The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 (62 page)

The fighting compartment was crowded with Orichos sharing the space with the three men of the combat crew, but Via! it was always crowded. A slim woman who wasn’t wearing body armor—her choice, and Huber thought it was a bad one—didn’t take up as much room as the cooler of beer they’d strapped onto the back of the bustle rack when they took her aboard. They weren’t using overhead cover for the combat cars here on Plattner’s World because they were generally operating in heavy forest.

“Wouldn’t your helmet show that information?” Orichos asked, tapping the side of the one Huber had borrowed for her from a mechanic when he learned she’d be traveling in his car. She didn’t need it so much for communications as for the sound damping it provided. A run like the one planned would jelly the brains of anybody making it without protection from all the shrieks, hums, and roars they’d get in an open combat car.

“Sierra Six to Sierra,” Captain Sangrela. “White Section—” the scouts “—move out. Over.”

The lead car, Foghorn, was already off the ground on fan thrust. Its driver nudged his control yoke forward, sending the thirty-tonne vehicle toward the northwest in a billow of dust. Foghorn’s skirts plowed a broad path through the young corn.

Four infantrymen on skimmers lifted when the combat car moved. For a moment they flew parallel to the bigger vehicle, just out of the turbulent air squirting beneath the plenum chamber; then they moved out ahead by 150 meters, spreading to cover a half-klick frontage. Foghorn’s sensor suite covered the infantry while they ranged ahead on their light mounts to discover the sort of terrain problems that didn’t show up on satellite.

“I can access everything Central’s got in its data banks here on my faceshield,” Huber replied to Orichos, thinking about her gray eyes behind her faceshield. She’d smiled at him when he offered her the helmet. “I like to keep it for stuff with immediate combat significance, though.”

He grinned through his visor and added, “Sometimes it’s more important that I’m Fencing Master’s left wing gunner than that I command platoon F-3.”

The scouts patrolled a klick ahead of whichever vehicle was leading the main body. The combat cars and infantry would rotate through White Section every hour under the present conditions, more frequently if the terrain got challenging.

Huber had picked Sergeant Nagano’s car to start out in the lead because it’d been so badly battered at Northern Star. If last night’s massive repairs weren’t going to hold up, Huber wanted to know about it now—by daylight and long before the enemy started reacting to Task Force Sangrela.

“Sierra Six to Sierra,” Sangrela ordered in a hoarsely taut voice.

“Red Section—” the main body, with Fencing Master leading two tanks, followed by the recovery vehicles and the last two tanks “— move out. Over.”

“That’s us, Tranter,” Huber ordered on the intercom channel. “Hold us at thirty kph until the whole section’s under way, got that?”

They planned to average sixty kph on the run, putting them in Midway exactly twenty-four hours from this moment, including breaks to switch drivers and the stretches of bad terrain that’d hold down their speed. Ordinarily on this sort of smooth ground they’d have belted along at the best speed the infantry could manage on skimmers, close to 100 kph. Sierra had to build speed gradually, however, or the vehicles would scatter themselves too widely to support each other in event of enemy action.

Which was certain to come; more certain than any trooper in Task Force Sangrela could be of seeing the next sunrise.

Sergeant Tranter brought Fencing Master up from a dead halt as smoothly as if he were twisting a rheostat. He’d been a maintenance technician, so he’d learned to drive armored vehicles by shifting them—frequently badly damaged—around one another in the tight confines of maintenance parks. He’d stopped being a tech when a hydraulic jack blew out, dropping a tank’s skirts to a concrete pad and pinching his right leg off as suddenly as lightning.

The mechanical leg was in most respects as good as the original one, but in serious cold the organic/electrical interface degraded enough to send the limb into spasms. The Regiment had offered Tranter the choice of retirement on full pay or a rear-echelon job he could do in a heated building. He’d chosen the latter, a berth in Logistics Section.

Summer temperatures on Plattner’s World never dropped below the level of mildly chilly. If Regimental Command was willing to make an exception, there was nobody Arne Huber would’ve preferred driving his car than Tranter.

