by David Drake
Trip flares attached to the wire on the south side of Bulwark Base began to go off. The sappers leading the Democrat assault had disconnected the flares on their approach routes. Members of the garrison stumbled over their own mines while fleeing into the night.
A truck, one of the few vehicles assigned to the base, drove south out of the engineer compound. Scores of troops clung to the cab and body. Some of them shot wildly.
Democrat riflemen and machine gunners opened fire. Bullets sparked on the frame and slapped troops from the vehicle. The truck continued to accelerate, skidding on the slick surface. Its eight driven wheels cast up a rooster-tail of mud, water, and duckboards.
Two buzzbombs sputtered toward the moving target. One missed high, sailing over the berm to vanish. The other went off close alongside. Would-be escapees tumbled from the bed, but the run-while-flat tires permitted the truck to keep going.
The gate to the road south from Bulwark Base was three X-frames connected by a horizontal pole and strung with barbed wire. A flangelike extension of the berm was intended to force vehicles to slow for a right-angle turn when entering or leaving the base.
The truck hit the gate, crushed it down, and roared over the berm’s sloped extension in low gear. A Central States soldier ran along behind the vehicle, trying to climb aboard. He lost his footing on the berm and sprawled.
As the truck disappeared, the soldier rose to one knee and tried to shoot at the vehicle. Mud clogged his rifle. He flung the useless weapon after the truck. A moment later, a Democrat machine gun nailed him into the berm with a burst of golden tracers.
The leg Daun had flung around the mast cramped because of the awkward angle. That pain was lost in the red throb of blood returning to his left arm now that he didn’t dangle by it.
With no tools and one good hand, Daun couldn’t unwrap the guy wire that held him. It was spliced into his safety belts and apparently pinched by a fold of the slowly collapsing mast. He’d lost the wrist light when the first missile went off.
He supposed that was a good thing, because otherwise he’d have been a lighted target. He giggled hysterically.
Daun heard a thump over the shooting. He looked down. A dark parcel lay on an expanse of softly reflectant aluminum. Someone had tossed a satchel charge onto the roof of the battery commander’s trailer.
Daun clutched the mast with his free arm and tried to find footing for his other leg. He closed his eyes instinctively. Blood vessels in his eyelids reddened the yellow flash that streamed through them.
The blast flattened the trailer and flung Daun upward like a yo-yo shooting the moon. The guy wire broke again, but the safety belts held.
The mast toppled with the grace of a falling tree, slowly at first but accelerating as it neared the ground. Daun was underneath. Remaining guy wires zinged as they parted.
A Democrat parachute flare drifted down through the overcast to illuminate the encampment. The mast rotated as light bloomed. Daun stared down through the latticework at the ruin of Bulwark Base instead of up into the clouds that would otherwise have been the last thing he saw.
A pole in the base section had broken, causing the mast to twist on the remaining verticals before it hit the ground. Daun slammed into the mud, beside rather than beneath the structure to which he was bound.
The impact knocked all the breath out of his body. The antenna capsule snapped off and bounced twice before coming to rest beside the technician. He didn’t quite lose consciousness, but the shots and screams around him faded into a thirty-cycle hum for a few seconds.
The rain had almost ceased. The flare sank lower. Vertical objects cast jagged shadows that cut like saw-teeth across the surface of Bulwark Base.
Daun lay with the mast on one side of him and on the other the low sandbag wall that had once protected the Technical Detachment’s tent. The missile had destroyed the wall it hit and the structure beyond, but it spared the sandbags on the opposite side.
Someone just across the wall was moaning.
Daun tried to free himself from the tangle in which he lay. His left leg was pinned and his left arm was still tethered to the mast. He could move his head as far as his neck flexed, but he couldn’t crane it high enough to see what was holding his limbs.
The bunched jacket held his right arm almost as tightly as his left. There was no possibility of tearing the tough, weatherproof fabric.
Daun heard voices nearby. He opened his mouth to call for help. One of the voices said, “Watch it! This one’s alive!”
