by David Drake
The pockmark in the ceramic plate had a metallic sheen, and there were highlights of glittering metal in the blood covering the backs of both Suilin's hands. When the bullet hit the clamshell armor and broke up, fragments splashed forward and clawed the reporter's bare hands.
He rose, pushing himself up with his arms. For a moment, his hands burned and there were ice picks in his neck and lower back.
Coolness spreading outward from his chest washed over the pain. There were colored tabs on the breast of the armor. Suilin had thought they were decorations, but the one Cooter had pulled was obviously releasing medication into Suilin's system.
Thank the Lord for that.
He picked up the grenade launcher and reloaded it. Shock, drugs, and the tiny bits of metal that winked when he moved his fingers made him clumsy, but he did it.
Like working against a deadline. Your editor didn't care why you hadn't filed on time; so you worked when you were hung over, when you had flu . . . .
When your father died before you had had time to clear things up with him. When your wife left you because you didn't care about her, only your cursed stories.
Dick Suilin raised his eyes and his ready weapon just as both the combat car and the immediate universe opened up with a breathtaking inferno of fire.
They'd reached the Headquarters of Camp Progress.
It was a three-story building at the southern end of the encampment. Nothing separated the pagoda-roofed structure from the berm except the camp's peripheral road. The berm here, like the hundred-meter square in front of the building, had been sodded and was manicured daily.
There were bodies sprawled on the grass. Suilin didn't have time to look at them,because lights flared in several ground-floor windows as Consies launched buzzbombs and ducked back.
The grenade launcher's dull report was lost in the blurred crackling of the three tribarrels, but the reporter knew he'd gotten his round away as fast as the veterans had theirs.
Unlike the rest of Camp Progress, the Headquarters building was a masonry structure. At least a dozen powerguns were raking the two lower floors. Though the stones spattered out pebbles and molten glass at every impact, the walls themselves held and continued to protect the Consies within them.
The grenade was a black dot against the window lighted by bolts from the powerguns. It sailed through the opening, detonated with a dirty flash, and flung a guerrilla's corpse momentarily into view.
The oncoming buzzbomb filled Suilin's forward vision. He saw it with impossible clarity, its bulbous head swelling on a thread of smoke that trailed back to the grenade-smashed room.
The close-in defense system went off, spewing miniature steel barrels into the path of the free-flight missile. They slashed through the warhead, destroying its integrity.When the buzz bomb hit the side of the combatcar between the left and center gun positions, the fuse fired but the damaged booster charge did not.
The buzzbomb bounced from the armor with a bell sound, then skittered in tight circles around the grass until its rocket motor burned out.
Cooter's driver eased the vehicle forward, onto the lawn, at barely walking speed. The square was normally lighted after sunset, but all the poles had been shot away.
Dick Suilin had spent three days at or close to the Headquarters building while he gathered the bulk of his story. Clean-cut, professional members of the National Army, doing their jobs with quiet dedication—to contrast with ragged, brutal-looking mercenaries (many of whom were female!), who absorbed such a disproportionate share of the defense budget.
"Hey turtle!" Otski called. "Watch that—"
To either side of the grassed area were pairs of trailers, living quarters for Colonel Banyussuf and his favored staff. The one on the left end was assigned to Sergeant Major Lee, the senior noncom at Camp Progress. Suilin was billeted with him. The door was swinging in the light breeze,and a dozen or so bulletholes dimpled the sidewall at waist height, but Suilin could at least hope he'd be able to recover his gear unharmed when this was over.
The car to their left fired a short burst at the trailer. The bolts blew the end apart, shattering the plywood panels and igniting the light metal sheathing. The reporter swore at the unnecessary destruction.
The air crisscrossed with machine-gun bullets and the smoke trails of at least a dozen buzzbombs. All four of the silent trailers were nests of Consie gunners.
Suilin ducked below the car's armored side.
