Elemental

by Steven Savile

  The presumed Adolpho stared at her like a bunny paralyzed in the headlights. His mouth opened slackly. Bloody Hell! Buntz thought. All it’ll take is for him to start drooling!

  Instead the other fellow, Andreas, lunged forward and grabbed the book in both hands. He lifted it and planted a kiss right in the middle of the pebble-grain leather. Lowering it he boomed, “There, Dolph, you pussy! There’s one man in the deCastro family, and the whole county knows it ain’t you!”

  “Why you—” Adolpho said, cocking back a fist with his face a thundercloud, but the blonde had already lifted the book from Andreas. She held it out to Adolpho.

  “Here you go, Dolph, you fine boy!” she said. “Andreas, turn and take the salute of Captain Buntz of Hammer’s Slammers, a hero from beyond the stars greeting a Placidan patriot!”

  “What’s that?” Andreas said. He turned to look over his shoulder.

  Buntz’d seen more intelligence in the eyes of a poodle, but it wasn’t his business to worry about that. He and Lahti together threw the fellow sharp salutes. The Slammers didn’t go in for saluting much—and to salute in the field was a court-martial offense since it fingered officers for any waiting sniper—but a lot of times you needed some ceremony when you’re dealing with the locals. This was just one of those times.

  “An honor to serve with you, Trooper deCastro!” said Lahti. That was laying it on pretty thick, but you really couldn’t overdo it in a dog-and-pony show for the locals.

  “You’re a woman!” Andreas said. “They said they was taking women too, but I didn’t believe it.”

  “That’s right, Trooper,” Buntz said briskly before his driver replied. He trusted Lahti—she wouldn’t be driving Herod if he didn’t—but there was no point in risking what might come out when she was hot and dry and pretty well pissed off generally.

  “Now,” he continued, “I see the paymaster—” another bored clerk, a little back from the recorder “—waiting with a stack of piasters for you. Hey, and then there’s free drinks in the refreshment car just like they said.”

  The “refreshment car” was a cattle truck with slatted steel sides that weren’t going to budge if a new recruit decided he wanted to be somewhere else. A lot of steers had come to that realization over the years and it hadn’t done ’em a bit of good. Two husky attendants waited in the doorway with false smiles, and there were two more inside dispensing drinks: grain alcohol with a dash of sweet syrup and likely an opiate besides. The truck would hold them, but a bunch of repentant yokels crying and shaking the slats wouldn’t help lure their neighbors into the same trap.

  Buntz saluted the other deCastro. The poor lug tried to salute back, but his arm seemed to have an extra joint in it somewhere. Buntz managed not to laugh and even nodded in false approval. It was all part of the job, like he’d told Lahti; but the Lord’s truth was that he’d be less uncomfortable in a firefight. These poor stupid bastards!

  The newsreader had given the mike back to the county governor. It was funny to hear the crew from the capital go on about honor and patriotism while the local kept hitting the pay advance and free liquor. Buntz figured he knew his neighbors.

  Though the blonde knew them too, or anyway she knew men. Instead of climbing back onto the platform, she was circulating through the crowd. As Buntz watched she corralled a tall, stooped fellow who looked pale—the locals were generally red-faced from exposure, though many women carried parasols for this event—and a stocky teenager who was already glassy-eyed. It wouldn’t take much to drink in the truck to put him the rest of the way under.

  The blonde led the sickly fellow by the hand and the young drunk by the shirt collar, but the drunk was really stumbling along quick as he could to grope her. She didn’t seem to notice, though when she’d delivered him to the recorder, she raised the book to his lips with one hand and used the other to straighten her blouse under a jumper that shone like polished silver.

  They were starting to move, now, just like sheep in the chute to the slaughter yard. Buntz kept saluting, smiling, and saying things like, “Have a drink on me, soldier,” and, “Say, that’s a lot of money they pay you fellows, isn’t it?”

  Which it was in a way, especially since the inflation war’d bring—war always brought—to the Placidan piaster hadn’t hit yet except in the capital. There was three months’ pay in the stack.

