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Under the Hammer

"Think you're going to like killing, boy?" asked the old man on double crutches.

Rob Jenne turned from the streams of moving cargo to his unnoticed companion in the shade of the starship's hull. His own eyes were pale gray, suited like his dead-white skin to Burlage, whose ruddy sun could raise a blush but not a tan. When they adjusted, they took in the clerical collar which completed the other's costume. The smooth, black synthetic contrasted oddly with the coveralls and shirt of local weave. At that, the Curwinite's outfit was a cut above Rob's own, the same worksuit of Burlage sisal that he had worn as a quarryhand at home. Uniform issue would come soon.

At least, he hoped and prayed it would.

When the youth looked away after an embarrassed grin, the priest chuckled. "Another damned old fool, hey, boy? There were a few in your family, weren't there . . . the ones who'd quote the Book of the Way saying not to kill—and here you go off for a hired murderer. Right?" He laughed again, seeing he had the younger man's attention. "But that by itself wouldn't be so hard to take—you were leaving your family anyway, weren't you, nobody really believes they'll keep close to their people after five years, ten years of star hopping. But your mates, though, the team you worked with . . . how did you explain to them why you were leaving a good job to go on contract? 'Via!' " the priest mimicked, his tones so close to those of Barney Larsen, the gang boss, that Rob started in surprise, "you get your coppy ass shot off, lad, and it'll serve you right for being a fool!"

"How do you know I signed for a mercenary?" Jenne asked, clenching his great, calloused hands on the handle of his carry-all. It was everything he owned in the universe in which he no longer had a home. "And how'd you know about my Aunt Gudrun?"

"Haven't I seen a thousand of you?" the priest blazed back, his eyes like sparks glinting from the drill shaft as the sledge drove it deeper into the rock. "You're young and strong and bright enough to pass Alois Hammer's tests—you be proud of that, boy, few enough are fit for Hammer's Slammers. There you were, a man grown who'd read all the cop about mercenaries, believed most of it . . . more'n ever you did the Book of the Way, anyhow. Sure, I know. So you got some off-planet factor to send your papers in for you, for the sake of the bounty he'll get from the colonel if you make the grade—"

The priest caught Rob's blink of surprise. He chuckled again, a cruel, unpriestly sound, and said, "He told you it was for friendship? One a these days you'll learn what friendship counts, when you get an order that means the death of a friend—and you carry it out."

Rob stared at the priest in repulsion, the grizzled chin resting on interlaced fingers and the crutches under either armpit supporting most of his weight. "It's my life," the recruit said with sulky defiance. "Soon as they pick me up here, you can go back to living your own. 'Less you'd be willing to do that right now?"

"They'll come soon enough, boy," the older man said in a milder voice. "Sure, you've been ridden by everybody you know . . . now that you're alone, here's a stranger riding you too. I don't mean it like I sound . . . wasn't born to the work, I guess. There's priests—and maybe the better ones—who'd say that signing on with mercenaries means so long a spiral down that maybe your soul won't come out of it in another life or another hundred. But I don't see it like that.

"Life's a forge, boy, and the purest metal comes from the hottest fire. When you've been under the hammer a few times, you'll find you've been beaten down to the real, no lies, no excuses. There'll be a time, then, when you got to look over the product . . . and if you don't like what you see, well, maybe there's time for change, too."

The priest turned his head to scan the half of the horizon not blocked by the bellied-down bulk of the starship. Ant columns of stevedores manhandled cargo from the ship's rollerway into horse- and ox-drawn wagons in the foreground: like most frontier worlds, Burlage included, self-powered machinery was rare in the back country. Beyond the men and draft animals stretched the fields, studded frequently by orange-golden clumps of native vegetation.

"Nobody knows how little his life's worth till he's put it on the line a couple times," the old man said. "For nothing. Look at it here on Curwin—the seaboard taxed these uplands into revolt, then had to spend what they'd robbed and more to hire an armored regiment. So boys like you from—Scania? Felsen?—"

"Burlage, sir."

"Sure, a quarryman, should have known from your shoulders. You come in to shoot farmers for a gang of coastal moneymen you don't know and wouldn't like if you did." The priest paused, less for effect than to heave in a quick, angry breath that threatened his shirt buttons. "And maybe you'll die, too; if the Slammers were immortal, they wouldn't need recruits. But some that die will die like saints, boy, die martyrs of the Way, for no reason, for no reason . . .

"Your ride's here, boy."

The suddenly emotionless words surprised Rob as much as a scream in a silent prayer would have. Hissing like a gun-studded dragon, a gray-metal combat car slid onto the landing field from the west. Light dust puffed from beneath it: although the flatbed trailer behind was supported on standard wheels, the armored vehicle itself hovered a hand's-breadth above the surface at all points. A dozen powerful fans on the underside of the car kept it floating on an invisible bubble of air, despite the weight of the fusion power unit and the iridium-ceramic armor. Rob had seen combat cars on the entertainment cube occasionally, but those skittering miniatures gave no hint of the awesome power that emanated in reality from the machines. This one was seven meters long and three wide at the base, the armored sides curving up like a turtle's back to the open fighting compartment in the rear.

From the hatch in front of the powerplant stuck the driver's head, a black-mirrored ball in a helmet with full face shield down. Road dust drifted away from the man in a barely-visible haze, cleansed from the helmet's optics by a static charge. Faceless and terrible to the unfamiliar Burlager, the driver guided toward the starship a machine that appeared no more inhuman than did the man himself.

"Undercrewed," the priest murmured. "Two men on the back deck aren't enough for a car running single."

The older man's jargon was unfamiliar but Rob could follow his gist by looking at the vehicle. The two men standing above the waist-high armor of the rear compartment were clearly fewer than had been contemplated when the combat car was designed. Its visible armament comprised a heavy powergun forward to fire over the head of the driver, and similar weapons, also swivel-mounted, on either side to command the flanks and rear of the vehicle. But with only two men in the compartment there was a dangerous gap in the circle of fire the car could lay down if ambushed. Another vehicle for escort would have eased the danger, but this one was alone save for the trailer it pulled.

Though as the combat car drew closer, Rob began to wonder if the two soldiers present couldn't handle anything that occurred. Both were in full battle dress, wearing helmets and laminated back and breast armor over their khaki. Their faceplates were clipped open. The one at the forward gun, his eyes as deep-sunken and deadly as the three revolving barrels of his weapon, was in his forties and further aged by the dust sweated into black grime in the creases of his face. His head rotated in tiny jerks, taking in every nuance of the sullen crowd parting for his war-car. The other soldier was huge by comparison with the first and lounged across the back in feigned leisure: feigned, because either hand was within its breadth of a powergun's trigger, and his limbs were as controlled as spring steel.

With careless expertise, the driver backed his trailer up to the conveyor line. A delicate hand with the fans allowed him to angle them slightly, drifting the rear of the combat car to edge the trailer in the opposite direction. The larger soldier contemptuously thumbed a waiting horse and wagon out of its slot. The teamster's curse brought only a grin and a big hand rested on a powergun's receiver, less a threat than a promise. The combat car eased into the space.

"Wait for an old man," the priest said as Rob lifted his carry-all, "and I'll go with you." Glad even for that company, the recruit smiled nervously, fitting his stride to the other's surprisingly nimble swing-and-pause, swing-and-pause.

The driver dialed back minusculy on the power and allowed the big vehicle to settle on the ground without a skip or a tremor. One hand slid back the face shield to a high, narrow nose and eyes that alertly focused on the two men approaching. "The Lord and his martyrs!" the driver cried in amazement. "It's Blacky himself come in with our newbie!"

Both soldiers on the back deck slewed their eyes around at the cry. The smaller one took one glance, then leaped the two meters to the ground to clasp Rob's companion. "Hey!" he shouted, oblivious to the recruit shifting his weight uncertainly. "Via, it's good to see you! But what're you doing on Curwin?"

"I came back here afterwards," the older man answered with a smile. "Born here, I must've told you . . . though we didn't talk a lot. I'm a priest now, see?"

"And I'm a flirt like the load we're supposed to pick up," the driver said, dismounting with more care than his companion. Abreast of the first soldier, he too took in the round collar and halted gape-mouthed. "Lord, I'll be a coppy rag if you ain't," he breathed. "Whoever heard of a blower chief taking the Way?"

"Shut up, Jake," the first soldier said without rancor. He stepped back from the priest to take a better look, then seemed to notice Rob. "Umm," he said, "you the recruit from Burlage?"

"Yessir. M-my name's Rob Jenne, sir."

"Not 'sir,' there's enough sirs around already," the veteran said. "I'm Chero, except if there's lots of brass around, then make it Sergeant-Commander Worzer. Look, take your gear back to the trailer and give Leon a hand with the load."

"Hey, Blacky," he continued with concern, ignoring Rob again, "what's wrong with your legs? We got the best there was."

"Oh, they're fine," Rob heard the old man reply, "but they need a weekly tuning. Out here we don't have the computers, you know; so I get the astrogation boys to sync me up on the ships' hardware whenever one docks in—just waiting for a chance now. But in six months the servos are far enough out of line that I have to shut off the power till the next ship arrives. You'd be surprised how well I get around on these pegs, though. . . ."

Leon, the huge third crew member, had loosed the top catches of his body armor for ventilation. From the look of it, the laminated casing should have been a size larger; but Rob wasn't sure anything larger was made. The gunner's skin where exposed was the dense black of a basalt outcropping. "They'll be a big crate to go on, so just set your gear down till we get it loaded," he said. Then he grinned at Rob, teeth square and slightly yellow against his face. "Think you can take me?"

That was a challenge the recruit could understand, the first he could meet fairly since boarding the starship with a one-way ticket to a planet he had never heard of. He took in the waiting veteran quickly but carefully, proud of his own rock-hardened muscles but certain the other man had been raised just as hard. "I give you best," the blond said. "Unless you feel you got to prove it?"

The grin broadened and a great black hand reached out to clasp Rob's. "Naw," the soldier said, "just like to clear the air at the start. Some of the big ones; Lord, testy ain't the word. All they can think about's what they want to prove with me . . . so they don't watch their side of the car, and then there's trouble for everybody."

"Hammer's Regiment?" called an unfamiliar voice. Both men looked up. Down the conveyor rode a blue-tunicked ship's man in front of what first appeared to be a huge crate. At second glance Rob saw that it was a cage of light alloy holding four . . . "Dear Lord!" the recruit gasped.

