by David Drake
Jonas shook his head in disgust as he locked the mast in place. "Take us in, Rita," he said. "I guess we eat dust for the last half klick."
Hula Girl accelerated slowly: a quick jerk against the inertia of the command vehicle would snap the tow cables. Dust from the rest of the column was almost a wall rather than a cloud. Panchin breathed through his helmet filters. An electrostatic charge was supposed to keep his face shield clear, but some of the grit was too large to be repelled. Lebusan covered his face with his bandanna again.
This ridge was a slightly lower step of Knoll 45/13. When Hula Girl topped it, the laager was in view just ahead. APCs and Zaporoskiye tanks faced out from a circle so that their thicker bow armor and main weapons were toward a potential enemy.
There were many more vehicles than Panchin had expected to see.
"Via, Sarge!" Ericssen said. "That's the firebase, not an outpost. Did they give us the wrong coordinates?"
So quietly that his crew could barely hear him over the intercom, Sergeant Jonas said, "Those are Brazilian free-launch artillery vehicles. They aren't ours."
Major Lebusan bobbed his head enthusiastically. "I used to complain because the Council spent so much money on you Brazilians but didn't pay its own officers properly," he shouted through the bandanna. "Now I know you're worth the expense!"
Panchin looked over his shoulder. The locals still aboard the command vehicle were inside with the hatches closed; dust turned all the surfaces white, armor and vision blocks alike. Nobody could see what was happening aboard Hula Girl.
He smiled at Major Lebusan and kneed him in the groin.
The rebel officer doubled up with a squeal. His hat fell off. Ericssen chopped Lebusan on the back of the head with the butt of a grenade launcher.
Panchin felt cold and sick to his stomach. He had to consciously force his lips to straighten out of the frozen smile.
Ericssen tossed the rebel major over the side. Lebusan was a small man, but it was still an impressive one-handed lift by the gunner. Hysterical strength, very likely.
"Awaiting instructions!" Cortezar said urgently.
"Keep going," Sergeant Jonas said. He sounded calm. "We'll never get away if we turn around a hundred meters from them. We'll proceed till they notice us, then bull straight in and raise so much hell that maybe we'll be able to get out the other side."
"I make it four Brazilian launchers and a calliope," Cortezar said. Her voice was an octave higher than normal, but she didn't speak any faster than usual. "The rest of the hardware's local or Zaporoskiye like the folks in the column. That what you've got, too, Sarge?"
"There ought to be a second calliope with a battery of artillery," Jonas said. "Maybe it's deadlined, but don't count on that."
The Slammers depended on the 2cm tribarrels of their tanks and combat cars to sweep incoming shells and missiles from the sky. Most other high-end mercenary units used specialized equipment to protect themselves from artillery. Calliopes, eight- or nine-tube fixed powergun arrays, could blast incoming even if one or more of the individual guns jammed.
They could also shred a combat car the way a shark tears a man.
"Brigadier Vijanta's going to be pleased to know where to find the rebel main body," Ericssen said sourly. "If we get to Scepter Base to tell him, that is."
Panchin was suddenly thankful for the dust. His sweaty hands wouldn't slip from the grips of his tribarrel.
"Rita, when I give the word, break the tow lines," Jonas said. "We won't have time to do it any other way. Wing guns shoot at everything on your side. Try to get the launchers and any reload vehicles. Remember, we need to confuse them for long enough to get away."
The Slammers' own rocket howitzers fired individual rounds from a tube with a closed breech. The Brazilians launched from open troughs, a less efficient technique. In exchange for needing more fuel to reach a given range, the Brazilians were able to mount their artillery on much lighter chassis than the Slammers' massive Hogs.
Ericssen turned his head. "You okay with this, Panchin?" he asked.
Panchin nodded. "I'm okay," he said. His mouth was dry and his soul was already trying to squeeze free. He knew in a moment his body would be ripped and burned.
The rebels hadn't raised a dirt berm around the encampment for protection, but the air-cushion artillery vehicles were dug in hull deep. Soldiers were filling sandbags under artificial light. The layout was at least as professional as that of a government firebase.
A pair of female soldiers lounged against a sandbag bunker near the entrance, drinking from a bottle they passed back and forth. They wore chameleon-weave uniforms whose fabric adjusted to match the background patterns.
