Because Hammer’s Slammers exist only to make war.
We were fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, students, teachers, workers, merchants, and slaves . . . turned soldiers. And once the war was over they all went back to being whatever we were before.
Hammer’s Slammers were soldiers. Then, now, forever. Period.
So here we are, years later, and another Vaerst is standing before this council. You’re beating the war drum again, calling for another rebellion, and you need yourselves a general, and who better to be your figurehead than a war hero?
I will heed your call. I will accept this commission, and I will help the people throw off the yoke of tyranny . . . On one condition.
We hire Hammer’s Slammers.
This time I want to be on the winning side.
* * *
Larry Correia is the New York Times bestselling author of the Monster Hunter International series, the Grimnoir Chronicles trilogy, the Dead Six military thrillers (co-written with Mike Kupari), and the upcoming epic fantasy Son of the Black Sword, from Baen Books. Larry is a retired accountant and firearms instructor who lives in northern Utah.
At my request, he provided this afterword.
The first time I read something by David Drake was around 1985. I was ten years old. The reason I bought it from the grocery store with my own money was because there was an awesome space tank on the cover. Hammers Slammers rocked my little world. I loved it.
I’ve been reading David Drake’s work ever since. His style was a huge influence on me. If I had to pick one favorite, it would The Sharp End, and The Voyage would come in second.
When Mark asked me if I’d like to participate in this anthology, the first thing I did was go through all my old boxes of books I’ve accumulated over my life looking for that first paperback. I’m 99% sure it was At Any Price, but I couldn’t find it, and that’s been bugging me for a while because I hate losing books. I’ve got it on my Kindle, but that’s just not the same as a book a little kid bought with his limited chore money and whatever coins he could fish out of the couch cushions.
Thank you, David, for writing such great stories and inspiring the rest of us.
Save What You Can
David Drake
Raney didn’t think she’d been able to sleep more than fifteen minutes or so on the run from the spaceport, but when the truck rocked to a halt she heard someone outside shout, “End of the line, troopers! Out! Out!”
“This is Mormont?” she said to the trooper beside her. If it was, she’d slept most of six hours.
“I guess,” he said. “Unless they changed their bloody minds again on the road. Which is likely enough.”
Raney slung her sub-machine gun, then put on her commo helmet. She wasn’t netted in to the First Platoon channel; that was the first order of business after she reported.
“Say?” she said to the trooper shuffling to the open tailgate ahead of her. They’d loaded at night, and she only knew a few people in First Platoon. “Who’s the CO?”
They’d been crammed in so tight that you had to negotiate to get room to curl up to sleep, but that was all the talking Raney had done during the ride. They were all slugged out from Transit; they’d offloaded from the ship and packed straight onto the trucks without the usual couple days’ stand-down to acclimate.
“That’s Sergeant Krotcha,” the trooper said, “but they said we’re with a section of combat cars and the El-tee of them’s in command of the team. Say, are you a recruit?”
“Not exactly,” said Raney, feeling her lips grin a little. She was thirty standard years old, twelve years a veteran of the Slammers. “I’m a sergeant/gunner from Third, but my jeep’s deadlined. My driver’s with the vehicle, waiting for the rest of Support Section to land. Major Pritchard stuck me in First because Third had already pulled out and they need all the bodies they have up on the border.”
“You watch,” said the other trooper, holding the tailgate latch with one hand as he stepped from the truck’s bumper to the ground. His 2 cm weapon banged between the tailgate and his body armor. “We’ll be here freezing our butts for a month without our hold baggage, and nothing will happen.”
“That’s okay with me,” Raney said, swinging down in turn. She thought of asking the fellow’s name, but there’d be time later so it didn’t matter.
Or there wouldn’t be time, that could happen too. Then it mattered even less.
Their convoy was four civilian trucks—the one Raney had been aboard had Glover Shirtwaists painted on the side—with a combat car ahead and another behind. They’d halted in an irregular plaza surrounded by one- and two-story fieldstone houses with slate roofs. It had stopped snowing, but at least a decimeter lay on the roofs and pavement.
