The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3 (hammer's slammers)

by David Drake

  Huber had no idea who Flasher Six was nor what he commanded. The AI could probably tell him, but right now Huber had too little brain to clutter it up with needless detail.

  Fencing Master’s sending unit had the reference signal from the original transmission to go on, so Huber could reasonably expect his reply to get through. It must have done so, because a moment later the much clearer voice responded, “Highball, you’re in position to anchor a Solace artillery regiment. I need you to adjust your course to follow the Masterton River, a few degrees east of the original plot. I’m downloading the course data—”

  A pause. An icon blinked in the lower left corner of Huber’s faceshield, then became solid green when the AI determined that the transmission was complete and intelligible.

  “—now. Central delegated control to me because they haven’t been able to get through to you directly. Flasher over.”

  Task Force Huber was winding through slopes too steep and rocky to be easily cultivated. Shrubs and twisted trees with small leaves were the only vegetation they’d seen for ten kilometers. That was why they’d been routed this way, of course: the chance of somebody accurately reporting their location and course to Solace Command was very slight.

  Huber was behind schedule, and the notion of further delay irritated him more than it might’ve done if he hadn’t been so tired. He glared at the transmitted course he’d projected onto a terrain overlay and said, “Flasher, what is it that you want us to do? We’re to attack an artillery regiment? Highball over.”

  “Negative, Highball, negative!” Flasher Six snapped. “These are the Firelords! There’s an eight-gun battery of calliopes with each battalion and they’d cut you to pieces. Your revised course will take you through a town with a guardpost that’ll alert Solace Command. That’ll give the Firelords enough warning to block the head of the valley with their calliopes and take you under fire with their rockets. We’ll handle it from there. Over.”

  Huber called up the Firelords from Fencing Master’s data bank; his frown grew deeper. They were one of several regiments fielded from the Hackabe Cluster. Their truck-mounted bombardment rockets were relatively unsophisticated and short ranged but they could put down a huge volume of fire in a short time.

  “Flasher,” Huber said, switching his faceshield back to the course display, “the Firelords’ll be able to saturate our defenses if they try hard enough. I’ll have to put all my tribarrels on air defense, and even then it’s going to be close. Are you sure about this? Over.”

  “Roger, Highball!” Flasher said in a tone of obvious irritation. “Your infantry component will have to handle local security. Are you able to comply, over?”

  “Roger, Flasher,” Huber said. It wasn’t the first time he’d gotten orders he didn’t like. It wouldn’t be the last, either—if he survived this one. “Highball Six out.”

  He paused a moment to collect his mind. The AI was laying out courses and plotting fields of fire; doing its job, as happy as a machine could be. And Arne Huber was a soldier, so he’d do his job also. If it didn’t make him happy, sometimes, he and all the other troopers in the Regiment had decided—if only by default—that it made them happier than other lines of work.

  “Trouble, El-Tee?” Deseau asked without looking up from his sight picture. He’d been covering the left front while Huber was getting their orders.

  “Hey, we’re alive, Frenchie,” Huber said. “That’s something, right?”

  He looked at the new plot on the C&C display, took a deep breath, and said over the briefing channel, “Highball, this is Six. There’s been a change of plan. We’re to proceed up the valley of the Masterton River, through a place called Millhouse Crossing. There’s a Militia guardpost there.”

  In briefing mode, the unit commanders could respond directly and lower-ranking personnel could caret Huber’s display for permission to speak. Nobody said anything for the moment.

  He continued, “We’ll shoot up the post on the move, but be aware that they may shoot back. We’ll continue another fifteen klicks to where the road drops down into the plains around Hundred Hectare Lake. We’ll halt short of there because an artillery regiment is set up beside the lake, the Firelords. We’re to keep their attention while a friendly unit takes care of them. Any questions? Over.”

  “If they’re so fucking friendly,” Deseau said over Fencing Master’s intercom, “then let them draw fire and we’ll shoot up the redlegs. How about that?”

