by David Drake
Fencing Master’s ruined bow lifted on thrust alone. Not high, not even a finger’s breadth, but enough to free the skirt from the decking and allow the rear nacelles to shove her forward. Staggering like a drunken ox, the car lurched from the hold and onto the ramp. Her bow dragged again, but this time the fans had gravity to aid them. She accelerated toward the field, scraping up a fountain of red sparks from either side of her hull.
The attackers tried to jump out of the way. Huber didn’t know and didn’t much care what happened to them when they disappeared below the level of the sensor pickups feeding Fencing Master’s main screen. A few gunmen more or less didn’t matter; Huber’s problem was to get this car clear of the ramp so that Flame Farter and Floosie, still aboard the freighter, could deploy and deal with the enemy.
Fencing Master reached the bottom of the ramp and drove a trench through the gravel before shuddering to a halt. The shock curtains swathed Huber again; he’d have disengaged the system if he’d had time for nonessentials after the machine’s well-meant swaddling clothes freed him. Skewing the stern nacelles slightly to port, he pivoted Fencing Master around her bow and rocked free of the rut.
The air above him sizzled with ozone and cyan light: two of the tribarrels in the car’s fighting compartment had opened up on the enemy. Somebody’d managed to board while Huber was putting the vehicle in motion. Fencing Master was a combat unit again.
There must’ve been about forty of the attackers all told, ten to each of the shipping containers. Half were now bunched near Foghorn or between that car and the starship’s ramp. Huber switched Fencing Master’s Automatic Defense System live, then used the manual override to trigger three segments.
The ADS was a groove around the car’s hull, just above the skirts. It was packed with plastic explosive and faced with barrel-shaped osmium pellets. When the system was engaged, sensors triggered segments of the explosive to send blasts of pellets out to meet and disrupt an incoming missile.
Fired manually, each segment acted as a huge shotgun. The clanging explosions chopped into cat food everyone who stood within ten meters of Fencing Master. Huber got a whiff of sweetly poisonous explosive residues as his nose filters closed again. The screaming fans sucked away the smoke before he could switch back to thermal imaging.
An attacker aboard Foghorn had seen the danger in time to duck into the fighting compartment; the pellets scarred the car’s armor but didn’t penetrate it. The attacker rose, pointing his slugthrower down at the hatch Huber hadn’t had time to close. A tribarrel from Fencing Master decapitated the hostile.
A powergun converted a few precisely aligned copper atoms into energy which it directed down the weapon’s mirror-polished iridium bore. Each light-swift bolt continued in a straight line to its target, however distant, and released its energy as heat in a cyan flash. A 2-cm round like those the tribarrels fired could turn a man’s torso into steam and fire; the 20-cm bolt from a tank’s main gun could split a mountain.
One of the shipping containers was still jammed halfway open. Soldiers were climbing out like worms squirming up the sides of a bait can. Two raised their weapons when they saw a tribarrel slewing in their direction. Ravening light slashed across them, flinging their maimed bodies into the air. The steel container flashed into white fireballs every time a bolt hit it.
Huber’s ears were numb. It looked like the fighting was over, but he was afraid to shut down Fencing Master’s fans just in case he was wrong; it was easier to keep the car up than it’d be to raise her again from a dead halt. He did back off the throttles slightly to bring the fans down out of the red zone, though. The bow skirt tapped and rose repeatedly, like a chicken drinking.
Flame Farter pulled into the freighter’s hatchway and dipped to slide down the ramp under full control. Platoon Sergeant Jellicoe was behind the central tribarrel. She’d commandeered the leading car when the shooting started rather than wait for her own Floosie to follow out of the hold.
Jellicoe fired at something out of sight beyond the shipping containers. Huber touched the menu, importing the view from Jellicoe’s gunsight and expanding it to a quarter of his screen.
Three attackers stood with their hands in the air; their weapons were on the gravel behind them. Jellicoe had plowed up the ground alongside to make sure they weren’t going to change their minds.
