by David Drake
“Yes,” she said, setting the aircar’s autopilot as she leaned toward Huber. “A nice day for normal things instead of with guns and destruction.”
They kissed, wriggling closer in their bucket seats.
In his mind, Port Plattner blazed with plasma bolts and the rich, red light of burning tents. But for me, Huber thought as he raised his hand to her breast, guns and destruction are what’s normal.
THE DARKNESS
“Hi, Lieutenant,” someone said as he walked into Ruthven’s room. “Good to see you up and around. I gotta do a few tests with you back in the bed, though.”
On the electronic window, a brisk wind was scudding snow over drifts and damaged armored vehicles. Ruthven turned from it; a jab of pain blasted the world into white, buzzing fragments. It centered on his left hip, but for a few heartbeats it involved every nerve in his body.
“Your leg’s still catching you?” said Drayer. He was the senior medic on this ward. “Well, it’ll do that for a while, sir. But they did a great job putting you back together. It’s just pain, you know? There’s nothing wrong really.”
Pain like this isn’t nothing, thought Ruthven. If he hadn’t been nauseous he might’ve tried to put Drayer’s head through the wall; but he had no strength, and anyway, there was no room for anger just now in the blurred gray confines of his mind.
He eased his weight back onto his left leg; it reacted normally, though the muscles trembled slightly. The agony of a few moments past was gone as thoroughly as if it’d happened when he was an infant, twenty-odd years earlier.
“Anyway, come lie down,” Drayer said. “This won’t take but
a …”
He noticed the window image for the first time. “Blood and Martyrs, sir!” he said. What d’ye want to look at that for? You can set these panels to show you anyplace, you know? I got the beaches on Sooner’s World up on all my walls. Let me tell you, walking to my quarters across that muck is plenty view of it for me!”
Ruthven glanced back at the window, catching himself in mid-motion; his hip ignored him, the way a hip ought to do. The snow was dirty, and what appeared to be patches of mud were probably lubricating oil. The Slammers’ hospital here on Pontefract shared a compound with the repair yard, a choice that probably reflected somebody’s sense of humor.
“That’s all right,” Ruthven said, walking to the bed; monitoring devices were embedded in the frame. “I chose it deliberately.”
He grinned faintly as he settled onto the mattress. The juxtaposition of wrecked personnel and wrecked equipment reflected his sense of humor too, it seemed.
Drayer knelt to fit his recorder into the footboard. “Well, if that’s what you want,” he said. “Me, I was hoping we’d be leaving as soon as the Colonel got transport lined up. The government found the money for another three months, though.”
Drayer looked up; a sharp-featured little man, efficient and willing to grab a bedpan when the ward was short-handed. But by the Lord and Martyrs, his talent for saying exactly the wrong thing amounted to sheer genius.
“Had you heard that, sir?” Drayer said, obviously hopeful that he’d given an officer the inside dope on something. “Though I swear, I don’t see where they found it. You wouldn’t think this pit could raise the money to hire the Regiment for nine months.”
“They’re probably mortgaging the amber concession for the next twenty years,” Ruthven said. He braced himself to move again.
The fat of beasts in Pontefract’s ancient seas had fossilized into translucent masses which fluoresced in a thousand beautiful pastels. Ruthven didn’t know why it was called amber.
“Twenty years?” Drayer sneered. “The Royalists won’t last twenty days after we ship out!”
“It’ll still be worth some banker’s gamble at enough of a discount,” Ruthven said. “And the Five Worlds may run out of money to supply the Lord’s Army, after all.”
He lifted his legs onto the mattress, waiting for the pain; it didn’t come. It wouldn’t come, he supposed, until he stopped thinking about it every time he moved …and then it’d grin at him as it sank its fangs in.
“Well, I don’t know squat about bankers, that’s the truth,” Drayer said with a chuckle. “I just know I won’t be sorry to leave this pit. Though …”
He bent to remove the recorder.
“ …I guess they’re all pits, right, sir? If they was paradise, they wouldn’t need the Slammers, would they?”
