The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3 (hammer's slammers)

by David Drake

  While Fencing Master balanced in place, dust and grit billowed out all around beneath her lifted skirts. Some flew toward the crowd, forcing the thugs in the front rank to cover their faces or turn their heads away.

  “Watch the guys in the back!” Huber ordered, gripping the tribarrel with his thumbs deliberately lifted clear of the butterfly trigger. “Watch for anybody aiming at us!”

  With the skill of a ballerina, Tranter cocked the two bow nacelles forward at the same time as he angled the six other fans slightly to the rear. The blast from the bow nacelles dug like a firehose into the gravel roadway, then sprayed the spoil into the crowd with the energy required to float thirty tonnes of combat vehicle.

  The crowd broke. Those in the direct blast could no more stand against it than they could’ve swum through an avalanche. Spun away, battered away—some of the gravel was the size of a clenched fist—frightened away; blind from the dust and deafened by the howling air, they drove against those behind them.

  The rout was as sudden and certain as the collapse of a house of cards. Tranter adjusted his throttles with the care of a chemist titrating a solution. The thugs at the front and the gunmen at the rear were no threat compared to the iridium sandstorm that ground forward, minutely but inexorably.

  Dinkybob held station at Fencing Master’s left flank, her mass even more of a threat than the gape of her main gun’s pitted bore. She and the tank echeloned to the right behind her, Doomsayer, were buttoned up. There was nothing human about any of them, not even the mirrored facelessness of the gunners behind the combat car’s tribarrels.

  When panic started the crowd running, it continued till there was nothing left but the sort of detritus a flood throws up at the edge of its channel: clothing, clubs, papers of all manner and fashions, whirling in the wind from beneath Fencing Master’s steel skirts. A few bodies lay in the street as well: people who’d been trampled, people who’d been squeezed breathless; probably a few who’d fainted.

  Tranter cut his fan speed, adjusting the nacelles in parallel again to bring Fencing Master back into normal operation. They resumed forward movement at a walking pace.

  Arne Huber relaxed for the first time in …well, he wasn’t sure how long. He raised his faceshield and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.

  “Good job, Tranter,” he said. “Now, park us in the grounds of that building up there on the mound.”

  “Roger, El-Tee,” the driver said. “Ah, how about the landscaping, sir?”

  “Fuck the landscaping!” said Sergeant Deseau.

  Huber looked over his shoulder at Captain Orichos. She stood with the communicator in her hand but she wasn’t speaking into it. Huber grinned and said, “Frenchie’s right, Tranter. The bushes can take their chances.”

  He took a deep breath and looked at the dust and debris in front of them. “The good Lord knows the rest of us just did,” he added.

  The second recovery vehicle backed carefully into position between Fencing Master and a tank, grunting and whining through her intake ducts. Her rear skirts pinched up turf which her fans fired forward out of the plenum chamber in a black spray. The driver shut down, and for the first time since Task Force Sangrela’s arrival, there was relative peace in the center of Midway.

  “Can we stand down now, El-Tee?” Deseau asked, turning to face Huber. People in the street were staring up at the mercenaries while others looked down from circling aircars, but they were simply interested spectators. Some onlookers might have belonged to the mob that scattered half an hour earlier, but if so they’d thrown away their weapons and hidden their red headbands. Certainly they were no present threat.

  “Fox, this is Fox Three-six,” Huber said, making a general answer to Frenchie’s personal question. “Stand down, troopers. One man in the fighting compartment, the rest on thirty-second standby. I don’t know how long we’ll be halting here, but at least break out the shelter tarps. Three-six out.”

  “Learoyd, you’ve got first watch,” Frenchie said. “In two hours I’ll relieve you. Tranter, give me a hand with the tarp and the coolers.”

  Captain Orichos had vanished into the Assembly Building as soon as Fencing Master settled onto the terraced mound. To Huber’s surprise, a stream of chauffeured aircars had begun to arrive while Task Force Sangrela was setting up a defensive position around the pillared stone building. The civilian vehicles landed in the street and disgorged one or two expensively dressed passengers apiece, then lifted away in a flurry of dust.

