The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 Read online

  The infantry protecting the base lived in tents on the bunker roofs. They had no protection except—for the ambitious ones—a wall of sandbags. The tents weren’t dry either, but at least the troops didn’t have to swim to their bunks.

  Conditions for support personnel within the base weren’t a great deal better. Walkways constructed from wooden shell crates led between locations, but for the most part the makeshift duckboards had sunk into the greasy, purplish mire. The Tactical Operations Center was an assemblage of the high officers’ four living trailers placed around a large tent.

  The whole complex was encircled by a triple row of sandbags and dirt-filled shell boxes. The construction engineers had trenched around the protective wall to draw off water. Because of the lack of slope the would-be channel was a moat, but at least it prevented the TOC from flooding.

  The 150-mm howitzers of the four-tube battery were on steel planking to keep them from sinking to the trunnions. The guns slid during firing, so it was impossible to place accurate concentrations when the sensors located movement. Because rain and the slick ground made it so difficult to manhandle the 45-kg shells, most firing was done at random when battalion command decided it needed more ammo crates for construction.

  The remainder of the support personnel lived in tents and slept on cots. Most of the tents were sandbagged to knee-height, three layers. Higher than that, the single-row walls fell down when the slippery filling bled through the fabric.

  The two Frisians’ assignment was for six standard months. The indigs were here for a local year—twenty-one months standard, and at least three times longer than Daun could imagine lasting under such conditions.

  “Oh, sure, it’ll dry out in spring,” Bondo said as he scowled at his cards. “Dry out, bake to dust, and blow into every curst thing from your food to the sealed electronics. You think equipment life’s bad in this rain, wait until spring.”

  The purpose of this Central States Army outpost in Maedchen’s western tablelands was to service a belt of sensors brought at great expense from Nieuw Friesland. In theory, the sensors and the reaction forces they triggered would prevent infiltration from the Democrat-controlled vestries on the other side of the divide.

  Bondo was quite right about the sensor failure rate. The Belt no doubt looked impressive during briefings in the capital, but the reality was as porous as cheesecloth. Infiltrators had an excellent chance of penetrating the eastern vestries unnoticed, and an even better chance of evading the Central States Army’s half-hearted reaction patrols.

  “One club,” Bondo offered.

  Daun didn’t blame the rain or the quality of the hardware for the rate of sensor failure. Quite simply, personnel assigned by the Central States government weren’t up to the job of servicing electronics this sophisticated.

  Central States field teams wouldn’t follow procedures. For example, they regularly used knives or bayonets to split the sensor frames to exchange data cartridges. The special tools that would perform the task without damage were lost or ignored. They didn’t understand their duties. At least a third of the cartridges were inserted upside down, despite the neon arrows on both casing and cartridge, and despite anything Daun could say to the troops he was trying to train.

  And they didn’t care. As often as not, a field team huddled in a sheltered spot within a klick of the base instead of humping through the rain to service the sensors for which they were responsible. In the morning, they returned with the circuit marked complete—and there wasn’t a curst thing Daun or Anya could do about it.

  “Three no trump,” Anya bid. She grinned coldly around the table.

  Daun had already drafted an assessment for the Frisian Defense Forces Maedchen Command, back in the capital Jungfrau. In it he stated flatly that the system wasn’t working and could never work as presently constituted.

  Nieuw Friesland should either withdraw support from the Central States, or the FDF should insist that the Central States hire a detachment of Frisians sufficient to perform all field as well as base servicing tasks. Otherwise, the inevitable failure would be blamed on Frisian technology rather than the ineptness of the Central States Army at using that technology.

  Anya wouldn’t let Daun transmit the assessment. It wasn’t that she disagreed with him—quite the contrary. But she didn’t believe anything a Tech II said could change the policy of bureaucrats on Nieuw Friesland . . . and there was a good chance Daun’s opinions, once released, were going to become known to the Central States personnel she and Daun shared a tent with.

