Nobody spoke.
“Good,” said Taggert. “Taggert Force, take your positions. Taggert out.”
The five infantry moved ahead, into the woods. A moment later, Camptown started forward at a fast walk.
The creek broke open under the downdraft supporting their thirty tonnes. Water sprayed to the side in crystal droplets.
Raney scanned the terrain. She thought, I still haven’t rebarrelled my sub-machine gun.
Bessie artillery began firing again while Taggert Force was sliding and crunching through the forest. Raney barely noticed the rockets. The intake roar of Camptown’s fans dimmed all other noise, and the green/white tracers in her peripheral vision didn’t interfere with her focus on the red beads of prediced targets plotted on her face-shield.
When they came over the hill, Cormorant closed up so tightly that when it knocked down a sapling which Camptown had missed—no driver could track perfectly in terrain so broken—hard-shelled fruit showered onto Raney from the treetop. It was as much luck as training that she didn’t trigger a wild burst into the woods.
It had been a lot like the patter of bark and clipped branches when ambushers sprayed their first shots high in a forest. The best way to handle an ambush was to charge through behind overwhelming gunfire . . .
Raney’s grin was humorless. She’d screwed up in the past, but never that bad. Well, it hadn’t happened this time either.
A whine filled the valley before them. It was so loud that Raney could feel it over the intake howl. She recognized it from a deployment five years before on Princip, where Government tanks used railguns which stored their power in great uranium flywheels. When they were at full spin, they made just that sort of sound.
Wetsam broke squelch twice, indicating all his troopers were in position. They’d been loose with commo on the march, but the infantry sergeant wasn’t taking chances now that they were in the same valley as the Bessies.
Camptown twitched left, around a sandstone outcrop swathed in the roots of the bush growing over it. “Hit it, Bolan!” Taggert said on the vehicle channel.
The combat car lurched, bouncing upward as the driver coarsened his blade pitch. The fans were already running at full output.
Camptown thundered through the last ten meters of woods. The trees were scattered, but the car hit one that Bolan would surely have driven around if they’d had the leisure. They had thirty tonnes and the help of gravity behind their rush. The bulging plenum chamber butted the tree out by the roots and sent it cartwheeling down the slope like a drum major’s baton.
Snow was still falling, and the fans kicked more up from the ground. Raney walked a burst across a group of humans, probably dismounted infantry.
She lifted her muzzles, shifting fire onto trucks moving south on the road. The troops on the ground were more dangerous—any one of them could fire the lucky shot that blew Raney’s brains out—but the Slammers couldn’t kill all the Bessies. The purpose of this attack was disruption, not annihilation, and exploding vehicles were about as disruptive as you could hope for.
Thermal imaging didn’t allow ranging: a child with a stick three meters away looks the same as a gunman at six—but that didn’t matter now. Everything within the valley was hostile, and to anything but serious armor a 2cm bolt was lethal at line of sight.
Raney hit the cab of the first truck. It slewed off the road as she put another short burst into the truck body. The blindingly vivid bolts were stenciled black across her face-shield, but the fires they lit were white blossoms in the thermal display. Fabric and plastics burned at the plasma’s touch; some metals ignited also, and flesh too fed the flames.
Camptown continued to accelerate now that they didn’t have to hold their speed down to that of the skimmers. They careened through the last of the trees and bumped over the floor of the valley. This was the first time Raney had crewed a combat car, but she found aiming to be surprisingly easy. She was experienced in shooting on the move, and the car was a more stable gun platform than her familiar jeep was.
Fireballs erupted to the left and ahead, fuel bowsers hit while coupled to Bessie armored vehicles. Fires bathed Raney in radiance and fogged the side of her face-shield.
She hit the cab of the second truck, which stopped; then the third, whose fuel tank ruptured. That vehicle was already a bubble of fire when it crashed into the one ahead.
