The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3

by David Drake

  “I slept like a baby,” Huber said. “I never sleep that well on leave when I’m in a bed.”

  The Assembly had offered the Slammers any kind of billets they wanted, but Captain Sangrela had decided to keep his troopers beside their vehicles for the night. Nobody’d argued with him. The weather wasn’t unpleasant, and chances were some Freedom Party supporters had stayed in Midway. The risks of going off by yourself were a lot greater than any benefit a bed in an unfamiliar room was going to bring.

  “Not me,” said Deseau, grinning even broader. “The people here are real grateful, let me tell you.”

  Learoyd looked around from his gun. Shyly he said, “The girls didn’t charge nothing, El-Tee. I never been a place before that the girls didn’t charge.”

  A Gendarmery aircar came up the Axis from the south, flying low and slow. Huber caught the motion in the corner of his eye, then cranked the image up to x32 as an inset on his faceshield. As he’d thought, Captain Orichos was in the passenger seat.

  The fourth D Company tank pulled out at the back of the main body, accelerating with the slow majesty that its mass demanded. Floosie was out of sight beyond the northern end of the Axis, into the mixture of forest and scattered houses that constituted the city’s suburbs.

  “Fox Three-six to Three-one,” Huber said to Sergeant Nagano. “Move into the street. We’ll follow you down and bring up the rear. Three-six out.”

  Foghorn lurched from its berth and ground through a hedge that’d survived Task Force Sangrela’s arrival. Whoever was driving for Nagano today must be keyed tighter than a lute string, Huber thought; he grinned faintly. Which showed the driver understands what we’re about to get into.

  “Sir, shall I shift us now?” Sergeant Tranter prodded from the driver’s compartment.

  “Give me a moment, Tranter,” Huber replied. “I think I’ve got a visitor.”

  “Hey, it’s your girlfriend, El-Tee,” Deseau said cheerfully. He waved at the aircar swinging in along Fencing Master’s port side.

  “Not my girlfriend,” Huber said as he lifted himself out of the fighting compartment to stand on the plenum chamber. And probably not even a friend, to Arne Huber or to any member of the Slammers. Orichos had other priorities, and Huber had only the vaguest notion of what they might be.

  As the aircar hovered beside them, the Gendarmery captain tossed Huber a satchel no larger than the personal kit of a trooper on active deployment. “I hope you don’t mind, Lieutenant . . .” she called over the thrum of the aircar and the whine of Fencing Master’s idled fans. “But I’m going to join you again.”

  Huber thrust the satchel behind him for Deseau to take. He extended his right hand while his left anchored him to the fighting compartment’s coaming.

  “Welcome aboard, Captain,” he said, swinging Orichos across to the combat car. She was surprisingly light; his subconscious expected the weight of a figure wearing body armor, of course.

  Mauricia Orichos wasn’t welcome, but she was part of Huber’s job so he’d make the best of it. And he really had more important things on his mind just now. . . .

  Huber heard a coarse ripping as three more rounds from batteries far to the south streaked overhead. To give the shells sufficient range from the Slammers’ gun positions in the UC, a considerable part of what would normally be payload was given over to the booster rockets.

  “What’s that?” asked Mauricia Orichos, pointing upward. The shells’ boron fluoride exhaust unrolled broad, poisonous ribbons at high altitude, spreading as she watched. “Are we under attack?”

  “No, that’s outgoing,” Huber explained, mildly surprised that their passenger had picked up the sound of artillery over Fencing Master’s intake howl. Orichos noticed quite a lot, he realized, and she had the knack for absorbing what was normal in a new situation so that she could quickly identify change. “They’re prepping the route for us.”

  He wasn’t sure how much Orichos knew about the plan, and he wasn’t going to be the one to tell her anything Base Alpha hadn’t already explained. If it’d been up to Arne Huber, he’d have told the Point authorities an amount precisely equal to the part Point forces were taking in the reduction of Fort Freedom: zip.

  He glanced up at the path the shells had taken northward. For this use, the reduced payloads didn’t matter. The shells would spill their incendiary bomblets at very high altitude to get maximum dispersion. The target wasn’t a single facility but rather a fifty-kilometer swathe of forest, and there was plenty of time for the widely-spread ignition points to grow together into a massive firestorm.