  There are a lot of ways to get hurt in a war zone. Pissing off the heavily armed people closest to you wasn’t a good way to survive to a pension.

  But the situation grated on Daun’s sense of rightness, as well as making him feel he was a bubble in a very hostile ocean.

  “Too rich for my blood,” Hendries said. “I pass.”

  Daun stared at his cards again. They hadn’t changed for the better. He had four clubs, three of each other suit, and his high card was the jack of hearts.

  He knew his partner was asking where his support was greatest; and he knew also that the proper answer was: nowhere.

  “I pass,” he said aloud.

  Anya grimaced.

  “Pass,” said Bondo.

  Daun laid out his wretched hand. His partner’s expression softened as she saw just what Daun had dealt himself. Hendries glared at his cards to determine a lead, a nearly hopeless task under the circumstances.

  The tent flap tore open. “Hey!” called the Central States soldier who stuck his head in. “Smart guys! Your fucking pickup’s gone down again. The screen in the TOC’s nothing but hash!”

  “Bloody hell,” Anya muttered. She laid her cards down. “My turn, I guess,” she said to Daun. “You were out all morning with the satellite dish.”

  Daun stood up, waving his partner back. “Look, you were up the mast last night. Besides, I’m dummy. I’ll catch this one.”

  “Hey!” the messenger from the Tactical Operations Center repeated. “Colonel Jeffords isn’t real thrilled about this, you know.”

  That was probably true. The amount paid to Nieuw Friesland by the Central States government for Anya’s services was comparable to what the colonel himself earned. Daun’s pay was at the scale of a senior captain. The money didn’t go into the two technicians’ pockets, much of it, and if it had there was still no place to spend money out here on the tableland. It still provided a reason for some of the locals—Jeffords certainly, and apparently this messenger—to get shirty about off-planet smart-asses whose equipment didn’t work.

  “I’m on the way,” Daun said. “Just let me get my gear.”

  He buckled his equipment belt around his narrow waist, pulled on his poncho, and tried to punch the larger working canopy down into its carrying sheath. He could only get it partway into the container, but that would hold it while he climbed the mast.

  The slick fabric still shone with water from when Daun had had to use it that morning. It didn’t matter—to the job—if he got soaked, but rain dripping into an open box could only make a bad situation worse.

  The messenger disappeared. Daun sighed and followed him. “I’ll catch the next one, Niko,” Anya called as Daun stepped out into the rain.

  The flashlight strapped for the moment to Daun’s left wrist threw a fan of white light ahead of him. He could switch the beam to deep yellow which wouldn’t affect his night vision, but it didn’t matter if he became night-blind. He’d need normal light to do his work anyway: many of the components were color-coded. The markings would change hue or vanish if viewed under colored light.

  Rain sparkled in the beam. Reflections made it difficult to tell what was mud and what was wet duckboard. The crates were likely to shift queasily underfoot anyway.

  Three months more. How the locals stood it was beyond him.

  Daun couldn’t blame the soldiers he tried to train for being apathetic. It was all very well to tell the troops that their safe
ty depended on them servicing the sensors properly, but a threat to lives so wretched had little incentive value.

  Daun and Anya complained, but professionalism and a sense of duty would carry the pair of them through no matter how bad things got. The vast majority of the Central States personnel were conscripts, and the conscripts with the least political influence in Jungfrau besides. Daun was sure that at least eighty percent of the outpost would have deserted by now, if there was any place to which they could desert.

  Light through the walls of the tent turned the TOC into a vast russet mushroom, though the fabric looked dull brown by daylight. Daun could hear voices, some of them compressed by radio transmission.

  It was conceivable that the problem was inside the TOC, either in the console or the connecting cables. Daun was tempted to check out those possibilities first, but he decided not to waste his time. The console was of Frisian manufacture and sealed against meddling by the locals.

  The cables had been laid by the previous pair of FDF advisers. They’d done a first-class job; Daun had checked and approved every millimeter of the route the day he and Anya arrived. Unless somebody’d driven a piece of tracked construction equipment through the TOC, the conduits should be fine. The indigs were capable of doing something that bone-headed, but Daun would have heard it happening.

