Paying the Piper

by David Drake

  Which wasn't the sort of thing a local from Plattner's World, where the forest was preserved with almost religious fervor, could be expected to like. Colonel Hammer put his troopers' lives first, though, and Colonel Hammer was calling the shots on this one.

  The vehicles ahead of Fencing Master had mown and gouged the riverbank into a muddy wasteland. Wherever possible the lead car had chosen a route that kept its skirts on solid ground, but occasionally an outcrop or a deep inlet forced the column partly into the water. Each thrum! as plenum-chamber pressure beat the river echoed for kilometers up and down the channel.

  Huber grinned. Orichos misread his expression, for she smiled back ruefully and said, "I suppose I do sound like a Nervous Nellie. Sorry."

  "What?" said Huber. "Oh, not at all. I was just thinking that there's never been an armored column in human history that sneaked up on anybody, and this time isn't going to be the exception."

  "El-Tee?" said Learoyd, staring dutifully into the holographic display. "Take a look at this, will you?"

  Huber'd put his right wing gunner on the first sensor watch of the run because he hadn't expected anything to show up so early. He'd manually notched out Fencing Master and the other vehicles in the column during the run from Northern Star, so that they wouldn't hide the more distant, hostile, signals. Unlike a quicker mind, Learoyd's wouldn't be lulled into daydreams by the minute changes in pearly emptiness that was probably all that he'd see in the display, but Huber feared that Learoyd might not notice subtleties that really had meaning.

  Except that the trooper'd done just that. Huber frowned at the display in dawning comprehension, then said, "Sierra Six, this is Fox Three-six. We've got an aircar, probably a small one, following us about a kilometer back. I figure if it was just civilian sightseers, they'd be, well, in sight. Over."

  "Roger, Three-six," Captain Sangrela said. "We leave a broad enough track that the Volunteers figure they can follow us without coming so close we spot them. Good work, Huber. I'll drop off a fire team to take care of it. Six out."

  "Three-six out," Huber said. "Break. Blue Section, some infantry's staying behind to clean off our tail. Don't run 'em over, and get ready to back 'em up when the music starts. Three-six out."

  "We gonna get a chance to pop somebody, El-Tee?" Deseau asked, turning hopefully to meet Huber's eyes.

  "Not a chance, Frenchie," Huber said. "But we're going to follow the drill anyway."

  A thought struck him and he went on, "Captain Orichos? Is there any chance that a Gendarmery aircar is trailing the column? If there is, tell me now. You won't get a second chance."

  Orichos frowned. "One of ours?" she said. "Not unless somebody's disregarded my clear instructions. And if that's happened, Lieutenant—"

  She smiled. Frenchie Deseau couldn't have bettered the cruel surmise in her expression.

  "—then the sort of lesson I assume you propose will bring the survivors to a better appreciation of the authority granted me by the Assembly."

  Huber nodded and returned his attention to his tribarrel's sector forward. He didn't have a problem with ruthlessness, but he found disquieting the gusto with which people like the Gendarmery captain did what was necessary.

  "Three-six, watch the pedestrians!" Nagano warned from Foghorn fifty meters ahead. Four infantrymen had hopped their skimmers off one of the maintenance vehicles; now they were positioning themselves behind treeboles where they'd have good fields of fire for their 2-cm weapons as soon as the aircar came in sight above the water. Huber nodded in salute, but the infantrymen were wholly focused on what was about to happen.

  The ambush team had shut down their skimmers immediately upon hitting the ground. The Volunteers weren't likely to have sensors that'd pick up a skimmer's small fans more than a stone's throw away, but Regimental training emphasized that you didn't assume any more than you had to. Plenty of stuff that you couldn't control was going to go wrong, so you made doubly sure on the rest.

  "How long, Lieutenant?" Orichos asked. Not what: how long. She was a sharp one, no mistake.

  "About a minute and a half," Huber explained. "We're travelling at about forty kph in this salad—"

  He gestured to the soft vegetation just outside the track, where the previous vehicles hadn't ground it to green slime.

  "—and our Volunteer friends back there'll be holding to the same speed. The last thing they want's to fly up on our tail."