Mercenaries fought for money, not principle. The Slammers and their peers took prisoners as a matter of policy, encouraging their opponents toward the same professional ideal.
Enemies who killed captured Slammers could expect to be slaughtered man, woman and child; down to the last kitten that mewled in their burning homes.
“Bloody Hell . . .” Huber muttered. He raised the seat to look out at the shattered landscape with his own eyes, though the filters still muffled his nostrils.
Haze blurred the landing field. It was a mix of ozone from powergun bolts and the coils of the slug-throwers, burning paint and burning uniforms, and gases from superheated disks that had held the copper atoms in alignment: empties ejected from the tribarrels. Some of the victims were fat enough that their flesh burned also.
The dirigible that’d carried the attackers into position now fled north as fast as the dozen engines podded on outriggers could push it. That wasn’t very fast, even with the help of the breeze to swing the big vessel’s bow; they couldn’t possibly escape.
Huber wondered for a moment how he could contact the dirigible’s crew and order them to set down or be destroyed. Plattner’s World probably had emergency frequencies, but the data hadn’t been downloaded to F-3’s data banks yet.
Sergeant Jellicoe raked the dirigible’s cabin with her tribarrel. The light-metal structure went up like fireworks in the cyan bolts. An instant later all eight gunners in the platoon were firing, and the driver of Floosie was shooting a pistol with one hand as he steered his car down the ramp with the other.
“Cease fire!” Huber shouted, not that it was going to make the Devil’s bit of difference. “Unit, cease fire now!”
The dirigible was too big for the powerguns to destroy instantly, but the bolts had stripped away swathes of the outer shell and ruptured the ballonets within. Deseau had guessed right: the dirigible got its lift from hydrogen, the lightest gas and cheap enough to dump and replace after every voyage so that the ballonets didn’t fill with condensed water over time.
The downside was the way it burned.
Flames as pale and blue as a drowned woman’s flesh licked from the ballonets, engulfing the middle of the great vessel. The motors continued to drive forward, but the stern started to swing down as fire sawed the airship in half. The skeleton of open girders showed momentarily, then burned away.
“Oh bloody buggering Hell!” Huber said. He idled Fencing Master’s fans and stood up on the seat. “Hell!”
“What’s the matter, sir?” Learoyd asked. He’d lost his helmet, but he and Sergeant Deseau both were at their combat stations. The tribarrels spun in use, rotating a fresh bore up to fire while the other two cooled. Even so the barrels still glowed yellow from their long bursts. “They were hostiles too, the good Lord knows.”
“They were,” Huber said grimly. “But the folks living around here are the ones who’ve hired us.”
The remaining ballonets in the dirigible’s bow exploded simultaneously, flinging blobs of burning metal hundreds of meters away. Fires sprang up from the treetops, crackling and spewing further showers of sparks.
Huber heard a siren wind from somewhere deep in the forest community. It wasn’t going to do a lot of good.
The dirigible’s stern, roaring like a blast furnace, struck the terminal building. Some of those inside ran out; they were probably screaming, but Huber couldn’t hear them over the sound of the inferno. One fellow had actually gotten twenty meters from the door when the mass of airship and building exploded, engulfing him in flames. He was a carbonized husk when they sucked back an instant later.
Huber sighed. That pretty
well put a cap on the day, he figured.
Base Alpha—regimental headquarters on every world that hired the Slammers was Base Alpha—was a raw wasteland bulldozed from several hectares of forest. The clay was deep red when freshly turned, russet when it dried by itself to a form of porous rock, and oddly purple when mixed with plasticizer to form the roadways and building foundations of the camp.
The aircar and driver that’d brought Huber from Rhodesville to Base Alpha were both local, though the woman driving had a cap with a red ball insignia and the words:
Logistics Section
Hammer’s Regiment
marking her as a Slammers’ contract employee. Colonel Hammer brought his own combat personnel and equipment to each deployment, but much of the Regiment’s logistics tail was procured for the operation. Supplies and the infrastructure to transport them usually came from what the hiring state had available.
