The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 (65 page)

The display was blank until Huber stuttered up three orders of magnitude. At such high gain there was a tiny quiver that even the Slammers’ electronics couldn’t fully damp.

The shell, twenty centimeters in diameter and almost two meters long, was a blurred dash in the four-bar reticle to which Jellicoe had set her sights. The image jumped minusculely as a tribarrel’s recoil jiggled the platform. Several cyan dots, vivid even at that range, intersected the shell.

The target ruptured in a red flash and a puff of dirty black smoke. Two more shells exploded into black rags in the sky around it; a fourth followed an instant later as one of the car’s tribarrels made a double. Bomblets from the last shell detonated around the initial burst in a white sparkle.

Huber thought he heard the distance-delayed thumping of Floosie’s guns, but he was probably wrong. Loud though they were up close, the sound of 2-cm discharges several klicks away would’ve been lost in Fencing Master’s intake roar. As for the shellbursts, they wouldn’t have been visible to unaided eyes even if the column had a clear view of the sky to the southeast.

Huber cleared his and Orichos’ faceshield. “They’ll keep on firing for a while,” he said, speaking through the intercom but keeping eye contact with the local, the only person in the car who’d be interested. “The thing is, cargo shells’re expensive to make and they have to be brought in from off-planet. If Solace Command wants to waste them like this, they can be our guests. There could be a time the tribarrels’d have their usual work to do, and we wouldn’t want to worry then about firecracker rounds going off overhead.”

“Fox Three-three rejoining column,” Jellicoe said in a tone of mild satisfaction. Sure it was shooting fish in a barrel; and true, neither she nor her crew had touched their triggers while the gunnery computer took care of business . . . but it was still a nice bag of fish. “Out.”

“Three indig batteries have opened fire,” Central announced. “Seventeen tubes. None of the rounds are going to come close enough to worry about, so proceed on course as planned. Over.”

Tranter straightened, stretched, and then turned enough to meet Huber’s eyes. He ventured a weak grin; Huber clasped Tranter’s arm, closing the file on their previous short exchange.

From the driver’s compartment Deseau called, “Hey El-Tee? See if you can find us something t’ shoot at, will you? I don’t want my tribarrel growing shut like an old maid’s cunt.”

He laughed.

Before Huber could speak, Central broke in with, “Six rounds incoming from vector oh-nine-three. Fox Three-six respond. Over.”

A terrain display appeared on the upper left quadrant of his faceshield with a short, crooked red line reaching left toward the spot Central had picked for Fencing Master’s firing position.

“Roger, Central,” Huber said, swaying as Deseau pulled into a ravine. It was filled with feathery bushes that crumpled beneath Fencing Master’s bow skirts. The car rocked violently on the rough climb.

“Well, it’s a start,” said Frenchie. He kept his voice bright, but Huber could hear the strain; this wasn’t easy driving, not for anybody. “But you know, it’s been a bitch of a run. I’m looking forward to getting back behind my gun where I can maybe kill some of the bastards who put us through it.”

Deseau laughed. Huber didn’t join him, but he noticed that Captain Orichos wore a broad, grim smile.

“Sierra, we got buildings up here!” called an unfamiliar voice. Huber’s AI slugged the speaker as one of the scouting infantry. “By the Lord, we do! There’s more of ’em! We finally made it!”

“Ermanez, get off the push!” Captain Sangrela snapped. They were all punchy, fatigued in mind and body alike. “White Section, hold in place. Blue Section, close up as soon as you can without running any civilians down. These’re friendlies, remember! Six out.”

“Six, this is Fox Three-six,” Huber said. He twisted and leaned sideways to look off the stern of the car, past Captain Orichos. As he expected, the commander’s jeep was on its way forward. The light vehicle wobbled furiously in the turbulent air spurting beneath the skirts of the wrenchmobiles and tanks it was passing. “I’m moving into the lead in place of Sergeant Nagano. All right? Over.”

“Roger, Three-six,” Sangrela said. Huber watched the jeep lift airborne and plop down again hard enough to pogo on its flexible skirts. The message paused for a grunt. Sangrela went on, “Three-six, I’m dismounting all the infantry. I’m putting two squads up front with you for outriders. Out.”

“Fox Three-one,” Huber said, cueing Foghorn ahead of him with the scouts, “halt at a wide spot and let me in ahead of you. Three-six out.”

