The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 Page 11

  Tagrifah had a common well. The women congregated around it in the first dawn, drawing household water and exchanging gossip while adult males were still abed. Barbour hadn’t targeted the well, of course, but one of the firecracker rounds strewed its trail of bomblets across the women and spilled them in a bloody windrow. Some of the corpses looked like bundles of rags rather than something once human; rags of predominantly red color.

  One old woman, apparently unharmed, sat wailing in the middle of the carnage. Her blank eyes didn’t react to the combat car, though the vehicle moved past close enough to stir her garments with the air vented beneath the skirts.

  Mamie followed Barbour’s eyes. She leaned close to him and said, “It’s not us that did this, Bob. It’s the sons of bitches who deliberately used civilians as a shield. We can’t let them make up the rules for their own benefit.”

  “I know that,” Barbour said. He didn’t really know anything at all. He was pretending that he saw Tagrifah in a recorded image, with the camera lens between him and reality.

  He pointed. “That was the headquarters,” he said.

  More accurately, the Kairene HQ had been concealed in a bunker beneath that, the mosque and the attached madrassah in which village boys were schooled in reading, writing, and the Koran. Girls as well as boys here in Tagrifah, and apparently a mixed class besides.

  Kairouan had been settled three centuries ago from North Africa, where both Islam and Christianity had developed unique strains. Even so, Kairene society had departed to a surprising degree from its roots. Tagrifah could have been an interesting subject for study, before the shells hit.

  The stone-built religious buildings had collapsed to rubble which barely filled the large bunker beneath. Gray smoke rose through the interstices of the jumbled stones. Mixed with the ashlars and broken roof beams were the bodies of the pupils, seated on the madrassah’s floor at dawn to begin their lessons.

  Some of the children were still moving. Captain Currant touched her helmet key again. Barbour heard the word “medics” in the request.

  A preplanned operation like this probably had second echelon medical support laid on at the firebase already. The troops wouldn’t need help, but the medics and their equipment would get a workout nonetheless.

  The radio antenna serving the Kairene headquarters had run up the minaret. The vertical mast was still standing, pure and gleaming in the sunlight, though the building had crumbled around it.

  The mast made a fitting monument for Tagrifah. Barbour had initially identified the village as a hostile center because of the signals emanating from that antenna.

  The Kairenes had limited themselves to burst transmissions: data collapsed into the smallest possible packets and spit out in a second or two instead of over minutes. They might as well have flown battle flags and set off fireworks for all the good their attempts at concealing their signals had done. They hadn’t understood that they weren’t dealing with hicks like themselves, they were facing the Frisians.

  More particularly, the Kairenes faced Lieutenant Robert Barbour. Barbour’s tuned instruments not only pinpointed the source of the transmissions, they ran the packets through decryption programs which spat the information out in clear faster than the Kairene units in the field would be able to process it.

  “It wasn’t a mistake!” Barbour said. “Tagrifah was a regimental headquarters!”

  “Curst right it was!” Mamie Currant agreed. “Look at there.”

  She gestured this time by waggling the muzzles of her tribarrel. A hand and arm clutching a 2-cm powergun extended from beneath a collapsed house.

  The weapon wasn’t of Frisian pattern, though it might well take the same ammunition. The Kairenes had been well equipped with small arms. They lacked artillery and armor, but they would have put up at least a good fight if the Boumedienne government had attempted to reduce them with its own forces.

  Guerrilla bands with powerguns, familiar with the terrain and dedicated to victory, could wreak holy havoc with an invader’s lines of communications. Boumedienne’s troops would have flailed blindly, destroying random villages but taking disastrous casualties whenever they tried to move in less than battalion strength.

  The money cost to Boumedienne of a Frisian brigade was considerable, but it was the difference between victory and the sort of bloody stalemate that is perhaps the only thing worse than losing a war. Tagrifah was proof the money had been well spent.

