The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 1 (hammer's slammers)

by David Drake

"You and I are what the rebellion has for a technical staff in Pamiers," Lamartiere said. He was in the turret and couldn't see the doctor. A narrow passage connected the two portions of the tank, but that was for emergency use only. "And we've got to figure out where the switches are. Without the guns and sensors, this is just scrap metal."

  It was a good thing that Lamartiere needed to encourage Clargue: otherwise he'd have been screaming in frustration himself. Lamartiere had been in intimate contact with the mercenaries' armored vehicles for three months, learning every detail he could about them. It hadn't occurred to him that he'd need to know where the cut-off switches were, but without that information he might as well have waited to wave good-bye when the freighter lifted with Hoodoo tomorrow. At least that way Lamartiere would have his final pay packet to donate to the rebellion.

  The fighting compartment darkened as Captain Befayt stuck her head in the cupola hatch. "How are you coming?" she asked. "Say, there really isn't much room in there, is there?"

  "No," Lamartiere said, trying not to snarl. "And we don't even have the interior lights working, so while you're standing there I can't see anything inside."

  Befayt commanded the company of guerrillas who provided security for Pamiers. She had a right to be concerned since the tank was a risk to the community for as long as it remained here.

  Besides that, Lamartiere liked Befayt. Too often in rebel communities the fighters ate and drank well while the civilians, even the children, starved. In Pamiers all shared, and anybody who thought his gun made him special found he had the captain to answer to.

  Having said that, Lamartiere really didn't need to have the heavy-set woman looking over his shoulder while everything was a frustrating mess.

  "Here, I'll come down with you," Befayt said. She lowered her legs through the hatch, then paused for a moment. Her boots dribbled dirt and cinders down on Lamartiere. After laying her equipment belt on top of the turret to give her ample waist more clearance, she dropped the rest of the way into the compartment.

  Maybe Lamartiere should have snarled, though people pretty much heard what they wanted to hear. Befayt wanted a look at this wonderful, war-winning piece of equipment.

  Twelve hours earlier, Lamartiere too had believed the tank was all those things. Now he wasn't sure.

  The trouble was that there were so many marvelous devices packed into Hoodoo's vast bulk that the breaker box Lamartiere was looking for was concealed like a grain of sand in the desert. If the electronics had been live, Dr. Clargue could have called up a schematic that would tell them where the switches were . . .

  Befayt stood on the seat which Lamartiere had lowered to give himself more light within the fighting compartment. He and Clargue had handlights as well, but the focused beams distorted appearances by shutting off the ambiance beyond their edges.

  Befayt peered around the turret in wonder. "Boy," she said with unintended irony, "I'm glad it's you guys figuring this stuff out instead of me. This the big gun?"

  She patted what was indeed the breech of the main gun. Lamartiere had seen a 20cm weapon tested after armorers had replaced the tube. The target was a range of hills ten kilometers south of the firing point. The cyan bolt had blasted a cavity a dozen meters wide in solid rock.

  "Yes," Lamartiere said shortly. "The round comes from the ready magazine in the turret ring, shifts to the transfer chamber—"

  He slid back a spring-loaded door beside the breech. The interior was empty.

  "—and then into the gun when the previous round's ejected. That way all but the one round's under heavy armor at all times."

  "Amazing," Befayt said with a gratified smile. "Guess we'll be giving the Synod's dogs back some of what they been feeding us, right?"

  "If we're given a chance to get the tank in working order, yes, we will!" Lamartiere said. To cover his outburst he immediately went on, "Say, Captain, I'd been meaning to ask you: Do you know where my sister Celine's gone? I thought she might be here to, you know, say hello when I arrived."

  "She was until about a week ago," Befayt said, relaxing deliberately. The captain didn't want a pointless confrontation either. "Then she got a message and went back with the supply trucks to Goncourt. You might check with Franciscus when he comes back from there tonight."

  "Yes, I'll do that," Lamartiere said. The only good thing about the past hours of failure were that Colonel Franciscus had gone on to Goncourt to confer with Father Renaud instead of staying to watch Lamartiere.

