The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 (99 page)

Well, it didn’t matter that a command car’s high center of gravity and poor power-to-weight ratio made it a bad choice for breaking trail in wooded hills. This wasn’t a choice, it was a military necessity unless Ruthven wanted to take the chance that the bodies weren’t bait. His two years’ experience in the field wasn’t much for the Slammers, but it’d been plenty to teach him to avoid unnecessary risks.

The victims had been tied to the crosses with their own intestines, but that was just the usual fun and games for the Lord’s Army. Ruthven grinned. If he’d had a better opinion of the Royalists, he might’ve been able to convince himself the Regiment was Doing Good on Pontefract. Fortunately, Colonel Hammer didn’t require his platoon leaders to maintain feelings of moral superiority over their enemies.

His eyes on the dots of his troopers slanting across the terrain display, Ruthven keyed his microphone and said, “Courage Command, this is Echo One-six. Come in Courage Command, over.”

The combat car’s display showed that the transmitter in Lieutenant-Colonel Carrera’s headquarters was one of half a dozen in Firebase Courage which were live, but nobody replied. Ruthven grimaced. He wasn’t comfortable communicating with the Royalists to begin with, since any message which the Royalists could hear, the Lord’s Army could overhear. It added insult to injury that the fools weren’t responding.

The car bucked as the forward skirts dug into an outcrop with a skreel! of steel on stone. Ruthven expected they’d have to back and fill, but Melisant kicked her nacelles out and lifted them over the obstacle. She was driving primarily because her skimmer . . . now strapped to the side of the car in hopes of being able to repair it at the Royalist base . . . was wonky, but she was probably as good at the job as anybody in the platoon.

“Courage Command, this is Echo One-six,” Ruthven repeated, keeping his voice calm but wondering if showing his irritation would help get the Royalists’ attention. “Respond ASAP to arrange linkup, if you please. Over.”

The car shifted back to level from its strongly nose-up attitude, though it continued to rock side to side. Ruthven had a real-time panorama at the top of his display, but he didn’t bother checking it. His responsibility was the whole platoon, not the problems of weaving the car through woodland.

“Echo One-six, my colonel say, ‘Who are you?’” replied a voice from the firebase. “We must know who you are, over!”

Ruthven sighed. It could’ve been worse. Of course, it might still get worse.

“Unit, hold in place till I sort this,” he said aloud. Rennie’s squad, now in the lead, must be nearly in sight of the firebase by now. “Break. Courage Command, this is Echo One-six. We’re the unit sent to reinforce you. Please confirm that your troops are expecting us and won’t open fire.”

He hesitated three long heartbeats while deciding whether to say what was going through his mind, then said it: “Courage, we’re the Slammers. If we’re shot at, we’ll shoot back. With everything we’ve got. Over.”

Third Squad was in sight of the Royalists: the feed from Rennie’s skimmer showed the firebase as a scar of felled trees on the hill 700 meters from him. Ruthven frowned; he was looking down into the firebase. The ridge by which E/1 had approached was a good fifty meters higher than the knoll where the Royalists had sited their guns.

“You must not shoot!” squealed a new voice from the Royalist firebase; a senior officer had apparently taken over from the radioman. “We will not shoot! You must come in and help us at once!”

Ruthven grinned faintly. “Courage, I’ll give you three minutes to make sure all your bunkers get the word,” he said. “We don’t want any mistakes. Echo One-six out.”

“Hey El-Tee?” said Sergeant Wegelin on the command push; he was crewing the tribarrel at the end of the column. “What d’ye mean, come in shooting with everything we got? We’re not exactly a tank company, you know, over.”

“They don’t know that, Wegs,” Ruthven said, smiling more broadly as he examined the real-time visuals. “And anyway, I don’t think we’d need panzers to put paid to this lot, over.”

Fire Support Base Courage housed four 120-mm howitzers with an infantry battalion for protection. Treetrunks had been bulldozed into a wall around the camp, but they wouldn’t stop light cannon shells as effectively as an earthen berm. The Slammers’ powerguns would turn the wood into a huge bonfire.

“Why in hell did they set up with this ridge above them, d’ye suppose?” asked Hassel. Though the platoon sergeant had his own line of sight to the firebase, the display indicated he was using Wegelin’s higher vantage point. “We could put the guns out of action with four shots, over.”