"Roger, Hammer's," Leon agreed, handing the crewman a plastic chit while the latter cut power to the rollers to halt the cage. The chit slipped into the computer linkage on the crewman's left wrist, lighting a green indicator when it proved itself a genuine bill of lading.

There were four female humanoids in the cage—stark naked except for a dusting of fine blue scales. Rob blinked. One of the near-women stood with a smile—Lord, she had no teeth!—and rubbed her groin deliberately against one of the vertical bars.

"First-quality Genefran flirts," Leon chuckled. "Ain't human, boy, but the next best thing."

"Better," threw in Jake, who had swung himself into the fighting compartment as soon as the cage arrived. "I tell you, kid, you never had it till you had a flirt. Surgically modified and psychologically prepared. Rowf!"

"N-not human?" Rob stumbled, unable to take his eyes off the cage, "you mean like monkeys?"

Leon's grin lit his face again, and the driver cackled, "Well, don't know about monkeys, but they're a whole lot like sheep."

"You take the left side and we'll get this aboard," Leon directed. The trailer's bed was half a meter below the rollerway so that the cage, though heavy and awkward, could be slid without much lifting.

Rob gripped the bars numbly, turning his face down from the tittering beside him. "Amazing what they can do with implants and a wig," Jake was going on, "though a course there's a lot of cutting to do first, but those ain't the differences you see, if you follow. The scales, now—they have a way—"

"Lift!" Leon ordered, and Rob straightened at the knees. They took two steps backward with the cage wobbling above them as the girls—the flirts!—squealed and hopped about. "Down!" and cage clashed on trailer as the two big men moved in unison.

Rob stepped back, his mouth working in distaste, unaware of the black soldier's new look of respect. Quarry work left a man used to awkward weights. "This is foul," the recruit marveled. "Are those really going back with us for, for . . ."

"Rest'n relaxation," Leon agreed, snapping tiedowns around the bars.

"But how . . ." Rob began, looking again at the cage. When the red-wigged flirt fondled her left breast upward, he could see the implant scars pale against the blue. The scales were more thinly spread where the skin had been stretched in molding it. "I'll never touch something like that. Look, maybe Burlage is pretty backward about . . . things, about sex, I don't know. But I don't see how anybody could . . . I mean—"

"Via, wait till you been here as long as we have," Jake gibed. He clenched his right hand and pumped it suggestively. "Field expedients, that's all."

"On this kinda contract," Leon explained, stepping around to get at the remaining tiedowns, "you can't trust the local girls. Least not in the field, like we are. The colonel likes to keep us patrol sections pretty much self-contained."

"Yeah," Jake broke in—would his cracked tenor never cease? "Why, some of these whores, they take a razor blade, see—in a cork you know?—and, well, never mind." He laughed, seeing Rob's face.

"Jake," Sergeant Worzer called, "Shut up and hop in."

The driver slipped instantly into his hatch. Disgusting as Rob found the little man, he recognized his ability. Jake moved with lethal certainty and a speed that belied the weight of his body armor.

"Ready to lift, Chero?" he asked.

The priest was levering himself toward the starship again. Worzer watched him go for a moment, shook his head. "Just run us out to the edge of the field," he directed. "I got a few things to show our recruit before we head back; nobody rides in my car without knowing how to work the guns." With a sigh he hopped into the fighting compartment. Leon motioned Rob in front of him. Gingerly, the recruit stepped onto the trailer hitch, gripped the armored rim with both hands, lifted himself aboard. Leon followed. The trailer bonged as he pushed off from it, and his bulk cramped the littered compartment as soon as he grunted over the side.

"Put this on," Worzer ordered, handing Rob a dusty, bulbous helmet like the others wore. "Brought a battle suit for you, too," he said, kicking the jointed armor leaning against the back of the compartment, "but it'd no more fit you than it would Leon there."

The black laughed. "Gonna be tight back here till the kid or me gets zapped."

"Move 'er out," Worzer ordered. The words came through unsuspected earphones in Rob's helmet, although the sergeant had simply spoken, without visibly activating a pickup.

The car vibrated as the fans revved, then lifted with scarcely a jerk. From behind came the squeals and chirrups of the flirts as the trailer rocked over the irregularities in the field.

Worzer looked hard at the starship's open crew portal as they hissed past it. "Funny what folks go an' do," he said to no one in particular. "Via, wonder what I'll be in another ten years."

"Pet food, likely," joked the driver, taking part in the conversation although physically separated from the other crewmen.

"Shut up, Jake," repeated the blower captain. "And you can hold it up here, we're out far enough."

The combat car obediently settled on the edge of the stabilized area. The port itself had capacity for two ships at a time; the region it served did not. Though with the high cost of animal transport many manufactures could be star-hopped to Curwin's back country more cheaply than they could be carried from the planet's own more urbanized areas, the only available exchange was raw agricultural produce—again limited to the immediate locality by the archaic transport. Its fans purring below audibility, the armored vehicle rested on an empty area of no significance to the region—unless the central government should choose to land another regiment of mercenaries on it.

"Look," the sergeant said, his deep-set eyes catching Rob's, "we'll pass you on to the firebase when we take the other three flirts in next week. They got a training section there. We got six cars in this patrol, that's not enough margin to fool with training a newbie. But neither's it enough to keep somebody useless underfoot for a week, so we'll give you some basics. Not so you can wise-ass when you get to training section, just so you don't get somebody killed it if drops in the pot. Clear?"

"Yessir." Rob broke his eyes away, then realized how foolish he must look staring at his own clasped hands. He looked back at Worzer.

"Just so it's understood," the sergeant said with a nod. "Leon, show him how the gun works."

The big black rotated his weapon so that the muzzle faced forward and the right side was toward Rob and the interior of the car. The mechanism itself was encased in dull-enameled steel ornamented with knobs and levers of unguessable intent. The barrels were stubby iridium cylinders with smooth, 2 cm bores. Leon touched one of the buttons, then threw a lever back. The plate to which the barrels were attached rotated 120 degrees around their common axis, and a thick disk of plastic popped out into the gunner's hand.

"When the bottom barrel's ready to fire, the next one clockwise is loading one a these"—Leon held up the 2 cm disk—"and the other barrel, the one that's just fired, blows out the empty."

"There's a liquid nitrogen ejector," Worzer put in. "Cools the bore same time it kicks out the empty."

"She feeds up through the mount," the big soldier went on, his index finger tracing the path of the energized disks from the closed hopper bulging in the sidewall, through the ball joint and into the weapon's receiver. "If you try to fire and she don't, check this." The columnar finger indicated but did not move the stud it had first pressed on the side of the gun. "That's the safety. She still doesn't fire, pull this"—he clacked the lever, rotating the barrel cluster around one-third turn and catching the loaded round that flew out. "Maybe there was a dud round. She still don't go, just get down outa the way. We start telling you about second-order malfunctions and you won't remember where the trigger is."

"Ah, where is the trigger?" Rob asked diffidently.

Jake's laughter rang through the earphones and Worzer himself smiled for the first time. The sergeant reached out and rotated the gun. "See the grips?" he asked, pointing to the double handles at the back of the receiver. Rob nodded.

"OK," Worzer continued, "you hold it there"—he demonstrated—"and to fire, you just press your thumbs against the trigger plate between 'em. Let up and it quits. Simple."

"You can clear this field as quick as you can spin this little honey," Leon said, patting the gun with affection. "The hicks out there"—his arm swept the woods and cultivated fields promiscuously—"got some rifles, they hunted before the trouble started, but no powerguns to mention. About all they do since we moved in is maybe pop a shot or two off, and hide in their holes."

"They've got some underground stockpiles," Worzer said, amplifying Leon's words, "explosives, maybe some factories to make rifle ammo. But the colonel set up a recce net—spy satellites, you know—as part of the contract. Any funny movement day or night, a signal goes down to whoever's patrolling there. A couple calls and we check out the area with ground sensors . . . anything funny then—vibration, hollows showing up on the echo sounder, magnetics—anything!—and bam! we call in the artillery."

"Won't take much of a jog on the way back," Leon suggested, "and we can check out that report from last night."

"Via, that was just a couple dogs," Jake objected.

"OK, so we prove it was a couple dogs," rumbled the gunner. "Or maybe the hicks got smart and they're shielding their infra-red now. Been too damn long since anything popped in this sector."

"Thing to remember, kid," Worzer summed up, "is never get buzzed at this job. Stay cool, you're fine. This car's got more firepower'n everything hostile in fifty klicks. One call to the firebase brings in our arty, anything from smoke shells to a nuke. The rest of our section can be here in twenty minutes, or a tank platoon from the firebase in two hours. Just stay cool."

Turning forward, the sergeant said, "OK, take her home Jake. We'll try that movement report on the way."

The combat car shuddered off the ground, the flirts shrieking. Rob eyed them, blushed, and turned back to his powergun, feeling conspicuous. He took the grips, liking the deliberate way the weapon swung. The safety button was glowing green, but he suddenly realized that he didn't know the color code. Green for safe? Or green for ready? He extended his index finger to the switch.

"Whoa, careful, kid!" Leon warned. "You cut fifty civvies in half your first day and the colonel won't like it one bit."

Sheepishly, Rob drew back his finger. His ears burned, mercifully hidden beneath the helmet.

They slid over the dusty road in a flat, white cloud at about forty kph. It seemed shockingly fast to the recruit, but he realized that the car could probably move much faster were it not for the live cargo behind. Even as it was, the trailer bounced dangerously from side to side.

The road led through a gullied scattering of grain plots, generally fenced with withies rather than imported metal. Houses were relatively uncommon. Apparently each farmer plowed several separate locations rather than trying to work the rugged or less productive areas. Occasionally they passed a rough-garbed local at work. The scowls thrown up at the smoothly running war-car were hostile, but there was nothing more overt.

"OK," Jake warned, "here's where it gets interesting. Sure you still want this half-assed check while we got the trailer hitched?"

"It won't be far," Worzer answered. "Go ahead." He turned to Rob, touching the recruit's shoulder and pointing to the lighted map panel beside the forward gun. "Look, Jenne," he said, keeping one eye on the countryside as Jake took the car off the road in a sweeping turn, "if you need to call in a location to the firebase, here's the trick. The red dot"—it was in the center of the display and remained there although the map itself seemed to be flowing kitty-corner across the screen as the combat car moved—"that's us. The black dot"—the veteran thumbed a small wheel beside the display and the map, red dot and all, shifted to the right on the panel, leaving a black dot in the center—"that's your pointer. The computer feeds out the grid coordinates here"—his finger touched the window above the map display. Six digits, changing as the map moved under the centered black dot, winked brightly. "You just put the black dot on a bunker site, say, and read off the figures to Fire Central. The arty'll do all the rest."

