by David Drake
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 mutal 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 sai
d 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 anyway—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.
"Task Force Sangrela's going to prove Grayle's wrong," he said. "You're going to run from here straight to the Point and be in the capital, Midway, before any civilians even know you're coming."
His grin tightened fractionally. "I wish I could say the same about the Solace military," he added, "but their surveillance equipment's better than that. We're all leaving the satellites up because our employers need them. We can hope they won't have time to mount a real counter to the move, though."
"Blood and Martyrs!" Lieutenant Myers muttered.
"How's my infantry supposed to keep up?" asked Captain Sangrela in a more reasoned version of what was probably the same concern. "That's fourteen hundred kilometers by the shortest practical route—"
Either he'd cued his helmet AI with the question, or he was a better off-the-cuff estimator than Huber ever thought of being.
"—and we're not going to do that in skimmers without taking breaks the cars 'n panzers won't need."
Slammers infantry could travel long distances on their skimmers, recharging their batteries on the move by hooking up to the fusion bottles of the armored fighting vehicles. What they couldn't do was change off drivers the way their heavy brethren would.
Pritchard nodded. "The recovery vehicles that just arrived will go along with you on the run," he said. "Off-duty troops'll ride in the boxes the A Company infantry arrived in. There'll be a convoy of wheeled trucks here tomorrow for the prisoners; the White Mice will ride back in them as guards and escort."
Huber frowned. "What happens if a car's too badly damaged to move under its own power, though?" he asked. Battle damage wasn't the only thing that could cripple a vehicle on a long run over rough country, but a montage of explosions and dazzling flashes danced through Huber's memory as he spoke the words. "The wrenchmobiles can't carry twenty troops and a car besides."
"If a car's damaged that bad," Pritchard said, "you blow her in place, report a combat loss, and move on."
He turned to Mitzi Trogon and continued, "You do the same thing if it's a tank. No hauling cripples along, no leaving other units behind to guard the ones that have to drop out. This mission is more important than the hardware. Understood?"
Everybody nodded grimly.
What Arne Huber understood was that on a mission of this priority, the troops involved were items of hardware also. Colonel Hammer wouldn't throw them away, but their personal wellbeing and survival weren't his first concern either.
"My people plotted a route for you," the S-3 resumed. The electronics projected a yellow line—more jagged than snaky—across the holographic continent. More than a third of the route was within the russet central block of Solace territory, though that probably didn't matter: the task force was going to be a target anywhere the enemy could catch it, whether or not that was in theoretically neutral territory.
Captain Sangrela's face went even bleaker than it'd been a moment before. Pritchard saw the expression and grinned reassuringly. "No, you're not required to follow it," he said. "I know as well as the next guy that what looks like a good idea from satellite imagery isn't necessarily something I want to drive a tank over. Make any modifications you see fit to—but this is a starting point, in more ways than one."
Sangrela nodded, relaxing noticeably. Huber did too, though he was only fully conscious of the momentary knot in his guts when it released. It was good to know that despite the political importance of this mission, the troops on the ground wouldn't have Regimental Command trying to run things from Base Alpha. That'd have been a sure way to get killed.
Mind, if Solace reacted as quickly as the Slammers themselves would respond to a similar opportunity, the mission was still a recipe for disaster.
"What're we going to find when we get to the Point?" Lieutenant Myers asked. "You say there's opposition in the backwoods. Are we going to have to look out for local snipers when we get to—"
He grinned harshly.
"—friendly territory?"
"I'll let our guest field that one," Pritchard said with a tip of his hand toward the woman in the jumpsuit beside him. "Troops, this is Captain Mauricia Orichos of the Point Gendarmery, their army. Captain Orichos?"
"We're not an army," Orichos said. Her pleasant, throaty voice complemented her cheerfully cynical smile. "The job of the Gendarmery is primarily to
prevent outsiders from harvesting our Moss. Without paying taxes on it, that is."
She let that sink in for a moment, then continued, "My own job is a little different, however. You might say that I'm head of the state security section. I contacted my opposite number in your regiment—"
Which means Joachim Steuben. Huber hoped he kept his reaction from reaching his facial muscles.
"—and asked for help. The situation is beyond what the Gendarmery, what the Point, can handle by itself."
The map had vanished when Orichos began to speak. Now in its place the car projected first the close-up of Melinda Grayle speaking, then drew back to an image of her audience—a long plaza holding several thousand people: mostly male, mostly armed. Mostly drunk as well, or Huber missed his bet.
"Generally," Orichos continued, "Grayle's supporters—they call themselves the Freedom Party—have stayed in the backlands. They've got a base and supposedly stores of heavy weapons on Bulstrode Bay—"
The map returned briefly, this time with a caret noting an indentation on the west coast of the peninsula, near the tip.
"—which is completely illegal, of course, but we—the government—weren't in any position to investigate it thoroughly." Her smile quirked again. "It seemed to me that most members of the government were concerned that we'd find the rumors were true and they wouldn't be able to stick their heads in the sand any more."
Huber and the other Slammers smiled back at her. Cynicism about official cowardice was cheap, but mercenary soldiers gathered more supporting evidence for the belief than many people did.
The image of Grayle appeared again, but this time the point of view drew back even farther than before. The crowd itself shrank to the center of the field. On all sides were the two- and three-story buildings typical of Plattner's World, set within a forest which had been thinned but not cleared. This was a city. It was larger by far than Benjamin, the administrative capital of the UC.