by David Drake
In retrospect it hadn’t been much of a battle, though it’d seemed real enough to Arne Huber as he watched scores of Militiamen rise from a trench and aim at his oncoming combat cars. And all it takes is one bullet in the wrong place and you’re dead as dirt, no matter how great your side’s victory looks to whoever writes the history books.
Priamedes shook her head in inward directed anger, then turned a genuinely warm smile toward Huber. “I’m sorry,” she said. “The situation frustrates me, but that isn’t your fault and it’s not what I came to see you about. Will this place do for our drink? I like it myself.”
She banked the car slightly and gestured through her window. On Plattner’s World, there was forest even in the cities. She was pointing toward a three-story structure shaded by trees on all sides. On the roof were open-air tables, half empty at this hour, and a service kiosk in one corner with an outside elevator rising beside it. Above, a holographic sign, visible from any angle, read GUSTAV’S. The letters changed from dark to light green and back in slow waves.
“That’s fine,” Huber said. “Anywhere’s fine. I don’t know much about Benjamin.”
He’d been on seven planets besides Nieuw Friesland where he was born, and he didn’t know much about any of them. He remembered the way powergun bolts glinted among the ice walls on Humboldt and the way the whores on Dar es-Sharia dyed their breasts and genitalia blue; those things and scores of similar things, little anecdotes of existence with nothing connecting them but the fact they were fragments from the life of Lieutenant Arne Huber.
Priamedes brought them around in a tight reverse instead of angling the fans forward to slow them. The car dropped between the treetops to level out just above the gravel roadway. The elevator was descending with a pair of well-dressed men in the glass cage.
Dust puffed as Priamedes landed smoothly in a line of similar cars. City streets in the Outer States were for parking and delivery vehicles. They were almost never paved, because that would speed storm-water runoff and decrease the amount of water that penetrated the soil to nourish vegetation.
Huber reached for his door release; parts of his body decided to protest, cramping when they were directed to move. He gasped with pain, then tried to cover his weakness with a blistering curse.
“Wait, I’ll—” Priamedes said.
Snarling under his breath, Huber shoved the door open before his hostess could get around the vehicle to help him. He hopped out, forcing his left leg to work even though it felt as if somebody had turned a blowtorch on the hip joint.
She paused, turning her head away politely, and waited for Huber to join her so that they could walk to the waiting elevator together. “My father was injured in the fighting before he was captured,” she said in a neutral tone. “He got off crutches a few days ago and should make a full recovery.”
Huber laughed as the cage rose. “So will I,” he said, more cheerfully than he felt. “Look, mostly I’m just stiff from sitting at a console all day. I’m not used to desk duty, that’s all.”
That was part of why he was stumbling around, all right; and he was tense from frustration at the people he had to deal with, which was another part of the problem. But at the back of Huber’s mind was the awareness that the fragments he’d caught when the shot struck might have done damage that even time and the best medical treatment couldn’t quite repair. That he might never again be fit for a field command….
“Lieutenant?” the black-haired woman said in concern.
Via, what had his expression been like? “Sorry,” Huber said, forcing a smile. “I was klicks away, just thinking of the work I’ve got to do in the morning.”
He must have sounded convincing, because Priamedes’ features softened with relief. To keep away from the subject of his health, Huber made his way to a table near the wickerwork railing and pulled out a chair for the woman. It was with considerable relief that he settled across from her, though.
A waitress approached with an expectant look. The dozen other customers were glancing covertly at them as well, their eyes probably drawn by Huber’s uniform and possibly his limp. There were a lot of mercenaries in Benjamin now, but the Slammers’ khaki and rampant lion patch were the trappings of nobility to those who were knowledgeable. On a planet as wealthy and interconnected as Plattner’s World, that meant most people.
Because of that perfectly accurate perception and because of the perfectly normal human resentment it engendered in other mercenaries, the United Cities were going to lose the war. A single armored regiment couldn’t defeat several divisions worth of enemies, many of whom were themselves highly sophisticated; and the other UC mercenaries weren’t cooperating with the Slammers the way they’d need to do to win.
