Paying the Piper

by David Drake

  Huber hadn't taken the guns out of air defense mode, though, because there was still a chance that the Firelords would try to carry their enemies with them to Hell. A slim chance. They were all mercenaries; their war was a business, not a holy crusade.

  Sensor suites gave the task force few details of what to expect in the plains below. At this distance electronic and sonic signatures couldn't pinpoint targets, and the cars didn't have a line of sight. Obviously Flasher had the enemy under direct observation, but the link between the tank unit and Highball was too marginal for complex data transmission.

  There shouldn't be a big problem. The artillerymen were so busy getting out of the frying pan that they weren't going to worry about the fire.

  Because of the angle, F-2's cars were in position before Fencing Master tore through the stunted nut trees on the upper slope. Messeman's gunners opened fire while Deseau screamed angry curses at Padova. She ignored him, swinging them with necessary caution around a spur of rock into the position the AI had chosen. Here they'd be sheltered from possible snipers higher up the hill.

  The plains beyond were full of targets. After a volley into their rocket-laden trucks had put the Firelords off-balance, Flasher concentrated on the calliopes in firing positions on the lip of the escarpment. The multi-barreled 3-cm powerguns could be dangerous even to tanks at long range. Main gun bolts had blown all of the calliopes to shimmering vapor before the combat cars nosed over the rise, but there were enough other things to shoot at.

  Huber swung his tribarrel onto a ten-wheeled truck trying to flee through a field of sorghum. He squeezed and watched his plasma snap in cyan brilliance across the bed loaded with bombardment rockets in five forward-slanting racks. Before the third bolt hit, the vehicle erupted into rolling orange fury, searing a black circle from the crops.

  The Firelords had set up between the ridge and the lakeside, shielded from the task force. When the tanks began to rake them from the flank and rear, some of the hundreds of vehicles—not just rocket trucks but also the command, service, and transportation vehicles that an artillery regiment requires—tried to escape west along the lake's margin. Others—the truck Huber hit was one—had climbed out of the bowl and spread out across the fields.

  Another volley of 20-cm bolts lashed the milling chaos, setting off further secondary explosions. The billowing flames and blast-flung debris curtained the survivors to some degree from the tanks fifty, eighty—maybe over a hundred kilometers distant, but the combat cars had good visibility.

  Huber ripped a tank truck. It turned out to be a water purification vehicle, not a fuel tanker, but it gushed steam and began to burn anyway.

  Three white flares burst over the center of the encampment. A man jumped onto the TOC, a cluster of sandbagged trailers, waving a towel—beige, but Huber understood—over his head. All around him was blazing wreckage, but apart from a few hits by 2-cm bolts the TOC had been spared. The Slammers had concentrated on targets that'd give the greatest value in terms of secondary explosions, and there was no lack of those in an artillery regiment.

  "Enemy commander!" said a hoarse voice. Huber's AI noted that the fellow was broadcasting on several frequencies, desperately hoping that one would get through to the gunners shooting his troops like ducks in a barrel. "The Firelords surrender on standard terms. I repeat, we surrender on terms. Cease fire! Cease fire!"

  "Highball, cease fire!" Huber repeated, and as he did so another volley of tank bolts lanced into the lakeside with fresh mushroomings of flame. Flasher couldn't pick up the radio signal—a truckload of exploding rockets had knocked down the transmitter masts—and the white flares could be easily overlooked in the general fiery destruction.

  "Flasher Six!" Huber shouted, the AI switching his transmission to the ionization track system. "Cease fire! All Flasher units, cease fire! They're surrendering!"

  Explosions continued to rumble in the plains below, but the ice-pick sharpness of plasma bolts no longer added to it. Even before they got Huber's warning, the Flasher gunners would've noticed that Highball had stopped firing. A blast had knocked the officer with the towel to his knees, but he kept his hand high and waving.

