The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 (71 page)

I guess the poor bastard’s not going to drown after all, Huber thought.

When Fencing Master reached the ambush site a few seconds later, the infantrymen had remounted their skimmers. Huber gestured them forward to put the combat car in drag position again.

“You were right, El-Tee,” said Deseau regretfully. “Not a bloody thing for us.”

One of the infantrymen waved back as he passed Fencing Master. He was now wearing a helical copper bracelet, its ends shaped like snakeheads.

Apparently the leader of the squad Huber shot it out with in Freedom Party headquarters hadn’t learned from that experience. Huber smiled coldly. The Slammers didn’t give anybody a third chance.

The alert signal brought Huber out of a doze; it was like swimming upward through hot sand. He’d jumped to his feet and had the tribarrel’s grips in his hands, straining for a target in his faceshield’s light-amplified imagery, before his conscious mind took over and he realized why he’d awakened.

Learoyd was driving. Sergeant Deseau was at the forward gun, as rested as anybody could be after eighteen hours of slogging through river-bottom vegetation. Huber wouldn’t have been able to drop off if he hadn’t been sure Frenchie was there to take up the slack. He’d needed the mental down-time badly, though. The shoot-out in Freedom Party headquarters had drained him more than he’d realized right after it happened.

But that was part of the past, a different world, and now the present was calling. “Fox Three-six acknowledging!” Huber said, and his helmet dropped him into the virtual meeting room with Colonel Hammer himself and the other officers of Task Force Sangrela. He’d been the last to arrive, but from the look of Mitzi Trogon—her mouth was half-open and her eyes looked like they were staring into oncoming headlights—she was in at least as bad a shape as he was.

“Troopers,” Hammer said, acknowledging his four subordinates with a glance that swept the table. The imagery was sharper than it’d been in the forest south of Midway; the sky above the Fiorno was fairly open. “There’s Volunteers setting up a blocking position on an island three hours ahead of you. There’s about two hundred men with buzzbombs and six calliopes if they’re not further reinforced.”

Hammer’s torso vanished into a slant view of a roughly oval island; it covered about as much of the river valley as the channels flowing to north and south of it. From the scale at the bottom of the image, the heavily wooded surface between the streams was on the order of a square kilometer.

“They’ve been flying in from Bulstrode Bay over the past hour,” Hammer said with a disbelieving shake of his head. “They apparently don’t realize that here at Base Alpha we can follow everything they’re doing, right down to who had grits for breakfast.”

Icons of red light marked hostile positions: calliopes on the forward curve of the island, and squads of infantry both on the island itself and on the north bank of the floodway. The Volunteers probably intended the mainland element to halt the task force in line along the shore where the calliopes could rake the Slammers from the flank.

Sangrela laughed in derision. “You want us to go through ’em or around ’em, sir?” he asked. “For choice we’ll go through.”

“Neither,” said Hammer with a spreading smile. “I’m just telling you what the situation is. We’re going to handle it from here with artillery.”

“Why in hell would you want to do that?” Mitzi Trogon snarled. She must’ve heard her own tone; she snapped fully awake at last. “Ah, sir, that is,” she added with a grimace of embarrassment.

Hammer looked at Trogon without expression for a moment, then lifted his chin minutely to show that the incident was closed— if not forgotten. “Right,” he said with a mildness that deceived nobody. “This ambush isn’t a problem, but Fort Freedom is likely to be more of one. Here the Volunteers have their calliopes tasked for ground use, waiting for your column to come into their killing zone. They aren’t professional enough to redirect the guns for artillery defense in the amount of time they’ll have. Follow?”

Because Huber understood and none of his fellow officers were in a hurry to speak after Mitzi’d stepped on her dick, he said, “When a salvo takes out the whole ambush party, Volunteer Command is going to decide it’s our shells they ought to be worrying about. When we get to Bulstrode Bay, their calliopes are going to be aimed up for artillery defense and we’ll take ’em with direct fire.”

“Roger that, troopers,” Hammer said, his face minusculely softer than it’d been a moment before. “This won’t be a milk run for you, there’s no way it’s going to be that. But I told you from the beginning that you’d have all the support we could give you. Any questions?”