  The thirty-meter mast was a triangular construct set in concrete and anchored to the trailer housing the battery commander. The unit telescoped in three sections. Daun could lower the mast to save most of the climb, but re-erecting it would require help to keep the guy wires from fouling. He didn’t trust the indigs to do that properly even during daylight.

  He squelched to the base of the mast, hooked his safety belts, and began to climb the runglike braces which bound the three verticals together. The mast was formed from plastic extrusions, not metal, but the rungs still felt icy to Daun’s bare hands. They were also slick as glass.

  The sensor wands’ removable recording cartridges provided extremely precise information on all movements within the coverage area. If a human passed within two or three meters of the wand, the retrieved cartridge could determine the state of health based on body temperature and pulse rate. Such data were remarkable but useful only as the raw material for a historical overview.

  Base Bulwark collected coarse sensor readings in real-time, via coded frequency-hopping radio signals. As the messenger had implied, this was the second miserable night in a row that the ultra-high gain antenna atop the mast had failed.

  Last night a matchhead-sized integrated circuit had blown: the sort of thing that happened only occasionally with Frisian hardware, but always at a bad time. Anya had unplugged the blown chip and replaced it with a good one.

  Anya, simply glad to have the antenna working again, had pitched the bad chip out into mud and darkness. If she’d instead saved the fried unit, Daun would have examined it to determine the cause of failure. Long odds the problem was due to manufacturing error, but there was always a possibility that a short within the box was causing a hot spot.

  The chance to diagnose the underlying problem instead of merely fixing the symptom was much of the reason Daun had volunteered to climb the mast. Besides, he liked the hardware part of his work well enough that he preferred to be doing it instead of playing cards with strangers he couldn’t respect and didn’t much like.

  There were guy wires on each of the three sections of the telescoping mast. When he reached each set of guys, Daun unhooked one of his two safety loops, rehooked it above the wires, and repeated the process with the second loop. At no time did he trust merely his boots and grip to keep him on the mast. Daun wasn’t so much cautious as perfectly methodical. The notion of cutting corners to lessen his exposure to the chill drizzle didn’t cross his mind.

  Viewed from the top of the thirty-meter mast, the lights of Bulwark Base had a surreal innocence, like the gleam of will-o’-thewisps in a nighted meadow. Rain softened the patterns and dusted glare into sparkle. The scene wasn’t beautiful but it had a dignified tranquility, far removed from the muddy truth. The glowing canvas of the TOC could be the entrance to the Venusberg, and Daun could imagine that flashlights in the tents on the perimeter were cupids twinkling around the goddess of love.

  The receiving antenna at the mast peak was enclosed in a weatherproof capsule about the size of a soccer ball. The covering was dull gray plastic which was reasonably sturdy but remained transparent over most of the electromagnetic spectrum. Wherever possible, the sensor wands transmitted over microwave frequencies, but those without a line of sight to the receiver used VHF or UHF as circumstances required.

  Daun arranged the working canopy over the capsule. When he had it stiffened into position, the monomolecular sheeting blocked the rain completely. Before then, however, he managed to pour what felt like a liter of cold water down the back of his neck from the canopy’s folds.

  He sighed, clipped his light to a strut so that it shone down on the work, and opened the antenna capsule. Two of the micro-miniaturized circuits were black instead of the healthy gold color. That was neither surprising nor a problem. When one chip blew, it could easily have overloaded its neighbor. Daun’s repair kit contained at least three replacements for every chip on the chassis.

  He opened the cover wider as he prepared to pull the failed chips. An irregularity on the inner face of the cover caught his eye. The plastic had blistered and turned silvery on the side facing the chips that had failed.

  The antenna didn’t draw enough juice to heat the cover even slightly. A short circuit which blistered the plastic that way would have vaporized the circuitry, chassis and all, instead of popping a chip or two.

