The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 (3 page)

A stray bolt ruptured the fuel tank under a truck cab. Kerosine, superheated and atomized by the plasma, expanded into an explosive mixture with the surrounding atmosphere—

And flash ignited, just as it would normally have done when injected into the cylinders of the truck’s diesel engine. Bodies and body parts flew up in the mushrooming flame, but most of the Association troops had already been killed by gunfire.

“You wanted to know what?” Coke shouted over the wail of the siren. He gestured to the screen which glowed with the light of the scenes it displayed. “That’s what, General, and there’s a lot more Association units out there tonight than those.”

An automatic cannon opened fire from a bunker on the perimeter of Fortress Auerstadt. The gunners probably didn’t have a real target. They were shooting at shadows or livestock.

That was the right response to the present circumstances. With the base fully alerted, any attack Association troops made would be fragmentary instead of coordinated and overwhelming. In all likelihood there would be no attack. At daybreak the National Army would be able to concentrate on scattered companies of their opponents.

“Why that’s . . .” the Marquis said, staring at the console display. “That’s a massacre!”

Coke was surprised that his nominal superior had enough military knowledge to make that perfectly accurate assessment of what was happening in Parcotch.

As soon as the shooting started, the combat cars’ drivers fed full power to the lift fans. Howling like banshees as the fans sucked in vast quantities of air to pressurize the plenum chambers, spraying water and soupy mud in all directions from beneath their skirts, the fifty-tonne behemoths accelerated toward Parcotch Hamlet 3 from two directions.

While her wing gunners destroyed the rocket launcher, Sergeant Lennox had opened fire on the community itself. Lennox didn’t have a line of sight to the vehicles leaving the hamlet eastward from The Facts of Life’s starting position half a klick distant. Instead she shot up the buildings.

The structures had thatch walls and roofs of corrugated plastic sheeting, supported by wood or plastic frames. All the construction materials were flammable at the temperature of copper plasma. Houses, the school building, and the community center all burst into flame, spreading panic and confusing the enemy.

Everything moving this night was a foe and a target. The Frisians’ only chance was to hit hard and keep on hitting before the enemy forces could organize their superior numbers. In the morning, every corpse in Hamlet 3 would be tagged as an Association soldier or an Association supporter. Like other forms of history, after-action reports are written by the survivors.

Mother Love bounced onto the Auerstadt Road from the dike which had concealed the vehicle in the darkness. The gunners depressed their tribarrels, raking the troops who’d jumped into the fields to either side of the causeway. A gout of steam flew up at each bolt, whether it hit a flooded paddy or superheated the fluids within a soldier’s body.

The flames enveloping the hamlet rolled in redoubled fury, whipped by The Facts of Life’s powerful drive fans. The combat car bellied through the blaze at a walking pace, firing continuously from all three weapons. Cyan bolts cut down the soldiers who had jumped from wagons and truck beds to run toward the fancied safety of the buildings.

Lennox made a point of destroying each of the stalled vehicles. Blazing fuel geysered over the paddies, igniting rice and troops alike.

“Good Lord!” the Marquis said. He turned from the display to Coke and continued, “Get those tanks back here now, you fool! How dare you leave me at risk at a time of such danger?”

“Yessir,” Coke said. “They’re on their way back now.”

The Facts of Life bulldozed burning wreckage off the causeway, clearing the route by which to return to Fortress Auerstadt. The driver was buttoned up within his compartment, using the curved bow slope to butt aside a truck festooned with corpses.

The tribarrels continued to fire. The visors of Frisian commo helmets could be switched to either light enhancement or thermal imaging modes. The latter could pick up bodies even through the shallow water of the paddies.

Captain Wilcken blurted something, clawed his personal sidearm out of a white patent leather holster, and pointed the small-bore projectile pistol at General the Marquis Bradkopf. Colonel Jaffe was drawing his pistol also.

Part of Coke’s mind reasoned:

Wilcken and Jaffe were supporters of the Association of Barons. They intended to assassinate Bradkopf in conjunction with the attack, leaving Fortress Auerstadt leaderless at the moment of crisis. In panic, Wilcken has gone ahead with the plan even though circumstances have obviously changed. . . .

That was with the conscious part of his mind. Reflex thumbed off the safety of Coke’s sub-machine gun as his left hand slapped the foregrip and his finger took up the slack in the trigger.

