by David Drake
The pad wasn’t cratered: the explosive had spread in a thin smooth sheet before it went off, and concrete has great compression strength. The structures which had covered more than a thousand square meters of the pad were gone except for twisted fragments which had fallen back after the blast blew everything skyward. The starship, thick-hulled and weighing over 150,000 tonnes, appeared undamaged. The valves had been wrenched off the two open cargo hatches, however.
Huber found the truck he’d been aiming at; the shockwave had shoved it into the loading dock which extended from the back of the terminal building. He gave it a three-round burst from reflex, watching it burst into flames as his AI found him something more useful to shoot at.
Deseau and Learoyd were firing at gun positions on the roof of the terminal, though nothing moved there except the haze of smoke from the anti-personnel bomblets which had gone off seconds before. Instead of a nearby target, Huber’s helmet targeted a line of vehicles on the northern edge of the pad. At least a company of the Waldheim Dragoons were using blast deflectors as breastworks against the Slammers attacking from that side. Tribarrels on the Waldheim APCs and 10-cm powerguns on their tanks stabbed the distant hills.
The walls now raised from the pad were meant to deflect a giant starship’s full takeoff thrust skyward so it wouldn’t knock down everything within a kilometer. The structures were sufficient to stop even a 20-cm bolt, but the cars approaching from southeast had a clear shot at the sheltering vehicles.
Huber set the target and brought up his sight’s magnification. He was using light amplification rather than thermal viewing; the many fires dotting the port’s flat expanse provided more than enough illumination. When his pipper centered on a tank’s turret ring, he thumbed the trigger and let the stabilizer hold his bolts on target. The tank’s own ammunition blew it up in a cyan flash.
Huber shifted to the next target over, an APC rocking in the shockwave of the tank’s destruction. Before he could fire, a 20-cm bolt hit the lightly armored vehicle and sprayed molten blobs of it a hundred meters away.
Fencing Master continued to advance. The ten-story terminal building blocked Huber’s line of sight to the Dragoons; his faceshield careted windows instead. He squeezed, slewing the tribarrel to help the car’s forward motion draw his burst across the seventh floor from left to right. The rooms were dark till the bolts hit, but gulps of orange flame followed each cyan flash as plasma ignited the furnishings.
An equipment park on the southwest side of the pad had taken a pasting from incendiaries. Hundreds of vehicles were alight. Every so often one erupted with greater enthusiasm like a bubble rising in a caldera to scatter blazing rock high in the air. Eight combat cars skirted the park to the south, moving fast. Their tribarrels raked the back side of the terminal building.
At the beginning of the war, Solace had started building concrete-roofed dugouts at intervals around the perimeter of Port Plattner. The work had stopped when Solace Command realized that the Outer States were barely capable of defense, and even those completed—three of them in the sector Central had assigned to Huber’s troops—appeared to be unmanned.
Deseau and Learoyd had burned the firing slit of the southernmost to twice its original size. Now as Fencing Master swept around the squat structure, Learoyd depressed his tribarrel and fired a long burst down the entrance ramp at the back. The steel door gushed red sparks and ruptured inward, but there was no secondary explosion.
White flares popped from the roof of the terminal building. More flares followed from a dozen points across Port Plattner, including the northern perimeter where the Waldheim Dragoons had been fighting. “UC forces, we surrender!” a woman’s voice cried. “Terminal control surrenders, by the Lord’s mercy we surrender!”
She must have been using the port’s starship communications system because her high-output transmission blanketed all frequencies. Every floor of the terminal building was ablaze, but those were merely administrative offices. The actual control room was in a sub-basement, armored against the chance of a starship crash.
Fencing Master turned left, away from the base of the terminal. Padova dropped the car twice onto the sodded lawn to scrub off inertia that wanted to carry them into the burning building. The other Highball cars were braking in roostertails of red sparks as their skirts skidded on concrete. The terminal was a tower of flame, lashing the ground with pulses of heat.
