by David Drake
Tyl's lungs filled again. He'd been holding his breath unknowingly, terrified that his colonel was about to strip him of his rank for saying too much, saying the wrong thing. Anything else, that was all right . . . .
Even command problems that weren't any business of a captain in the line.
"Our contract,"Hammer said carefully,"is with the government of Bamberia, not precisely with President Delcorio."
The image of the screen glared as if reading on Tyl's face the interjection his subordinate would never have spoken aloud. "The difference is the sort that only matters in formal proceedings—like a forfeiture hearing before the Bonding Authority, determining whether or not the Regiment has upheld its end of the contract."
"Yes sir!" Tyl said.
Hammer's face lost its hard lines. For a moment, Tyl thought that the hint of grayness was more than merely an artifact of the degraded signal.
"There's a complication," the colonel said with a precision that erased all emotional content from the statement."Bishop Trimer has been in contact with the Eagle wing Division regarding taking over conduct of the Crusade in event of a change of government."
He shrugged. "My sources," he added needlessly. "It's a small community, in a way."
Then, with renewed force and no hint of the fatigue of moments before, Hammer went on, "In event of Trimer taking over, as you accurately estimated was his intention, we're out of work. That's not the end of the world, and I certainly don't want any of my men sacrificed pointlessly—"
"No sir," Tyl barked in response to the fierceness in his commander's face.
"—but I need to know whether a functional company like yours might be able to give Delcorio the edge he needs."
Hammer's voice asked, but his eyes demanded. "Stiffen Dowell's spine, give Trimer enough of a wild card to keep him from making his move before the Crusade gets under way and whoever's in charge won't be able to replace units that're already engaged."
And do it, Tyl realized, without a major troop movement that could be called a contract violation by Colonel Hammer, acting against the interests of a faction of his employers.
It might make a junior captain—acting on his own initiative—guilty of mutiny, of course.
"Sir," Tyl said crisply, vibrant to know that he had orders now that he could understand and execute. "We'll do the job if it can be done.Ripper Jack's a good man, cursed good. I don't know the others yet,most of 'em, but it's three-quarters veterans back from furlough and only a few newbie recruits coming in."
"Understand me, Captain," Hammer said—again fiercely. "I don't want you to become engaged in fighting unless it's necessary for your own safety. There aren't enough of you to make any difference if the lid really comes off, and I won't throw away good men just to save a contract. But if your being in the capital keeps President Delcorio in power for another two weeks . . . ?"
"Yes sir!" Tyl repeated brightly,marvelling that his commander seemed relieved at his reaction. Via, he was an officer of Hammer's Slammers, wasn't he? Of course he'd be willing to carry out orders that were perfectly clear—or as clear as combat orders ever could be.
Keep the men in battledress and real visible; hint to Dowell that there was a company of panzers waiting just over the horizon to land and really kick butt as soon as he said the word. Make waves at the staff meetings. They couldn't bother him now with their manners and fancy clothes.
The colonel had told Tyl Koopman what to do, and a few rich fops weren't going to affect the way he did it.
"Then carry on, Captain," Hammer said with a punctuation of static in the middle of the words that did not disguise the pleasure in his voice. "There's a lot—"
The sky was a lighter gray than the ground or the sea, but the sun had fully set. The cyan flash of a powergun lanced the darkness like a scream in silence.
"Hold!" Tyl shouted to his superior,rising from his crouch to get a better view past the microwave dish beside him.
A volley of bolts spat from at least half a dozen locations in the plaza. The orbiting police aircar staggered and lifted away. Its plastic hull had been hit. The driver's desperate attempt to increase speed fanned the flames to sluggish life; a trail of smoke marked the vehicle's path.
A huge roar came from the crowd in the plaza. Led by a line of torches and light wands, it crawled like a living thing up both the central and eastern stairs.
They weren't headed for the Palace of Government across the river. They were coming here.
