The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 (7 page)

Daun looked stricken. “What does that—” he began.

His mind paused in mid-thought, then resumed smoothly like a transmission shifted from the lay-shaft to a front gear with only the least clicking of teeth. “If there were a way you could arrange for me to get the assignment on a provisional basis, mister, I would be personally grateful to you. I’ve got more saved up than you might think because there was no way to spend it—”

Avenial, still grinning, waved Daun to silence. There were times he’d been insulted by an attempt to bribe him, but this wasn’t one of them.

“What I thought,” Avenial said, “was that we’d just get you the extra stripes. Stripe, really. Like I said before, you’re due for your third already.”

“I—” Daun said. “I . . .”

He sat up very straight in his seat. “Mister Avenial,” he said, “you don’t need my money, I understand that. But some day you may need something from me. Let me know.”

“Just doing my job, kid,” Avenial said.

But someday it might be good to know a guy who could make walls talk and knew what anybody he pleased was saying, right up to the President . . . Yeah, that just might be.

Daun rose to his feet. “I’ll wait for my assignment, mister,” he said. “Ah—do you have any notion when it might come through?”

Avenial touched another button. “It just did, kid,” he said. “You’re bound for a place named Cantilucca.”

Earlier: Maedchen

As Technician Niko Daun dealt the last cards, Bondo, one of the two Central States soldiers in the game, grumbled, “If I get a decent hand this time, it’ll be the first tonight.”

A dripping soldier entered the twenty-man tent that served as living quarters for the battalion’s Technical Detachment. His boots slipped in purple mud as he tried to seal the tent flap. He thumped the ground, cursing in a monotonous voice.

“You’re only a rubber down,” objected Sergeant Anya Wisloski, Daun’s Frisian Defense Forces superior, partner, and—for the three months they’d been on outpost duty—lover.

“Yeah, but that’s on Hendries’ cards, not me,” Bondo said. “I want some cards of my own.”

Daun picked up his own bridge hand. Based on what the dealer had, everybody else in the game was looking at great cards.

“What I want,” said Anya, “is some decent weather. I haven’t seen the sun since we’ve been up here.”

Anya was short, dark-haired, and white-skinned. Her waist nipped in and her chest was broad, but the breasts themselves were flat. She was several years older than Daun’s twenty-one standard— how much older she’d avoided saying—and had gone straight into the Frisian Defense Forces while Daun had four years of technical school.

Daun trusted his own judgment inside a piece of electronics farther than he did Anya’s (or most anybody else’s, if it came to that). There was never any question about who was in charge of a group when Anya decided to take charge, however.

Another gust pelted the tent as a colophon to Anya’s statement. For the most part, today’s rain had been a drizzle, but occasionally big drops splattered to remind the battalion outpost that there were various forms of misery.

Support Base Bulwark was almost as isolated as a space station would have been. Weekly convoys brought food, replacements, and very occasionally a team of journalists from one of the major cities.

The journalists never stayed long. Sometimes the replacements didn’t either. Troops who shot themselves in the foot or, less frequently, in the head, during their first week at Bulwark were a significant cause of attrition.

The base was sited on a low plateau, chosen for its accessibility by road rather than for purposes of defense. Higher peaks surrounded it within a five-klick radius.

The sensors themselves were expected to alert friendly forces if the Democrats massed in numbers sufficient to threaten the outpost. Daun had his doubts, but he realized the Democrats might be just as sloppy as their Central States opponents.

Heavy construction equipment had encircled the perimeter of the base with an earthen wall. The same construction crews then dug bunkers into the sides of that berm. During the months of constant rain, the bunkers filled as much as a meter deep with water.

The infantry protecting the base lived in tents on the bunker roofs. They had no protection except—for the ambitious ones—a wall of sandbags. The tents weren’t dry either, but at least the troops didn’t have to swim to their bunks.

Conditions for support personnel within the base weren’t a great deal better. Walkways constructed from wooden shell crates led between locations, but for the most part the makeshift duckboards had sunk into the greasy, purplish mire. The Tactical Operations Center was an assemblage of the high officers’ four living trailers placed around a large tent.

