“Who’s in charge here?” the captain demanded, his voice booming through the command vehicle’s public address system.
The Dutch unloading the trucks halted silently. A squat man in a parka of feathery native fur stepped forward. Unlike many of the other civilians, he was not armed. He did not flinch when Pritchard pinned him with the spotlight of the tank. “I am Paul van Oosten,” the man announced in the heavy Dutch of Kobold. “I am Mayor of Haacin. But if you mean who leads us in what we are doing here, well…perhaps Justice herself does. Klaus, show them what these trucks were carrying to Portela.”
Another civilian stepped forward, ripping the top off the box he carried. Flat plastic wafers spilled from it, glittering in the cold light: powergun ammunition, intended for shoulder weapons like those the infantry carried.
“They were taking powerguns to the beasts of Portela to use against us,” van Oosten said. He used the slang term “skepsels” to name the Francophone settlers. The mayor’s shaven jaw was jutting out in anger.
“Captain!” called one of Barthe’s truck drivers, brushing forward through the ring of Hammer’s men. “Let me explain.”
One of the civilians growled and lifted his heavy musket. Rob Jenne rang his knuckles twice on the receiver of his tribarrel, calling attention to the muzzles as he swept them down across the crowd. The Dutchman froze. Jenne smiled without speaking.
“We were sent to pick up wheat the regiment had purchased,” Barthe’s man began. Pritchard was not familiar with Barthe’s insigniae, but from the merc’s age and bearing he was a senior sergeant. An unlikely choice to be driving a provisions truck. “One of the vehicles happened to be partly loaded. We didn’t take the time to empty it because we were in a hurry to finish the run and go off duty—there was enough room and lift to handle that little bit of gear and the grain besides.
“In any case—” and here the sergeant began pressing, because the tank captain had not cut him off at the first sentence as expected—“you do not, and these fools surely do not, have the right to stop Col. Barthe’s transport. If you have questions about the way we pick up wheat, that’s between your CO and ours, sir.”
Pritchard ran his gloved index finger back and forth below his right eyesocket. He was ice inside, bubbling ice that tore and chilled him and had nothing to do with the weather. He turned back to Mayor van Oosten. “Reload the trucks,” he said, hoping that his voice did not break.
“You can’t!” van Oosten cried. “These powerguns are the only chance my village, my people have to survive when you leave. You know that’ll happen, don’t you? Friesland and Aurore, they’ll come to an agreement, a trade-off, they’ll call it, and all the troops will leave. It’s our lives they’re trading! The beasts in Dimo, in Portela if you let these go through, they’ll have powerguns that their mercenaries gave them. And we—”
Pritchard whispered a prepared order into his helmet mike. The rearmost of the four tanks at the edge of the village fired a single round from its main gun. The night flared cyan as the 200 mm bolt struck the middle of the tailings pile a kilometer away. Stone, decomposed by the enormous energy of the shot, recombined in a huge gout of flame. Vapor, lava, and cinders spewed in every direction. After a moment, bits of high-flung rock began pattering down on the roofs of Haacin.
The bolt caused a double thunder-clap, that of the heated air followed by the explosive release of energy at the point of impact. When the reverberations died away there was utter silence in Haacin. On the distant jumble of rock, a dying red glow marked where the charge had hit. The shot had also ignited some saplings rooted among the stones. They had blazed as white torches for a few moments but they were already collapsing as cinders.
“The Slammers are playing this by the rules,” Pritchard said. Loudspeakers flung his quiet words about the village like the echoes of the shot; but he was really speaking for the recorder in the belly of the tank, preserving his words for a later Bonding Authority hearing. “There’ll be no powerguns in civilian hands. Load every bit of this gear back in the truck. Remember, there’s satellites up there—” Pritchard waved generally at the sky—“that see everything that happens on Kobold. If one powergun is fired by a civilian in this sector, I’ll come for him. I promise you.”
The mayor sagged within his furs. Turning to the crowd behind him, he said, “Put the guns back on the truck. So that the Portelans can kill us more easily.”
