The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 (75 page)

Six dirigibles hovered a half-kilometer east of the enclosure. Slung beneath them were bar-sided containers like those Huber had seen transporting livestock from the feedlots of Solace to the United Cities where they’d be slaughtered. The props of one of the big airships began to turn at a slightly faster rate than what was necessary to hold position against the breeze. It crawled closer to the camp, its empty containers bonging occasionally when they touched the ground.

Instead of halting to coordinate with Task Force Sangrela, the A Company combat cars drove past the defensive circle and continued around the east side of the prisoner cage. Their skirts squirted water and gray sludge in jets punctuated by the furrows in the soil. Prisoners putting the finishing touches on the chute dropped their tools and scuttled away from the spray.

“Fox Three-six to Sierra Six,” Huber said. “Any word what we’re supposed to be doing? Over.”

The cars’ passage splashed the guards as well. A Gendarme officer retrieved the hat that’d been blown into a puddle and shook his fist at the big vehicles. Deseau snickered and said, “Bad move. Could’ve been a real bad move if the dumb bastard’d decided to wave his gun instead.”

“Sierra, this is Six,” Captain Sangrela said, replying to the whole unit. “I’ve been told we’re to hold ourselves in readiness to support Flamingo as required. If that sounds to you like, ‘Go play, kiddies, while the big boys get on with business,’ then you’ve got company thinking that. Six out!”

The incoming infantry drove their skimmers off while the wrenchmobiles were still slowing. Huber noticed with some amusement that they didn’t perform the operation as smoothly as Captain Sangrela’s troopers had. The White Mice were real soldiers as well as being the Regiment’s police and enforcers, but they didn’t use skimmers nearly as much as the line infantry did.

The newcomers began to deploy along the southern length of the cage. There were only forty of them, so that meant almost ten meters between individuals. They carried 1-cm sub-machine guns rather than a mix of the automatic weapons with 2-cm shoulder weapons.

Deseau must’ve been thinking along the same lines as Huber was, because he said, “Blow apart the first man who moves with one a’ these—”

He patted the receiver of the 2-cm weapon wedged muzzle-down beside his position between two ammo boxes and the armor.

“—and you quiet a mob a lot faster than spraying it with a buzz-gun.”

Learoyd looked at him. “Did you ever do that, Frenchie?” he said. “To a mob?”

Huber kept his frown inside his head. You didn’t generally ask another trooper about his past. Learoyd had an utter, undoubted innocence that allowed him to say things nobody else could get away with . . . and a lack of mental wattage that made it very likely he would.

Deseau said nothing for a moment, then shrugged. He nodded to Huber, explicitly including him, and said, “Naw, that was back on Helpmeet when I was a kid, Learoyd. I was on the other side of the powergun, you see. So when things quieted down, I joined the Regiment before they shipped out again.”

The moving dirigible settled so that all three containers dragged, then detached them. The center box stuck momentarily. The airship bounced upward when the weight of the other two released, so the third clanged loudly to the ground when it finally dropped. It hit on a corner which bent upward, kinking the bars.

“Good thing it wasn’t full of cattle,” Huber muttered, frowning at the thought of broken legs and beasts bellowing in pain and terror. Now that he’d seen dirigibles in operation, he realized that they were about as unwieldy a form of transportation as humans had come up with. Useful here on Plattner’s World, though.

“The cows’re gonna be killed anyway, El-Tee,” Deseau said. “It don’t matter much, right?”

“Maybe not,” Huber said; not agreeing, just ending a discussion that didn’t have anywhere useful to go. Maybe nothing at all mattered, but on a good day Arne Huber didn’t feel that way.

The command car pulled up alongside the chute, making a half turn so that its bow angled toward the camp proper. Though it was an hour short of sunset and the clouds had cleared, the driver switched on his headlights. In their beams the strands of razor ribbon glittered like jagged icicles. Two troopers with sub-machine guns got out of the vehicle and walked over to the wire.

“Prisoners of Hammer’s Regiment!” a voice boomed through the command car’s loudspeakers. “You will walk in line through the passage at the southeast corner of this camp. As you pass my vehicle—”

The whip antenna on top of the car glowed, becoming a wand of soft red light.