He could see Foghorn. For nearly eight hundred kilometers the column had been picking its way through trees. Suddenly they’d exited the forest onto a boulevard broad enough that even the wide recovery vehicles could’ve driven down it two abreast. The buildings to either side were three- and four-story wood-framed structures, but they had much wider street frontage than those of the United Cities. In the UC, Huber’d had the feeling he was standing in a field of towers rather than houses.

A few pedestrians walked between buildings and a scattering of high-wheeled jitneys bounced and wavered along the street. There was no other traffic. Despite its width the road wasn’t surfaced. At the moment it was rutted and dusty, but a rainstorm would turn it into a sea of mud.

Captain Orichos took a hand-held communicator from a belt pouch, stuck a throat mike against her larynx—it adhered to the skin of her neck, but it hadn’t clung to her fingers—and lifted the commo helmet enough to slip earphones under. As she entered codes on the handset, her eyes remained on the road ahead.

The scouts waited as ordered, the four infantrymen beside their skimmers to the left of Foghorn. They looked ragged and filthy— Huber glanced down at himself, his jacket sleeves a rusty color from the road grime, and grinned wearily—but they held their weapons with the easy care of veterans ready for whatever happened next.

Tranter throttled back and adjusted his nacelles to slow gently to a halt. He steered to bring Fencing Master up on Foghorn’s starboard side without fishtailing or dragging a jolting dust storm with the skirts.

The thought made Huber look over his shoulder. He trusted Sergeant Tranter to be able to drive safely, no matter how tired. The tank immediately behind them weighed 170 tonnes and its driver had probably had less rest than the car crewmen. Some of the infantry could drive and had been spelling the two-man crews of the tanks, but there was still a real chance that whoever was at Dinkybob’s control yoke wouldn’t notice that the vehicles ahead were stopped.

Orichos lowered her communicator and looked at Huber. “You’ll be camping on the grounds of the Assembly Building straight ahead,” she said over the intercom. “I informed my superiors that you were on the way. We can proceed immediately.”

Can we indeed? Huber thought. He didn’t let the irritation reach his face; it’d been a hard run for all of them. Instead of responding to Orichos, he said, “Sierra Six, this is Fox Three-six. The indig officer riding with me says that that we can go straight on in to the Assembly Building and set up around it. Do you have any direction for me? Over.”

The jeep pulled alongside Fencing Master. Captain Sangrela sat braced in the passenger seat, his holographic display a shimmer before him as he looked up at Huber. “Via, yes!” he snarled. “Let’s get to where we’re going so we can bloody dismount! Move out, Three-six. Sierra Six out.”

Dinkybob had managed to slow to a halt. So did the vehicles following, though as Huber looked back he noticed one of the later tanks swing wide to the left when its driver awoke to the fact that he was in danger of overrunning whoever was stopped ahead of him.

“Roger, Six,” Huber said, keeping his tone even. “Three-six out. Break. Tranter, start on up the street. Keep it at twenty kph and—”

“And don’t run over any locals,” he’d started to say, but there wasn’t any risk of that. The words would’ve done nothing but shown his own ill-temper.

“—and maybe we’ll have a chance to rest pretty quick.”

Huber’s muscles were so wobbly that he wasn’t sure he’d be able to walk any distance when he got down from the combat car. The clamshell had chafed him over the shoulders, his hip bones, and at several points on his rib cage. He itched everywhere, especially the skin of his hands and throat; they’d been exposed to the ozone, cartridge gases, and iridium vaporized from the gunbores when the tribarrels raked incoming shells from the sky.

Fencing Master lifted and started forward, building speed to an easy lope. The roadway was smooth, a welcome relief from the slopes and outcrops they’d been navigating for the last long while. Dust billowed from beneath the skirts, a vast gulp initially but settling into a wake that rolled out to either side.

Even before the recovery vehicles had halted, the infantrymen pitched off to port and starboard on their skimmers. The infantry platoon, C-1, had left the jeep-mounted tribarrels of its Heavy Weapons Squad behind in Base Alpha. The gun jeeps weren’t needed for the original mission, the capture of Northern Star Farm, because there the infantry was to operate in close conjunction with combat cars in open country. The soft-skinned jeeps would be easy targets for an enemy and wouldn’t add appreciably to the firepower of the task force.