Huber stopped in front of the building marked PROVOST MARSHAL and straightened his equipment belt. The guards, one of them in a gun jeep mounting a tribarrel, watched him in the anonymity of mirrored faceshields. The tribarrel remained centered on Huber’s midriff as he approached.
The orders recalling Lieutenant Arne Huber from F-3 directed him to report to the Provost Marshal’s office on arrival at Base Alpha. Huber had left his gear with the clerk at the Transient Barracks—he wasn’t going to report to the Regiment’s hatchetman with a dufflebag and two footlockers—but he hadn’t taken time to be assigned a billet. There was a good chance—fifty-fifty, Huber guessed—that he wouldn’t be a member of the Slammers when the present interview concluded.
He felt cold inside. He’d known the possibilities the instant he saw the first bolts rake the dirigible, but the terse recall message that followed his report had still made his guts churn.
Nothing to be done about it now. Nothing to be done about it since Sergeant Jellicoe shifted her aim to the dirigible and thumbed her butterfly trigger.
“Lieutenant Huber reporting to the Provost Marshal, as ordered,” he said to the sergeant commanding the squad of guards.
“You’re on the list,” the sergeant said without inflexion. He and the rest of his squad were from A Company; they were the Regiment’s police, wearing a stylized gorget as their collar flash. In some mercenary outfits the field police were called Chain Dogs from the gorget; in the Slammers they were the White Mice. “You can leave your weapons with me and go on in.”
“Right,” said Huber, though the order surprised him. He unslung his belt with the holstered pistol, then handed over the powerknife clipped to a trouser pocket as well.
“He’s clean,” said a guard standing at the readout from a detection frame. The sergeant nodded Huber forward.
The Slammers were used to people wanting to kill them. Major Joachim Steuben, the Regiment’s Provost Marshal, was obviously used to the Slammers themselves wanting to kill him.
Huber opened the door and entered. The building was a standard one-story new-build with walls of stabilized earth and a roof of plastic extrusion. It was a temporary structure so far as the Slammers were concerned, but it’d still be here generations later unless the locals chose to knock it down.
It was crude, ugly, and as solid as bedrock. You could use it as an analogy for the Slammers’ methods, if you wanted to.
The door facing the end of the hallway was open. A trim, boyishly handsome man sat at a console there; he was looking toward Huber through his holographic display. If it weren’t for the eyes, you might have guessed the fellow was a clerk. . . .
Huber strode down the hall, staring straight ahead. Some of the side doors were open also, but he didn’t look into them. He wondered if this was how it felt to be a rabbit facing a snake.
I’m not a rabbit. But if half the stories told about him were true, Joachim Steuben was a snake for sure.
Before Huber could raise his hand to knock on the door jamb, the man behind the desk said, “Come in, Lieutenant; and close it behind you.”
A holographic landscape covered the walls of Joachim Steuben’s office; flowers poked through brightly lit snow, with rugged slopes in the background. The illusion was seamless and probably very expensive.
“You know why you’re here, Huber?” Steuben asked. Everything about the little man was expensive: his manicure, his tailored uniform of natural silk, and the richly chased pistol in a cut-away holster high on his right hip.
The only chair in the office was the one behind Steuben’s console.
“I’m here because of the ratfuck at Rhodesville, sir,” Huber said. He held himself at attention, though the major’s attitude wasn’t so much formal as playfully catlike.
Instead of staring at the wall over Steuben’s shoulder, Huber met the major’s eyes directly. If he hadn’t, he’d have been giving in to fear. Because Major Joachim Steuben scared the crap out of him.
“Close enough,” Steuben said as though he didn’t much care. “What’s your excuse?”
“Sir!” Huber said, truly shocked this time. “No excuse, sir.”
It was the Nieuw Friesland Military Academy answer, and it was the right answer this time beyond question. Platoon F-3’s commander had started to disembark his unit without waiting to issue sidearms and to cycle ammunition for the vehicles’ tribarrels up from their storage magazines. Five troopers had died, a sixth had lost her left arm to a ricocheting slug, and it was the Lord’s mercy alone that kept the damage from being worse.
