Paying the Piper Read online

  The platoon sergeant was a twenty-year veteran so she must know something, but Huber didn't want to burn out his barrels now when in a matter of minutes he'd be at knife range with several thousand hostiles. There wasn't a right way to do it. If suppressing fire was the rabbit's foot Jellicoe used to get through hard times, Huber wasn't going to order her to stop.

  Not that he thought she'd obey him anyway.

  A geyser of cyan light—powergun ammunition gang-firing—lit the side of the volcano. Blast-gouged rock gleamed white, fading toward red in the instant before the shattered slope caved in to hide it. The tanks were first hitting positions which Central believed were occupied, though they'd shortly hammer the locations where the Volunteers planned to move their guns after the first exchange of fire.

  The bloody civilians didn't understand that none of their guns would survive its first shot at the Slammers.

  A calliope opened up, one of those dug so deep into the forward slope that Volunteer command couldn't retask it to air defense. Its dense volley of 30-mm bolts was probably aimed at Flame Farter, which'd already raced past the narrow window through which the calliope fired. The rounds instead came dangerously close to the infantry following. Calcium in the clay soil blazed white in the center of gouting ash; the skimmers maneuvered wildly to avoid the track of shots.

  Two 20-cm bolts hit the firing slit in quick succession. The calliope might have been deep enough that neither tank had a direct line on the weapon itself, but the amount of energy the main guns liberated in the tunnel would be enough to cook the crew in a bath of gaseous rock. The hillside burped, then slumped as it rearranged itself.

  Fort Freedom loomed above the plain five klicks ahead like a sullen monument. Where the eastern sun angled across ravines, shadows streaked the cinder cone. Speckles against the lava indicated a few Volunteers were firing their personal weapons. At this range the electromagnetic carbines were harmless; the slugs probably wouldn't carry to the oncoming Slammers. Though the attempt showed bad fire discipline, it also meant that not all—not quite all—of the enemy were cowed by the sight of the iridium hammers about to fall on them.

  The ground rose slightly into a ridge paralleling the base of the cone and changed from clay to a friable soil that must have been mostly volcanic ash. The forest here had been of tall trees spaced more widely than those of the stretch the task force had just traversed, but the firestorm had reduced them to much the same litter of ash and cinders.

  The two tanks accompanying the combat cars halted on the ridge; the wake of debris they'd raised during their passage continued to roll outward under its own inertia. They immediately began punching Volunteer positions with their main guns. The panzers now far to the rear began to advance, accelerating as quickly as their mass allowed. They'd each shot off the twenty round basic load in their ready magazines and couldn't use their main guns until a fresh supply had cycled up from storage in their bellies.

  Mercenary artillery in Solace might weigh in at any time. The tanks' tribarrels were tasked to air defense. With the wide sight distances here, that should be a sufficient deterrent. If it wasn't, well, Huber had more pressing concerns right now.

  His faceshield careted movement at the top of the cinder cone: the Volunteers were shifting calliopes from air defense sites in the interior of the ancient volcano to notches cut in the rim from which they could bear on the advancing armored vehicles. Huber adjusted his sight picture onto the leftmost caret, enlarging the central portion around the pipper while the surrounding field remained one-to-one so that he wouldn't be blindsided by an unglimpsed danger.

  The gun crew had rolled their multi-barrel weapon into position and were depressing their eight muzzles at the mechanism's maximum rate. Huber locked his tribarrel's stabilizer on the glinting target and squeezed the trigger.

  Huber's AI blacked out the 2-cm bolts from the magnified image to save his retinas. Instead of a smooth Thump! Thump! Thump! as the tribarrel cycled at 500 rounds per minute, it stuttered Thump! and a moment later Thump! Thump! again. The stabilizer adjusted the weapon within broad parameters, but Fencing Master was jolting over broken terrain with a violence beyond what the servos were meant to control. The software simply interrupted the burst until the gun bore again on its assigned target.

  The calliope in the holographic sight picture—its iridium barrels gleaming against the frame of baked-finish steel and the taut-faced Volunteers crewing it—slumped like a sand castle in the tide. The impacts were smears of emptiness, but the image cleared in snapshots of destruction, headless bodies falling and white-glowing cavities eaten from the carriage and gun-tubes.

