Paying the Piper

by David Drake

  "Two weeks ago," Orichos said, "Grayle ordered her followers to join her in Midway—and come armed. Her Freedom Party has its headquarters directly across the Axis, Midway's central boulevard, from the Assembly Building. They've been holding rallies every day in the street. This was the first, but they've gotten bigger."

  "And you can't stop them?" Captain Sangrela asked. He tried to keep his voice neutral, but Huber could hear the tone of disapproval.

  Orichos had probably heard it also, because she replied with noticeable sharpness, "Apart from the ordinary members of the Freedom Party, Captain, there are some ten thousand so-called Volunteers who train in military tactics and who're considerably better armed than the Gendarmery—as well as outnumbering us two to one. I am doing something about them: I'm calling in your Regiment to aid the Point with a show of force."

  "Captain Sangrela was merely curious, Mauricia," Pritchard said mildly, though his smile wasn't so much mild as dismissive of anything as trivial as status and honor. "Task Force Sangrela's arrival in Midway will prove Mistress Grayle was wrong about the Slammers being unable to reach the Point in a hurry . . . and if a more robust show turns out to be necessary, that's possible as well."

  The imagery vanished. Pritchard looked across the arc of officers, his eyes meeting those of each in turn. In that moment he reminded Huber of a bird of prey.

  "Troopers," he said, "route and intelligence assessments have been downloaded to all members of your force. The resupply convoy brought a full maintenance platoon; they'll be working on your equipment overnight so you can get some sleep. I recommend you brief your personnel and turn in immediately. You've got quite a run ahead of you starting tomorrow."

  "Blood and Martyrs!" Lieutenant Myers repeated. "That's not half the truth!"

  * * *

  Huber waited for Sangrela and Myers to clear the doorway, then started out. Offering politely to let Mitzi precede him would've at best been a joke—at worst she'd have kicked him in the balls—and he didn't feel much like joking.

  "Lieutenant Huber?" Pritchard called. He turned his head. "Walk with me for a moment, will you?"

  "Sir," Huber said in muted agreement. He stepped down the ramp and put his clamshell on as he waited for the major to follow Mitzi out of the command car. For a moment his eyes started to adapt to darkness; then the first of several banks of lights lit the Night Defensive Position. The scarred iridium hulls reflected ghostly shadows in all directions.

  Huber didn't know why the S-3 wanted to talk to him out of Captain Orichos' hearing; the thought made him uncomfortable. Things a soldier doesn't know are very likely to kill him.

  Pritchard gestured them into the passage between his command car and Mitzi's tank, Dinkybob. He didn't speak till they were past the bows of the outward-facing blowers. A crew was already at work on Fencing Master; across the laager, a recovery vehicle had winched Foghorn's bow up at a thirty-degree angle so that a squad of mechanics could start switching out the several damaged nacelles for new ones. Power wrenches and occasionally a diamond saw tore the night like sonic lightning.

  "Two things, Lieutenant," Pritchard said when they were beyond the bright pool from the floodlights. He faced the night, his back to the NDP. "First, I was surprised to see you were back with F-3. I had the impression that you'd applied for a transfer?"

  Ah. "No sir," Huber said, looking toward the horizon instead of turning toward the major. "Major Steuben offered me a position in A Company. I considered it, but I decided to turn him down."

  "I see," said Pritchard. "May I ask why? Because I'll tell you frankly, I don't know of a single case in which Joachim offered an officer's slot to someone who didn't prove capable of doing the job."

  "I'm not surprised, sir," Huber said, smiling faintly. "It was because I was pretty sure I could handle the work that I passed. I decided that I didn't want to live with the person I'd be then."

  Pritchard laughed. "I can't say I'm sorry to hear that, Huber," he said. "What are your ambitions then? Because I've looked at your record—"

  He faced Huber, drawing the younger man's eyes toward him. They couldn't see one another's expressions in the darkness, but the gesture was significant.

  "—and I don't believe you're not ambitious."

  "Sir . . ." Huber said. He was willing to tell the truth, but right in this moment he wasn't sure what the truth was. "Sir, I figure to stay with F-3 and do a good job until a captaincy opens up in one of the line companies. Or I buy the farm, of course. And after that, we'll see."

