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

by David Drake

  The Government of Ambiorix had decided the Mosite Rebellion was broken, so they'd terminated the mercenaries' contract to save the cost of paying for such sophisticated troops and equipment. Hoodoo was the last piece of Slammers' hardware on the planet. An electrical fault had held it and its two-man crew back when the rest of the regiment lifted for Beresford, 300 light-years away.

  Those planning the operation on behalf of the Mosite Council in Goncourt had claimed that Hoodoo would win the war. With a single supertank the Council could force the Carcassone government to grant autonomy to the Western District where the Mosite faith predominated.

  Lamartiere had been at the sharp end, infiltrating Brione as one of the mercenaries' Local Service Personnel—cheap local labor who did fetch and carry for the Slammers' skilled service technicians. He hadn't thought beyond completion of the operation, and even that only in the moments when he had enough leisure to think more than half a second ahead. If asked, though, he'd have said that Hoodoo's enormous power would restore military parity between Mosite forces and the government.

  Maybe, just maybe, that would have been true—if he and Clargue could use Hoodoo's armament properly. As it was, with luck and fewer than a hundred rounds of 2cm ammunition gleaned from the local militia, they'd been able to smash a government mechanized battalion at the Lystra River.

  It wouldn't work that way again, though. By now the government would have analyzed the wreckage of the previous battle and realized that Hoodoo's main gun wasn't working, though they might not guess why. A powerful force would attack Hoodoo again as soon as Carcassone learned where she had fled. This time Lamartiere's trickery wouldn't be enough to win.

  In addition to the government, the tank's mercenary crew, Sergeant Heth and Trooper Stegner, had stayed on Ambiorix instead of rejoining the regiment. They might or might not be actively helping the government forces, but in any case they contributed to the aura of overhanging doom Lamartiere had felt ever since his triumph at stealing Hoodoo had worn off.

  "The drone hasn't returned," Clargue said in his usual mild tone. The doctor was as tired and frustrated as Lamartiere, but you never heard that in his voice.

  "Sorry," Lamartiere said. "I was daydreaming." Daydreaming in the middle of the night, with the stars above jewels in the desert air. It was thirty-six hours since Lamartiere had last slept.

  He raised the drive fans from idle speed to full power, then broadened the angle of the blades so that they pushed the atmosphere instead of simply cutting it. Hoodoo rose on the bubble of air trapped within her steel-skirted plenum chamber, then slid out of the gully in which Lamartiere had hidden her when the government drone came over the horizon. With the nacelles tilted forward to retard the tank's rush down the slope, Hoodoo entered the Boukasset.

  Most of Ambiorix' single large continent was organized in districts under administrators appointed by Carcassone. The sparsely settled Boukasset, the rocky wasteland in the rain shadow of the mountains forming the Western District, had always been ignored as a poor relation. Since the Western District had rebelled when the Synod of the Established Church attempted to put down what it described as the Mosite Heresy, the Boukasset's connection to Carcassone had become even more tenuous.

  Hoodoo squirmed out of the mountains and into a broad river basin, dry now but a gushing, foaming torrent once every decade or so when cloudbursts drenched the Boukasset. The bottom was carpeted with vegetation that survived on groundwater dribbling beneath the sand. The coarse brush flattened beneath a 170-tonne tank with the power of a fusion bottle to drive it, then sprang up again to conceal all traces of Hoodoo's passage.

  Lamartiere pulled his control yoke back, increasing speed gradually. The AI overlaid a recommended course on the terrain display and steered the tank along it as long as Lamartiere permitted it to do so.

  Their intended destination was the Shrine of the Blessed Catherine. If Lamartiere fell asleep now, Hoodoo would roar past the site in three hours and forty-nine minutes according to the countdown clock at the top of the display.

  Giggling and aware that he wasn't safe to drive, Lamartiere pulled the yoke back a hair farther. The Estimated Time of Arrival dropped to three hours and twenty-four minutes.

  Nowhere on Ambiorix was safe for Lamartiere until he and Clargue got Hoodoo's guns working. He wouldn't be safe then either, but at least he could fight back.

