The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3 (hammer's slammers) Read online

  The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

  ( Hammer's Slammers )

  David Drake

  This three volume set presents for the first time the genre-defining Slammers series in a uniform hardcover set. This volume features the final two Slammers novels, The Sharp End and Paying the Piper, as well as an original novelette, The Darkness. This volume will feature an introduction by Barry Malzberg, and cover art by John Berkey.

  David Drake

  The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

  Inextricable Disengagement: The War Games of David Drake

  An Introduction By Barry N. Malzberg

  “Hammers Slammers” no misnomer, that is what war accomplishes, combat demands, training forces: it hammers, it slams, it breaks you down, reduces to nullity. They’ll tell you that training first breaks you down “only to rebuild you” but that is snare and delusion, brochure hype, a sell because what training breaks it never replaces, cannot replenish, you become something else if you are restored at all, some foggy mountain breakdown self. War guts, eviscerates, makes all of us the same living and dead, in so doing blurs—as is training’s purpose—the line between living and dead to indistinguishability. The only difference in these extreme conditions is that the living perceive themselves as dead while the dead perceive nothing at all.

  Believe this: it is not only the outcome of assessment, it is taken from the pulp of experience. I settled for Basic Training at Fort Dix in the last months of Eisenhower’s sleepy post-Korean Army; Drake was in the flames of Johnson’s Vietnam. We appear to have reached the same conclusions however and our work is much closer than one might think. The shuffling, burnt-away assassins of my FINAL WAR are Slammer dropouts, not rejects.

  Extreme conditions flatten, make us all the same, combat is among the most extreme conditions and Drake’s Slammers, dead-gone mercenaries fighting in squalor for their own squalor inherit Remarque, Mailer, Heller. Only sentimentalists believe that there is a difference between mercenaries and “ideological” warriors and there are no sentimentalists in foxholes, no foxholes in sentimentalists. They grieve and gravitate these warriors and they leave ideology to the landlocked, protected homefront. Their ideology is their etiology: survival.

  To live through Hammer’s Slammers is to pay the piper, to understand that these blown-out functionaries are our own idealized selves no longer idealized. David Drake has through furious refusal to compromise, from refusal to special plead, taken us into the bowels and apparatus of wartime as has no science fiction writer; he is the inheritor of the cold flare of military fiction’s history and his rifle sight, his shot pattern is exact. Exact and exacting; a freezing, burning, incontestable body of work.

  Barry N. Malzberg

  New Jersey: 2005

  DEDICATION

  To our architect and builder Derwood Schrotberger.

  Writing a novel and moving to a new house are both stressful

  occupations. The fact that I was able to combine them is a

  comment on Derwood’s consummate skill, which reminds me

  that architect originally meant Master Builder.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Those of you who notice the echoes of The Glass Key and Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett in this book are correct. Those of you who don’t should go off and read Hammett’s splendid novels at your earliest convenience.

  When I’m at the crux of my plotting, I tend to talk at those around me. When I did this time on the way to the state fair with friends, my wife, Jo, and Mark Van Name made suggestions which were precisely on point. I adopted both.

  THE SHARP END

  Nieuw Friesland

  The room housing the Officers Assignment Bureau was spacious enough to have three service cages and seats for twenty around the walls of colored marble. Nobody was waiting when Major Matthew Coke entered, though a single officer discussed alternative assignments with a specialist.

  Coke stepped into an empty cage. A clerk rose from her desk in the administrative area across the divider and switched on the electronics.

  “Yes sir?” the clerk said pleasantly. “Is there a problem with your assignment?”

  The Frisian Defense Forces reassigned scores of officers every week. Normally the operation was impersonal, a data transfer to the officer’s present station directing him or her to report to a new posting, along with details of timing, transport, and interim leave.

  This office handled problems. President Hammer, in common with other leaders whose elevation owed more to bullets than ballots, felt most comfortable with a large standing army under his direct control. Professional soldiers are expensive, and unless they are used, they either rust, or find ways to employ themselves— generally to the detriment of the established government.

  Hammer’s answer to the problem was to hire out elements of the Frisian Defense Forces as mercenaries. This provided training for the troops, as well as defraying the cost of their pay and equipment.

  Sometimes the troops engaged were merely a few advisers or specialists. When somebody, a planetary government or the rebels opposed to it, hired a large force, however, the OAB would be standing room only.

  Officers on Nieuw Friesland knew that the only sure route to promotion was through combat experience. The Frisian Defense Forces had sprung from Hammer’s Slammers, a mercenary regiment with the reputation for doing whatever it took to win …and a reputation for winning.

  So long as Alois Hammer was President and the commanders of the Frisian Defense Forces were the officers who’d bought him that position in decades of bloody war, bureaucratic “warriors” weren’t on the fast track to high rank. You paid for your rank sometimes in blood, and sometimes with your life; but all that was as nothing without demonstrated success at the sharp end, where they buried the guys in second place.

  Not everybody was comfortable with Hammer’s terms of employment, but the Forces were volunteer only and the volunteers came from all across the human universe; just as they had to Hammer’s Slammers before. A certain number of men, and a lower percentage of women, would rather fight than not. Alois Hammer’s troops had always been the best there was at what they did: killing the other fellow, whoever he was.