“—you will turn to face it. Then you will walk on to the containers in which you’ll be transported to Midway. There you’ll be released.”

The words were being repeated on the north side of the POW encampment. It wasn’t an echo from the volcano, as Huber thought for a moment. The A Company combat cars were relaying the speech through their public address systems.

“Who’s that in the car?” Deseau said. From the way his eyes were narrowed, he already knew the answer to his question.

“It sounds like Major Steuben,” Huber said. “As you’d expect.”

A full company of Gendarmes stood by the shipping containers. Mauricia Orichos was among them, her hands linked behind her back. Huber had been watching her as Steuben spoke. Orichos hadn’t been best pleased at the words “prisoners of Hammer’s Regiment.”

That was tough. She knew she’d been the only member of the Point forces present when Fort Freedom fell. The Slammers had taken these prisoners, and if the Gendarmery wanted to get snooty about it, the Slammers could take the prisoners away from their present guards any time they wanted to.

A prisoner bellowed something toward the car. Though he made a megaphone of his hands, Huber couldn’t catch the word or brief phrase.

Steuben did, however. The loudspeakers boomed, “A gentleman has expressed doubt that you will actually be released. Let me assure you, mesdames and sirs, that if I wished to kill you all I would not bother with play acting. When you get to Midway, you will be told to sin no more and be released.”

The trucks had unloaded their pallets of black-banded gas cylinders. Five of them shut down. The sixth lifted and lumbered past Task Force Sangrela to settle again beside the command car. The driver opened the cab door and stood on his mounting step, looking at the camp. Another squad of White Mice dismounted from the back and walked over to the chute.

“Very well,” the PA system thundered. Amplification softened Steuben’s clipped tones, making his words sound pompous. Huber found the contrast with the real man chilling. “Start coming through. The sooner you get moving, the sooner we can all get on to more congenial tasks.”

A prisoner near the front looked around, then shambled into the chute. One of the White Mice reached an arm over the wire to halt the man in the headlights. His head rose in surprise and sudden fear.

“Keep going!” the amplified voice ordered.

The trooper’s arm dropped; the prisoner jogged the rest of the way to where Gendarmes herded him into the first container. Several more prisoners followed, shuffling forward in a mixture of desperation and apathy.

“I suggest reconsideration on the part of anyone who thinks he’ll remain in the tents,” Steuben continued, the catlike humor of his tone coming through despite mechanical distortion. “We’re going to destroy the entire site, starting at the north side. We can see you through cloth as surely as we’ll be able to see you in the dead of night, so don’t be foolish.”

There was a hollow boop, then a second later a white flash and a shattering crash. A second boop, Wham! followed immediately. Troopers in the combat cars on the north side were firing grenade launchers into the tents.

Thermal viewing would show any holdouts, so there was no need for the grenades. Major Steuben was just making a point, to the Gendarmes as surely as to the captive Volunteers.

“Sierra, this is Flamingo Six-three,” said the A Company signals officer. “Fox Three-six is to report to the command car ASAP. Out.”

Deseau and Learoyd both looked at Huber. From the driver’s compartment, Sergeant Tranter said over the intercom, “El-Tee? What’s going on?”

Huber cued his intercom and said, “Curst if I know, Sarge. I’ll tell you when I get back. Assuming.”

He swung his left leg over the armor, then paused. He unclipped the sling of his 2-cm weapon from the epaulet and offered the big gun to Learoyd, saying, “Trade me, will you, Herbert?”

“Sure, sir,” the trooper said. He took the 2-cm weapon and slapped the butt of his sub-machine gun into Huber’s palm.

Deseau cackled like a demon. “Handier inside a car, eh, El-Tee?” he said.

Huber climbed the rest of the way out of the fighting compartment, then hopped from the plenum chamber to the ground. He started grinning also. You might as well see the humor in the screwed-up way things worked. It didn’t change things; but then, nothing did change them.

He started toward the command car, his boots squelching and tossing mud up his pants leg with each stride. He didn’t look over his shoulder to see the troopers of Task Force Sangrela watching him, but the Gendarmes watched and the driver of the big air-cushion truck stared down from the cab with a puzzled expression.

Grenades continued to crash on the north side of the camp. They’d started several fires; the sluggish flames gave off curls of black smoke.

