by David Drake
Pulling a trailer with an air-cushion vehicle wasn’t a great deal of fun on surfaced roads. Dragging wheels through brush and plowed fields, as this crew had been doing, was like trying to swim with a boat anchor. The company commander had wisely unloaded the pair of mortars as soon as she could.
“Charlie element in position,” Captain Garmin reported. His platoons had a shorter route than Coke’s, though there’d been a delay as many of the troops and cars crossed the road cautiously to reach their attack positions. “Charlie out.”
Coke frowned at his display. Eight Heliodoran vehicles were moving away from the terminal building. Twelve more were in the final stages of loading soldiers from an early landed transport. A battalion headed toward Potosi to reinforce the patrol engaged there. The squad of infantry he’d left in a blocking position could at best slow them with a hit-and-run ambush, and that would be extremely risky.
On the southern perimeter, three of the combat cars and their associated infantry were short of where he’d wanted them to be able to enfilade the westernmost of the Heliodoran transports. Coke gave the order anyway: “All Team elements. Move into final attack positions.”
Johann Vierziger eased Cutting Edge forward. His seat was raised so that he looked out of the hatch in the bow slope instead of through the vision displays within the driver’s compartment.
“Wait for my command to fire,” Coke continued, “unless the enemy engages you first. In the latter case, fire at will. Mortars, when the shooting starts, drop your rounds on concentrations shielded from direct fire. Team One out.”
Some troopers felt claustrophobic when they were buttoned up in a vehicle. Coke was pretty sure that Vierziger just wanted to be able to add his own increment to the skein of fire which would shortly enwrap the Heliodorus Regiment.
The bow of Cutting Edge nosed up to the perimeter fence. Beside the vehicle, an infantryman was slicing a hole in the fence so that the wire didn’t obstruct his line of fire.
The nearest starship—a freighter in the gage trade—was 200 meters away, northward and to the right. The terminal buildings were almost 800 meters distant.
The column of Heliodoran transport, lightly armored ten-wheeled trucks, drove toward the gate and Potosi beyond. Soldiers leaned on the waist-height panels of the cargo boxes, looking like sightseers rather than combat troops.
“Barbour says we’ve been seen!” Margulies shouted.
“Fire at will!” Coke ordered. He squeezed his thumb trigger as three red flares lifted from the terminal building.
Coke aimed at a detail of soldiers horsing crates from the cargo bay of a Heliodoran transport. The figures went down like bowling pins. A case ruptured, spewing out multicolored smoke from the marking grenades within.
Sten Moden launched one, then the other, of his missiles from the starboard wing of the fighting compartment toward targets far to the left. The backblast cleared swathes of empty scrub.
Coke needn’t have worried about the most distant transports. A missile detonated on the boarding ramp of each.
Coke shifted his point of aim to the cargo hold of his chosen freighter. The inertia of the spinning iridium barrels fought the weapon’s powered traverse, giving the motion a greasy dynamism.
The open hatch was a foreshortened trapezoid in his sight picture. Coke squeezed the butterfly again. The stream of 2-cm bolts reflected within the starship’s dark interior like the pulses of a short circuit.
Ammunition detonated in a series of quivering yellow puffs. The orange flash that followed ripped the vessel apart, blowing the middle third across the port as jagged shrapnel.
The blast hurled Coke back from his tribarrel. The concussion set off stacked munitions previously unloaded from other ships. The shock wave skidded the eight Heliodoran trucks, already racked and burning from the eastern element’s gunfire, into a single piled inferno.
Coke got up. He’d lost his helmet. Pilar, white and as stiff-featured as a skull, handed it to him.
A black mushroom mounted a thousand meters from the crater where the center of the starship had been. The two ends of the vessel lay crumpled, thirty meters from where they rested before the explosion.
Gunfire ceased for an instant. The shock had flattened potential targets as well as stunned the FDF gunners.