Raney ignored the figures running away from the trucks, some of them on fire. She was slewing her gun toward a line of vehicles parked off the road—they were probably empty, but they’d burn just the same—when something clanged through the combat car.
Camptown spun end for end in a vicious whipcrack. Raney slammed into the rear bulkhead, caromed against the left wing gun—Meese had just crashed into Lieutenant Taggert—and finally hit the deck splay-legged beneath her own tribarrel.
The fans stalled—the jolt had tripped circuit breakers. The car skidded stern first, plowing a broad furrow across the ground. A rooster-tail of ice and frozen turf rained down, some of it falling into the fighting compartment.
There was a round hole the size of a commo helmet in the left rear of the compartment and a larger hole in the right side, slightly forward of the first. The exit hole was noticeably oval: the slug had started wobbling when it punched its way through the side armor the first time.
Raney wasn’t sure where she was or what had happened. She got to her feet. Nothing looked familiar. The spade grips of a tribarrel were in front of her and she grabbed them from reflex. Memory flooded back with the familiar contact.
Camptown was pointing in the opposite direction from what Raney last remembered. Fire and wreckage scarred the ranks of Bessie vehicles which had been preparing to attack Mormont. Taggert, Meese, and the guns of the following combat car had raked them, turning fuel trucks into fireballs and smashing the combat vehicles’ light rear armor.
The four newly arrived Bessie heavies were side by side a half-kilometer away. Following Taggert’s orders the Slammers hadn’t shot at them, but a ghostly plume of ionized metal hung over the vehicle on the near end of the line. That banner was the driving band of a slug weighing a full kilogram, vaporized when a jolt of electricity flung the projectile down the gun bore.
The big vehicle had six wheels on a side, all of them steerable. The Bessie commander had used the enormous centrifugal force of the flywheel to rotate his vehicle in place, facing around more quickly than a jeep could have done. He then used the rest of the flywheel’s inertia to power the round he fired at Camptown.
Every once in a while a mercenary met someone who was very, very good. More often than not, that was the mercenary’s last experience. The saving grace here was that shifting the vehicle and firing the shot had slowed the flywheel to a crawl. It would take minutes to spin it up to the point that the gun could fire again.
“Bolan, go!” Raney shouted. “Go go go!”
She felt Camptown shiver as the driver brought his fans back on line. With luck either the orders or common sense would get them going, but that was out of her hands. She held the tribarrel’s muzzles low and ripped a long burst across the six left-side tires of the heavy which had nailed them.
The tires burst in quick succession, throwing gobbets of flaming rubber in all directions. That wouldn’t disable the big gun; it ran the length of the hull’s axis with only a stub of the barrel projecting from the heavy bow armor. It made it next to impossible for the vehicle to move, however, even if the crew was willing to fight from a hull which was wrapped in the filthy red flames of its own tires.
Bolan got Camptown moving forward—that is, back toward the slope the Slammers had attacked from. They seemed to be crawling, but that might just be because everything had speeded up in Raney’s mind.
She sprayed the other three heavies, cyan flashes lighting the flanks and louvered rear panels as well as hitting some of the tires. Her face-shield was on direct visuals now. She didn’t remember changing mode, but it was all right. Fuel fires
threw up great torches which reflected from the snow.
“Taggert Force, withdraw!” said the El-Tee’s voice. “Withdraw at once, out!”
Raney kept firing at the heavies until her gun shut off when it ran out of ammunition. The iridium barrels blazed like incandescent lights. She ejected the empty ammo drum and locked a fresh one in place.
As Camptown wove through the straggling limit of the trees, Raney opened fire again. She had the tribarrel pivoted to its lock and had to lean over the edge of the compartment to see her sights. She was trying to hit the heavies again, but a pair of APCs were in the way. They were already burning, but she raked them anyway. The barrels were already shot out, so why not?
“El-Tee?” Wetsam said. “Can you take Talbert aboard? I’ve got him double with me, but he’s gorked out from painkillers and can’t hold on so good. Over.”