  There was a pause as the rest of the task force stared at the transmitted map; at least the unit commanders would also check out the Firelords. The first response was from Lieutenant Basingstoke, saying, “Highball Six, this is Rocker One-six. The Firelords can launch nearly fifteen hundred fifteen-centimeter rockets within five seconds. You can’t—the task force cannot, I believe—defend against a barrage like that. Over.”

  Huber sighed, though he supposed it was just as well that somebody’d raised the point directly. “One-six,” he said, “I agree with your calculations, but we have our orders. We’re going to do our best and hope that the Firelords don’t think it’s worth emptying their racks all in one go. Over.”

  Somebody swore softly. It could’ve been any of the platoon leaders. Blood and Martyrs, it could’ve been Huber himself muttering the words that were dancing through his mind.

  “All right, troopers,” Huber said to the fraught silence. “You’ve got your orders. We’ve all got our orders. Car Three-six leads from here till we’re through this. Highball Six out.”

  Padova obediently increased speed by five kph, pulling around Foghorn as Sergeant Nagano’s driver swung to the left in obedience to the directions from the C&C box. As soon as they were into the broader part of the valley, they’d form with the combat cars in line abreast by platoons at the front and rear of the task force. The X-Ray vehicles would crowd as tightly together between the cars as movement safety would allow.

  Bombardment rockets had a wide footprint but they weren’t individually accurate, so reducing the target made the tribarrels’ task of defense easier. Not easy, but an old soldier was one who’d learned to take every advantage there was.

  Padova took them up a swale cutting into the ridge to the right. Deseau looked at the landscape. By crossing the ridge, they’d enter a better-watered valley where the data bank said the locals grew crops on terraces.

  “Ever want to be a farmer, Bert?” Deseau asked.

  “No, Frenchie,” Learoyd said.

  Deseau shrugged. “Yeah, me neither,” he said. “Besides, I like shooting people.”

  He laughed, but Huber wasn’t sure he was joking.

  Fencing Master nosed through the spike-leafed trees straggling along the crest. They were similar to giants Huber’d seen in the lowland forests, but here the tallest were only ten meters high and their leaves had a grayish cast.

  Limestone scraped beneath Fencing Master’s skirts as they started down the eastern slope. The landscape immediately became greener, and after less than a minute they’d snorted out of wasteland into a peanut field.

  A man—no, a woman—was cultivating the far end of the field with a capacitor-powered tractor. The farmer saw Fencing Master and stood up on her seat. As Foghorn slid out of the scrub with the rest of the column following, she leaped into the field and began crawling away while the tractor continued its original course. The peanut bushes wobbled, marking her course. Deseau laughed.

  “It’s like a different planet,” Padova said, taking them down the path to the next terrace, a meter lower. Fencing Master was wider than the farm machinery, so they jolted as their skirts plowed the retaining wall and upper terrace into a broader ramp. The valley opened into more fields interspersed with the roofs of houses and sheds. “All green and pretty.”

  An aircar heading south a kilometer away suddenly turned in the air and started back the way it’d come. Learoyd and Deseau fired. Half the vehicle including the rear fan disintegrated. The forward portion spun into the ground and erupt
ed in flames.

  “Just wait a bit, Rita,” Frenchie said with a chuckle.

  The Solace Militia used civilian vehicles with no markings that’d show at a quick glimpse through a gunsight. That aircar might’ve been a farm couple coming home with all their children, but Huber would’ve fired also if he hadn’t been concentrating on other business. He had to cover the sensor readouts as well as the position of his task force.

  Killing civilians—maybe civilians—wasn’t a part of the work that Huber much cared for, but you’d go crazy if you let yourself worry about the things you couldn’t change. Go crazy or shoot yourself.

  In the interests of command, Fencing Master should’ve been farther back in the column with Foghorn or Fancy Pants leading …but Huber was making the choice, and he knew that afterward the CO had less to explain to the survivors if he’d been leading from the front. He had less to explain to himself, too, if he was one of those survivors.