  Pritchard laughed again. Huber thought there was wistfulness in the sound along with the humor, but he didn't know the S-3 well enough to judge his moods. "Let's go back to your car and get you settled in," he said.

  "Yes, sir," Huber said, turning obediently. "But you said there were two things, sir?"

  "Hey, there you are, El-Tee!" Sergeant Deseau bellowed as he saw Huber reentering the haze of light. "Come look what the cat dragged in! It's Tranter, and he says he's back with us for the operation!"

  "I saw from the after-action review that you were going to need a replacement driver," Pritchard said in a low voice. "You've worked with Sergeant Tranter before and I believe you found him a satisfactory driver—"

  "Frenchie says he's the best driver he ever served with," Huber said. "I say that too, but Frenchie's got a hell of a lot more experience than I do."

  "—so I had him transferred from Logistics Section to F-3."

  Huber strode forward to greet the red-haired sergeant he knew from his brief stint in Log Section. Suddenly remembering where he was—and who he'd just turned his back on—he stopped and faced the major again.

  "Sorry, sir," he muttered. "I—I mean, I've been sweating making the run tomorrow short a crewman, and there was no way I was going to have Costunna on my car or in my platoon. I was . . . Well, thank you, I really appreciate it."

  "Colonel Hammer and I are asking you and the rest of the task force to do a difficult job, Lieutenant," Major Danny Pritchard said. This time his smile was simple and genuine. "I hope you can depend on us to do whatever we can to help you."

  He clasped Huber's right hand and added, "Now, go give your troopers a pep talk and then get some rest. It's going to be your last chance to do that for a bloody long time."

  Unless I buy the farm, Huber repeated mentally; but he didn't worry near as much about dying as he had about carrying out tomorrow's operation with his car a crewman short.

  * * *

  The Command and Control module housed in the box welded to Huber's gun mount projected ten holographic beads above Fencing Master's fighting compartment. Call-Sign Sierra—the four tanks, four combat cars, and two recovery vehicles of Task Force Sangrela—was ready to roll.

  If Huber'd wanted to go up an increment, the display would've added separate dots for the vehicle crews, the infantry platoon, and the air-cushion jeep carrying the task force commander with additional signals and sensor equipment. He didn't need that now, though he'd raise the sensitivity when the scout section—one car and a fire-team of infantry on skimmers—moved out ahead.

  Huber gestured to the display and said over the two-way link he'd set with Captain Orichos' borrowed commo helmet, "We're on track, Captain. Another two minutes."

  Sergeant Tranter ran up his fans, keeping the blade incidence fine so that they didn't develop any lift. Huber heard the note change minusculely as the driver adjusted settings, bringing the replacement nacelle into perfect balance with the other seven.

  Sergeant Deseau nodded approvingly, chopping the lip of the armor with his hand and then pointing forward to indicate the driver's compartment. Trooper Learoyd didn't react. He usually didn't react, except to do his job; which he did very well, though Huber had met cocker spaniels he guessed had greater intellectual capacity than Learoyd.

  The fighting compartment was crowded with Orichos sharing the space with the three men of the combat crew, but Via! it was always crowded. A slim woman who wasn't wearing body armo
r—her choice, and Huber thought it was a bad one—didn't take up as much room as the cooler of beer they'd strapped onto the back of the bustle rack when they took her aboard. They weren't using overhead cover for the combat cars here on Plattner's World because they were generally operating in heavy forest.

  "Wouldn't your helmet show that information?" Orichos asked, tapping the side of the one Huber had borrowed for her from a mechanic when he learned she'd be travelling in his car. She didn't need it so much for communications as for the sound damping it provided. A run like the one planned would jelly the brains of anybody making it without protection from all the shrieks, hums and roars they'd get in an open combat car.

  "Sierra Six to Sierra," Captain Sangrela. "White Section—" the scouts "—move out. Over."

  The lead car, Foghorn, was already off the ground on fan thrust. Its driver nudged his control yoke forward, sending the thirty-tonne vehicle toward the northwest in a billow of dust. Foghorn's skirts plowed a broad path through the young corn.