  The new arrivals walked up the steps—three flights with landings between on the terraces—and entered the building. Some eyed the armored vehicles with obvious interest; others, just as obviously, averted their eyes as if from dung or a corpse.

  Captain Sangrela had spaced his vehicles bows outward like spokes on a wheel. Because there were only ten vehicles, they had to back onto the uppermost terrace in order to be close enough for mutual support; even so there was a twenty-meter gap between the flank of one unit and the next. The infantry were using power augers to dig two-man pits above and behind the armored circle.

  Huber unlatched his body armor to loosen it, but he didn’t strip it off quite yet. Tranter and Deseau stood behind Fencing Master, releasing the tie-downs that held gear to the bustle rack. Huber leaned out of the fighting compartment to steady a beer cooler with his hand till the troopers on the ground were ready to take the weight.

  Trooper Learoyd raised his helmet and rubbed his scalp; he was in his early twenties but already nearly bald. “Hey El-Tee?” he said. “Are all them people behind us friendlies? Because if they’re not …?”

  “I don’t think they’re going to shoot at us, Learoyd,” Huber said. “I won’t say I think they’re friendly, though.”

  That was particularly true of the group now walking across the Axis toward where Fencing Master was grounded. There were three principals, a woman with two men flanking her at a half-step behind to either side. Each wore a white blouse and kilt with a bright red sash and cummerbund. Before and behind that trio were squads of toughs with red sweatbands, some of those who’d been at the front and rear of the mob half an hour before. Now they weren’t carrying weapons, at least openly.

  They’d come from a walled compound across the Axis where it circled the Assembly Building. The outer walls were plasticized earth cast with a dye that Huber supposed was meant to be bright red. Because the soil was yellowish, the mixture had the bilious color of a sunburned Han.

  There were two four-story buildings within—wood-sheathed and painted red—and two more domed roofs which the three-meter walls would’ve hidden from ground level. Fencing Master had a good view down into the compound, however.

  Mauricia Orichos came out of the Assembly Building, pausing briefly to speak with a man entering. His cape of gossamer fabric shimmered repeatedly up through the spectrum on a three-minute cycle.

  The conversation over, Orichos walked purposefully toward Captain Sangrela who was bent over the commo unit on the back of his jeep. His driver was inflating a two-man tent.

  “El-Tee?” Learoyd said. “Is that the woman who’s making all the trouble?”

  He meant the head of the three dignitaries in white and red, now climbing the steps. “Right,” Huber said, a little surprised that Learoyd had volunteered what amounted to a political observation. “That’s Melinda Riker Grayle.”

  Grayle moved with an athleticism that hadn’t come through in the hologram of her haranguing the crowd. Those images must have been taken right here: Grayle speaking from the steps of the Assembly Building to a crowd larger than the one Fencing Master had just scattered.

  “But I still shouldn’t shoot her, that’s right?” Learoyd said, his voice troubled.

  “Blood and Martyrs!” Huber said. “Negative, don’t shoot her, Learoyd!”

  Grayle wasn’t one of those who averted her eyes from the armored vehicles. She noticed Huber’s attention and glared back at him like a bird of prey. Her hair was in short curls. J
udging from Grayle’s complexion she’d once been a redhead, but she’d let her hair go naturally gray.

  She and her companions—including the escort—stalked through the tall doors of embossed bronze into the Assembly Building. Learoyd sighed and said, “Yeah, that’s what I figured.”

  Huber looked at him hard. Nobody but Learoyd would’ve considered shooting the leader of the opposition dead in the middle of the city, with the whole country watching through video links. Nobody but simple-minded Herbert Learoyd; but you know, it might not have been such a bad idea after all….

  “Fox Three-six to me ASAP!” Captain Sangrela ordered. Huber glanced over. Beside Sangrela stood Orichos, wearing a gray beret in place of the commo helmet she’d left behind on Fencing Master. She looked very cool and alert: her hands were crossed behind her at the waist. “Six out.”

  “No rest for the wicked,” Huber murmured, but he couldn’t say he was sorry for the summons. “Fox, this is Fox Three-six. Sergeant Jellicoe will take acting command of the platoon till I return. Three-six out.”