A machine pistol within the area the Tech Detachment tent had covered fired a short burst downward. The muzzle flashes were red and bright.
Daun wore a pistol as part of his required equipment. It was in a cross-draw holster on his left side, where it was least in the way when he was working. He could no more reach the weapon now than he could fly back to Nieuw Friesland under his own power.
“They were playing cards,” said one of the Democrats.
“Hey!” said his partner. “We’re just supposed to be taking guns and ammunition.”
“So I’m searching their wallets for items of intelligence value,” the first Democrat snarled. “If you’re smart, you’ll keep your fucking mouth shut about it, too.”
The sky blazed orange as the light of an explosion reflected from the low clouds. The ground shock lifted Daun, the mast, and the sandbag wall an instant before the airborne shock wave punched across them. The ammo dump had exploded.
Daun hit the ground again. He was still tied to the mast. Sandbags collapsed over him.
Individual shells detonated during the next fifteen seconds, some of them at a considerable distance where the initial explosion hurled them. The first Democrat was cursing. The blast had knocked him skidding in the mud.
“There’s one!” cried his partner. Two machine pistols fired together. Daun felt the whack of little bullets against the sandbags over him, but he wasn’t the target. The moans of the soldier on the other side of the wall ended in a liquid gurgle.
“Hey, lookit!” shouted the second member of the Democrat clean-up team. He was standing beside Daun, but the Frisian could see only a triangle of cloud through the jumble of collapsed wall. “Look at this!”
“Bloody hell!” said the first man. “That’s a bloody powergun. The Cents don’t have bloody powerguns!”
“I do,” said his jubilant partner. A bolt of cyan plasma lanced skyward.
“You cursed fool!” the first Democrat said. “Don’t do that! Somebody’ll shoot us! Besides”—his voice changed slightly into that of a hustler calculating his chances—“it’s not worth anything much ’cause we can’t get ammo for it. Look, though—just for the hell of it, I’ll give you two hundred lira for it. For the curiosity.”
“Fuck you,” said his partner. “This is mine.”
The two Democrats stepped onto the bags covering Daun. They hopped from him over the fallen antenna mast.
“Look,” the first man was saying, “half of it is mine anyway. . . .”
Daun’s lungs burned, but he was afraid to breathe. The detached part of his mind noted that the second Democrat should be very careful about standing with his back to his partner this night. Otherwise he might die for the trophy, as surely as Sergeant Anya Wisloski had died.
Lawler
The platoon leader’s door was open. Trooper Johann Vierziger paused in the day room and raised his knuckles to knock on the jamb.
“Come on in, Vierziger,” called Lieutenant Hartlepool in false jollity. “You haven’t been with us long enough to know, but we’re not much on ceremony in this outfit.”
Vierziger had been transferred to the 105th Military Police Detachment on Lawler as soon as he’d completed basic training with the Frisian Defense Forces. He’d arrived a week ago, and had seen action—with the FDF—only once according to his records. That action had occurred the night before.
“Thank you, sir,” Vierziger said. He was a short man, dainty except for telltale
signs like the thickness of his wrists. Pretty, Hartlepool thought when the fellow was assigned to his platoon, and a nance.
Hartlepool had nothing against queers, not so it got in the way of his duties, but this was ridiculous. The One-Oh-Fifth wasn’t some parade-ground unit for show. They, and particularly 1st Platoon, A Company, were in firefights at least once a week.
Hartlepool couldn’t imagine who’d thought his platoon was the place to stick an effeminate newbie. He’d liked to have met the bureaucrat in an alley.
“Sit down, sit down,” Hartlepool said, gesturing to the seat in front of his desk. Malaveda, who now commanded First Squad, was in the room’s third chair, backed against the wall to one side.
Platoon leaders didn’t rate a lot of space at the best of times. Hartlepool had a glorified broom closet, but he knew there were lieutenants in the 105th who shared comparable quarters. Accommodations in Belair were tight. Expectation of war brought people to the capital, either for its fancied safely or because they believed there was money to be made.
