by David Drake
There was a centimeter's clearance front and rear to turn the jeep in the tunnel's width, but the sergeant did not even consider backing after he tested his eyeball guesstimate with a brief tap on the throttle as he twisted the tiller to bring the vehicle just short of alignment. Sure that it was going to make it, he goosed the fans again and brought the detection vehicle quickly around, converting spin into forward motion as the bow swung toward the first angle and the entrance. If it could be done with a ground effect vehicle, Profile would do it without thinking. Thinking wasn't his strong suit anyway.
The mercenaries' commo helmets brightened with message traffic as the jeep slid back down the initial leg of the gallery. Even a satellite relays quarely overhead didn't permit radio communication when one of the parties was deep beneath a slab of rock. Ground conduction signals were a way around that, but a bloody poor one when all your troops were mounted on air-cushion vehicles.
Might be nice to have a portable tunnel to crawl into, now and again. When some poof circus needed to have its butt saved again, for instance.
The tunnel mouth gave them a wedge of vision onto the far slope, expanding as the jeep slid smoothly toward the opening where the driver grounded it. Sparkling chains of fire laced the air above the valley, bubbling and dancing at a dozen points from which snipers might have fired earlier.
"'Bout bloody time!" the driver chortled, though support from the Slammers' big blowers had come amazingly quickly, given the care with which the expensive vehicles had to travel on this hostile terrain. "About bloody time!"
The tribarreled powerguns raking Molt hiding places with counterfire cycled so quickly that, like droplets of water in a fountain, the individual cyan flashes seemed to hang in the air instead of snapping light-quick across the valley. Afterimages strobed within Bourne's dark-adapted eyes: on a sunny day, the bursts of two-centimeter fire imposed their own definition of brightness. Snipers were still safe if they fired and fled instantly; but if a warrior paused to take a breath or better aim, heat sensors would lock on the glowing barrel of his powergun and crisscrossing automatic fire would glaze the landscape with his remains.
The support was combat cars, not the panzers—the tanks—that Bourne had been hoping for. This'd do, but it'd be nice to see a whole bloody hillside go up in a blue flash!
Lieutenant Hawker, holding the Molt, stepped from the jeep and the tunnel mouth, his gunhand raised as if he were hailing a cab in a liberty port. It wasn't the safest thing in the world, on this world, to do, what with autochthons still firing at the oncoming poof battalion and those locals themselves dangerously trigger-happy. Still,the Molts had proven unwilling to shoot toward their infants, and the poofs were more likely to pitch a bunker-buster into the tunnel mouth than they were to shoot at a Slammer in battledress, three times the size of any Molt who ever lived. Shrugging, Bourne butted the jeep a couple meters further forward to take a look himself.
The leading elements of Fox Victor had reformed on the ridge crest and were advancing raggedly abreast in a mounted assault line. There were thirty or so vehicles in the first wave, armored cars and APCs with a leavening of all-terrain trucks taking the place of armored vehicles destroyed earlier in the operation.
The nearest vehicle was one of the light trucks, this one equipped with a pintle-mounted machine gun instead of carrying a squad of engineers with blasting charges the way the mercenaries had hoped.The Loot signalled it over peremptorily while his tongue searched the controller of his commo helmet for the setting that would give him Fox Victor's intervehicle push—Hawker's previous radio contact had been with the battalion commander, pointless right now.
The truck, still fifty meters upslope, wavered in its course and did not immediately slow; its driver and vehicle commander, as well as the rest of the six Oltenians aboard, obviously had doubts about the idea of halting on open ground pocked with glassy evidence of Molt gunfire. They did, however, turn squarely toward the entrance of the nursery tunnel while the independent axles permitted the four wheels to bobble in nervous disorder over the irregularities of the terrain.
Most important, nobody took a shot at the two Slammers. Profile's tattooed gunhand had swung his own weapon minutely to track the Oltenians; now he relaxed it somewhat.Allies, sure, but curse it, they only had to look like they were planning to fire and they were gone . . . .