  He smiled. Which was just what they were about to do.

  Orichos nodded and turned to watch the route behind Fencing Master. There wasn't anything to see but mud and muddy water, of course. Sight distances close to the ground were at most a hundred meters in the few places the river flowed straight, and generally much less where vegetation arched over the curving banks.

  Huber imported to the lower left quadrant of his faceshield the view from the sergeant commanding the ambush team; it wouldn't interfere with his sight picture in the unlikely event that Fencing Master ran into trouble. After a moment's hesitation, he touched Orichos' shoulder. When she turned, he linked their helmets as he had while Floosie raked incoming shells from the sky. Orichos nodded appreciatively.

  It took ten seconds longer than Huber'd estimated before an open aircar with four men aboard loitered into sight. Sangrela had chosen the ambush site well: the car slowed, dipping beneath a branch draped with air plants which crossed the river only three meters above the purling surface.

  The lift fans flung a rainbow of spray through the sunlight, momentarily blinding the two men in the front. As the car started to rise again, three cyan bolts hit the driver, vaporizing his torso, and a fourth took off the head of the gunman in the passenger seat.

  The driver jerked the control yoke convulsively, throwing the car belly forward and spilling the remaining gunman off the stern. The sergeant shot the falling man before he hit the water; the three troopers blew the car's underside into fireballs of plastic paneling superheated into a mixture that exploded in the air.

  "Blue Section, reverse!" Huber screamed. Sergeant Tranter was a trifle slower to spin Fencing Master than he should've been; Huber'd forgotten the driver didn't have reflexes ingrained by combat like the rest of them did. "Move it! Move it! Move it!"

  The ambush team didn't need help. The aircar crashed edgewise onto a spine of rock sticking up from the water; it broke apart. The fourth Volunteer had been concentrating on detector apparatus feeding through a bulky helmet. He must've been strapped in; his arms flailed, but he didn't get out of the car even when the wreckage slipped off the rocks and started to sink.

  The river geysered as at least four and maybe twice that many 2-cm bolts hit the man and the water nearby. A bolt hit an upthrust rock; it burst like a grenade, shredding foliage on the bank with sharp fragments.

  I guess the poor bastard's not going to drown after all, Huber thought.

  When Fencing Master reached the ambush site a few seconds later, the infantrymen had remounted their skimmers. Huber gestured them forward to put the combat car in drag position again.

  "You were right, El-Tee," said Deseau regretfully. "Not a bloody thing for us."

  One of the infantrymen waved back as he passed Fencing Master. He was now wearing a helical copper bracelet, its ends shaped like snakeheads.

  Apparently the leader of the squad Huber shot it out with in Freedom Party headquarters hadn't learned from that experience. Huber smiled coldly. The Slammers didn't give anybody a third chance.

  * * *

  The alert signal brought Huber out of a doze; it was like swimming upward through hot sand. He'd jumped to his feet and had the tribarrel's grips in his hands, straining for a target in his faceshield's light-amplified imagery, before his conscious mind took over and he realized why he'd awakened.

  Learoyd was driving. Sergeant Deseau was at the forward gun, as rested as anybody could be after eighteen hours of slogging through river-bottom vegetation. Huber wouldn't have been able to drop off if he hadn't been sure Frenchie was ther
e to take up the slack. He'd needed the mental down-time badly, though. The shoot-out in Freedom Party headquarters had drained him more than he'd realized right after it happened.

  But that was part of the past, a different world, and now the present was calling. "Fox Three-six acknowledging!" Huber said, and his helmet dropped him into the virtual meeting room with Colonel Hammer himself and the other officers of Task Force Sangrela. He'd been the last to arrive, but from the look of Mitzi Trogon—her mouth was half-open and her eyes looked like they were staring into oncoming headlights—she was in at least as bad a shape as he was.

  "Troopers," Hammer said, acknowledging his four subordinates with a glance that swept the table. The imagery was sharper than it'd been in the forest south of Midway; the sky above the Fiorno was fairly open. "There's Volunteers setting up a blocking position on an island three hours ahead of you. There's about two hundred men with buzzbombs and six calliopes if they're not further reinforced."