  Padova increased speed, crossing the fields at forty kph and using the extra inertia to help break down the retaining walls before accelerating again. Huber frowned, but the rest of the column kept station. Since Fencing Master was widening the ramps, the following vehicles didn’t have to slow as much to negotiate the terraces.

  The valley’s lower levels were planted in rice, a green much brighter than the leaves of the peanut bushes. The paddies were flooded; showers of spray, muck, and young plants erupted as the Slammers drove through. Upper fields began to drain as the column’s passage opened the dikes.

  Occasionally someone stepped out of a wood-framed dwelling or glanced up in a field to see what the noise was. Some continued to stare as the column howled by, perhaps thinking they were mercenaries under contract to the Solace government.

  Twice an aircar appeared in the far distance. A tribarrel in air defense mode ripped each out of the sky.

  The Masterton River here was twenty meters wide, too narrow to rate as a river back on Friesland. Even so, it carried more tumbling water than Huber’d have wanted to take his combat cars over without being sure of a ford.

  No need to cross, of course. There was plenty of room on the broad bottom terrace to form on a platoon front. Foghorn came up on the right of Fencing Master, with Gabinus’ Three-eight and Fancy Pants falling in alongside.

  Funnel-mouthed fish weirs lined both banks. The small boys tipping them up to check the catch turned to watch the passing armored vehicles. Fencing Master still set the pace. Padova continued to accelerate now that they were no longer descending the slope.

  The town, Millhouse Crossing, was two rows of buildings which began as a straggle of shacks with board walls and roofs of corrugated plastic. Further on the houses were masonry and two or three stories high. The road was barely wide enough for the recovery vehicle, and even the combat cars would have to go through one at a time.

  A black-and-yellow Solace flag flew over the cupola of a building in the center of town. All the F-3 vehicles fired as soon as the guardpost came in view, shattering the stuccoed limestone in dazzles of cyan and white.

  Chickens were running in nervous circles in the street. A cart and small tractor stood forlorn beside a roofed marketplace on the inland side. The cart was half-loaded, but its owner and every other human in Millhouse Crossing was trying to hide.

  “Highball, form on Three-six in line ahead,” Huber said. “We’ll go back to platoon front on the—”

  As Fencing Master drew ahead again, Deseau decided he had a fair shot at the facade of the guardpost—and took it. He was more right than not, placing most of his ten-round burst in the ground floor of the government building, though a pair of 2-cm bolts blew in the arched entryway of the private house next door.

  “—other side of town. Six out.”

  Huber swiveled his gun so that it covered building fronts a hundred meters ahead on his side. Padova brushed a pair of shacks that’d been built closer to the road than most of the row, knocking them to scrap. A sheet of plywood flipped outward and slapped down over a screened intake on Fencing Master’s port side; it clung there, partially blocking the duct, till Padova deliberately swerved through another shack and swept the debris off. A brief snowstorm of chicken feathers sprayed from beneath the skirts.

  They howled past a house painted pale green. In the corner of his eye Huber saw a white face staring from the interior. The spectator was no threat, and besides Huber’s attention was focused on the magnified image of buildings well in the distance. A sniper directly alongside would be for Foghorn’s gunners to deal with.

  Learoyd’s gun hammered, the bolts’ intense cyan reflecting from the soft pastels of the building fronts. His burst fanned the interior of the government building which Deseau’s gun had already set alight. As Fencing Master passed, orange flame whuffed! from the window openings, a gas stove adding its note to the ongoing destruction.

  Fencing Master hit the cart in the roadway, flinging its contents into the air, and bunted the tractor through the lightly framed market stalls. Huber flinched reflexively as cans of meat bounced off the armor beside him. Civilians scrambled out of the wreckage running in circles much as the chickens had moments before.

  The rest of the way was clear. Padova kept Fencing Master on the raised roadbed through the village, then dropped into the left-hand paddy at a slant to let the rest of the platoon fall in beside them. High-pressure air squirting from beneath the plenum chambers excavated furrows twice the width of the vehicles themselves, gouging out the young rice.

