attractive in all respects—would be loyal to her brother if push came to shove, instead of being loyal to the regiment of off-planet killers she happened to be working for at the moment. Surviving in a combat environment meant taking as few risks as possible, because the ones you couldn’t avoid were plenty bad enough.

CR was at present under the command of Senior Warrant Leader Edlinger; Buck Edlinger to his friends, and Huber knew him well enough from previous deployments to be in that number. Instead of doing a data transmission through the console, Huber made a voice call. It took a moment for Edlinger to answer; he didn’t sound pleased as he snarled, “Edlinger, and who couldn’t bloody wait for me to call back, tell me!”

“Arne Huber, Buck,” Huber replied calmly. He’d been shouted at before—and worse. Edlinger’d been squeezed into a place too tight for him to wear his commo helmet, and he wasn’t best pleased to be dragged out of there to take a voice call slugged Urgent. “I’ve got a problem that may turn out to be your problem too. Are your people working round the clock right now?”

“Via!” Edlinger said. “No, not by a long ways. You’re in Log Section now, Huber? What’re you about to drop on us? Did a ship-load of blowers come down hard?”