  Hammer's torso vanished into a slant view of a roughly oval island; it covered about as much of the river valley as the channels flowing to north and south of it. From the scale at the bottom of the image, the heavily wooded surface between the streams was on the order of a square kilometer.

  "They've been flying in from Bulstrode Bay over the past hour," Hammer said with a disbelieving shake of his head. "They apparently don't realize that here at Base Alpha we can follow everything they're doing, right down to who had grits for breakfast."

  Icons of red light marked hostile positions: calliopes on the forward curve of the island, and squads of infantry both on the island itself and on the north bank of the floodway. The Volunteers probably intended the mainland element to halt the task force in line along the shore where the calliopes could rake the Slammers from the flank.

  Sangrela laughed in derision. "You want us to go through 'em or around 'em, sir?" he asked. "For choice we'll go through."

  "Neither," said Hammer with a spreading smile. "I'm just telling you what the situation is. We're going to handle it from here with artillery."

  "Why in hell would you want to do that?" Mitzi Trogon snarled. She must've heard her own tone; she snapped fully awake at last. "Ah, sir, that is," she added with a grimace of embarrassment.

  Hammer looked at Trogon without expression for a moment, then lifted his chin minutely to show that the incident was closed—if not forgotten. "Right," he said with a mildness that deceived nobody. "This ambush isn't a problem, but Fort Freedom is likely to be more of one. Here the Volunteers have their calliopes tasked for ground use, waiting for your column to come into their killing zone. They aren't professional enough to redirect the guns for artillery defense in the amount of time they'll have. Follow?"

  Because Huber understood and none of his fellow officers were in a hurry to speak after Mitzi'd stepped on her dick, he said, "When a salvo takes out the whole ambush party, Volunteer command is going to decide it's our shells they ought to be worrying about. When we get to Bulstrode Bay, their calliopes are going to be aimed up for artillery defense and we'll take 'em with direct fire."

  "Roger that, troopers," Hammer said, his face minusculely softer than it'd been a moment before. "This won't be a milk run for you, there's no way it's going to be that. But I told you from the beginning that you'd have all the support we could give you. Any questions?"

  "Support" this time didn't mean the artillery, not really, Huber realized. It was the planning, the misdirection; the thinking two steps ahead of his own troops and at least six steps ahead of the enemy, that the Colonel was providing here.

  "What orders do you have for us, sir?" Captain Sangrela asked, the burr of warmth in his tone suggesting that he was thinking along the same lines as Huber was.

  "Keep on with what you're doing, that's all," Hammer said. His grin spread. "Which is plenty, I know that. We'll time the stonk for thirty seconds before you come into sight of the target. Hit anybody that shows himself, but keep going as fast as you can. That'll make more of an impression on what passes for a Volunteer command group than we would by digging out a couple shell-shocked wogs and blasting them. Clear?"

  "Clear," said Sangrela, nodding, and Huber added his "Clear" to the muttered "Roger," and "Clear," from his fellow lieutenants.

  That'd save gun bores for the real fight at Bulstrode Bay as well. Maintenance had replaced the barrels burned out at Northern Star, but there probably wouldn't be time for another refit before Sierra slammed into Fort Freedom and the Volunteer's main body. . . .

  Hammer gave a crisp nod. "Let me stick it to the bastards this time, troopers," he said. "There'll be plenty of opportunity for you up north."

  The Colonel's image dissolved, returning Huber to Fencing Master's jouncing fighting compartment. His mind and senses were as sharp as they'd ever been in his life. To the watchful expressions of his troopers and Captain Orichos, he began, "In about three hours . . ."

  * * *

  What looked like a streak of sparse vegetation at right angles to the river was a dike of impermeable clay channeling water into the softer soil beyond. The scout section infantry slid across without being aware of the change, but Fencing Master came down on algae-covered soup instead of the expected solid ground. A gout of mud spewed higher than the armored sides, drenching Huber and the others in the fighting compartment.

  Tranter boosted power and adjusted the nacelles vertical for maximum lift. Fencing Master pogoed back onto an even keel and wallowed slowly across the basin.