  Four infantrymen on skimmers lifted when the combat car moved. For a moment they flew parallel to the bigger vehicle, just out of the turbulent air squirting beneath the plenum chamber; then they moved out ahead by 150 meters, spreading to cover a half-klick frontage. Foghorn's sensor suite covered the infantry while they ranged ahead on their light mounts to discover the sort of terrain problems that didn't show up on satellite.

  "I can access everything Central's got in its data banks here on my faceshield," Huber replied to Orichos, thinking about her gray eyes behind her faceshield. She'd smiled at him when he offered her the helmet. "I like to keep it for stuff with immediate combat significance, though."

  He grinned through his visor and added, "Sometimes it's more important that I'm Fencing Master's left wing gunner than that I command Platoon F-3."

  The scouts patrolled a klick ahead of whichever vehicle was leading the main body. The combat cars and infantry would rotate through White Section every hour under the present conditions, more frequently if the terrain got challenging.

  Huber had picked Sergeant Nagano's car to start out in the lead because it'd been so badly battered at Northern Star. If last night's massive repairs weren't going to hold up, Huber wanted to know about it now—by daylight and long before the enemy started reacting to Task Force Sangrela.

  "Sierra Six to Sierra," Sangrela ordered in a hoarsely taut voice. "Red Section—" the main body, with Fencing Master leading two tanks, followed by the recovery vehicles and the last two tanks "—move out. Over."

  "That's us, Tranter," Huber ordered on the intercom channel. "Hold us at thirty kph until the whole section's under way, got that?"

  They planned to average sixty kph on the run, putting them in Midway exactly twenty-four hours from this moment, including breaks to switch drivers and the stretches of bad terrain that'd hold down their speed. Ordinarily on this sort of smooth ground they'd have belted along at the best speed the infantry could manage on skimmers, close to 100 kph. Sierra had to build speed gradually, however, or the vehicles would scatter themselves too widely to support each other in event of enemy action.

  Which was certain to come; more certain than any trooper in Task Force Sangrela could be of seeing the next sunrise.

  Sergeant Tranter brought Fencing Master up from a dead halt as smoothly as if he were twisting a rheostat. He'd been a maintenance technician, so he'd learned to drive armored vehicles by shifting them—frequently badly damaged—around one another in the tight confines of maintenance parks. He'd stopped being a tech when a hydraulic jack blew out, dropping a tank's skirts to a concrete pad and pinching his right leg off as suddenly as lightning.

  The mechanical leg was in most respects as good as the original one, but in serious cold the organic/electrical interface degraded enough to send the limb into spasms. The Regiment had offered Tranter the choice of retirement on full pay or a rear-echelon job he could do in a heated building. He'd chosen the latter, a berth in Logistics Section.

  Summer temperatures on Plattner's World never dropped below the level of mildly chilly. If Regimental command was willing to make an exception, there was nobody Arne Huber would've preferred driving his car than Tranter.

  Huber looked over his shoulder, twisting his body at the waist because the clamshell armor stiffened his neck and upper torso. The lead tank, Dinkybob, lifted to follow thirty meters behind Fencing Master. Mitzi's driver echeloned the big vehicle slightly to the right of Tranter's line to stay out of the combat car's dust. That was fine on a grain-field like this, but pretty soon Task Force Sangrela would be winding through hillside scrub where the big vehicles'd feel lucky to have one route.

  Well, troopers got used to dust pretty quick. The only thing they knew better was mud. . . . The commo helmets had nose filters that dropped down automatically and static charges to keep their faceshields clear, but on a run like this Huber knew to expect a faintly gritty feeling every time he blinked. The ration bars he ate on the move would crunch, too.

  The tribarrels were sealed against dust—until you had to use them. It didn't take much grit seeping down the ejection port to jam mechanisms as precise as those in the interior of an automatic weapon.

  Captain Orichos swayed awkwardly, uncertain of what she could safely grab or sit on. She was familiar with aircars and thought this would be the same. She hadn't realized that terrain affected the ride of air cushion vehicles—not as much as it affected wheels and treads, but still a great deal.