“Sir, what should I do!” Padova said. They were moving slowly south along the face of the building, crushing ornamental shrubs under their skirts. Foghorn and Fancy Pants followed, while Lieutenant Messeman’s cars had halted on the other side of a wing-shaped entrance marquee which extended twenty meters from the front entrance.
“All Slammers units,” a familiar voice growled. “This is Regiment Six, troopers. Cease fire unless you’re fired on. Under no circumstances fire on the starships that’ll start landing shortly. Hammer out.”
Deseau tracked a man running across the pad to the left. He didn’t shoot, but he was touching the trigger. Huber hooked a thumb to back him off, then said, “Highball, we’ll laager a hundred meters back the way we came. Infantry in the center of the circle.”
He looked at the plot the C&C box suggested, approved it, and concluded, “Six out.”
That was far enough from the terminal building that they wouldn’t broil, though Huber wanted to keep Highball reasonably close to its objective until somebody got around to ordering them to move. The Lord knew when that’d be, given what the Colonel and his staff had on their plate right now.
The eight vehicles crossing the pad from the west slowed as they approached the terminal. Huber’s eyes narrowed: one was a command car, a high-sided box built on the chassis of a combat car to hold far more communications and display options than could be fitted into a C&C box. Mostly they were staff vehicles, though Huber knew a couple of line company commanders preferred them to combat cars.
The shooting had probably stopped, though it was hard to say because munitions continued to explode. That wouldn’t end for days, not with the number of fires burning across the huge port. You could get killed just as dead when a truck blew up as you could by somebody aiming at you. . . .
That reminded Huber of casualties. He checked the readout on his faceshield and saw to his pleasant surprise that all the personnel were green—infantry included—except for a cross-hatched icon on Foghorn. “Three-one, what’s your casualty?” he said.
“Six, the right gun blew back and burned Quincy both arms,” Sergeant Nagano replied. “We got him sedated and covered in SpraySeal. He’ll be all right, I guess, but he won’t be much good in the field for a few months. Over.”
“Highball Six,” broke in another voice before Huber could reply, “this is Regiment Six. We’re joining your laager but leaving you in local control. Out.”
Huber felt a momentary jolt, but that was ingrained reflex; his conscious mind was far too exhausted to be concerned. “Roger, Six,” he said. “Break. Highball, spread the laager to accommodate eight more cars. The command group’s joining us. Highball Six out.”
The eight vehicles with Colonel Hammer, five of them from K Company, idled toward Highball. The cars of Huber’s original command reformed as the eastern half of a circle instead of the complete circuit. Instead of steering Fencing Master straight to its new location and rotating the bow out, Padova drove the car sideways. She was bragging, but Huber was too wrung out to call her down for it.
“Guess they didn’t have a walkover like we did,” Deseau said as he gave the newcomers a professional once-over. Three of the combat cars had holes in their plenum chambers; one was shot up badly enough that its skirts dragged. It probably couldn’t have kept up with the rest of the unit if they hadn’t been crossing such a smooth, hard surface. “Nobody even shot at us that I saw.”
“They shot at us, Frenchie,” Learoyd said. He tapped the bulkhead beside him with the knife he was using to scrape his ejection port.
Hube
r leaned forward to look past the trooper. Three projectiles, each separated from the next by a hand’s breadth, had dimpled the iridium inward. The third was deep enough that the armor had started to crack.
“From the bunker when we got close,” Learoyd explained; he sounded apologetic. “I guess I shouldn’t’ve quit shooting when something blew up inside.”
The impacts must’ve been audible in the next county, but Huber hadn’t been aware of them, nor Deseau either it seemed. Aloud Huber said, “No harm done, Learoyd. Nobody’d guess their compartmentalization was that good, and it’s not like there wasn’t anything else needing attention.”
The laager was complete with two meters between adjacent cars: tight, but giving them room to maneuver fast if something unexpected happened. The right wing gunner of the car next to Fencing Master raised his faceshield and shouted over the idling fans, “How’s your leg, Lieutenant?”
“Sir!” Huber said. He’d expected Colonel Hammer to be in the command car. “Sir, my leg’s fine, I guess, but I haven’t been using it much except to stand on.”
