by David Drake
“All right,” Huber said to the driver, more mildly than before. “I’ll check as we go, but you shouldn’t have any trouble now. Let’s get going.”
She nodded warily and fed power to her fans. The drive motors were in better shape than the truck’s body, which was something. They lifted smoothly, sending back a billow of dust before they transitioned from ground effect to free flight.
Why did a trade representative figure he could give orders to the Slammers? And being pretty close to right in the assumption, given the way Captain Dillard had hopped to attention after checking with Central. Nonesuch bought half the Thalderol base which Plattner’s World exported, but that was no concern of the Regiment’s.
Except that it obviously was a concern, if Hammer himself took time to meet with the fellow while the war was going to hell in a handbasket. Huber chuckled.
“You find something funny in this, Lieutenant?” Lindeyar said in a voice that could’ve frozen a pond.
“I’d been thinking earlier this morning that things can always get worse, sir,” Huber said calmly. When you’ve spent a significant fraction of your life with other people shooting at you, it’s easy to stay calm in situations where the potential downside doesn’t include a bullet in your guts. “I won’t say I’m glad to’ve been right, but I guess I do find it amusing, yes.”
Lindeyar didn’t reply, not so that he could be heard over the fans at any rate. Huber’d called up a topo map as a thirty percent mask on his faceshield. Base Alpha lay just beyond the city’s eastern outskirts. The driver was holding them on a direct course toward it, the only variations being those imposed by traffic regulations which were completely opaque to an outsider like Huber.
As well as five dirigibles hauling heavy cargoes, there were hundreds of aircars in sight. That in itself was a good reason to leave the driving to a local.
Base Alpha was a scar on the landscape, a twelve-hectare tract scraped bare of forest. There was nothing else like it in the Outer States. Even the dirigible fields where starships now landed were smaller. The soil had a yellow tinge and was already baking to coarse limestone. A two-meter berm of dirt stabilized with a plasticizer surrounded the perimeter; the TOC complex was a cruciform pattern dug in at the center.
The clearing wasn’t just to house the vehicles and temporary buildings required for the headquarters of an armored regiment: Hammer also demanded sight distances for the powerguns that defended the base against incoming aircraft and artillery fire. The UC government had protested, but that didn’t matter. The Colonel didn’t compromise on military necessities; he and his troops were the sole judges of what war made necessary.
One or more guns had been tracking the aircar ever since it came over the horizon on a course for the base. An icon quivered in the right corner of Huber’s faceshield, indicating that his AI had received and replied to Central’s authentication signal.
A kilometer from the base, the driver slowed her vehicle to a hover. Lindeyar leaned forward and said, “Why are we stopping?” in a louder voice than the fan roar demanded.
Huber tapped the green light on top of the navigational pod and said to the driver, “Go on in, we’re cleared.”
“No, I’ve got to call in,” the driver said. “Otherwise they’ll shoot us out of the air. It’s happened!”
“I told you, we’re cleared!” Huber said. “Do as I tell you or I’ll shoot you myself!”
Most of that was for Lindeyar’s benefit—but he wasn’t in a good mood, that was the bloody truth. Not that he’d have shot the woman while they were a hundred meters in the air and she was driving . . .
The driver obeyed with a desperate look, though they flew into the compound at a noticeably slower pace than they’d crossed Benjamin proper. The navigation pod directed her to a ten-byten meter square just outside the gate through the razor ribbon surrounding the TOC. The troopers on guard in a gun jeep watched with bored interest rather than concern, but their tribarrel tracked the car all the way in.
Huber hopped out immediately and offered Lindeyar his arm for support; the open truck didn’t have doors in back, though the sidewalls weren’t high. The civilian ignored the offer with the studied discourtesy that Huber’d expected.
A staff lieutenant—an aide, Huber supposed, but he didn’t know the fellow—trotted up the ramp from the TOC entrance as Huber and the civilian got out of the aircar. The driver kept her fans spinning, so grit swirled around their ankles and made Huber blink. He didn’t bother snarling at her.
“Mr. Lindeyar?” the aide called as he swung open the wire-wrapped gate. “Please step this way. The Colonel’s waiting for you.”