  Huber snugged the sling of his 2-cm weapon, then swung out of the fighting compartment. He balanced for a moment on the bulging plenum chamber before half jumping, half sliding to the ground. The landing was softer than he’d expected because his boots dug into the black loam of what had been a flowerbed.

  “You gonna be all right, El-Tee?” Sergeant Tranter asked. Despite the hard run they’d just completed, Tranter managed to look as though he’d stepped off a recruiting poster.

  “Sure he is!” said Deseau who’d by contrast be scruffy the day they buried him in an open coffin. Right now you might guess he’d been dragged behind Fencing Master instead of riding in her. “Hey, there’s nobody around this place that the Slammers need to worry about, right?”

  “I’ll let you know, Frenchie,” Huber said. He walked toward the captain wearing a grin, wry but genuine.

  Now that Huber’s world no longer quivered with the harmonics of the drive fans, he was coming alive again. He guessed he knew how a toad felt when the first rains of autumn allowed it to break out of the summer-baked clay of a water hole.

  “Sir?” he said to Sangrela. Huber hadn’t known the captain well before the operation began, but he’d been impressed by what he’d seen thus far. A lot of times infantry officers didn’t have much feel for how to use armored vehicles. Officers from the vehicle companies probably didn’t do any better with infantry, but that wasn’t Huber’s problem.

  “Captain Orichos wants you with her inside there,” Sangrela said, indicating the Assembly Building with a curt jerk of his head. He didn’t look happy about the situation. “Our orders are to cooperate with the Point authorities, so that’s what you’re going to do.”

  “The Speaker’s called an extraordinary meeting of the Assembly to deal with the crisis,” Captain Orichos said, sounding conciliatory if not apologetic. “I’m to address them. I’d like you with me, Lieutenant, as a representative of Hammer’s Regiment.”

  Me rather than Sangrela, Huber thought. “Sure,” he said aloud. “Do I need to say anything?”

  “No, Lieutenant,” Orichos said. “Your presence really says all that’s necessary. Your armed presence.”

  Well, that’s clear enough, Huber thought. He said, “All right, I’m ready when you are.”

  Orichos turned, nodding him to follow. “When we get inside, the ushers will direct us to the gallery upstairs,” she said. “Ignore them; we’ll wait in the anteroom until Speaker Nestilrode recognizes me. When he does, you’ll come with me to the podium.”

  Huber shrugged. Parliamentary procedure, especially on somebody else’s planet, wasn’t a matter of great concern to him. “Who all’s going to be in there?” he said, gesturing left-handed to the approaching doorway. The stairway up from the street was limestone, but the building’s plinth and the attached steps were of dense black granite.

  “Most assemblymen will be present,” Orichos said. “Many are afraid, but they’ve been warned that this is the government’s only chance of safety and that they won’t be allowed to compromise it. If necessary—”

  She looked sidelong at Huber.

  “—members of the Gendarmery would escort a sufficient number of assemblymen here to make up a quorum. Whether they wanted to come or not.”

  Huber grinned, then sobered again. It was easy—and satisfying— to mock cowardly politicians, but in fairness they weren’t people who’d signed on for armed conflict. You could be brave enough in the ordinary sense and still not want to enter a building surrounded by tanks and professional killers.

  “The only people in the gallery …” Orichos continued. “Will be the goons, the so-called Volunteers, who you saw enter with Grayle and her Freedom Party colleagues. Those few are just bodyguards, but there’d have been hundreds packing the seats if it weren’t for your arrival.”

  A porch of the same hard black stone as the plinth loomed above them. Just inside the doorway stood a man and a woman in embroidered tunics, presumably the ushers.

  A mural on the wall of the semi-circular anteroom depicted an idealized Moss ranger on the right and an equally heroic female mechanic on the left. Stairs slanted upward from either side.

  “We’ll wait here,” Orichos said curtly to the male usher. He and his colleague looked doubtful, but they didn’t argue. Huber’s big powergun drew their quick glances the way the view of a nude woman might have tempted a modest man, but they said nothing about the weapon.