One of the soldiers straightened and spoke to her companion. They both stared at Hula Girl, now only forty meters away.
"Hit it!" Sergeant Jonas shouted as his tribarrel lashed the night. His cyan bolts missed the Brazilian women, but he blew the side of the bunker in. The metal-plank roof buried the gun position.
Hula Girl lurched forward on the full thrust of her fans. The right tow cable parted. The combat car and the command vehicle whipsawed on the remaining cable. Hula Girl sideswiped the Zaporoskiye tank being towed by its fellow ahead of them. The impact helped Cortezar fight her controls straight. She continued to accelerate, pulling the command vehicle into the pair of tanks in a crash that finally broke the cable.
Panchin pressed his trigger with both thumbs, blinking reflexively. The barrel group spun at 500 rpm. Each stubby iridium tube fired with a hissCRACK when it rotated into the top position, then ejected the spent matrix from the port in a spurt of liquid nitrogen before loading a fresh round in the third station on the receiver.
He aimed at a parked APC but shot high, raking the roof of a tent in the center of the encampment. The sidewalls were heavily sandbagged, but the center pole shattered and dropped blazing canvas into the interior.
Frosty Ericssen's bolts glanced crazily from the turtle-backed hull of a Zaporoskiye tank. When the ceramic armor finally failed, the tank exploded in a mushroom of flame—fuel for the turbine and the main gun's MHD generator.
Hula Girl drove into the crowded firebase at 40 kph and still accelerating. Panchin squeezed the butterfly trigger, remembering to fire short bursts. His face shield blanked the bolts' intense blue-green glare to save his vision. He didn't hit what he aimed at—he was constantly behind his targets even though he tried to allow for the combat car's acceleration. He'd lowered his muzzles, and there were too many targets to miss everything.
When he shot at the three crew members running for a Zaporoskiye tank, his bolts slapped the flank of their vehicle instead. The cyan reflection threw the men down anyway, their clothing afire.
Hula Girl skidded. Panchin aimed at the open rear hatch of an APC close enough to spit into but punched the side of a carrier twenty meters away. The steel armor burned white in the heat of the plasma; then the whole vehicle erupted. The commander's cupola spun out of the fireball.
Cortezar was dodging obstacles as best she could, but Hula Girl repeatedly brushed a vehicle or a sandbag wall. The skirts were sturdy, but they weren't a bulldozer blade. If the plenum chamber was too damaged to hold high-pressure air, the car became a sitting duck for everything a regimental firebase could throw at her.
An explosion with three distinct pulses hammered the camp. Hula Girl spun ninety degrees before Cortezar got her under control again. The quivering yellow flare threw the shadows of men and equipment a kilometer across the desert. Jonas or Ericssen had hit an artillery vehicle, detonating some of the ready ammo.
Metal clanged discordantly. Pink tracers clipped one of the stakes holding Hula Girl's overhead screen and kicked smoldering dimples in the baggage.
Panchin tried to swing his tribarrel onto the Zaporoskiye tank firing at them with the automatic weapon in its cupola. Sergeant Jonas was faster, pounding the tank's mid-hull with a long burst that crumbled the ceramic. The tank didn't explode violently, but a red flash
lifted all the hatches. The machine gun stopped firing.
Panchin shot at a supply truck and for once hit his target. Greasy flames enveloped the crates stacked on the bed. Men jumped off the other side of the vehicle and ran unharmed into the night.
Panchin's iridium barrels glowed so brightly that his face shield had to gray out their glare. The long burst Sergeant Jonas fired to destroy the tank had jammed his tribarrel. He tilted his weapon up to chip with a knife blade at the matrix material gumming his ejection port.
Cortezar swung Hula Girl hard left on the track within the outer ring of vehicles. Half a dozen rebel soldiers squatted behind their APC and the sandbag wall they'd started for a sleeping bunker. They fired at Hula Girl with automatic rifles. Panchin slewed his gun toward them. A bullet whanged Jonas' weapon. The impact spun the tribarrel on its pintle. Like a white-hot baseball bat, the lower muzzle knocked the sergeant down.
A second artillery vehicle blew up. This time at least four rounds detonated simultaneously. The blast threw Hula Girl ten meters sideways into a heavy tractor with an earthmoving blade. The combat car rotated a half turn and stalled because Cortezar had dropped the controls when her helmet bounced off the side of her compartment.