  "Fox Three-six to Sierra," Huber warned. "There's quicksand here. The panzers had better swing wide or they'll sink to wherever the bottom turns out to be. Three-six out."

  By rights, Foghorn would've been the leading car if they'd gone by the preplanned rotation. Sergeant Nagano hadn't been pleased when Huber exercised his command prerogative to put Fencing Master in the lead as the column prepared to run the Volunteer ambush, but Huber was doubly glad he'd done it now. Only a driver as able as Sergeant Tranter would've kept from bogging or simply sinking out of sight in this soft spot, and there were bloody few drivers that good.

  "Roger Three-six," Captain Sangrela said. "Delta units, follow the contour lines north. Looks to me like two hundred meters will let you cross safely. Six out."

  Fencing Master lifted itself with a jerk onto higher, harder ground. Tranter paused a moment before readjusting the fans, checking to be sure that mud and water plants hadn't choked any of the intake ducts. The combat car built up speed again, shedding weed and watery mud like a dog emerging from a pond.

  Mauricia Orichos dabbed at the muck staining her uniform, managing only to spread the stain until she gave up the pointless exercise. She noticed Huber's glance and smiled faintly.

  "I suppose it doesn't matter," she said. "I'm used to thinking in . . . urban terms, I suppose."

  "It doesn't matter," Huber agreed. Especially if we're all dead in the next thirty seconds, but he didn't let that last thought reach his tongue.

  He heard the incoming shells at first as a distant friction in the sky. With shocking suddenness their howl filled the whole world and still grew louder. Sergeant Deseau hunched over the forward gun, aware that it was friendly fire aimed to impact half a klick ahead of Fencing Master; aware also that mistakes happen, that even the most technologically advanced shells land short occasionally, and that no fire is friendly when it's coming in on your position.

  The Gendarmery captain's face went blank; her eyes opened wide. For a moment Huber thought she was going to throw herself as close to flat as she could get in the crowded fighting compartment, but she recovered her composure when she noticed he wasn't taking any action.

  "It's all right," he explained. "This is the prep that's—"

  The shells burst directly overhead with four distinct pops. The opened casings spilled the separate white streaks of over a thousand bomblets toward the ground ahead of Fencing Master. They whistled like a symphony for chalk on blackboards.

  "—going to land on the
—"

  The timing was slightly off: Fencing Master tore through the last screen of feather-fronded vegetation a second before instead of a few seconds after the bomblets struck the Volunteer positions. The mid-channel island was a green mass against the tannin-black water. Near the shore the foliage was the same sort of lush shrubbery that Task Force Sangrela had ground through on the route from Midway, but there were some sizeable trees a hundred meters back from the bank.

  The landscape disintegrated in crackling white flashes, snarling and sparkling for almost five seconds. A pall of mud and shredded greenery lifted several meters high, then settled back on a barren wasteland. Only memory could say that eastern half of the island and the spit of riverbank to the north of it had been covered by dense vegetation a moment before.

  A cyan flash blew a temporary crater in the mud: a calliope's ammunition had detonated. A wheel spun skyward, then fell back and splashed into the river.

  The scout infantry had grounded their skimmers at the moment of impact. Now they lifted again and resumed their course, four fingers feeling Sierra's path across the trackless terrain. Fencing Master snorted a hundred meters behind, the iridium fist ready to punch if the infantry touched anything.

  "Not a bloody thing for us, El-Tee," Deseau said. "Not a bloody thing."

  The firecracker rounds had left a haze of explosive residue and finely divided soil above the island, blurring its shape, but Huber knew there'd have been little more to see even without that blanket. The rolling blasts had pulped everything in the impact area. Except for the single wheel, there'd been no sign of two hundred enemy soldiers and their equipment.

  His nose wrinkled. That wasn't quite true. Besides the prickle of ozone and the sickening sweetness of explosive, the air had a tinge of burned flesh.

  Fencing Master bucked into the undisturbed vegetation beyond the line which shell fragments had scythed. When the professionals sat down to the table, war stopped being a game for street thugs wearing uniforms. The Volunteers at ground zero here hadn't had time to learn that, but the folks who'd given them their orders must be thinking hard about the future by now.