"Ah," Rob murmured, "ah . . . Sergeant, how do you get the little dot off that and onto a bunker like you said?"

There was a moment's silence. "You know how to read a map, don't you kid?" Worzer finally asked.

"What's that, sir?"

The earphones boomed and cackled with raucous laughter. "Oh my coppy ass!" the sergeant snarled. He snapped the little wheel back, re-centering the red dot. "Lord, I don't know how the training cadre takes it!"

Rob hid his flaming embarrassment by staring over his gunsights. He didn't really know how to use them, either. He didn't know why he'd left Conner's Stoneworks, where he was the cleanest, fastest driller on the whole coppy crew. His powerful hands squeezed at the grips as if they were the driver's throat through which bubbles of laughter still burst.

"Shut up, Jake," the sergeant finally ordered. "Most of us had to learn something new when we joined. Remember how the ol' man found you your first day, pissing up against the barracks?"

Jake quieted.

They had skirted a fence of cane palings, brushing in once without serious effect. Russet grass flanking the fence flattened under the combat car's downdraft, then sprang up unharmed as the vehicle moved past. Jake seemed to be following a farm track leading from the field to a rambling, substantially-constructed building on the near hilltop. Instead of running with the ground's rise, however, the car cut through brush and down a half-meter bank into a broad-based arroyo. The bushes were too stiff to lie down under the fans. They crunched and howled in the blades, making the car buck, and ricocheted wildly from under the skirts. The bottom of the arroyo was sand, clean-swept by recent run-off. It boiled fiercely as the car first shoomped into it, then ignored the fans entirely. Somehow Jake had managed not to overturn the trailer, although its cargo had been screaming with fear for several minutes.

"Hold up," Worzer ordered suddenly as he swung his weapon toward the left-hand bank. The wash was about thirty meters wide at that point, sides sheer and a meter high. Rob glanced forward to see that a small screen to Worzer's left on the bulkhead, previously dark, was now crossed by three vari-colored lines. The red one was bouncing frantically.

"They got an entrance, sure 'nough," Leon said. He aimed his powergun at the same point, then snapped his face shield down. "Watch it, kid," he said. The black's right hand fumbled in a metal can welded to the blower's side. Most of the paint had chipped from the stenciled legend: grenades. What appeared to be a lazy overarm toss snapped a knobby ball the size of a child's fist straight and hard against the bank.

Dirt and rock fragments shotgunned in all directions. The gully side burst in a globe of black streaked with garnet fire, followed by a shock wave that was a physical blow.

"Watch your side, kid!" somebody shouted through the din, but Rob's bulging eyes were focused on the collapsing bank, the empty triangle of black gaping suddenly through the dust—the two ravening whiplashes of directed lightning ripping into it to blast and scatter.

The barrel clusters of the two veterans' powerguns spun whining, kicking gray, eroded disks out of their mechanisms in nervous arcs. The bolts they shot were blue-green flashes barely visible until they struck a target and exploded it with transferred energy. The very rock burst in droplets of glassy slag splashing high in the air and even back into the war-car to pop against the metal.

Leon's gun paused as his fingers hooked another grenade. "Hold it!" he warned. The sergeant, too, came off the trigger, and the bomb arrowed into the now-vitrified gap in the tunnel mouth. Dirt and glass shards blew straight back at the bang. A stretch of ground sagged for twenty meters beyond the gully wall, closing the tunnel the first explosion had opened.

Then there was silence. Even the flirts, huddled in a terrified heap on the floor of their cage, were soundless.

Glowing orange specks vibrated on Rob's retinas; the cyan bolts had been more intense than he had realized. "Via," he said in awe, "how do they dare . . . ?"

"Bullet kills you just as dead," Worzer grunted. "Jake, think you can climb that wall?"

"Sure. She'll buck a mite in the loose stuff." The gully side was a gentle declivity, now, where the grenades had blown it in. "Wanna unhitch the trailer first?"

"Negative, nobody gets off the blower till we cleaned this up."

"Umm, don't want to let somebody else in on the fun, maybe?" the driver queried. If he was tense, his voice did not indicate it. Rob's palms were sweaty. His glands had understood before his mind had that his companions were considering smashing up, unaided, a guerrilla stronghold.

"Cop," Leon objected determinedly. "We found it, didn't we?"

"Let's go," Worzer ordered. "Kid, watch your side. They sure got another entrance, maybe a couple."

The car nosed gently toward the subsided bank, wallowed briefly as the driver fed more power to the forward fans to lift the bow. With a surge and a roar, the big vehicle climbed. Its fans caught a few pebbles and whanged them around inside the plenum chamber like a rattle of sudden gunfire. At half speed, the car glided toward another fenced grainplot, leaving behind it a rising pall of dust.

"Straight as a plumb line," Worzer commented, his eyes flicking his sensor screen. "Bastards'll be waiting for us."

Rob glanced at him—a mistake. The slam-spang! of shot and ricochet were nearly simultaneous. The recruit whirled back, bawling in surprise. The rifle pit had opened within five meters of him, and only the haste of the dark-featured guerrilla had saved Rob from his first shot. Rob pivoted his powergun like a hammer, both thumbs mashing down the trigger. Nothing happened. The guerrilla ducked anyway, the black circle of his foxhole shaped into a thick crescent by the lid lying askew.

Safety, safety! Rob's mind screamed and he punched the button fat-fingered. The rifleman raised his head just in time to meet the hose of fire that darted from the recruit's gun. The guerrilla's head exploded. His brains, flash-cooked by the first shot, changed instantly from a colloid to a blast of steam that scattered itself over a three-meter circle. The smoldering fragments of the rifle followed the torso as it slid downward.

The combat car roared into the field of waist-high grain, ripping down twenty meters of woven fencing to make its passage. Rob, vaguely aware of other shots and cries forward, vomited onto the floor of the compartment. A colossal explosion nearby slewed the car sideways. As Rob raised his eyes, he noticed three more swarthy riflemen darting through the grain from the right rear of the vehicle.

"Here!" he cried. He swiveled the weapon blindly, his hips colliding with Worzer in the cramped space. A rifle bullet cracked past his helmet. He screamed something again but his own fire was too high, blue-green droplets against the clear sky, and the guerrillas had grabbed the bars while the flirts jumped and blatted.

The rifles were slamming but the flirts were in the way of Rob's gun. "Down! Down!" he shouted uselessly, and the red-haired flirt pitched across the cage with one synthetic breast torn away by the bullet she had leaped in front of. Leon cursed and slumped across Rob's feet, and then it was Chero Worzer shouting, "Hard left, Jake," and leaning across the fallen gunner to rotate his weapon. The combat car tilted left as the bow came around, pinching the trailer against the left rear of the vehicle—in the path of Worzer's powergun. The cage's light alloy bloomed in superheated fireballs as the cyan bolts ripped through it. Both tires exploded together, and there was a red mist of blood in the air. The one guerrilla who had ducked under the burst dropped his rifle and ran.

Worzer cut him in half as he took his third step.

The sergeant gave the wreckage only a glance, then knelt beside Leon. "Cop, he's gone," he said. The bullet had struck the big man in the neck between helmet and body armor, and there was almost a gallon of blood on the floor of the compartment.

"Leon?" Jake asked.

"Yeah. Lord, there musta been twenty kilos of explosive in that satchel charge. If he hadn't hit it in the air . . ." Worzer looked back at the wreck of the trailer, then at Rob. "Kid, can you unhitch that yourself?"

"You just killed them," Rob blurted. He was half blinded by tears and the after-image of the gunfire.

"Via, they did their best on us, didn't they?" the sergeant snarled. His face was tiger striped by dust and sweat.

"No, not them!" the boy cried. "Not them—the girls. You just—"

Worzer's iron fingers gripped Rob by the chin and turned the recruit remorselessly toward the carnage behind. The flirts had been torn apart by their own fluids, some pieces flung through gaps in the mangled cage. "Look at 'em, Jenne!" Worzer demanded. "They ain't human but if they was, if it was Leon back there, I'd a done it."

His fingers uncurled from Rob's chin and slammed in a fist against the car's armor. "This ain't heroes, it ain't no coppy game you play when you want to! You do what you got to do, 'cause if you don't, some poor bastard gets killed later when he tries to.

"Now get down there and unhitch us."

"Yes, sir." Rob gripped the lip of the car for support.

Worzer's voice, more gentle, came through the haze of tears: "And watch it, kid. Just because they're keeping their heads down don't mean they're all gone." Then, "Wait." Another pause while the sergeant unfastened the belt and holstered handgun from his waist and handed it to Rob. Leon wore a similar weapon, but Worzer did not touch the body. Rob wordlessly clipped the belt, loose for not being fitted over armor, and swung down from the combat car.

The hitch had a quick-release handle, but the torqueing it had received in the last seconds of battle had jammed it. Nervously aware that the sergeant's darting-eyed watchfulness was no pretense, that the shot-scythed grainfield could hide still another guerrilla, or a platoon of them, Rob smashed his boot heel against the catch. It held. Wishing for his driller's sledge, he kicked again.

"Sarge!" Jake shouted. Grain rustled on the other side of the combat car, and against the sky beyond the scarred armor loomed a parcel. Rob threw himself flat.

The explosion picked him up from the ground and bounced him twice, despite the shielding bulk of the combat car. Stumbling upright, Rob steadied himself on the armored side.

The metal felt odd. It no longer trembled with the ready power of the fans. The car was dead, lying at rest on the torn-up soil. With three quick strides, the recruit rounded the bow of the vehicle. He had no time to inspect the dished-in metal, because another swarthy guerrilla was approaching from the other side.

Seeing Rob, the ex-farmer shouted something and drew a long knife. Rob took a step back, remembered the pistol. He tugged at its unfamiliar grip and the weapon popped free into his hand. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to finger the safety, placed just as the tribarrel's had been, then trigger two shots into the face of the lunging guerrilla. The snarl of hatred blanked as the body tumbled facedown at Rob's feet. The knife had flown somewhere into the grain.