  "Guess I'll get out of your way," Befayt said with a tight control that showed she knew she'd been unwelcome. She wasn't the sort to let that affect her unduly, but it wasn't something that anybody liked to feel. "Celine seemed chirpy as a cricket when I last saw her, though."

  She braced her hands on the edges of the hatch.

  "Here, let me raise the seat," said Lamartiere. He touched the button on the side of the cushion. It was hydraulic, not electrical, and worked off an accumulator driven directly by Number Four fan. "I know I shouldn't worry about her, but we're all each other has since—"

  As the seat whined upward, Lamartiere saw the flat box attached to the base plate. It had a hinged cover.

  "Clargue!" he shouted. "I found it! There's a breaker box on the bottom of the seat!"

  He flipped the cover open. The seat had halted at midcolumn when Lamartiere took his finger off the control. Befayt, excited though uncertain about what was going on, squatted on the cushion and tried to look underneath without getting in the way.

  Lamartiere aimed his handlight at the interior of the box. There was a triple row of circuit breakers. All of them were in the On position.

  "Turn them one at a time!" Dr. Clargue said. "We don't want a surge to damage the equipment."

  "They're already on, Doctor," Lamartiere said. He felt sandbagged. Were the electronics dead because of a fault, one the crew hadn't bothered to fix once they had Hoodoo mobile again? But Heth and Stegner wouldn't have relaxed until they had the tank's guns working, surely!

  "Doctor!" Lamartiere said. "Check under your seat. Both crew members would have the cut-offs so they—"

  "Yes, it's here!" said Clargue. "I've got it open . . ."

  Lamartiere heard ventilation motors hum. The interior lights, flat and a deep yellow that didn't affect night vision, came on; then the 30cm gunnery screen above the breech of the main gun glowed.

  Hoodoo rang with a violent explosion against the turret. Choking smoke swirled through the open hatch. The ventilation system switched to high speed.

  Befayt jumped out of the hatch, moving quickly and without the awkwardness with which she'd entered. "What is happening?" Clargue shouted. The doctor's voice faded as he climbed out of the driver's compartment. "Are we attacked?"

  Lamartiere tried to rotate the turret. It didn't move: that breaker was still off. He pulled himself into the open air. He couldn't do anything inside and he didn't choose to wait in the turret to be killed if that was what was going to happen.

  The smoke was dissipating. The tarpaulin had been hurled up the tailings pile, but Lamartiere saw no other sign of damage. Dr. Clargue was coming around the front of the tank. Befayt stood on the back deck, staring in consternation at fresh scars on the side of the turret.

  "My belt blew up," Befayt said. "May God cast me from Her if that's not what happened. My belt blew up."

  The women and children who made up most of Pamiers' population were disappearing into the mouths of the mines that had sheltered them through previous attacks. The traverses weren't comfortable homes, but they were proof against anything the government could throw against them. Guerrillas had dived into fighting positions as quickly. Those in sight of their leader were looking toward her for direction.

  "What?" said Clargue. "Did you have electrically primed explosives on your belt, Captain?"

  "Well," said Befayt. "Sure, I—Oh, Mother God. You turned the radios on, didn't you?"

  "Of course a tank like this has radios, you idiot!" the doctor
screamed. His goatee wobbled. Clargue was a little man in his late sixties, unfailingly pleasant in all the encounters Lamartiere had had with him to this moment. "What did you mean bringing blasting caps here!"

  "I . . ." Befayt said. She looked completely stupefied. Everyone in the district knew that a powerful radio signal generated enough current in the wires of an electrical blasting cap to detonate the primer. On reflection it was obvious that a tank would have radios; but Lamartiere hadn't thought of that, and neither had the guerrilla commander.

  Clargue had scrambled back into the driver's compartment. "Doctor, I'm sorry!" Befayt called after him. "I'll warn the men. And I'll get the tarpaulin over you again."

  She trotted toward the entrance of the mine which served as the village's command post. Her hand-held radio had been on the equipment belt.

  Clargue reappeared. Lamartiere looked at him in dismay and said, "It was my fault. I should have warned her."