  Maury, the rebel commander in the Boukasset, dealt with off-planet smugglers who slipped down in small vessels. Hoodoo's tribarrel used the same ammunition as the 2cm shoulder weapons of the Slammers' infantry and others who could afford those smashingly effective weapons. Maury had some of the guns, so he could supply the tank if he chose to.

  If. . . .

  "What do you know about Maury, Doctor?" Lamartiere asked, partly to keep himself awake. "He seems to have held the government out of his region, which we couldn't do in the mountains."

  Great trees overhung the riverbed. The pinlike leaves of their branches shivered as the tank slid past. The trees' taproots penetrated the buried aquifer, but their trunks were clear of the flash floods that periodically scoured the channel.

  "There's nothing in the Boukasset that the government wanted badly enough to commit Hammer's mercenaries to get it," Clargue said. "Nomadic herdsmen and small-scale farmers using terraces and deep wells. Our mines in the Western District were Ambiorix' main source of foreign exchange before the rebellion."

  Clargue was a small, precise man in his sixties; a doctor who'd left the most advanced hospital in Carcassone to serve the sick of his home village of Pamiers in the mountains. Because of his experience with medical computers as complex as the systems of this tank, the Council had chosen him to help Lamartiere make Hoodoo operational. He'd tried despite his distaste for the war that had wrecked his home and Ambiorix as a whole, but he hadn't been able to find a way to access the ammunition Lamartiere knew was stored in Hoodoo's hull.

  "As for what I know of Maury," Clargue continued, "nothing to his credit. At the best of times leaders in the Boukasset have been one step removed from posturing thugs. 'Posturing thug' would be a kind description of Maury if half the rumors one hears are true."

  "Beggars can't be choosers, I suppose," Lamartiere muttered. His yoke twitched in his hands as the AI guided Hoodoo.

  He had a bad feeling about this, but he'd had a bad feeling about the operation almost from the beginning. He'd bloodied the government badly both when he escaped from Brione with the tank and at the Lystra River. But Pamiers had received a hammering by artillery and perhaps worse because Hoodoo had hidden there, and at Brione Lamartiere's sister Celine had died while driving a truckload of explosive into the main gate of the base.

  So long as the war went on, everybody lost. If Hoodoo became fully operational, she could extend the war for years and maybe decades.

  "Beggars have no power," Clargue said. He sniffed. "A man like Maury understands no language but that of power. The Council must be fools to send us into the Boukasset with that message."

  Lamartiere sighed. "Yeah," he said. "But we already knew that, and we're here anyway. We'll see what we can work out."

  The dry riverbed lost itself among the plains. The skirts began to ring on rocks, the heavy debris dumped here at the last spate and not yet covered by sand. Lamartiere edged Hoodoo northward to where the ground was smoother. The AI reconfigured the course slightly; the ETA changed again.

  Hoodoo roared through the starlit night, heading at speed toward the next way-station on a road to nowhere.

  It was an hour past dawn. The low sun deepened the color of the red cliffs and the red sand into which those cliffs decayed. By midday the sun would turn the sky brassy and bleach every hue to a ghost of itself.

  The shrine was in the Boukasset where four generations ago Catherine had given birth to the child who became Bishop Moses, to whom God revealed the foundations of the Mosite faith. The site had been a pilgrimage center during peacetime, but Lamartiere hadn't been religi
ous in that fashion.

  Since Lamartiere learned what had happened to his sister Celine, he hadn't been religious in any way at all; but now there was no way out of the course he'd chosen in the days when he could believe in a future.

  The first sign of habitation was the line of conical shelters, two or three abreast, which wound across the plain. Low hills lay in the distance to east and west, and a jagged sandstone slope rose immediately north of the site.

  The shrine itself was a fortress walled in the russet stone of the overlooking cliff. It was built on a lower slope where the rise could be accommodated by a single terrace, but the gullied rock behind it rose at 1:2 or even 1:1.

  The spire of a church showed above the enclosure's ten-meter sidewalls. A bell there rang when Hoodoo appeared out of the east, trailing a great plume of dust.