"Ebros?" a man called. Another lid had raised from the ground ten meters away. Rob fired at the hole, missed badly. He climbed the caved-in bow, clumsily one-handed, keeping the pistol raised. There was nothing but twisted metal where the driver had been. Sergeant Worzer was still semi-erect, clutched against his powergun by a length of structural tubing. It had curled around both his thighs, fluid under the stunning impact of the satchel charge. The map display was a pearly blank, though the window above it still read incongruously 614579 and the red line on the detector screen blipped in nervous solitude. Worzer's helmet was gone, having flayed a bloody track across his scalp as it sailed away. His lips moved, though, and when Rob put his face near the sergeant's he could hear, "The red . . . pull the red tab . . ."

Over the left breast of each set of armor were a blue and a red tab. Rob had assumed they were decorations of some sort. He shifted the sergeant gently. The tab was locked down by a cotter pin which he yanked out. Something hissed in the armor as he pulled the tab, and Sergeant Worzer murmured, "Oh Lord. Oh Lord." Then, "Now the stimulant, the blue tab."

After the second injection sped into his system, the sergeant opened his eyes. Rob was already trying to straighten the entrapping tube. "Forget it," Worzer ordered weakly. "It's inside, too . . . damn armor musta flexed. Oh Lord." He closed his eyes, opened them in time to see another head peak cautiously from the tunnel mouth. "Bastard!" he rasped, and faster than he spoke he triggered his powergun. Its motor whined spitefully though the burst went wide. The head disappeared.

"I want you to run back to the gully," the sergeant said, resting his eyes again. "You get there, you say 'Fire Central.' That cuts in the arty frequency automatic. Then you say, 'Bunker complex . . .' " Worzer looked down. " 'Six-one-four, five-seven-nine.' Stay low and wait for a patrol."

"It won't bend!" Rob snarled in frustration as his fingers slid again from the blood-slick tubing.

"Jenne, get your ass out of here, now."

"Sergeant—"

"Lord curse your soul, get out or I'll call it in myself! Do I look like I wanna live?"

"Oh, Via . . ." Rob tried to reholster the pistol he had set on the bloody floor. It slipped back with a clang. He left it, gripping the sidewall again.

"Maybe tell Dad it was good to see him," Worzer whispered. "You lose touch in this business, Lord knows you do."

"Sir?"

"The priest . . . you met him. Sergeant-Major Worzer, he was. Oh Lord, move it—"

At the muffled scream, the recruit leaped from the smashed war-car and ran blindly back the way they had come. He did not know he had reached the gully until the ground flew out from under him and he pitched spread-eagled onto the sand. "Fire Central," he sobbed through strangled breaths, "Fire Central."

"Clear," a strange voice snapped crisply. "Data?"

"Wh-what?"

"Lord and martyrs," the voice blasted, "if you're screwing around on firing channels, you'll wish you never saw daylight!"

"S-six . . . oh Lord, yes, six-one-four, five-seven-nine," Rob sing-songed. He was staring at the smooth sand. "Bunkers, the sergeant says it's bunkers."

"Roger," the voice said, businesslike again. "Ranging in fifteen."

Could they really swing those mighty guns so swiftly, those snub-barreled rocket howitzers whose firing looked so impressive on the entertainment cube?

"On the way," warned the voice.

The big tribarrel whined again from the combat car, the silent lash of its bolts answered this time by a crash of rifle shots. A flattened bullet burred through the air over where Rob lay. It was lost in the eerie, thunderous shriek from the northwest.

"Splash," the helmet said.

The ground bucked. From the grainplot spouted rock, smoke and metal fragments into a black column fifty meters high.

"Are we on?" the voice demanded.

"Oh, Lord," Rob prayed, beating his fists against the sand, "Oh Lord."

"Via, what is this?" the helmet wondered aloud. Then, "All guns, battery five."

And the earth began to ripple and gout under the hammer of the guns.

Rolling Hot

Chapter One

The camera light threw the shadow of the Slammers' officer harshly across the berm which the sun had colored bronze a few moments ago as it set. Her hair was black and cut as short as that of a man.

"For instance, Captain Ranson," Dick Suilin said, "here at Camp Progress there are three thousand national troops and less than a hundred of your mercenaries, but—"

shoop 

Ranson's eyes widened, glinting like pale gray marble. Fritzi Dole kept the camera focused tightly on her face. He'd gotten an instinct for a nervous subject in the three years he'd recorded Suilin's probing interviews.

"—the cost to our government—"

shoop-shoop 

"—is greater for your handful of—"

"Incoming!" screamed Captain June Ranson as she dived for the dirt. It wasn't supposed to be happening here—

But for the first instant, you never really believed it could be happening, not even in the sectors where it happened every bleeding night. And when things were bad enough for one side or the other to hire Hammer's Slammers you could be pretty sure that there were no safe sectors.

Camp Progress was on the ass end of Prosperity's inhabited continent—three hundred kilometers north of the coast and the provincial capital, Kohang, but still a thousand kays south of where the real fighting went on in the areas bordering the World Government enclaves. Sure, there'd been reports that the Conservatives were nosing around the neighborhood, but nothing the Yokel troops themselves couldn't handle if they got their thumbs out.

For a change.

Camp Progress was a Yokel—was a National Army—training and administrative center, while for the Slammers it served as a maintenance and replacement facility. In addition to those formal uses, the southern sector gave Hammer a place to post troops who were showing signs of having been at the sharp end a little too long.

People like Junebug Ranson, for instance, who'd frozen with her eyes wide open during a firefight that netted thirty-five Consies killed-in-action.

So Captain Ranson had been temporarily transferred to command the Slammers' guard detachment at Camp Progress, a "company" of six combat cars. There'd been seventeen cars in her line company when it was up to strength; but she couldn't remember a standard day in a war zone that they had been up to strength . . .

And anyway, Ranson knew as well as anybody else that she needed a rest before she got some of her people killed.

shoop 

But she wasn't going to rest here.

The bell was ringing in the Slammers' Tactical Operations Center, a command car in for maintenance. The vehicle's fans had all been pulled, leaving the remainder as immobile as a 30-tonne iridium boulder; but it still had working electronics.

The Yokel garrison had a klaxon which they sounded during practice alerts. It was silent now despite the fact that camp security was supposedly a local responsibility.

Slammers were flattening or sprinting for their vehicles, depending on their personal assessment of the situation. The local reporter gaped at Ranson while his cameraman spun to find out what was going on. The camera light sliced a brilliant swath through the nighted camp.

Ranson's left cheek scraped the gritty soil as she called, "All Red Team personnel, man your blowers and engage targets beyond the berm. Blue Team—" the logistics and maintenance people "—prepare for attack from within the camp."

She wasn't wearing her commo helmet—that was in her combat car—but commands from her mastoid implant would be rebroadcast over her command channel by the base unit in the TOC. With her free hand, the hand that wasn't holding the sub-machinegun she always carried, even here, Ranson grabbed the nearer of the two newsmen by the ankle and jerked him flat.

The Yokel's squawk of protest was smothered by the blast of the first mortar shell hitting the ground.

"I said hold it!" bellowed Warrant Leader Ortnahme, his anger multiplied by echoes within the tank's plenum chamber. "Not slide the bloody nacelle all across the bloody baseplate!"

"Yessir," said Tech 2 Simkins. "Yes, Mr. Ortnahme!"

Simkins gripped his lower lip between his prominent front teeth and pushed. The flange on the fan nacelle slid a little farther from the bolt holes in the mounting baseplate. "Ah . . . Mr. Ortnahme?"

It was hot and dry. The breeze curling through the access port and the fan intakes did nothing but drift grit into the eyes of the two men lying on their backs in the plenum chamber. It had been a hard day.

It wasn't getting any easier as it drew to a close.

The lightwand on the ground beneath the baseplate illuminated everything in the scarred, rusty steel cavern—including the flange, until Simkins tried to position the nacelle and his arms shadowed the holes. The young technician looked scared to death. The good Lord knew he had reason to be, because if Simkins screwed up one more time, Ortnahme was going to reverse his multitool and use the welder end of it to—

Ortnahme sighed and let his body relax. He set down the multitool, which held a bolt ready to drive, and picked up the drift punch to realign the cursed holes.

Henk Ortnahme was tired and sweaty, besides being a lot older and fatter than he liked to remember . . . but he was also the Slammers' maintenance chief at Camp Progress, which meant it was his business to get the job done instead of throwing tantrums.

"No problem, Simkins," he said mildly. "But let's get it right this time, huh? So that we can knock off."

The tank, Herman's Whore, had been squarely over the blast of a hundred-kilogram mine. The explosion lifted the tank's 170-tonne mass, stunning both crewmen and damaging the blades of five of the six fans working at the time.

By themselves, bent blades were a field repair job—but because the crew'd been knocked silly, nobody shut down the system before the fans skewed the shafts . . . which froze the bearings . . . which cooked the drive motors in showers of sparks that must've been real bloody impressive.

Not only did the entire fan nacelles have to be replaced now—a rear echelon job by anybody's standards—but three of the cursed things had managed to weld their upper brackets to the hull, so the brackets had to be replaced also.

It was late. Ortnahme'd kept his assistant at it for fourteen hours, so he couldn't rightly blame Simkins for being punchy . . . and the warrant leader knew his own skills and judgment weren't maybe all they bloody oughta be, just at the moment. They should've quit an hour before; but when this last nacelle was set, they were done with the cursed job.

"I got it, kid," he said calmly.

Simkins hesitated, then released the nacelle and watched nervously as his superior balanced the weight on his left palm. The upper bracket was bolted solidly, but there was enough play in the suspension to do real harm if the old bastard dropped—

A bell rang outside in the company area—rang and kept on ringing. Simkins straightened in terrified surmise and banged his head on the tank's belly armor. He stared at Ortnahme through tear-blinded eyes.

The warrant leader didn't move at all for a moment. Then his left biceps, covered with grit sticking to the sweat, bunched. The nacelle slid a centimeter and the drift punch shot through the realigned holes.

"Kid," Ortnahme said in a voice made tight by the tension of holding the fan nacelle, "I want you to get into the driver's seat and light her up, but don't—"

White light like the flash of a fuse blowing flickered through the intakes. The blam! of the mortar shell detonating was almost lost in the echoing clang of shrapnel against the skirts of the tank. Two more rounds went off almost simultaneously, but neither was quite as close.

Ortnahme swallowed. "But don't spin the fans till I tell you, right? I'll finish up with this myself."

"S—" Simkins began. Ortnahme had let the drift punch slide down and was groping for the multitool again. His arm muscles, rigid under their covering of fat, held the unit in place.

Simkins set the multitool in his superior's palm, bolt dispenser forward, and scuttled for the open access plate. "Yessir," he called back over his shoulder.

The multitool whirred, spinning the bolt home without a shade of difficulty.