Sky, land and buildings were different dirty shades of gray, and it was as cold as a witch’s tit. Raney saw no sign of civilians.
The last truck was a stakebed carrying the infantry skimmers snugged down with cargo ties. They were being offloaded now, but Raney figured she’d better report before she picked up the skimmer they’d assigned her at the spaceport.
She’d only had time to glance at her skimmer, but that was long enough to see that it was a clapped-out junker. If she had to do any serious travel on it, she was well and truly screwed.
Krotcha was a heavy-set man, not old—forty, maybe—but bald except for a black fringe circling above his ears. Raney knew him slightly. He was talking to somebody on his commo helmet when Raney walked over to him.
“Top, Major Pritchard attached me to you just as you were pulling out,” Raney said. “I’m—”
“You’re Raney,” Krotcha said. His gaze was disturbingly sharp. “You got a tribarrel in Third, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but the jeep’s deadlined for parts until the Sundquist lands,” Raney said. “Maybe tomorrow—”
“And maybe next month,” Krotcha said, shrugging. “Well, I’m glad to have you, Raney. I’d be a long sight gladder to have your gun too, but in a ratfuck like this I guess you take what you can get.”
A younger man in clean khakis and new body armor joined them. He’d gotten down from the lead combat car, Camptown. Krotcha looked toward him and said, “El-Tee, this is Sergeant Raney from Third. I’m putting her in Wetsam’s squad. Raney, this is Lieutenant Taggert from Charlie Troop, he’s in charge.”
“Sir,” said Raney. “I’m still on the Third Platoon net. There wasn’t time—”
Krotcha leaned forward to read the serial number from her helmet, then spoke it into the AI of his own unit. A machine voice in her ear said, “Accepted.” A moment later the same voice said, “Command net, accepted.”
Raney nodded thanks. Top was treating her as a sergeant rather than just an extra trooper, though she wouldn’t have any command responsibilities unless something went badly wrong. She didn’t know the people in the platoon well enough to be giving orders, but she’d do what she could if it all hit the fan.
“There isn’t time to breathe,” Taggert muttered. He suddenly looked very young; Raney wondered if this was his first command. “The Bessies mobilized as soon as they learned the Commonwealth had hired us. It looks like they hope to take the spaceport before the Slammers have landed, all but us on the Garrett.”
“We’ll have backup soonest, sir,” Sergeant Krotcha said. “The other ships can’t be more than a day out, and then it’s just a couple hours before there’s a company of panzers barreling down the road to us.”
He sounded reassuring, upbeat even, when he spoke to the green lieutenant. You’d scarcely imagine that he was the same man who’d muttered to Raney, another veteran, that the rest of Hammer’s Regiment might not land for a month.
“I’ll get my ride and find Wetsam,” Raney said, turning away. The combat cars were in air-defense mode, their tribarrels slanted up toward the north. They would sweep incoming shells from the sky before the combat team—and the nearby portion of Mormont-was in any danger.
Three locals in
gray uniforms had come out of a building facing the plaza and were walking toward the command group. Two of them carried long-barreled coil guns; the middle-aged man in the middle had only a pistol.
Raney used the locator of her helmet as she walked toward the stakebed. It was taking time to unload the skimmers; the catches of the tie-downs had frozen. She wasn’t surprised to find Sergeant Wetsam in the crowd at the back of the truck.
“Sarge, Top assigned me to you,” Raney said to the trooper highlighted by her face-shield. “I’m Raney.”
Wetsam—short, sturdy and thirty; a male equivalent of Raney herself—gave her a wry smile. “Lucky you,” he said. “Did he tell you were he’d put us?”
“I don’t know squat,” said Raney. “Pretty much like usual.”
The skimmer being driven off the truck now was hers. It looked even worse in morning sun than it had when she first got it under the spaceport floods.
“Well, there’s a farm north of town proper and half a klick off the main road,” Wetsam said. “We’re there to snipe at the Bessies if they barrel straight up the road to Mormont. If they decide to use the farm for their own outpost, though, I’ll be bloody glad to have you and anybody else you can scrape up besides.”
