by David Drake
Both of them.
"Hey, maybe the next time," Tyl said with a false smile and a playful tap on the shoulder of the man who wasn't a stranger anymore.
Several boats—hovercraft too small to haul more than a dozen men and their luggage—were putting out from Bamberg City, spraying their way toward the island with an enthusiasm that suggested they were racing.
Tyl's view of them was unexpectedly cut off when a huge surface-effect freighter slid in front of the shelter and settled.The freighter looked like a normal subsonic aircraft, but its airfoils were canted to double their lift by skimming over water or smooth ground. The bird couldn't really fly, but it could carry a thousand tonnes of cargo at 200 kph—a useful trade-off between true ships and true aircraft.
"Traders from Two,"Desoix explained as men began scuttling from the freighter before its hydraulic outriggers had time to lock it firmly onto the pad."They circle at a safe distance from the island while the starships are landing. Then, if they're lucky, they beat the Bamberg factors to the pad with the first shot at a deal."
He shrugged."And if their luck's really out, there's another starship on its way in about the time they tie up. Doesn't take much of a shock wave to make things real interesting aboard one of those."
Tyl squinted at the men scuttling from the surface-effect vehicle. Several of those waiting in the shelter were joining them, babbling and waving documents. "Say, those guys 're—"
"Yeah, rag-heads," Desoix agreed. "I mean, I'm sure they're in church every day, kissing crosses and all the proper things, but . . . yeah, they're looking at some problems if President Delcorio gets his crusade going."
"Well, that's what we're here for," Tyl said, looking around horizons that were hemmed by starships to the back and side and the surface-effect vehicle before him.
"Now," he added, controlling his grimace, "how do we get to the mainland if we're not cargo?"
"Ah, but we are," Desoix noted as he raised the briefcase that seemed to be all the luggage he carried. "Just not very valuable cargo, my friend. But I think it's about time to—"
As he started toward the door, one of the hovercars they'd watched put out from the city drove through the mingled cluster of men from the starships and the surface freighter. Water from the channel surrounded the car in a fine mist that cleared its path better than the threat of its rubber skirts. While the driver in his open cab exchanged curses with men from the surface freighter, the rear of his vehicle opened to disgorge half a dozen civilians in bright garments.
"Our transportation," Desoix said, nodding to the hovercar as he headed out of the shelter. "Now that it's dropped off the Bamberg factors to fight for their piece of the market. Everybody's got tobacco, and everybody wants a share of what may be the last cargoes onto the planet for a while."
"Before the shooting starts," Tyl amplified as he strode along with the UDB officer. They hadn't sent a briefing cube to Miesel for him . . . but it didn't take that or a genius to figure out what was going to happen shortly after a world started hiring mercenary regiments.
"That's the betting," Desoix agreed. He opened the back of the car with his universal credit key, a computer chip encased in noble metal and banded to his wrist.
"Oh," said Tyl, staring at the keyed door.
"Yeah, everything's up to date here in Bamberg," said the other officer, stepping out of the doorway and waving Tyl through. "Hey!"he called to the driver. "My friend here's on me!"
"I can—" Tyl said.
"—delay us another ten minutes,"Desoix broke in,"trying to charge this one to the Hammer account or pass the driver scrip from Lord knows where."
He keyed the door a second time and swung into the car, both men moving with the trained grace of soldiers who knew how to get on and off air-cushion vehicles smoothly—because getting hung up was a good way to catch a round.
"Goes to the UDB account anyway," Desoix added. "Via, maybe we'll need a favor from you one of these days."
"I'm just not set up for this place, coming off furlough," Tyl explained. "It's not like, you know, Colonel Hammer isn't on top of things."
The driver fluffed his fans and the car began to cruise in cautious arcs around the starships, looking for other passengers. All the men they saw were busy with merchants or with the vessels themselves, preparing the rails and gantries that would load the vacuum-sealed one-tonne bales of Bamberg tobacco when the factors had struck their deals.
