The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3

by David Drake

  “Hey, El-Tee,” called Kerry, the 305th Military Police Detachment’s first sergeant. “Good to see you. You look like you’re getting around okay.”

  Margulies grimaced. “Twinges, that’s all,” she said, “but the bastard medics put me on a profile anyhow. I’m being transferred out, Top. Stuck behind a desk, I suppose.”

  She was a stocky woman whose black hair was her only affectation. She’d removed padding from her commo helmet so that she could coil a longer braid when she was on duty. As a platoon leader in a war zone, she had been on duty virtually all the time, awake or sleeping, until a routine convoy escort went sour.

  “Ah . . .” said Kerry. “You suppose? You got a copy of the actual orders, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, I got them all right,” Margulies said with a wan smile. “Long enough to see I was being transferred back to Camp Able. Then I threw the chip and reader right through the window. I don’t belong on Nieuw Friesland. Curst if I don’t think I’ll put in my resignation if that’s what they want from me.”

  She nodded toward the detachment commander’s door. “The Old Man in?”

  “Ah . . .” Sergeant Kerry said. “No, Major Yates had an Orders Group at Tannahill Command this morning. Ah . . .”

  Margulies smiled harshly. “Go on, Top, say it if that’s what you’re thinking. A crip like me shouldn’t be in the field where she could get good people killed because she’s hobbling around.”

  “No sir,” Sergeant Kerry said. “Hell no, sir. What I meant—and I know that nobody but the recipient reads assignment orders until the recipient’s signed off on them—”

  Margulies laughed, this time with genuine good humor. “Top, you’ve got seventeen years in the FDF and the Slammers before them. Let’s take it as read that you knew my orders before I did, all right?”

  Kerry grinned. “For the sake of argument . . .” he said.

  His fingers touched keys on his desk; the integral printer hummed. “I guess there’s no harm in me giving you a hardcopy replacement of the assignment orders you lost, is there?” he said.

  A flimsy spooled out of the printer slot. Kerry tore off the document and handed it to the lieutenant without looking at the contents. “I think you’ll find,” he continued, “that Camp Able on Nieuw Friesland is just a transit stop, where you’ll join your new unit. You’ve been assigned as security to a survey team, El-Tee. You’re not supposed to be in combat; but if things were peaceful, a survey team wouldn’t be there trolling for business.”

  “Well I’ll be hanged,” Margulies said, reading the data through for the first time. “I was so scared they were going to stick me at a desk that I . . .”

  Kerry affectionately scratched the corner molding of his desk as though the piece of furniture were a living creature. “Different strokes, El-Tee,” he murmured. “Personally, I don’t find I miss getting shot at in the least.”

  “Well, I’ll be hanged,” Margulies repeated with changed emphasis. “Do you know where this survey team—”

  She blinked. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, sure you know where we’re going.”

  “Cantilucca,” Kerry said, returning the smile. “I looked it up. West Bumfuck is more like.”

  His lips pursed in sudden concern. His fingers started to summon Margulies’ personnel data, then realized doing so now couldn’t help the situation. “Ah—don’t tell me you come from Cantilucca, El-Tee?” he added.

  “Not me,” said Margulies with a broad grin. “But I know somebody who does . . ..”

  Earlier: Tannahill

  “Sarge . . .” Lieutenant Mary Margulies said as Angel Tijuca slid their two-seat air-cushion jeep between a pair of road trains. The huge vehicles had accelerated slowly, but they were maintaining 50 kph now and there was just enough clearance to spare the jeep’s paint. “If you don’t take it easy, you’re not going to survive the last three days of your enlistment.”

  Margulies didn’t sound concerned. Her eyes continued to search the roadsides instead of glaring at her driver.

  Angel laughed infectiously. “Now, Missie Mary,” he said. “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar. And anyway, it’s not three days, it’s two and a wake-up.”

  In public Sergeant Tijuca was never less than deferential to his superior officer, but he and Margulies had gone through a lot in the year he’d been driving her. Angel was ending his enlistment in the Frisian Defense Forces, and Margulies was curst sorry to see him go.