  The target's magazines detonated. The flash scooped the square-bottomed firing notch into a crescent five meters across. A mushroom of vaporized rock lifted from the site. Nothing remained of the calliope and its crew.

  Blasts and gouts of lava spurted from a dozen places on the crater's rim as combat cars raked the enemy with their tribarrels. Deseau and Learoyd both fired at the turret of an armored car which the Volunteers had held beneath the crater rim until the Slammers were within range of whatever weapon it mounted. Satellite imagery from Central cued the troopers' AIs, so they were waiting with their thumbs on their triggers at the instant the armored car's crew drove up a ramp into firing position.

  The turret of high maraging steel blazed in a red inferno before its gun could swing on target. Internal explosions must have killed the whole crew, because they didn't attempt to back the vehicle or bail out of it.

  Deseau and Learoyd continued firing, eating away the rock to get to the car's hull. They didn't have a better target—other tribarrels had cleared the rest of the Volunteer positions—and they saw no reason to stop shooting at something that might possibly be useful to the enemy. A fireball of exploding fuel finally ended their fun.

  Fencing Master bucked onto humped, barren ridges of hard rock. Layers of ash blown from the vent had formed most of the nearby landscape, but here magma had rolled out of cracks in the base of the cone and solidified. The steel skirts clanged and squealed, scraping showers of red sparks.

  Huber grabbed the coaming with his left hand. Captain Orichos shouted as the car bounced her forward into Deseau. Frenchie snarled a vivid curse, but he didn't lose his grip on the tribarrel.

  "They're running!" somebody shouted over the general channel. From the voice and the way the AI let it cut through the chatter of a dozen or more excited soldiers, Huber figured it was Captain Sangrela. "Get the bastards! Get 'em all!"

  The Volunteers had spent years building Fort Freedom. In addition to tunnels carved through the cone, they'd dug hundreds of bunkers on the volcano's outer face. The squads and fire teams placed there hadn't run earlier because there was no way out except up a bare slope; by the time they'd had a good enough look at what was coming toward them, they were more afraid to show themselves than they were to stay.

  The shriek as combat cars crossed rock and the nearing intake howl of the fans changed the equation. First a few, then many scores of Militiamen clambered out of their holes to dash for the rim and what they hoped was safety. It was near suicide, but with the tanks continuing methodically to pulverize bunkers, running may still have been the better option even so.

  The Volunteers' black uniforms would've blended well with the slopes of compacted ash, but the Slammers' helmets keyed on motion. A forest of translucent red carets lit on Huber's faceshield. All he had to do was swing his sight picture onto the thickest clumps and squeeze his trigger, letting Fencing Master's movement hose the burst across running victims. Bodies and severed limbs bounced against the rock, shrouded in smoke from burning uniforms.

  "Get the bastards before they grow their spines back!" Captain Sangrela screamed. "Get 'em all!"

  Some Volunteers fired from their bunkers or turned to fight like cornered rats as cyan bolts slaughtered their comrades. A burst hit Fencing Master's bow slope and ricocheted in dazzling violet streaks. The car's armor rang like a trip hamme
r working, but that was just a fact of life. Huber's skin prickled and his throat was as raw as if he'd drunk lye.

  Fencing Master reached the cone. It was steep, forty degrees on average and occasionally almost vertical where weather had sheared the concreted ash. Tranter fought his controls, fishtailing the car so that they mounted the slope in a series of switchbacks instead of fighting gravity head on. The combat cars had a higher power to weight ratio than the massively armored tanks did so they could climb the cone, but it still took finesse to do it well.

  A powergun bolt stabbed over the rim of the fighting compartment's armor, splashing the interior. The cyan brilliance blew a chunk of iridium into a white-hot bubble between Huber and Deseau.

  The gas flung Huber backward, tearing his hands from the tribarrel. He felt as though he'd been slammed in the crotch by a medicine ball.