No one looked at the car with more than idle interest. The driver spun his vehicle back into the channel with a lurch and building acceleration.
Chapter Two
"One thing," Desoix said, looking out the window even though the initial spray cloaked the view. "Money's no problem here. Any banking booth can access Hammer's account and probably your account back home if it's got a respondent on one of the big worlds. Perfectly up to date. But, ah, don't talk to anybody here about religion, all right?"
He met Tyl's calm eyes."No matter how well you know them, you don't know them that well. Here. And don't go out except wearing your uniform. They don't bother soldiers, especially mercs; but somebody might make a mistake if you were in civilian clothes."
Their vehicle was headed for the notch in the sea cliffs. It was a river mouth as Tyl had assumed from the spaceport, but human engineering had overwhelmed everything natural about the site. The river was covered and framed into a triangular plaza by concrete seawalls as high as those reinforcing the corniche.
Salt water from the tide-choked sea even now gleamed on the plaza, just as it was streaming from the spaceport. Figures—women as well as men,Tyl thought, though it was hard to be sure between the spray and the loose costumes they wore—were pouring into the plaza as fast as the water had left it.
For the most part the walls were sheer and ten meters high, but there were broad stairs at each apex of the plaza—two along the seaside east and west and a third, defended by massive flood works, that must have been built over the channel of the river itself.
"What's the problem?" Tyl asked calmly. From what he'd read, the battle lines on Bamberia were pretty clearly drawn. The planetary government was centered on Continent One—wealthy and very centralized,because the Pink River drained most of the arable land on the continent. All the uniquely flavorful Bamberg tobacco could be barged at minimal cost to Bamberg City and loaded in bulk onto starships.
There hadn't been much official interest in Continent Two for over a century after the main settlement. There was good land on Two, but it was patchy and not nearly as easy to develop profitably as One proved.
That didn't deter other groups who saw a chance that looked good by their standards. Small starships touched down in little market centers. Everything was on a lesser scale: prices, quantities, and profit margins . . . .
But in time, the estimated total grew large enough for the central government to get interested. Official trading ports were set up on the coast of Two. Local tobacco was to be sent from them to Bamberg City, to be assessed and transshipped.
Some was; but the interloping traders continued to land in the back country, and central government officials gnashed their teeth over tax revenues that were all the larger for being illusory.
It didn't help that One had been settled by Catholic Fundamentalists from Germany and Latin America, and that the squatters on Two were almost entirely Levantine Muslims.
The traders didn't care. They had done their business in holographic entertainment centers and solar-powered freezers, but there was just as much profit in powerguns and grenades.
As for mercenaries like Alois Hammer—and Tyl Koopman . . . They couldn't be said not to care; because if there wasn't trouble, they didn't have work.
Not that Tyl figured there was much risk of galactic peace being declared.
Desoix laughed without even attempting to make the sound humorous."Well," he said, "do you know when Easter is?"
"Huh?" said Tyl. "My family wasn't, you know, real religious . . . and an
yway, do you mean on Earth or here or where?"
"That's the question, isn't it?" Desoix answered, glancing around the empty cabin just to be sure there couldn't be a local listening to him.
"Some folks here," he continued, "figure Easter according to Earth-standard days.You can tell them because they've always got something red in their clothing, acapora ribbon around their sleeve if nothing else.And the folks that say,'We're on Bamberia so God meant us to use Bamberg days to figure his calendar . . . well, they wear black."
"And the people who wear cloaks, black or red," Desoix concluded. "Make sure they know you're a soldier. Because they'd just as soon knock your head in as that of any policeman or citizen—but they won't, because they know that killing soldiers gets expensive fast."
Tyl shook his head. "I'd say I didn't believe it," he said with the comfortable superiority of somebody commenting on foolishness to which he doesn't subscribe."But sure,it's no screwier than a lot of places.People don't need a reason to have problems, they make their own."
"And they hire us," agreed Desoix.
"Well, they hire us to give 'em more control over the markets on Two,"Tyl said, not quite arguing. "This time around."