  The crop could be replanted; the damaged buildings could be repaired. In a few years, people in Millhouse Crossing would no longer talk about the day Hammer’s Slammers roared through. Nothing really matters but life itself, and death.

  The village was twelve kilometers from the mouth of the valley. According to the terrain display, the Masterton River dropped twenty meters in the next five hundred, boiling over a series of cataracts that closed it to navigation, and from there meandered another eight klicks to Hundred Hectare Lake.

  In the geologic past the lake had been of twice its present area. When the water drained, the original shoreline remained as a limestone escarpment on the south and western margins. Though never more than a few meters high, it was sufficient to cover an artillery regiment against powerguns firing from the Masterton Valley.

  Under other circumstances, Huber might’ve considered taking his combat cars in a balls-to-the-wall charge across the farmland south of the lake. The Firelords’ calliopes, emplaced on the escarpment and manned by professionals, made that notion suicide.

  Another option—the one Huber would’ve picked—was to have halted well beyond the twenty-kilometer range of the Firelords’ bombardment rockets and let Battery Alpha clear the problem. Again the calliopes were the difficulty. Saturating the Firelords’ air defenses would require much of the ammunition the battery was carrying, and there wouldn’t be any resupply until after—and if— the Regiment captured Port Plattner.

  Which left the third option, Flasher Six dealing with the Firelords in his own good time and fashion, while Task Force Huber took whatever was thrown at them. Maybe next time his troopers’d be dishing it out while somebody else drew fire….

  The sensor display gave Huber the warning: not movement but a radio signal from the hills overlooking the broad pass to the north. A Solace lookout was signaling back to headquarters near the lakeside.

  “Highball!” Huber called. He didn’t aim his own gun; he had other duties. “Tar—”

  Deseau must’ve expected an outpost and set his AI to caret RF sources. Most civilians would be using land lines, but a mercenary unit would generally depend on its own communications system. While Huber was still speaking, Frenchie acted. A three-round ranging burst hiss/CRACKed from his tribarrel, vivid even in sunlight.

  “—get at vector zero-seven degrees, radio trans—”

  Nobody was good enough to hit a target ten kilometers away with his first shot. Deseau adjusted his aim, dialed up the magnifi
cation on his holographic sights, and engaged the gun’s stabilizer. Learoyd leaned over his own gun, importing the target information from Deseau’s weapon instead of duplicating the effort.

  “—mitter. Fire at—”

  Deseau and Learoyd fired together. Their tribarrels spat streams in near parallel, merging optically as they snapped through the sunlight ahead of the task force.

  “—will!”

  The distant slope winked—cyan from the impacting plasma, red and gushing gray steam where brush burned explosively. There was a burp of orange and the radio signal cut off.

  “Got ’em!” Deseau shouted as he and Learoyd took their thumbs from their triggers. He wasn’t on intercom, but Huber could easily hear his excited voice. “Got the bastards!”

  Fancy Pants and Three-eight ripped ropes of blue-green hellfire toward the pass. A stretch of hillside where the vegetation was dry began to burn with some enthusiasm. Another gun, this one from F-2 aiming past the X-Ray vehicles, joined in.

  “Cease fire!” Huber ordered. “Six to Highball, cease fire! Save your gunbarrels, troopers, because we’re going to need them bad. Out!”

  “Here it comes,” Deseau said, reading the flicker of saffron from beyond the mouth of the valley. “For what we are about to receive, the Lord make us thankful.”

  The sensor suite analyzed the sound some ten seconds after Frenchie had correctly identified the exhaust flashes reflected from clouds of dust: rocket motors igniting, sixty of them rippling in groups of six every second. A Firelord battery had just launched half the rockets on its six trucks.

  “Fox elements,” Huber said, “put all your guns, I repeat all your guns in air defense mode. Have your backup weapons ready to deal with ground threats.”

  He pressed his hands against his armored chest to keep from balling them into fists till they cramped.

  “Troopers,” he went on, “this is going to be hard but we’re going to do it. Hold station on Three-six, watch for problems on the ground, and let our gunnery computers do their job. They can handle it if anything can. Six out. Break.”