Huber’s left leg ached like a wall was leaning on it, but the rest of his body wasn’t much better. His skin itched and the slickness where his clamshell rubbed over his hipbones was either popped blisters or blood. In the morning, that might matter; right now, Arne Huber was alive and that was good enough.
Huber’s AI pulsed a warning on his faceshield. The task force was still under combat conditions, and a pair of aircars were approaching from the northeast a thousand meters up. The cars’ tribarrels weren’t on air defense, and the AI thought maybe they ought to be.
“They got running lights on, El-Tee,” Deseau said, swinging his gun onto the aircars manually. “They’re not trying to sneak up on us, but maybe they’re just too smart to try what wouldn’t work.”
“Put that gun on safe, trooper!” Colonel Hammer roared. Then he snapped his faceshield down and continued, “All Slammers units, do not shoot. Under no circumstances harm the incoming aircars. They’re bringing Solace representatives to treat with us! Six out.”
The aircars hovered a kilometer from the perimeter of Port Plattner. Hammer continued an animated conversation with someone on a push that didn’t include Highball Six. After nearly a minute’s discussion, the aircars mushed toward the laager together. The command car’s rear door opened; Major Pritchard stepped out of the vehicle.
Colonel Hammer nodded approval and swung his legs over the coaming of his fighting compartment to stand on the plenum chamber. He looked at Huber, grinned, and said, “Come along with me, Lieutenant. We’re going to take the surrender of the Republic of Solace.”
The two squads of infantry tilted their skimmers on end and stacked them in groups of three between the combat cars of Highball section. Sergeant Tranter swung down a cooler from Fancy Pants since the infantry’s supports were back with the hogs.
The troopers looked more concerned with the Colonel and his operations officer in the center of the circle than they were with the crackling destruction that covered most of the near distance. They’d seen destruction more often than they’d been this close to the Colonel, after all.
The aircars hovered for a moment, then landed a hundred meters out from the laager. Hammer grimaced and snapped to Pritchard, “Get ’em in here, Major. Do they think we’re going to walk over to them?”
Huber wasn’t sure he could walk that far. His left leg had been numb till he dropped from the plenum chamber to the ground. That shock had seemed to drive a hot steel rod straight up from his heel to the hip joint. His knee didn’t want to bend, and every time he moved the rod burned hotter.
Pritchard spoke into his commo helmet. He must have had a link to the aircars through his command vehicle, because after a moment they lifted and crawled toward the laager in ground effect. He smiled tightly to Hammer and Huber, saying, “The gentleman from Nonesuch was concerned that the terminal might fall in this direction. I assured him that the shell of a ferroconcrete building will remain standing after it’s burned itself out.”
His grin grew even harder. “I’ve got a lot of experience with that, of course. We all have.”
“Right,” said Hammer. “That’s why they hire us.” He glanced at Huber and added, “You’ve met Mister Lindeyar already, haven’t you, Lieutenant?”
“Him?” said Huber, shocked out of his torpor. He wasn’t sure he’d heard right; or if he had, that his brain hadn’t taken a shock during the battle that was making him remember things that’d never happened. “There was a Lindeyar at Benjamin, but what’s that got to do with Solace?”
A starship was dropping slowly. It was still at high altitude but the effort of supporting its mass in a controlled descent made it pulsingly noticeable. Hammer’d mentioned ships landing, so Huber supposed it part of the plan. Somebody’s plan, and no concern for a line lieutenant.
“Sigmund Lindeyar is the Nonesuch representative for all of Plattner’s World, not just to the United Cities,” Major Pritchard said, sounding detached. “Quite an important man back home, I gather.”
Hammer spat on the dirt at his feet. “Yeah,” he said, releasing the catches on the right side of his clamshell. “And if you don’t believe us, just ask Lindeyar himself.”
The aircars landed again, this time a few meters short of the bows of the combat cars. The slick-finished limousines reflected the surging firelight like pools of oil; by contrast, Foghorn and Fancy Pants were hulking gray boulders, scarred by the ages.