  She caught Huber's glance and waved a hand in frustration. "I'd expected the floor to vibrate," she said. "But the jolting—what does that? I didn't feel anything like that when I rode here with Major Pritchard."

  Huber grinned. "You rode here in a convoy travelling at the speed of heavily loaded supply vehicles, with the number two man in the Slammers aboard. Sierra has different priorities. Even on these fields, the front skirt digs in every time there's a little dip or rise in the ground. It'll get a lot worse when we start working along the sides of the foothills we're scheduled to hit pretty soon."

  "Then it's always like this?" she asked. Deliberately she lifted her faceshield, squinting slightly against the wind blast. She quirked the wry smile he'd seen the night before as she discussed the moral courage of elected officials.

  "No, not always," Huber said, raising his own shield to give Orichos a much broader smile than the one he'd been wearing before. "Sometimes they're shooting at us, Captain."

  "Sierra Six to Sierra," Captain Sangrela said. "Blue Section, move out."

  Blue Section was the two remaining combat cars under Platoon Sergeant Jellicoe. They'd follow the main body at a kilometer's distance, extending the column's sensor range to the rear by that much. There wasn't a high likelihood that the enemy would sweep up on the task force from behind, but some of the mercenary units Solace was known to have hired had equipment with sufficient performance to manage it.

  The cars in Blue Section would rotate at the same intervals as the scouts did. Either Huber or Jellicoe would be at the front or rear of the column—but never both at the same end.

  "Then I guess I'd better get used to it, hadn't I?" Orichos said. She spread her left hand over her eyes to shield them as she surveyed the terrain. She added, "Have you been with Hammer's Slammers long, Lieutenant?"

  "Five years," Huber said, facing forward and lowering his faceshield so that Orichos could do the same. "I entered the Military Academy on Nieuw Friesland with the intention of enlisting in the Regiment when I graduated . . . and I did."

  The scouts were already into the gullied scrubland that the task force would grind through for the first half of the route. Central had timed the departure from Northern Star so that Sierra would be in pitch darkness while it navigated the last of the foothills south of Point territory where forests resumed.

  Until the task force set off, the enemy would assume the Slammers intended to return to UC territory after capturing Northern Star. It'd take the Solace command time to rea
ct when they realized the Slammers' real intent. The most dangerous ambush sites were in the foothills; by waiting till noon to set off, the task force would have the advantage of the Regiment's more sophisticated night vision equipment in that last stretch which the enemy might reach in time to block them.

  Huber hoped the Colonel was right; but then, he hoped a lot of things, and his tribarrel was ready to take care of whatever reality threw at them. You couldn't always blast your way through problems, but the ability to out-slug the other fellow never stopped being an advantage.

  "Do you know much about the political structure of the Point, Lieutenant?" Orichos asked. Since her voice came through the commo helmet, she could've been standing anywhere on the planet—but Huber was very much aware of her presence beside and just behind him.

  "Not a thing, ma'am," he admitted. "I studied the United Cities some from the briefing cubes because they were hiring us, but I didn't look at the rest of you folks."

  He touched the controller with his left hand, projecting an image remoted from Foghorn into the air before him. The scout car was bulling through brush already. The stems were wiry enough to spring back after Foghorn passed, but they were too thin to be a barrier to a thirty-tonne vehicle.

  He hoped what he'd just said didn't sound too much like, "I'm not interested in you dumb wogs;" which wasn't true for Arne Huber himself but pretty well summed up the attitude of a lot of Slammers, officers as well as line troopers like Sergeant Deseau. Trooper Learoyd wasn't likely to have thoughts so abstract.

  "Midway's the only city in the Point," Orichos said. "We're not like Trenchard or the UC where there's half a dozen places each as big as the next. There's a quarter million people in Midway, and no town as big as a thousand in all the rest of the country."

  "So about a third of your population's in the one city," Huber said. He hadn't studied the Point, not like you'd really mean studied; but he'd checked the basic statistics on Plattner's World, sure. "I guess there's a lot of trouble between people in Midway and the rest of the country, then?"