“Thank you, sir,” Vierziger said. His face bore a slight smile, but he obviously didn’t intend to volunteer anything unasked. He sat down gracefully without touching the chair with his hands.
Vierziger reminded Hartlepool of somebody, but the lieutenant couldn’t place who.
“Well, we’ve got some good news for you, Vierziger,” Hartlepool said. The cheerful tone was wearing thin, but he didn’t know what other persona to adopt. “To begin with, Sergeant Vierziger. On the basis of Sergeant Malaveda’s report—”
He nodded to the non-com. Malaveda’s forehead glistened with sweat. He stared at the wall across the desk without acknowledging the remark.
Hartlepool cleared his throat. “Based on that,” he resumed, “and my analysis of both yours and Malaveda’s helmet recorders from last night’s incident, I requested that Lawler Command grant you an immediate field promotion. I’m pleased to say that they’ve agreed.”
“Thank you, sir,” Vierziger said. He reached across the desk to take Hartlepool’s proffered hand. His grip was firm and dry, almost without character.
“And thank you, Sergeant Malaveda,” Vierziger added, glancing at the non-com. “I trust your promotion will come through quickly also. You deserve it.”
He was perfectly appropriate in words, tone, and expression, but Hartlepool got the feeling that Vierziger was laughing at them. It was like watching a master artist accept the congratulations of a six-year-old on the quality of his painting.
Vierziger’s faint smile made memories click into place: another man, dark rather than blond, but small and pretty and queer . . .
“Ah, Vierziger?” the lieutenant asked. “Do you—did you happen to have a relative in the FDF? In Hammer’s Slammers, actually?”
Vierziger shook his head easily. “Not me,” he said. “No relatives at all, I suspect, though it’s been a very long time since I was home.”
Hartlepool thought of asking where Vierziger called home. He decided not to.
“I, ah . . .” he said. “I met Major Joachim Steuben once. He was an interesting man.”
He raised an eyebrow, an obvious demand that Vierziger reply to the non-question.
Vierziger smiled wider. The expression was as unpleasant as a shark’s gape. The lieutenant had been playing games with him. The lieutenant would never do that again. “So I gather,” Vierziger said. “Hammer’s hatchetman, wasn’t he? Until someone shot him in the back.”
“Bodyguard, as I heard it,” Hartlepool said. He chewed on his tongue for a moment to stimulate the flow of saliva in his dry mouth. “Well, he’s been gone for some while now. Almost since Colonel Hammer’s accession to the Presidency.”
“Seven years,” Vierziger said. “Seven years to the day I joined the Frisian Defense Forces. Or so they told me.”
Vierziger’s battle dress uniform was perfectly tailored. That wasn’t surprising, since Frisian MP units were traditionally strac, even on field duty. On Vierziger, however, the garb hung so perfectly that he might have modeled for the tailor.
Hartlepool cleared his throat again and tried on a brisk, businesslike expression. “Along with the promotion, Vierziger,” he said, “you’ve been reassigned. You’re, ah, quite remarkable. Of course you know that. Somebody seems to have decided you’re too valuable for a line unit here on Lawler.”
He was betting that Vierziger was too new to the FDF to know that the statement was utter nonsense. Nobody got transferred so quickly unless his commanding officer made a “This or I resign!” point of it with echelon.
From Vierziger’s icy smile, he knew exactly why he was being transferred. Hartlepool had been shocked speechless by the images recorded by the new recruit’s helmet cameras the night before.
Granted that Johann Vierziger was a valuable member of the FDF, the fellow was still too dangerous for Hartlepool to risk having him around. It was just that simple.
“Very well, sir,” Vierziger said. “My service with you has been interesting. I wish you the best of luck in the future.”
As if he were a commanding general speaking to his staff as he stepped down.
Vierziger stood up. “Am I dismissed, then, sir?” he added calmly.
“What?” said Hartlepool. “I, ah—I’d tell you your new assignment if I knew what it was, of course.”
Hartlepool didn’t know how he’d expected Vierziger to react to the notice of transfer, but he’d expected some reaction. The lieutenant felt as if he’d tried to climb one more step than the staircase had.