  Huber stood beside the jamb and looked through the inner doorway. Save for the anteroom, the ground floor of the Assembly Building was given over to a single chamber paneled in carved wood. Desks in ranks curved around three sides, each row rising above the one before it. It didn’t look to Huber as though half of the places were occupied, but presumably enough assemblymen for the purpose were present.

  The entrance was on the fourth side. Facing the desks to the right of the doorway was a railed enclosure with seats for a dozen members; all but one of them were filled. To the left was a raised lectern at which an old man in a black robe was saying, “By virtue of the powers granted me as Speaker, I have called this extraordinary session….”

  Orichos leaned close to Huber. “The cabinet,” she whispered, nodding toward the enclosure.

  The ordinary assemblymen sitting in the arcs of desks were staring at Huber and Orichos instead of watching the Speaker. Even some of the cabinet members stole furtive glances over their shoulders, though they faced front quickly when they caught Huber’s eye.

  Melinda Grayle and her two companions were almost alone on the Speaker’s side of the room. The men appeared ill at ease, but Grayle’s expression was sneeringly dismissive as she eyed the doorway.

  Huber couldn’t see the gallery from where he stood; that meant it must be directly overhead. The Volunteers’d be staring at his back if he went to the podium with Orichos. Staring at, and maybe aiming …

  Well, Huber hadn’t joined the Slammers because he was looking for a risk-free life. He grinned; but he also latched his clamshell again.

  The Speaker continued reading from a lighted screen set into the lectern before him. He stumbled frequently over the words. This may have been the first time he’d had occasion to invoke these emergency powers, and he was probably just as nervous as most of the assemblymen.

  “I’d think some of the public would want to watch,” Huber said into Captain Orichos’ ear. “Is everybody in the Point afraid of his shadow?”

  Orichos looked at him sharply. “Of course not!” she said. “The proceedings are broadcast to the whole country by satellite! The gallery only holds a few hundred people; it’d be full normally, but by citizens indulging their whim rather than because they needed to be present to know what the Assembly was doing. Half the population lives in individual households scattered throughout the forest anyway.”

  Huber nodded, his eyes on the Assembly beyond. He hadn’t meant to step on the woman’s toes, but he should’
ve known his comment would do just that. He must be nervous too.

  “Therefore …” the Speaker said, his voice gaining new life as he reached the end of the set formula; the constitutions of most colonies had been drafted by settlers with little education but a fierce desire to make things “sound right” by using high-flown language. “Invoking the special powers granted the Speaker in the present emergency, I hereby call Captain Mauricia Orichos of the Gendarmery to address the Assembly.”

  Melinda Riker Grayle rose to her feet. “I protest!” she said. She filled the hall as effectively with her unamplified voice as the Speaker had moments before using a concealed public address system. “This is a business for the citizens of the Point, not for the self-serving bureaucracy which rigged the last—”

  Speaker Nestilrode stabbed a control on the lectern with his bony index finger.

  “—elec—” Grayle said. Her voice cut off abruptly; her lips continued to move. The Assembly Building had a very sophisticated audio system. The Speaker had clamped a sonic distorter around Grayle, not for privacy as it’d be used in an office but to shut her up.

  “The member from Bulstrode Borough is out of order,” Nestilrode said with a touch of venom in his dry voice. “The chair recognizes Captain Orichos.”

  Orichos stepped forward purposefully. Huber followed at her heel like a well-trained dog. The patrol sling held his 2-cm weapon muzzle-forward. His hand was on the grip, though his index finger lay along the receiver instead of through the trigger guard.

  His faceshield was down. For the moment he left it clear instead of polarizing the surface to those trying to look at him.

  Orichos mounted the podium. The Speaker edged sideways to let her by, but there wasn’t even possibly room for Huber wearing his body armor. He stood below the Gendarmery officer instead, surveying the Assembly.

  “Honored Personages,” Orichos said in a tone that combined dignity with considerable forcefulness. “As many of you know, my department is responsible for information about our foreign enemies and potential enemies. While pursuing sources in the Solace government, we came upon conclusive proof that Assemblyman Grayle of Bulstrode Borough takes the pay of Solace in exchange for sowing discord within the Point.”