  “Only if you survive,” Margulies remarked, but she wasn’t serious. Angel’s willingness to take chances was just as important a reason for her keeping him as her permanent driver as his skill at the joystick was.

  Angel accelerated to 60 kph. The jeep passed along the right side of the road trains at an increment that was slightly faster than a man could walk.

  The convoy consisted of ten articulated road trains, each of which had three track-laying segments with a driver in the lead cab. There was a gun tub crewed by Brigantian troops on the center segment of each individual train, but the convoy’s real security was provided by the four combat cars manned by Frisian military police under Lieutenant Margulies’ command.

  The war was over, but the fighting might not stop for years. Brigantian regiments, spearheaded by armored companies of Frisian mercenaries, had swept across Tannahill’s Beta Continent. The armies of the continent’s local population, mostly Muslims of South Indian descent, had been smashed if they stood and run down if they retreated.

  The guerrillas, supported by the local communities even when they weren’t actually members of those communities, were a more difficult problem. They were controllable, at least for as long as the Brigantians of Alpha Continent could afford to pay their Frisian mercenaries, but Margulies suspected it would be decades if not generations before the locals accepted Brigantian domination.

  That was somebody else’s worry. Margulies had a convoy to take through eighty klicks of—literally—Indian Country.

  “Yes sir,” Angel said. “Inside a week and a half, I figure, I’ll be back on Cantilucca with a forty-hectare gage farm of my own. Three more days here. Three days objective to Delos, that’s the cluster’s port of entry. Maybe a day to get transport from there to Cantilucca, another day’s transit, and bam! I’m home, with a discharge bonus in my pocket. How long can it take then to buy some land, hey?”

  Tijuca began to whistle a flamenco tune. Margulies smiled at his enthusiasm. She noticed that despite the sergeant’s air of heedless relaxation, every time they overhauled a road train his eyes flicked left. He was checking through the gaps between vehicles to see what was happening along the far treeline.

  Combat engineers had defoliated, then burned off, strips a hundred meters wide along either edge of the road. Ash flew out from beneath the jeep’s skirts. It merged with the yellow dust which the trains’ cleats raised from the gravel road surface. The breeze was slightly from the right, so for the moment the jeep was clear. Tijuca kept them ten meters out in the burned zone—comfortable, but by that amount the closest vehicle to the enemy if the guerrillas decided to start something.

  “Take us back across between the second and first trucks,” Margulies said. “I don’t believe in giving anybody long enough to compute the lead on a full-deflection shot.”

  “Your wish is my command,” Angel said. He goosed the fans, let the jeep settle into its new, higher speed, and angled the vehicle sideways across the line of heavy trucks. It was an expert job, as difficult as threading a needle blindfolded.

  “My command is your command,” Margulies grumbled. Her commo helmet slapped nose filters in place automatically, but she tasted the chalky dust on her tongue.

  She wished that a battery of Frisian howitzers rather than Brigantian artillery was providing call fire for the run. Brigantian artillery was reasonably accurate, but Margulies didn’t trust the indigs to react as fast as Frisian hogs would if anything blew.

  The chance of an ambush was less than one in ten, but Margulies’ pla
toon had provided security on this run fourteen times already.

  “You ought to come to Cantilucca, Missie,” Angel said, throttling back to 60 kph. “You’d love it. With a tract of top gage land—”

  “Sarge,” Margulies said, “I’m a city girl, born right smack in the center of Batavia. I wouldn’t know which end of a hoe to use, and I don’t even like gage. Alcohol works just fine for me.”

  When they crossed the road, Margulies hunched higher in the seat to view the left treeline over her driver’s head. Angel watched the potential danger area also, navigating with his peripheral vision. A sub-machine gun was clamped beside his seat. Though it was ready for use, it didn’t interfere with his driving the way a slung weapon would have done.

  “Huh!” Angel said. “The only thing you can get from booze that you can’t from gage is a hangover. The good stuff—the pure stuff, we’re not talking about refinery tailings, sure—there’s no side effects at all. You just go to sleep when you come down. Why would anybody want booze over gage?”