Bullets hit the iridium and rang louder than things that small could sound. The defense system, a different portion of the continuous strip, went off. The light reflected from the underside of the splinter shield was white and orange and cyan, and there was no room in the universe for more noise.
The reporter managed to raise himself, behind the muzzle of his grenade launcher, just in time to see Sergeant Major Lee's trailer erupt in a violent explosion that showered the square with shrapnel and blew the trailer behind it off its slab foundation.
There was a glowing white spot on the armor of the combat car to Suilin's left. As he watched,the driver's hatch popped open and a man scrambled out.Another crewman rolled over the opposite sidewall of the fighting compartment.
The car blew up.
Because the first instants were silent, it seemed a drawn-out affair, though the process couldn't have taken more than seconds from beginning to end. A streak of blue-green light shot upward, splashed on the splinter shield and through the steel covering almost instantaneously.
The whole fighting compartment became a fireball that bulged the side armor and lifted the remnants of the shield like a bat-wing.
A doughnut of incandescent gas hung for a moment over the wreckage, then imploded and vanished.
Suilin screamed and emptied the clip of his grenade launcher into the other trailer on his side. It was already burning; Cooter didn't bother to fire into its crumpled remains as their car accelerated toward the Headquarters building.
Two flags—one white, the other the red-and-gold of the National Government—fluttered from the top floor of the building on short staffs.No one moved at those windows.
Now the lower floors were silent also.Otski raked the second story while Cooter used the car's slow drift to saw his twin guns across the lowest range of windows. Cooter's rotating iridium barrels were glowing white, but a ten-meter length of the walls collapsed under the point-blank jackhammer of his bolts.
Suilin reloaded mechanically. He didn't have a target. At this short range, his grenades were more likely to injure himself and the rest of the crew than they were to find some unlikely Consie survivor within the Headquarters building.
He caught motion in the corner of his eye as he turned.
The movement came from a barracks they'd passed moments before, on the north side of the square. Tribarrels, Otski's and that of the next combat car in line, had gnawed the frame building thoroughly and set it alight.
A stubby black missile was silhouetted against those flames.
Gear on the floor of the fighting compartment trapped the reporter's feet as he tried to swing his grenade launcher. The close-in defense system slammed just above the skirts. The buzzbomb exploded in a red flash, ten meters away from the combat car.
A jet of near-plasma directed from the shaped-charge warhead skewered the night.
The spurt of light was almost lost to Suilin's retinas, dazzled already by the powerguns, but the blast of heat was a shock as palpable as that of the bullet that had hit him in the chest.
Otski fell down. Something flew past the reporter as he reeled against the armor.
The barrel of the grenade launcher was gone. Just gone, vaporized ten centimeters from the breech. If the jet had struck a finger's breadth to the left, the grenade would have detonated and killed all three of them.
The shockwave had snatched off Otski's helmet. The gunner's left arm was missing from the elbow down. That explained the stench of burned meat.
Suilin vomited onto his legs and feet.
"I'm all right," Otski said. He must have been screaming for Suilin to be able to hear him. "It don't mean nothin'."
A line was charred across the veteran's clamshell armor. A finger's breadth to the left, and . . .
There were two tabs on the front of Otski's back-and-breast armor. Suilin pulled them both.
"Is it bleeding?" Cooter demanded. "Is it bleeding?"
The bone stuck out a centimeter beyond where the charred muscle had shrunk back toward the gunner's shoulder. "He's—" Suilin said. "It's—"
"Right," shouted Cooter. He turned back to his tribarrel.
"I'm all right," said Otski. He tried to push himself erect. His stump clattered on the top of an ammunition box. His face went white and pinched in.
Don't mean nothin', Otski's lips formed. Then his pupils rolled up and he collapsed.
The combat car spun in its own length and circled the blasted Headquarters building. There were figures climbing the berm behind the structure. Cooter fired.
Dick Suilin leaned over Otski and took the grips of his tribarrel. Another car was following them; a third had rounded the building from the other side.