“I suppose some contract worlds are better than others,” Ruthven said, looking at the repair yard. Base Hammer here in the lowlands seemed to get more snow than Platoon E/1 had in the hills. He’d been in the hospital for three weeks, though; the weather might’ve changed in that length of time. “I’ve only been with the Regiment two years, so I’m not the one to say.”
Drayer’s brow furrowed as he concentrated on the bed’s holographic readout. He looked up beaming and said, “Say, Lieutenant, you’re so close to a hundred percent it don’t signify. You oughta be up and dancing, not just looking out the window!”
“I’ll put learning to dance on my list,” Ruthven said, managing a smile with effort. “Right now I think I’ll get some more sleep, though.”
“Sure, you do that, sir,” said Drayer, never quick at taking a hint. “Doc Parvati’ll be in this afternoon to certify you, I’ll bet. Tonight or tomorrow, just as sure as Pontefract’s a pit.”
He slid his recorder into its belt sheath and looked around the room once more. “Well, I got three more to check, Lieutenant, so I’ll be pushing on. None of them doing as well as you, I’ll tell you. Anything more I can …”
The medic’s eyes lighted on the gold-bordered file folder leaning against the water pitcher on Ruthven’s side-table. The recruiter’d been by this morning, before Drayer came on duty.
“Blood and Martyrs, sir!” he said. “I saw Mahone in the lobby but I didn’t know she’d come to see you. So you’re transferring back to the Frisian Defense Forces, is that it?”
“Not exactly ‘back,’” Ruthven said. He gave up the pretense of closing his eyes. “I joined the Slammers straight out of the Academy.”
Sometimes he thought about ordering Drayer to get his butt out of the room, but Ruthven’d had enough conflict when he was in the field. Right now he just wanted to sleep, and he wouldn’t do that if he let himself get worked up.
“Well, I be curst!” the medic said. “You’re one lucky dog, sir. Here I’m going on about wanting to leave this place and you’re on your way back to good booze and women you don’t got to pay! Congratulations!”
“Thank you, Technician,” Ruthven said. “But now I need sleep more than liquor or women or anything else. All right?”
“You bet, sir!” Drayer said as he hustled out the door at last. “Say, wait till I tell Nichols in Supply about this!”
Ruthven closed his eyes again. Instead of going to sleep, though, his mind drifted back to the hills last month when E/1 arrived at Fire Support Base Courage.
“El-Tee?” said Sergeant Hassel, E/1’s platoon sergeant but doubling as leader of First Squad from lack of non-coms. “We got something up here you maybe want to take a look at before we go belting on int’ the firebase, over.”
“Platoon, hold in place,” Ruthven ordered from the command car, shrinking the map layout on his display to expand the visual feed from Hassel some 500 meters ahead. The platoon went to ground, troopers rolling off their skimmers and scanning the windblown scrub through their weapons’ sights.
Melisant, driving the high-sided command car today, nosed them against the bank to the right of the road and unlocked the tribarrel on the roof of the rear compartment. She used the gunnery screen at her station instead of climbing out of her hatch and taking the gun’s spade grips in her hands. The screen provided better all-round visibility as well as being safer for the gunner, but many of the ex-farmers in the Regiment felt acutely uncomfortable if they had to hunch down in a box when somebody might start shooting at the
m.
Ruthven expanded the image by four, then thirty-two times, letting the computer boost brightness and contrast. The command car’s electronics gave him clearer vision than Hassel’s own, though the sergeant can’t have been in any doubt about what he was seeing. It was a pretty standard offering by the Lord’s Army, after all.
“Right,” Ruthven said aloud. “Unit, there’s three Royalists crucified upside down by the road. We’ll go uphill of them. Nobody comes within a hundred meters of the bodies in case they’re booby-trapped, got it? Six out.”
As he spoke, his finger traced a virtual course on the display; the electronics transmitted the image to the visors of his troopers. They were veterans and didn’t need their hands held …but it was the platoon leader’s job, and Ruthven took his job seriously.
The Lord knew there were enough ways to get handed your head even if you stayed as careful as a diamond cutter. The Lord knew.