“Support” this time didn’t mean the artillery, not really, Huber realized. It was the planning, the misdirection; the thinking two steps ahead of his own troops and at least six steps ahead of the enemy, that the Colonel was providing here.

“What orders do you have for us, sir?” Captain Sangrela asked, the burr of warmth in his tone suggesting that he was thinking along the same lines as Huber was.

“Keep on with what you’re doing, that’s all,” Hammer said. His grin spread. “Which is plenty, I know that. We’ll time the stonk for thirty seconds before you come into sight of the target. Hit anybody that shows himself, but keep going as fast as you can. That’ll make more of an impression on what passes for a Volunteer Command group than we would by digging out a couple shell-shocked wogs and blasting them. Clear?”

“Clear,” said Sangrela, nodding, and Huber added his “Clear” to the muttered “Roger,” and “Clear,” from his fellow lieutenants.

That’d save gun bores for the real fight at Bulstrode Bay as well. Maintenance had replaced the barrels burned out at Northern Star, but there probably wouldn’t be time for another refit before Sierra slammed into Fort Freedom and the Volunteers’ main body. . . .

Hammer gave a crisp nod. “Let me stick it to the bastards this time, troopers,” he said. “There’ll be plenty of opportunity for you up north.”

The Colonel’s image dissolved, returning Huber to Fencing Master’s jouncing fighting compartment. His mind and senses were as sharp as they’d ever been in his life. To the watchful expressions of his troopers and Captain Orichos, he began, “In about three hours . . .”

What looked like a streak of sparse vegetation at right angles to the river was a dike of impermeable clay channeling water into the softer soil beyond. The scout section infantry slid across without being aware of the change, but Fencing Master came down on algae-covered soup instead of the expected solid ground. A gout of mud spewed higher than the armored sides, drenching Huber and the others in the fighting compartment.

Tranter boosted power and adjusted the nacelles vertical for maximum lift. Fencing Master pogoed back onto an even keel and wallowed slowly across the basin.

“Fox Three-six to Sierra,” Huber warned. “There’s quicksand here. The panzers had better swing wide or they’ll sink to wherever the bottom turns out to be. Three-six out.”

By rights, Foghorn would’ve been the leading car if they’d gone by the preplanned rotation. Sergeant Nagano hadn’t been pleased when Huber exercised his command prerogative to put Fencing Master in the lead as the column prepared to run the Volunteer ambush, but Huber was doubly glad he’d done it now. Only a driver as able as Sergeant Tranter would’ve kept from bogging or simply sinking out of sight in this soft spot, and there were bloody few drivers that good.

“Roger Three-six,” Captain Sangrela said. “Delta units, follow the contour lines north. Looks to me like two hundred meters will let you cross safely. Six out.”

Fencing Master lifted itself with a jerk onto higher, harder ground. Tranter paused a moment before readjusting the fans, checking to be sure that mud and water plants hadn’t choked any of the intake ducts. The combat car built up speed again, shedding weed and watery mud like a dog emerging from a pond.

Mauricia Orichos dabbed at the muck staining her uniform, managing only to spread the stain until she gave up the pointless exercise. She noticed Huber’s glance and smiled faintly.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m used to thinking in . . . urban terms, I suppose.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Huber agreed. Especially if we’re all dead in the next thirty seconds, but he didn’t let that last thought reach his tongue.

He heard the incoming shells at first as a distant friction in the sky. With shocking suddenness their howl filled the whole world and still grew louder. Sergeant Deseau hunched over the forward gun, aware that it was friendly fire aimed to impact half a klick ahead of Fencing Master; aware also that mistakes happen, that even the most technologically advanced shells land short occasionally, and that no fire is friendly when it’s coming in on your position.

The Gendarmery captain’s face went blank; her eyes opened wide. For a moment Huber thought she was going to throw herself as close to flat as she could get in the crowded fighting compartment, but she recovered her composure when she noticed he wasn’t taking any action.

“It’s all right,” he explained. “This is the prep that’s—”

The shells burst directly overhead with four distinct pops. The opened casings spilled the separate white streaks of over a thousand bomblets toward the ground ahead of Fencing Master. They whistled like a symphony for chalk on blackboards.