“Because I never met nobody wearing a uniform here who knows how to pour piss outa a boot, Top,” said Wegelin. “Over.”

“The ridge’s too narrow for a battalion and the guns,” said Ruthven. He was using text crawls to monitor the panicked orders flying across the firebase, but he didn’t see any reason to wait in respectful silence for the Royalists to get their act in order. “They should’ve left a detachment . . .”

“Echo One-six, you must come in now,” Lieutenant-Colonel Carrera said sharply. “Quickly, before the Dogs take advantage! Quick! Quick!”

“Break,” said Ruthven, closing his conversation with his squad leaders. “Rennie, take your squad in. Wegelin, stay on overwatch. I’ll follow Rennie, then Sellars, Wegelin, and you bring up the rear, Hassel. Six Out.”

Again green blips signaled Received and Understood. Sergeant Rennie knelt on his skimmer to lead the way down and up the wooded saddle to the firebase. His troopers were lying flat with their control sticks folded down. That wasn’t a good way to drive, but it made them very difficult targets in case somebody in the garrison hadn’t gotten the word after all.

Rennie wasn’t the brightest squad leader in the Regiment, but he was reflexively brave and never hesitated to take a personal risk to spare his troopers. They’d have followed him to Hell.

Melisant was sending power to the fans before Ruthven’d finished giving his orders, but the command car lifted awkwardly and only slowly started to wallow forward. The grace with which the troopers flitted around him made Ruthven feel like a hog surrounded by flies, but the skimmers’d run out of juice in a matter of hours without the car’s fusion bottle to recharge them. He knew he was doing his proper job here inside the vehicle, though he didn’t feel like he was.

The gun jeep that’d been reinforcing the lead squad didn’t follow Rennie’s troopers. The driver/assistant gunner waved as the combat car swept past; the jeep was hunkered down in a notch on the reverse slope that gave it a line of fire to the four howitzers and most of the interior of the firebase.

Sergeant Wegelin’d probably ordered the crew to keep under cover till he came up with the other gun and mortar. That wasn’t precisely disobeying Ruthven’s instructions, but it came bloody close; and Wegelin was probably right in his caution, so the El-Tee would keep his mouth shut. That was a lot of what a junior lieutenant did when he had good non-coms. . . .

The infantry moved toward the firebase through the stumps and brush in a skirmish line, but Melisant swung the car onto the road as soon as she reached the swale connecting the knolls. The track’d been cut with a bulldozer rather than properly graded, but the car’s air cushion smoothed the ride nicely. The deep ruts from wheeled vehicles were frozen now and had snow on their southern edges.

Royalists cheered from the top of the wall. The soldiers were male but there were scores of women and children in the compound as well, some of them waving garments.

Ruthven grimaced, thinking of what’d happen if the Lord’s Army overran the place. His job was to prevent that, but if the rebels were in the strength Intelligence thought they were . . . well, one platoon, even a bloody good platoon like E/1, wasn’t going to be able to do the job without help that the Royalists might not be able to provide.

The firebase entrance was a simple gap in the wall, but bulldozers had scraped a pile of trunks and dirt as a screen ten meters in front of it. Semi-trailers bringing in supplies would have a hard time with the angle, but Melisant should be able to guide the combat car through without trouble.

There were three strands of barbed wire in front of the wall. That gave negligible protection against assault, but maybe it’d hearten the defenders: placebo effects were real in more areas than medicine.

Ruthven grinned. It wasn’t much of a joke, but in a situation like this you took any chance for a laugh that you got.

Rennie parked his skimmer beside the entrance and hopped up the front of the wall like a baboon with a 2-cm gun; he stood facing inward. His troopers split to either side, four of them joining him on the main wall while the other two mounted the screen and looked back to cover the rest of the column.

“Melisant, ease off a bit,” Ruthven said over the intercom as he opened the roof hatch. “We don’t want to spook our allies, over.”

“You mean they’ll mess their pants, El-Tee?” Melisant said. “Yeah, we don’t want that. Out.”

The fan note didn’t change, but the driver let gravity slow the heavy vehicle as they started up the slope toward the entrance. Ruthven thumbed the lift button and a hydraulic jack raised his seat until his head and shoulders were above the hatch coaming. This way the Royalists could see him instead of watching forty tonnes of steel and iridium growl toward them impassively.