The snow on the road was unmarked, so Wetsam took the squad well to the right through the straggling woods. If the wind kept up, the snow swirled from the pavement by the skimmers’ air cushions would be wiped out in a few hours anyway. Wetsam was right not to give the Bessies a chance that they didn’t need to have, though.
Wetsam was number two in the line and Raney brought up the rear. She had her skimmer punched out to hold the moderate pace. Winter had frozen the undergrowth down to bare canes.
The clean-up slot was proper for Raney’s rank—she might even be senior to Wetsam, though she had no intention of pushing the point—but she hoped that her skimmer didn’t crap out while the others drove on without her. She would call on the helmet if necessary, but they wanted to hold electronic silence. The Bessies couldn’t listen-in on the frequency-hopping communications, but helmet commo might alert them to the Slammers’ presence.
The farm that was to be the squad outpost was a one and a half story fieldstone building in a large yard. There was a shed, a chicken coop, and a shoulder-high woodpile ten meters long.
The fence was probably more a more of a way to dispose of stones plowed up from the field than a barrier. It was waist-high on three sides, but on the back toward the woods it was low enough for a healthy skimmer to hop. Raney and another member of the squad stopped just short of it. Each in turn then lifted the front of the other’s machine while its rider gunned the fans. They parked against the rear of the building with the other skimmers.
Wetsam had opened the slanting door in the ground against the rear wall. Beneath was a root cellar which reached some distance back under the house proper.
“Okay, here’s our hide,” Wetsam said. “Blessing, you take Sparky and Carl to tear apart them sheds. The rest of us’ll use the timbers to brace the cellar roof in case the house gets shelled. Raney, there’s a window in the roof peak. Central hasn’t warned us yet, so I’m not expecting anybody down the road till we’re set up here. Just in case, though, you keep an eye out. All right?”
“Roger,” Raney said. Her sub-machine gun didn’t have the punch to be effective on targets five hundred meters away, but the other squad members were used to working together. Besides, shooting at scouts would just warn the Bessies that the farm was a target worth dealing with.
The only door to the house was in the front. It was ajar; a trickle of snow had blown over the board floor. The fireplace—Raney checked it with thermal imaging on her face-shield—was cold.
The stairs to the loft were almost steep enough to be called a ladder. When Raney started up, a dog began yapping above her. She paused, then lunged up two steps and raised her head above floor level behind the holographic sights of her sub-machine gun.
A little girl stared big-eyed from the side of a bed. She held a puppy in one arm and was trying to clamp its muzzle shut with the other hand. She shrieked and dropped the dog when Raney appeared. The yapping continued, punctuated by slobbering as the puppy tried to lick tears from the girl’s face.
Raney stepped onto the loft floor. She could stand upright if she stayed under the ridgepole. There weren’t supposed to be any civilians left in the district, but besides the kid—she looked about eight—there was an old man lying in bed. The quilt over his chest rose and fell slightly, but his face was as still as wax.
“What are you doing here, kid?” Raney said. “You’ll get blown to Hell! You were supposed to evacuate.”
“Grampa can’t go!” the girl said. “The Da Costas said they wouldn’t carry him, he’d just die anyway, but I won’t leave him!”
“Look, sometimes you gotta cut your losses, kid,” Raney said. She squatted to bring her head more on a level with that of the kneeling girl. “You know, save what you can. I’m sorry, but your grandfather isn’t going to make it much longer even without a shell landing on top of him.”
Which was what was going to happen a couple minutes after the squad started shooting.
“I won’t!”
Raney sighed. “What’s your name, kid?” she said, trying to sound calm and friendly. This was just one more screw-up. That’s what a war was: one bloody screw-up after another.
“Celie,” said the girl. She hugged the dog close again. “And this is Bubbles.”
Instead of keying her helmet, Raney bent over the ladder and shouted, “Sarge! Wetsam! I need you soonest!”