Panchin screamed in fear and clamped his trigger. There was a sound like water dropped into an ocean of hot grease, and the center of his face shield became a shadow with cyan edges. The protective spot collapsed to show the ruin of an air-cushion vehicle, still glowing but no longer so bright that it could etch retinas.
"Drive!" Sergeant Jonas said. "Drive!"
Hula Girl shuddered, rose minusculy, and turned to lurch off the northern edge of the knoll between a pair of Sulewesan APCs. One burned sluggishly; the other was as still as a grave though apparently undamaged.
More Brazilian rockets exploded. Hula Girl pogoed twice even though this time high ground shielded them from the shockwave. Debris from a previous explosion must have set this one off because Frosty wasn't shooting and Panchin's tribarrel had jammed.
Hula Girl tore through the night. Tracers arched across the sky, but the rebel laager was out of direct sight. There was a risk that the car might hit a large boulder, but Cortezar was driving with a touch as deft as a brain surgeon's.
Panchin knelt with his hands clasped over the chestplate of his armor. He knew he ought to clear his tribarrel, but his whole body was shaking.
Ericssen worked on Sergeant Jonas' forearm. "It's just a bruise!" the sergeant said. His voice was tight with pain.
"So the medics at Scepter Base take the splint off," Ericssen said equably. "Where's the harm in that? Now, you just relax until the blue tab—" the analgesic injector built into Slammer's body armor, beside the red tab which injected stimulant "—kicks in."
The night behind them belched yellow again. The shockwave was a dull thump instead of a world-devouring roar when it reached Hula Girl several seconds later.
"I never thought it'd work," Panchin whispered.
"Hey, snake?" Ericssen said. "You did good to nail that second calliope before it waxed us. I didn't even see it till you lit the spics up."
"I'm glad," Panchin said. He closed his eyes, then opened them again very quickly. He'd throw up if he closed them.
"Blood and martyrs!" Cortezar said. "I don't get it. We were shaking hands with those bastards and we didn't even know they were the other side. And them too! It don't make sense that if everybody's the same they're all trying to kill each other."
The overhead net sagged. The bullet-damaged stake had bent and might break at any moment.
"Maybe in some universe there's got to be a difference before people kill each other," Panchin said to his clasped hands. "That's never been a requirement in the universe humans live in, though."
M9A4 COMMAND CAR
THE IMMOVABLE OBJECT
Hoodoo, the only one of the Slammers' gigantic tanks remaining on Ambiorix, hulked in the starlight beyond the barred window of the maintenance shed where the party was going on. Lamartiere looked at the gray bulk again, then tossed down the last of the drink he'd been nursing for an hour.
It wasn't quite time for him to act. Since Franciscus, the commander of the Company of Death, had sent the orders three days ago, Lamartiere had been worried sick over what he had to do. Now he just wished it was over, one way or the other.
Sergeant Heth tried to stand but toppled back onto a couch improvised from rolls of insulating foam. He was Hoodoo's commander and the ranking mercenary on Ambiorix since the remainder of Hammer's Regiment had lifted during the past three weeks. Even though the stubby, dark-skinned mercenary had drunk himself legless, his gaze was sharp as he searched the crowd of Local Service Personnel to focus on Lamartiere.
"Hey, Curly!" he called. It was a joke: Lamartiere's straight blond hair was so fine that he looked bald in a strong light. "I want you to know that you were a good LSP, and I'd say that even if you hadn't just fed me the best whiskey I ever had in my life!"
"Yeah, Denis," said L'Abbaye, another of the LSPs. "I didn't know your folks had money. What're you doing in a job like this, anyhow?"
"Because of my faith," Lamartiere said simply. His mouth was dry, but oddly enough the question steadied him. "I thought the best way I could serve God was by serving the mercenaries who came here to fight the Mosite rebels. These refreshments are also a way of serving God."