Instead of answering verbally, the squad leaders’ icons on Ruthven’s display flashed green. Seven troopers of Sergeant Rennie’s Third Squad—the other two escorted the gun jeep covering the rear—were already on the high ground, guiding their skimmers through trees which’d wrapped their limbs about their boles at the onset of winter. The thin soil kept the trees apart, and the undergrowth was already gray and brittle; Heavy Weapons’ jeeps, two with tribarrels and the third with a mortar, wouldn’t have a problem either. The command car, though …
Well, it didn’t matter that a command car’s high center of gravity and poor power-to-weight ratio made it a bad choice for breaking trail in wooded hills. This wasn’t a choice, it was a military necessity unless Ruthven wanted to take the chance that the bodies weren’t bait. His two years’ experience in the field wasn’t much for the Slammers, but it’d been plenty to teach him to avoid unnecessary risks.
The victims had been tied to the crosses with their own intestines, but that was just the usual fun and games for the Lord’s Army. Ruthven grinned. If he’d had a better opinion of the Royalists, he might’ve been able to convince himself the Regiment was Doing Good on Pontefract. Fortunately, Colonel Hammer didn’t require his platoon leaders to maintain feelings of moral superiority over their enemies.
His eyes on the dots of his troopers slanting across the terrain display, Ruthven keyed his microphone and said, “Courage Command, this is Echo One-six. Come in Courage Command, over.”
The combat car’s display showed that the transmitter in Lieutenant-Colonel Carrera’s headquarters was one of half a dozen in Firebase Courage which were live, but nobody replied. Ruthven grimaced. He wasn’t comfortable communicating with the Royalists to begin with, since any message which the Royalists could hear, the Lord’s Army could overhear. It added insult to injury that the fools weren’t responding.
The car bucked as the forward skirts dug into an outcrop with a skreel! of steel on stone. Ruthven expected they’d have to back and fill, but Melisant kicked her nacelles out and lifted them over the obstacle. She was driving primarily because her skimmer …now strapped to the side of the car in hopes of being able to repair it at the Royalist base …was wonky, but she was probably as good at the job as anybody in the platoon.
“Courage Command, this is Echo One-six,” Ruthven repeated, keeping his voice calm but wondering if showing his irritation would help get the Royalists’ attention. “Respond ASAP to arrange linkup, if you please. Over.”
The car shifted back to level from its strongly nose-up attitude, though it continued to rock side to side. Ruthven had a real-time panorama at the top of his display, but he didn’t bother checking it. His responsibility was the whole platoon, not the problems of weaving the car through woodland.
“Echo One-six, my colonel say, ‘Who are you?’” replied a voice from the firebase. “We must know who you are, over!”
Ruthven sighed. It could’ve been worse. Of course, it might still get worse.
“Unit, hold in place till I sort this,” he said aloud. Rennie’s squad, now in the lead, must be nearly in sight of the firebase by now. “Break. Courage Command, this is Echo One-six. We’re the unit sent to reinforce you. Please confirm that your troops are expecting us and won’t open fire.”
He hesitated three long heartbeats while deciding whether to say what was going through his mind, then said it: “Courage, we’re the Slammers. If we’re shot at, we’ll shoot back. With everything we’ve got. Over.”
Third Squad was in sight of the Royalists: the feed from Rennie’s skimmer showed the firebase as a scar of felled trees on the hill 700 meters from him. Ruthven frowned; he was looking down into the firebase. The ridge by which E/1 had approached was a good fifty meters higher than the knoll where the Royalists had sited their guns.
“You must not shoot!” squealed a new voice from the Royalist firebase; a senior officer had apparently taken over from the radioman. “We will not shoot! You must come in and help us at once!”
Ruthven grinned faintly. “Courage, I’ll give you three minutes to make sure all your bunkers get the word,” he said. “We don’t want any mistakes. Echo One-six out.”
“Hey El-Tee?” said Sergeant Wegelin on the command push; he was crewing the tribarrel at the end of the column. “What d’ye mean, come in shooting with everything we got? We’re not exactly a tank company, you know, over.”
“They don’t know that, Wegs,” Ruthven said, smiling more broadly as he examined the real-time visuals. “And anyway, I don’t think we’d need panzers to put paid to this lot, over.”