  "Firelords, this is Slammers command," Huber said, responding on the highest of the frequencies the Firelords had used. He wasn't in command, of course, Flasher Six was, but the tanker couldn't communicate with the poor bastards down below. "We accept your parole. Hold in place until my superiors can make arrangements for your exchange. Ah, that may be several days. We will not, I repeat not, be halting at this location. Slammers over."

  "Roger, Slammers," the enemy commander said, relief and weariness both evident in his voice. "We've got enough to occupy us here for longer than a few fucking days. Can you spare us medical personnel? Over."

  "Negative, Firelords," Huber said. "I hope your next contract works out better for you. Slammers out."

  He lifted off his commo helmet and closed his eyes, letting reaction wash over him. He was exhausted, not from physical exertion—though there'd been plenty of that, jolting around in the fighting compartment during the run—but from the adrenaline blazing in him as shells rained down and he could do nothing but watch and pray his equipment worked.

  He settled the helmet back in place and said, "Booster," to activate the C&C box, "plot our course north from this location."

  On the plains below, fuel and munitions continued to erupt. It didn't make Huber feel much better to realize that the destruction would've been just as bad if those rockets had landed on Task Force Huber instead of going off in their racks.

  * * *

  It was an hour short of full darkness, but stars showed around the eastern horizon; stars, and perhaps one or more of the planet's seven small moons. Sunset silhouetted the three grain elevators a kilometer to the west where monorail lines merged at a railhead. Timers had turned on the mercury vapor lights attached to the service catwalks as the task force arrived, but there was no sign of life in the huge structures or the houses at their base.

  "Suppose we oughta do a little reconnaissance by fire, El-Tee?" Deseau said hopefully. He patted his tribarrel's receiver.

  Padova and Learoyd slept on the ground beside Fencing Master. They hadn't strung the tarp, just spread it over the stubble as a ground cloth. The car's idling drive fans whispered a trooper's lullaby.

  "Do I think you should use up another set of barrels just because you like to see things burn, Frenchie?" Huber said, smiling faintly. "No, I don't. We'll have plenty to shoot at for real in a few hours, don't worry."

  A tribarrel across the perimeter snarled a short burst. Huber jerked his head around, following the line of fire to a flash in the distant sky.

  "Highball, Fox Two-six," Lieutenant Messeman reported. "Air defense splashed an aircar, that's all. Out."

  Probably civilians who hadn't gotten the word that a Slammers task force had driven into the heart of their country. Huber'd lost count of the number of aircars they'd shot down on this run; thirty-odd, he thought, but poppers always washed the past out of his mind. He needed the stimulant a lot more than he needed to remember what was over and done with, that was for sure.

  The tracked excavator whined thunderously as it dug in the second of the six Hogs. The note of its cutting head dopplered up and down, its speed depending on the depth of the cut and the number of rocks in the soil.

  The task force was carrying minimal supplies, so the excavator didn't have plasticizer to add to the earth it spewed in an arc forward of the cut. The berm would still stop small arms and shell fragments. If Battery Alpha needed more than that, the Colonel had lost his gamble and the troopers of Task Force Huber were probably dead meat.

  Lieutenant Basingstoke, half a dozen of his people, and three techs from the recovery vehicle, stood beside the Hog whose starboard fans had cut out twice during the run. Sergeant Tranter had joined them. He wasn't in Maintenance any more, but neither was he a man to ignore a problem he could help with just because it'd stopped being h
is job.

  Huber looked westward. Lights were on in the spaceport seven klicks away, backlighting the smooth hillcrest between it and Task Force Huber.

  He could imagine the panic at Port Plattner, military and civilians reacting to the unexpected threat in as many ways as there were officials involved. They'd be trying to black out the facilities, not that it would make much difference to the Slammers' optics, but they hadn't yet succeeded. The port was designed to be illuminated for round-the-clock ship landings. Nobody'd planned for what to do when a hostile armored regiment drove a thousand kilometers to attack from all sides.

  The sky continued to darken. Huber always felt particularly lonely at night; in daytime he could pretend almost any landscape was a part of Nieuw Friesland that he just hadn't seen before, but the stars were inescapably alien.