Enough prisoners had passed through the chute that the cage meant for twenty cattle was what Huber would’ve called full. The Gendarmes seemed happy to pack more in. Well, if the former Volunteers had nothing worse in their future than an uncomfortable airship ride, they were luckier than they deserved to be.

“That one,” the loudspeaker ordered crisply. A low-intensity laser stabbed from the mount of the command car’s tribarrel. Its yellow dot quivered like a suppurating boil on the cheek of the bald-headed man nearing the end of the chute.

The fellow looked up in startled horror. One of the waiting troopers grabbed him left-handed by the shoulder, holding the sub-machine gun back like a pistol in his right where the prisoner couldn’t reach it.

The trooper walked the fellow out of the chute. Instead of leaving him for the Gendarmes, he handed him over to another of the White Mice who led him in turn to the back of the air-cushion truck.

The prisoners had been moving with something like the docility of the cattle normally loaded into the shipping containers. Now they paused; the woman two places behind the fellow who’d been taken away tried to go back.

“Move it!” the other trooper at the chute snarled, waggling his weapon.

The woman resumed her way down the chute—and out the other end to the Gendarmes, ignored by the voice from the command car. A man who’d been waiting in the crowd turned and started to force his way back through his fellows.

“Halt!” called the trooper nearest to him along the fenceline as he leveled his sub-machine gun. The prisoner tried to run, pushing at others who were trying desperately to get out of the line of fire. The sub-machine gun stuttered a short burst into the man’s legs, one bolt into the left calf and two more at the back of the right knee.

The prisoner fell, screaming with surprise. It was too soon yet for the pain to have reached him; though that’d come, it’d surely come. Only a tag of skin and one tendon connected his right thigh and lower leg.

“Two of you carry him through,” ordered the loudspeaker.

“Make sure to turn his face toward me.”

The wounded man continued to scream. He tried to stand but slipped onto his right side.

From the command car, Joachim Steuben giggled. Amplified, the sound was even more gut-wrenching than it’d seemed when Huber heard it from across the major’s desk.

The prisoners nearest the fallen man stood frozen till the trooper waggled the glowing muzzle of his sub-machine gun. Then they grabbed his arms convulsively and stumbled through the chute as he screamed even louder. One brushed the razor ribbon, leaving much of his sleeve on the wire and blood dripping from his torn arm. The wounded man’s legs didn’t bleed; the powergun bolts had cauterized the wounds.

“A moment of your time, Lieutenant Huber,” said Captain Orichos. He jumped. She’d walked over to him while his attention was on the byplay in the camp.

“Ma’am?” he said. Without thinking about it, he stiffened to parade rest. “That is, Captain?”

“Mauricia, I hope,” Orichos said. After the battle she’d resumed wearing her beret instead of a Slammers commo helmet. She took it off now and shook her short hair loose before replacing the cap. “I suppose you know your unit will be routed back with a stopover in Midway?”

“No ma’am,” Huber said with a faint grin. “There were rumors, but we’re line soldiers. Nobody tells us anything.”

“Well, I’m telling you,” Orichos said with a mixture of crispness and challenge. “I’ll be flying back by car shortly; there are some things to clear up in the capital now that the threat’s been dealt with.”

She cleared her throat and looked away. “What I’m saying, Arne, is that I hope when you arrive in Midway, you’ll get in touch with me. I’ll have some free time by then, and I’d really like to repay you for all you’ve done for the Point and for me.”

Orichos smiled. It softened and transformed her face to a remarkable degree.

“I think I can guarantee you a good time,” she said. She touched the back of Huber’s wrist, then turned and went back to her fellows.

Huber rubbed his wrist with the fingers of his other hand as he walked on, thinking about Orichos and about the shooting he’d just watched.

It’d taken skill to hit the running man and not nail a couple of the bystanders. Though it could as easily have been dumb luck: he didn’t suppose either the trooper or Major Steuben would’ve cared if some of the other prisoners had lost limbs.

Huber reached the hatch in the rear of the command car. It opened before he rapped it with the barrel of his powergun. The two men inside had their backs to him as they watched a high-resolution image of prisoners moving steadily through the chute to the shipping containers.