The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 (12 page)

A woman knocked to the floor drew a pistol from the sleeve of a garment apparently too diaphanous to hide anything. Vierziger shot her hand off. Chips of vitril, now pulverized, erupted in the cyan jolts as the flimsy target vaporized at the first round of the burst.

Malaveda noticed movement and swung. A man threw down a carbine as though it were as hot as the white, glowing muzzle of Vierziger’s sub-machine gun. “No!” he screamed. His eyes were closed.

“No,” agreed Vierziger, touching Malaveda’s hand on the forestock. He lifted the 2-cm weapon to a safe angle.

The armored shutters rang under multiple powergun bolts. A thirty-centimeter splotch went from gray to red to bright orange. The survivors of the squad were concentrating their fire, but the armor remained proof against small arms.

“That’s the, the s-s-switch,” said a small man whose beige suit would have paid Malaveda’s salary for a year. He pointed to a short baton. The man the sergeant shot had flung it onto the vitril in his dying convulsions. “To set off the bombs.”

Vierziger nodded to Malaveda. Malaveda scooped up the device, careful not to touch the red contact points.

A grenade went off outside. The concussion lifted dust from the foyer floor without affecting the armor.

“Now,” said Vierziger. “We’ll need the controls to raise those doors. And we’ll need a white flag, because our colleagues don’t seem ready to accept my radioed assurance that we’ve captured the position.”

He gestured to a man wearing a tunic that glittered as if diamond studded. “Your shirt will do, I think.”

“The controls are here, right here, mister!” a woman whispered, tugging Malaveda’s sleeve to get his attention. “Right here!”

She pointed to what looked like a trash chute in the wall between elevator and stairs. The cover plate was lifted to display a keyboard.

“Besides,” Vierziger continued, smiling at the captive stripping before him, “I’d like a better look at your pecs, handsome.”

He laughed. It was the most terrifying sound Malaveda had ever heard in his life.

Mahgreb

“I’m looking for a piss-ant named Barbour!” roared the stocky man who slammed open the double doors of the officers’ canteen. “Lieutenant Robert Barbour? He thinks he’s lifting out of here today!”

The man’s gray hair was shaved into a skullcap. He wore his rank tabs field-fashion—on the underside of his collar, where they wouldn’t target him for a sniper. His aura of command obviated the need of formal indicia anyway.

Barbour set down the chip projector he was reading and got to his feet. The projector was loaded with an off-planet news feed, nothing Barbour cared about one way or the other. It was just a means of killing time while waiting for the boarding signal of the ship that would return him to Nieuw Friesland. Killing time and taking his mind off other things.

“I’m Barbour,” he said. His voice squeaked.

The dozen or so other officers in the canteen stared at Barbour when he stood up, then quickly looked in any direction except that of the two principals to the encounter. Conversations stopped, and the four poker players at a corner table huddled their cards between their cupped palms. The lights twinkling in enticement from the autobar looked loud.

“Do you know who I am, Lieutenant Barbour?” the stocky man demanded. When the canteen doors flapped, Barbour saw two nervous-looking aides waiting in the starport concourse. Unlike their principal, the aides wore scarlet command-staff fourragères.

Via! Barbour did know the fellow. Know of him, at any rate. Tedeschi didn’t spend a lot of time in the headquarters in Al Jain, where Barbour had worked until six days previous.

“Yes sir,” Barbour said. He restrained himself from saluting. Field regulations again. In order to encourage his command into a war zone mentality, General Tedeschi, commanding the FDF contingent on Mahgreb, had forbidden salutes. “You’re General Tedeschi. Sir.”

“You’re bloody well told I am!” Tedeschi snapped.

He looked around the canteen. From his expression, he’d just as soon have swept it with a machine gun. “You lot,” he said. “Take a walk. Now!”

The trio nearest the doors were out before the order had been fully articulated. The cardplayers left their stakes on the table, and there was hand luggage beside several of the previously occupied chairs.

Hellfire Hank Tedeschi had no manners and no patience. He successfully completed campaigns in minimal time and with minimal casualties among his own troops, because there was absolutely nothing else in the universe that mattered to him. He would cashier an officer in a heartbeat, and he was rumored to have knocked down underlings who didn’t jump fast enough to suit him.

Tedeschi believed in leading from the front. He’d killed people with his pistol, his knife, and his bare hands.