The initial eight-round salvo of mortar shells landed amidst the unloaded cargo. The white flashes and blasts would have seemed devastating had they not just followed a cataclysm.
Loudspeakers throughout the terminal buildings blared, “Invading forces, you have been surrounded by soldiers of the Marvelan Confederacy. Throw down your arms and surrender. You are surrounded by troops of the Marvelan Confederacy. There is no escape but surrender!”
Bob Barbour again, using the patches into the PA system he’d prepared weeks earlier. Coke had never doubted the value of intelligence and electronic warfare, but Barbour would make a believer of the most hardened grunt.
A Heliodoran crew-served weapon raked the southern perimeter from a position far enough to the west to have been shielded from the exploding starship. They were using a coil gun, a scaled-up version of the Heliodorans’ personal weapons. The gun managed to cough out a dozen half-kg shells. One round lifted a Frisian infantryman twenty meters in the air, shedding limbs as he tumbled.
A storm of fire erased the weapon and its crew. Some of the shots came from nearby Heliodorans who knew their best chance of survival lay in surrender.
Partial silence returned, striated by the crackle of flames and the screams of those injured too badly to crawl from the spreading fires. Bits of cloth fluttered above whatever sparse cover the Heliodoran survivors had found. Some of the makeshift flags were white, but the intention was clear regardless.
“Colonel Shirazi to Marvelan Command!” a voice cried over one of the commo helmet’s open channels. “We’re laying down our arms! I repeat, we’re laying down our arms! We claim the right of exchange under Bonding Authority regulations! We’re laying d—”
Coke cut away from the Heliodoran commander’s bleating.
“Team One to all Team elements,” he ordered. His throat felt as though somebody’d scaled it with a wood rasp. “Cease fire, but hold your positions. When the other side’s sorted itself out a little better, I’ll have them leave their weapons in place and march to the west end of the port reservation. Cease fire unless you’re in danger. One out.”
Coke switched to a general push to contact Colonel Shirazi. Sudden dizziness made him sag against the receiver of his tribarrel. The air above the glowing iridium shimmered. Through the heat waves, Coke saw Johann Vierziger looking back at him anxiously.
Pilar gripped Coke’s shoulder, trying to keep him from falling. Silent tears cleared tracks across the grime on her face.
Sten Moden stared out at the barren killing field. There was no telling how many people had died. There would never be a certain figure: the secondary explosions had been too general and too powerful. Hundreds, perhaps over a thousand; in as little time as it takes to open a poached egg….
“It could have been worse,” the logistics officer said. “It could have been us.”
Niko Daun was talking sixteen to the dozen in the light of a lantern hanging over the nearby mess table. He wasn’t bragging. In fact, he didn’t seem to be aware of the presence of the members of the expeditionary force seated with him.
Many of the ex-Slammers were veterans of a score of incidents as hot as the one the young technician had just survived. They listened tolerantly as they ate.
“He’s coming along, Matthew,” Johann Vierziger said with mild amusement. “And the next time he won’t make the mistake of pointing his gun at a pair of thugs and telling them to surrender.”
The lantern illuminated only half of Vierziger’s face. Shadows hollowed the killer’s perfect features into the agony of a fourteenth century Pietà.
“Is mercy a mistake, Johann?” Coke asked. They sat on an empty mortar case near the edge of the exp
editionary force’s Night Defensive Position.
“I used to think so,” Vierziger said. He smiled. “Thinking a gun’s a magic wand that you wave—that is a mistake. When those Astra stragglers stumbled onto the van, he should have cut them down immediately.”
The wired-in southwest corner of the port reservation was ablaze with floodlights. The Heliodorus Regiment, disarmed and under the guard of four combat cars, would be repatriated as soon as possible.
One of the transports the regiment landed in was still operable. Several days of work were necessary to repair two more, however.
Three transports would suffice to carry all the survivors comfortably.