  “Because if something pops, I can deal with it if I’m hung over and I can’t if I’m in a gage coma,” Margulies said tartly. That was true enough, but it wasn’t the reason she relaxed with alcohol instead of stim cones of gage. It was all a matter of what you got used to—

  Like everything else across the board. There was no question that a city was the most dangerous combat environment you could find: stone and concrete ate troops. Nonetheless, Margulies was always more comfortable patrolling or even fighting in a city than she was in the open air like this.

  Not that it mattered. She was here to do a job.

  This portion of the route was through lowlands. The soil was mucky, and there were frequent potholes where the treads of road trains had chewed through the gravel. The trees outside the cleared strip were five to ten meters tall. Their foliage was vaguely blue.

  Margulies’ four combat cars flanked the convoy front and rear, fifty meters out from the road. Because of the size of the road trains, the convoy was more than half a kilometer long even when closed up properly. The tribarrels of the combat cars could still sweep the full length of it on straight stretches.

  They were coming to one of the route’s few major curves, nicknamed Ambush Junction until the guerrillas hit what turned out to be a platoon of Frisian tanks instead of the Brigantian armor they’d expected. The route had been quiet as a grave since then.

  Margulies keyed her commo helmet. “White Six to Rose One,” she said, calling the driver of the leading road train. She glanced up at the cab looming beside her. Because of the angle, she couldn’t see the Brigantian to whom she was speaking. “Can you crank up the speed a little? This isn’t a place I want to hang around. Over.”

  A wash of hollow noise flooded Margulies’ helmet, racket echoing from within the driver’s compartment. The cab was lightly armored but not sound-proofed. A moment later the Brigantian said, “All right, we’ll see, but I don’t want to put this sucker in the bog either.”

  The background noise shut off. It was as effective a close-transmission signal as more standard commo procedures would have been. Presumably the Brigantian notched his hand throttle forward, though change came very slowly for mechanical dinosaurs the size of the road trains.

  The leading combat cars pulled farther ahead and swung a little closer to their respective sides of the cleared strip. Margulies hadn’t bothered to give her own people orders. They knew what the situation was and had been dealing with it for the better part of a month now.

  There was new growth where Frisian tanks had blasted hundred-meter notches through the vegetation with their main guns. The flushes of new leaves were red and violet.

  There wasn’t enough silica in the soil to glaze when struck by powerguns, but steam from the high water content exploded main-gun impacts into craters that could swallow the jeep. During file ambush, one of the panzers had swept out into the forest, deliberately scraping its steel skirts across the dirt to uncover the guerrillas’ spider holes. The arcing scar was still barren save for speckles of low growth.

  Angel hung off the left front fender of the leading road train as the convoy squealed and rumbled into the long right-hand curve. He glanced at Margulies to remind her that this wasn’t the position he would choose for a plastic-bodied jeep, though whatever the lieutenant wanted . . .

  “Yeah, ease back, let them pass us, and we’ll cross to the right side between the second and third trucks,” Margulies agreed. She was holding her 2-cm shoulder weapon at high port. Now her index finger pushed the lever at the front of the trigger guard forward, off safe.

  She had a bad feeling about this spot. That was nothing new. She’d had a bad feeling about it every bloody time she crossed it.

  Angel eased the fan nacelles closer to vertical, raising clearance beneath the skirt to slow the jeep as ordered. He kept the power up. The wasted charge was a cheap price to pay for greater agility in a crisis. Margulies rose in her seat to get a better view back along the convoy.

  The lead road train’s quad automatic cannon was swung to starboard, aiming at the inside of the curve. That was fine, but the crew of the second vehicle was doing the same cursed thing instead of covering the left side of the route as each alternate crew should do.

  Margulies swore and took her left hand from the powergun’s forestock to key her helmet—as a command-detonated mine went off under the third segment of the leading road train.

  The charge buried beneath the gravel was huge, at least fifty kilos of high explosive. It lifted the segment, blew the track plates and several road wheels from the suspension, and dropped the 30-tonne mass on its right side.