Tyl flipped his helmet's manual switch to the company frequency. "Sar'ent Major," he snapped, "all men in combat gear and ready t' move soonest! Three days rations and all the ammo we can carry."
He switched back to the satellite push and began folding the screen—not essential to the transmission while the face of Colonel Alois Hammer still glowed on it with tigerish intensity.
"Sir," Tyl said without any emotion to waste on the way he was closing his report, "I'll tell you more when I know more."
Then he collapsed the transceiver antenna. Hammer didn't have anything as important to say as the mob did.
Chapter Ten
The mob was pulsing toward the City Offices like the two heads of a flood surge. Powergun bolts spiked out of the mass, some aimed at policemen but many were fired at random.
That was the natural reaction of people with the opportunity to destroy something—an ability which carries its own imperatives. Tyl wasn't too worried about that, not if he had his men armed and equipped before they and the mob collided.
But when he clumped down the stairs from the trap door in the roof, he threw a glance over his shoulder. The north doors of the House of Grace had opened, disgorging men who marched in ground-shaking unison as they sang a Latin hymn.
That was real bad for President Delcorio, for Colonel Hammer's chances of retaining his contract—
And possibly real bad for Tyl Koopman and the troops in his charge.
The transit detachment was billeted on the second floor, in what was normally the turn-out room. Temporary bunks, three-high, meant the troops on the top layer couldn't sit up without bumping the ceiling. What floor space the bunks didn't fill was covered by the foot-lockers holding the troops' personal gear.
Now most of the lockers had been flung open and stood in the disarray left by soldiers trying to grab one last valuable—a watch; a holoprojector; a letter. They knew they might never see their gear again.
For that matter, they knew that the gear was about as likely to survive the night as they themselves were—but you had to act as if you were going to make it.
Sergeant Major Scratchard stumped among the few troopers still in the bunk room, slapping them with a hand that rang on their ceramic helmets. "Move!" he bellowed with each blow. "It's yer butts!"
If the soldier still hesitated with a fitting or to grab for one more bit of paraphernalia, Scratchard gripped his shoulder and spun him toward the door. As Tyl stuck his head into the room, a female soldier with a picture of her father crashed off the jamb beside him, cursing in a voice that was a weapon itself.
"All clear,sir,"Scratchard said as the last pair of troopers scampered for the door ahead of him, geese waddling ahead of a keeper with aready switch."Kekkonan's running the arms locker, he's a good man."
Tyl used the pause to fold the dish antenna of his laser communicator. The sergeant major glanced at him. He said in a voice as firm and dismissing as the one he'd been using on his subordinates, "Dump that now. We don't have time fer it."
"I'll gather 'em up outside," Tyl said. "You send 'em down to me, Jack."
He clipped the communicator to his equipment belt.Alone of the detachment, he didn't have body armor. Couldn't worry about that now.
The arms locker, converted from an interrogation room, was next door to the bunk room. The hall was crowded with troopers waiting to be issued weapons and those pushing past, down the stairs with armloads of lethal hardware that they would organize in the street where there was more space.
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Tyl joined the queue thumping its way downstairs. As he did so, he glanced over his shoulder and called, "We'll have time, Sar'ent Major. And by the Lord! We'll have a secure link to Central when we do."
Chapter Eleven
For a moment, the exterior of the City Offices was lighted by wall sconces as usual. A second or two after Tyl stepped from the door into the bulk of his troops, crouching as they awaited orders, the sconces, the interior lights, and all the streetlights visible on the east side of the river switched off.
There was an explosion louder than the occasional popping of slug throwers in the distance. A transformer installation had been blown up or shorted into self-destruction.
That made the flames, already painting the low clouds pink, more visible.
A recruit turned on his hand light.The veteran beside him snarled,"Fuckhead! Use infrared on your helmet shield!"
The trooper on the recruit's other side—more direct—slapped the light away and crushed it beneath her boot.