  Lamartiere disengaged the AI and began slowing the tank by turning the fan nacelles vertical instead of tilting them to the rear. Hoodoo's enormous inertia meant control inputs had to be added well in advance.

  "They grow lemon trees in those shelters," Dr Clargue said. He sounded puzzled at something. "The plantings are laid out over an underground aquifer, but without protection the wind would scour the leaves and even bark off the trees."

  He paused, then added, "There weren't nearly as many trees when I came here twelve years ago. Only a handful of Brothers tended to the shrine then."

  Lamartiere guided the tank past the cones straggling as they followed a seam in the bedrock. Overlying sand kept the water from evaporating. He knew that lemons from the Boukasset had a reputation for flavor, but because he'd never visited the region he hadn't wondered how terrain so barren could grow citrus fruit.

  Hoodoo had slowed to a crawl when she was still a hundred meters from the high walls of the shrine. Lamartiere cut his fan speed but angled the nacelles sternward again. The tank slid the remainder of the way forward under perfect control.

  Lamartiere ruefully congratulated himself on his skill. He was probably the only person in the Boukasset who knew how difficult it was to drive a 170-tonne air-cushion vehicle.

  He slid open his hatch. What looked from a distance like the shrine's entrance had been closed by sandstone blocks many years in the past. A woman leaned over the battlements. Beside her, a basket hung on a crane extending from the wall. A great geared wheel within raised and lowered it. The basket was apparently the only way in and out of the shrine.

  "Tell your leader that we need help to spread the camouflage cover over this tank," Lamartiere called to the woman. "Otherwise we'll be spotted if the government overflies us."

  Men and women were approaching from the lemon orchard, though the sprawled extent of the plantings meant it would be half an hour before the more distant folk reached the shrine. There were hundreds of people, far more than Lamartiere had expected.

  "The Brothers have been sheltering refugees," Clargue realized aloud. He sat on the edge of his hatch, his legs dangling down the turret's smooth iridium armor.

  Lamartiere looked up at his companion and hid a frown. The doctor had always seemed frail. Now he was skeletal, worn to the bone by strain and the frustration of not being able to find the command that would transfer ammunition and permit Hoodoo to use her devastating weaponry.

  "Go away!" the woman shouted. Her left hand was bandaged. "Go back to the hell you came from and leave us alone!"

  An old man in black robes and a pillbox hat appeared on the battlements beside her. He and the woman held a brief discussion while Lamartiere kept silent.

  The woman unpinned the gearwheel, letting the basket wobble down. The man held his hat on with one hand as he bent forward. "Please," he said. "If you gentlemen will come up, it will be easier for us to discuss your presence."

  Lamartiere looked at Clargue. "One of us should stay with . . ." he said.

  The doctor smiled. "Yes, of course," he said, "but you should carry out the negotiations. I wouldn't know what to say to them."

  "And you think I do?" Lamartiere said; but he knew Clargue was right. The doctor was smarter and older and better educated; but this was war, and Clargue was utterly a man of peace.

  Denis Lamartiere was . . . not a man of peace. He and Clargue were operating in a world at war, now, however much both of them might hate it.

  Lamartiere got into the basket. He let the sway of it ratcheting upward soothe his tension.

  The basket was still several feet below the stone coping when the pulley touched the fiber cage connecting the rim to the draw rope. The old man helped Lamartiere onto the battlements. Normally Lamartiere would have scrambled over easily by himself, but his head was swaying with fatigue even though the basket was steady again.

  The old man wore a clean white tunic with a red sash under the black robe. Though his beard was gray, not white, his face bore the lines of someone much older than Lamartiere would have guessed from a distance.

  "Sorry, ah, Father?" Lamartiere said. "You're in charge of the shrine?"

  "I'm Father Blenis," the old man said. "We try to work cooperatively here in the presence of the Blessed Catherine, but because of my age the others let me speak for us all."