The truck braked to a halt beside the notch in the slope which formed the tunnel entrance. Everybody aboard but the gunner leaped out with the spraddle-legged nervousness of dogs sniffing a stranger's territory. Dust, thrown up by treads that were woven in one piece with the wheel sidewalls from ferrochrome monocrystal, continued to drift downhill at a decreasing velocity.
"Who'n blazes're you!" demanded the close-coupled Oltenian captain who presumably commanded more than the crew of this one truck. Additional vehicles were rolling over the ridge, some of them heavy trucks; and, though the artillery was still crunching away at distant locations, fire from the combat cars in crest positions had slackened for lack of targets.
"We're the fairy godmothers who cleared the back slope for you," said Lieutenant Hawker, pumping his submachine gun toward, and by implication over, the ridge. "Now, I want you guys to go in there and bring out the rest of these, the babies."
He joggled the Molt infant that his left hand held to his breastplate; the little creature made a sound that seemed more like a purr than a complaint. "We get them out—there's maybe a dozen of 'em—and we can pack the tunnel with enough explosives to lift the top off the whole bloody ridge. Let's see 'em use it to snipe from then!"
"You're crazy," said one of the poofs in a tone of genuine disbelief.
"We aren't doing any such thing,"agreed his captain."Just shove the explosives in on top—there'll be plenty room still."
"They're babies," Lieutenant Hawker said with the kind of edge that made Bourne smile, not a nice smile, as he checked the damage to the jeep's front skirt. "I didn't risk my hide to get a lot of lip from you boys when I saved your bacon. Now, hop!"
Lord knew what the chain of command was in a ratfuck like this situation, but it was a fair bet that the Loot couldn't by protocol give direct orders to a higher-ranking local. Hawker didn't wear rank tabs, nobody did when the Slammers were in a war zone; and no poof with a lick of sense was going to argue with somebody the size and demeanor of the mercenary officer. The captain's short-barreled shotgun twitched on his shoulder where he leaned it, finger within the trigger guard; but it was to the locals around him that he muttered, "Come on, then," as he strode within the lighted tunnel.
The skirt wasn't damaged badly enough to need replacement, but Profile hoped he'd have a chance soon to hose it down. The slime which guttered with Molt scales was already beginning to stink.
The Loot talked to Central, business that Bourne's mind tuned out as effectively as a switch on his helmet could've done. It was relaxing, standing in the sunlight and about as safe as you could be on this bloody planet: there were still the sounds of combat far away, but the jeep was now lost in the welter of other military vehicles, a needle among needles. The Molts were reeling, anyway, and the few hundred casualties this operation had cost them must be a very high proportion of the fighting strength of the theme involved.
Lieutenant Hawker was absently stroking the back of the infant with the muzzle of his submachine gun. In the minutes since the gun was last fired, the iridium had cooled to the point that the little Molt found its warmth pleasurable—or at least it seemed to: its eyes were closed, its breathing placid.
Echoes merged the shots in the tunnel into a single hungry roar.
"Loot, the—" the sergeant began as he knelt beside the skirt, the jeep between him and the gunfire, his own weapon pointed back down the tunnel. He meant a teleporting warrior, of course, but the detector holograms had been within the driver's field of vision and they were calm with no yellow-violet flicker of warning.
Besides, the squad of Oltenians was coming back down the gallery talking excitedly,
two of them supporting a third who hopped on one leg and gripped the calf of the other with both hands. But that was only a ricochet; you couldn't blaze away in a confined space and not expect to eat some of your own metal.
Bourne stood up and let his sling clutch the submachine gun back against his breastplate now that he knew there was no problem after all. Wisps of smoke eddied from the barrels of the shotguns, residues of flash suppressant from the propellant charges. The air in the nursery chamber must be hazy with it . . . .
"What in the name of the Lord have you done?" Lieutenant Hawker asked the captain in a tone that made Profile Bourne realize that the trouble wasn't over yet after all.
"It's not your planet, renter,"the captain said. His face was spattered with what Bourne decided was not his own blood. "You don't capture Molts, you kill 'em. Every cursed chance you get."
"C'mon,somebody get me a medic,"the wounded man whined."This hurts like the very blazes!" The fabric of his trousers was darkening around his squeezing hands, but the damage didn't seem to Bourne anything to lose sleep over.
