Paying the Piper Read online

  When a bolt liberated its energy in a human body, it turned the tissues to steam with explosive suddenness. The file room's walls, the ceiling, and the people within were all covered with a mist of blood. Huber's hands were red, and there was a sticky film across his faceshield that the static charge hadn't been able to repel. He flipped the shield up and out of the way.

  The stench of cooked flesh and of the wastes voided when Fewsett's sphincters spasmed in death was stomach-churning, even for Huber who'd smelled it before. Some things you never get used to. . . .

  Captain Orichos raised herself to her knees, still pointing her pistol at the assemblyman. She patted the floor with her left hand till she found the lens wand and raised it vertical again. Grayle twisted to look back into the bore of the pistol.

  "Assemblyman Grayle!" Orichos said. "You stand convicted of treason by your own records and by your failed attempt to use force against the agents of the Assembly!"

  "That's a lie!" Grayle said in a hoarse voice. "You planted that file!"

  Several voices were jabbering at Huber through his commo helmet; at least one of them seemed to be from Base Alpha. He locked out all incoming channels and concentrated on the door in case the Volunteers tried to rush it. The muzzle of his powergun was cooling from yellow to bright orange.

  "In order to prevent bloodshed among citizens . . ." Orichos continued as though her prisoner hadn't spoken. She was facing Grayle over the gunsights, but Huber noted that her eyes weren't focused anywhere in this world. "I'm offering you, in the name of the citizens of the Point, a chance to go into exile. You and all your fellow conspirators will have one hour to leave Midway and six hours to leave the Point. After that time, you will be considered criminals and dealt with according to law."

  "You faked that so-called evidence," Grayle said, "and you faked the vote count to steal the last election from the Freedom Party! You're the criminals! You're thieves, and you're bankrupting the state by hiring these mercenaries!"

  "Assemblyman Grayle!" Orichos said. She jerked her weight backward to balance her as she stood. She held the wand in her left hand like a torch, and the pistol slanted down toward her prisoner's face. "Do you accept my offer, made in the presence of the entire citizenry of the Point?"

  "Better take the offer, lady," Huber said. Ozone from the 2-cm bolts had flayed his throat, making his voice a rasp that he wouldn't have recognized himself. "Whatever else happens, I guarantee you're not going to leave here alive any other way."

  Grayle looked at him. Her eyes slid downward to the floor on which she lay. Fewsett's head, severed when his chest exploded, stared back at her from a hand's breadth away. She jumped to her feet, forgetting the threat of Orichos' pistol.

  "It's all a lie!" Grayle said. She got control of her breathing and went on, "But I don't have any choice. All right—we'll leave Midway, but I'm agreeing under duress. You have no legal right to expel us!"

  "You out there in the hall?" Huber shouted. He figured the Volunteers, a lot of them anyway, would be watching the broadcast along with the rest of the citizens, but the gunmen just outside the door might be an exception. "I'm going to open the door. The first one through it's going to be your leader, Assemblyman Grayle. But be clear on this—you've got a deal with your government and your Gendarmery. You don't have a deal with me personally. If anybody sticks his head into this room, I'm going to blow him to atoms just like I did a lot of his buddies a moment ago. Got it?"

  Nobody answered. Huber thought he heard the sound of boots running down the staircase. Grayle was poised like a roach caught by the light, momentarily frozen.

  "Captain Orichos?" Huber said.

  "Yes, open the door," Orichos said.

  Instead of reaching, Huber kicked out with his right boot and sprung the latch. The panel bounced open. The hallway was empty.

  Grayle jumped through so quickly that she slid on the blood pooling from the dead technician's body. She caught herself on the wall and ran toward the stairs, leaving a handprint on the wall behind her.

  Nothing else moved for over a minute.

  Huber let out his breath. He switched his helmet back to receive mode and said, "Fox Three-six to Sierra. We're holding our present position on the fourth floor of the Freedom Party headquarters until somebody comes to fetch us out. And give me plenty of warning before you show yourselves, people, because I'm as jumpy as I've ever been in my life!"