“Are you mad, van Oosten?” demanded the gunman who had earlier threatened Barthe’s sergeant.
“Are you mad, Kruse?” the mayor shouted back without trying to hide his fury. “D’ye doubt what those tanks would do to Haacin? And do you doubt this butcher—” his back was to Pritchard but there was no doubt as to whom the mayor meant—“would use them on us? Perhaps tomorrow we could have….”
There was motion at the far edge of the crowd, near the corner of a building. Margritte, watching the vision blocks within, called a warning. Pritchard reached for his panic bar—Rob Jenne was traversing the tribarrel. All three of them were too late. The muzzle flash was red and it expanded in Pritchard’s eyes as a hammer blow smashed him in the middle of the forehead.
The bullet’s impact heaved the tanker up and backwards. His shattered helmet flew off into the night. The unyielding hatch coaming caught him in the small of the back, arching his torso over it as if he were being broken on the wheel. Pritchard’s eyes flared with sheets of light. As reaction flung him forward again, he realized he was hearing the reports of Jenne’s powergun and that some of the hellish flashes were real.
If the tribarrel’s discharges were less brilliant than that of the main gun, then they were more than a hundred times as close to the civilians. The burst snapped within a meter of one bystander, an old man who stumbled backwards into a wall. His mouth and staring eyes were three circles of empty terror. Jenne fired seven rounds. Every charge but one struck the sniper or the building he sheltered against. Powdered concrete sprayed from the wall. The sniper’s body spun backwards, chest gobbled away by the bolts. His right arm still gripped the musket he had fired at Pritchard. The arm had been flung alone onto the snowy pavement. The electric bite of ozone hung in the air with the ghostly afterimages of the shots. The dead man’s clothes were burning, tiny orange flames that rippled into smoke an inch from their bases.
Jenne’s big left hand was wrapped in the fabric of Pritchard’s jacket, holding the dazed officer upright. “There’s another rule you play by,” the sergeant roared to the crowd. “You shoot at Hammer’s Slammers and you get your balls kicked between your ears. Sure as God, boys; sure as death.” Jenne’s right hand swung the muzzles of his weapon across the faces of the civilians. “Now, load the bleeding trucks like the captain said, heroes.”
For a brief moment, nothing moved but the threatening powergun. Then a civilian turned and hefted a heavy crate back aboard the truck from which he had just taken it. Empty-handed, the colonist began to sidle away from the vehicle—and from the deadly tribarrel. One by one the other villagers reloaded the hijacked cargo, the guns and ammunition they had hoped would save them in the cataclysm they awaited. One by one they took the blower chief’s unspoken leave to return to their houses. One who did not leave was sobbing out her grief over the mangled body of the sniper. None of her neighbors had gone to her side. They could all appreciate—now—what it would have meant if that first shot had led to a general firefight instead of Jenne’s selective response.
“Rob, help me get him inside,” Pritchard heard Margritte say.
Pritchard braced himself with both hands and leaned away from his sergeant’s supporting arm. “No, I’m all right,” he croaked. His vision was clear enough, but the landscape was flashing bright and dim with varicolored light.
The side hatch of the turret clanked. Margritte was beside her captain. She had stripped off her cold weather gear in the belly of the tank and wore only her khaki uniform. “Get back inside there,” Pritchard muttered. “It’s not safe.” He was a
fraid of falling if he raised a hand to fend her away. He felt an injector prick the swelling flesh over his cheekbones. The flashing colors died away though Pritchard’s ears began to ring.
“They carried some into the nearest building,” the non-com from Barthe’s Company was saying. He spoke in Dutch, having sleep-trained in the language during the transit to Kobold just as Hammer’s men had in French.
“Get it,” Jenne ordered the civilians still near the trucks. Three of them were already scurrying toward the house the merc had indicated. They were back in moments, carrying the last of the arms chests.
Pritchard surveyed the scene. The cargo had been reloaded, except for the few spilled rounds winking from the pavement. Van Oosten and the furious Kruse were the only villagers still in sight. “All right,” Pritchard said to the truck drivers, “get aboard and get moving. And come back by way of Bitzen, not here. I’ll arrange an escort for you.”