Here in a city, gun jeeps would look a lot more useful than the pair of automatic mortars Sierra did have along; but they’d make do. They always did.

More aircars appeared, circling above the column instead of buzzing from place to place across the sky. The Slammers’ sudden appearance had taken the city by surprise, but now the citizens were reacting like wasps around an opened hive.

Deseau looked up and muttered a curse. His hand tightened on his tribarrel’s grip, raising the muzzles minutely before Huber touched his arm.

Huber leaned close and said, “They’re friendly, Frenchie.”

“Says you!” Deseau snarled, but he lowered the big gun again.

Huber coughed. “I’m surprised the streets here are so wide, Captain Orichos,” he said, looking at the local officer again. With Fencing Master idling along like this he could’ve spoken to her also without using the intercom, but he didn’t see any reason to. “In the United Cities, even the boulevards twist around under the trees.”

“This street—the Axis—is wide,” Orichos explained. “We don’t have a separate landing ground here at Midway. The warehouses where the rangers sell their Moss are on both sides—”

She gestured.

“—here, so the dirigibles from Solace set down in front of the establishment they’re trading with. They unload goods, mostly from the spaceport, of course—then they lift off again with the bales of Moss.”

Now that Orichos had told him the adjacent buildings were warehouses, Huber could see the outside elevators on each one and the doors at each story wide enough to take corrugated steel shipping containers which would then be shifted within by an overhead suspension system. The windows were narrow, providing light and ventilation, but with no concern for the view out them.

Orichos’ face blanked. She turned her head away from Huber and began talking into her communicator again.

Huber locked his faceshield down and concentrated on the terrain to the left front of his vehicle. That was the area his tribarrel’d be responsible for if the task force was suddenly ambushed . . . which they wouldn’t be, of course, but his irritation with the local officer cooled when he thought about a hose of cyan bolts lashing the buildings Fencing Master slid past.

Chances were Orichos would inform him of whatever crisis had called her attention away. Besides, it was a near certainty that the signals equipment in Sangrela’s jeep could break whatever encryption system the Point Gendarmery was using if Huber really thought the task force needed to know. . . .

Which he didn’t. He was just in a bad mood from the long run.

Captain Orichos lowered the communicator and said, “Lieutenant Huber, there’s a problem. Grayle’s gotten word of your arrival. She’s ordered her supporters to gather in the Axis in front of the Freedom Party offices. There’s already hundreds of them there, blocking the street. There may be thousands by the time we arrive.”

Even if there’d been no previous contact between Solace and the Freedom Party, somebody there had certainly given Grayle a heads-up when they realized where Task Force Sangrela was bound. Grayle probably wasn’t pro-Solace, but they were both opposed to the Point’s present government.

At the word “problem,” Huber had cut Sierra Six into the intercom channel. Orichos looked startled when Sangrela rather than Huber replied, “Are they armed, then? Do we have to shoot our way through? Six over.”

“Via, no!” Orichos cried in horror. “A bloodbath would do exactly what Grayle hopes! Everybody’d turn against you mercenaries and the government! These are just people standing in the street!”

In the distance ahead of Fencing Master stood the stone Assembly Building on a terraced hillside. A quick flash of Huber’s map display showed him that the Axis circled the building and continued its broad way northward.

Huber’s eyes narrowed. The map also emphasized that Midway was a large city compared to most of the places the Slammers operated. A company-sized task force would drown in a place this big if it turned hostile. And gunning down a few hundred citizens in the street would be a good way to make the hundreds of thousands of survivors hostile. . . .

“Well, bloody Hell, woman!” Captain Sangrela said. His jeep had pulled alongside Fencing Master and he was glaring up at Orichos. “If it’s a job for the police, get your bloody police on it, will you? You don’t expect us to idle here in the middle of the bloody street, do you? Or do you? Six over.”

“Captain Sangrela, I’m very sorry for the delay but we’re working on it,” Orichos said. Fencing Master continued to rumble on, twenty meters behind the screen of skimmer-mounted infantry. “We didn’t expect Grayle to react so quickly. Most of the crowd in the street are the Freedom Volunteers, the party’s militia, and there’s too many of them for the Gendarmery manpower we’ve got available at the moment. Over.”