The first bolt blew plaster from the wall above the TOC’s doorway. The next four hit Wilcken in the chest and neck at point-blank range, virtually decapitating him.

Officers and their gorgeously clad mistresses screamed and threw themselves down. Coke body-checked the Marquis, knocking him to the side and clearing a shot at Colonel Jaffe. Jaffe’s pistol was only half out of its holster. To Coke’s adrenaline-speeded reactions, the colonel didn’t seem to be moving at all.

The air stank of burned flesh and vaporized blood. Wilcken toppled backward, his head dangling onto his chest by a tag of skin. The pupils of the dead man’s eyes had tilted up into the skull.

Coke’s second burst winked cyan on Jaffe’s corneas. The colonel’s chest burst like a blood-filled sponge. The pistol in his hand fired a single shot into the floor. The bullet moaned away in sparks and a spurt of powdered concrete.

“Traitors!” gasped the Marquis, half-sprawled where Coke had knocked him, supporting his torso on the spread fingers of his right hand. “They were—uh!”

Coke was poised for a further threat, sweeping the bullpen over his sub-machine gun’s holographic sights. The iridium barrel glowed white from the nearly instantaneous bursts. Heat waves trembled through the haze of powergun matrix and smoldering fabric.

Officers and their women hugged the littered floor, some of them with their hands crossed over their heads. The trio of enlisted personnel huddled behind the overturned table at which they had been sitting.

No one else was touching a gun. Jaffe’s disemboweled body thrashed, but he was as dead as the headless Captain Wilcken. Everything was safe—

Except that General the Marquis Bradkopf vomited blood onto the concrete floor, then pitched facedown into the bright pool.

The hilt of a narrow-bladed dagger projected from his back. Bradkopf’s youthful mistress stared fixedly at the weapon. There was blood on her little finger and the heel of her right hand. Her tongue dabbed at it.

“Bloody hell,” Coke whispered. He didn’t shoot the girl, the third of the assassins. At this point, it wouldn’t do any good.

“Four-Two to Six,” Sergeant Lennox reported gleefully. “We’ve done all there is to do here, boss, so we’re heading back to the barn. Out!”

Bradkopf’s sightless eyes stared toward the split display of the carnage achieved by the troops who, by his orders, should have been guarding his own person. In that professionally significant aspect, Coke’s gamble hadn’t paid off after all.

Tannahill

Limping slightly, Lieutenant Mary Margulies entered the orderly room for the first time in seven months.

“Hey, El-Tee,” called Kerry, the 305th Military Police Detachment’s first sergeant. “Good to see you. You look like you’re getting around okay.”

Margulies grimaced. “Twinges, that’s all,” she said, “but the bastard medics put me on a profile anyhow. I’m being transferred out, Top. Stuck behind a desk, I suppose.”

She was a stocky woman whose black hair was her only affectation. She’d removed padding from her commo helmet so that she could coil a longer braid when she was on duty. As a platoon leader in a war zone, she had been on duty virtually all the time, awake or sleeping, until a routine convoy escort went sour.

“Ah . . .” said Kerry. “You suppose? You got a copy of the actual orders, didn’t you?”

“Oh, I got them all right,” Margulies said with a wan smile. “Long enough to see I was being transferred back to Camp Able. Then I threw the chip and reader right through the window. I don’t belong on Nieuw Friesland. Curst if I don’t think I’ll put in my resignation if that’s what they want from me.”

She nodded toward the detachment commander’s door. “The Old Man in?”

“Ah . . .” Sergeant Kerry said. “No, Major Yates had an Orders Group at Tannahill Command this morning. Ah . . .”

Margulies smiled harshly. “Go on, Top, say it if that’s what you’re thinking. A crip like me shouldn’t be in the field where she could get good people killed because she’s hobbling around.”

“No sir,” Sergeant Kerry said. “Hell no, sir. What I meant—and I know that nobody but the recipient reads assignment orders until the recipient’s signed off on them—”

Margulies laughed, this time with genuine good humor. “Top, you’ve got seventeen years in the FDF and the Slammers before them. Let’s take it as read that you knew my orders before I did, all right?”

Kerry grinned. “For the sake of argument . . .” he said.

His fingers touched keys on his desk; the integral printer hummed. “I guess there’s no harm in me giving you a hardcopy replacement of the assignment orders you lost, is there?” he said.