  Which wasn’t the sort of thing a local from Plattner’s World, where the forest was preserved with almost religious fervor, could be expected to like. Colonel Hammer put his troopers’ lives first, though, and Colonel Hammer was calling the shots on this one.

  The vehicles ahead of Fencing Master had mown and gouged the riverbank into a muddy wasteland. Wherever possible the lead car had chosen a route that kept its skirts on solid ground, but occasionally an outcrop or a deep inlet forced the column partly into the water. Each thrum! as plenum-chamber pressure beat the river echoed for kilometers up and down the channel.

  Huber grinned. Orichos misread his expression, for she smiled back ruefully and said, “I suppose I do sound like a Nervous Nellie. Sorry.”

  “What?” said Huber. “Oh, not at all. I was just thinking that there’s never been an armored column in human history that sneaked up on anybody, and this time isn’t going to be the exception.”

  “El-Tee?” said Learoyd, staring dutifully into the holographic display. “Take a look at this, will you?”

  Huber’d put his right wing gunner on the first sensor watch of the run because he hadn’t expected anything to show up so early. He’d manually notched out Fencing Master and the other vehicles in the column during the run from Northern Star, so that they wouldn’t hide the more distant, hostile, signals. Unlike a quicker mind, Learoyd’s wouldn’t be lulled into daydreams by the minute changes in pearly emptiness that was probably all that he’d see in the display, but Huber feared that Learoyd might not notice subtleties that really had meaning.

  Except that the trooper’d done just that. Huber frowned at the display in dawning comprehension, then said, “Sierra Six, this is Fox Three-six. We’ve got an aircar, probably a small one, following us about a kilometer back. I figure if it was just civilian sightseers, they’d be, well, in sight. Over.”

  “Roger, Three-six,” Captain Sangrela said. “We leave a broad enough track that the Volunteers figure they can follow us without coming so close we spot them. Good work, Huber. I’ll drop off a fire team to take care of it. Six out.”

  “Three-six out,” Huber said. “Break. Blue Section, some infantry’s staying behind to clean off our tail. Don’t run ’em over, and get ready to back ’em up when the music starts. Three-six out.”

  “We gonna get a chance to pop somebody, El-Tee?” Deseau asked, turning hopefully to meet Huber’s eyes.

  “Not a chance, Frenchie,” Huber said. “But we’re going to follow the drill anyway.”

  A thought struck him and he went on, “Captain Orichos? Is there any chance that a Gendarmery aircar is trailing the column? If there is, tell me now. You won’t get a second chance.”

  Orichos frowned. “One of ours?” she said. “Not unless somebody’s disregarded my clear instructions. And if that’s happened, Lieutenant—”

  She smiled. Frenchie Deseau couldn’t have bettered the cruel surmise in her expression.

  “—then the sort of lesson I assume you propose will bring the survivors to a better appreciation of the authority granted me by the Assembly.”

  Huber nodded and returned his attention to his tribarrel’s sector forward. He didn’t have a problem with ruthlessness, but he found disquieting the gusto with which people like the Gendarmery captain did what was necessary.

  “Three-six, watch the pedestrians!” Nagano warned from Foghorn fifty meters ahead. Four in
fantrymen had hopped their skimmers off one of the maintenance vehicles; now they were positioning themselves behind treeboles where they’d have good fields of fire for their 2-cm weapons as soon as the aircar came in sight above the water. Huber nodded in salute, but the infantrymen were wholly focused on what was about to happen.

  The ambush team had shut down their skimmers immediately upon hitting the ground. The Volunteers weren’t likely to have sensors that’d pick up a skimmer’s small fans more than a stone’s throw away, but regimental training emphasized that you didn’t assume any more than you had to. Plenty of stuff that you couldn’t control was going to go wrong, so you made doubly sure on the rest.

  “How long, Lieutenant?” Orichos asked. Not what: how long. She was a sharp one, no mistake.

  “About a minute and a half,” Huber explained. “We’re traveling at about forty kph in this salad—”

  He gestured to the soft vegetation just outside the track, where the previous vehicles hadn’t ground it to green slime.

