Paying the Piper

by David Drake

  Looking eastward toward a dirigible unloading what seemed to be empty shipping containers, Deseau went on, "I wish to hell they'd let us go when the local cops arrived. They can handle anything that's left, can't they?"

  Dirigibles full of Gendarmes and the supplies needed for an open-air prison had begun arriving within a few hours of the collapse of Volunteer resistance. Huber, and Captain Sangrela, and probably every other trooper in the task force, had thought Sierra would be released immediately. The optimists had even hoped they'd be sent back by way of Midway, with a few days of leave as a reward.

  Surviving a major engagement like the one just completed made even level-headed troopers optimistic.

  Central hadn't felt that way. Sierra had stayed where it was for the three days it took for a column from Base Alpha to reach them.

  "It won't be long, Frenchie," Huber said. He quirked a smile. "It shouldn't be long, anyhow."

  There were worse places, just as Learoyd said, but this was bad enough in all truth. The Slammers had snagged tents from the loads brought in to house the prisoners, but they didn't help much. You could keep the rain from falling on you, but the ditches the troopers dug around the tents hadn't been enough to stop streams of ash-clogged water from finding their way in from below and soaking everything.

  Huber looked over at the POW camp which lay between Task Force Sangrela's defensive circle and the slopes of what had for a short time been Fort Freedom; it was now Mount Bulstrode again. The prisoners had it worse than the troopers did, of course. There wouldn't have been enough tents to go around even if the Slammers hadn't imposed their tax on defeat, but accommodations weren't what was probably worrying the former Volunteers. The Slammers knew they'd be leaving within a few days, maybe even a few hours. The prisoners weren't sure they'd be alive in a few hours.

  "Sierra," said Huber's commo helmet in the voice of the signals officer of the approaching column, "this is Flamingo Six-three. We'll be in sight in figures two, I say again, two, minutes. Don't get anxious. Flamingo out."

  "Stupid bitch," Deseau muttered. "The only thing I'm anxious about is getting away from this bloody place. And if they'd got the lead outa their pants, that could've happened yesterday."

  Huber's opinion was similar enough that he didn't bother telling Frenchie to cool it. You never get relieved as quickly as you want to be. . . .

  He wondered if Sierra would be allowed to pick its own route back through the unburned forest, or if in the interests of speed they'd have to return across the fire-swept wasteland. The downpour would've quenched the hotspots, but the filthy sludge the vehicles'd be kicking up in its place wouldn't be much of an improvement.

  Huber chuckled. Deseau gave him a sour look.

  "Don't mind me, Frenchie," he said. "I'm just thinking that I went into the wrong line of work if I wanted luxury travel arrangements."

  "Guess they had to keep us," Learoyd said, nodding toward the waste of mud and tents and captured Volunteers. "I mean, if them guys tried to break out, what was the cops gonna do about it?"

  Learoyd was right, as he usually was when he offered an opinion. Squads of Gendarmes patrolled the perimeter of the vast razor-ribbon cage. Six or eight strands of wire were strung on flimsy poles only two meters out of the ground; all things considered, it wasn't much of a barrier. The Point didn't have the resources to deal with the sudden influx of over five thousand prisoners.

  The Gendarmes had carbines and pistols. If they'd hoped to supplement those with automatic weapons captured from the Volunteers, they were out of luck. Every crew-served weapon in Fort Freedom had been brought out to face the Slammers, and none of them had survived. For the most part, the sharp-shooting tanks had destroyed the emplacements before the Slammers were in range of the defenders' return fire.

  If the prisoners, many of whom were rightly desperate, made a concerted rush on the fence, a few hundred Gendarmes weren't going to stop them. The Slammers' massed fire would, and the certainty the powerguns would hose the camp indiscriminately meant that prisoners who didn't want to try a breakout were going to be bloody determined to keep their wilder fellows in line also.

  "Via, where's there to run to?" Deseau said. He spat toward the camp a hundred meters away, then started to shrug out of his poncho after all.

  "Back into the tunnels, for one thing," Huber said. "There might be enough guns down there to equip a division. It won't be safe till the support column comes up with the gas cylinders."