The French non-com winked, grinned, and shouted a quick order to his men. The infantrymen stepped aside silently to pass the truckers. The French mercenaries mounted their vehicles and kicked them to life. Their fans whined and the trucks lifted, sending snow crystals dancing. With gathering speed, they slid westward along the forest-rimmed highway.
Jenne shook his head at the departing trucks, then stiffened as his helmet spat a message. “Captain,” he said, “we got company coming.”
Pritchard grunted. His own radio helmet had been smashed by the bullet, and his implant would only relay messages on the band to which it had been verbally keyed most recently. “Margritte, start switching for me,” he said. His slender commo tech was already slipping back inside through the side hatch. Pritchard’s blood raced with the chemicals Margritte had shot into it. His eyes and mind worked perfectly, though all his thoughts seemed to have razor edges on them.
“Use mine,” Jenne said, trying to hand the captain his helmet.
“I’ve got the implant,” Pritchard said. He started to shake his head and regretted the motion instantly. “That and Margritte’s worth a helmet any day.”
“It’s a whole battalion,” Jenne explained quietly, his eyes scanning the Bever Road down which Command Central had warned that Barthe’s troops were coming. “All but the artillery—that’s back in Dimo, but it’ll range here easy enough. Brought in anti-tank battery and a couple calliopes, though.”
“Slide us up ahead of Michael First,” Pritchard ordered his driver. As The Plow shuddered, then spun on its axis, the captain dropped his seat into the turret to use the vision blocks. He heard Jenne’s seat whirr down beside him and the cupola hatch snick closed. In front of Pritchard’s knees, pale in the instrument lights, Margritte DiManzo sat still and open-eyed at her communications console.
“Little friendlies,” Pritchard called through his loudspeakers to the ten infantrymen, “find yourselves a quiet alley and hope nothing happens. The Lord help you if you fire a shot without me ordering it.” The Lord help us all, Pritchard thought to himself.
Ahead of the command vehicle, the beetle shapes of First Platoon began to shift position. “Michael First,” Pritchard ordered sharply, “get back as you were. We’re not going to engage Barthe, we’re going to meet him.” Maybe.
Kowie slid them alongside, then a little forward of the point vehicle of the defensive lozenge. They set down. All of the tanks were buttoned up, save for the hatch over Pritchard’s head. The central vision block was a meter by 30 cm panel. It could be set for anything from a 360° view of the tank’s surroundings to a one-to-one image of an object a kilometer away. Pritchard focused and ran the gain to ten magnifications, then thirty. At the higher power, motion curling along the snow-smoothed grainfields between Haacin and its mine resolved into men. Barthe’s troops were clad in sooty-white coveralls and battle armor. The leading elements were hunched low on the meager platforms of their skimmers. Magnification and the augmented light made the skittering images grainy, but the tanker’s practiced eye caught the tubes of rocket launchers clipped to every one of the skimmers. The skirmish line swelled at two points where self-propelled guns were strung like beads on the cord of men: anti-tank weapons, 50 mm powerguns firing high-intensity charges. They were supposed to be able to burn through the heaviest armor. Barthe’s boys had come loaded for bear; oh yes. They thought they knew just what they were going up against. Well, the Slammers weren’t going to show them they were wrong. Tonight.
“Running lights, everybody,” Pritchard ordered. Then, taking a deep breath, he touched the lift on his seat and raised himself head and shoulders back into the chill night air. There was a hand light clipped to Pritchard’s jacket. He snapped it on, aiming the beam down onto the turret top so that the burnished metal splashed diffused radiance up over him. It bathed his torso and face plainly for the oncoming infantry. Through the open hatch, Pritchard could hear Rob cursing. Just possibly Margritte was mumbling a prayer.
“Batteries at Dimo and Harfleur in Sector One have received fire orders and are waiting for a signal to execute,” the implant grated. “If Barthe opens fire, Command Central will not, repeat, negative, use Michael First or Michael One to knock down the shells. Your guns will be clear for action, Michael One.”