“It doesn’t really concern me, sir,” Vierziger said. “I’ll serve in any capacity to which my superiors choose to assign me.”
Vierziger’s voice was without expression, and his face was a skull.
If the man was what he appeared to be, he was a tool like the pistol in his belt holster or the knife whose hilt projected from his boot top. . . . But guns and knives will not act of their own accord. Nobody could watch images of the previous night without wondering whether Vierziger was at heart as uncontrolled as he was unstoppable when he went into action.
“Yes, well,” Hartlepool said. “Good luck in your assignment, wherever it is, Sergeant.”
Vierziger threw him a crisp salute. He looked like a boy in uniform—or a girl—as he turned on his heel and left the office.
“He isn’t human,” Sergeant Malaveda said. He could have been remarking on the quality of the local beer. His eyes swung toward the doorway now that Vierziger was gone, though he hadn’t looked at the man while they were together in the small room.
“He’s a hell of a gunman, though,” Hartlepool said, as if he were disagreeing. “Well, we’ll see what they make of him on a survey team. He’ll be going to Cantilucca as part of the security element.”
Malaveda raised an eyebrow.
“Via, yes, I know what his assignment is!” the lieutenant snapped.
He looked toward the empty doorway himself. “Major Steuben was like that. From the stories, at least. And the same kind of eyes. But Joachim Steuben’s been dead for a long time.”
Sergeant Malaveda stared at him. There seemed to be a chill in the room.
Earlier: Lawler
Though Vierziger, the trooper driving Sergeant Malaveda’s air-cushion jeep, was a newbie to the Frisian Defense Forces, he obviously had a lot of time in other armies on his clock. Malaveda guessed he was on the wrong side of thirty standard, but it was hard to be sure. Vierziger had the sort of baby-faced cuteness that some men keep from early teens to sixty.
It was one more reason for Malaveda, who shaved his scalp to hide the fact his hair was receding at age twenty-six, to dislike Vierziger.
“Pull up here,” Malaveda ordered as they eased toward the mouth of the alley by which they’d approached the rear of the target building. “And don’t get out where the street light’ll show us up.”
The newbie obeyed with the same delicate skill he’d shown while navigating the alley in the dark.
In light-amplification mode, the visors of Frisian commo helmets increased visibility to daytime norms, but they robbed terrain of the shadings, which the human brain processed into relative distances. Vierziger was a good driver, Malaveda had to admit—
To himself. There was no way he was going to praise the little turd out loud.
Vierziger switched off the fans. The hollow echo that filled the alley even on whisper mode drained away.
“Who the hell told you to shut down?” Malaveda snarled.
The newbie turned and looked at him. Vierziger’s expression was blank but not tranquil. Malaveda felt ice at the back of his neck.
“Nobody did, Sergeant,” Vierziger said. His voice was low-pitched, melodious, and just enough off-key to reinforce the chill Malaveda felt in his glance. “Would you like me to light the fans again?”
Malaveda scowled. “That’s not what I said. Just remember, you may think you’re something, but you’re serving with the best, now!”
Vierziger faced the alley mouth again. He drew his 2-cm shoulder weapon from the butt clamp that held it vertical beside his seat and checked the magazine. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.
Malaveda scowled, but he didn’t restart the discussion for the time being.
Lawler was a highly developed world with a population of nearly forty million. Even so there should have been enough room and resources for everybody.
The ostensible cause of—not-quite-war, but soon—was that the central provinces of the occupied continent wanted to retain links with Earth, while the coastal provinces wanted a Lawler that was independent and, coincidentally, ruled by coastal-province oligarchies.
The Junta of Central Province Governors had faced a planet-wide vote which would have been dominated by their opponents’ political machines. They forestalled it by raising their own army— and hiring two armored brigades from the Frisian Defense Forces.
The Junta couldn’t afford to pay the mercenaries forever just to stand around and look tough. Malaveda figured there’d be a riot pretty soon in one of the border cities. The Planetary Front—the thugs from the coasts—would kill people putting the riot down, or anyway the Junta would say they had.