  “—and our Volunteer friends back there’ll be holding to the same speed. The last thing they want’s to fly up on our tail.”

  He smiled. Which was just what they were about to do.

  Orichos nodded and turned to watch the route behind Fencing Master. There wasn’t anything to see but mud and muddy water, of course. Sight distances close to the ground were at most a hundred meters in the few places the river flowed straight, and generally much less where vegetation arched over the curving banks.

  Huber imported to the lower left quadrant of his faceshield the view from the sergeant commanding the ambush team; it wouldn’t interfere with his sight picture in the unlikely event that Fencing Master ran into trouble. After a moment’s hesitation, he touched Orichos’ shoulder. When she turned, he linked their helmets as he had while Floosie raked incoming shells from the sky. Orichos nodded appreciatively.

  It took ten seconds longer than Huber’d estimated before an open aircar with four men aboard loitered into sight. Sangrela had chosen the ambush site well: the car slowed, dipping beneath a branch draped with air plants which crossed the river only three meters above the purling surface.

  The lift fans flung a rainbow of spray through the sunlight, momentarily blinding the two men in the front. As the car started to rise again, three cyan bolts hit the driver, vaporizing his torso, and a fourth took off the head of the gunman in the passenger seat.

  The driver jerked the control yoke convulsively, throwing the car belly forward and spilling the remaining gunman off the stern. The sergeant shot the falling man before he hit the water; the three troopers blew the car’s underside into fireballs of plastic paneling superheated into a mixture that exploded in the air.

  “Blue Section, reverse!” Huber screamed. Sergeant Tranter was a trifle slower to spin Fencing Master than he should’ve been; Huber’d forgotten the driver didn’t have reflexes ingrained by combat like the rest of them did. “Move it! Move it! Move it!”

  The ambush team didn’t need help. The aircar crashed edgewise onto a spine of rock sticking up from the water; it broke apart. The fourth Volunteer had been concentrating on detector apparatus feeding through a bulky helmet. He must’ve been strapped in; his arms flailed, but he didn’t get out of the car even when the wreckage slipped off the rocks and started to sink.

  The river geysered as at least four and maybe twice that many 2-cm bolts hit the man and the water nearby. A bolt hit an upthrust rock; it burst like a grenade, shredding foliage on the bank with sharp fragments.

  I guess the poor bastard’s not going to drown after all, Huber thought.

  When Fencing Master reached the ambush site a few seconds later, the infantrymen had remounted their skimmers. Huber gestured them forward to put the combat car in drag position again.

  “You were right, El-Tee,” said Deseau regretfully. “Not a bloody thing for us.”

  One of the infantrymen waved back as he passed Fencing Master. He was now wearing a helical copper bracelet, its ends shaped like snakeheads.

  Apparently the leader of the squad Huber shot it out with in Freedom Party headquarters hadn’t learned from that experience. Huber smiled coldly. The Slammers didn’t give anybody a third chance.

  The alert signal brought Huber out of a doze; it was like swimming upward through hot sand. He’d jumped to his feet and had the tribarrel’s grips in his hands, straining for a target in his faceshield’s light-amplified imagery, before his conscious mind took over and he realized why he’d awakened.

  Learoyd was driving. Sergeant Deseau was at the forward gun, as rested as anybody could be after eighteen hours of slogging through river-bottom vegetation. Huber wouldn’t have been able to drop off if he hadn’t been sure Frenchie was there to take up the slack. He’d needed the mental down-time badly, though. The shoot-out in Freedom Party headquarters had drained him more than he’d realized right after it happened.

  But that was part of the past, a different world, and now the present was calling. “Fox Three-six acknowledging!” Huber said, and his helmet dropped him into the virtual meeting room with Colonel Hammer himself and the other officers of Task Force Sangrela. He’d been the last to arrive, but from the look of Mitzi Trogon—her mouth was half-open and her eyes looked like they were staring into oncoming headlights—she was in at least as bad a shape as he was.

  “Troopers,” Hammer said, acknowledging his four subordinates with a glance that swept the table. The imagery was sharper than it’d been in the forest south of Midway; the sky above the Fiorno was fairly open. “There’s Volunteers setting up a blocking position on an island three hours ahead of you. There’s about two hundred men with buzzbombs and six calliopes if they’re not further reinforced.”