Their vehicle was approaching the plaza.It stood two meters above the channel, barely eye-height to the men in the back of the hovercar. A pontoon-mounted landing stage slid with the tides in a vertical slot in the center of the dam blocking the river beneath the plaza; the car slowed as they approached the stage.
"If they dam the river—" Tyl started to say, because he wouldn't have commanded a company of the Slammers had he not assessed the terrain about him as a matter of course.
Before Desoix could answer, slotted spillways opened at either end of the dam and whipped the channel into froth with gouts of fresh water under enough pressure to fling it twenty meters from the concrete. The hovercar, settling as it made its final approach to the stage, bobbed in the ripples; the driver must have been cursing the operator who started to drain the impoundment now instead of a minute later.
"Hydraulics they know about," Desoix commented as their vehicle grounded on the stage with a blip of its fans and the pontoons rocked beneath them."They can't move the city—it's here because of the river, floods or no. But for twenty kilometers upstream, they've built concrete levees. When the tides peak every three months or so—as they just did—they close the gates here and divert the river around Bamberg City."
He pointed up the coast. "When the tide goes down a little, they vent water through the main channel again until everything's normal. In about two days, they can let barges across to the spaceport."
The hovercar's door opened, filling the back with the roar of the water jetting from a quarter kilometer to either side. "Welcome to Bamberg City," Desoix shouted over the background as he motioned Tyl ahead of him.
The Slammers officer paused outside the vehicle to slip on his pack again.
Steel-mesh stairs extended through the landing stage,up to the plaza—but down into the water as well: they did not move with the stage or the tides, and they were dripping and as slick as wet, polished metal could be.
"No gear?" he asked his companion curiously. Desoix waved his briefcase. "Some, but I'm leaving it to be off loaded with the gun. Remember, I'm travelling with a whole curst calliope."
"Well,you must be glad to have it back,"said Tyl as he gripped the slick railing before he attempted the steps.
"Not as glad as my battery commander, Major Borodin," Desoix said with a chuckle."It was his ass, not mine, if the Merrinet authorities had decided to keep it till it grew whiskers."
"But—" he added over the clang of his boots and Tyl's as they mounted the stairs "—he's not a bad old bird, the major, and he cuts me slack that not every CO might be willing to do."
The stairs ended on a meter-wide walkway that was part of the plaza but separated from it by a low concrete building, five meters on the side parallel to the dam beneath it and narrower in the other dimension. On top, facing inward to the plaza, was an ornate, larger than life crucifix.
Tyl hesitated, uncertain as to which way to walk around the building. He'd expected somebody from his unit to be waiting here on the mainland if not at the spaceport itself. He was feeling alone again. The raucous babble of locals setting up sales kiosks on the plaza increased his sense of isolation.
"Either way," Desoix said, putting a hand on the other man's shoulder—in comradeship as well as direction. "This is just the mechanical room for the locks except—"
Desoix leaned over so that his lips were almost touching Tyl's ear and said, "Except that it's the altar of Christ the Redeemer, if you ask anybody here. I really put my foot in it when I tried to get permission to site one of my guns on it. Would've been a perfect place to cover the sea approaches, but it seems that they'd rather die here than have their cross moved.
"Of course," the UDB officer added, a professional who didn't want another professional to think that he'd done a bad job of placing his guns, "I found an all-right spot on a demolition site just east of here."
Desoix nodded toward the thronged steps at the eastern end of the plaza."Not quite the arc of fire, but nothing we can't cover from the other guns. Especially now we've got Number Five back."
In the time it had taken the hovercar to navigate from the spaceport to the mainland, a city of small shops had sprung up in the plaza. Tyl couldn't imagine the development could be orderly—but it was, at least to the extent that a field of clover has order, because the individual plants respond to general stimuli that force them into patterns.
There were city police present, obvious from their peaked caps, green uniforms, and needle stunners worn on white cross-belts . . . but they were not organizing the ranks of kiosks. Men and women in capes were doing that; and after a glance at their faces, Tyl didn't need Desoix to tell him how tough they thought they were.