The starship continued to drop, balanced on the repulsion of two self-generated electromagnetic fields. Violet corona discharges danced across the heavens, crackling and roaring. Huber glanced at it, then frowned as he looked higher in the sky. A second starship was descending, and he thought a third waited above the second.
“El-Tee, there’s a couple more aircars coming up from the south,” Deseau said over Fencing Master’s intercom. “I don’t guess there’s a problem—they’re responding with Regimental IFF—but I figured I’d mention it.”
Huber nodded to Deseau. Learoyd had the receiver cover of the left wing tribarrel raised to adjust the feed mechanism. The crew of a CO’s vehicle caught a lot of extra work, which bothered Huber. Neither Deseau nor Learoyd seemed to notice, let alone care.
And it wasn’t like either one of them wanted to be platoon leader.
A group of military and civilian personnel were getting out of one of the aircars. Among them was an attractive—
Via! The attractive young woman was Daphne Priamedes, and the senior officer whom she’d bent to help to exit was her father, Colonel Apollonio Priamedes. Huber’d never expected to see either one of them again.
Lindeyar had arrived in the other vehicle, alone except for three bodyguards. Huber looked at him and smiled wryly. How many people have I killed in the last two days? And not one of them anybody I knew, let alone disliked.
“Colonel?” Huber said aloud. “There’s two more aircars coming from the south. I guess you’ve already got that under control, but—”
“But you thought you’d make sure I had the information,” Hammer said with an approving nod. “Right, I do.”
He gestured to the southern sky. “That’s the UC delegation,” he said. “They’re our principals on this contract so they need to be here.”
The first starship settled onto the far end of the pad, close by the ship that had brought the Waldheim Dragoons. The new vessel was about the size of the one that had held an entire brigade of armored cavalry. Its sizzling discharge ceased, but the concrete continued to vibrate at a dense bass note.
Lindeyar straightened the fall of his jacket and strode into the laager past the combat cars. His bodyguards waited beyond the circle.
The civilians who’d arrived in the other vehicle huddled for a moment. The old man wearing a fur stole and cap of office directed a question at Colonel Priamedes with a peevish expression.
Priamedes snapped a reply and walked after Lindeyar, his daughter at
his side. Daphne kept her face blank, but Huber could see from the way she held herself that she was ready to grab her father if his body failed him. Exchanging looks of indignation, the four civilians followed.
The two aircars coming from the south landed with a brusque lack of finesse; one even bounced. Huber leaned back slightly to get a better look between two vehicles of Lieutenant Messeman’s platoon. He’d been right about what he thought he’d seen: the four civilians getting out of the aircars were members of the UC Senate whom he’d seen before when he was assigned to duties in Benjamin, but White Mice were driving and guarding them. Their battledress was as ragged as Huber’s own, and one trooper’s plastron had been seared down to the ceramic core.
The man in the fur cap glared at Hammer. “You sir!” he said. “I’m President Rihorta. Colonel Priamedes tells me you’re the chief of these hirelings. May I ask why it’s necessary to hold these discussions in such a, such a—”
At a loss for words, he waved a hand toward the chaos beyond. His sleeves were fur-trimmed also. As if on cue, a fuel tank in the vehicle park exploded, sending a bubble of orange fire skyward.
“—a place?”
“Well, Mr. President . . .” Hammer said, putting a hand under his breastplate to take some of its chafing weight off his shoulders. “If I needed a better reason than that I felt like it, I’d say because it’ll convince you that you don’t have any choice. I could burn all of Bezant down around your ears even easier than I took the spaceport that your survival depends on.”
“Bezant is a civilian center, not a proper target of military operations,” Colonel Priamedes said in a tight voice.
“Is it?” Hammer snapped at the Solace officer. “I could say the same about Benjamin, couldn’t I?”
He waved his hand curtly. “But we’re not here to discuss, gentlemen,” he went on. “We already did all the discussing we needed to with those—”
He pointed to the bullet-gouged hull of the combat car he’d arrived in.