  "It's not your age!" the woman said. She'd pinned the ratchet, locking the wheel so that a breeze didn't send the basket hurtling down uncontrolled. She looked at Lamartiere and continued: "Father Blenis is a saint. He's taken us in after your kind would have let us all die—once you'd stolen everything we had."

  "Marie," Father Blenis said. "This gentleman—"

  He looked at Lamartiere and raised an eyebrow.

  "Lamartiere, Denis Lamartiere," Lamartiere said. "Dr. Clargue and I won't stay any longer than we need to, ah, do some work on Hoodoo. On our tank."

  Three of the people coming in from the field were nearing the base of the walls. A thin younger man was pushing ahead of a woman while a much larger fellow clumped along close behind.

  "It's the job of whoever last comes up the walls to lift the next person," Marie said with a challenging glare at Lamartiere. He first guessed she was well into middle age, but she might be considerably younger. Hunger and hard use could have carved the lines in her face.

  And anger. Anger was as damaging to a woman's appearance as a spray of acid.

  "Yes, all right," Lamartiere said. He was a little steadier now. Just getting out of the tank and its omnipresent vibration had helped, though he knew he was both weak and desperately tired.

  He removed the pin and lifted the ratchet pawl, controlling the basket with his other hand on the crank. "Don't you have any power equipment here?"

  "You should ask!" Marie spat. Pus had seeped through the bandage on her left hand; it needed to be changed again. "When it's your kind who stole it!"

  "Marie," Father Blenis murmured. He put his own frail hands on the crank beside Lamartiere's, silently rebuking the woman for her lack of charity.

  "We'd ordered a winch and solar power unit for it, Mr. Lamartiere," he explained, "but it didn't arrive. In general the parties who rule the region allow us to trade unhindered so long as we pay taxes to them—"

  "I'll handle it, Father," Marie said contritely. She patted both Blenis and Lamartiere away from the winch. The process of moving hundreds of people in and out of the fortress must be a very time-consuming one, though having each person lift the next one kept it from being an unbearable physical burden.

  Blenis stepped aside, gesturing Lamartiere with him. Lamartiere would have protested, but he was suddenly so dizzy that he sat down in order not to fall.

  "When we order something that looks particularly enticing, though," Blenis went on, "it may not arrive. By living simply here we avoid such problems for the most part."

  He grinned. "Another example of how those who follow God's tenets avoid temporal concerns," he said. It took Lamartiere a moment to realize that he was joking.

  There was angry shouting at the base of the walls. Concern wiped the smile from the Father's face. He leaned over to see what was happ
ening.

  "It's not taxes," Marie muttered to Lamartiere. "It's pure theft, and by both sides. But what can we do since you have the guns, eh?"

  "Rasile, Louise," Father Blenis called. His voice had penetrating volume when he chose to use it. Living in this windswept wasteland would teach a man to speak with authority. "Let Pietro come up first, then he can lift both of you together. Let us leave struggle outside our community."

  "I haven't robbed anybody," Lamartiere said. He'd killed. Some of those he'd killed had probably been civilians as innocent as the refugees here at the shrine, but even in his present exhausted state it made him angry to be accused of things he hadn't done.

  He shook his head, trying to clear it of the hot white fuzz that clogged his thoughts. "You pay taxes to the government, then?" he said. "I didn't know Carcassone had officials in the Boukasset nowadays."

  Marie grunted with the effort of hauling up the first of the civilians below. Before she could catch her breath to speak, Father Blenis said, "There aren't regular officials, or regular troops either. The government sent a group of former rebels, Ralliers, into the Boukasset under a Captain de Laburat."

  He smiled again. The Father's consistent good humor was a shock to Lamartiere. For years most of the people he'd been around were soured by war and fury.

  "I'm not sure whether the government was trying to impose its will or merely hoping to prevent Maury from having things all his own way." Blenis continued. "In any case, Maury's band and the Ralliers under de Laburat decided to cooperate rather than fight. A model for the whole planet, wouldn't you say?"

  The heavyset man got out of the basket. Lamartiere had seen more obvious signs of intelligence on the faces of sheep. Marie stepped away from the crank.