Steuben raised an eyebrow and smiled faintly. His console’s holographic display was only a shimmer of light from the back side, so Huber didn’t know whether the major was really viewing something—Huber’s file? A stress readout?—or if he just left it up to make the interviewee more uncomfortable.
Which would be a pretty good trick, as uncomfortable as Huber felt even before he entered the office.
“A fair number of people in the United Cities think it’d be a mistake to go to war with Solace, Huber,” Steuben said calmly. “They want to use the way you gutted Rhodesville as an excuse to cancel the Regiment’s contract and go back to peaceful negotiation with Solace over port fees. Do you have any comment about that?”
Huber licked his lips. “Sir,” he said, “everything my platoon did at Rhodesville was by my direct order. No blame whatever should attach to any of my troopers.”
Steuben laughed. It was a horrible sound, a madman’s titter. “Goodness,” he said. “An officer who has complete control of his troops while he’s driving a damaged combat car? You’re quite a paragon, Lieutenant.”
Huber licked his lips again. He had to pull his eyes back to meet Steuben’s. Like looking at a cobra. . . .
“For the time being,” the major continued, suddenly businesslike and almost bored, “you’ve been transferred to command of Logistics Section, Lieutenant Huber. Your office is in Benjamin proper, not Base Alpha here, because most of your personnel are locals. You have a cadre of six or so troopers, all of them deadlined for one reason or another.”
He laughed again. “None of the others have burned down a friendly community, however,” he added.
“Yes sir,” Huber said. He felt dizzy with relief. He’d thought he was out. He’d been pretending he didn’t, but he’d walked into this office believing he’d suddenly become a civilian again, with no friends and no future.
Major Steuben shut down his display and stood. He was a small man with broad shoulders for his size and a wasp waist. From any distance, the word “pretty” was the one you’d pick to describe him. Only if you were close enough to see Steuben’s eyes did you think of snakes and death walking on two legs. . . .
“I don’t have any problem with what you did in Rhodesville, Lieutenant,” Steuben said quietly. “But I don’t have a problem with a lot of things that seem to bother other people. If the Colonel told me to, I’d shoot you down where you stand instead of transferring you to Log Section. And it wouldn’t bother me at all.”
He smiled. “Do you understand?�
��
“Yes sir,” Huber said. “I understand.”
“Lieutenant Basime was a friend of yours at the Academy, I believe,” Steuben said with another of his changes of direction. “She’s acting head of our signals liaison with the UC now. Drop in and see her before you report to Log Section. She can fill you in on the background you’ll need to operate here in the rear.”
He waved a negligent hand. “You’re dismissed, Lieutenant,” he said. “Close the door behind you.”
Huber swung the panel hard—too hard. It slipped out of his hands and slammed.
Major Steuben’s terrible laugh followed him back down the hallway.
The ten-place aircar that ferried Huber into Benjamin had six other passengers aboard when it left Base Alpha: three troopers going into town on leave, and three local citizens returning from business dealings with the Regiment. Each trio kept to itself, which was fine with Arne Huber. He wasn’t sure what’d happened in Joachim Steuben’s office, whether it had all been playacting or if Steuben had really been testing him.
A test Huber’d passed, in that case; seeing as he was not only alive, he’d been transferred into a slot that normally went to a captain. But he wasn’t sure, of that or anything else.
He was the only passenger remaining when the car reached its depot, what had been a public school with a sports arena in back. The freshly painted sign out front read:
Benjamin Liaison Office
HAMMER’S REGIMENT
with a red lion rampant on a gold field. The driver set the car down by the sign, then lifted away to the arena to shut down as soon as Huber had gotten his luggage off the seat beside him.
Would the local have been more helpfully polite if he’d known Huber was his new boss? Huber smiled faintly. He was too wrung out, from the firefight and now from the interview with Major Steuben, to really care that a direct subordinate had just dumped him out on the pavement.