Pritchard grinned starkly. His face would not have been pleasant even if livid bruises were not covering almost all of it. The Slammers’ central fire direction computer used radar and satellite reconnaissance to track shells in flight. Then the computer took control of any of the Regiment’s vehicle-mounted powerguns and swung them onto the target. Central’s message notified Pritchard that he would have full control of his weapons at all times, while guns tens or hundreds of kilometers away kept his force clear of artillery fire.
Margritte had blocked most of the commo traffic, Pritchard realized. She had let through only this message that was crucial to what they were about to do. A good commo tech; a very good person indeed.
The skirmish line grounded. The nearest infantrymen were within fifty meters of the tanks and their fellows spread off into the night like lethal wings. Barthe’s men rolled off their skimmers and lay prone. Pritchard began to relax when he noticed that their rocket launchers were still aboard the skimmers. The anti-tank weapons were in instant reach, but at least they were not being leveled for an immediate salvo. Barthe didn’t want to fight the Slammers. His targets were the Dutch civilians, just as Mayor van Oosten had suggested.
An air cushion jeep with a driver and two officers aboard drew close. It hissed slowly through the line of infantry, then stopped nearly touching the command vehicle’s bow armor. One of the officers dismounted. He was a tall man who was probably very thin when he was not wearing insulated coveralls and battle armor. He raised his face to Pritchard atop the high curve of the blower, sweeping up his reflective face shield as he did so. He was Lt. Col. Benoit, commander of the French mercenaries in Sector Two; a clean-shaven man with sharp features and a splash of gray hair displaced across his forehead by his helmet. Benoit grinned and waved at the muzzle of the 200 mm powergun pointed at him. Nobody had ever said Barthe’s chief subordinate was a coward.
Pritchard climbed out of the turret to the deck, then slid down the bow slope to the ground. Benoit was several inches taller than the tanker, with a force of personality which was daunting in a way that height alone could never be. It didn’t matter to Pritchard. He worked with tanks and with Col. Hammer; nothing else was going to face down a man who was accustomed to those.
“Sgt. Major Oberlie reported how well and…firmly you handled their little affair, Captain,” Benoit said, extending his hand to Pritchard. “I’ll admit that I was a little concerned that I would have to rescue my men myself.”
“Hammer’s Slammers can be depended on to keep their contracts,” the tanker replied, smiling with false warmth. “I told these squareheads that any civilian caught with a powergun was going to have to answer to me for it. Then we made sure nobody thinks we were kidding.”
Benoit chuckled. Little puffs of vapor s
purted from his mouth with the sounds. “You’ve been sent to the Gröningen Academy, have you not, Capt. Pritchard?” the older man asked. “You understand that I take an interest in my opposite numbers in this sector.”
Pritchard nodded. “The Old Man picked me for the two year crash course on Friesland, yeah. Now and again he sends non-coms he wants to promote.”
“But you’re not a Frisian, though you have Frisian military training,” the other mercenary continued, nodding to himself. “As you know, Captain, promotion in some infantry regiments comes much faster than it does in the…Slammers. If you feel a desire to speak to Col. Barthe some time in the future, I assure you this evening’s business will not be forgotten.”
“Just doing my job, Colonel,” Pritchard simpered. Did Benoit think a job offer would make a traitor of him? Perhaps. Hammer had bought Barthe’s plans for very little, considering their military worth. “Enforcing the contract, just like you’d have done if things were the other way around.”
Benoit chuckled again and stepped back aboard his jeep. “Until we meet again, Capt. Pritchard,” he said. “For the moment, I think we’ll just proceed on into Portela. That’s permissible under the contract, of course.”
“Swing wide around Haacin, will you?” Pritchard called back. “The folks there’re pretty worked up. Nobody wants more trouble, do we?”
Benoit nodded. As his jeep lifted, he spoke into his helmet communicator. The skirmish company rose awkwardly and set off in a counterclockwise circuit of Haacin. Behind them, in a column re-formed from their support positions at the base of the tailings heap, came the truck-mounted men of the other three companies. Pritchard stood and watched until the last of them whined past.
The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century Page 24