  * * *

  Captain Sangrela's driver had bounced his jeep up the Assembly Building steps and parked it under the porch. The officers and senior sergeants of Task Force Sangrela stood on the patterned stone, listening to the holographic image of Danny Pritchard speaking from Base Alpha.

  Around them the citizens of Midway noisily celebrated their release from Freedom Party domination. In the street below whirled a round dance with hundreds of participants. A fiddler stood on a raised platform in the middle of the circle; beside him, occasionally crowding his elbow, gyrated a young woman wearing only briefs. Huber didn't think she was professional—just exuberant and very happy. As far up and down the Axis as Huber could see there were similar dances as well as free buffets, speakers on makeshift podiums, and crowds of people drinking and singing in good fellowship.

  "The Volunteers are gathering at their base on Bulstrode Bay on the northern coast," said Danny Pritchard's holographic image. "They call it Fort Freedom, and it's going to be a tough nut to crack."

  Aircars spun and swooped overhead, often with sirens blaring. The drivers were as excited and as generally drunk as the people in the street. Huber had seen two collisions and heard a worse one that sent a car crashing to the ground on the other side of the Mound.

  "Why us, sir?" Captain Sangrela asked. His voice was calm, but the way his hands tightly gripped the opposite elbows indicated his tension.

  "Because you can, Captain," Pritchard said simply. "Because we can't leave ten thousand armed enemies in a state whose support we need. And because the locals can't do it themselves—"

  He grinned harshly.

  "—which is generally why people hire the Slammers, right?"

  The Gendarmery had been conspicuous by its absence during the events of the afternoon. Now the Point's gray-uniformed police were out in force, though they seemed more to be showing themselves than making an effort to control the good-natured partying that was going on. The Gendarmes on foot patrol carried only pistols; those in the cruising aircars may have had carbines but they weren't showing them.

  "Ten thousand of 'em, sir?" said C-1's platoon sergeant, a rangy man named Dunsterville. He sounded incredulous rather than afraid at what he'd heard. "You mean the guys with red sweatbands?"

  "The Volunteers, yes," Pritchard agreed with a grim nod. "You won't have to deal with all of them—indeed, that's why we've decided to move on Fort Freedom immediately. We expect that at least half of Grayle's Volunteers will decide to stay home in the woods if they know that joining her means facing tanks. If we withdraw from the Point and the Volunteers don't have anybody to worry about except the locals, then they'll everyone of them march back into Midway and this time loot the place."

  When Pritchard said, "we've decided," he meant Colonel Hammer and his regimental command group. The "we" who'd be carrying out the operation meant Call-Sign Sierra, ten vehicles and less than a hundred troopers under Captain Sangrela. Huber was a volunteer, and he knew that the senior officers had all been at the sharp end in their day too . . . but Via! Fifty to one was curst long odds!

  "Here's a plan of Fort Freedom," Pritchard continued. The image of his body disappeared, leaving his head hovering above a sharply circular embayment viewed from the south at an apparent downward angle of forty-five degrees. The sea had cut away the northern third of the rock walls and filled the interior. "Bulstrode Bay's an ancient volcano. The walls average a hundred meters high and are about that thick at the base. There's normal housing inside of the crater, but the Volunteers have also tunneled extensively into the walls."
r />   "Have they got artillery?" Huber asked. He was still trying to get his head around the notion of going up against five thousand armed hostiles . . . or maybe ten thousand after all, because staff estimates were just that, estimates, and Sierra would be facing real guns.

  "The Volunteers don't have an indirect fire capacity so far as we can tell," Pritchard said, nodding at a good question. "Not even mortars. What they do have—"

  The holographic image transformed itself into a gun carriage mounting eight stubby iridium barrels locked together in two banks; each tube had its own ammo feed. The chassis was on two wheels with a trail for towing the weapon rather than being self-powered.

  "—are calliopes. We've traced a lot of twenty purchased by Grayle's agents nine months ago, and it's possible that there've been others besides."

  Calliopes, multi-barreled 2- or 3-cm powerguns, provided many mercenary units with the air defense that the Slammers handled through their own armored vehicles. The weapons were extremely effective against ground targets as well. A short burst from a calliope could shred a combat car and turn its crew into cat's meat. . . .