Huber looked over his shoulder, twisting his body at the waist because the clamshell armor stiffened his neck and upper torso. The lead tank, Dinkybob, lifted to follow thirty meters behind Fencing Master. Mitzi’s driver echeloned the big vehicle slightly to the right of Tranter’s line to stay out of the combat car’s dust. That was fine on a grain field like this, but pretty soon Task Force Sangrela would be winding through hillside scrub where the big vehicles’d feel lucky to have one route.

Well, troopers got used to dust pretty quick. The only thing they knew better was mud. . . . The commo helmets had nose filters that dropped down automatically and static charges to keep their faceshields clear, but on a run like this Huber knew to expect a faintly gritty feeling every time he blinked. The ration bars he ate on the move would crunch, too.

The tribarrels were sealed against dust—until you had to use them. It didn’t take much grit seeping down the ejection port to jam mechanisms as precise as those in the interior of an automatic weapon.

Captain Orichos swayed awkwardly, uncertain of what she could safely grab or sit on. She was familiar with aircars and thought this would be the same. She hadn’t realized that terrain affected the ride of air-cushion vehicles—not as much as it affected wheels and treads, but still a great deal.

She caught Huber’s glance and waved a hand in frustration. “I’d expected the floor to vibrate,” she said. “But the jolting—what does that? I didn’t feel anything like that when I rode here with Major Pritchard.”

Huber grinned. “You rode here in a convoy traveling at the speed of heavily loaded supply vehicles, with the number two man in the Slammers aboard. Sierra has different priorities. Even on these fields, the front skirt digs in every time there’s a little dip or rise in the ground. It’ll get a lot worse when we start working along the sides of the foothills we’re scheduled to hit pretty soon.”

“Then it’s always like this?” she asked. Deliberately she lifted her faceshield, squinting slightly against the wind blast. She quirked the wry smile he’d seen the night before as she discussed the moral courage of elected officials.

“No, not always,” Huber said, raising his own shield to give Orichos a much broader smile than the one he’d been wearing before. “Sometimes they’re shooting at us, Captain.”

“Sierra Six to Sierra,” Captain Sangrela said. “Blue Section, move out.”

Blue Section was the two remaining combat cars under Platoon Sergeant Jellicoe. They’d follow the main body at a kilometer’s distance, extending the column’s sensor range to the rear by that much. There wasn’t a high likelihood that the enemy would sweep up on the task force from behind, but some of the mercenary units Solace was known to have hired had equipment with sufficient performance to manage it.

The cars in Blue Section would rotate at the same intervals as the scouts did. Either Huber or Jellicoe would be at the front or rear of the column—but never both at the same end.

“Then I guess I’d better get used to it, hadn’t I?” Orichos said. She spread her left hand over her eyes to shield them as she surveyed the terrain. She added, “Have you been with Hammer’s Slammers long, Lieutenant?”

“Five years,” Huber said, facing forward and lowering his faceshield so that Orichos could do the same. “I entered the Military Academy on Nieuw Friesland with the intention of enlisting in the Regiment when I graduated . . . and I did.”

The scouts were already into the gullied scrubland that the task force would grind through for the first half of the route. Central had timed the departure from Northern Star so that Sierra would be in pitch darkness while it navigated the last of the foothills south of Point territory where forests resumed.

Until the task force set off, the enemy would assume the Slammers intended to return to UC territory after capturing Northern Star. It’d take Solace Command time to react when they realized the Slammers’ real intent. The most dangerous ambush sites were in the foothills; by waiting till noon to set off, the task force would have the advantage of the Regiment’s more sophisticated night vision equipment in that last stretch which the enemy might reach in time to block them.

Huber hoped the Colonel was right; but then, he hoped a lot of things, and his tribarrel was ready to take care of whatever reality threw at them. You couldn’t always blast your way through problems, but the ability to out-slug the other fellow never stopped being an advantage.

“Do you know much about the political structure of the Point, Lieutenant?” Orichos asked. Since her voice came through the commo helmet, she could’ve been standing anywhere on the planet—but Huber was very much aware of her presence beside and just behind him.

“Not a thing, ma’am,” he admitted. “I studied the United Cities some from the briefing cubes because they were hiring us, but I didn’t look at the rest of you folks.”