“Roger,” Taggert said. “Force, we’ll hold up on top of the ridge. Over.”
He turned and said, “Raney?”
She was watching the dots on her readout. Both cars had come through—Cormorant was close behind them—but there were only four skimmers. That was okay; skimmers were even easier to replace than troopers were, and there was a galaxyful of eighteen-year-olds just as desperate to get off-planet as Raney had been.
The El-Tee tapped her the shoulder. “Raney?” he said. Repeated, she realized; thinking back, she remembered the sound of him speaking a moment before.
“Sorry sir,” she said. “Over.”
“I just wanted to say ‘Good job,’ Sergeant,” Taggert said. “You may have saved our asses back there.”
“That was Bolan, I’d say,” said Raney. “But thanks. Over.”
“If you ever want to transfer to cars, there’s a platoon sergeant’s slot open for you here.”
“Umm,” said Raney. Her mind was drifting. She went back to watching beads of light on her face-shield.
Taggert and Meese hoisted Talbert into the fighting compartment with wounds in both legs and a silly grin on his face. His eyes were closed and he was snoring softly.
Taggert Force paralleled the main road for the last three kays into Mormont. They passed close enough to the outlying farm to see that several heavy shells had landed on the house since the squad left it.
Raney didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.
Raney had heard the vehicle purring up the road from Mormont, but it wasn’t until it pulled into the track to the farm that she paid attention. There was nothing to worry about: G Troop and a platoon of tanks from H Company had passed six hours before, heading north.
She tossed another piece of meat—it was labeled meat in the ration pack; it was pink but had no grain—to the puppy. Only then did she turn on the stump of gatepost where she was sitting.
Baur wove the gun jeep past the burned-out Bessie APCs and pulled up. He looked startlingly clean in ordinary battledress, which reminded Raney to check that her field roll—fatigues in a ground sheet—was in the side rack along with the driver’s own. Apart from the rips and ordinary grime, Raney’s sleeves were stiff with redeposited iridium which had sublimed off the bores of her tribarrel.
Her long bursts into the Bessie heavies had been a brutal misuse of the weapon. Her lips smiled. They’d done the job, though; and she’d been being misused pretty badly herself at the time.
“Hey, Sarge,” Baur said. “They said I’d find you here. We’re supposed to join Third Platoon in Servadac. I don’t guess it’s that big a rush with the Bessies asking for peace, though. The rest of the team in Mormont was stood down, so if you want to wait . . . ?”
“Naw, nothing here for me,” Raney said. She started to get up, then thumped back heavily when her legs twinged. “Give me a moment, is all.”
“I’m in no hurry,” said Baur. He got out of the jeep and stretched, looking around. “Blood and Martyrs. You were part of this?”
“Yeah, they drove right up to us in the fog instead of dismounting,” Raney said. The puppy had finished sniffing Baur’s boots. She threw the last of the meat to her. “It was hairy for seven of us even with the Bessies making it easy. I think we were supposed to be hitting the column from behind when the last of them passed. There wasn’t much of that, but I guess it worked out okay.”
She tried again to get up, this time putting her hand on the stone for a little extra boost. She made it, wobbling for a moment.
Baur looked at the long grave bordered with small rubble from the house. There were three larger headstones, though Raney hadn’t had anything to mark them with.
“Bloody hell,” Baur said, not loudly. “You lost three outa seven, Sarge?”
“Just one,” said Raney. “They called him Sparky.”
“Sparkman?” said Baur. “Red hair and bad acne scars?”
Raney shrugged. “I never saw him by daylight,” she said. “The other two were civilians, but I had the engineers make room here instead of dumping them in the trench with the Bessies.”
The mass grave was closer to the road, covered with a tumulus shoveled up from the wall around the field. There was a layer stones over Sparky and the locals too, but Raney had told the guy with the backhoe to cover them with dirt in case somebody wanted to plant flowers there sometime.
