The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 (60 page)

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 mutual 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 any-way—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.