He touched the controller with his left hand, projecting an image remoted from Foghorn into the air before him. The scout car was bulling through brush already. The stems were wiry enough to spring back after Foghorn passed, but they were too thin to be a barrier to a thirty-tonne vehicle.

He hoped what he’d just said didn’t sound too much like, “I’m not interested in you dumb wogs;” which wasn’t true for Arne Huber himself but pretty well summed up the attitude of a lot of Slammers, officers as well as line troopers like Sergeant Deseau. Trooper Learoyd wasn’t likely to have thoughts so abstract.

“Midway’s the only city in the Point,” Orichos said. “We’re not like Trenchard or the UC where there’s half a dozen places each as big as the next. There’s a quarter million people in Midway, and no town as big as a thousand in all the rest of the country.”

“So about a third of your population’s in the one city,” Huber said. He hadn’t studied the Point, not like you’d really mean studied; but he’d checked the basic statistics on Plattner’s World, sure. “I guess there’s a lot of trouble between people in Midway and the rest of the country, then?”

“There wasn’t any trouble at all before Melinda Grayle came along!” snapped Captain Orichos, her very vehemence proving that she was lying. “She started stirring up the Moss rangers ten years ago. All she’s interested in is power for herself.”

Not unlikely, Arne Huber thought. Of course, Melinda Grayle wasn’t the only politician you could say that about; and she maybe wasn’t the only politician in the Point you could say it about, either.

“Grayle claims that the votes in the last election were falsified and that she should’ve been elected Speaker of the Assembly,” Orichos went on. “She’s threatening to take by force what she claims her Freedom Party lost by fraud. Everybody knows that the reason most Assemblymen are residents of Midway is because Moss rangers can’t be bothered to vote!”

“Ma’am,” said Arne Huber, “I wouldn’t know about that. But if the lady thinks she’s going to use force while we’re in Midway—”

He turned his head toward her again and patted the receiver of his tribarrel.

“—then she’ll have another think coming. Because force is something I do know about.”

“Amen to that, El-Tee,” said Frenchie Deseau. He didn’t raise his voice on the intercom, but his words had the timbre of feeding time in the lion house.

It was four hours to dawn; the sky was a hazy overcast through which only the brightest stars winked. The car’s vibration and buffeting wind of passage—seventy kph, a little more or a little less— drew the strength out of the troopers who’d been subjected to it for the past half-day.

Huber sat cross-legged beside the left gun, watching the shimmering holographic display. He was too low to look out of the fighting compartment from here, but the range of inputs from Fencing Master’s sensors should provide more warning than his eyes could even during daylight.

Body heat, CO2 exhalations, and even the bioelectrical field which every living creature created were grist for the sensors to process. They scanned the gullied slopes a full three kilometers ahead, noting small animals sleeping in burrows and the scaly, warm-blooded night-flyers of Plattner’s World which curvetted in the skies above.

Tranter was sleeping—was curled up, anyway—under the right wing gun on a layer of ammo boxes. Orichos squatted behind him with her back to the armor, looking as miserable as a drenched kitten. Learoyd had just taken over the driving chores from Deseau, awake but barely as he hunched over the forward tribarrel. Huber didn’t worry about how the sergeant’d react to an alarm— Deseau was enough of a veteran and a warrior both to lay fire on a target in a sound sleep—but he certainly wasn’t going to raise the alarm.

That would be Arne Huber’s job. As platoon leader he wasn’t taking a turn driving, but neither did he catch catnaps like the rest of the crew between stints in the driver’s compartment. Fencing Master was the combat car in White Section during this leg, so Huber had the sensor suite on high sensitivity.

Task Force Sangrela was running the part of the route which Solace forces might have been able to reach for an ambush. Central hadn’t warned of enemy movement, but there could’ve been troops already in place in the region. Technically they were still within Solace territory, not that anybody was likely to stand on a technicality during wartime.

“Bloody fuckin’ hell,” Sergeant Deseau growled over the intercom. He clung to the grips of his tribarrel as though he’d have fallen without them to hold onto . . . which he might well have done. High-speed driving over rough terrain at night was a ten-tenths activity, many times worse than the grueling business of surviving the ride in the fighting compartment. “I wish somebody’d just shoot at us for a break from this bloody grind.”