“What’s this about you deserting your post, Barbour?” Tedeschi demanded. “The job here’s not done, you know.”

The anger previously in the general’s voice had been replaced by menace. Barbour knew this was an act Tedeschi had practiced, but it wasn’t merely an act. Tedeschi was a clever man as well as a violent one. As a means of intimidation, he let people see the raw emotions bubbling from his psyche.

“I’m not deserting, sir,” Robert Barbour said. “I’ve requested a transfer to another branch of the service.”

He didn’t add, “As is my right.” That would be pouring gasoline on hot coals.

“Like hell you are,” Tedeschi said. He gestured Barbour back into the chair from which the lieutenant had risen. “Sit.”

Barbour obeyed. Instead of sitting down across from Barbour, Tedeschi put one of his boots on the circular table and leaned his forearms against the back of his knee. “The job here needs you, Barbour,” the general said. “I need you. Are you hearing me?”

“Sir . . .” said Barbour. He didn’t know how to continue.

Tedeschi wouldn’t have given him the opportunity to go on anyway. “Look, what’s the problem?” he demanded. “Is it me? Do you have a problem with the way I run things here?”

“Lord, no sir,” Barbour blurted. Tedeschi could have been back at Camp Able for all the effect he’d had on Barbour up till this moment. Lieutenants in the headquarters bureaucracy didn’t expect to have anything to do with commanding generals.

“Then your section CO, Wayney,” Tedeschi pressed. “Trouble with her? Tell me, boy, tell me now.”

“Sir,” Barbour said. Tedeschi was leaning forward, compressing his cocked leg and bringing his brutal, swarthy features threateningly closer to Barbour’s face. “Captain Wayney’s—she’s no problem, sir. She’s fine.”

Captain Wayney wasn’t a brilliant intelligence technician. To tell the truth, she wasn’t even a good one. But she was far too good an administrator to get in the way of an underling who was brilliant. Wayney not only handed Barbour the tough ones, she let him run with his whims. The result had been a series of striking triumphs for the section which Wayney headed.

“Look, I’ll make you a proposition,” Tedeschi said, leaning back a few centimeters. “You get an appointment on my personal staff. You report to nobody else, and I leave you the fuck alone. And you jump two pay grades to major. When this operation’s over, which I expect to take another six to nine months standard, you have the choice of accompanying me to my next posting—as a light colonel. Fair, Barbour?”

Barbour stared up at Tedeschi. He didn’t know how to respond. The whole thing was beyond belief.

Instead of reacting directly to the proposition, Barbour said, “Sir? Why are you doing this? There’s eighteen people in Technical Intelligence. You don’t need me.”

Half of Tedeschi’s face smiled. “Right, eighteen,” he said flatly. “All of them can do thirty percent of what you do. Two of them can do about seventy percent. That a fair assessment, Lieutenant?”

Barbour swallowed. If he’d thought about the question—which he hadn’t—he’d have figured that Hellfire Hank knew nothing about the operations of Tech Int. He was too busy running around in a combat car and biting the heads off Kairene guerrillas.

Dead wrong.

“Yes sir,” Barbour said. “Wellborn’s maybe better than that, but okay, that’s about right.”

“And not a cursed one of them can do the rest of what you do, the magic part,” Tedeschi said, his voice like a cat’s tongue, rough but caressing nonetheless. “I said six to nine months standard to finish the job.”

He slammed the heel of his right fist into his left hand, a sudden stroke and whop! that made Barbour flinch back. “I don’t need shooters, Lieutenant,” the general continued. “I got shooters up the ass, I got shooters better than me, and that’s plenty fucking good! The difference between six and nine is knowing where the bastards are to shoot. Do you see?”

“Sir,” said Barbour miserably. “I can’t do that anymore. Target people to be shot. I can’t.”

“Do you want people to die, is that it?” Tedeschi shouted, his face ramming closer to Barbour’s again. “If the operation goes the long way, it’ll boost our casualties by fifty percent. You know that, don’t you?”

Barbour nodded. Again, there was nothing wrong with the general’s analysis. There was a pretty direct correlation between losses and the length of time people were running around, firing live ammunition.

“Also about double the number of local wogs get greased,” Tedeschi added, “not that I give a flying fuck about that, but maybe you do?”