A flimsy spooled out of the printer slot. Kerry tore off the document and handed it to the lieutenant without looking at the contents. “I think you’ll find,” he continued, “that Camp Able on Nieuw Friesland is just a transit stop, where you’ll join your new unit. You’ve been assigned as security to a survey team, El-Tee. You’re not supposed to be in combat; but if things were peaceful, a survey team wouldn’t be there trolling for business.”

“Well I’ll be hanged,” Margulies said, reading the data through for the first time. “I was so scared they were going to stick me at a desk that I . . .”

Kerry affectionately scratched the corner molding of his desk as though the piece of furniture were a living creature. “Different strokes, El-Tee,” he murmured. “Personally, I don’t find I miss getting shot at in the least.”

“Well, I’ll be hanged,” Margulies repeated with changed emphasis. “Do you know where this survey team—”

She blinked. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, sure you know where we’re going.”

“Cantilucca,” Kerry said, returning the smile. “I looked it up. West Bumfuck is more like.”

His lips pursed in sudden concern. His fingers started to summon Margulies’ personnel data, then realized doing so now couldn’t help the situation. “Ah—don’t tell me you come from Cantilucca, El-Tee?” he added.

“Not me,” said Margulies with a broad grin. “But I know somebody who does . . ..”

Earlier: Tannahill

“Sarge . . .” Lieutenant Mary Margulies said as Angel Tijuca slid their two-seat air-cushion jeep between a pair of road trains. The huge vehicles had accelerated slowly, but they were maintaining 50 kph now and there was just enough clearance to spare the jeep’s paint. “If you don’t take it easy, you’re not going to survive the last three days of your enlistment.”

Margulies didn’t sound concerned. Her eyes continued to search the roadsides instead of glaring at her driver.

Angel laughed infectiously. “Now, Missie Mary,” he said. “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar. And anyway, it’s not three days, it’s two and a wake-up.”

In public Sergeant Tijuca was never less than deferential to his superior officer, but he and Margulies had gone through a lot in the year he’d been driving her. Angel was ending his enlistment in the Frisian Defense Forces, and Margulies was curst sorry to see him go.

“Only if you survive,” Margulies remarked, but she wasn’t serious. Angel’s willingness to take chances was just as important a reason for her keeping him as her permanent driver as his skill at the joystick was.

Angel accelerated to 60 kph. The jeep passed along the right side of the road trains at an increment that was slightly faster than a man could walk.

The convoy consisted of ten articulated road trains, each of which had three track-laying segments with a driver in the lead cab. There was a gun tub crewed by Brigantian troops on the center segment of each individual train, but the convoy’s real security was provided by the four combat cars manned by Frisian military police under Lieutenant Margulies’ command.

The war was over, but the fighting might not stop for years. Brigantian regiments, spearheaded by armored companies of Frisian mercenaries, had swept across Tannahill’s Beta Continent. The armies of the continent’s local population, mostly Muslims of South Indian descent, had been smashed if they stood and run down if they retreated.

The guerrillas, supported by the local communities even when they weren’t actually members of those communities, were a more difficult problem. They were controllable, at least for as long as the Brigantians of Alpha Continent could afford to pay their Frisian mercenaries, but Margulies suspected it would be decades if not generations before the locals accepted Brigantian domination.

That was somebody else’s worry. Margulies had a convoy to take through eighty klicks of—literally—Indian Country.

“Yes sir,” Angel said. “Inside a week and a half, I figure, I’ll be back on Cantilucca with a forty-hectare gage farm of my own. Three more days here. Three days objective to Delos, that’s the cluster’s port of entry. Maybe a day to get transport from there to Cantilucca, another day’s transit, and bam! I’m home, with a discharge bonus in my pocket. How long can it take then to buy some land, hey?”

Tijuca began to whistle a flamenco tune. Margulies smiled at his enthusiasm. She noticed that despite the sergeant’s air of heedless relaxation, every time they overhauled a road train his eyes flicked left. He was checking through the gaps between vehicles to see what was happening along the far treeline.

Combat engineers had defoliated, then burned off, strips a hundred meters wide along either edge of the road. Ash flew out from beneath the jeep’s skirts. It merged with the yellow dust which the trains’ cleats raised from the gravel road surface. The breeze was slightly from the right, so for the moment the jeep was clear. Tijuca kept them ten meters out in the burned zone—comfortable, but by that amount the closest vehicle to the enemy if the guerrillas decided to start something.