  Heat penetrated a moment later. The fabric of his uniform was temperature resistant, but the metal resolidifying as a black crust over the khaki had vaporized at something over 4800 degrees. I'll worry about it later. . . .

  Frenchie'd gone down also. He was still holding his tribarrel's left grip, but that was the way a drowning man clutches flotsam. Litter on the floor of the compartment had ignited, twigs and leaves which had whirled into the vehicle during the march as well as plastic wrappers and similar human trash.

  Learoyd ripped short bursts toward what was now blank hillside above them: the Volunteer sniper had ducked into his foxhole after firing, and the slope itself concealed the opening. The shooter must've been lucky to hit a target he couldn't see till he showed himself, but he was also good. If he thought he was safe because he was out of sight again, though—

  The rock Learoyd's 2-cm bolts was splashing into fist-sized divots of glass suddenly erupted as though the volcano had gone active again. Two tanks hit it, then doubled the initial impacts as soon as their main guns could cycle. Each bolt lifted a truck-sized volume of compacted ash which strinkled down again on the breeze.

  There was no sign of the shooter. If his ammunition had gone off, its flash was lost in the immense violence of 20-cm bolts.

  Huber's legs were splayed before him; his hands waved in the air. Captain Orichos caught his right wrist and bent close. "Should I take your gun?" she shouted. "Can you—"

  "I'm all right," Huber said, forcing the words out. The shock had numbed his diaphragm; breathing was one agony among many. He braced his left arm against the side armor, then let the car's lurch help Orichos lift him to his feet again.

  On his feet but not upright; he was still half doubled over and he was pretty sure that he'd vomit if he tried to straighten fully. Via! but he hurt.

  Deseau's gun thumped a burst toward the top of the cone. Huber didn't see a target there; Frenchie was probably just proving to himself and others that he was alive and functioning . . . which is what Huber was doing, after all.

  "I'm all right!" he repeated, forcefully and with more truth this time. He took his tribarrel's grips in his hands as Fencing Master lurched to the top of the ridge, the western battlements of the Volunteer fortress. Below was the interior of the partial cone, and beyond that the sea.

  Aircars ranging from the big trucks that could haul twenty or more armed men to hoppers with one seat and room for a sack of groceries were mixed indiscriminately on the crater floor. The drivers had squeezed in wherever they'd seen a place to set down. The Volunteers had left Midway in a near panic; they probably hadn't landed here in much better emotional condition.

  There wasn't room in the tunnels to conceal so many vehicles, so the calliopes had been the Volunteers' only means of protecting their hope of escape if things went wrong—as they were certainly going wrong now. Those calliopes were molten ruin, but there was no need to waste shells on the aircars. They were perfect targets for Fencing Master's tribarrels.

  A few minutes ago there'd have been only a handful of Volunteers in the open. The maze of tunnels would've seemed safety until those inside realized that the Slammers would with certainty penetrate the outer defenses and so control the tunnel entrances. Now several of the armored doors had swung back; black-uniformed figures were running for vehicles. Huber's view was like a child's of a stirred-up anthill.

  A Volunteer drew a holstered powergun and fired in the direction of Fencing Master as he ran. One of the bolts snapped only twenty meters overhead, but that was dumb luck: nobody was that good, not with a pistol. Learoyd's short burst vaporized everything between the Volunteer's neck and his knees without any need for luck. He was an expert using a stabilized weapon with holographic sights. Learoyd could've put a round into his target's left nostril if he'd wanted to.

  The accompanying infantry squads spaced out to either side of Fencing Master, taking firing positions along the ridge. Foghorn still labored a hundred meters down the slope. Huber didn't have leisure to see how Jellicoe's section was doing on the eastern edge of the cone where a deep gully complicated the approach, but he knew she'd get them into action as quick as anybody could.

  An aircar lifted. Huber fired as he tracked it, his bolts splashing behind the accelerating vehicle for a moment before three flashes walked up the fuselage from the back. The car, a luxury model, flipped over and crashed under power. Ruptured fuel cells sprayed their contents over a dozen other vehicles, some of which also started to burn.

  "Cue aircar motors!" Huber shouted, shifting his AI to mark the electromagnetic rhythms of fan motors spinning. "Gunners—"

  Going to intercom.