“I don’t. . . .” Barbour said. “Sir, if I don’t do it, it’s not my responsibility. Sir.”

“That last operation,” the general said, “blitzing the headquarters of the Seventy-Three Bee regiment—that was fucking brilliant. That’s the sort of thing I need to get this operation over, quick and clean. Right?”

Barbour’s face formed itself into something between a smile and a rictus. He was afraid to speak.

“Come on, Barbour,” Tedeschi said. He took the junior man’s chin between a thumb and finger that could crush nutshells. He tilted Barbour’s face to meet his hard blue eyes. “Tell me that you’re going to stay with me till the job’s done. Not for the promotion. For the job.”

Barbour stood up carefully, lifting his chin out of the general’s grip. “Sir,” he said, staring at the wall beyond Tedeschi’s left shoulder, “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that job anymore.”

Tedeschi slammed his boot back onto the floor. He wasn’t quite as tall as Barbour, but he had the physical presence of a tank.

“I’d spit on you, Lieutenant,” the general said, “but you’d foul my saliva. Go to fucking Cantilucca, fuck around on a survey team. You’re not fit to associate with the people doing real work.”

Tedeschi slammed out of the canteen.

A few moments later, other officers returned to their drinks and belongings. They looked curiously at Lieutenant Robert Barbour, who remained where the general left him.

Barbour was crying.

Earlier Mahgreb

The incoming shells screamed down on Lieutenant Robert Barbour

like steam whistles pointed at his ears.

They’re landing short!

Barbour ducked in the fighting compartment of High Hat, the combat car in which he rode as a passenger. The regular crew, Captain Mamie Currant and her two wing gunners, didn’t react to the howls overhead. Barbour raised himself sheepishly as the first salvo hit beyond the grove 500 meters distant.

Black smoke spurted. A sheet-metal roof fluttered briefly above the treetops. The blasts of the four shells with contact fuzes were greatly louder than the remaining pair which burst underground.

“Party time!” cried the gunner at the left wing tribarrel. He waggled his weapon, but he obeyed Currant’s orders not to fire.

Currant’s driver and the drivers of the other thirteen operational cars in her company—three were deadlined for repairs—gunned their vehicles out of the temporary hides where they waited for the artillery prep. The combiner screen beside Currant at the forward tribarrel showed the separated platoons closing in on the village of Tagrifah from four directions, but the crew—including the captain herself—was too busy with its immediate surroundings to worry about the rest of the unit.

The six tubes of the battery of Frisian rocket howitzers firing in support of the operation could each put a shell in the air every four-plus seconds during the first minute and a half. Reloading a hog’s ammunition cassettes was a five-minute process for a trained crew, but that wouldn’t matter today. The hundred and twenty ready rounds were sufficient to absolutely pulverize the target.

The second, third, and fourth salvos mixed contact-fuzed high explosive with cluster munitions, firecracker rounds. The outer casing of the latter shells opened a hundred meters in the air with a puff of gray smoke, raining down submunitions. Bomblets burst like grenades when they hit, carpeting a wide area with dazzling white flashes and shrapnel that drank flesh like acid.

Because the glass-fiber shrapnel had little penetrating power, the firecracker rounds were mixed with HE to blow off roofs and other light top cover. From a distance, the exploding submunitions sounded like fat frying. The effect on people caught in a firecracker round’s footprint was also similar to being bathed in bubbling lard.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!” the left gunner called, hammering the heel of one hand on the fighting compartment’s coaming.

The two cars of 3d Platoon—understrength, so Currant was accompanying them—were to the immediate right, fifty and a hundred meters distant, approaching Tagrifah from the south. High Hat lurched repeatedly, throwing Barbour against the coaming. His clamshell armor spread the impact, but he still felt it.

Currant’s driver kept the skirts close to the ground so as not to spill air from the plenum chamber as he accelerated the heavy vehicle. The meadow wasn’t as smooth as the barley fields to the west and north of the village. Sometimes what looked like simply a flowering shrub turned out to be a rocky hillock against which the steel skirts banged violently.

Incoming shells drew red streaks across the pale dawn, plunging down at the targets Barbour had pinpointed in and around the village. The grove of deciduous trees swayed and toppled over. Rounds going off in the soil beneath the trees rippled the surface violently enough to tear their roots loose.