  A draft going out to a hot theater was a ticket to promotion. Officers would crowd the Assignment Bureau, begging and threatening, offering bribes and trying to pull rank to get a slot. Mostly it didn’t work.

  The Table of Organization for a combat deployment was developed by the central data base itself. Changes had to be approved by President Hammer, who was immune to any practical form of persuasion. The Assignments Bureaus were open because people prefer to argue with human beings instead of electronic displays, but that was normally a cosmetic rather than significant touch.

  You could also appeal to Hammer personally. In that case, you were cashiered if you didn’t convince him. Old-timers in the Assignment Bureau said that the success rate was slightly under three percent, but every month or so somebody else tried it.

  There were no large-scale deployments under way at the moment, but there were always glitches, clerical or personal, which had to be ironed out. The clerk smiled at Coke, expecting to learn that he’d been assigned to a slot calling for a sergeant-major, or that he was wanted for murder on the planet to which he was being posted.

  Coke’s problem was rather different.

  “I’m here to receive sealed orders,” Coke said, offering the clerk his identification card with the embedded chip. He smiled wryly.

  The clerk blinked in surprise. There were various reasons why an officer’s orders would be sealed within the
data base, requiring him or her to apply in person to the bureau to receive them. Coke didn’t look like the sort to whom any of the special reasons would apply. He looked—normal.

  Matthew Coke was thirty-four standard years old—twenty-nine dated on Ash, where he was born, fifty-one according to the shorter year of Nieuw Friesland. He had brown hair, eyes that were green, blue, or gray depending on how much sunlight had been bleaching them, and stood a meter seventy-eight in his stocking feet. He was thin but not frail, like a blade of good steel.

  Coke was in dress khakis with rank tabs and the blue edging to the epaulets that indicated his specialty was infantry. He wore no medal or campaign ribbons whatsoever, but over his left breast pocket was a tiny lion rampant on a field of red enamel.

  The lion marked the men who’d served with Hammer’s Slammers before the regiment was subsumed into the Frisian Defense Forces. Its lonely splendor against the khaki meant that, like most of the other Slammers veterans, Coke figured that when you’d said you were in the Slammers, you’d said everything that mattered.

  Considering that, the clerk realized that Major Coke might not be quite as normal as he looked.

  “Face the lens, please, sir,” the clerk said as she inserted the ID card into a slot on her side of the cage. Electronics chittered, validating the card and comparing Coke’s retinal patterns with those contained in the embedded chip.

  A soft chime indicated approval. Coke eased from the stiff posture with which he had faced the comparator lens. He continued to smile faintly, but the emotions the clerk read on his face were sadness and resignation.

  “Just a moment,” the clerk said. “The printer has to warm up, but—”

  As she spoke, a sheet of hardcopy purred from the dispenser on Coke’s side of the cage. Coke read the rigid film upside down as it appeared instead of waiting for the print cycle to finish so that he could clip the document.

  His face blanked; then he began to laugh. The captain at the next cage glanced at him, then away. The clerk waited, hoping Coke would explain the situation but unwilling to press him.

  Coke tapped the cutter, then tossed the sheet across the counter to the clerk. “It says my new assignment is Category Ten Forty-seven,” he said as the clerk scanned the document. “That’s survey team, isn’t it?”

  The clerk nodded. “Yessir,” she said. “You’ll be assessing potential customers for field force deployments.”

  She didn’t understand Major Coke’s laughter. “Isn’t this what you were expecting, sir?” she asked as she slid back the hardcopy.

  “What I was expecting …” Coke explained, “ …after the way I screwed up my last assignment on Auerstadt …”

  He was smiling like a skull, as broadly and with as little humor.

  “ …was that they’d fire my ass. But I guess the Assessment Board decided I couldn’t get into much trouble on a survey team.”

  He began to laugh again. Despite the obvious relief in Coke’s voice, the sound of his laughter chilled the clerk.

  Earlier: Auerstadt

  There was a party going on in the extensive quarters of General the Marquis Bradkopf, National Army commander of Fortress Auerstadt. Next door in the Tactical Operations Center, Major Matthew Coke of the Frisian Defense Forces was trying to do his job—and General Bradkopf’s job—through a real-time link to the pair of combat cars in ambush position thirty kilometers away.

  The combat cars were named Mother Love and The Facts of Life. They and their crews were Frisians; and the sergeants commanding them were, like Coke, former members of Hammer’s Slammers, the mercenary regiment whose ruthless skill had transformed Colonel Hammer into Alois Hammer, President of Nieuw Friesland.

  “We’re getting major movement into Hamlet 3, sir,” said Fourfour—Sergeant-Commander Dubose in Mother Love, stationed for the moment on a dike south of the three hamlets called Parcotch for administrative purposes. “Nearly a hundred just from the direction of Auerstadt. Most of them are carrying weapons, too.”