  Pritchard's full figure replaced the image of the calliope. "I'm not making light of the job you face," he said. "But I do want to emphasize that the Volunteers are not soldiers. Most of them have only small arms, they aren't disciplined, and they've never faced real firepower. If you hit them hard and fast they'll break, troopers. You'll break them to pieces."

  "Calliopes cost money," Mitzi Trogon said. "More money than I'd expect from a bunch of hicks in the sticks."

  Pritchard nodded again. "Whatever you think of the documents the Point security police found," he said with a grin, "we have evidence that the government of Solace is indeed supporting the Freedom Party."

  Solace would be insane not to, Huber thought. Arming the internal enemies of a hostile government was about the cheapest way to reduce its threat.

  In the street and sky, the citizens of Midway danced and sang. They were the rulers, the people who split among themselves the wealth and the status and the political power of the Point. They were right to fear Melinda Grayle, a demagogue who'd united the Moss rangers against the urban elite who lorded it over them.

  Captain Sangrela rubbed the back of his neck. "We're going cross-country, I suppose?" he said. "There isn't much but cross-country on this bloody planet."

  "Not exactly," Pritchard said as the image of a terrain map replaced that of his body. "The direct route'd take you through ancient forest. The trees are too thick and grow too densely for your vehicles to push through or maneuver through either one. We've plotted you a course down the valley of the River Fiorno. It won't be fast, but the vegetation there's thin enough that even the cars can break trail."

  The red line of the planned course dotted its way along the solid blue of a watercourse. Not far from the coast, the red diverged straight northward for some fifty kilometers to reach Bulstrode Bay.

  "The last part of the route, we'll clear for you with incendiary rounds. We estimate it'll take you nearly two days to reach the point you'll leave the Fiorno. The fire should've burned itself out by then, so you can make the last part of your run relatively quickly."

  Pritchard smiled again. "The fire should also limit the risk of ambush," he said; then he sobered and added, "But that'll be a very real possibility while you're following the river. We'll do what we can from Base Alpha, but you'll have to proceed with scouts and a full sensor watch the same as you did on the way here."

  Pritchard's image looked around the gathering. "Any questions?" he asked.

  "I don't like to complain, Major . . ." said Sergeant Jellicoe, lacing her fingers in front of her. "But do you suppose after this, somebody else in the bloody regiment can get a little action too?"

  Everybody laughed; but everybody, Pritchard included, knew that the comment hadn't entirely been a joke. "I'll see what I can do," he said.

  On the fiddler's platform below, the woman dancing had stripped off her panties as well. Huber glanced down at her . . . and turned his head away.

  He was going to need his rest. The next part of the operation sounded like it was going to be even rougher than what it'd taken to get Task Force Sangrela this far.

  * * *

  Huber called up a remote from Flame Farter, on the move with White Section for the past ten minutes. The Fiorno River was only thirty meters wide and almost shallow enough to wade where it curved around the north and east of Midway. The scouts' skimmers danced in rainbows of spray out in the channel to avoid the reeds along the margins; the combat car was chuffing down the bank, spewing mud and fragments of soft vegetation from beneath her skirts.

  "Red Section, move out!" Captain Sangrela ordered. The main body with Jellicoe's Floosie in the lead was already lined up on the Axis north of the Assembly Building. Dust puffed beneath their skirts as they lifted from the gravel. One at a time, carefully because objects so powerful must move carefully if they're not to destroy themselves and everything around them, the seven vehicles of the main body started down the avenue. The doughnuts of dust spread into wakes on either side.

  Sergeant Nagano glanced over from Foghorn's fighting compartment; Huber was keeping his section on the Mound till the main body had cleared the road beneath. Huber gave Nagano a thumb's up. Nagano hadn't commanded a car before the operations against Northern Star, and he was doing a good job.

  "How'd you make out last night, El-Tee?" Sergeant Deseau asked, stretching like a cat behind the forward gun.

  "I slept like a baby," Huber said. "I never sleep that well on leave when I'm in a bed."

