by David Drake
Before he finished the word, Learoyd spun a bomb the size of a walnut up through the narrow opening. Huber had seen the trooper knock birds off limbs ten meters high; this was no test at all for him.
The grenade blew the door shut with a bright flash that to the naked eye would’ve been blue. The bomb’s capacitors dumped their charge through an osmium wire. Electrical grenades had very little fragmentation effect, but their sudden energy release was both physically and mentally shattering for anybody close to the blast. Huber rose to his feet, leaped the final steps to the landing, and kicked the door open again. He went in shooting.
For the first instant he didn’t have a target, just the need to disconcert anybody who hadn’t lost his nerve when the grenade went off. The carpet of the sitting room beyond was on fire. A man lay in the middle of it, screaming and beating the floor with the butt of his pistol. Huber’s burst stitched him from the middle of one shoulderblade to the other. The man flopped like a fish on dry land, then shuddered silent.
There was a doorway ahead of Huber and another to the right, toward the back of the building. Huber went straight, into a small foyer around the elevator shaft. The top of the cage remained just above floor level.
Huber jerked open the door across the foyer. The room beyond was a mass of flame. It’d been a bedroom, and the buzzbomb had ignited all the fabric. Huber slammed the door again. His hands were singed; and only his faceshield had saved his eyes and lungs from the fire’s shriveling touch.
At the back of the foyer was a window onto the grounds; concussion from the warhead going off in the bedroom had blown out the casement an instant before it slammed the connecting door. Through the empty window, Huber heard the lift fans of an aircar spin up.
He jumped to the opening. To his right a closed car with polarized windows sat on a pad cantilevered off the back of the building, trembling as its driver built up speed in the fan blades. It was a large vehicle, capable of carrying six in comfort. The front passenger door was open and a uniformed man leaned out of it, firing a heavy slugthrower back toward the sitting room. The aluminum skirts that propelled the osmium projectiles vaporized in the dense magnetic flux, blazing as white muzzle flashes in Huber’s thermal vision.
Huber aimed between the hinge side of the car door and the jamb, then shot the guard in the neck and head. The fellow sprang forward like a headless chicken, flinging his gun away with nerveless hands.
The aircar lifted, the door swinging closed from momentum. Huber fired, starring the windscreen but not penetrating it. Deseau and Learoyd were in the doorway now, pocking the car’s thick plastic side-panels; their sub-machine guns couldn’t do real damage.
The car half-pivoted as its driver prepared to dive off the edge of the platform and use gravity to speed his escape. A buzzbomb detonated on the underside of the bow, flipping the vehicle over onto its back. The instant the warhead hit, Huber saw a spear of molten metal stab through the car’s roof in a white dazzle. The driver would’ve been in direct line with the explosion-formed hypersonic jet.
The blast rocked Huber away from the window, but the car had taken the direct impact and the building had protected him from the worst of the remainder. Deseau and Learoyd, running toward the vehicle when the warhead went off, bounced into the wall behind them and now lay sprawled on the deck. Learoyd had managed to hang onto his sub-machine gun; Deseau patted the tiles numbly, trying to find his again.
A man crawled out of the overturned car. The right side of his face was bloody, but Huber recognized Senator Patroklos Graciano.
The senator stood with a look of desperation on his face. Huber braced his left elbow on the window opening and laid his ring sight at the base of Graciano’s throat. He fired a short burst, flinging the man backward. Tufts of beard trimmed by the pellets swirled in the air, falling more slowly than the corpse.
There were figures still moving in the car. A stunningly beautiful woman tried to squirm out, hampered by the necklaces and jewel-glittering rings she clutched to her breasts with both hands. She wore a diaphanous shift that accentuated rather than hid her body, but on her a gunnysack would’ve been provocative.
Huber aimed. She looked up at him, her elbows on the chest of her lover so freshly dead that his corpse still shuddered. A powergun bolt blew out her left eyesocket and lifted the top of her skull. Her arms straightened convulsively, scattering the jewelry across the landing platform.