When Suilin pressed the thumb button, droplets of fire as constant as a strobe-lit fountain streamed from his rotating muzzles.
Sod spouted in a line as the reporter walked toward the black-clad figure trying desperately to climb the steep berm ahead of them. At the last moment the guerrilla turned with his hands raised, but Suilin couldn't have lifted his thumbs in time if he'd wanted to.
Ozone and gases from the empty cases smothered the stink of Otski's arm.
For a moment, Consies balanced on top of the berm. A scything cross fire tumbled them as the tanks and combat cars raked their targets from both sides.
When nothing more moved, the vehicles shot at bodies in case some of the guerrillas were shamming. Twice Suilin managed to explode the grenades or ammunition that his targets carried.
Cooter had to pry the reporter's fingers from the tribarrel when Tootsie Six called a ceasefire.
Chapter Four
"I've got authorization," said Dick Suilin, fumbling in the breast pocket of his fatigues. The "Extend all courtesies" card signed by his brother-in-law, Gover
nor Samuel Kung, was there, along with his Press ID and his Military Status Papers.
Suilin's military status was Exempt-III. That meant he would see action only in the event of a call-up of all male citizens between the ages of sixteen and sixty.
He was having trouble getting the papers out because his fingers were still numb from the way they'd been squeezing the tribarrel's grips.
For that matter, the National Government might 've proclaimed a general call-up overnight—if there was still a National Government.
"Buddy,"snarled the senior noncomat the door of the communications center, "I can't help you. I don't care if you got authorization from God 'n his saints. I don't care if you are God 'n his saints!"
"I'm not that," the reporter said in a soft, raspy voice. Ozone and smoke had flayed his throat. "But I need to get through to Kohang—and it's your ass if I don't."
He flicked at his shirtfront. Some of what was stuck there came off.
Suilin's wrist and the back of his right hand were black where vaporized copper from the buzzbomb had recondensed.All the fine hairs were burned off, but the skin beneath hadn't blistered. His torso was badly bruised where the bullet-struck armor had punched into him.
The butt of the pistol he now carried in his belt prodded the bruise every time he moved.
"Well, I'm not God neither, buddy," the noncom said, his tone frustrated but suddenly less angry.
He waved toward his set-up and the two junior technicians struggling with earphones and throat mikes."The land lines're down, the satellites're down, and there's jamming right across all the bands. If you think you can get something through, you just go ahead and try. But if you want my ass, you gotta stand in line."
The National side of Camp Progress had three commo centers. The main one was—hadbeen—in the shielded basement of Headquarters.A few Consies were still holed up thereafter the rest of the fighting had died down.A Slammers' tank had managed to depress its main gun enough to finish the job.
The training detachment had a separate system, geared toward the needs of homesick draftees. It had survived, but Colonel Banyussuf—who'd also survived—had taken over the barracks in which it was housed as his temporary headquarters. Suilin hadn't bothered trying to get through the panicked crowd now surrounding the building.
The commo room of the permanent maintenance section at Camp Progress was installed in a three-meter metal transport container. It was unofficial—the result of scrounging over the years. Suilin hadn't ever tried to use it before; but in the current chaos, it was his only hope.
"What do you mean, the satellites are down?" he demanded.
He was too logy with reaction to be sure that what he'd heard the noncom say was as absurd as he thought it was. The microwave links were out? Not all
of them, surely . . . .
"Out," the soldier repeated. "Gone. Blitzed. Out."
"Blood and martyrs," Suilin said.
The Consie guerrillas couldn't have taken down all the comsats. The Terran enclaves had to have become directly involved. That was a stunning escalation of the political situation—
And an escalation which was only conceivable as part of a planned deathblow to the National Government of Prosperity.
"I've got to call Kohang," said Dick Suilin, aloud but without reference to the other men nearby. All he could think of was his sister, in the hands of Consies determined to make an example of the governor's wife. "Suzi . . ."