  Four more combat cars approached from the east. The armored vehicles spun on their axes to extend the line on which 3d Platoon crawled through the village. The cars closed up. Another platoon was in sight to Barbour’s left.

  “Bunkers under every one of them?” Captain Currant asked/ observed as she scanned the wreckage.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Barbour agreed. The part of his mind that spoke retained its professional detachment.

  In every instance, the foundations of the houses they passed had collapsed into a crater instead of mounding above ground level. Delay-fuzed rounds—there was no need for true penetrators, designed to punch through the plating and reinforced concrete of fortresses—had sucked the fieldstone foundations into the bunkers the houses had concealed.

  Barbour had pinpointed the individual bunkers by having patrols set off small explosions in the ground, never closer than a kilometer from the village. Analyzing the hash of echo returns was more a matter of magic than science, despite the help Barbour’s computers provided.

  The results showed how perfectly he had succeeded. He wondered whether the villagers had built additional houses to conceal bunkers, or whether the Kairene military had limited their bunker locations to the existing buildings. Either way, there was a perfect equivalence.

  The operation’s planners had laid firecracker rounds down to follow the HE in order to catch soldiers stumbling from their shattered bunkers. It didn’t appear that any Kairene regulars had made it that far.

  Civilians lay individually and in groups near the doorways of their collapsed houses. An infant cried on the ground, between the bodies of its father and brother.

  The car beside High Hat slowed. A gunner hopped from the fighting compartment, picked up the orphan, and remounted the vehicle.

  Most of the dust had settled, but many of the house roofs burned sluggishly. Black smoke bubbled from the damp thatch. Occasionally the fans of a passing combat car would whip fires to bright flame, but mostly they remained glimmerings beneath an oily sludge.

  The four-car platoon from the north of the village joined, bringing the company to full strength. Captain Currant spoke, switching her helmet from one sendee to another.

  As a company commander, Mamie rated an enclosed command car with better communications gear and a specialist to run it. Like many other FDF officers, she preferred an ordinary combat vehicle.

  Military doctrine for millennia had been that a commander’s job was to command, not to fight; Aggressive officers had never accepted that formulation; and when the dust settled, the victorious side was normally the one whose officers were aggressive.

  High Hat rotated twenty degrees, then backed a few meters and settled onto its skirts. The remaining combat cars were shifting also, forming a tight defensive laager in what had been Tagrifah’s open marketplace. The vehicles’ bows faced outward, and their massed tribarrels were ready to claw.

  They would have no target. Occasionally civilians blind with smoke and tears stumbled toward the laager. They ran as soon as the gleaming iridium shapes registered on their consciousness.

  “There’s a battalion of Boumedienne’s boys coming on trucks,” Currant explained to Barbour. “We’ll wait for them, then head back to Desmond. There’s nothing here the locals can’t handle, now that we’ve done the real work.”

  She clapped Barbour on the shoulder again. “Now that you’ve done the real work, Bob. This one was all yours.”

  The dikes protecting Robert Barbour’s mind crumbled, letting unalloyed reality wash over him. The
smoke and screams and the stench of fresh entrails . . .

  It hadn’t been an atrocity. It was a necessary military operation.

  And it was all his.

  Cantilucca: Day One

  The sailor at the Norbert IV’s boarding hatch pointed to a row of low prefab buildings 300 meters in from where the vessel had landed. The freighter’s leave party—the whole crew except for a two-man anchor watch—had already stumped most of the distance over the blasted ground. The crewmen carried only AWOL bags, while the disembarking passengers had much more substantial luggage.

  “There’s the terminal,” the sailor said. “The left one’s Marvelan entry requirements. If there’s nobody home, go to passenger operations beside it. Pilar’ll be there, no fear.”

  “Not,” said Mary Margulies, surveying the lighted buildings, “the fanciest-looking place I’ve ever been sent.”

  “At the moment,” Matthew Coke said, “they aren’t shooting at us. That’s something.”

