Paying the Piper

by David Drake

  * * *

  Because the prevailing winds were from the northwest, Huber had been smelling the fire for almost three hours before the infantry sergeant with the scouting section called over the command channel, "Blood and Martyrs, Captain! This is Charlie One-three-four. Are we supposed to go through this on skimmers? Over."

  Huber switched a quadrant of his faceshield to the view from Floosie, the combat car attached to White Section at the moment. It was like looking into the maw of Hell.

  Regimental rocket howitzers hundreds of kilometers to the south in United Cities' territory had seeded the forest with incendiaries. Each time-fuzed zirconium pellet was capable of burning though light armor. When one landed in old growth forest, the likelihood of it igniting even green timber was three out of five . . . and there were tens of thousands of pellets in the shells, raining down over hundreds of square kilometers. The myriad simultaneous fires had spread till they joined in a firestorm, a towering conflagration that drove its column of smoke through the stratosphere and sucked air to feed it from all sides in a torrent at hurricane velocities.

  Everything combustible within the core of the blaze had burned, including the loam. Silica in the clay substrate ran liquid before cooling into slabs of glass colored like the rainbow by trace minerals.

  Though the first flush of the fire had burned to a glowing shadow of itself, what remained still shimmered. The boles of the largest trees smoldered, stripped to pillars of carbonized heartwood. Monstrous pythons of smoke and ash eddied, the ghosts of a forest dancing among its bones.

  "One-three-four, recover to your carrier vehicle," Sangrela responded without hesitation. "ASAP, troopers, don't get into that! There won't be an ambush in that stuff, not from anything these Volunteers have available."

  He paused, then resumed, "Break. Sierra, button up all hatches. Drivers switch to microwave radar, and exposed personnel lock down your faceshields. Make sure your filters are working before we get into it. We'll form an echelon perpendicular to the prevailing winds so—"

  A route map clicked as an imposed overlay on the lower right corner of Huber's faceshield. Every trooper in the task force had the same image.

  "—that we're not all driving through the trash the leaders stir up. Six out."

  Floosie must've entered the burned area just as Sangrela spoke, because a plume of ash shot skyward two kilometers ahead of Fencing Master. It was like watching the first puff of a volcano gathering its strength.

  The fire'd been set to clear the forest between Fort Freedom and the Fiorno Valley at its closest approach, some twenty klicks west of where the river entered the Northern Sea. The tract was well-watered and the foliage was in the green lushness of late spring, so the fire had generally burned itself out to either side of the kilometer-wide swathe seeded with incendiaries. Nothing organic could've resisted that dense rain of exothermic metal.

  Deseau was driving; Huber heard the hatch cover close over him. Learoyd checked his faceshield and filters with his left hand, then drew up the throat closure of his blouse to get the maximum protection possible without donning an environmental suit.

  Tranter was curled up asleep under the forward gun; his head rested on his commo helmet. Huber shook him awake and leaned close to shout, "Get your gear on and locked down, Sarge. There's going to be a lot of ash and sparks for the next hour or so."

  As Tranter slipped his helmet on with a grin of embarrassment, Huber turned to Captain Orichos. She'd been watching the troopers, but she wasn't on the Sierra net and didn't know what was happening. Her expression was neutral, with just enough quirk to the lips to prevent it from being grim.

  "We're going to be going through a burned-out area," he explained to Orichos over the intercom. He mimed locking down his faceshield rather than touch hers, at present raised. "Your nose filters ought to come down automatically when we hit the smoke, but you might want to push this button here—"

  He touched the hinge of his faceshield; the filters dropped over his nostrils.

  "—and deploy them manually right now."

  "Burned area?" Orichos said. Her hand stopped halfway to her faceshield, then finished the movement. "Have those animals set the forest on fire?"

  All the vehicles of the main body were out of the floodway now, striking north toward their goal. Eight separate ribbons of smoke and ash trailed downwind, spreading till they merged into a broad miasma that settled slowly back to the ravaged forest.

  "Whatever happened," Huber said, "it's going to be hot going till we reach the marshes this side of Bulstrode Bay. Get your filters in place now, all right?"