  "That what they're doing, El-Tee?" Deseau said, his tone bright with interest. "Pump the place full of gas?"

  Huber shrugged. "Nobody's appointed me to the staff," he said, "but that'd be standard operating procedure: fill the tunnels with KD1 or another of the persistent agents and forget about 'em."

  Sledges had been ringing on iron posts as prisoners constructed a narrow chute from the eastern end of the camp. An off-key whang indicated a hammer'd hit skew and broken the helve. A Gendarme shouted in a tone of anger tinged with fear, drawing the three troopers' attention.

  "Naw, nothing," Deseau muttered, lifting the muzzles of his tribarrel a safe fifteen degrees again so that the weapon wouldn't hit anything in the vicinity if it fired accidentally. "Them cops, they're ready to piss their pants they're so scared."

  Twenty Gendarmes guarded a crew of no more than fifty prisoners driving posts and stringing the wire. They seemed nervous to Huber, also. Maybe they knew what was planned and were afraid of what would happen when the prisoners learned also.

  "Sierra, this is Flamingo Six-three," the voice said. "We're coming into sight. Flamingo out."

  The vehicles of the task force were bows-out in a defensive circle, though the formation was looser than it'd have been if there were a real likelihood of attack. Instead of turning his head, Huber switched the upper left quadrant of his faceshield to the view from Floosie at the opposite side of the formation.

  A combat car slid over the ridgeline where Sierra had launched its assault on Fort Freedom. Three similar vehicles followed, then a dozen air-cushion trucks, and after them two wrenchmobiles modified to carry troops. The last vehicle in line was a command car.

  "It's the White Mice," Deseau said. From the tone of his voice, Huber thought he might be about to spit. "You know, I was kinda hoping I wouldn't see them again for a while."

  "If they're relieving us," Learoyd said, "I don't care who they are."

  "Yeah, I guess that's right," Deseau said; but Huber wasn't sure he agreed.

  Some prisoners drifted toward the south edge of their camp, interested in the column as a break in their miserable routine and probably also concerned about what it might mean. Huber noticed that others of the former Volunteers were disappearing into tents. He didn't know what they expected to gain by that, but he understood the impulse.

  A dozen civilians had come in by aircar a few hours before. They wore hooded raincapes even now that the sun was out, but Huber had raised his faceshield's magnification until he was sure of what he'd suspected: one of the newcomers was Speaker Nestilrode, and he recognized two others as cabinet ministers he'd seen when he entered the Assembly with Captain Orichos.

  Now they came out of Orichos' tent. She and the Speaker shook hands; then the civilians strode quickly to their car without a backward glance.

  Orichos sauntered toward the chute of razor ribbon. Perhaps she felt Huber's eyes on her because she turned her head and waved before she walked on.

  Deseau snickered. "She fancies you, El-Tee," he said.

  "Balls," Huber muttered. Orichos had been running the operation ever since enough Gendarmes had arrived to take primary responsibility from Task Force Sierra. The route march had been just as hard on her as on the Slammers, and so far as Huber'd seen she hadn't had a moment's downtime since. Despite that, Orichos looked as coolly fresh as she'd been the night a lifetime ago when Joachim Steuben introduced her at Northern Star.

  Learoyd looked over his shoulder at Huber. "He's right, El-Tee," he said. "She does."<
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  Huber shrugged rather than speaking. He didn't know what to say because he didn't know what he thought. He figured if he pretended not to care, they'd drop the subject.

  There was motion in the near distance eastward. "Hey, what d'ye suppose that's all about?" Frenchie said, swinging his tribarrel both as a pointer and out of judicious concern.

  Six dirigibles hovered a half kilometer east of the enclosure. Slung beneath them were bar-sided containers like those Huber had seen transporting livestock from the feedlots of Solace to the United Cities where they'd be slaughtered. The props of one of the big airships began to turn at a slightly faster rate than what was necessary to hold position against the breeze. It crawled closer to the camp, its empty containers bonging occasionally when they touched the ground.

  Instead of halting to coordinate with Task Force Sangrela, the A Company combat cars drove past the defensive circle and continued around the east side of the prisoner cage. Their skirts squirted water and gray sludge in jets punctuated by the furrows in the soil. Prisoners putting the finishing touches on the chute dropped their tools and scuttled away from the spray.