Major Steuben stood in the doorway from the sitting room, his pistol in his delicate right hand. His faceshield was raised and he was smiling.
The girl still in the car was probably a maid. She opened her mouth to scream when she saw her mistress die. The second pistol bolt snapped between her perfect teeth and nearly decapitated her. Her body thrashed wildly in the passenger compartment.
Learoyd was getting to his feet. Steuben grabbed the collar of Deseau’s clamshell armor and jerked the sergeant upright; the major must have muscles like steel cables under his trim exterior. The muzzle of the powergun in his other hand was a white-hot circle.
He turned toward Huber, looking out of the adjacent window, and shouted, “Come along, Lieutenant. We’ve taken care of our little problem and it’s time to leave now.”
Huber met them in the sitting room. Steuben waved him toward the stairwell. Sergeant Deseau still walked like a drunk, so Huber grabbed his arm in a fireman’s carry and half-lifted, half-dragged the man to the trucks. Every floor of the building was burning. The major was the last man out.
In all the cacophony—the screams and the blasts and the weeping desperation—that Arne Huber had heard in the past few minutes, there was only one sound that would haunt his future nightmares. That was Joachim Steuben’s laughter as he blew a girl’s head off.
If I buy the farm here on Plattner’s World, Huber thought as he walked toward the open door of Major Steuben’s office, they’re going to have to name this the Lieutenant Arne C. Huber Memorial Hallway.
There’s never a bad time for humor in a war zone. This was a better time than most.
“Come in and close the door, Lieutenant,” Steuben said as Huber raised his hand to knock on the jamb. “And don’t, if you please, attempt to salute me ever again. You’re not very good at it.”
Huber obeyed meekly. The major was working behind a live display, entering data on the touchpad lying on his wooden desk. It wasn’t a game this time: Steuben was finishing a task before he got on to the business who’d just walked in his door.
He shut down the display and met Huber’s eyes. He smiled; Huber didn’t try to smile back.
“This will be brief, Lieutenant,” Steuben said. “The United Cities are in a state of war with Solace, or will be when the Senate meets in a few hours. There’s been a second attack within UC territory by mercenaries in Solace pay. This one was directed against Senator Patroklos Graciano here in Benjamin.”
Steuben quirked a smile. “It was quite a horrific scene, according to reports of the event,” he went on. “Graciano and his whole household were killed.”
Huber looked at the man across the desk, remembering the same smile lighted by the flash of a powergun. “If I may ask, sir?” he said. “Why did the, ah, mercenaries attack that particular senator?”
“It’s believed that the Solace authorities had made an attempt to turn the poor fellow against his own people,” the major said blandly. “Graciano had gathered a great deal of information about Solace plans and was about to make a full report to the Senate. The attack forestalled him, but as a result of such blatant aggression even the former peace party in the Senate is unanimous in supporting military action against Solace.”
I wonder how many of the senators believe the official story, Huber thought, and how many are afraid they’ll go the same way as Patroklos Graciano if they continue to get in the way of the Regiment’s contract?
Well, it didn’t really matter. Like he’d told Major Steuben last night, he wasn’t a politician. Aloud he said, “I see, sir.”
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“None of that matters to you, of course,” Steuben continued. “I called you here to say that a review of your actions at Rhodesville the day you landed has determined that you behaved properly and in accordance with the best traditions of the Regiment.”
He giggled. “You may even get a medal out of it, Lieutenant.”
Huber’s mouth was dry; for a moment he didn’t trust himself to speak. Then he said, “Ah, sir? Does this mean that I’m being returned to my platoon?”
Steuben looked up at Huber. He smiled. “Well, Lieutenant,” he said, “that’s the reason I called you here in person instead of just informing you of the investigation outcome through channels. How would you like a transfer to A Company? You’d stay at the same rank, but you probably know already that the pay in A Company is better than the same grade levels in line units.”
“A Company?” Huber repeated. He couldn’t have heard right. “The White Mice, you mean?”
“Yes, Lieutenant,” Steuben said. His face didn’t change in a definable way, but his smile was suddenly very hard. “The White Mice. The company under my personal command.”