Ruthven tried to keep his face impassive as he eyed the barrier. It was a tangle of protruding roots and branches, no harder to climb than a ladder. Defenders firing over the top from the other side would have very little advantage over an attacking force. The common soldiers carried locally made automatic rifles, but the three blockhouses spaced around the wall mounted pulsed lasers; each weapon had its own fusion bottle.

The Lord’s Army wasn’t any better equipped, but the Prophet Isaiah certainly did a better job of building enthusiasm in his followers than King Jorge II did. Rumor had it that Jorge and his three mistresses had left Pontefract for a safer planet several months ago . . . and this time rumor was dead right. Ruthven’d heard that from a buddy on Colonel Hammer’s staff.

The command car eased through the S-bend at the base entrance. Melisant was squaring the corners, apparently to impress the locals. Ruthven looked down at them, trying to keep a friendly smile. They were impressed, all right, waving and cheering so loudly that sometimes he could hear them over the car’s howling fans.

Good Lord they’re young! he thought. It really was a war of children. Most of the Royalist soldiers were teenagers and so undernourished they looked barely pubescent, while the Lord’s Army recruited ten year olds at gunpoint from outlying villages.

It’d go on for as long as King Jorge managed to pay the Slammers and the Five Worlds Consortium shipped arms to the Prophet. A whole generation was dying in childhood.

History was a required subject at the Academy; Ruthven had done well in it. The realities of field service had provided color for those textual accounts of revolts, rebellions, and popular movements, however. That color was blood red.

He’d expected a vehicular circuit inside the wall, but the interior of the compound was sprinkled randomly with shanties and lean-tos except for the road from the gate to a clearing in the center. The four howitzers were emplaced evenly around the open area, each in a low sandbagged ring which again must’ve been built for its morale value.

“You want us up between the guns, El-Tee?” Melisant asked. “Looks like they dump the resupply there and the troops hoof it back to their billets, right? Over.”

“Roger that,” Ruthven said. “Break, Unit, we’ll form in the central clearing while I figure out what to do next. Six out.”

Blood and Martyrs! This’s looking more and more like a ratfuck. Ruthven hadn’t been thrilled by the assignment from the start, but until E/1 got to Firebase Courage he hadn’t have guessed how bad things really were.

He’d expected the Royalist troops to be ill-trained and poorly equipped . . .because all Royalist field units were: the defense budget never percolated far from the gaudily dressed officers in the capital, Zaragoza. He hadn’t expected Fire Support Base Courage to be so ineptly constructed, though. It was a wonder that the Lord’s Army hadn’t rolled over the position long before.

The Headquarters complex was four aluminum trailers which’d been buried in the ground to the right of the gate. A tower in the middle of them carried satellite and short-wave antennas, making the identification obvious and coincidentally providing an aiming point to the Prophet’s gunners. The Lord’s Army had only small arms, but painting a big bull’s-eye on your Tactical Operations Center still isn’t a good plan.

An officer in a green dress uniform with gold crossbelts was coming up the steps from one of the trailers, steadying his bicorn hat. The three aides accompanying him were less gorgeously dressed; that, rather than the rank tabs on his epaulets, identified Lieutenant-Colonel Carrera.

Ruthven dropped into the compartment again. As soon as Melisant brought the car to a halt, he swung the rear hatch down into a ramp and stepped out to meet the Royalist officers.

Carrera stopped where he was and braced to attention. A rabbity aide with frayed cuffs scurried to Ruthven and said, “Sir, you are the commander? My colonel asks, what is your rank?”

Ruthven frowned. Instead of answering, he walked over to Carrera and said, “Colonel? I’m Lieutenant Henry Ruthven, in command of Platoon E/1 of Hammer’s Regiment. We’ve been sent to you as reinforcements.”

“A lieutenant?” the Royalist officer said in amazement. “One platoon only? And where are the rest of your tanks? This one thing . . .”

He flicked his swagger stick toward the command car.

“ . . . this is not enough, surely! We must have more tanks!”

What Major Pritchard, the Slammers Operations Officer, had actually said when he assigned Ruthven was, “to put some backbone into the garrison.” It wouldn’t have been polite or politic either one to have repeated the phrasing, but now Ruthven half-wished he had.