"Sergeants to me," Tyl ordered on the unit push. He flashed momentarily the miniature lightwand that he carried clipped to a breast pocket—for reading and for situations like this, when his troops needed to know where he was.
Even at the risk of drawing fire when he showed them.
He hadn't called for noncoms, because the men here were mostly veterans with a minimum of the five-years service that qualified them for furlough. Seven sergeants crawled forward, about what Tyl had expected and enough for his purposes.
"Twelve-man squads," he ordered, using his commo helmet instead of speaking directly to the cluster of sergeants. That way all his troops would know what was happening.
As much as Tyl did himself, at any rate.
"Gather 'em fast, no screwing around. We're going to move as soon as everybody's clear." He looked at the sergeants, their face shields down, just as his was—a collection of emotionless balls, and all of them probably as worried as he was: worried about what they knew was coming, and more nervous yet about all the things that might happen in darkness, when nobody at all knew which end was up.
"And no shooting, troopers. Unless we got to."
If they had to shoot their way out, they were well and truly screwed. Just as Colonel Hammer had said—there weren't enough of them to matter a fart in a whirlwind if it came down to that.
A pair of emergency vehicles—fire trucks swaying with the weight of the water on board them—roared south along the river toward the City Offices. A huge block of masonry hurtled from the roof of an apartment building just up the street. Tyl saw its arc silhouetted against the pink sky for a moment.
The stone hit the street with a crash and half-bounced, and half-rolled, into the path of the lead truck. The fire vehicle slewed to the side, but its wheels weren't adequate to stabilize the kiloliters of water in its ready-use tank. The truck went over and skidded, rotating on its side in sparks and the scream of tortured metal—even before its consort rammed it from behind.
Someone began to fire a slug thrower from the roof. The trucks were not burning yet, but a stray breeze brought the raw, familiar odor of petroleum fuel to the hunching Slammers.
There wasn't anything in Hell worse than street fighting in somebody else's city—
And Tyl, like most of the veterans with him, had done it often enough to be sure of that.
A clot of soldiers stumbled out the doorway. Scratchard was the last, unrecognizable for a moment because of the huge load of equipment he carried.
Looked as if he'd staggered out with everything the rest of the company had left in the arms locker, Tyl thought. A veteran like Jack Scratchard should've known to—
Reinforced windows blew out of the second floor with a cyan flash, a bang, and a deep orange whoom! that was simultaneously a sound and a vision. The sergeant major hadn't tried to empty the arms locker after all.
"Put this on, sir," Scratchard muttered to the captain as the fire trucks up the street ignited in the spray of burning fragments hurled from the demolition of the Slammers' excess stores.The actinics of the powergun ammunition detonating in its storage containers made exposed skin prickle, but the exploding gasoline pushed at the crouching men with a warm, stinking hand.
Roof floodlights, driven by the emergency generator in the basement, flared momentarily around the City Offices. Shadows pooled beneath the waiting troops. They cursed and ducked lower—or twisted to aim at the lights revealing them.
Volleys of shots from the mob shattered the lenses before any of the Slammers made up their minds to shoot. The twin pincers, from the plaza and from the House of Grace, were already beginning to envelope the office building.
The route north and away was awash in blazing fuel. The police aircar that roared off that way, whipping the flames with its vectored thrust, pitched bow-up and stalled as an automatic weapon raked it from the same roof as the falling masonry had come.
Scratchard had brought a suit of clamshell body armor for Tyl to wear—and a submachine-gun to carry along with a bandolier holding five hundred rounds of ammo in loaded magazines.
"We're crossing the river," Tyl said in a voice that barely danced on the spikes of his present consciousness. "By squad."
He hadn't gotten around to numbering the squads.There was a clacking sound as the sergeant major latched Tyl's armor for him.