  "No," said Clargue. "It was my fault for turning on the power without thinking of the radios. It's not only the blasting caps. We—I—sent out a signal that the government listening posts almost certainly picked up. They know where we are now. They'll be coming."

  He shook his head with an expression of miserable frustration. Lamartiere remembered Clargue looking the same way six months before, when a child who'd stepped on a bomblet died despite anything the doctor could do.

  "I'll apologize to Captain Befayt," Clargue said. "I was angry with myself, but I blamed her."

  "First we need to get Hoodoo working," Lamartiere said. Befayt was leading a group of guerrillas toward them to re-erect the camouflage cover. "So that when the government troops arrive, we're ready for them."

  The villagers came out in the evening when they heard the truck approaching from Goncourt. They bowed low in the honor due a holy man on seeing that Father Renaud rode beside Franciscus in the cab. There wasn't, Lamartiere thought, much warmth in their greetings.

  Father Renaud was a slim, deeply ascetic man with a fringe of white hair and a placid expression. He was personally very gentle, a man who would let an insect drink its fill of his blood rather than needlessly crush one of God's creatures.

  But there was no compromise in the father's attitude as to what was owed God. He had blessed a young mother before she walked into a government checkpoint with six kilos of explosive hidden beneath the infant in her backpack.

  Most people in the mountains respected Father Renaud and his faith. A man who spent so much of his time with God wasn't entirely safe for ordinary folk to be around, however.

  The driver pulled up beside Hoodoo to let out Renaud and the colonel, then circled back to the center of the village to distribute the few crates of supplies which the Council in Goncourt could spare to Pamiers. The gardens planted in the rubble of burned-out buildings here couldn't support the population. Without some supplement the refugees would move to Goncourt, adding to the health and safety problems of what remained of the Mosites' alternative seat of government.

  Befayt and several of her aides had started for Hoodoo when they heard the fans of the oncoming truck. The captain knelt and accepted the blessing from Father Renaud, but she and Franciscus exchanged only the briefest nods of greeting. There was no love lost between the Company of Death and local guerrilla units. As for rank—an officer could call himself anything he pleased, but in the field it came down to who accepted his orders.

  In Pamiers, only Lamartiere took orders from Colonel Franciscus. Little as Lamartiere liked the man, he knew that local groups like Befayt's could never defeat the central government, though they might keep the mountains ungovernable indefinitely now that the mercenaries had left. In Lamartiere's opinion, decades of hungry squalor like this would be worse even than haughty repression by the government and Synod.

  Franciscus waited impatiently for Lamartiere to take the blessing, then snapped, "Have you fixed the tank yet? I've told the Council that we can move on Brione as soon as they've concentrated our forces, but that I have to be in charge. The tank is crucial, and I command it."

  "We have all the electronic systems working," Dr. Clargue said in a voice as thin as a scalpel. "The guns are not in operation yet because the magazines seem to be empty."

  Clargue wasn't a member of any military body, but he was a Mosite believer and had been an expert on Ambiorix' most advanced medical computer systems before he left Carcassone Central Hospital for hands-on care of the folk of his home village. His presence was the reason the Council had picked Pamiers as an initial destination for the stolen tank.

  "What do you mean?" Franciscus said. He turned on Lamartiere with all the fury of a terrier facing a rat. "Didn't you bring ammunition? Did you think we were going to stand on the turret and throw rocks?"

  Lamartiere was taller than Franciscus, but the colonel was an athlete who went through a long exercise regimen every morning and who gloried in hand-to-hand combat. He didn't need his trappings of guns, bombs, and knives to be dangerous. He was physically capable of beating Lamartiere to death at this moment, and he was very possibly willing to do so as well.

  "Hoodoo has a full load of ammunition, both 2cm and 20cm," Lamartiere said quietly, forcing himself not to flinch as Franciscus stepped toe to toe with him. "I drove the ammo trailer to her myself and watched Sergeant Heth load her. But the rounds are in storage magazines in the floor of the hull. The ready magazines in the turret are empty."