  The energy that had caused the antenna to fail had come from outside. The most likely outside source was a precisely aimed X-ray laser on one of the enemy-held hilltops overlooking Bulwark Base.

  Feeling colder than rain could make him, Daun reached up to key his commo helmet and alert the camp. The shock wave proved he was too late.

  The warhead went off with a hollow Klock! that blew one of the TOC trailers inside out in a sleet of aluminum. The weapon, a laser-guided anti-tank missile, was configured to defeat heavy armor with a shaped charge. A straight fragmentation or HE warhead would have been better suited for the present task. This was along the lines of killing mosquitoes with an elephant gun.

  On the other hand, an elephant gun will kill a mosquito. Little survived of the trailer, and nothing of anyone who happened to be in it.

  The canopy flapped skyward in the blast. The antennas whipped violently and a guy wire parted, either overstressed or cut by flying shrapnel. Daun hugged the mast with both arms as his feet slipped from the rungs.

  Buzzbombs and crew-served automatic weapons raked the bunkers on the north and west perimeter of the base. Tents collapsed or exploded, flinging out the corpses of troops huddled beneath canvas for shelter.

  While the antenna was deadlined the previous night, the Democrats had moved an assault force into position in the gullies close to Bulwark Base. Tonight they had taken the antenna out of commission again in order to make their final approach through the rain. The Democrats knew they had nothing to fear from the garrison’s patrols or the watchfulness of the troops on duty on the perimeter of the base.

  Another terminally guided missile impacted, this time on furniture near the center of the TOC. The tent shredded in a reddish appliqué over the white flash at the core. Bits of missile casing, and fragments of equipment converted into secondary projectiles, riddled the three remaining trailers.

  The mast swayed even more violently. Daun lost his grip. He was hanging by his safety belts. The broken guy wire whacked across his helmet and bound his outflung arm to the antenna mast.

  Half a second later, a third missile detonated in the Technical Detachments tent.

  For an instant, the flash threw the silhouettes of the dozen startled occupants against the canvas. Then the tent was gone, the flash was a blinding purple afteri
mage on Daun’s retinas, and Sergeant Anya Wisloski shrieked into her commo helmet like a hog being gelded.

  Daun’s legs flailed as he tried to find the rungs again with his feet. The mast had torqued and bent over so that he hung out in the air. Most of his weight was on his left forearm, bound to the mast. He thought the bones might have broken. The pain was inconceivable.

  He didn’t scream. His ears still rang with the sound of Anya’s cry.

  Figures, some of them waving weapons, lurched from tents. The TOC’s instrumentation ran off a portable fusion power plant adapted from the drive unit of a Frisian armored vehicle. There was plenty of excess capacity. Most of the living quarters within the berm had electric lights run through a variety of jury-rigged conductors, with telephone line predominating.

  The Central States personnel were backlit by their own illumination. Democrat troops had quickly crossed the skimpy wire entanglements by throwing quilted padding over the barbs. They opened fire from the berm, knocking startled defenders down like bowling pins.

  Daun managed to grip a rung with his right hand and take some of the weight off his tangled arm. The mast swayed, dipping slightly with each movement. Sooner or later one of the twisted poles would snap and collapse the whole tower. Daun had to get free before then.

  A ricochet moaned past his face. The bullet sounded lonely, like a dog unjustly kicked. Daun thrashed his lower body and finally hooked his right leg around the tilting mast.

  In one of the gun pits nearby, the crew was trying to depress their 150-mm howitzer to fire directly on the attackers. A buzzbomb described a flat arc that climaxed on the gun’s recoil compensator. The projectile burst with a white flash and a blast of shrapnel that was invisible except for its effect on the crew.

  The gunners spun away and fell. Open powder charges sprayed across the gun pit and ignited in a fierce red flare. The gun captain crawled back toward her position through the flame, dragging loops of intestine. She pulled herself onto the trail and died, reaching vainly for the firing lanyard.