Glass splintered. Instead of coming around to the door, Wetsam had knocked out a back window. Through it he called, “What the hell is it, Raney?”
“We got civilians! Get up here!”
“Bloody hell,” the squad leader snarled. More glass broke, but it was some moments before Wetsam appeared through the doorway from the back room. He’d have used the butt of his weapon to clear glass from the casement, but that left sharp edges. Nicking an artery by accident could let your life out as sure as a powergun would.
“Celie, come stick your head over,” Raney said. Obediently the girl came and looked down the stairs beside Raney. Bubbles waddled over also, whining.
“Bloody hell,” Wetsam said.
“There’s an old guy in the bed, too,” Raney said. “He’s on his last legs, but she won’t leave him.”
“The bloody National Guard swore they’d cleared all the bloody civilians from the bloody area!” Wetsam said as he started up the stairs.
“Hey, you don’t suppose the locals might be bloody useless, do you?” Raney said. She stood and eased Celie back from the stairhead with her. “We’ve never run into that on other deployments, have we?”
“Joke,” Wetsam said as he joined them in the loft. He stared at Grampa and made a sour expression with his lips. “But we’re still stuck with them.”
“Do we get the Guard in Mormont to pick ‘em up?” Raney said. “We can’t carry the old guy on our skimmers.”
“They didn’t take him before, so why’re they going to now?” Wetsam said. The puppy was sniffing his boots. “Besides, I don’t want a bunch of Guards tramping around here. If the Bessies ignore us till we decide to get noticed, we got a lot better chance of retiring.”
“Well, then we got to bring them down into the cellar with us,” Raney said. She thought about retirement, but it was just a gray blur. She knew she wasn’t going back to Hagel’s World—ever; but there wasn’t any other planet that she wanted to be. The Slammers were the only place she’d been that seemed like home.
“Hell, it’s cramped already,” Wetsam said, but he wasn’t really arguing. “Bloody hell.”
“You know what’s going to happen to the upper floors,” said Raney. “Want me to go down and you reach him down to me on the floor?”
“Yeah, I don’t have a better idea,” Wetsam said. He bent over the bed and gripped the old man around
the shoulders.
“What are you doing?” Celie said, and her puppy started to yap again.
“We’re going to get your grampa some place safer,” Raney said, going down the stairs backward. It wasn’t going to be very safe, but it was the best they could do for now. It was all they had themselves, but the Slammers got paid for it.
The dog suddenly squatted and peed on Wetsam’s boots. Wetsam didn’t react, maybe didn’t even notice. Raney wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d kicked Bubbles downstairs, but then the kid would make even more noise than the dog had.
Wetsam bent, lowering the old man. Raney stood with one boot on the floor and the other on the first step. She surged up, then eased back when she had a hand on each side of grampa’s ribs.
He weighed next to nothing, but she felt his breath on her cheek as she stepped back. It smelled sour.
Bubbles bounced down the stairs front-first, circling and yapping as Raney walked to the door. She wasn’t going to try fitting grampa through the jagged casement.
The girl scooted down ahead of Wetsam. Just as well that Raney didn’t need help carrying the old man.
Celie walked beside her, holding one of grampa’s dangling hands. “Are you going to save us from the Filth?” she asked.
“Huh?” said Raney, then realized that “Filth” must be the local name for citizens of the Republic of Bessarabia. “We’ll, we’re going to try to give the Bessies a bloody nose if they come this way, but maybe they won’t.”
“You’ll save us,” the little girl said firmly. “I know you will.”
“If Central was right about what’s coming down the road tonight . . . ,” Wetsam said from behind them. He was carrying the bedding and even the thin mattress. “I figure we’ll be lucky to save our own asses.”
Raney didn’t respond, but she sure didn’t disagree.
Grampa was still alive, though the only evidence of that was the occasional wheeze of breath through his open mouth. The girl huddled against him; the puppy varied between sniffing at the crouching Slammers and trying to wriggle between the two civilians.
Onward, Drake! - eARC Page 27