That was quite true. The Company of Death, the special operations commando of the Mosite rebellion, had recruited Lamartiere from the ranks of ordinary guerrillas and ordered him to take this job. He came from the planetary capital, Carcassone, rather than the western mountains where the Mosite faith—Mosite heresy, the Synod of the Established Church would have it—was centered. Lamartiere had his father's fair complexion. Perhaps in compensation his sister Celine was darker than most pure-blood Westerners, but they both had their mother's faith. Lamartiere's technical education from the Carcassone Lyceum made him an ideal recruit to the Local Service Personnel whom the mercenaries hired for cleaning and fetch-and-carry during depot maintenance of their great war machines.
Heth prodded Hoodoo's driver, Trooper Stegner, with a boot toe. "Hear that, Steg?" the sergeant said. "We're the Sword of God again. How many gods d'ye suppose we been the swords for, hey?"
"We ain't nobody's sword now," Stegner said, lying on his back on the floor with a block of wood for his pillow. His eyes were closed and the straw of an emergency water bottle projected into the corner of his mouth. "We been fired, cast into the outer darkness of space just because we want to be paid."
Before Stegner lay down on the concrete, he'd filled the water bottle with the whiskey Lamartiere brought to this farewell party for the two mercenaries. Though the trooper had seemed to be asleep, his Adam's apple moved at intervals as he sucked on the straw.
"You weren't fired, sir," said another of the LSPs. "You've won and can go home now."
Everyone in the shed except Lamartiere was drunk or almost drunk. For this operation, Franciscus had provided enough liquor to fill Hoodoo's heat exchanger. The money to buy it had come from folk on whom the yoke of war and the Synod lay heavy; but they paid the tax, just as they paid in blood—for their Mosite faith.
"Home?" muttered Stegner. "Where's that?"
"We won the battles we fought, son," Sergeant Heth said, turning to the LSP who'd spoken. "The Slammers generally do. That's why people hire us. But don't kid yourself that the war's over. That's not going to happen until either you give your rebels a piece of the government or you kill everybody in the Western District."
"But they're heretics!" Fourche blurted. "We aren't going to allow Ambiorix to be ruled by heretics!"
Heth belched loudly. He stared at his empty class. Lamartiere filled it from the bottle he held.
"Well, that leaves the second way, don't it?" Heth said. "I don't think we'd be able to handle the job, not kill all of them, even if you had the money to pay us. And not to be unkind, son, but your National Army sure can't do it, which i
s why you hired us in the first place."
"Cast into the darkness . . ." Stegner mumbled. He started to laugh, choked, and turned his head away from the bottle to vomit.
It was time. Lamartiere stood, wobbly with adrenalin rather than liquor, and said, "We're getting low on whiskey. I'll fetch more."
"I'll give you a hand," volunteered L'Abbaye. He was a friendly youth but all thumbs on any kind of mechanical task. Lamartiere thought with grim humor that if the secret police came looking for Mosites among the LSPs, L'Abbaye's clumsiness could easily be mistaken for systematic sabotage.
Lamartiere handed him the present bottle. There was just enough liquor to slosh in the bottom. "You hold this," he said. "I'll be right back."
Lamartiere stepped outside, feeling the night air bite like a plunge into cold water. He was shivering. He closed the shed's sturdy door, then threw the strap over the hasp and locked it down with the heavy padlock he'd brought for the purpose.
He trotted to the sloped gray bow of Hoodoo, a vast boulder cropping out of the spaceport's flat expanse. Lamartiere had the feeling that the tank was watching him. Even now when it was completely shut down.
The mercenaries had used the spaceport of Brione, the major city of Ambiorix' Western District, as their planetary logistics base during operations against the Mosites in the surrounding mountains. The seventeen tanks of H Company provided base security during the Slammers' withdrawal at the end of their contract.
The withdrawal had gone so smoothly that the government in Carcassone was probably congratulating itself on the savings it had made by ceasing to pay the enormously high wages of the foreign mercenaries. Over a period of three weeks starship after starship had lifted, carrying the Slammers' equipment and personnel to Beresford, 300 light-years distant, where the dictator of a continental state didn't choose to become part of the planetary democracy.
The last transport was supposed to carry H Company. As the tanks headed for the hold, Hoodoo's aft and starboard pairs of drive fans failed because of an electrical fault. This wasn't a serious problem or an uncommon one—vibration and grit meant wiring harnesses were almost as regular an item of resupply as ammunition. With the Regiment's tank transporters and dedicated maintenance personnel already off-planet, though, Major Harding—the logistics officer overseeing the withdrawal—had a problem.