“I don’t …” Huber said, then realized that among the things he didn’t know was how to end the sentence he’d begun. He let his voice trail off.
“Recent events have demonstrated that you’re smart and that you’re willing to use your initiative,” the major said. His fingers were tented before him, but his wrists didn’t quite rest on the touchpad beneath them.
The smile became amused again. He added, “Also, you can handle a gun. You’ll have ample opportunity to exercise all these abilities in A Company, I assure you.”
“Sir …” said Huber’s lips. He was watching from outside himself again. “I don’t think I have enough …”
This time he stopped, not because he didn’t know how to finish the sentence but because he thought of Steuben’s hell-lit smile the night before. The words choked in his throat.
“Ruthlessness, you were perhaps going to say, Lieutenant?” the major said with his cat’s-tongue lilt. “Oh, I think you’ll do. I’m a good judge of that sort of thing, you know.”
He giggled again. “You’re dismissed for now,” Steuben said. “Go back to Logistics—you’ll have to break in your replacement no matter what you decide. But rest assured, you’ll be hearing from me again.”
Arne Huber’s soul watched his body walking back down the hallway. Even his mind was numb, and despite the closed door behind him he continued to hear laughter.
The Political Process
The air above Fencing Master sizzled just beyond the visual range; some of the farm’s defenders were using lasers that operated in the low-ultraviolet. Lieutenant Arne Huber sighted his tribarrel through his visor’s thirty percent mask of the battlefield terrain and the units engaged. He swung the muzzles forward to aim past Sergeant Deseau’s left elbow and gunshield.
If Huber fired at the present angle, the powerful 2-cm bolts would singe Deseau’s sleeve and his neck below the flare of his commo helmet. He wouldn’t do that unless the risk to his sergeant was worth it—though worse things had happened to Deseau during his fifteen years in Hammer’s Slammers.
“Fox Three-one,” Huber said; his helmet’s artificial intelligence cued Foghorn, another of the four combat cars in platoon F-3. “Ready to go? Fox Six over.”
A rocket gun from somewhere in the Solace defenses fired three times, its coughing ignition followed an instant later by the snap-p-p! of the multiple projectiles going supersonic. At least one of the heavy-metal slugs punched more than a hole in the air: the clang against armor would have been audible kilometers away. No way to tell who’d been hit or how badly; and no time to worry about it now anyway.
“Roger, Six, we’re ready!” cried Sergeant Nagano, Foghorn’s commander. He didn’t sound scared, but his voice was an octave higher than usual with excitement. “Three-one out!”
Huber figured Nagano had a right to be excited. Via, he had a right to be scared.
“Costunna, pull forward,” Huber ordered his own driver, a newbie who’d replaced the man whom a buzzbomb had decapitated. “Three-one, rush ’em!”
The Northern Star Farm was a network of cornfields crisscrossed by concrete-lined irrigation canals. In the center were more than twenty single-story buildings: barns, equipment sheds, and barracks for the work force. The layout was typical of the large agricultural complexes with which the nation of Solace produced food not only for her own citizens but for all the residents of Plattner’s World— when Solace wasn’t at war with the Outer States, at any rate.
Technically, only the United Cities were at war with Solace at the moment. Everybody knew that the other five Outer States were helping fund the cost of hiring Hammer’s Regiment, but Solace couldn’t afford not to look the other way.
The civilians had fled, driving off in wagons pulled by the farm’s tractors. The buildings and canals remained as a strongpoint where a battalion of Solace Militia and a company of off-planet mercenaries defended howitzers with the range to loft shells deep into the UC.
Colonel Hammer had sent Task Force Sangrela, one platoon each of tanks, combat cars, and infantry, to eliminate the problem.
Fencing Master began to vibrate as Costunna brought up the speed of the eight powerful fans which pressurized the plenum chamber and lifted the combat car for frictionless passage over the ground. The thirty-tonne vehicle didn’t slide forward, however. “Go, Costunna!” Huber screamed. “Go! Go! G—”
Finally Fencing Master pulled up from the swale in which she’d sheltered during her approach to the target. Huber’s helmet careted movement all along the canal slanting across their front at thirty degrees to their course: Solace Militiamen rising to fire at Foghorn, which was already in plain sight.