"You can forget bloody Kohang," said one of the techs as he stripped off his headphones. He ran his fingers through his hair. The steel room was hot, despite the cool morning and the air conditioner throbbing on the roof."It's been bloody overrun."
Suilin gripped the pistol in his belt. "What do you mean?" he snarled as he pushed past the soldier in the doorway.
"They said it was," the technician insisted. He looked as though he intended to get out of his chair, but the reporter was already looming over him.
"Somebody said it was,"argued the other tech."Look,we're still getting signals from Kohang, it's just the jamming chews the bugger outa it."
"There's fighting all the hell over the place," said the senior noncom, putting a gently restraining hand on Suilin's shoulder." 'Cept maybe here.Look,buddy, nobody knows what the hell's going on anywhere just now."
"Maybe the mercs still got commo," the first tech said. "Yeah, I bet they do."
"Right," said the reporter. "Good thought."
He walked out of the transport container. He was thinking of what might be happening in Kohang.
He gripped his pistol very hard.
The chip recorder sitting on the cupola played a background of guitar music while a woman wailed in Tagalog, a language which Henk Ortnahme had never bothered to learn. The girls on Esperanza all spoke Spanish. And Dutch. And English. Enough of it.
The girls all spoke money, the same as everywhere in the universe he'd been since.
The warrant leader ran his multitool down the channel of the close-in defense system. The wire brush he'd fitted to the head whined in complaint, but it never quite stalled out.
It never quite got the channel clean, either. Pits in the steel were no particular problem—Herman's Whore wasn't being readied for a parade, after all. But crud in the holes for the bolts which both anchored the strips and passed the detonation signals . . . that was something else again.
Something blew up nearby with a hollow sound, like a grenade going off in a trash can. Ortnahme looked around quickly, but there didn't seem to be an immediate problem.Since dawn there'd been occasional shooting from the Yokel end of the camp, but there was no sign of living Consies around here.
Dead ones, sure. A dozen of 'em were lined up outside the TOC, being che
cked for identification and anything else of intelligence value. When that was done—done in a pretty cursory fashion, the warrant leader expected, since Hammer didn't have a proper intelligence officer here at Camp Progress—the bodies would be hauled beyond the berm, covered with diesel, and barbecued like the bloody pigs they were.
Last night had been a bloody near thing.
Ortnahme wasn't going to send out a tank whose close-in defenses were doubtful. Not after he'd had personal experience of what that meant in action.
He bore down harder. The motor protested; bits of the brush tickled the face shield of his helmet. He'd decided to wear his commo helmet this morning instead of his usual shop visor, because—
Via, why not admit it? Because he'd really wished he'd had the helmet the night before. He couldn't change the past, couldn't have all his gear handy back then when he needed it; but he could sure as hell have it on him now for a security blanket.
There was a 1cm pistol in Ortnahme's hip pocket as well. He'd never seen the face of the Consie who'd chased him with the bomb, but today the bastard leered at Ortnahme from every shadow in the camp.
The singer moaned something exceptionally dismal. Ortnahme backed off his multitool, now that he had a sufficient section of channel cleared. He reached for a meter-long strip charge.
Simkins, who should've been buffing the channels while the warrant leader bolted in charges, had disappeared minutes after they'd parked Herman's Whore back in her old slot against the berm. The kid'd done a bloody good job during the firefight—but that didn't mean he'd stopped being a bloody maintenance tech. Ortnahme was going to burn him a new asshole as soon as—
"Mr. Ortnahme?" Simkins said. "Look what I got!"
The warrant leader turned,already shouting."Simkins,where in the name of all that's holy have—"
He paused. "Via, Simkins," he said. "Where did you get that?"
Simkins was carrying a tribarrel, still in its packing crate.
"Tommy Dill at Logistics, sir," the technician answered brightly. "Ah, Mr. Ortnahme? It's off the books, you know. We set a little charge on the warehouse roof, so Tommy can claim a mortar shell combat-lossed the gun."