"I told you . . ." the Loot said in a breathless voice, as though he had been punched hard in the pit of the stomach. The big mercenary was holding himself very straight, the infant against his breastplate in the crook of one arm, towering over the captain and the rest of the poofs, but he had the look of a man being impaled.
A four-vehicle platoon of the combat cars which had been firing in support now kicked themselves sedately from the ridgeline and proceeded down the slope. Dust bloomed neatly around the margin of the plenum chamber of each,trailing and spreading behind the big, dazzle-painted iridium forms. A powergun bolt hissed so high overhead that it could scarcely be said to be aimed at the cars. Over a dozen tribarrels replied in gorgeous fountains of light that merged kilometers away like strands being spun into a single thread.
"When you've had as many of your buddies zapped as we have," said a poof complacently to the Slammer who had earned his commission on Emporion when he, as ranking sergeant, had consolidated his company's position on the landing zone, "then you'll understand."
"Blood and martyrs, Loot!"said Profile Bourne as he squinted upslope."That's Alpha Company—it's the White Mice and Colonel Hammer!"
"The only good Molt," said the captain, raising overhead the shotgun he held at the balance and eyeing the infant in Lieutenant Hawker's arms as if it were the nail he was about to hammer, "is a dead—"
And the Loot shot him through the bridge of the nose. Bloody hell, thought Bourne as he sprayed first a poof whose gun was half-pointed, then the one who leaped toward the truck and the weapon mounted there. Had he reloaded after popping the round into the nursery chamber? Bourne's first target was falling forward,tangled with the man the Loot had killed, and the second bounced from the side of the truck, the back of his uniform ablaze and all his muscles gone flaccid in midleap. A bolt that had gotten away from Bourne punched a divot of rock from the polished wall of the tunnel.
"Profile, that's enough!" the Loot screamed, but of course it wasn't.
The Oltenian with a bit of his own or a comrade's shot-charge in his calf was trying to unsling his shotgun. Everything in the sergeant's mind was as clear and perfect as gears meshing. The emotion that he felt, electric glee at the unity of the world centered on his gun fight, had no more effect on his functioning than would his fury if the submachine gun jammed. In that case, he would finish the job with the glowing iridium barrel as he had done twice in the past . . . .
The submachine gun functioned flawlessly. Bourne aimed low so that stray shots would clear the Loot, lunging to try to stop his subordinate; and as the trio of poofs doubled up, the second burst hacked into their spines.
This close, a firefight ended when nobody on one side or the other could pull a trigger anymore. The Loot knew that.
Combat cars whining like a pair of restive banshees slid to a dynamic halt to either side of the tunnel archway. The central tribarrel, directly behind the driver's hatch, and one wing gun of each bore on the detection team from close enough to piss if the wind were right. Despite the slope, the cars were not grounded; their drivers held them amazingly steady on thrust alone, their skirts hovering only millimeters above the rocky soil. The offside gunner from either car jumped out and walked around his vehicle with pistol drawn.
Lieutenant Hawker turned very slowly, raising his gunhand into the air. The infant Molt clutched in the crook of the other arm began to greet angrily, disturbed perhaps by the screams and the smell of men's bodies convulsing without conscious control.
A dead man's hand was thrashing at Profile's boot. He stepped back, noticing that the hair on the back of his left hand, clutching the foregrip of his weapon, had crinkled from the heat of the barrel.
"I want you both to unsnap the shoulder loop of your slings," said a voice, clear in Bourne's ears because it came through his commo helmet and not over the rush of the big fans supporting tonnes of combat car so close by.
There was no threat in the words, no emotion in the voice. The quartet of tribarrels was threat enough, and as for emotion—killing wasn't a matter of emotion for men like Profile Bourne and the troopers of Headquarters Company—the White Mice.
Lieutenant Hawker took a long look over his shoulder, past his sergeant and on to the Oltenian vehicles already disappearing over the far ridge—their path to Captain Henderson's infantry cleared by the risks the detection team had taken.