If the two cars had broken cover together as Huber planned, Foghorn wouldn’t have looked like the lone target in a shooting gallery. Swearing desperately, he hosed the lip of the canal with his tribarrel. Deseau, Learoyd at Fencing Master’s right wing gun, and Foghorn’s three gunners fired also, but the other car sparkled like a short circuit as slugs struck her iridium armor.
In Huber’s holographic sight picture, dark-uniformed Militiamen turned with horrified looks as they tried to shift the heavy rocket guns they wore harnessed to their shoulders. They’d been so focused on Foghorn that the appearance of another combat car two hundred meters away took them completely by surprise.
Fencing Master’s forward motion and the angle of the canal helped Huber traverse the target simply by holding his thumbs on the tribarrel’s trigger. The two-centimeter weapon’s barrel cluster rotated as it sent copper ions blasting at the speed of light down each iridium bore in turn. The bolts burned metal, shattered concrete in flares of glass and white-hot quicklime, and blew humans apart in gushes of steam. An arm spun thirty meters into the air, trailing smoke from its burning sleeve.
One of the D Company tanks on overwatch to the west fired its main gun twice, not toward the canal but into the interior of the farm where anti-armor weapons were showing themselves to engage the combat cars. An orange flash blew out the sidewalls of a barn; three seconds later, the shock of that enormous secondary explosion made water dance in the irrigation canals.
The surviving Militiamen ducked to cover. Foghorn had stalled for a moment, but she was bucking forward again now. Huber cleared the terrain mask from his faceshield to let his eyes and the helmet AI concentrate on nearby motion, his potential targets. He didn’t worry about the heavier weapons that might be locking in on Fencing Master from long range; that was the business of the tanks—and of the Gods, if you believed in them, which right at the moment Huber couldn’t even pretend to do.
A slug penetrated the plenum chamber on the right side of the bow, struck a nacelle inside—the fan howled momentarily, then died; blue sparks sprayed from a portside intake duct and the hair on Huber’s arm stood up—and punched out from the left rear in a flash of burning steel. Costunna s
creamed, “Port three’s out!”
The air was sharp with ozone. Huber’s nose filters kept the ions from searing his lungs, but the skin of his throat and wrists prickled.
“Drive on!” Huber shouted.
You didn’t have to believe in Gods to believe in Hell.
Instead of a square grid, Northern Star’s canal system formed a honeycomb of hexagons three hundred meters across each flat. Fencing Master slid to where three canals joined and halted as planned. Costunna had adequate mechanical skills and took orders well enough, he just seemed to lack an instinct for what was important. Huber had a straight view down the length of the shallow trough slanting north-northeast from his side. Solace Militiamen—some of them dead, some of them hunching in terror; a few raising weapons to confront the howling monster that had driven down on them—were dark blurs against the white concrete and the trickle of sunbright water.
Huber fired, his bolts shredding targets and glancing from the canal walls in white gouts. Deseau was firing also, and from Fencing Master’s starboard wing Learoyd ripped the canal intersecting at a southeastern angle. Foghorn’s left gun was raking that canal in the opposite direction.
It was dangerous having two cars firing pretty much toward one another—if either of the gunners raised his muzzles too far, he’d blow divots out of the friendly vehicle—but this was a battle. If safety’d been the Slammers’ first concern, they’d all have stayed in bed this morning.
A bullet from the central complex ricocheted off Fencing Master’s bow slope, denting the armor and impact-heating it to a shimmering rainbow. Further rounds clipped cornstalks and spewed up little geysers of black dirt.
Sergeant Deseau shouted a curse and grabbed his right wrist momentarily, but he had his hands back on the tribarrel’s spade grips before Huber could ask if he was all right. The slug that hit the bow had probably sprayed him with bits of white-hot iridium; nothing serious.