  "You must understand," Clargue said, breaking in with an expression that implied he didn't care whether Franciscus understood how to breathe, "that this tank is a very complex system. As yet I haven't found the command that will transfer ammunition between locations or even the command set it belongs to. It doesn't seem to be part of the gunnery complex, as I would have expected."

  He shrugged. His frustration was as great as Lamartiere's, but the doctor was better at hiding it. "We're working through the range of possibilities. It will take time."

  Clargue knew, as Lamartiere did, that there might be very little time because of the RF spike when Hoodoo's radios came on.

  "Well look," said Befayt. She wore a new equipment belt, but this one didn't contain any of the electrically primed bombs that were a staple of the guerrillas' ambush techniques. "Why don't you move the disks by hand? I can supply the people if the weight's a problem."

  "The storage magazines are sealed and locked," Lamartiere explained. This was something he knew about. "It takes a special fitting on the end of the ammo trailer to get into the tube. If there's dust on the rounds, they might explode when they're fired."

  "We don't have time to be picky!" Franciscus said. He was a little off-balance around Clargue, perhaps because the doctor was so completely Franciscus' opposite in personality. "Blow open the magazines and load the turret by hand."

  "No!" said Lamartiere and Clargue together.

  "Like bloody Hell!" Befayt said, speaking directly to the colonel for the first time since he'd arrived. "I've looked at those fittings. Enough charge to blow one open and the best thing you're going to do is crush all the disks so they don't work. There's a better chance that you'll set one off and the whole lot gang fires. How does that help us, will you tell me, Mister Colonel?"

  Franciscus looked as though he was going to hit her. Befayt's aides must have thought so too, because they backed slightly and leveled their weapons at the colonel: a pair of Ambiorix-made electromotive slug-throwers, and a 2cm powergun stolen or captured from the Slammers' stocks.

  "Children," Father Renaud said with none of the sarcasm the word might have carried had it come from another mouth. "If we squabble among ourselves then we fail the Lord in Her time of need. There is no greater sin."

  "Sorry, father," Befayt muttered. Franciscus gave her a sour look, then dipped his head to Renaud in a sign of contrition.

  Renaud returned his attention to Clargue and Lamartiere. "Go on with your work," he said calmly. "Remember, have faith and She will provide."

  Lamartiere bowe
d and turned to board the tank again. He mostly kept silent while Dr. Clargue methodically went over the software, but there was always the possibility that he would recognize something that the doctor had missed.

  It hadn't happened yet, though. Working on the mercenaries' vehicles in depot didn't teach him anything about the way they operated in combat, and to ask questions on the subject would have compromised Lamartiere as surely waving a sign saying, I AM A MOSITE SPY!

  The radio on Befayt's belt buzzed. She unhooked it and held it to her cheek, shielding the mouthpiece by reflex even in this company. When she lowered the unit, her face looked as though it had been hacked from stone.

  "The government outposts at Twill, Lascade, and on Marcelline Ridge have just been reinforced," she said. "That's an anvil all around Pamiers. There's a mechanized battalion heading south out of the Ariege cantonment to be the hammer."

  "It's because of my mistake," Dr. Clargue said in a stricken voice. "I shouldn't be involved in this. I'm not a man of war."

  "Well, there's no problem," Franciscus said. "Just get the tank working and we'll wipe out this whole Synod battalion. The first battle will be in Pamiers instead of us having to go to them."

  "I don't know how long I will need," Clargue said. "Finding the right command is like—"

  He pointed to the sky. The sun had set and the first stars were appearing in the twilight.

  "Like finding one star at random in all the heavens. How long is it before the enemy will attack?"

  "It's forty klicks from Ariege," Befayt said uncomfortably. "I won't say they're going to have clear going, but after the way the villages on the route got ground up over the past five months I wouldn't expect a whole lot of resistance. Even though it's just government troops and not the mercenaries this time."

  "Two hours," Lamartiere translated. "Less if they're willing to push very hard and abandon vehicles that break down."

  "I can't guarantee success," Dr. Clargue said. His face wrinkled in misery. "I can't even expect success. There's no sign that I will ever find the right command."