  By tomorrow, though, most of the recruits would’ve lost the whole wad to the trained dice of somebody else in the barracks. They’d have to send home for money then; that or starve, unless the Placidan government fed its soldiers better than most of these boondock worlds did. Out in the field they could loot, of course, but right now they’d be kept behind razor ribbon so they didn’t run off when they sobered up.

  The clerks were trying to move them through as quick as they could, but the recruits themselves wanted to talk: to the recorder, to the paymaster, and especially to Buntz and Lahti. “Bless you, buddy!” Buntz said brightly to the nine-fingered man who wanted to tell him about the best way to start tomatoes. “Look, you have a drink for me in the refreshment car and I’ll come back and catch you up with a couple more as soon as I’ve done with these other fellows.”

  Holding the man’s hand firmly in his left, Buntz patted him on the shoulders firmly enough to thrust him toward the clerk with the waiting stack of piasters. The advance was all in small bills to make it look like more. At the current exchange rate three months’ pay would come to about seventeen Frisian thalers, but it wouldn’t be half that in another couple weeks.

  A pudgy little fellow with sad eyes joined the line. A woman followed him, shrieking, “Alberto, are you out of your mind? Alberto! Look at me!” She was no taller than the man but easily twice as broad.

  The woman grabbed him by the arm with both hands. He kept his face turned away, his mouth in a vague smile and his eyes full of anguish. “Alberto!”

  The county governor was still talking about liquor and money, but all the capital delegation except an elderly, badly overweight union leader had gotten down from the platform and were moving through the crowd. The girlishly pretty army officer touched the screaming woman’s shoulder and murmured something Buntz couldn’t catch in the racket around him.

  The woman glanced up with a black expression, her right hand rising with the fingers clawed. When she saw the handsome face so close to hers, though, she looked stunned and let the officer back her away.

  Alberto kissed the book and scooted past the recorder without a look behind him. He almost went by the pay table, but the clerk caught him by the elbow and thrust the wad of piasters into his hand. He kept on going to the cattle truck: to Alberto, those steel slats were a fortress, not a prison.

  A fight broke out in the crowd, two big men roaring as they flailed at each other. They were both blind drunk, and they didn’t know how to fight anyway. In the morning they’d wake up with nothing worse than hangovers from the booze that was the reason they were fighting to begin with.

  “I could take ’em both together,” Lahti muttered disdainfully. She fancied herself as an expert in some martial art or another.

  “Right,” said Buntz. “And you could drive Herod through a nursery, too, but they’d both be a stupid waste of time unless you had to. Leave the posing for the amateurs, right?”

  Buntz doubted he could handle the drunks barehanded, but of course he wouldn’t try. There was a knife in his boot and a pistol in his right cargo pocket; the Slammers had been told not to wear their sidearms openly to this rally. Inside the turret hatch was a submachine gun, and by throwing a single switch he had control of Herod’s tribarrel and 20-cm main gun.

  He grinned. If he said that to the recruits passing through the line, they’d think he was joking.

  The grin faded. Pretty soon they were going to be facing the Brotherhood, who wouldn’t be joking any more than Buntz was. The poor dumb bastards.

  The county governor had talked himself out. He was drinking from a demijohn, resting the heavy e
arthenware on the cocked arm that held it to his lips.

  His eyes looked haunted when they momentarily met those of Buntz. Buntz guessed the governor knew pretty well what he was sending his neighbors into. He was doing it anyway, probably because bucking the capital would’ve cost him his job and maybe more than that.

  Buntz looked away. He had things on his conscience too; things that didn’t go away when he took another drink, just blurred a little. He wouldn’t want to be in the county governor’s head after the war, though, especially at about three in the morning.

  “Against tyrants we are all soldiers,” caroled the tune in the background. “If our young heroes fall, the fatherland will raise new ones!”

  The union leader was describing the way the army of the legitimate government would follow the Slammers to scour the continent north of the Spine clean of the patches of corruption and revolt now breeding there. Buntz didn’t know what Colonel Hammer’s strategy would be, but he didn’t guess they’d be pushing into the forested highlands to fight a more numerous enemy. The Brotherhood’d hand ’em their heads if they tried.