“Come on, Bubbles,” Raney said, squatting down with her hands out. “We’re going home to Third Platoon.”
“Hey?” said the driver.
“We’ve got a mascot, Baur,” Raney said. Holding the dog, she walked to her seat behind the tribarrel. “Her name’s Bubbles.”
Dave supplied this afterword, “The Slammers and Me,” for the story.
1
I started to title this essay Colonel Hammer and Me, but that would be wrong. Only one story in the series is primarily about the regimental commander, and that one—“But Loyal to His Own”—was written at Jim Baen’s request (made in the hall of a convention hotel at the 1974 Worldcon where we first met).
I spent most of 1970 in Viet Nam and Cambodia with the 11th ACR, the Blackhorse Regiment. I was a draftee with the rank of Spec4 and later Spec5. In WWII or today, those ranks would have been corporal and buck sergeant. I wasn’t concerned with grand strategy or the Big Picture. I was just trying to stay alive and to carry out whatever duties an officer, generally a low-ranking officer, gave me. In the field those duties included shit-burning.
Very few of the Hammer stories involve anything even vaguely on a strategic level. Nobody asked me what we should do in Viet Nam.
Maybe they should have, though. In Interrogation School my class (all college graduates) had a map exercise to determine how to drive the North Vietnamese Army from a section of War Zone C. We determined that it was impossible: the enemy could only be defeated in large numbers if they chose to attack us. If they just hid in the bamboo, we couldn’t reach them. According to the instructors, this was the wrong answer.
When I got to War Zone C myself, I found that my classmates and I had been right. (It was still the wrong answer so far as the strategic thinkers in Washington were concerned, which strengthened my contempt for those strategic thinkers.)
2
I began writing seriously after I got back to the World and civilian life. Though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, the Hammer stories became my way of sorting through my memories and trying to make sense of my experiences in the army.
Recently I’ve come to the realization that those experiences don’t make sense: they were a waste, a tragedy, and they shattered to rubble the guy I’d been in 1968. Writing the Hammer stories did give me an outlet for that anger, though; an outlet which didn’t involve me winding up dead or in jail, likely results of some of the other options.
When I say that writing helped me keep it between the ditches, I don’t mean that the problems disappeared: writing helped me control my feelings, but the worldview, the mindset, that I . . . hmm, I was about to say “gained,” but I’m not sure that’s the right word. The mindset which I developed in Southeast Asia, I’
ll say, is still the bedrock of my personality.
A number of people have asked me whether I’ve lost my feel for the Hammer series in the eight or nine years since I most recently wrote a story in it. Judge for yourselves, of course, but I personally think it’s obvious that the damage is still there. The ordinary civilian I was in 1968 was ground to pebbles. In the past forty years I’ve glued enough of the pebbles together to pass for normal under most circumstances; but trust me, I’ll never be a civilian again, much as I would like to be.
3
But that brings me to a final point, something I didn’t realize myself until shortly before I started to write this story. A friend asked me whether I would rather be a Nam vet with my present writing career or a lawyer who hadn’t been drafted.
I started to say that I would much rather not be so screwed up, and that being a writer has never been that big a deal to me. Both those things are true, but I realized that they didn’t completely answer her question.
I know a lot of writers whom I don’t respect. Likewise, I know a lot of lawyers and really a lot of people with Duke diplomas whom I don’t respect. Therefore I don’t see why anybody should respect me because I’m a writer, a lawyer, or a Dukie.
The thing is, I do respect anybody who served with me in the Blackhorse or in a comparable unit, in Nam or elsewhere. They may be drunks or druggies, they may have screwed up their lives beyond belief or redemption, but they once put it on the line in a way that very few people do.
Unless you’ve been a part of an elite combat unit in a war zone, you can’t really understand what it feels like. There’s Us and there’s Them, and Them is everybody else: the fat cats and politicians, the actors and sports stars. They all count for less than we do, because we are the Blackhorse.
Onward, Drake! Page 30