“Niko did all right,” Coke said. “A lot of veterans would have frozen when somebody shot them square in the chest. Thank the Lord for body armor.”
Vierziger stretched his slim, hard form, still smiling. “It has its uses,” he said, rather than agreeing.
Coke turned toward the eastern horizon, though there was nothing immediately visible save dark forest which had so recently flamed with the directed lightning of powerguns. “Thanks for taking over organizing a citizens’ watch in Potosi,” he said. “I’ve got a platoon backing them up as a reaction force, but the gunmen seem pretty much willing to come in peacefully.”
Vierziger nodded. “Sten had some friends in town,” he said. “Solid people, for civilians. It’s not hard to set a structure up if you’ve got good material. And the locals want a structure.”
Matthew Coke’s spirit osmosed through the flesh and hovered above the scene. He was aware of sensory stimuli—the laughter of troops relaxing after an action of exceptionally concentrated violence; long-molecule soot from smoldering plastic, masking but not completely hiding the stench of burned flesh; the touch of a breeze on a night that was beginning to turn cool—the way he would have been aware of readings on a console display.
“The Marvelans should’ve sent along a civil administration unit with the troops,” his voice said.
“They didn’t have time,” Vierziger said. “Alois wasn’t going to wait for civilians to get their end together when he already had clearance to deal with the military side.”
Vierziger spoke with almost proprietary satisfaction; the tone of a long-time veteran or even friend of President Alois Hammer. Coke looked at the sergeant and said nothing.
“I think, Matthew,” Vierziger added mildly, “that you have a visitor coming.”
Coke’s mind was one again with his body, aches and stresses complete. Pilar’s solid figure walked toward the NDP from the terminal building. She’d insisted on trying to put the facilities to rights immediately. It was hard to see that being possible, given the disruption the Heliodorans had caused and the damage from the exploding starship.
They had decisions to make in the near future, both of them.
Coke stood up. “Johann?” he said. “It’s quiet now, but the Marvelans will pull us out of here in a few weeks at the longest. Do you think the civilians here will do any better the next time?”
“That’s up to them, Matthew,” Vierziger said. “The only thing that matters to our souls is what we’ve done ourselves.”
“You believe in souls, then?” Coke snapped.
Vierziger nodded. His smile reminded Coke that Lucifer was a fallen angel. “Oh, yes,” the little killer said. “I believe in souls.”
Matthew Coke turned and walked to meet Pilar at the guard-post. By his own orders as Commanding Officer, troops of the Cantilucca Expedition were required to carry weapons with them at all times.
Coke’s sub-machine gun and holstered pistol remained on the crate where he’d been sitting.
The Sharp End
To Larry Barnthouse, who long ago as another 96 C 2 L 94 was missed by all the same bullets that missed me.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book involved computer adventures unusual even for me, The Man Who Kills Computers. (Three dead within two weeks.) My son Jonathan, Mark Van Name, Karen Zimmerman, Allyn Vogel, and my wife Jo, were of particular importance in making it possible for me to continue working.
This book required a lot of attention by Dan Breen, my first reader. I’m very fortunate to have him.
PAYING THE PIPER
A Background Note from the Author
I’ve always found it easier to use real settings and cultures than to invent my own. No matter how good a writer’s imagination, the six or seven millennia of available human history can do a better job of creating backgrounds.
More than ten years ago I finally took the advice my friends Jim Baen and Mark Van Name had been giving me and did an afterword, explaining where I got the details of the book I’d just completed. I’d resisted this, feeling that it was bad art—the book should explain itself—and anyway, it was unnecessary. It was obvious to any reader that I was using historical and mythological backgrounds, so why should I bother to tell them?
It still may be bad art, and I may have been correct about readers in general seeing what I was doing without me telling them explicitly, but reviewers suddenly discovered that my fiction utilizes literary, historical and mythological material. I’ve kept up the practice, though generally not with straight Military SF like the Hammer series—but in this case I thought it might be useful, because the background I’ve used is from a backwater of history.
The Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the third century BC was a very complex region. The three empires founded by the successors of Alexander the Great were collapsing. They were locally powerful, but none was a superpower. Usurpers and secessionists complicated their politics.
Leagues of city states—the Achaeans and Aetolians in Greece proper, others in Asia Minor—had their own interests. New kingdoms, particularly that of Pergamum, were growing at the expense of their neighbors, and barbarians—both Celtic and Illyrian—were becoming regional powers instead of merely raiding and moving on.
Rome was still in the wings but the violent morass would shortly draw her in, ending both the chaos and her own status as a republic. (The region’s enormous wealth and complexity, in my opinion, inexorably turned Rome into an empire.)
I adapted this setting for Paying the Piper. The general background is that of the war between Rhodes and Byzantium, ostensibly over freedom of navigation. It was about as stupid a conflict as you’re likely to find, during which the real principals licked their lips and chuckled while well-meaning idealists wrecked their own societies in pursuit of unobtainable goals by improper means. Much of the military detail is drawn from the campaigns of Philip the Fifth and his allies against the Aetolian League, particularly the campaign of 219 BC which culminated in Philip’s capture of Psophis.
I guess it isn’t out of place to add one comment about the study of history. Knowing a good deal about how cultures interacted in the past allows one to predict how they will interact in the present, so I’m rarely surprised by the daily news. But I regret to say that this understanding doesn’t appear to make me happier.
Choosing Sides
The driver of the lead combat car revved his fans to lift the bow when he reached the bottom of the starship’s steep boarding ramp. The gale whirling from under the car’s skirts rocked Lieutenant Arne Huber forward into the second vehicle—his own Fencing Master, still locked to the deck because a turnbuckle had kinked when the ship unexpectedly tilted on the soft ground.
Huber was twenty-five standard years old, shorter than average and fit without being impressively muscular. He wore a commo helmet now, but the short-cropped hair beneath it was as black as the pupils of his eyes.
Sighing, he pushed himself up from Fencing Master’s bow slope. His head hurt the way it always did just after star travel—which meant worse than it did any other time in his life. Even without the howling fans of Foghorn, the lead car, his ears would be roaring in time with his pulse.
None of the troopers in Huber’s platoon were in much better shape, and he didn’t guess the starship’s crew were more than
nominal themselves. The disorientation from star travel, like a hangover, didn’t stop hurting just because it’d become familiar.
“Look!” said Sergeant Deseau, shouting so that the three starship crewmen could hear him over the fans’ screaming. “If you don’t have us free in a minute flat, starting now, I’m going to shoot the cursed thing off and you can worry about the damage to your cursed deck without me to watch you. Do you understand?”
Two more spacers were squeezing through the maze of vehicles and equipment in the hold, carrying a power tool between them. This sort of problem can’t have been unique to Fencing Master.
Huber put his hand on Deseau’s shoulder. “Let’s get out of the way and let them fix this, Sarge,” he said, speaking through the helmet intercom so that he didn’t have to raise his voice. Shouting put people’s backs up, even if you didn’t mean anything by it except that it was hard to hear. “Let’s take a look at Plattner’s World.”
They turned together and walked to the open hatch. Deseau was glad enough to step away from the problem.
The freighter which had brought platoon F-3, Arne Huber’s command, to Plattner’s World had a number rather than a name: KPZ 9719. It was much smaller than the vessels which usually carried the men and vehicles of Hammer’s Regiment, but even so it virtually overwhelmed the facilities here at Rhodesville. The ship had set down normally, but one of the outriggers then sank an additional meter into the soil. The lurch had flung everybody who’d already unstrapped against the bulkheads and jammed Fencing Master in place, blocking two additional combat cars behind it in the hold.
Huber chuckled. That made his head throb, but it throbbed already. Deseau gave him a sour look.