  On the broad plains here in the south, though … . Well, Herod’s main gun was lethal for as far as her optics reached, and that could be hundreds of kilometers if you picked your location.

  The delegation from the capital kept trying, but not even the blond newsreader was making headway now. They’d trolled up thirty or so recruits, maybe thirty-five. Not a bad haul.

  “Haven’t saluted so much since I joined,” Lahti grumbled, a backhanded way of describing their success. “Well, like you say, Top, that’s the job today.”

  The boy kissing the book was maybe seventeen standard years old—or not quite that. Buntz hadn’t been a lot older when he joined, but he’d had three cousins in the Regiment and he’d known he wasn’t getting into more than he could handle. Maybe this kid was the same—the Army of Placidus wasn’t going to work him like Hammer’s Slammers—but Buntz doubted the boy was going to like however long it was he wore a uniform.

  The last person in line was a woman: mid-30s, no taller than Lahti, and with a burn scar on the back of her left wrist. The recording clerk started to hand her the book, then recoiled when he took a look at her. “Madame!” he said.

  “Hey, Hurtado!” a man said gleefully. “Look what your missus is doing!”

  “Guess she don’t get enough dick at home, is that it?” another man called from a liquor booth, his voice slurred.

  “The proclamation said you were enlisting women too, didn’t it?” the woman demanded. “Because of the emergency?”

  “Sophia!” cried a man stumbling to his feet from a circle of dice players. He was almost bald, and his long, drooping moustaches were too black for the color to be natural. Then, with his voice rising, “Sophia, what are you doing?”

  “Well, maybe in the capital,” the recorder said nervously. “I don’t think—”

  Hurtado grabbed the woman’s arm. She shook him off without looking at him.

  “What don’t you think, my man?” said the newsreader, slipping through what’d become a circle of spectators. “You don’t think you should obey the directives of the Emergency Committee in a time of war, is that what you think?”

  The handsome officer was just behind her. He’d opened his mouth to speak, but he shut it again as he heard the blonde’s tone.

  “Well, no,” the clerk said. The paymaster watched with a grin, obviously glad that somebody else was making the call on this one. “I just—”

  He swallowed whatever else he might’ve said and thrust the book into the woman’s hands. She raised it; Hurtado grabbed her arm again and said, “Sophia, don’t make a spectacle of yourself!”

  The newsreader said, “Sir, you have no—”

  Sophia bent to kiss the red cover, then turned and backhanded Hurtado across the mouth. He yelped and jumped back. Still holding the book down at her side, she advanced and slapped him again with a full swing of her free hand.

  Buntz glanced at Lahti, just making sure she didn’t take it into her head to get involved. She was relaxed, clearly enjoying the spectacle and unworried about where it was going to go next.

  The Placidan officer stepped between the man and woman, looking uncomfortable. He probably felt pretty much the same as the recorder about women in the army, and maybe if the blonde hadn’t been here he’d have said so. As it was, though—

  “That will be enough, Señor Hurtado,” he said. “Every family must do its part to eradicate the cancer of rebellion, you know.”

  Buntz grinned. The fellow ought to be glad that the blonde’d interfered, because otherwise there was a pretty fair chance that Lahti would’ve made the same points. Lahti wasn’t one for words when she could show just how effective a woman could be in a fight.

  “We about done here, Top?” she said, following Sophia with her eyes as she picked up her advance pay.

  “We’ll give it another fifteen minutes,” Buntz said. “But yeah, I figure we’re done.”

  “Arise, children of the fatherland … ,” played the sound truck.

  “It’s gonna be a hot one,” Lahti said to the sky above Herod. The tank waited as silent as a great gray boulder where Lahti’d nestled it into a gully on the reverse slope of a hill. They weren’t overlooked from any point on the surface of Placidus—particularly from the higher ground to the north which was in rebel hands. Everything but the fusion bottle was shut down, and thick iridium armor shielded that.

  “It’ll be hot for somebody,” Buntz agreed. He sat on the turret hatch; Lahti was below him at the top of the bow slope. They could talk in normal voices this way instead of using their commo helmets. Only the most sophisticated devices could’ve picked up the low-power intercom channel, but he and Lahti didn’t need it.