Simkins' boots banged on the skirts as the technician thrust through the access port in the steel wall. It was a tight enough fit even for a young kid like him, and as for Ortnahme—Ortnahme had half considered cutting a double-sized opening and welding the cover back in place when he was done with this cursed job.

Just as well he hadn't done that. With a hole that big venting the plenum chamber, the tank woulda been anchored until it was fixed.

Tribarrels fired, the thump of expanding air preceded minutely by the hiss of the energy discharge that heated a track to the target. Another salvo of mortar shells landed, and an earthshock warned of something more substantial hitting in the near distance.

Not a time to be standing around outside, welding a patch on a tank's skirts.

With the first bolt in place, the second was a snap. Or maybe Herman's Whore had just decided to quit fighting him now that the shooting had started. The bitch was Slammers' equipment, after all.

The tank shuddered. It was just Simkins hitting the main switch, firing up the containment/compression lasers in the fusion bottle that powered the vehicle, but for a moment Ortnahme thought the fan he held was live.

And about to slice the top half of his body into pastrami as it jiggled around in its mounting.

Shrapnel glanced from the thick iridium of the hull. It made a sharp sound that didn't echo the way pieces did when they rang on the cavernous steel plenum chamber. Ortnahme found the last hole with the nose of a bolt and triggered the multitool. The fastener spun and stopped—too soon. Not home, not aligned.

Another earthshock, much closer than the first. Herman's Whore shuddered again, and the bolt whirred the last centimeter to seat itself properly.

Warrant Leader Henk Ortnahme, wheezing with more than exertion, squirmed on his belly toward the access port. He ignored the way the soil scraped his chest raw.

He started to lift himself through the access port—carefully: the mine had stripped half the bolts holding down the cover plate, so there was sharp metal as well as a bloody tight fit.

Tribarrels ripped outward, across the berm. To the south flares and tracers—mostly aimed high, way too high—from the Yokel lines brightened the sky.

Ortnahme was halfway through the access port when, despite the crash and roar of gunfire, he heard the whisper of more incoming mortar shells.

The 20cm main gun of another tank fired, blotting every other sight and sound from the night with its thunderous cyan flash.

When Ranson hit the deck, Dick Suilin's first reaction was that the woman officer was having convulsions. He turned to call for help, blinking because Fritzi's light had flared across him as the cameraman spun to record a new subject: half-clad soldiers sprinting or sprawling all across the detachment area. Somebody was ringing a raucous bell that—

Ranson, flat on the ground, grabbed Suilin's right ankle and jerked forward.

"Hey!" the reporter shouted, trying to pull away.

Standing straight, the woman didn't even come up to his collarbone, but she had a grip like a wire snare. Suilin overbalanced, flailing his arms until his butt hit the coarse soil and slammed all the air out of his lungs.

There was a white flash, a bang, and—about an inch above Suilin's head—something that sounded like a bandsaw hitting a pineknot. Fritzi grunted and flung his camera in the opposite direction. Its floodlights went out.

"Fritzi, what are you—" Suilin shouted, stopping when his words were punctuated by two more blasts.

They were being shelled for God's sake! Not two hours' ride from Kohang!

The Slammers' captain had disappeared somewhere, but when Suilin started to get up to run for cover, Fritzi Dole fell across him and knocked him flat again.

Suilin started to curse, but before he got the first word out a nearby combat car lighted the darkness with a stream of bolts from a tribarrel.

The chunk of shrapnel which grated past Suilin a moment before had chopped off the back of his cameraman's skull. Fritzi's blood and brains splashed Suilin's chest.

Dick Suilin had seen death before; he'd covered his share of road accidents and nursing home fires as a junior reporter. Even so, he'd been on the political beat for years now. This was a political story; the waste of money on foreign mercenaries when the same sums spent on the National Army would give ten times the result.

And anyway, covering the result of a tavern brawl wasn't the same as feeling Fritzi's warm remains leak over the neat uniform in which Suilin had outfitted himself for this assignment.

He tried to push the body away from him, but it was heavy and as flexible as warm bread dough. He thought he heard the cameraman mumbling, but he didn't want to think that anyone so horribly wounded wouldn't have died instantly. Half of Fritzi's brains were gone, but he moaned as the reporter thrust him aside in a fit of revulsion.

Suilin rolled so that his back was toward the body.

The ground which he'd chosen for his interview was bare of cover, but a tank was parked against the berm twenty meters from him. He poised to scuttle toward the almost astronomical solidity of the vehicle and cower under the tarpaulin strung like a lean-to from its flank.

Before the reporter's legs obeyed his brain's decision, a man in the Slammers' dull khaki ran past. The mercenary was doubled over by the weight of equipment in his arms and fear of shrapnel.

He was the only figure visible in what had been a languorously busy encampment. Suilin ran after him, toward the combat car almost as close as the tank, though to the opposite side.

The reporter needed companionship now more than he needed the greater bulk of steel and iridium close to his yielding flesh.

The combat car's driver spun its fans to life. Dust lifted, scattering the light of the tribarrel firing from the vehicle.

Three more mortar shells struck. Through the corner of his eye, Suilin saw the tarp plastered against the side of the tank.

The cloth was shredded by the blast that had flung it there.

"Hey, snake," said DJ Bell, smiling like he always had, though he'd been dead three months. "How they hangin'?"

Sergeant Birdie Sparrow moaned softly in his sleep. "Go away, DJ," his dream-self murmured. "I don't need this."

"Via, Birdie," said the dead trooper. "You need all the friends you can get. We—"

The short, smiling man started to change, the way he did in this dream.

"—all do."

Birdie didn't sleep well in the daytime, but with a tarp shading him, it was OK, even with the heat.

He couldn't sleep at all after dark, not since DJ bought it but kept coming back to see him.

DJ Bell was a little guy with freckles and red hair. He kept his helmet visor at ninety degrees as an eyeshade when he rode with his head and shoulders out of the commander's hatch of his tank, but his nose was usually peeling with sunburn anyways.

He'd had a bit of an attitude, DJ did; little-guy stuff. Wanted to prove he was as tough as anybody alive, which he was; and that he could drink anybody under the table—which he couldn't, he just didn't have the body weight, but he kept trying.

That stuff only mattered during stand-downs, and not even then once you got to know DJ. Birdie'd known DJ for five years. Been his friend, trusted him so completely that he never had to think about it when things dropped in the pot. DJ'd covered Birdie's ass a hundred times. They were the kind of friends you only had when you were at the sharp end, when your life was on the line every minute, every day.

It'd been a routine sweep, G Company's combat cars had pushed down a ridgeline while the tanks of M Company's 3rd Platoon held a blocking position to see what the cars flushed. One tank was deadlined with problems in its main-gun loading mechanism, and Lieutenant Hemmings had come down with the rolling crud, so Birdie Sparrow was in charge of the platoon's three remaining tanks.

Being short a tank didn't matter; G Company blew a couple of deserted bunkers, but they couldn't find any sign of Consies fresher than a month old. The combat cars laagered for the night on the ridge, while the tanks headed back for Firebase Red.

They were in line abreast. Birdie'd placed his own Deathdealer on the right flank, while DJ's Widowmaker howled along forty meters away in the center of the short line. They were riding over fields that'd been abandoned years before when the National Government cleared the area of civilians in an admission that they could no longer defend it from Conservative guerrillas slipping across the enclave borders.

All three tank commanders were head-and-shoulders out of their cupolas, enjoying the late afternoon sun. DJ turned and waved at Birdie, calling something that wasn't meant to be heard over the sound of the fans.

The motion sensor pinged a warning in Birdie's helmet, but it was too late by then.

Later—there was plenty of time later to figure out what had happened—they decided that the stand-off mine had been set almost three years before. It'd been intended to hit the lightly-armored vehicles the Yokels had been using in the region back then, so its high-sensitivity fuze detonated the charge 200 meters from the oncoming tanks.

Birdie's tanks didn't have—none of the Hammer's tanks had—its detection apparatus set to sweep that far ahead, because at that range the mine's self-forging projectile couldn't penetrate the armor even of a combat car. What the motion sensor had caught was the warhead shifting slightly to center on its target.

The mine was at the apex of an almost perfect isosceles triangle, with the two tanks forming the other corners. It rotated toward Widowmaker instead of Deathdealer.

Both tank commanders' minds were reacting to the dirty, yellow-white blast they saw in the corner of their eyes, but there hadn't been time for muscles to shift enough to wipe away DJ's grin when the projectile clanged against Widowmaker's sloping turret and glanced upward. It was a bolt of almost-molten copper, forged from a plate into a spearpoint by the explosive that drove it toward its target.

DJ wore ceramic body armor. It shattered as the projectile coursed through the trooper's chest and head.

As Birdie Sparrow hosed the countryside with both his tribarrel and main gun, trying to blast an enemy who'd been gone for years, all he could think was, Thank the Lord it was him and not me. 

"Look, y' know it's gonna happen, Birdie," said DJ's ghost earnestly. "It don't mean nothin'."

His voice was normal, but his chest was a gaping cavity and his face had started to splash—the way Birdie'd seen it happen three months before; only slowly, very slowly.

DJ had a metal filling in one of his molars. It glittered as it spun out through his cheek.

"DJ, you gotta stop doin' this," Birdie whimpered. His body was shivering and he wanted to wake up.

"Yeah, well, you better get movin', snake," DJ said with a shrug of his shoulders almost separated from what was left of his chest. The figure was fading from Birdie's consciousness. "It's starting again, y'know."

shoop 

Birdie was out of his shelter and climbing the recessed steps to Deathdealer's turret before he knew for sure he was awake. He was wearing his boots—he hadn't taken them off for more than a few minutes at a time in three months—and his trousers.

Most troopers kept their body armor near their bunks. Birdie didn't bother with that stuff anymore.

Despite the ringing alarm bell, there were people still standing around in the middle of the company area; but that was their problem, not Birdie Sparrow's.

He was diving feet-first through the hatch when the first mortar shell went off, hurling a figure away from its blast.

The body looked like DJ Bell waving goodbye.

When the third mortar shell went off, June Ranson rolled into a crouch and sprinted toward her combat car. The Consies used 100mm automatic mortars that fired from a three-round clip. It was a bloody good weapon—a lot like the mortar in Hammer's infantry platoons, and much more effective than the locally-made tube the National Army used.

The automatic mortar fired three shots fast, but the weight of a fresh clip stretched the gap between rounds three and four out longer than it would have been from a manually-loaded weapon.