  The blast stunned the gun crew atop the middle segment and flung several of them out of the tub. The jeep flipped like a tiddlywink.

  Margulies didn’t hear the explosion. The shockwave gripped like a fevered giant’s hand, crushing her in conditions of intense heat. She couldn’t see anything but white light. Both her shins broke against the dashboard as she and the jeep spun in different trajectories. There was no present pain, but she heard the bones go with tiny clicks like those of fingers on a data-entry keyboard.

  Margulies’ world reformed as she lay prone on soggy ground. She wasn’t sure whether or not she’d been unconscious. Her skin crawled, and all her senses were preternaturally sharp.

  Twenty meters away the leading road train was skewed across the gravel. The rear segment lay on its side, but the coupling still held. The segment had acted as an anchor, bringing the huge vehicle to a dead halt. The cab door was open. A splotch of blue uniform marked the driver huddling in the ditch beside his abandoned charge.

  The combat cars maneuvered violently, engaging the weapons shooting at them. Explosive shells raked the road train, igniting the two upright segments. Margulies thought part of the cargo was ammunition. Tracers or rocket exhaust trails fanned from a position at the treeline.

  The second road train had tried to pass on the right side of its disabled fellow, but the ground to that side was apparently even softer than that on which Margulies lay. The vehicle had sunk in over its running gear, hopelessly mired. The gun crew jumped from the tub and hid between the bogies.

  The driver fired a pistol from his cab doorway. Machine gun bullets sparkled on the armor, starred the windscreen opaque, and punched the driver’s lungs out through the back of his rib cage.

  Margulies had lost her 2-cm powergun and her commo helmet. She didn’t wear a pistol because it got in the way in a jeep’s tight seating. Anyhow, she couldn’t hit anything with a handgun. She wished she had one now. Her legs ached so fiercely that she had to look down to be sure that they hadn’t been blown off at the knees.

  Angel Tijuca ran toward her. A guerrilla machine gun combed for him, aiming low and making the black soil spurt upward. Angel tumbled, slapping at his pelvis.

  Powerguns and automatic cannon fired at the rear of the convoy, out of sight around the curve. Small arms were probably involved also
, but the sound was lost in the blasts of the heavier weapons.

  Margulies tried to crawl toward the center of the convoy. Ash on the ground made her sneeze violently. The machine gunner shifted his aim toward her. The guerrilla wasn’t very good, but it could be only a matter of time before he found the range.

  Angel jumped to his feet, scooped Margulies up, and staggered toward the road with her in a packstrap carry. “Fucking ricochet,” he said. “Knocked me—down!”

  Margulies’ toes dragged the ground. The pain in her shins was indescribable. Angel’s normally olive complexion had paled to a jaundiced yellow, and his skin gleamed with perspiration.

  “Not there!” Margulies cried. She wasn’t sure if she was speaking audibly. “That truck’ll blow any minute now!”

  “That’s—” her driver gasped “—the next—thing, M-Missie.”

  He tumbled into the mine crater with his burden and released her. The pulverized soil was pillow-soft, but the reek of explosive residues clung to the pit chokingly. The machine gun sent a last spiteful burst of white tracer over the jeep’s crew before casting off for other targets.

  Angel had lost his helmet and sub-machine gun, but the butt of a pistol projected from the left cargo pocket of his trousers. He drew the weapon as he lurched out of the crater.

  Margulies tried to follow her sergeant, using her knees and elbows for purchase on the loose soil. It was like swimming through molasses. Every pulse tightened a red-hot vise on her lower legs.

  Angel ran to the coupling which linked the overturned third segment to the pair whose running gear was undamaged. The machine gun and the guerrillas’ light cannon traversed toward the motion, but the Frisian was fairly well covered by the bogies of the second segment. Cannon shells fanned the flames already snorting through holes in the cargo box.

  The coupling was torqued and immobile. Angel aimed his pistol at it point-blank, covered his eyes with his right forearm, and fired. The 1-cm powergun bolt sprayed blazing steel in all directions.