Well, I guess that’s “mission accomplished” for me, Huber thought. He turned to get back into the aircar. His helmet filters slapped down as the driver took off without him in a spray of dust. Some of it got under his collar, sticking to the sweat and making the cloth feel like sandpaper when he moved.
Lindeyar and his new escort were already entering the TOC, four buried climate-controlled trailers. Corrugated planking roofed the hub, and there was a layer of dirt over the whole. It wouldn’t do much against a direct hit by artillery, but the air defense tribarrels took care of that threat. A sniper with a 2-cm powergun could be dangerous from an aircar many kilometers away, though; burying the TOC avoided possible disruption.
Rather than call Log Section for another ride, Huber nodded to the troopers on guard and walked toward a temporary building a few hundred meters away. He wasn’t in a hurry to get back to the operations annex. The Lord knew, he’d always tried to do his job; but it was hard to see what good he was doing there, or what good he or anybody else could do in a ratfuck like Plattner’s World was turning into.
A combat car drove slowly along the clearing outside the berm; Huber could see only the upper edge of the armor. The trooper in the fighting compartment was part of the training cadre, giving a newbie driver some practice. The car was either worn out or a vehicle straight from Central Repair, being tested before it was released to a field troop.
Either way, the car and both troopers were going to be in combat very shortly—unless the UC faced reality and surrendered. The Colonel’d have to throw everything in to stop the Solace juggernaut, and it wouldn’t be enough.
The building’s open window had screens whose static charge repelled dust. The door with the stenciled sign SIGNALS 2 wasn’t screened, so Huber stepped inside quickly and closed it behind him. Three troopers looked at him through the displays of their specialized consoles.
“Is Lieutenant Basime here?” Huber asked. “I was told—”
Doll Basime stepped out of a side office, looking elfin although she wore issue fatigues without the tailoring some rear-echelon officers affected. “Arne! Come on in. Yeah, I’ve been at Central the past three weeks. Are you okay, because from what I’d heard . . .?”
“Hey, I’m walking around,” Huber said with a laugh. “That’ll do for now.”
Doll’s office was really a cubicle, but it had a door as a concession to her rank. She closed it behind Huber and motioned him to the chair behind the console, taking the flip-down seat on the wall for herself.
“You’re going to be a REMF like me from now on, Arne?” she asked, smiling but obviously concerned. She and Huber had been good friends at the Academy, a relationship simplified by the fact that neither had any sexual interest in men.
“Just for now,” he said as he sat down carefully. “I’m getting movement back day by day, and it doesn’t hurt much anymore.”
He shrugged, wishing he could truthfully say more. It felt really good to take the weight off his left leg, and that scared him. “A trade representative arrived from Nonesuch for a meeting with the Colonel and wound up in the wrong place. I got to bring him back here.”
Doll’s face went grim. “Do you know anything about what’s going on, Arne?” she asked. She patted her console. “Because I wasn’t about to eavesdrop on the Colonel’s private meetings.”
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br /> “Could you?” Huber said, interested.
She grinned, a more familiar expression. “Yeah,” she said, “but I couldn’t do it without leaving a trail that the counterintelligence people could follow. I don’t want to discuss that with Joachim Steuben.”
“It’d be a short discussion,” Huber said, also with a smile of sorts. Major Steuben was as pretty as Doll herself. Frequently his duties involved killing somebody, a task at which Steuben was remarkably good. Inhumanly good, you might say.
“I don’t know anything about Lindeyar except he seemed to expect a red carpet and wasn’t best pleased not to have one,” Huber said. He rubbed his neck; Doll gestured to the box of tissues on the console.
“Doll?” he went on, meeting her eyes. “Do you know how bad it is out there?”
She shrugged in turn. “I know it’s not good,” she said. “My section’s job is to keep up the links with friendly units, so I see all the traffic whether I want to or not.”
“Solace is pushing us everywhere,” Huber said. He was glad to talk to somebody. Misery wanting company, he supposed, and he knew he could trust Doll. “We’re just trying to block their advances.”