  Grinning wryly at himself, he said, "Frenchie, hold the fort till I'm back. I'm going to talk to the redlegs."

  Another thought struck him and he said, "Fox Two-six, this is Six. Join me and Rocker One-six. Out."

  He lifted himself from the fighting compartment as Messeman responded with a laconic, "Roger."

  The cutting head hummed to idle as the excavator backed up the ramp from the gun position it'd just dug. Waddling like a bulldog, it followed the sergeant from the engineer section as he walked backwards to guide it to the next pit. A Hog drove into the just-completed gun position and shut down its fans. The hull was below the original surface level, and the howitzer's barrel slanted up at twenty degrees to clear the berm.

  Huber nodded to the munitions trucks loaded with 200-mm rockets. He said to Lieutenant Basingstoke, "I hope the engineers have time to dig those in too, Lieutenant. After watching what happened to the Firelords when their ammo started going off."

  "If we begin firing at maximum rate . . ." Basingstoke said. He was a tall, hollow-cheeked man. His pale blond hair made him look older than he was, but Huber suspected he'd never really been young. "We'll expend all the ammunition we've carried in less than ten minutes. No doubt that will reduce the risk."

  He smiled like a skull. Huber smiled back when he realized that the artillery officer had made a joke.

  Lieutenant Messeman trotted over, looking back toward his cars and speaking into his commo helmet on the F-2 frequency. He turned and glared at Huber, not really angry but the sort of little man who generally sounded as though he was.

  "Any word on when we'll be moving?" he demanded. "We are moving, aren't we? We're not going to have to nursemaid the artillery while the rest of the Regiment attacks?"

  Basingstoke stiffened. Before he could speak—and they were all tired, but Blood and Martyrs, didn't Messeman have any sense at all?—Huber snapped, "We're going to leave the two combat cars which I determine to be sufficient for air defense, Lieutenant. That's one from each platoon. Personally, I expect to be thankful for all the artillery support we can get when we attack."

  Messeman grimaced but shrugged. "Yeah, I'll leave Two-four. The patch we put on the plenum chamber after the breakout's starting to crack. They can use the time to weld it properly."

  "Seven kilometers," Basingstoke said, glancing to the west. The crest showed up more sharply against the port lighting as the sky darkened. "That's closer to the target than I care to be, but—"

  He gave the other officers another skull smile.

  "—I've been glad to have the combat cars' company for as long as possible, and I realize that means following you to your attack positions."

  Tranter crawled out of an access hatch in the Hog's plenum chamber. He was a big, red-haired man who moved so gracefully that you generally forgot that his right leg was a biomechanical replacement for the one severed when a tank fell off a jack.

  "Got it, Lieutenant!" he called cheerfully to Basingstoke. "They pinched a cable when they replaced your Starboard Three, so when the nacelles're canted hard right you get a short. The wrenches'll have it rerouted in ten minutes."

  "Three-eight'll be staying here with the Hogs, Sergeant," Huber said, looking over his shoulder. The combat cars faced outward around the artillery vehicles. The circuit was too open for defense against serious ground attack but admirably suited to stop incoming shells and possible Solace infiltrators. If the Waldheim Dragoons and the scattering of Militiamen and other mercenaries in Port Plattner mounted an attack before the Regiment was ready to strike, the cars' sensor suites would give Huber sufficient warning to change his dispositions.

  "Roger," Tranter said, nodding. "Ah, El-Tee? Can I swap out Chisum on Three-eight for Stoddard on my car? Stoddard pukes every time he takes a popper, so he's pretty washed out after this run."

  "Right, the cars here'll be in air defense mode unless a lot of wheels fall off," Huber said, frowning to hear that Stoddard couldn't take stimulants. That didn't handicap a trooper quite as badly as blindness would, but it wasn't something a platoon leader wanted to hear about a useful man. "Want me to . . . ?"

  "I'll tell him," Tranter said, throwing Huber a brilliant smile again as he strode off to inform Chisum and Gabinus, Three-eight's commander. Tranter wore a slip-over shoe on his right foot to raise it to the height of the boot on his left, giving his leg movements an unbalanced look.