They just might be right, too; but things have a way of getting a lot worse than anybody expected, and it was then that you got a good look at what you and the rest of your crew were really made of.
Traffic in the plaza was entirely pedestrian. Vehicles were blocked from attempting the staircases at either seafront corner by massive steel bollards, and the stairs at the remaining apex were closed by what seemed to be lockworks as massive as those venting the river beneath the plaza. They'd have to be, Tyl realized, because there needed to be some way of releasing water from the top of its levee-channeled course in event of an emergency.
But that wasn't a problem for Captain Tyl Koopman just now.What he needed was somebody wearing the uniform of Hammer's Slammers, and he sure as blazes didn't see such in all this throng.
"Ah," he said, "Lieutenant . . . do you—"
The transceiver implanted in his mastoid bone beeped,and an unfamiliar voice began to answer Tyl's question before he had fully formed it.
"Transit Base to Captain Tyl Koopman," said the implant, scratchy with static and the frustration of the man at the other end of the radio link."CaptainKoopman, are you reading me? Over."
Tyl felt a rush of relief as he willed his left little finger to crook. The finger didn't move, but the redirected nerve impulse triggered the transmitter half of his implant. "Koopman to Transit," he said harshly. "Where in blazes are you, anyway? Over."
"Sir," said the voice, "this is Sergeant Major Scratchard, and you don't need to hear that I'm sorry about the cock-up. There's an unscheduled procession, and I can't get into the main stairs until it's over. If you'll tell me where you are, I swear I'll get t' you as soon as the little boys put away their crosses and let the men get back to work."
"I'm—" Tyl began. Desoix was turned half aside to indicate that he knew of the conversation going on and knew it wasn't any of his business. That gave the Slammers officer the mental base he needed for a reasoned decision rather than nervously agreeing to wait in place.
"All, sir," Scratchard continued; he'd paused but not broken the transmission. "There's a load of st
uff for you here from Central. The colonel wants you to read the draft over when you report to Two. And, ah, the President, ah,Delcorio,wants to see you ASAP because you're the ranking officer now. Over."
"The main stairs," Tyl said, aloud rather than sub-vocalizing the way he had done thus far through the implant. Desoix could hear him. To underscore that he wanted the UDB officer to listen, Tyl pointed toward the empty stairs at the third apex. "That's at the end farthest from the sea, then?"
Desoix nodded. Scratchard's voice said, "Ah, Yes sir," through the static.
"Fine, I'll meet you there when you can get through," Tyl said flatly. "I'm in uniform and I have one pack is all. Koopman out."
He smiled to Desoix."It'll give me a chance to look around,"he explained. Now that his unit had contacted him he felt confident—whole, for the first time in . . . Via, in six months, just about.
Desoix smiled back. "Well, you shouldn't have any real problems here," he said. "But—" his head tilted, just noticeably, in the direction of three red-cloaked toughs "—don't forget what I told you. Myself, I'm going to check Number Three gun so long as I'm down on the corniche anyway. See you around, soldier."
"See you around,"Tyl agreed confidently. He grinned at his surroundings with a tourist's vague interest. Captain Tyl Koopman was home again, or he would be in a few minutes.
Chapter Three
Charles Desoix thought about the House of Grace as he mounted the eastern stairs from the plaza. The huge hospital building, Bishop Trimer's latest but not necessarily last attempt to impose his presence on Bamberg City, was about all a man could see as he left the plaza in this direction. For that matter, the twenty glittering stories of the House of Grace were the only portions of the city visible from the floor of the plaza, over the seawalls.
It was like looking at a block of blue ice; and it was the only thing about being stationed in Bamberg City that Desoix could really have done without. But the Bishop certainly wasn't enough of a problem that Desoix intended to transfer to one of the batteries out in the boonies on Two, rumbling through valleys you could be sure the rag-heads had mined and staked for snipers.