“—going to land on the—”

The timing was slightly off: Fencing Master tore through the last screen of feather-fronded vegetation a second before instead of a few seconds after the bomblets struck the Volunteer positions. The mid-channel island was a green mass against the tannin-black water. Near the shore the foliage was the same sort of lush shrubbery that Task Force Sangrela had ground through on the route from Midway, but there were some sizeable trees a hundred meters back from the bank.

The landscape disintegrated in crackling white flashes, snarling and sparkling for almost five seconds. A pall of mud and shredded greenery lifted several meters high, then settled back on a barren wasteland. Only memory could say that eastern half of the island and the spit of riverbank to the north of it had been covered by dense vegetation a moment before.

A cyan flash blew a temporary crater in the mud: a calliope’s ammunition had detonated. A wheel spun skyward, then fell back and splashed into the river.

The scout infantry had grounded their skimmers at the moment of impact. Now they lifted again and resumed their course, four fingers feeling Sierra’s path across the trackless terrain. Fencing Master snorted a hundred meters behind, the iridium fist ready to punch if the infantry touched anything.

“Not a bloody thing for us, El-Tee,” Deseau said. “Not a bloody thing.”

The firecracker rounds had left a haze of explosive residue and finely divided soil above the island, blurring its shape, but Huber knew there’d have been little more to see even without that blanket. The rolling blasts had pulped everything in the impact area. Except for the single wheel, there’d been no sign of two hundred enemy soldiers and their equipment.

His nose wrinkled. That wasn’t quite true. Besides the prickle of ozone and the sickening sweetness of explosive, the air had a tinge of burned flesh.

Fencing Master bucked into the undisturbed vegetation beyond the line which shell fragments had scythed. When the professionals sat down to the table, war stopped being a game for street thugs wearing uniforms. The Volunteers at ground zero here hadn’t had time to learn that, but the folks who’d given them their orders must be thinking hard about the future by now.

Because the prevailing winds were from the northwest, Huber had been smelling the fire for almost three hours before the infantry sergeant with the scouting section called over the command channel, “Blood and Martyrs, Captain! This is Charlie One-three-four. Are we supposed to go through this on skimmers? Over.”

Huber switched a quadrant of his faceshield to the view from Floosie, the combat car attached to White Section at the moment. It was like looking into the maw of Hell.

Regimental rocket howitzers hundreds of kilometers to the south in United Cities’ territory had seeded the forest with incendiaries. Each time-fuzed zirconium pellet was capable of burning though light armor. When one landed in old growth forest, the likelihood of it igniting even green timber was three out of five . . . and there were tens of thousands of pellets in the shells, raining down over hundreds of square kilometers. The myriad simultaneous fires had spread till they joined in a firestorm, a towering conflagration that drove its column of smoke through the stratosphere and sucked air to feed it from all sides in a torrent at hurricane velocities.

Everything combustible within the core of the blaze had burned, including the loam. Silica in the clay substrate ran liquid before cooling into slabs of glass colored like the rainbow by trace minerals.

Though the first flush of the fire had burned to a glowing shadow of itself, what remained still shimmered. The boles of the largest trees smoldered, stripped to pillars of carbonized heartwood. Monstrous pythons of smoke and ash eddied, the ghosts of a forest dancing among its bones.

“One-three-four, recover to your carrier vehicle,” Sangrela responded without hesitation. “ASAP, troopers, don’t get into that! There won’t be an ambush in that stuff, not from anything these Volunteers have available.”

He paused, then resumed, “Break. Sierra, button up all hatches.

Drivers switch to microwave radar, and exposed personnel lock down your faceshields. Make sure your filters are working before we get into it. We’ll form an echelon perpendicular to the prevailing winds so—”

A route map clicked as an imposed overlay on the lower right corner of Huber’s faceshield. Every trooper in the task force had the same image.

“—that we’re not all driving through the trash the leaders stir up. Six out.”

Floosie must’ve entered the burned area just as Sangrela spoke, because a plume of ash shot skyward two kilometers ahead of Fencing Master. It was like watching the first puff of a volcano gathering its strength.