  The excavator started on a fifth gun pit. Messeman watched a Hog slide into the one just completed with the delicacy required by tight quarters. He said, "Ah, Six? Will we be getting a view of the target before we go in?"

  "What I've been told," Huber said, "is that they'll launch a commo and observation constellation just before we drop the hammer. They're estimating that the new satellites will survive two minutes, certainly no more than five. That's why they're saving it till everything's ready."

  Messeman sighed. "Sure, makes sense," he said. "I like to tell my people what we're getting into, that's all."

  "Tell them there's nobody on the planet as good as they are, Lieutenant," Huber said. His glance took in Lieutenant Basingstoke as well. "We proved that getting here. Tell them one more push and we'll be able to stand down."

  Messeman and Basingstoke nodded agreement; Huber gave them a thumbs-up and headed back to Fencing Master.

  It was true, as far as it went: one push and a stand-down.

  If they survived.

  And until the next time.

  * * *

  Automatic weapons had been firing from the port area at intervals ever since sunset three hours ago. Occasional tracers ricocheted high enough to be seen over the hills. Less often, a tribarrel flickered across the cloud bases like distant cyan lightning. That'd be another task force splashing an aircar or something equally insignificant . . . except for the poor bastards on the receiving end.

  The alert signal at the upper left corner of Huber's faceshield was the first message he'd gotten from Central since the fire mission before they'd reached the Solace Highlands. He let out his breath in a gasp.

  There might not have been a Central any more. Base Alpha might have fallen and the Solace forces begun mopping up the Slammers task force by task force, bringing to bear as much weight as they needed to crush each hard nut. Huber'd kept his fear below the surface of his mind, but it'd been there nonetheless.

  "All units, prepare to receive orders and target information," said a voice as emotionless as the surf on a rocky shore. "Don't get ahead of your start times, and once you commit don't, I repeat do not, stop shooting until you're told to. Regiment One out."

  The data dump started at once, progressing for thirty seconds instead of concluding instantaneously. Satellite reconnaissance was updating the information at the same time those satellites transmitted it to the Regiment's scattered elements. Port Plattner, an oval five kilometers by three, expanded on the Command and Control display. There'd been six warehouse complexes spaced about the perimeter when the satellites shut down thirty-six hours before; now there was a seventh beside the huge starship on northwest edge, twelve large temporary buildings with more under construction.

  "Regiment One? That's Major Steub
en," Deseau muttered, unusually worried for him. "Is he in fucking charge now?"

  "Shut up, Frenchie," Huber snapped as he scrolled through the download. He was more irritated than he'd have been if a newbie like Padova had made the comment. Deseau should've known they didn't have enough data to guess what was going on. Steuben might be in command of Base Alpha because his White Mice were defending it, but that didn't mean the Colonel and Major Pritchard were casualties.

  It didn't mean they weren't casualties, either.

  "Right!" Huber muttered when he had the situation clear. At least it was clear enough that he knew staring at it longer wasn't going to change anything in a good way. "Red and Blue elements—"

  F-2 and F-3 respectively, each with a squad of infantry in support.

  "—will proceed to designated positions on the reverse slope—"

  The download from Central set out the east side of the terminal building as the general objective for Highball's action elements, but Central hadn't known what strength Huber would have available for the attack. Huber's C&C box had broken the assignment into individual targets. Losing two cars and six infantry was probably better than Operations had calculated, though under normal circumstances twenty percent was a horrendous casualty rate.

  "—and hold there till two-two-three-seven hours, when—"

  Battery Alpha opened fire, loosing thunder and the long crackling lightning of sustainer motors as the missiles streaked west so low that they barely cleared the ridgeline. The Hogs rocked from the backblasts, slamming their skirts against the hard clay substrate.

  "—we'll cross the crest and attack our objectives at forty kph. White element under Sergeant Marano—"

  The remaining two combat cars and eleven infantry—some of whom were walking wounded only if they didn't have to walk very far.