  He and Lahti didn’t need to talk at all. They just had to wait, them and the crew of Hole Card, Tank H47, fifty meters to the north in a parallel gully.

  The plan wouldn’t have worked against satellites, but the Holy Brotherhood had swept those out of the sky the day they landed at New Carthage on the north coast, the Federation capital. The Brotherhood commanders must’ve figured that a mutual lack of strategic reconnaissance gave the advantage to their speed and numbers … and maybe they were right, but there were ways and ways.

  Buntz grinned. And trust Colonel Hammer to find them.

  “Hey Top?” Lahti said. “How long do we wait? If the Brotherhood doesn’t bite, I mean.”

  “We switch on the radios at local noon,” Buntz said. “Likely they’ll recall us then, but I’m just here to take orders.”

  That was a gentle reminder to Lahti, not that she was out of line asking. With Herod shut down, she had nothing to see but the sky—white rather than really blue—and the sides of the gully.

  Buntz had a 270° sweep of landscape centered with the Government firebase thirty klicks to the west. His external pickup was pinned to a tree on the ridge between Herod and Hole Card, feeding the helmet displays of both tank commanders through fiber optic cables.

  There were sensors that could maybe spot the pickup, but it wouldn’t be easy and even then they’d have to be searching in this direction. The Brotherhood wasn’t likely to be doing that when they had the Government battalion and five Slammers combat cars to hold their attention on the rolling grasslands below.

  The Placidan troops were in a rough circle of a dozen bunkers connected by trenches. In the center of the encampment were four 15-cm conventional howitzers aiming toward the Spine from sandbagged revetments. The trenches were shallow and didn’t have overhead cover; ammunition trucks were parked beside the guns without even the slight protection of a layer of sandbags.

  According to the briefing materials, the firebase also had two calliopes whose task was to destroy incoming shells and missiles. Those the Placidan government bought had eight barrels each, arranged in superimposed rows of four.

  Buntz couldn’t see the weapons on his display. That meant they’d
been dug in to be safe from direct fire; the only decision the Placidan commander’d made that he approved of. Two calliopes weren’t nearly enough to protect a battalion against the kind of firepower a Brotherhood commando had available, though.

  The combat cars of 3d Platoon, G Company, were laagered half a klick south of the Government firebase. The plains had enough contour that the units were out of direct sight of one another. That wouldn’t necessarily prevent Placidans from pointing their slugthrowers up in the air and raining projectiles down on the Slammers, but at least it kept them from deliberately shooting at their mercenary allies.

  Buntz’s pickup careted movement on the foothills of the Spine to the north. “Helmet,” he said, enabling the voice-activated controls. “Center three-five-oh degrees, up sixteen.”

  The magnified image showed the snouts of three air-cushion vehicles easing to the edge of the evergreen shrubs on the ridge nearly twenty kilometers north of the Government firebase. One was a large armored personnel carrier; it could carry fifteen fully-armed troops plus its driver and a gunner in the cupola forward. The APC’s tribarrel was identical to the weapons on the Slammers’ combat cars, a Gatling gun that fired jets of copper plasma at a rate of five hundred rounds per minute.

  The other two vehicles were tank destroyers. They used the same chassis as the APC, but each carried a single 9-cm high-intensity powergun in a fixed axial mount—the only way so light a vehicle could handle the big gun’s recoil. At moderate range—up to five klicks or so—a 9-cm bolt could penetrate Herod’s turret, and it’d be effective against a combat car at any distance.

  “Saddle up, trooper,” Buntz said softly to Lahti as he dropped down into the fighting compartment. “Don’t crank her till I tell you, but we’re not going to have to wait till noon after all. They’re taking the bait.”

  The combat cars didn’t have a direct view of the foothills, but like Buntz they’d raised a sensor pickup; theirs was on a pole mast extended from Lieutenant Rennie’s command car. A siren wound from the laager; then a trooper shot off a pair of red flare clusters. Rennie was warning the Government battalion—they couldn’t be expected to keep a proper radio watch—but Buntz knew that Platoon G3’s main task was to hold the Brotherhood’s attention. Flares were a good way to do that.