  "Fox Three-six to Sierra Six," Huber said. "Any word what we're supposed to be doing? Over."

  The cars' passage splashed the guards as well. A Gendarme officer retrieved the hat that'd been blown into a puddle and shook his fist at the big vehicles. Deseau snickered and said, "Bad move. Could've been a real bad move if the dumb bastard'd decided to wave his gun instead."

  "Sierra, this is Six," Captain Sangrela said, replying to the whole unit. "I've been told we're to hold ourselves in readiness to support Flamingo as required. If that sounds to you like, 'Go play, kiddies, while the big boys get on with business,' then you've got company thinking that. Six out!"

  The incoming infantry drove their skimmers off while the wrenchmobiles were still slowing. Huber noticed with some amusement that they didn't perform the operation as smoothly as Captain Sangrela's troopers had. The White Mice were real soldiers as well as being the Regiment's police and enforcers, but they didn't use skimmers nearly as much as the line infantry did.

  The newcomers began to deploy along the southern length of the cage. There were only forty of them, so that meant almost ten meters between individuals. They carried 1-cm sub-machine guns rather than a mix of the automatic weapons with 2-cm shoulder weapons.

  Deseau must've been thinking along the same lines as Huber was, because he said, "Blow apart the first man who moves with one a' these—"

  He patted the receiver of the 2-cm weapon wedged muzzle-down beside his position between two ammo boxes and the armor.

  "—and you quiet a mob a lot faster than spraying it with a buzz-gun."

  Learoyd looked at him. "Did you ever do that, Frenchie?" he said. "To a mob?"

  Huber kept his frown inside his head. You didn't generally ask another trooper about his past. Learoyd had an utter, undoubted innocence that allowed him to say things nobody else could get away with . . . and a lack of mental wattage that made it very likely he would.

  Deseau said nothing for a moment, then shrugged. He nodded to Huber, explicitly including him, and said, "Naw, that was back on Helpmeet when I was a kid, Learoyd. I was on the other side of the powergun, you see. So when things quieted down, I joined the Regiment before they shipped out again."

  The moving dirigible settled so that all three containers dragged, then detached them. The center box stuck momentarily. The airship bounced upward when the weight of the other two released, so the third clanged loudly to the ground when it finally dropped. It hit on a corner which bent upward, kinking the bars.

  "Good thing it wasn't full of cattle," Huber muttered, frowning at the thought of broken legs and beasts bellowing in pain and terror. Now that he'd seen dirigibles in operation, he realized that they were about as unwieldy a form of transportation as humans had come up with. Useful here on Plattner's World, though.

  "The cows're gonna be killed anyway, El-Tee," Deseau said. "It don't matter much, right?"

  "Maybe not," Huber said; not agreeing, just ending a discussion that didn't have anywhere useful to go. Maybe nothing at all mattered, but on a good day Arne Huber didn't feel that way.

  The command car pulled up alongside the chute, making a half turn so that its bow angled toward the camp proper. Though it was an hour short of sunset and the clouds had cleared, the driver switched on his headlights. In their beams the strands of razor ribbon glittered like jagged icicles. Two troopers with sub-machine guns got out of the vehicle and walked over to the wire.

  "Prisoners of Hammer's Regiment!" a voice boomed through the command car's loudspeakers. "You will walk in line through the passage at the southeast corner of this camp. As you pass my vehicle—"

  The whip antenna on top of the car glowed, becoming a wand of soft red light.

  "—you will turn to face it. Then you will walk on to the containers in which you'll be transported to Midway. There you'll be released."

  The words were being repeated on the north side of the POW encampment. It wasn't an echo from the volcano, as Huber thought for a moment. The A Company combat cars were relaying the speech through their public address systems.

  "Who's that in the car?" Deseau said. From the way his eyes were narrowed, he already knew the answer to his question.

  "It sounds like Major Steuben," Huber said. "As you'd expect."

  A full company of Gendarmes stood by the shipping containers. Mauricia Orichos was among them, her hands linked behind her back. Huber had been watching her as Steuben spoke. Orichos hadn't been best pleased at the words, "Prisoners of Hammer's Regiment."