  Fencing Master had reached the point at which Sierra's route left the river; Deseau boosted fan speed and adjusted his nacelle angles. The previous vehicles, particularly the tanks, had battered the bank into a slope of glistening mud. Skirts had dragged chunks of buried quartz up with them in deep gouges through the clay.

  Fencing Master roared, bursting over the top of the bank at over thirty kph. Huber realized what was about to happen in time to brace his left hand against the coaming and clasp Orichos to his chest with the other arm. The Gendarmery officer didn't have the instincts to react correctly even if he'd had a chance to warn her instead of acting.

  The car's nose skirts spilled air and dropped, slamming down onto the charred soil. Despite being prepared, Huber's own weight and that of Captain Orichos threw him hard against the coaming. The rigid clamshell armor spread the shock, but he'd still have bruises along the side of his ribcage by the morning.

  If he was alive in the morning, of course. Well, civilians could die at any moment too.

  Deseau took them into the hell-lit wasteland. Smoke was a gray pall; sometimes dense enough to seem solid, sometimes hiding objects that were solid in all truth. Huber tried light-amplified viewing but decided the lack of depth perception would be too dangerous at their present high speed. Infrared—thermal imaging—wasn't ideal at the ambient temperatures of the burning forest, but the helmet AI had enough discrimination to make it the choice.

  "Vandals!" snarled Captain Orichos. "Stupid vandal bastards! What did they think they'd accomplish by this destruction?"

  There was no point in telling her how the blaze had really started. Not when she and Arne Huber shared a crowded combat car on the verge of action with an entrenched enemy.

  Hot spots—open flames and sparks the skirts plowed up from fires banked in the ashes—were white highlights in the faceshield. The AI coded cooler objects through the spectrum from violet to dark reds that verged on black, though little in this expanse was colored below green. A suited human would be visible in outline against the brighter background, but nobody expected to find Volunteers waiting here in ambush.

  Fencing Master bumped and racketed across the landscape, scraping its skirts frequently and often hurling up gouts of fire. Deseau was being careful—too careful. He was trying to avoid every possible stump and cavity instead of taking a line and holding it till a major obstacle interposed. The combat car repeatedly sideswiped the skeletons of fallen trees, blasting them into sparks, or grounded when the skirts swayed over the edge of a pit left when a toppling giant had dragged its root ball out of the soil. Sergeant Tranter gripped the coaming to either side of his gun pintle with a set look on his face.

  Huber touched Tranter's shoulder to get his attention, then leaned close to shout into his ear instead of using the intercom circuit and including Deseau: "Don't worry, Sarge—you and Frenchie will switch positions when we form up for the attack."

  Tranter nodded gratefully. He might or might not understand that Huber was even more interested in getting Deseau behind the forward tribarrel than he was to have Tranter's expertise in the driver's compartment. Horses for courses . . .

  "Vandals!" Mauricia Orichos repeated as she stared across the flame-ravaged bleakness. Sparks whirled from the skirts and spun down again into the fan intakes, dusting those in the fighting compartment. Slammers' uniforms were flame resistant, but Huber
stuck his hands under the opposite armpits and wished he had gauntlets.

  Did Orichos think that Colonel Hammer cared about trees when the lives of his troopers were at stake? And if there'd been a thousand civilians in the corridor before the incendiaries fell, that wouldn't have changed the Colonel's plan either.

  This was war. If the government of the Point hadn't known what it meant to hire the Slammers to do their fighting for them, then they were in the process of learning.

  * * *

  Fencing Master slowed, wobbled drunkenly, and finally came to rest on a south-facing backslope with her fans at idle. Deseau rotated the driver's hatch open; Tranter was already climbing off the right side of the fighting compartment.

  Huber raised his faceshield, then lifted the commo helmet for a moment to scratch his scalp. He grinned at Captain Orichos and said, "We're getting ready for the final run-up, Captain. If there's anything you need to do while we're halted, do it now. We won't stop again until the shooting's over."

  He smiled more broadly and added, "At least over for us, I mean."