“Lieutenant?” said Daphne Priamedes, loudly enough to penetrate Huber’s brown study. They were waiting for his order, of course….
He swore in embarrassment. “Ah, there’s corn whiskey? I don’t remember the name for it here, but my sergeant when I was in Log Section …?”
Priamedes nodded understanding and said to the waitress, “Zapotec—and water, I believe, unless …?”
“That’s fine,” Huber said in reply to her raised eyebrow. “Anything’s fine, really.”
He didn’t know whether Zapotec was generic or a brand name; if the latter, it was probably the best available unless he’d misjudged Daphne Priamedes. Huber suddenly realized that he knew very little about anything beyond what he needed to do his job well. He and his fellow troopers wouldn’t have been nearly as effective if they hadn’t focused so completely on their jobs, but when he thought about it he felt lonely.
The waitress trotted away. Priamedes glanced around the covered patio, slapping the eyes of the others back to their own proper concerns. When she and Huber were as private as one ever is in open air, she said, “My father told me what happened at Northern Star, Lieutenant. At the end, I mean. He said it would’ve been much easier for you to kill him and his men than to capture them, but you took a considerable risk to spare their lives.”
The waitress came back with the drinks. Priamedes entered her credit chip in the reader before Huber even thought to take his out of its pouch. Via! Maybe it was a good thing he wasn’t in the field right now, because he was dropping too bloody many stitches.
Though …in the field he knew what he was doing reflexively. This was civilian life, and that was another matter. Arne Huber hadn’t been a civilian for a long time.
He took a swig of the liquor; it cleaned the gumminess from his mouth and tongue and focused his mind like a leap into cold water. “Ma’am,” he said, “I guess I’ve done worse things than shooting civilians who didn’t have sense enough to give up, but only by mistake or when I had to.”
He drank again; too much. He’d supposed he’d made his opinion of the Solace Militia clearer than he should’ve to an officer’s daughter. The whiskey was good but it was strong as well, even cut with water; the big slug made his throat spasm and he had to cough.
Covering his embarrassment, Huber went on, “Ma’am, I can give you policy reasons why my commanding officer didn’t want to blow away your father’s men when they made a break for it. The truth is, though, neither I nor Captain Sangrela really likes to kill people. I’m a soldier, not a sociopath.”
“I see that,” she said, smiling faintly. “And I still prefer Daphne, Lieutenant.”
“It’s the booze talking,” Huber said, smiling back. It was warm in his stomach, though and it felt good. “Look, Daphne, I appreciate the drink, but I really need to get to a bunk.”
“Very well,” she said, tossing off the rest of the fizzy, light green concoction she was drinking over ice. “If I can’t offer you dinner …?”
“No ma—no Daphne,” Huber said, rising more easily than he’d sat down. “I’ll eat some rations, but right now I need sleep more than company—even company as nice as you.”
“Then I’ll just thank you again for sparing my father,” she said, standing also.
“And I hope we’ll see one another again in the future when you’re better rested—Arne?”
“Arne,” Huber agreed. “And I hope that too.”
“I’ll expect your report in three hours, then, General Rubens,” Huber said and broke the connection. He adjusted the little fan playing on him from the console as he thought about the next call he had to make. The day’d started out cool, but now by midmorning it was unseasonably hot for Plattner’s World.
Parts of Base Alpha were climate controlled, but mostly the Regiment’s machines and personnel were expected to operate under whatever conditions nature offered. You weren’t going to win many battles from inside a sealed room, and the Colonel tried to discourage people from thinking you could.
As a break from talking to people he didn’t like and didn’t trust—he knew they probably felt the same way—Huber called up the Solace Order of Battle. He wasn’t sure he was really supposed to have the information, but he’d found that his retina pattern was on Central’s validation list. A benefit of being assigned to Operations …
As he viewed the latest information, his gut told him that he’d have been better off staying ignorant. Sure, things could’ve gotten worse—things can always get worse—but he hadn’t really expected them to go this bad. Daphne’d said Solace was mortgaging its next ten years to hire mercenaries. Huber knew now that she’d been understating the real costs.