  That was tough. She knew she'd been the only member of the Point forces present when Fort Freedom fell. The Slammers had taken these prisoners, and if the Gendarmery wanted to get snooty about it, the Slammers could take the prisoners away from their present guards any time they wanted to.

  A prisoner bellowed something toward the car. Though he made a megaphone of his hands, Huber couldn't catch the word or brief phrase.

  Steuben did, however. The loudspeakers boomed, "A gentleman has expressed doubt that you will actually be released. Let me assure you, mesdames and sirs, that if I wished to kill you all I would not bother with play acting. When you get to Midway, you will be told to sin no more and be released."

  The trucks had unloaded their pallets of black-banded gas cylinders. Five of them shut down. The sixth lifted and lumbered past Task Force Sangrela to settle again beside the command car. The driver opened the cab door and stood on his mounting step, looking at the camp. Another squad of White Mice dismounted from the back and walked over to the chute.

  "Very well," the PA system thundered. Amplification softened Steuben's clipped tones, making his words sound pompous. Huber found the contrast with the real man chilling. "Start coming through. The sooner you get moving, the sooner we can all get on to more congenial tasks."

  A prisoner near the front looked around, then shambled into the chute. One of the White Mice reached an arm over the wire to halt the man in the headlights. His head rose in surprise and sudden fear.

  "Keep going!" the amplified voice ordered.

  The trooper's arm dropped; the prisoner jogged the rest of the way to where Gendarmes herded him into the first container. Several more prisoners followed, shuffling forward in a mixture of desperation and apathy.

  "I suggest reconsideration on the part of anyone who thinks he'll remain in the tents," Steuben continued, the catlike humor of his tone coming through despite mechanical distortion. "We're going to destroy the entire site, starting at the north side. We can see you through cloth as surely as we'll be able to see you in the dead of night, so don't be foolish."

  There was a hollow boop, then a second later a white flash and a shattering crash. A second boop, Wham! followed immediately. Troopers in the combat cars on the north side were firing grenade launchers into the tents.

  Thermal viewing would show any holdouts, so there w
as no need for the grenades. Major Steuben was just making a point, to the Gendarmes as surely as to the captive Volunteers.

  "Sierra, this is Flamingo Six-three," said the A Company signals officer. "Fox Three-six is to report to the command car ASAP. Out."

  Deseau and Learoyd both looked at Huber. From the driver's compartment, Sergeant Tranter said over the intercom, "El-Tee? What's going on?"

  Huber cued his intercom and said, "Curst if I know, Sarge. I'll tell you when I get back. Assuming."

  He swung his left leg over the armor, then paused. He unclipped the sling of his 2-cm weapon from the epaulet and offered the big gun to Learoyd, saying, "Trade me, will you, Herbert?"

  "Sure, sir," the trooper said. He took the 2-cm weapon and slapped the butt of his sub-machine gun into Huber's palm.

  Deseau cackled like a demon. "Handier inside a car, eh, El-Tee?" he said.

  Huber climbed the rest of the way out of the fighting compartment, then hopped from the plenum chamber to the ground. He started grinning also. You might as well see the humor in the screwed-up way things worked. It didn't change things; but then, nothing did change them.

  He started toward the command car, his boots squelching and tossing mud up his pants leg with each stride. He didn't look over his shoulder to see the troopers of Task Force Sangrela watching him, but the Gendarmes watched and the driver of the big air-cushion truck stared down from the cab with a puzzled expression.

  Grenades continued to crash on the north side of the camp. They'd started several fires; the sluggish flames gave off curls of black smoke.

  Enough prisoners had passed through the chute that the cage meant for twenty cattle was what Huber would've called full. The Gendarmes seemed happy to pack more in. Well, if the former Volunteers had nothing worse in their future than an uncomfortable airship ride, they were luckier than they deserved to be.

  "That one," the loudspeaker ordered crisply. A low-intensity laser stabbed from the mount of the command car's tribarrel. Its yellow dot quivered like a suppurating boil on the cheek of the bald-headed man nearing the end of the chute.