Of course, if the Consies had a pair of mortars targeted on Ranson's detachment area, she was right outta luck.

Guns were firing throughout the encampment now, and the Yokels had finally switched on their warning klaxon. A machinegun sent a stream of bright-orange Consie tracers snapping through the air several meters above Ranson's head. One tracer hit a pebble in the earthen berm and ricocheted upward at a crazy angle.

A strip charge wheezed in the night, a nasty, intermittent sound like a cat throwing up. A drive rocket was uncoiling the charge through the wire and minefields on which the Yokels depended for protection.

The charge went off, hammering the ground and blasting a corridor through the defenses. It ignited the western sky with a momentary red flash like the sunset's afterthought.

Ranson caught the rear hand-hold of her combat car, Warmonger—Tootsie One-three—and swung herself into the fighting compartment. The fans were live, and both wing guns were firing.

Beside the vehicle were the scattered beginnings of an evening meal: a catalytic cooker, open ration packets, and three bottles of local beer spilled to stain the dust. Warmonger's crew had been together for better than two years. They did everything as a team, so Ranson could be nearly certain her command vehicle would be up to speed in an emergency.

She was odd man out: apart from necessary business, the crewmen hadn't addressed a dozen words to her in the month and a half since she took over the detachment.

Ranson didn't much care. She'd seen too many people die herself to want to get to know any others closely.

Hot plastic empties ejecting from Stolley's left-wing gun spattered over her. One of the half-molten disks clung to the hair on the back of her wrist for long enough to burn.

Ranson grabbed her helmet, slapped the visor down over her face, and thumbed it from optical to thermal so that she could see details again. That dickheaded Yokel reporter had picked a great time to blind her with his camera light. . . .

A mortar shell burst; then everything paused at the overwhelming crash of a tank's main gun. At least one of the panzers sent to Camp Progress for maintenance was up and running.

Figures, fuzzy and a bilious yellow-green, leaped from concealment less than a hundred meters from the berm. Two of them intersected the vivid thermal track of Stolley's tribarrel. The third flopped down and disappeared as suddenly as he'd risen.

A cubical multi-function display, only thirty centimeters on a side and still an awkward addition to the clutter filling the blower's fighting compartment, was mounted on the front bulkhead next to Ranson's tribarrel. She switched it on and picked up her back-and-breast armor.

"Janacek!" She ordered her right gunner over the pulsing thump-hiss of the tribarrels to either side of her. "Help me on!"

The stocky, spike-haired crewman turned from the spade grips of his gun and took the weight of Ranson's ceramic armor. She shrugged into the clamshell and latched it down her right side.

All six blowers in the guard detachment were beads of light in the multi-function display. Their fusion bottles were pressurized, though that didn't mean they had full crews.

"Now your own!" she said, handing the compartment's other suit to Janacek.

"Screw it!" the gunner snarled as he turned to his tribarrel.

"Now, trooper!" Ranson shouted in his ear.

Janacek swore and took the armor.

Two bullets clanged against the underside of the splinter shield, a steel plate a meter above the coaming of the fighting compartment. One of the Consie rounds howled off across the encampment while the other disintegrated in red sparks that prickled all three of the Slammers.

Stolley triggered a long burst, then a single round. "My trick, sucker!" he shouted.

The air was queasy with the bolts' ionized tracks and the sullen, petrochemical stink of the empty cases.

The blowers of the guard detachment were spaced more or less evenly around the 500-meter arc of the Slammers' area, because they were the only vehicles Ranson could depend on being combat ready. Two tanks were in Camp Progress for maintenance, and a third one—brand new—had been delivered here for shake-down before being sent on to a line company.

All three of the panzers might be able to provide at least fire support. If they could, it'd make a lot of difference.

Maybe the difference between life and death.

Ranson poked the control to give her all units with live fusion powerplants in a half-kilometer area. She prayed she'd see three more lights in her display—

Somebody who at least said he was Colonel Banyussuf, the camp commander, was bleating for help on the general channel. ". . . are overrunning headquarters! They're downstairs now!" 

Likely enough, from the crossfire inside the berm at the other end of the camp. And Banyussuf's own bloody problem until Ranson had her lot sorted out.

There were ten blips: she'd forgotten the self-propelled howitzer in because of a traversing problem. Somebody'd brought it up, too.

Ranson switched on her own tribarrel. A blurred figure rose from where the two Consies Stolley'd killed were cooling in her visor's image. She ripped the new target with a stream of bolts that flung his arm and head in the air as his torso crumpled to the ground.

They were Hammer's Slammers. They'd been brought to Prosperity to kick ass, and that's just what they were going to do.

Chapter Two

Hans Wager, his unlatched clamshell flapping against his torso, lifted himself onto the back deck of his tank and reached for the turret handhold.

He hated mortars, but the shriek of incoming didn't scare him as much as it should've. He was too worried about the bleeding cursed, huge whale of a tank he was suddenly in charge of in a firefight.

And Wager was pissed: at Personnel for transferring him from combat cars to tanks when they promoted him to sergeant; at himself, for accepting the promotion if the transfer came with it; and at his driver, a stupid newbie named Holman who'd only driven trucks during her previous six months in the regiment.

The tank was brand new. It didn't have a name. Wager'd been warned not to bother naming the vehicle, because as soon as they got the tank to D Company it'd be turned over to a senior crew while he and Holman were given some piece of knackered junk.

Wager grabbed the hatch—just in time, because the tank bucked as that dickhead Holman lifted her on her fans instead of just building pressure in the plenum chamber. "Set—" Wager shouted. The lower edge of his body armor caught on the hatch coaming and jolted the rest of the order out as a wheeze.

Curse this bloody machine that didn't have any bloody room for all its size!

The berm around the Yokel portion of Camp Progress was four meters high—good protection against incoming, but you couldn't shoot over it. They'd put up guard towers every hundred meters inside the berm to cover their barbed wire and minefields.

As Wager slid at last into his turret, he saw the nearest tower disintegrate in an orange flash that silhouetted the bodies of at least three Yokel soldiers.

Holman had switched on the turret displays as soon as she boarded the tank, so Wager had access to all the data he could possibly want. Panoramic views in the optical, enhanced optical, passive thermal, active infra-red, laser, millimetric radar, or sonic spectra. Magnified views in all the above spectra.

Three separate holographic screens, two of which could be split or quadded. Patching circuits that would display similar data fed from any other Slammer vehicle within about ten kays.

Full readouts through any of the displays on the status of the tank's ammunition, its fans, its powerplant, and all aspects of its circuitry.

Hans Wager didn't understand any of that cop. He'd only been assigned to this mother for eighteen hours.

His commo helmet pinged. "This is Tootsie six," said the crisp voice of Captain Ranson from the guard detachment. "Report status. Over."

Ranson didn't have a callsign for Wager's tank, so she was highlighting his blip on her multi-function display before sending.

Wager didn't have a callsign either.

"Roger, Tootsie six," he said. "Charlie Three-zero—" the C Company combat car he'd crewed for the past year as driver and wing gunner "—up and running. Over."

Holman'd got her altitude more or less under control, but the tank now hunched and sidled like a dog unused to a leash. Maybe Wager ought to trade places with Holman. He figured from his combat car experience that he could drive this beast, so at least one of the seats'd be filled by somebody who knew his job.

Wager reached for the seat lever and raised himself out of the cold electronic belly of the turret. He might not have learned to be a tank commander yet, but . . .

The night was bright and welcoming. Muzzle flashes erupted from the slim trees fringing the stream 400 meters to Wager's front. Short bursts without tracers. He set his visor for persistent display—prob'ly a way to do that with the main screens, too, but who the cop cared?—to hold the aiming point in his vision while he aligned the sights of the cupola tribarrel with them.

The first flash of another burst merged with the crackling impact of Wager's powergun. There wasn't a second shot from that Consie.

Wager walked his fire down the course of the stream, shattering slender tree trunks and igniting what had been lush grass an instant before the ravening cyan bolts released their energy. The tank still wasn't steady, but Wager'd shot on the move before. He knew his job.

A missile exploded, fuel and warhead together, gouging a chunk out of the creekbank where the tribarrel had found it before its crew could align it to fire.

Hans Wager's job was to kill people.

The helmeted Slammers' trooper—with twenty kilos of body armor plus a laden equipment belt gripped in his left arm—caught the handle near the top of the car's shield, put his right foot in the step cut into the flare of the plenum chamber skirt, and swung himself into the vehicle.

Suilin's skin was still prickling from the hideous, sky-devouring flash/crash! that had stunned him a moment before. He'd thought a bomb had gone off, but it was a tank shooting because it happened again. He'd pissed his pants, and that bothered him more than the way Fritzi was splashed across the front of his uniform.

Suilin grabbed the handle the way the soldier had. The metal's buzzing vibration startled him; but it was the fans, of course, not a short circuit to electrocute him. He put his foot on the step and jumped as he'd seen the soldier do. He had to get over the side of the armor which would protect him once he was there.

His chest banged the hard iridium, knocking the breath out of him. His left hand scrabbled for purchase, but he didn't have enough strength to—

The trooper Suilin had followed to the combat car leaned over and grabbed the reporter's shoulder. He jerked Suilin aboard with an ease that proved it was as much a knack as pure strength—

But the fellow was strong, and Dick Suilin was out of shape for this work. He didn't belong here, and now he was going to die in this fire-struck night. . . .

"Take the left gun!" shouted the trooper as he slapped the armor closed over his chest. He lowered his helmet visor and added in a muffled voice, "I got the right!"

A trio of sharp, white blasts raked the National Army area. Something overflew the camp from south to north with an accelerating roar that dwarfed even the blasts of the tank gun. It was visible only as the dull glow of a heated surface.

Suilin picked himself up from the ice chest and stacked boxes which halved the space available within the fighting compartment. One man was already bent over the bow gun, ripping the night in short bursts. Suilin's guide seized the grips of the right-hand weapon and doubled the car's weight of fire.

Two of the guard towers were burning. Exploding flares and ammunition sent sparkles of color through the smoky orange flames. The fighting platforms were armored, but the towers were constructed of wood. Suilin had known that—but he hadn't considered until now what the construction technique would mean in a battle.

There wasn't supposed to be a battle, here in the South.

Suilin bent close to the third tribarrel, hoping he could make some sense of it. He'd had militia training like every other male in the country over the age of sixteen, but Prosperity's National Army wasn't equipped with powerguns.

He took the double grips in his hands, that much was obvious. The weapon rotated easily, though the surprising mass of the barrels gave Suilin's tentative swings more inertia than he'd intended.