  It was late evening. The sky was purple. Cantilucca was supposed to have two moons, but either they weren’t up or they were so small that Coke lost them in the unfamiliar stars.

  The sailor snorted. “You want shooting?” he said. “Go on into Potosi. I guarantee you’ll find somebody there who’ll oblige you.”

  Johann Vierziger looked at him. “A tough town?” he asked.

  His voice was delicate, effeminate. Coke didn’t know what to make of Vierziger overall, but he’d watched the sergeant run the combat course at Camp Able. Whatever else Vierziger might be, he was surely a gunman.

  “Tough enough, boyo,” the sailor replied, eyeing Vierziger speculatively. “But it’s a place a fellow can have a good time if he wants one, too.”

  “It appears that we’re our own baggage handlers,” Sten Moden said. He lifted his twin-width suitcase in his only hand. “Shall we?”

  The big logistics specialist started down the ramp, drawing the others after him. Vierziger moved immediately to the front. Each member of the survey team carried a concealed pistol, but they were under Coke’s strict orders not to draw their weapons unless he ordered them to.

  Coke was uncomfortable. This wasn’t either a combat operation or a routine change of station. He didn’t know how he was supposed to feel.

  Cantilucca’s starport was a square kilometer bulldozed from the forest and roughly leveled. The earth had been compressed and stabilized.

  There hadn’t been a great deal of maintenance in the century or so since the port was cleared. Slabs of surface had tilted in a number of places, exposing untreated soil on which vegetation could sprout. The jets of starships landing and taking off limited the size of the shrubbery, at least in the portion nearer the terminal buildings.

  There were twenty-three ships in port at the moment. Most of them were freighters of around 20 KT displacement, like the Norbert IV. Gage was big business, and Cantilucca grew the best gage in the universe.

  Niko Daun chuckled. He was toward the rear of the straggling line—Lieutenant Margulies alone walked behind him, looking frequently over one shoulder, then the other.

  “Here we all are in civilian clothes and everything,” the young sensor tech said. “We look like a bunch of businessmen.”

  Coke glanced back at Daun. “That’s right,” he said wryly. “We are businessmen. Or ambulance-chasing lawyers, that might be closer.”

  The survey team’s luggage, two pieces for every member except the one-armed Moden, had static suspension systems. When the systems were switched on, they generated opposing static charges in the bottom of each case and the surface beneath it. The cases floated just above the ground and could be pulled along without friction.

  On terrain as broken as that of the untended starport, that was only half the problem. Because of their contents and their armored sidewalls, the cases were extremely heavy. They wobbled on their narrow bases of support, threatening to fall over unless the person guiding them was relentlessly vigilant. The poor illumination didn’t help either.

  “Not bad training for life,” Coke muttered.

  “Sir?” Sten Moden said, turning his head back.

  “Just talking to myself,” Coke explained. “Sorry.”

  A bus pulled away from the terminal area. Its wheels were driven by four separate electric motors. One of the drives shrieked jaggedly as the bus headed toward the gate of the port compound.

  “It’s a lot easier,” Sten Moden said without emphasis as he watched the bus go, “to replace a bearing than it is to replace a driveshaft and a bearing.”

  The bus didn’t have headlights. A spotlight jury-rigged to the driver’s side window swept the road and a stretch of the fence surrounding the compound. The forest beyond was a black mass. The sky had some color still in the west, but it no longer illuminated the land beneath it.

  “Let’s hope the soldiers aren’t any better than the mechanics,” said Robert Barbour.

  Coke didn’t have any more of a handle on the intelligence specialist than he did on Vierziger. Based on Barbour’s personnel file, he was an easy-going man who was brilliant in his field. He had a bright career ahead of him, despite a lack of ambition outside his professional specialty.

  There was no question about Barbour’s qualifications. Coke had thought he himself knew his way around a sensor console, until he saw what Barbour could do casually with one.