Tyl pointed at one of the sergeants—he didn't know any bloody names!—with his lightwand. "You first. And you. Next—"
In the pause, uncertain in the backlit darkness where the other noncoms were, Scratchard broke in on the command frequency saying, "Haskins, third. Hu, Pescaro, Bogue, and Hagemann. Move, you dickheads!"
Off the radio, his head close to Tyl's as the captain clipped his sling reflexively to the epaulet tab of his armor and shrugged the heavy bandolier over the opposite shoulder, the sergeant major added, "You lead 'em, sir—I'll hustle their butts from here."
Even as Tyl opened his mouth to frame a reply, Scratchard barked at one of the men who'd appeared just ahead of him, "Kekkonan—you give 'im a hand with names if he needs it, right?"
Sergeant Kekkonan, short and built like one of the tanks he'd commanded, clapped Tyl on the shoulder hard enough that it was just as well the captain had already started in the direction of the thrust—toward the river and the squad running toward the levee wall as swiftly as their load of weapons and munitions permitted.
A column of men came around the northern corner of the building. Their white tunics rippled orange in the glare of the burning vehicles. The leaders carried staffs as they had when they guarded the procession route, but in the next rank back winked the iridium barrels of powerguns and the antennas of sophisticated communications gear.
They were no more than three steps from the nearest of the nervous Slammers. When the leading orderlies shouted and threw themselves out of the way, there were almost as many guns pointed at the troops as pointed by them.
"Hold!" Tyl Koopman ordered through his commo helmet as his skin chilled and his face went stiff. Almost they'd made it, but now—
He was running toward the mob of orderlies—Via! They weren't a mob!—with his hands raised, palms forward.
"This isn't our fight!" he cried, hoping he was close enough to the orderlies to be understood by them as well as by the troops on his unit push. "Squads,keep moving—over the levee!"
The column of orderlies had stopped and flattened like the troops they were facing, but there were three men erect at the new head of the line. One carried a shoulder-pack radio; one a bull-horn; and the man in the middle was a priest with a crucifix large enough to be the standard that the whole column followed.
Tyl looked at the priest,wondering if he could grab the butt of his slung weapon fast enough to take some of them with him if the words the priest murmured to the man with the bull-horn brought a blast of shots from the guns aimed at the Slammers captain.
The burning trucks roared. Sealed parts ruptured with plosive sounds and an occasiona
l sharp crack.
"Go on,get out of here,"the bull-horn snarled,its crude amplification making the words even harsher than they were when they came from the orderly's throat.
Tyl spun and brandished his lightwand. "Third Squad," he ordered. "Move!"
A dozen of his troopers picked themselves up from the ground and shambled across the street behind him—toward the guns leveled on the mob from the levee's top. The first two squads were deployed there with the advantages of height and a modicum of cover if any of the locals needed a lesson about what it meant to take on Hammer's Slammers.
Tyl's timing hadn't been quite as bad as he'd thought. Hard to tell just what might have happened if the column from the House of Grace had arrived before Tyl's company had a base of fire across the street.
Two more squads were moving together. The leaders of the mob's other arm, bawling their way up the river road, had already reached the south corner of the City Offices. The cries of "Freedom, Freedom!" were suddenly punctuated with screams as a dozen or so of the leaders collapsed under a burst of electrostatic needles fired by one of the policemen inside.
Tyl heard the shots that answered the stunner, slug throwers as well as powerguns, but the real measure of the response was the barely audible clink of bottles shattering.
Then the gasoline bombs ignited and silhouetted the building from the south.
Tyl stood on the pedestrian way atop the levee, wondering when somebody would get around to taking a shot at him just because he was standing.
"Three and four," he ordered as the heavily laden troops scrambled up the steps to join him. "Across the river, climb over the barges. Kekkonan, you lead 'em, set up a perimeter on the other side.
"And wait!" he added, though Kekkonan didn't look like the sort you had to tell that to.
The rest of the company was moving in a steady stream, lighted between the two fires of the trucks and the south front of the building they had abandoned.