When his thumbs pressed the trigger button between the grips, nothing happened. The tribarrel had a switch or safety somewhere, and in the dark Suilin wasn't going to be able to overcome his ignorance.

The gun in a tank's cupola snapped a stream of cyan fire south at a flat angle. There was a huge flash and a separate flaring red streak in the sky above the National Army positions. Two other missiles detonated on the ground as three of the earlier salvo had done.

The mercenaries claimed they could shoot shells and missiles out of the air. Suilin hadn't believed that was more than advertising puffery, but he'd just seen it happen. The Slammers' vehicles couldn't protect the National Army positions, but missiles aimed high enough to threaten the mercenaries' own end of Camp Progress were being gutted by computer-aimed powerguns.

The back of Suilin's mind shivered to realize that just now he really didn't care what happened to his fellow citizens, so long as those Consie missiles couldn't land on him.

The tribarrel was useless—the reporter knew he was useless with it—but a short-barreled grenade launcher and bandolier lay across the ice chest beside him. He snatched it up and found the simple mechanical safety with his left thumb.

Suilin had never been any good with a rifle, but his shotgun had brought down its share of birds at the estates of family friends. In militia training he'd taken to grenade launchers like a child to milk.

A bullet passed close enough to crack in Suilin's left ear. He didn't have any idea where the round came from, but both the other men in the fighting compartment swung their tribarrels and began hosing a swale only a hundred meters from the berm. So. . . .

Suilin lifted his grenade launcher and fired. He didn't bother with the sights, just judged the angle of the barrel. The chook! of the shot was a little sharper than he'd expected; the Slammers used lighter projectiles with a higher velocity than the weapons he'd trained on.

They used a more potent bursting charge, too. The grenade's yellow flash, fifty meters beyond Suilin's point of aim, looked like an artillery piece firing.

He lowered the muzzle slightly and squeezed off. This time the projectile burst just where he wanted it, in the swale whose lips were lighted by the tribarrel's crackling bolts.

Suilin didn't see the figure leap from concealment until the powerguns clawed the Consie dazzlingly apart.

"That's right!" his guide screamed from the right-hand gun. "Flush the bastards for us!"

The grenade launcher's recoil woke a familiar warmth from the reporter's shoulder. He swung his weapon slightly and walked three shots down the hidden length of the swale. The last was away before the first was cratering the darkened turf.

An empty clip ejected from the weapon after the fifth round. Both tribarrels fired. There was a disemboweled scream as Dick Suilin reached for the bandolier, groping for more ammunition. . . .

The turret hatch clanged above Birdie Sparrow; he wasn't shivering any more. Albers, his driver, hadn't boarded yet, so Birdie brought Deathdealer up himself by touching the main switch. The displays lighted softly on auxiliary power while the fusion bottle built pressure.

Deathdealer's hull deadened most sounds, but mortar fragments rang on her skirts like sleet on a window. "Booster, Screen Three," Birdie said, ordering the tank's artificial intelligence to bring up Screen Three, which he habitually used for non-optical sensor inputs.

The tracks of mortar shells were glowing holographic arcs, red for the first salvo and orange for the second. Birdie computed a vector and overlaid it on his main screen at the same time he fed the data to fire control. The turret began to rotate on its frictionless magnetic bearings; the breech of the main gun raised a few centimeters as the muzzle dipped onto its aiming point.

Deathdealer grunted as her fans took a first bite of air. Albers had boarded, so they were fully combat ready.

Light enhancement on the main screen showed the shell tracks arcing from a copse 1800 meters from the berm at a deflection of forty-three degrees east of true north. The orange pipper on Screen Two, the gunnery display, was centered on that point.

The Consies might be in a gully hidden by the trees, and there was a limit to the amount of dirt and rock even a 20cm powergun could excavate, but—

Birdie rocked his foot switch, sending two rounds from his main gun crashing downrange.

Deathdealer shook. The amount of copper plasma being expelled was only a few grams, but when even that slight mass was accelerated to light speed, its recoil force shifted the tank's 170 tonnes. Spent casings ejected onto the turret floor, overwhelming the air conditioning with the stench of hot matrix.

The copse exploded in a ball of fire and live steam. A tree leaped thirty meters skyward, driven by the gout of energy that had shattered the bole at root level.

Birdie chuckled and coughed in the atmosphere of reeking plastic. The mortar crew might not've bought it this time, but they bloody sure weren't going to call attention to themselves for a while. DJ'd have appreciated that.

The main screen highlighted movement in blue: two figures hunched with the weight of the burden they carried between them toward the berm.

Birdie's left thumb rocked the gun control from main to coax while his right hand expertly teased the joystick to bring the pipper onto his targets. They went to ground just as his foot was tensing on the gunswitch, disappearing into a minute dip that meant the difference between life and death.

Birdie started to switch back to the main gun and do the job by brute force, but—

Y' know it's gonna happen, DJ had said in his dream. Birdie waited, ten seconds, twenty. . . .

The Consies popped up from cover, their figures slightly blurred by phosphor delays in the enhanced hologram. Birdie's foot pressed down the rest of the way. A drive motor whirred as the cupola tribarrel thumped out its five-round burst. Cyan impacts flung the targets to left and right as parts of their bodies vaporized explosively.

Death had waited; thirty seconds for that pair, years for other men. But Death didn't forget.

Birdie was safe. He was inside the heaviest piece of land-based armor in the human universe.

Three artillery rockets hit in the near distance. A fourth rumbled overhead, shaking Deathdealer and Birdie's vision of safety. Those were definitely big enough to hurt anything in their impact zone.

Even a tank.

The reflexes of five years' combat, including a year as platoon sergeant, took over. Birdie kept one eye on the panoramic main screen while his hands punched data out of his third display.

The other tanks in the encampment were powered up. The tribarrel couldn't override it without codes he didn't have. The third tank, an H Company repair job named Herman's Whore, didn't respond when he pinged it, and a remote hook-up indicated nobody was in the turret.

From his own command console, Birdie rotated the Whore's tribarrel to the south and slaved it to air defense. Until somebody overrode his command, the gun would engage any airborne targets her sensors offered her.

That left Birdie to get back to immediate business. An alarm pinged to warn him that a laser rangefinder painted Deathdealer's armor. The gunnery computer was already rotating the turret, while a pulsing red highlight arrowed the source: an anti-tank missile launcher twelve hundred meters away, protected only by night and distance.

Which meant unprotected.

Deathdealer's close-in defense system would detonate the missile at a distance with a sleet of barrel-shaped steel pellets, but the Consies needed to learn that you didn't target Colonel Hammer's tanks.

Birdie Sparrow thumbed the gunswitch, preparing to teach the Consies a main-gun lesson.

Henk Ortnahme, panting as he mounted the turret of Herman's Whore, didn't notice the cupola tribarrel was slewed until the bloody thing ripped out a bloody burst that almost blew his bloody head off.

The plasma discharge prickled his scalp and made the narrow fringe that was all the hair he had stand out like a ruff.

Ortnahme ducked blindly, banging his chin on the turret. He couldn't see a bloody thing except winking afterimages of the bolts, and he was too stunned to be angry.

The southern sky flashed and bled as one warhead detonated vainly and another missile's fuel painted the night instead of driving its payload down into the Slammers' positions. Sure, somebody'd slaved the cupola gun to air defense, and that was fine with Ortnahme.

Seeing as he'd managed to survive learning about it.

He mounted the cupola quickly and lowered himself into the turret, hoping the cursed gun wouldn't cut loose again just now. The hatch was a tight fit, but it didn't have sharp edges like the access port.

The port had torn Ortnahme's coveralls so he looked like he'd been wrestling a tiger. Then the bloody coverplate—warped by the mine that deadlined the tank to begin with—hadn't wanted to bolt back in place.

But Ortnahme was in the turret now, and Herman's Whore was ready to slide.

The radio was squawking on the command channel. Ortnahme'd left the hatch open, and between the racket of gunfire and incoming—most of that well to the south by now—the warrant leader couldn't hear what was being said. If he'd known he was in for a deal like this, he'd've brought the commo helmet stashed in his quarters against the chance that someday he'd get back out in the field. . . .

For now he rolled the volume control up to full and blasted himself with, "—DO YOU HAVE A CREW? O—"

Ortnahme dumped some of the volume.

"—ver."

"Roger, Tootsie Six," the warrant leader reported. "Herman's Whore is combat ready. Over."

He sat down, the first chance he'd had to do that since sun-up, and leaped to his feet again as the multitool he'd stowed in his cargo pocket clanged against the frame of the seat. Blood and martyrs!

Ortnahme was itching for a chance to shoot something, but he'd spent too long with the fan and the coverplate. There weren't any targets left on his displays, and he suspected that most of the bolts still hissing across the berm were fired by kids who didn't have the sense God gave a goose.

The Consies had hit in a rush, figuring to sweep over the encampment by sheer speed and numbers. You couldn't do that against the firepower the Slammers put out.

The rest of Camp Progress, though . . .

"Tootsie Six to all Red and Blue personnel," Junebug Ranson continued. "The Yokels report that bandits have penetrated their positions. Red units will form line abreast and sweep south through the encampments. Mobile Blue units—"

The three tanks. Ortnahme's tank, by the Lord's blood!

"—will cross the berm, form on the TOC, and sweep counterclockwise from that point to interdict bandit reinforcements. Deathdealer has command."

Sergeant Sparrow. Tall, dark, and as jumpy as a pithed frog. Usually Ortnahme got crewmen to help him when he pulled major maintenance on their vehicles, but he'd given Sparrow a wide berth. That boy was four-plus crazy.

"Remaining Blue elements," Ranson concluded, "hold what you got, boys. We got to take care of this now, but we'll be back. Tootsie Six over."

Remaining Blue elements. The maintenance and logistics people, the medic and the light-duty personnel. The people who were crouched now in bunkers with their sidearms and their prayers, hoping that when the armored vehicles shifted front, the Consies wouldn't be able to mount another attack on the Slammer positions.

"Deathdealer, roger."

"Charlie Three-zero, roger."

"Herman's Whore, roger," Ortnahme reported. He didn't much like being under the command of Birdie Sparrow, a flake who was technically his junior; but Sparrow was a flake because of years of line service, and it wasn't a point that the warrant leader would even think of mentioning after it all settled down again.

Assuming.

He switched to intercom. "You heard the lady, Simkins," he said. "Lift us over the bloody berm!"

And as the fan note built from idle into a full-throated roar, Ortnahme went back to looking for targets.