  "—hit the moving cars, not the men!"

  Three more vehicles tried to take off. One didn't have enough altitude and collided immediately with the truck parked ahead of it. As it tumbled, Learoyd's burst chopped the car's belly open.

  The infantry were shooting at individual targets. Though their weapons were semi-automatic, a single 2-cm bolt was enough to disable an aircar—let alone kill the driver.

  One and then both cars of Jellicoe's section opened fire from the other side of the crater. Foghorn finally not only mounted the rim but started down the steeper inner slope, wreathed in the grit its steel skirts rasped from the soft rock. Solid cyan streams lashed from its guns.

  Deseau either didn't hear Huber's order or ignored it, instead laying his sights onto an entrance. He squeezed his trigger till a blast within spurted a cloud of smoke and yellow flame into the sunlight; the tunnel collapsed.

  Three Volunteers rose together behind the bed of a truck, aiming at Foghorn for the split second before Huber shot them down. One's carbine fired skyward as his head exploded. Huber'd been swinging his gun onto the car behind the men; its driver leaped out and flattened on the ground. The empty vehicle started to loop before falling sideways and crashing.

  Fuel fires and the foul black plumes of burning plastic rose from dozens of vehicles. Nobody was coming out of the tunnels any more, and the Volunteers surviving on the crater floor either huddled beside cars—there was no "behind" to the crossfire from the rim—or raised their hands in surrender. Many of the latter had their eyes closed as if they were afraid they'd see death coming for them.

  "Sierra, cease fire!" Captain Sangrela called. "The enemy's radioed to surrender! Cease fire!"

  A carbine fired. The whack of the electromagnetic coils might've gone unnoticed in the chaos, but the clang! of the slug ricocheting from Foghorn's armor was unmistakable. Some Volunteer hadn't gotten the word. . . .

  Huber hadn't seen the shooter, but Deseau did: his tribarrel was one of five or six guns which spiked the closed cab of an aircar. That car and three more nearby erupted in fireballs. A body panel fluttered skyward, deforming in the heat of the blast that lifted it.

  "Cease fire!" Sangrela repeated angrily. His jeep was so heavy with electronics that he hadn't been able to reach the rim, so he didn't know the reason for the additional gunfire. "Cease fire!"

  The shooting stopped. Arne Huber took his hands from the tribarrel grips and flexed them cautiously, afraid they'd cramp. He might need
to use them if things got hot again. The underside of his chin was as stiff and painful as if it'd been flayed. The skin there'd caught some of the iridium vaporized when the bolt hit inside the fighting compartment.

  "Cease fire!" said Captain Sangrela, but nobody was firing any more.

  "Blood and Martyrs!" Deseau wheezed, raising his faceshield. "I'm as dry as that rock out there!"

  Huber'd had the same thought. In turning toward the cooler that still should have a few beers in it, he caught sight of Captain Orichos' expression: she looked as though she'd just been told she was Master of the Universe.

  It shouldn't have disturbed Huber, but it did.

  * * *

  It'd been pouring rain. Now that the afternoon sun was out, the tents steamed and the clay had already started to bake to laterite. Ash lay as a slimy gray coating over ridges in the soil, but the sides of the rain-carved gullies were the color of rust. Dead tree trunks stood like tombstones for the forest that had once grown here.

  "What a bloody fucking awful fucking place!" Deseau snarled, flipping up the front of his poncho without taking it off; the rain could resume any moment. "Learoyd, did you ever see such a bloody fucking awful fucking place?"

  "Sure, Frenchie," Learoyd said, frowning as he tried to puzzle sense out of the question. "Remember Passacaglia, where the dust got in everything and we kept burning out drive fans? And that swamp the place before that? And where was it everybody got skin fungus if they didn't wear their gas suits all the time? Was that—"

  "Yeah, well, this's still a crummy place," Deseau muttered. He saw Huber smiling and grimaced, turning his head away. Frenchie'd been around Learoyd long enough to know the trooper had too much trouble with the literal truth to make a good audience for a figure of speech—even a figure as simple as rhetorical exaggeration.