The whole complex was encircled by a triple row of sandbags and dirt-filled shell boxes. The construction engineers had trenched around the protective wall to draw off water. Because of the lack of slope the would-be channel was a moat, but at least it prevented the TOC from flooding.

The 150-mm howitzers of the four-tube battery were on steel planking to keep them from sinking to the trunnions. The guns slid during firing, so it was impossible to place accurate concentrations when the sensors located movement. Because rain and the slick ground made it so difficult to manhandle the 45-kg shells, most firing was done at random when battalion command decided it needed more ammo crates for construction.

The remainder of the support personnel lived in tents and slept on cots. Most of the tents were sandbagged to knee-height, three layers. Higher than that, the single-row walls fell down when the slippery filling bled through the fabric.

The two Frisians’ assignment was for six standard months. The indigs were here for a local year—twenty-one months standard, and at least three times longer than Daun could imagine lasting under such conditions.

“Oh, sure, it’ll dry out in spring,” Bondo said as he scowled at his cards. “Dry out, bake to dust, and blow into every curst thing from your food to the sealed electronics. You think equipment life’s bad in this rain, wait until spring.”

The purpose of this Central States Army outpost in Maedchen’s western tablelands was to service a belt of sensors brought at great expense from Nieuw Friesland. In theory, the sensors and the reaction forces they triggered would prevent infiltration from the Democrat-controlled vestries on the other side of the divide.

Bondo was quite right about the sensor failure rate. The Belt no doubt looked impressive during briefings in the capital, but the reality was as porous as cheesecloth. Infiltrators had an excellent chance of penetrating the eastern vestries unnoticed, and an even better chance of evading the Central States Army’s half-hearted reaction patrols.

“One club,” Bondo offered.

Daun didn’t blame the rain or the quality of the hardware for the rate of sensor failure. Quite simply, personnel assigned by the Central States government weren’t up to the job of servicing electronics this sophisticated.

Central States field teams wouldn’t follow procedures. For example, they regularly used knives or bayonets to split the sensor frames to exchange data cartridges. The special tools that would perform the task without damage were lost or ignored. They didn’t understand their duties. At least a third of the cartridges were inserted upside down, despite the neon arrows on both casing and cartridge, and despite anything Daun could say to the troops he was trying to train.

And they didn’t care. As often as not, a field team huddled in a sheltered spot within a klick of the base instead of humping through the rain to service the sensors for which they were responsible. In the morning, they returned with the circuit marked complete—and there wasn’t a curst thing Daun or Anya could do about it.

“Three no trump,” Anya bid. She grinned coldly around the table.

Daun had already drafted an assessment for the Frisian Defense Forces Maedchen Command, back in the capital Jungfrau. In it he stated flatly that the system wasn’t working and could never work as presently constituted.

Nieuw Friesland should either withdraw support from the Central States, or the FDF should insist that the Central States hire a detachment of Frisians sufficient to perform all field as well as base servicing tasks. Otherwise, the inevitable failure would be blamed on Frisian technology rather than the ineptness of the Central States Army at using that technology.

Anya wouldn’t let Daun transmit the assessment. It wasn’t that she disagreed with him—quite the contrary. But she didn’t believe anything a Tech II said could change the policy of bureaucrats on Nieuw Friesland . . . and there was a good chance Daun’s opinions, once released, were going to become known to the Central States personnel she and Daun shared a tent with.

There are a lot of ways to get hurt in a war zone. Pissing off the heavily armed people closest to you wasn’t a good way to survive to a pension.

But the situation grated on Daun’s sense of rightness, as well as making him feel he was a bubble in a very hostile ocean.

“Too rich for my blood,” Hendries said. “I pass.”

Daun stared at his cards again. They hadn’t changed for the better. He had four clubs, three of each other suit, and his high card was the jack of hearts.

He knew his partner was asking where his support was greatest; and he knew also that the proper answer was: nowhere.

“I pass,” he said aloud.