The combat car drove a plume of dust from the berm as it started to back and swing. The man who'd been firing the forward tribarrel turned so that Dick Suilin could see the crucifix gilded onto the plastron of his body armor. He flipped up his visor and said, "Who the cop're you?"

"I'm, ah—" the reporter said.

His ears rang. Afterimages like magnified algae rods filled his eyes as his retinas tried to redress the chemical imbalances burned into them by the glaring powerguns.

He waggled the smoking muzzle of the grenade launcher.

That must have been the right response. The man with the crucifix looked at the trooper who'd guided Suilin to the vehicle and said, "Where the cop's Speed, Otski?"

The wing gunner grimaced and said, "Well, Cooter, ah—his buddy in Logistics got in, you know, this morning."

"Bloody buggered fool!" Cooter shouted. He'd looked a big man even when he hunched over his tribarrel; straightening in rage made him a giant. "Tonight he's stoned?"

"Cut him some slack, Cooter," Otski said, looking aside rather than meeting the bigger soldier's eyes. "This ain't the Strip, you know."

Suilin rubbed his forehead. The Strip. The no-man's-land surrounding the Terran Government enclaves in the north.

"Tonight it's the bleeding Strip!" Cooter snapped.

Cooter's helmet spoke something that was only a tinny rattle to Suilin. "Tootsie Three, roger," the big man said. Otski nodded.

A multiple explosion hammered the center of the camp. Munitions hurled themselves in sparkling tracks from a bubble of orange flame.

"Blood 'n martyrs," Cooter muttered as angry light bathed his weary face.

He lifted a suit of hard armor from the floor of the fighting compartment. "Here," he said to Suilin, "put this on. Wish I could give you a helmet, but that dickhead Speed's got it with him."

Their combat car was sidling across the packed earth, keeping its bow southward—toward the flames and the continued shooting. The car passed close to where Fritzi Dole lay. The photographer's clothing swelled in the draft blasting from beneath the plenum chamber.

Dust whipped and eddied. The other combat cars were maneuvering also, forming a line. Here at the narrow end of the encampment, the separations between vehicles were only about ten meters apiece.

"The gun work?" Cooter demanded, patting the breech of the tribarrel as Suilin put on the unfamiliar armor. The clamshell seemed to weigh more than its actual twenty kilos; it was chafing over his left collarbone even before he got it latched.

"Huh?" the reporter grunted. "I think—I mean, I don't—"

Making a bad guess now meant someone might die rather than just a libel suit.

Meant Dick Suilin might die.

"Oh, right," Cooter said easily. He poked with a big finger at where the gun's receiver was gimballed onto its pedestal. A green light glowed just above the trigger button. "No sweat, turtle. I'll just slave it to mine. You just keep bombin' 'em like you been doing."

The helmet buzzed again. "Tootsie Three, roger," Cooter repeated. He tapped the side of his helmet and ordered, "Move out, Shorty, but keep it to a walk, right?"

Cooter and Otski bent over their weapons. When the big trooper waggled his handgrips, the left tribarrel rocked in parallel with his own.

"What are we doing?" Suilin asked, swaying as the combat car moved forward. The big vehicle had the smooth, unpleasant motion of butter melting as a grill heats.

The reporter pulled another loaded clip from the bandolier to have it ready. He squinted toward the barracks ahead of them, silhouetted in orange light.

"Huh?" said Cooter. His face was a blank behind his lowered visor as he looked over his shoulder in surprise.

"We're gonna clear your Consie buddies outta Camp Progress," Otski said with a feral grin in his voice.

"Yeah, right, you don't have a commo," Cooter said/apologized. "Look, anybody you see in a black uniform, zap him. Anybody shoots at us, zap him. Fast."

"Anything bleedin' moves," said Otski, "you zap it. Any mistake you gotta make, make it in favor of our ass, right?"

Suilin nodded tightly. There was a howl and whump! behind them. For a moment he thought the noise was a shell, but it was only one of the huge tanks lifting its mass over the berm.

A combat car on the right flank fired down one of the neat boulevards which served the National Army's portion of the camp.

"Hey, turtle?" the right wing gunner said. "You got a name?"

"Dick," Suilin said. He'd lifted the grenade launcher to his shoulder twice already, then lowered it because he felt like a fool to be aiming at no target. The noise around him was hideous.

"Don't worry, Dick," Otski said. "We'll tell yer girl you was brave."

He chuckled, then lighted the wide street ahead of them with a burst from his tribarrel.

"You must send the 4th Armored Brigade to relieve us!" Colonel Banyussuf was ordering his superiors in Kohang. Since June Ranson's radio was picking up the call down in the short-range two-meter push, there was about zip possibility that anybody 300 kilometers away could hear the Yokel commander's panicked voice.

Two men in full uniform poked their rifles gingerly southward, around the corner of a barracks. Light reflected from their polished leather and brightly-nickeled Military Police gorgets. The MPs stared in open-mouthed amazement as the combat car slid past them.

"About zip" was still a better chance than that District Command in Kohang would do anything about Banyussuf's problems.

Trouble here meant there was big trouble everywhere on Prosperity. District Command wasn't going to send the armored brigade based on the coast near Kohang haring off into the sticks to relieve Banyussuf.

"Watch it," Willens, their driver, warned.

Warmonger slid into an intersection. A crowd of thirty or so women and children screamed and ran a step or two away from them, then screamed again and flattened as another car crossed at the next intersection east. Dependents of senior non-coms, looking for a place to hide. . . .

Ranson wouldn't have minded having a Yokel armored brigade for support, but it'd take too long to reach here. Her team could do the job by themselves.

"Two o'clock!" she warned. Movement on the second floor of a barracks, across the wide boulevard that acted as a parade square every morning for the Yokels.

The left corner of her visor flashed the tiny red numeral 2. Her helmet's microprocessor had gathered all its sensor inputs and determined that the target was of Threat Level 2.

Cold meat under most circumstances, but in Camp Progress there were thousands of National Army personnel who looked the same as the Consies to scanners. With her visor on thermal, Ranson couldn't tell whether the figure wore black or a green-on-green mottled Yokel uni—

The figure raised its gun. 2 blinked to 1 in Ranson's visor, then vanished—

Because a dead man doesn't have any threat level at all. Ranson's burst converged with Janacek's; the upper front of the barracks flew apart as the powerguns ignited it.

Willens slewed the car left. Somebody leaned out of a window of the same barracks and fired—missed even the combat car except for one bullet ricocheting from the dirt street to whang on the skirts.

Ranson killed the shooter, letting Warmonger's forward motion walk the flashing cyan cores of her burst down the line of barracks windows. Janacek was raking the lower story, and as they came abreast of the building, the One-five blower to Warmonger's right laid on a crossfire from two of its tribarrels.

A single bolt from the other car sizzled through gaps already blown in the structure and hit the barracks on the other side of the street. The cyan track missed Ranson by little enough that the earphones in her helmet screamed piercingly with harmonics from the energy release.

She noticed it the way she'd notice a reflection in a shop window. Everything around her seemed to be reflected or hidden behind sheets of thick glass. Nothing touched her. Her skin felt warm, the way it did when she was on the verge of going to sleep.

A tank's main gun flashed beyond the berm. Ranson would've liked the weight of the panzers with her to push the Consies out, but their 20cm cannon were too destructive to use within a position crammed with friendly troops and their dependents. If things got hot enough that the combat cars needed a bail-out—

She'd give the orders she had to give and worry about the consequences later. But for now . . .

A group of armed men ran from a cross street into the next intersection. Some of them were still looking back over their shoulders when Warmonger's three tribarrels lashed them with converging streams of fire.

Figures whirled and disintegrated individually for a moment before a bloom of white light—a satchel charge, a buzzbomb's warhead; perhaps just a bandolier strung with grenades—enveloped the group. The shockwave slammed bodies and body fragments in every direction.

Ranson was sure they'd been wearing black uniforms. Pretty sure.

"—must help me!" whimpered the radio. "They have captured the lower floor of my headquarters!" 

She hand-keyed the microphone and said, "Progress Command, this is Slammers' Command. Help's on the way, but be bloody sure your own people don't shoot at us. Out."

Or else, her mind added, but she didn't want that threat on record. Anyway, even the Yokels were smart enough to know what happened when somebody shot at the Slammers. . . .

"Tootsie Six to Red elements," Ranson heard herself ordering. "Keep moving even if you're taking fire. Don't let 'em get their balance or they'll chop us."

Her voice was echoing to her down corridors of glass.

Chapter Three

Callsign Charlie Three-zero hit halfway up the berm's two-meter height. Holman had the beast still accelerating at the point of impact.

Even though Wager'd seen it coming and had tried to brace himself, the collision hurled his chest against the hatch coaming. His clamshell armor saved his ribs, but the shock drove all the breath from his body.

Air spilled from the tilted plenum chamber. The tank sagged backward like a horse spitted on a wall of pikes.

Hans Wager hoped that the smash hadn't knocked his driver's teeth out. He wanted to do that himself, as soon as things got quiet again.

"Holman," he wheezed as he keyed his intercom circuit. He'd never wanted to command a tank. . . . "Use lift, not your bloody speed. You can't—"

Dust exploded around Charlie Three-zero as if a bomb had gone off. Holman kept the blades' angle of attack flat to build up fan speed before trying to raise the vehicle again. She wasn't unskilled, exactly; she just wasn't used to moving something with this much inertia.

"—just ram through the bloody berm!" Wager concluded; but as they backed, he got a good look at the chunk they'd gouged from the protective dirt wall and had to wonder. They bloody near had plowed their way through, at no cost worse than bending the front skirts.

Rugged mother, this tank was. Might be something to be said for panzers after all, once you got to know 'em.

And got a bleedin' driver who knew 'em.

Something in the middle of the Yokel positions went off with walloping violence. Other people's problems weren't real high on Hans Wager's list right now, though.

The acting platoon leader, Sergeant Sparrow, had assigned Wager to the outside arc of the sweep and taken the berm side himself. Wager didn't like Sparrow worth spit. When Wager arrived at Camp Progress, he'd tried to get some pointers from the experienced tank sergeant, but Sparrow was an uncommunicative man whose eyes focused well beyond the horizon.

The dispositions made sense, though. The action was likely to be hottest right outside the camp. Sparrow's reflexes made him the best choice to handle it. Wager wasn't familiar with his new hardware, but he was a combat trooper who could be trusted to keep their exposed flank clear.

The middle slot of the sweep was a tank