  The Assembly had offered the Slammers any kind of billets they wanted, but Captain Sangrela had decided to keep his troopers beside their vehicles for the night. Nobody'd argued with him. The weather wasn't unpleasant, and chances were some Freedom Party supporters had stayed in Midway. The risks of going off by yourself were a lot greater than any benefit a bed in an unfamiliar room was going to bring.

  "Not me," said Deseau, grinning even broader. "The people here are real grateful, let me tell you."

  Learoyd looked around from his gun. Shyly he said, "The girls didn't charge nothing, El-Tee. I never been a place before that the girls didn't charge."

  A Gendarmery aircar came up the Axis from the south, flying low and slow. Huber caught the motion in the corner of his eye, then cranked the image up to x32 as an inset on his faceshield. As he'd thought, Captain Orichos was in the passenger seat.

  The fourth D company tank pulled out at the back of the main body, accelerating with the slow majesty that its mass demanded. Floosie was out of sight beyond the northern end of the Axis, into the mixture of forest and scattered houses that constituted the city's suburbs.

  "Fox Three-six to Three-one," Huber said to Sergeant Nagano. "Move into the street. We'll follow you down and bring up the rear. Three-six out."

  Foghorn lurched from its berth and ground through a hedge that'd survived Task Force Sangrela's arrival. Whoever was driving for Nagano today must be keyed tighter than a lute string, Huber thought; he grinned faintly. Which showed the driver understands what we're about to get into.

  "Sir, shall I shift us now?" Sergeant Tranter prodded from the driver's compartment.

  "Give me a moment, Tranter," Huber replied. "I think I've got a visitor."

  "Hey, it's your girlfriend, El-Tee," Deseau said cheerfully. He waved at the aircar swinging in along Fencing Master's port side.

  "Not my girlfriend," Huber said as he lifted himself out of the fighting compartment to stand on the plenum chamber. And probably not even a friend, to Arne Huber or to any member of the Slammers. Orichos had other priorities, and Huber had only the vaguest notion of what they might be.

  As the aircar hovered beside them, the Gendarmery captain tossed Huber a satchel no larger than the personal kit of a trooper on active deployment. "I hope you don't mind, Lieutenant . . ." she called over the thrum of the aircar and the whine of Fencing Master's idled fan
s. "But I'm going to join you again."

  Huber thrust the satchel behind him for Deseau to take. He extended his right hand while his left anchored him to the fighting compartment's coaming.

  "Welcome aboard, Captain," he said, swinging Orichos across to the combat car. She was surprisingly light; his subconscious expected the weight of a figure wearing body armor, of course.

  Mauricia Orichos wasn't welcome, but she was part of Huber's job so he'd make the best of it. And he really had more important things on his mind just now. . . .

  * * *

  Huber heard a coarse ripping as three more rounds from batteries far to the south streaked overhead. To give the shells sufficient range from the Slammers' gun positions in the UC, a considerable part of what would normally be payload was given over to the booster rockets.

  "What's that?" asked Mauricia Orichos, pointing upward. The shells' boron fluoride exhaust unrolled broad, poisonous ribbons at high altitude, spreading as she watched. "Are we under attack?"

  "No, that's outgoing," Huber explained, mildly surprised that their passenger had picked up the sound of artillery over Fencing Master's intake howl. Orichos noticed quite a lot, he realized, and she had the knack for absorbing what was normal in a new situation so that she could quickly identify change. "They're prepping the route for us."

  He wasn't sure how much Orichos knew about the plan, and he wasn't going to be the one to tell her anything Base Alpha hadn't already explained. If it'd been up to Arne Huber, he'd have told the Point authorities an amount precisely equal to the part Point forces were taking in the reduction of Fort Freedom: zip.

  He glanced up at the path the shells had taken northward. For this use, the reduced payloads didn't matter. The shells would spill their incendiary bomblets at very high altitude to get maximum dispersion. The target wasn't a single facility but rather a fifty-kilometer swathe of forest, and there was plenty of time for the widely-spread ignition points to grow together into a massive firestorm.