  The three clerks in the TOC with Coke were National Army enlisted personnel, two women and a male who looked fifteen years old. They were chattering in a corner of the open bullpen. One of the women had brought in a series of holovision cubes of Deiting, the planetary capital, where she’d gone on leave with her boyfriend, a transport driver.

  There was a National Army officer listed as Commander of the Watch, but whoever it was hadn’t put in an appearance this evening. In all likelihood, the fellow was at General Bradkopf’s party.

  That was fine with Coke. The best a National officer could do was to keep out of the way of the advisor hired from the Frisian Defense Forces.

  Though all the raw data was provided by the combat cars, processing by the base unit in the TOC added several layers of enhancement to what the troops on the ground could see. Coke checked the statistical analysis in a sidebar of his holographic display and said, “There’s a hundred and seventeen up the Auerstadt Road. They’re all armed, and ninety percent of them are in spatter-camouflage uniforms.”

  “Bloody hell,” said Sergeant-Commander Lennox from The Facts of Life. “We’ve got regulars from the Association of Barons? Then it’s really going to blow!”

  “And Four-Two has spotted another eighty-four coming down from Hamlet 1 and points north,” Coke continued, watching his split-screen display. “The only thing I can imagine from an assembly this large is that they’re planning to attack the fortress itself in a night or two.”

  Two companies, even of fully equipped regulars, weren’t a threat to a base the size of Fortress Auerstadt; but Parcotch was only one village of the ninety or a hundred within comparable distance of the base.

  The direct views from sensors in the combat cars filled the lower right and left quadrants of Coke’s display. The top half of the screen looked down at an apparent thirty degrees on a panorama extrapolated from the separate inputs and combined with map data.

  Mother Love was a klick to the south and east of Hamlet 3. The Facts of Life was within 500 meters of the hamlet’s west edge, and that was the problem. Lennox’s vehicle was only 500 meters east of Hamlet 2 as well, where the incoming troops had parked a launching trailer full of short-range guided weapons.

  The combat cars were in perfect position to do a number on the enemy concentration in Hamlet 3, but Coke wasn’t willing to put Lennox between two fires.

  “Any chance the Nationals might send us some support?” Sergeant Dubose said wistfully.

  “Any chance the tooth fairy is making a run by your car tonight?” Sergeant Lennox retorted tartly. She was a lanky woman who shaved her head and was just as tough as she looked. “Sir,” she continued, “let’s do it. If we rip this one, the locals’ll get their heads out of the sand.”

  “Not in your present location, Four-Two,” Coke said. “If they salvo the full load of missiles, there’s no way you’re going to survive. Particularly with whatever’s happening in Three.”

  “Sir, look,” Lennox said. “The personnel are going to be in Three with the others, getting a pep talk or whatever the hell they’re doing. The launcher’s no threat!”

  “We don’t—” Coke started to say.

  A mortar fired just outside the TOC.

  “Hold one!” Coke shouted, spinning from the console and grabbing the sub-machine gun he’d slung over the back of his chair. The National Army clerks jumped up also. They’d been frightened by Coke’s reaction rather than the mortar’s flash and hollow CHUG! through the TOC’s doorway. The vacationer’s glittering holoviews spilled onto the floor.

  Cheers and laughter from outside the TOC told Coke there was no danger. The shell popped thousands of meters in the air, casting harsh magnesium light across Fortress Auerstadt. General the Marquis Bradkopf was using parachute flares to provide fireworks for his party.

  Which suggested a way out of Coke’s immediate problem.

  In theory, Coke’s console was linked to the National Army net. Rather than go through the complic
ated handshake procedures, however, Coke turned to the rack system at the adjacent bay.

  He switched the unit from standby to operations and waited a moment for it to warm up. When the light went from amber to green, Coke keyed the address of the heavy battery of the artillery battalion attached to the fortress defenses. The clerk responsible for the communications bay watched Coke in concern from across the room, but she didn’t attempt to interfere.

  Marquis Bradkopf began hectoring a subordinate outside the door of the TOC. Drink and anger slurred his words so that Coke couldn’t make them out. A woman’s voice wove a descant around Bradkopf’s.

  “Battery Seven,” a man said. “Yeah?”

  “This is Fortress Command,” Coke said crisply. “I have an immediate fire mission for you.” As he spoke, his left hand addressed a target information packet on the Frisian console. “This will require seeker shells, so I’m authorizing you to release them from locked storage.”

  “What!” said the soldier on the other end of the line. “What? Look, I’ll get Chief Edson.”

  Theoretically, the Frisians were in advisory capacity without direct control of National Army forces. As with other large organizations, somebody who was willing to claim authority was more than likely to be granted it.

  The mortar fired again, lofting a second flare into the night sky. There was static on the land line, masking a half-audible conversation at the battery end.

  National Army heavy equipment was generally of off-planet manufacture, ranging from good to very good in design. The local personnel were of low quality, however, and virtually untrained. Coke didn’t dare call an ordinary fire mission to support units within half a klick of the intended impact area. Battery 7’s 200-mm guns were capable of nail-driving accuracy at thirty kilometers, but the crews were as apt as not to drop their heavy shells directly on The Facts of Life.