He shrugged again and went on, “The Waldheim Dragoons are landing at Port Plattner in a day’s time. They’re mechanized and brigade strength, maybe a thousand combat vehicles. They’ve got powerguns and there’s three 5-cm cannon in each platoon. Those’ll take out a tank at short range, and a combat car’s toast any time they hit it.”
Doll made a moue and patted her tight black hair with her fingertips as she absorbed the information. “I can tell you,” she said, staring toward the bulldozed wasteland past the slanting louvers, “that the UC isn’t expecting the arrival of any significant reinforcements in the next ten days. I’d have been warned to make sure there’d be circuits clear.”
“It wouldn’t matter,” Huber explained. “Solace is landing the Dragoons in a single lift. In a week or less they’ll be organized and move out. It’d take a month to unload a brigade in what passes for spaceports in the UC, and it’d take longer than that to put the dribs and drabs together as a fighting force. Via, what we’ve got now isn’t a coherent force except for the Regiment!”
“Could Nonesuch do anything?” Doll asked. “They’re the major player in this arm of the galaxy.”
“Lindeyar isn’t somebody whose good will I’d want to depend on,” Huber said. He chuckled at the thought. “But I sure don’t see a better hope.”
He was still wearing his commo helmet out of habit. The faceshield was raised, so the attention signal chimed in his ear instead of being a flashing icon. At the same time Doll’s switched-off console lit under Central’s control.
Colonel Hammer’s face coalesced out of pearly light. He looked grim, though that was normal for the few times Huber had seen the Colonel make a Regiment-wide announcement.
“Listen up, troopers,” Hammer said. Huber and Basime stared at the display. Hammer’s hard gray eyes were locked with theirs, despite the varied angles, and with those of everyone else who viewed the transmitted image. “Orders’ll be coming down in two hours. Be ready to move with your field kit. This means everybody. There’ll be reassignments of rear echelon personnel to line slots where they need to be filled.”
The Colonel rubbed his forehead; for a moment he looked very tired. His expression hardened again and he went on, “You’ve been the best soldiers every place you’ve fought. It’s no different here. Do your jobs, troopers; and if I do mine as well as you’ve always done yours, we’re going to pull this off yet!”
The image shrank and vanished; the memory of the Colonel’s words hung a moment longer in the small office. Huber got to his feet.
“Going to get your kit together, Arne?” Doll said as she squeezed aside to let him past.
“That’s next,” Huber said. “First I’m going to see the Colonel.”
He grinned at Doll as he opened the door. He felt numb, and there was a glowing wall in his mind that blocked off all the future except the next five minutes or so.
“First . . .” Huber said as he stepped into the outer office. “I’ve got to make sure I’m going back to the line!”
Huber strode toward the TOC entrance, his left leg stiff but not slowing him up a bit. He didn’t know how he was going to bluff his way through the guards, but as it chanced he didn’t have to. They’d heard the Colonel also, and they knew a lot of people were going to be moving fast on Regiment business.
Half a dozen figures came up the ramp from the TOC at the same time as Huber reached the wire going the other way. He unhooked the gate and pulled it open, then closed it behind him when they’d passed.
The last one through was the civilian, Lindeyar. He reached back and caught Huber’s arm over the wire. “You, Lieutenant!” he cried. “There’s to be a vehicle to carry me to Benjamin!”
Huber hooked the wire loop to the gate’s frame. He pulled his arm away, suppressing a momentary desire to slap the civilian back on his haunches with the same movement. He nodded to the guards and shuffled down the ramp, keeping to the right side as three more officers came out of the buried trailers with set expressions. They were on their way to duties that weren’t limited to staring at a display as other people fought a war. . . .
Huber grabbed the door before it closed; the air puffing from the interior was cool. The man coming out now was Colonel Hammer himself, with Major Kreutzer—the S-4 Personnel Officer—just behind him. Kreutzer’s arm was raised; he was in an agony of wishing he dared to physically restrain his commanding officer.
“Sir!” said Huber, stepping in front of Hammer.
“Not bloody now!” the Colonel snarled. He looked as though he might bull past. Huber braced himself, but there was no contact.