  Huber was keyed up, but it was in a good way. The drive had been physically and mentally fatiguing. It had blotted out the past and future, turning even his immediate surroundings into a gray blur. Now adrenaline coursed through him, bringing the fire-swept wasteland into bright focus and shuffling a series of possible outcomes through his mind.

  Arne Huber was alive again. He might die in the next ten minutes, but a lot of people never really lived for even that short time.

  "No, I'm ready," Orichos said. She rubbed her hands together, then wiped her palms on the breast of her jumpsuit. If she was trying to clean the ash and grit off them, she failed. "What do you want me to do? In the battle, that is."

  Frenchie climbed into the fighting compartment past his tribarrel; Tranter was walking forward on the steel bulge of the plenum chamber. The thirty-degree slope was awkwardly steep for the exchange, but the relatively sparse vegetation here had left fewer smoldering remains than the flatter, better-watered stretches the task force had been crossing.

  "Keep out of the way," Huber said. "Keep your head down unless one of us buys it. If that happens, take over his gun and try not to shoot friendlies."

  He grinned, feeling a degree of genuine amusement to talk about his own death in such a matter-of-fact way. He'd chosen the line of work, of course.

  Huber really would've preferred to get the Gendarmery officer off his combat car, but that wasn't a practical solution in this landscape. Orichos was smart and quick both, so he could at least hope that she'd jump clear if he or a trooper needed one of the ammo boxes stacked behind her.

  Frenchie slid behind his gun and spun the mechanism, ejecting the round from the loaded chamber in a spurt of liquid nitrogen. As he did so, Tranter spun the idling fans up one at a time so that he could listen to the note of each individually. Both men were veterans and experts; they didn't trust their tools to be the way they'd left them until they'd made sure for themselves.

  Barely visible eighty meters eastward, Foghorn's crew were giving their car and weapons a final check. Sierra's remaining six combat vehicles waited still further to the east, out of sight from Fencing Master behind undulations of the ground.

  Despite hotspots in the terrain, the infantry had deployed from the wrenchmobiles; they'd advance on their skimmers to avoid the risk of losing two squads to a single lucky hit. Besides, the recovery vehicles might shortly be needed for their original purpose.

  "Central, this is Sierra Six," Captain Sangrela reported over the command channel. "Sierra is in position. Over."

  "Roger, Sierra," Base Alpha replied. Despite the compression and stuttering created when the transmission bounced from one ionization track to another, Huber would've been willing to swear the voice was Major Pritchard's. "Hold two, I repeat, figures two, minutes while we prepare things for you from this end. Central out."

  Though the transmission closed, an icon on the corner of Huber's faceshield indicated there was view-only information available if he wanted to tap it. He did, tonguing the controller instead of voice-activating the helmet AI.

  A crystalline, satellite-relayed voice announced, "Freedom command, this is Solace Intelligence! Emergency! Emergency! Slammers artillery is launching a maximum effort barrage on your positions! We will relay shell trajectories to you as they leave the guns!"

  The voice transmission ended without a signoff. A data feed which the AI courteously translated into a schematic of lines curving from south to north across the continent replaced it. The tracks shown as emanating from all three of the Regiment's six-gun batteries were initially blue but turned red at a rate scaled to 880 meters per second: the velocity of 200-mm shells launched from the Slammers' rocket howitzers.

  Learoyd clicked the loading tube into his backup weapon, a sub-machine gun, and turned to Huber. "Are we just mopping up again, El-Tee?" he said.

  "No, Learoyd," Huber said. He was explaining to Captain Orichos as well. Deseau'd been on the net and would've understood the implications of the way the artillery smashed the Volunteer ambush. Learoyd hadn't understood, and Orichos hadn't heard. "Central's broken into the Solace net to send a false transmission to make the Volunteers think our enemies are helping them. There isn't really any artillery—"

  As he spoke, the Regiment's Signals Section followed the graph of "shell trajectories" with computer-generated images of Hogs firing at their maximum rate of ten rounds per minute. The gun carriages jounced from the backblast of each heavy rocket. Doughnuts of dust lifted around the self-propelled chassis and a bright spark of exhaust spiked skyward for the seven seconds before burnout. Real shells would ignite sustainer motors in the stratosphere to range from firebases in the UC to the northern tip of the Point, but there was no need to simulate that here.