Fire Support Base Courage housed four 120-mm howitzers with an infantry battalion for protection. Treetrunks had been bulldozed into a wall around the camp, but they wouldn’t stop light cannon shells as effectively as an earthen berm. The Slammers’ powerguns would turn the wood into a huge bonfire.
“Why in hell did they set up with this ridge above them, d’ye suppose?” asked Hassel. Though the platoon sergeant had his own line of sight to the firebase, the display indicated he was using Wegelin’s higher vantage point. “We could put the guns out of action with four shots, over.”
“Because I never met nobody wearing a uniform here who knows how to pour piss outa a boot, Top,” said Wegelin. “Over.”
“The ridge’s too narrow for a battalion and the guns,” said Ruthven. He was using text crawls to monitor the panicked orders flying across the firebase, but he didn’t see any reason to wait in respectful silence for the Royalists to get their act in order. “They should’ve left a detachment …”
“Echo One-six, you must come in now,” Lieutenant-Colonel Carrera said sharply. “Quickly, before the Dogs take advantage! Quick! Quick!”
“Break,” said Ruthven, closing his conversation with his squad leaders. “Rennie, take your squad in. Wegelin, stay on overwatch. I’ll follow Rennie, then Sellars, Wegelin, and you bring up the rear, Hassel. Six Out.”
Again green blips signaled Received and Understood. Sergeant Rennie knelt on his skimmer to lead the way down and up the wooded saddle to the firebase. His troopers were lying flat with their control sticks folded down. That wasn’t a good way to drive, but it made them very difficult targets in case somebody in the garrison hadn’t gotten the word after all.
Rennie wasn’t the brightest squad leader in the Regiment, but he was reflexively brave and never hesitated to take a personal risk to spare his troopers. They’d have followed him to Hell.
Melisant was sending power to the fans before Ruthven’d finished giving his orders, but the command car lifted awkwardly and only slowly started to wallow forward. The grace with which the troopers flitted around him made Ruthven feel like a hog surrounded by flies, but the skimmers’d run out of juice in a matter of hours without the car’s fusion bottle to recharge them. He knew he was doing his proper job here inside the vehicle, though he didn’t feel like he was.
The gun jeep that’d been reinforcing the lead squad didn’t follow Rennie’s troopers. The driver/assistant gunner waved as the combat car swept past; t
he jeep was hunkered down in a notch on the reverse slope that gave it a line of fire to the four howitzers and most of the interior of the firebase.
Sergeant Wegelin’d probably ordered the crew to keep under cover till he came up with the other gun and mortar. That wasn’t precisely disobeying Ruthven’s instructions, but it came bloody close; and Wegelin was probably right in his caution, so the El-Tee would keep his mouth shut. That was a lot of what a junior lieutenant did when he had good non-coms….
The infantry moved toward the firebase through the stumps and brush in a skirmish line, but Melisant swung the car onto the road as soon as she reached the swale connecting the knolls. The track’d been cut with a bulldozer rather than properly graded, but the car’s air cushion smoothed the ride nicely. The deep ruts from wheeled vehicles were frozen now and had snow on their southern edges.
Royalists cheered from the top of the wall. The soldiers were male but there were scores of women and children in the compound as well, some of them waving garments.
Ruthven grimaced, thinking of what’d happen if the Lord’s Army overran the place. His job was to prevent that, but if the rebels were in the strength Intelligence thought they were …well, one platoon, even a bloody good platoon like E/1, wasn’t going to be able to do the job without help that the Royalists might not be able to provide.
The firebase entrance was a simple gap in the wall, but bulldozers had scraped a pile of trunks and dirt as a screen ten meters in front of it. Semi-trailers bringing in supplies would have a hard time with the angle, but Melisant should be able to guide the combat car through without trouble.
There were three strands of barbed wire in front of the wall. That gave negligible protection against assault, but maybe it’d hearten the defenders: placebo effects were real in more areas than medicine.
Ruthven grinned. It wasn’t much of a joke, but in a situation like this you took any chance for a laugh that you got.
Rennie parked his skimmer beside the entrance and hopped up the front of the wall like a baboon with a 2-cm gun; he stood facing inward. His troopers split to either side, four of them joining him on the main wall while the other two mounted the screen and looked back to cover the rest of the column.