He looked out through the fence, trying to settle his mind. An aircar with Log Section markings had landed in the street under the guns of the combat car on guard. The driver, one of the locals the Regiment had hired for non-combat work, waited in the cab. A tall civilian in an expensive-looking pearl-gray outfit got out, stalked to the gate, and said, “I am Sigmund Lindeyar. Take me to Colonel Hammer at once!”
Instead of snapping to attention obediently, Captain Dillard turned his back to the furious man on the other side of the fence. He was frowning as he called Central on his commo helmet.
The fellow ought to be more thankful than he seemed. Dillard was treating him a lot better than some troopers would’ve done to a civilian who raised his voice to them.
Dillard grimaced minusculely as he signed off. When he focused again on his present surroundings, he caught Huber’s eye. “Lieutenant Huber?” he called. “Will you join us, please?”
Huber cut the power to his console manually instead of trusting it to turn itself off when he rose from the attached seat. He didn’t want anybody else to see what he’d just learned. Blood and Martyrs, a brigade of armored cavalry in addition to what Solace was already fielding!
“Sir?” said Huber crisply to Captain Dillard. He stood at parade rest, trying to look like what a civilian expected a professional soldier to be. He’d picked up from Dillard’s expression that Central had confirmed the civilian’s high self-opinion, so a little theater was called for.
Huber’s rumpled fatigues weren’t what a rear-echelon soldier would’ve called “professional appearance,” but Huber wasn’t a rear-echelon soldier.
Huber’d thought Lindeyar was an old man; viewing him closely, he wasn’t sure. The hair beneath the fellow’s natty beret was pale blond, not white, and his face was unlined; despite that, his blue eyes had age in them as well as a present snapping fury.
“Lieutenant,” Dillard said, turning to include both Huber and the civilian, “Mr. Lindeyar is the Nonesuch trade representative. His driver brought him here rather than to the Tactical Operations Center at Base Alpha, where he’s to meet Colonel Hammer. I’d like you to escort Mr. Lindeyar to the correct location.”
“Yessir!” Huber said, his back straight. He thought about saluting, but that’d come through as obvious caricature if Lindeyar knew anything about the way the Slammers operated. Besides, Huber was lousy at it.
“Mr. Lindeyar,” Dillard said, shifting his eyes slightly, “Lieutenant Huber is my second in command. He’ll see to it that there isn’t a repetition of the error that brought you here in the first place.”
“He’d better,” said the civilian, his eyes flicking over Huber with the sort of attention one gives to a zoo animal. “Your colonel is expecting me. Expecting me before now!”
“We’ll get you there, sir,” Huber said as Dillard opened the gate. He was the only officer in the annex besides Dillard himself, but “second in command” was more theater. If one of the warrant officers or enlisted men had caught Dillard’s eye at the moment he needed a warm body to cover somebody else’s screwup, that trooper would have become “my most trusted subordinate” as sure as day dawns.
And screwup it’d been. The driver had a navigational pod, but he or it had chosen the coordinates for the operations annex instead of the TOC. A soldier wouldn’t have made that mistake, but to the contract driver it was simply a destination. That probably wasn’t the fault of anybody in the Regiment—and it certainly wasn’t Captain Dillard’s fault—but Lindeyar didn’t seem like the sort of man who worried about justice when he was angry.
They walked toward the street together. The path was gravel and Huber’s left knee didn’t want to bend. He tensed his abdomen to keep from gasping in pain as he kept up with the long-legged civilian.
“I want you to drive,” Lindeyar said as they reached the aircar—a ten-seat utility vehicle that’d seen a lot of use. “I don’t trust this fool not to get lost again.”
“Negative!” said the scruffy driver—who turned out to be female, though Huber couldn’t imagine anyone to whom the difference would matter. “I own this truck and I’m not letting any soldier-boy play games with it!”