“Sir, you said you owe me,” Huber said, pitching his voice loudly enough to be heard over the sound of vehicles spinning up all around the base. “I’m collecting now. I want to go back to the field.”
Behind Kreutzer were three other officers, trying to catch Hammer before he went off without answering their questions. Warrant officers sat at consoles to either side of the narrow aisle, immersed in their displays.
“Huber?” Hammer said. His face thawed like ice breaking up on the surface of a river. “Via, yeah, you’re going back if you’re able to walk.”
He looked over his shoulder at the personnel officer. “Kreutzer, you wanted a CO for L Company?” he said. “All right, put Huber in the slot. And brevet him captain when you get a chance.”
“No sir!” Huber said. He’d expected the fury in Hammer’s expression, so it didn’t slow him down as he continued, “Sir, I’ve never commanded infantry and this is no time for on-the-job training. Send me back to F-3.”
“You only get away with crossing me if you’re right, Lieutenant!” Hammer said; and smiled again, minusculely. “Which you are this time. Kreutzer, got any suggestions?”
“Yancy in L-2’s senior enough,” Kreutzer said. He shrugged. “We’ll see if she can handle it. There’s not a lot of choice, not now.”
“Not a bloody lot,” Hammer agreed. “All right, and we’ll transfer—Algren, isn’t it? The newbie we put in F-3 to L-2. Get on with it.”
He pushed past Huber. The S-4 locked down his faceshield and passed the orders on, his voice muffled by his helmet’s sonic cancellation field. Huber fell in behind the Colonel, heading back to the surface and an aircar to take him to wherever platoon F-3 was
while the movement orders were being cut. Lieutenant Arne Huber was going home.
Huber could’ve held a virtual meeting, but for his first contact with F-3 since his medevac he preferred face-to-face. The platoon could still scramble in thirty seconds if they had to; as they well might have to. . . .
Fox Three-eight was straight out of Central Repair and hadn’t been named yet. Until this moment Huber hadn’t seen either the vehicle or its crew, three newbies commanded by a former tank driver named Gabinus who’d just
been promoted to sergeant.
Its forward tribarrel, tasked to sector air defense, ripped a burst skyward. One of the newbies jumped.
“Relax, trooper,” Sergeant Deseau said, making a point of being the blasé veteran. “They’re just sending over a round every couple hours to keep us honest. If one ever gets through, then they’ll start shelling us for real.”
Nothing would get through while elements of the Slammers were stiffening the defenses of Benjamin. This shell popped above the northern horizon, leaving behind a flag of dirty black smoke. The sun was low above the trees, though it’d be three hours before full dark. Three hours before the start of the mission.
“For those of you who don’t know me . . .” Huber said. Because Three-three had been knocked out in his absence, eight of the wary faces were new to him. “I’ve been at Central for the past three weeks, and I’m glad to be back with F-3 where I belong.”
“And we’re bloody lucky to have you back, El-Tee,” Deseau muttered. “It’s going to be tough enough as it is.”
It’s going to be tougher than that, Frenchie, Huber thought, but aloud he said, “We’re part of Task Force Highball—” the whole Regiment had been broken up into task forces for this operation; Captain Holcott of M Company was leading Task Force Hotel “— with F-2, Battery Alpha, and the infantry of G-1 riding the hogs and ammo haulers. We’ll have a tank recovery vehicle, but it’ll be carrying a heavy excavator. If a car’s hit or breaks down so it can’t be fixed ASAP, we combat loss it and proceed with the mission. Got that?”
A couple of the veterans swore under their breath; they got it, all right. An operation important enough that damaged vehicles were blown in place instead of being guarded for repair meant the personnel involved couldn’t expect a lot of attention if they were hit, either.
“I’m in command of the task force,” Huber continued. “Lieutenant Messeman of F-2 is XO. We’ve got six cars running, they’ve got four. There’ll be six hogs—” self-propelled 200-mm rocket howitzers “— and eleven ammo vehicles in the battery, and G-1 has thirty-five troops under Sergeant Marano.”