  Hammer’s torso vanished into a slant view of a roughly oval island; it covered about as much of the river valley as the channels flowing to north and south of it. From the scale at the bottom of the image, the heavily wooded surface between the streams was on the order of a square kilometer.

  “They’ve been flying in from Bulstrode Bay over the past hour,” Hammer said with a disbelieving shake of his head. “They apparently don’t realize that here at Base Alpha we can follow everything they’re doing, right down to who had grits for breakfast.”

  Icons of red light marked hostile positions: calliopes on the forward curve of the island, and squads of infantry both on the island itself and on the north bank of the floodway. The Volunteers probably intended the mainland element to halt the task force in line along the shore where the calliopes could rake the Slammers from the flank.

  Sangrela laughed in derision. “You want us to go through ’em or around ’em, sir?” he asked. “For choice we’ll go through.”

  “Neither,” said Hammer with a spreading smile. “I’m just telling you what the situation is. We’re going to handle it from here with artillery.”

  “Why in hell would you want to do that?” Mitzi Trogon snarled. She must’ve heard her own tone; she snapped fully awake at last. “Ah, sir, that is,” she added with a grimace of embarrassment.

  Hammer looked at Trogon without expression for a moment, then lifted his chin minutely to show that the incident was closed— if not forgotten. “Right,” he said with a mildness that deceived nobody. “This ambush isn’t a problem, but Fort Freedom is likely to be more of one. Here the Volunteers have their calliopes tasked for ground use, waiting for your column to come into their killing zone. They aren’t professional enough to redirect the guns for artillery defense in the amount of time they’ll have. Follow?”

  Because Huber understood and none of his fellow officers were in a hurry to speak after Mitzi’d stepped on her dick, he said, “When a salvo takes out the whole ambush party, Volunteer Command is going to decide it’s our shells they ought to be worrying about. When we get to Bulstrode Bay, their calliopes are going to be aimed up for artillery defense and we’ll take ’em with direct fire.”

  “Roger that, troopers,” Hammer said
, his face minusculely softer than it’d been a moment before. “This won’t be a milk run for you, there’s no way it’s going to be that. But I told you from the beginning that you’d have all the support we could give you. Any questions?”

  “Support” this time didn’t mean the artillery, not really, Huber realized. It was the planning, the misdirection; the thinking two steps ahead of his own troops and at least six steps ahead of the enemy, that the Colonel was providing here.

  “What orders do you have for us, sir?” Captain Sangrela asked, the burr of warmth in his tone suggesting that he was thinking along the same lines as Huber was.

  “Keep on with what you’re doing, that’s all,” Hammer said. His grin spread. “Which is plenty, I know that. We’ll time the stonk for thirty seconds before you come into sight of the target. Hit anybody that shows himself, but keep going as fast as you can. That’ll make more of an impression on what passes for a Volunteer Command group than we would by digging out a couple shell-shocked wogs and blasting them. Clear?”

  “Clear,” said Sangrela, nodding, and Huber added his “Clear” to the muttered “Roger,” and “Clear,” from his fellow lieutenants.

  That’d save gun bores for the real fight at Bulstrode Bay as well. Maintenance had replaced the barrels burned out at Northern Star, but there probably wouldn’t be time for another refit before Sierra slammed into Fort Freedom and the Volunteers’ main body. . . .

  Hammer gave a crisp nod. “Let me stick it to the bastards this time, troopers,” he said. “There’ll be plenty of opportunity for you up north.”

  The Colonel’s image dissolved, returning Huber to Fencing Master’s jouncing fighting compartment. His mind and senses were as sharp as they’d ever been in his life. To the watchful expressions of his troopers and Captain Orichos, he began, “In about three hours . . .”

  What looked like a streak of sparse vegetation at right angles to the river was a dike of impermeable clay channeling water into the softer soil beyond. The scout section infantry slid across without being aware of the change, but Fencing Master came down on algae-covered soup instead of the expected solid ground. A gout of mud spewed higher than the armored sides, drenching Huber and the others in the fighting compartment.