"Aye,aye,Colonel Hammer,"Hawker said to the wing gunner in the right-hand car, and he unsnapped his sling.
The hologram display began to flash between yellow and violet, warning that a Molt was about to appear.
"Nikki, I've been looking for you the past half hour," said General Radescu no louder than needful to be heard over the minuet that the orchestra had just struck up. His young aide nonetheless jumped as if goosed with a hot poker, bumping the urn that he had been peering around when Radescu came up behind him."Alexi,I—" Major Nikki Tzigara said,his face flushed a darker red than the scarlet of his jacket bodice. There were white highlights on Nikki's cheekbones and browridge,and the boy's collar looked too tight."Well it's a . . ." He gestured toward the whirling tapestry of the dance. "I thought I ought to circulate, you know, since you were so busy with your uncle and important people."
The general blinked, taken aback by the unprovoked sharpness of his aide's tone. Nikki was counterattacking when there'd been no attack, Radescu had only said . . . "Ah, yes, there's no doubt something over a hundred people here I really ought to talk to for one reason or another," he said, filing Tzigara's tone in memory but ignoring it in his response because he hadn't the faintest notion of its cause. Nikki really ought to wear full makeup the way Radescu himself had done ever since he understood the effectiveness of Uncle Grigor's poker face. Antonescu might not have become Chief Tribune, despite all his gifts, had he not learned to rule his expression. Heavy makeup was the edge which concealed the tiny hints from blood and muscle that only the most accomplished politician could wholly control.
And Man, as Aristotle had said, was the political animal.
"Rather like being on the edge of arhododendron thicket," Radescu continued, looking away from his aide to give Nikki room to compose himself, for pity's sake. Uncle Grigor had worked his way a few meters along the margin of the circular hall so that he was almost hidden by a trio of slender women whose beehive coiffures made them of a height with the tall Chief Tribune. "Very colorful, of course, but one can't see very much through it, can one?
"Which reminds me," headded, rising onto the toes of his gilded boots despite the indignity of it—and finding that he could see no farther across the ballroom anyway, "do you know where the mercenary adjutant is, Major Steuben?"
"Why would I know that? He could be anywhere!"
Makeup wouldn't keep Nikki's voice from being shrill as a powersaw when the boy got excited, Alexander Radescu thought; and thought other things, about the way Nikki's medals were now disarranged, r
owels and wreathes and dangling chains caught and skewed among themselves. The back of Radescu's neck was prickling, and the hairs along his arms. He hoped it wasn't hormonal, hoped that he had better control of his emotions than that. But dear Lord! He didn't care about Nikki's sexual orientation, but surely he had better sense than to get involved with a killer like Steuben . . . didn't he?
Ignoring the whispers in his mind, Radescu eyed the gorgeous show on the ballroom floor and said, "This is why the war's being fought, you know, Nikki? The—all the men having to wear uniforms, all the women having to be seen with men in uniforms." Except for Uncle Grigor, who distanced himself and his fellow Tribunes from the war by starkly traditional robes. Everyone else—of the aristocracy—gained from the war the chance to cavort in splendid uniforms, while Grigor Antonescu settled for real control of the Oltenian State . . . .
"They don't fight the war—we don't fight the war, even the ones of us with regular commissions," Radescu continued, turning to face Nikki again and beginning to straighten the boy's medals, a task that kept his eyes from Tzigara's face. "But it couldn't be fought without our support."
The whole surface of his skin was feeling cold as if the nerves themselves had been chilled, though sweat from the hot, swirling atmosphere still tingled at his joints and the small of his back. The two blue john urns stood tall and aloof just as they had done for centuries, but between them—
"I think maybe the Molts would have something to say about ending the war," said Nikki Tzigara. "I mean, you have your opinions, Alexi, but we can't make peace—"
"Nikki!" Radescu shouted, for suddenly there was an ancient Molt warrior directly behind the young aide. The Molts hide was the color of an algae-covered stone, soaked for decades in peat water, and his right brow horn was twisted in a way unique in the general's experience. The powergun he held was a full-sized weapon, too heavy for the Molt's stringy muscles to butt it against his shoulder the way one of the Slammers would have done.