“No sir,” said Huber, letting himself breathe now that he didn’t have to match strides with Lindeyar, “I can’t drive an aircar. We won’t get lost.”
He got into the cab, motioning the driver aside. She opened her mouth for another protest. “Shut up,” Huber said, not loudly but not making any attempt to hide how he felt.
He was pissed at quite a number of things and people right at the moment, and the driver was somebody he could unload on safely if she pushed him just a hair farther. Huber didn’t know how to drive an aircar, that was true; but he was in a mood to give himself some on-the-job training with this civilian prick along for the ride.
The driver shut her mouth. Huber switched on the dashboard navigational pod, synched it with his helmet AI, and downloaded the new destination. Lindeyar climbed into the back, looking tautly angry but keeping silent for now.
“All right,” Huber said to the driver, more mildly than before. “I’ll check as we go, but you shouldn’t have any trouble now. Let’s get going.”
She nodded warily and fed power to her fans. The drive motors were in better shape than the truck’s body, which was something. They lifted smoothly, sending back a billow of dust before they transitioned from ground effect to free flight.
Why did a trade representative figure he could give orders to the Slammers? And being pretty close to right in the assumption, given the way Captain Dillard had hopped to attention after checking with Central. Nonesuch bought half the Thalderol base which Plattner’s World exported, but that was no concern of the Regiment’s.
Except that it obviously was a concern, if Hammer himself took time to meet with the fellow while the war was going to hell in a handbasket. Huber chuckled.
“You find something funny in this, Lieutenant?” Lindeyar said in a voice that could’ve frozen a pond.
“I’d been thinking earlier this morning that things can always get worse, sir,” Huber said calmly. When you’ve spent a significant fraction of your life with other people shooting at you, it’s easy to stay calm in situations where the potential downside doesn’t include a bullet in your guts. “I won’t say I’m glad to’ve been right, but I guess I do find it amusing, yes.”
Lindeyar didn’t reply, not so that he could be heard over the fans at any rate. Huber’d called up a topo map as a thirty percent mask on his faceshield. Base Alpha lay just beyond the city’s eastern outskirts. The driver was h
olding them on a direct course toward it, the only variations being those imposed by traffic regulations which were completely opaque to an outsider like Huber.
As well as five dirigibles hauling heavy cargoes, there were hundreds of aircars in sight. That in itself was a good reason to leave the driving to a local.
Base Alpha was a scar on the landscape, a twelve-hectare tract scraped bare of forest. There was nothing else like it in the Outer States. Even the dirigible fields where starships now landed were smaller. The soil had a yellow tinge and was already baking to coarse limestone. A two-meter berm of dirt stabilized with a plasticizer surrounded the perimeter; the TOC complex was a cruciform pattern dug in at the center.
The clearing wasn’t just to house the vehicles and temporary buildings required for the headquarters of an armored regiment: Hammer also demanded sight distances for the powerguns that defended the base against incoming aircraft and artillery fire. The UC government had protested, but that didn’t matter. The Colonel didn’t compromise on military necessities; he and his troops were the sole judges of what war made necessary.
One or more guns had been tracking the aircar ever since it came over the horizon on a course for the base. An icon quivered in the right corner of Huber’s faceshield, indicating that his AI had received and replied to Central’s authentication signal.
A kilometer from the base, the driver slowed her vehicle to a hover. Lindeyar leaned forward and said, “Why are we stopping?” in a louder voice than the fan roar demanded.
Huber tapped the green light on top of the navigational pod and said to the driver, “Go on in, we’re cleared.”
“No, I’ve got to call in,” the driver said. “Otherwise they’ll shoot us out of the air. It’s happened!”
“I told you, we’re cleared!” Huber said. “Do as I tell you or I’ll shoot you myself!”
Most of that was for Lindeyar’s benefit—but he wasn’t in a good mood, that was the bloody truth. Not that he’d have shot the woman while they were a hundred meters in the air and she was driving …