Anya grimaced.

“Pass,” said Bondo.

Daun laid out his wretched hand. His partner’s expression softened as she saw just what Daun had dealt himself. Hendries glared at his cards to determine a lead, a nearly hopeless task under the circumstances.

The tent flap tore open. “Hey!” called the Central States soldier who stuck his head in. “Smart guys! Your fucking pickup’s gone down again. The screen in the TOC’s nothing but hash!”

“Bloody hell,” Anya muttered. She laid her cards down. “My turn, I guess,” she said to Daun. “You were out all morning with the satellite dish.”

Daun stood up, waving his partner back. “Look, you were up the mast last night. Besides, I’m dummy. I’ll catch this one.”

“Hey!” the messenger from the Tactical Operations Center repeated. “Colonel Jeffords isn’t real thrilled about this, you know.”

That was probably true. The amount paid to Nieuw Friesland by the Central States government for Anya’s services was comparable to what the colonel himself earned. Daun’s pay was at the scale of a senior captain. The money didn’t go into the two technicians’ pockets, much of it, and if it had there was still no place to spend money out here on the tableland. It still provided a reason for some of the locals—Jeffords certainly, and apparently this messenger—to get shirty about off-planet smart-asses whose equipment didn’t work.

“I’m on the way,” Daun said. “Just let me get my gear.”

He buckled his equipment belt around his narrow waist, pulled on his poncho, and tried to punch the larger working canopy down into its carrying sheath. He could only get it partway into the container, but that would hold it while he climbed the mast.

The slick fabric still shone with water from when Daun had had to use it that morning. It didn’t matter—to the job—if he got soaked, but rain dripping into an open box could only make a bad situation worse.

The messenger disappeared. Daun sighed and followed him. “I’ll catch the next one, Niko,” Anya called as Daun stepped out into the rain.

The flashlight strapped for the moment to Daun’s left wrist threw a fan of white light ahead of him. He could switch the beam to deep yellow which wouldn’t affect his night vision, but it didn’t matter if he became night-blind. He’d need normal light to do his work anyway: many of the components were color-coded. The markings would change hue or vanish if viewed under colored light.

Rain sparkled in the beam. Reflections made it difficult to tell what was mud and what was wet duckboard. The crates were likely to shift queasily underfoot anyway.

Three months more. How the locals stood it was beyond him.

Daun couldn’t blame the soldiers he tried to train for being apathetic. It was all very well to tell the troops that their safety depended on them servicing the sensors properly, but a threat to lives so wretched had little incentive value.

Daun and Anya complained, but professionalism and a sense of duty would carry the pair of them through no matter how bad things got. The vast majority of the Central States personnel were conscripts, and the conscripts with the least political influence in Jungfrau besides. Daun was sure that at least eighty percent of the outpost would have deserted by now, if there was any place to which they could desert.

Light through the walls of the tent turned the TOC into a vast russet mushroom, though the fabric looked dull brown by daylight. Daun could hear voices, some of them compressed by radio transmission.

It was conceivable that the problem was inside the TOC, either in the console or the connecting cables. Daun was tempted to check out those possibilities first, but he decided not to waste his time. The console was of Frisian manufacture and sealed against meddling by the locals.

The cables had been laid by the previous pair of FDF advisers. They’d done a first-class job; Daun had checked and approved every millimeter of the route the day he and Anya arrived. Unless somebody’d driven a piece of tracked construction equipment through the TOC, the conduits should be fine. The indigs were capable of doing something that bone-headed, but Daun would have heard it happening.

The thirty-meter mast was a triangular construct set in concrete and anchored to the trailer housing the battery commander. The unit telescoped in three sections. Daun could lower the mast to save most of the climb, but re-erecting it would require help to keep the guy wires from fouling. He didn’t trust the indigs to do that properly even during daylight.

He squelched to the base of the mast, hooked his safety belts, and began to climb the runglike braces which bound the three verticals together. The mast was formed from plastic extrusions, not metal, but the rungs still felt icy to Daun’s bare hands. They were also slick as glass.