  "—but if the Volunteers think there is, they'll switch their calliopes to high-angle use. They won't be waiting to hit us when we come into sight."

  "This's what we've been waiting for, Learoyd," Deseau said, murderously cheerful. "We get to blow away a bunch of civilians in uniform!"

  "Oh," said Learoyd. He turned again and swung his tribarrel stop to stop, just making sure it'd work when he needed it. Huber didn't recall ever hearing the trooper sound enthusiastic. "All right."

  Herbert Learoyd wasn't the brightest trooper in the Regiment, but you could do worse than have him manning the right wing gun of your combat car. In fact Huber wasn't sure he could've done better.

  It was time to be a platoon leader again. Huber cleared his faceshield and replaced the phony transmission with a fifty degree mask of the terrain map. It showed the planned routes that would take the four combat cars toward the outlying Volunteer positions and Fort Freedom itself. Colored bands connected each course to the segment of hostile terrain for which that car's guns were responsible.

  "Fox Three-six to Fox," Huber said. "We'll be executing in a minute or less. If there's any questions, let's hear them now, troopers. Three-six over."

  None of his vehicle commanders responded. He'd have been amazed if one had. Four green beads along the top of his faceshield indicated that the cars themselves were within field-service parameters. That could've meant they'd have been deadlined for maintenance on stand-down, but unless there'd been serious damage since the last halt Huber figured they'd all pass even rear-area inspection.

  "Central to Sierra Six," the command channel announced. "You're clear to go. Out."

  "Sierra Six to Sierra," said Captain Sangrela. "Execute, troopers!"

  "Go, Tranter!" Huber shouted, thinking that the former technician was waiting for his direct superior to relay the force commander's order.

  Fencing Master was already moving. Tranter had fooled him by the skill with which he coaxed the nacelles into a smooth delivery of power, balancing acceleration against blade angle so perfectly that the speed of the eight fans didn't drop below optimum. Fencing Master lifted from the clay and climbed the hillside as slickly as a
raindrop slides down a windowpane.

  They shot over the brow of the hill. Bright verticals on Huber's faceshield framed the sector Fencing Master was responsible for, the left post on the western spur of the ancient cinder cone fifteen kilometers away.

  To the right Foghorn blasted into view measurable seconds later, its bow skirts nearly a meter above the ground for the instant before gravity reasserted itself. That'll rattle their back teeth, Huber thought, but he had more immediate problems of his own.

  A cyan bolt split the smoke-streaked gloom, whirling helices of ash as it snapped toward the volcano. A gout of white-hot rock spurted from a cave mouth prepared as a firing position.

  Two tanks were hanging back on overwatch while the infantry and the other six armored vehicles charged Fort Freedom at the best speed their fans could drive them. The second tank's bolt lit a secondary explosion, munitions detonating at the ravening touch of a 20-cm powergun. Even at this range, the main guns were capable of destroying anything short of another tank.

  Fencing Master's path across the terrain was as smooth as a flowing river—not straight, but never diverging much from the line Tranter had chosen. The other cars and the two advancing tanks were plumes of ash streaking the sky to eastward; they were falling behind Fencing Master, though not by so much that Huber worried about it. Somebody had to lead the advance, after all, and he guessed that was what he was being paid for.

  The tanks on overwatch, now well to the rear, continued firing, one and then the other. They could hit on the move, but they'd halted so that irregularities of terrain wouldn't mask their fire at some instant it was critically needed. Even the best soldiers and best equipment in the universe—and most of Hammer's troopers would say that meant the Slammers—couldn't keep things from going wrong in battle, but good planning limited the number of opportunities Fate got to screw things up.

  Floosie raked the volcano's eastern margin with two tribarrels. The streams of 2-cm bolts interlaced like jets from a fountain—now crossing, now fanning apart. The impacts sparkled against the lava like dustmotes caught in a shaft of sunlight. At twelve kilometers' range the tribarrels weren't likely to be effective, but Jellicoe always claimed that keeping the other guy's head down was the first rule of survival.