  In the flesh, though, the young lieutenant was withdrawn and apparently miserable. The file would have indicated if Barbour had survived a close one, as had happened to Daun. Maybe he’d had trouble with a woman. The Lord knew, there was plenty of that going around.

  “They don’t have soldiers here, Lieutenant,” Johann Vierziger said. “On Cantilucca they have thugs, gangsters.”

  “We’re not going to prejudge the situation,” Coke said sharply. “Our report on the quality of potential allies and opposition is just as important as whether we recommend Nieuw Friesland accept an offer of employment here in the first place.”

  “Sorry, sir,” Vierziger said. He didn’t sound ironic, but neither was he making any effort to appear contrite.

  The sergeant had made a statement which he knew, and which Coke knew, was correct on the basis of the score or more similar planets they’d both seen. Coke didn’t know what Vierziger’s background was—his file began at the point he enlisted in the FDF; but he knew the little gunman had a background. Nobody got as good as Vierziger was by spending his time at the target range.

  Coke laughed. “Hold up,” he called to Moden and Vierziger. He stopped where he was, set down the cases he was pulling, and motioned his team closer.

  Lights from the terminal brightened that side of the faces watching Coke, but even there the flesh was colorless. Opposite the terminal, the team’s features lacked detail.

  “Look,” Coke said, “we’re here now, we’re on our own. From this point on, we’re on first-name basis.”

  Nobody reacted openly. Shutters clicked across the eyes of the more experienced trio, Moden, Margulies, and Vierziger.

  “I don’t mean,” Coke explained hastily, “that we’ve suddenly become a democracy. Fuck that notion. You will take my orders, or I’ll have you court-martialed on return to Camp Able.”

  A starship across the compound tested its landing motors. Plasma flared in an iridescent shimmer above the vessels, lighting the team members and the shattered ground about them. Vierziger grinned in broad approval.

  “We’re all good at our jobs,” Coke resumed as the jet’s rumble faded away. “And we’ll be living in each other’s pockets while the operation goes on. I trust that we can maintain real discipline without pretending we’re back in base somewhere. Okay?”

  The other members of the team nodded—Margulies with obvious relief. The last thing any sensible officer wanted was to serve under a commander whose first priority was that his troops like him.

  Coke smiled and nodded. “Saddle up, troopers,” he said. He switched on the repulsion units of hi
s cases and resumed the last stage of his trudge to the terminal buildings.

  Vierziger fell in beside him. “I’m not used to thinking of myself as ‘Johann,’” the little man said with an unreadable substrate to the comment.

  “Better get used to it, Johann,” Coke said.

  Vierziger’s eyes were always on the far distance, the shadows which might be hiding an ambush. His cases tracked as nearly straight as the ground permitted, never tilting far enough to be in danger of toppling over. The little man’s peripheral vision chose the best line possible across the field.

  “People generally don’t trust me,” Vierziger said, as if he were commenting on the magenta glow of the western horizon. “That’s understandable, of course. But I want you to know that you could trust me, can if you want to.”

  A speck of light now at zenith had been fifteen degrees further east when Coke left the freighter. A moon, then, rather than a star; but merely a speck.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said aloud.

  Vierziger laughed without malice. “The only difference between me and the pistol in your holster,” he said, “is that you’re more likely to hit the target if you aim me than if you aim it.”

  Coke looked at the little man. Neither of them spoke for a moment.

  “Watch out for this,” Vierziger said, gesturing toward a raw pit with the index finger of the hand gripping one of his cases.

  The pit separated the two men by its width as they avoided it. “Why?” Coke asked.

  “Because I think that’s what I’m here to do, Matthew,” Vierziger said.

  He took two longer strides, then released his cases. They stood as sentinels to either side of the door as the gunman entered the terminal with his delicate hands free.

  Coke walked through the doors a step behind Vierziger. Coke had been a combat soldier all his career, so he was irritated to be treated as an object for protection. Another part of him, though—