"I've got authorization," said Dick Suilin, fumbling in the breast pocket of his fatigues. The "Extend all courtesies" card signed by his brother-in-law, Governor Samuel Kung, was there, along with his Press ID and his Military Status Papers.
Suilin's military status was Exempt-III. That meant he would see action only in the event of a call-up of all male citizens between the ages of sixteen and sixty.
He was having trouble getting the papers out because his fingers were still numb from the way they'd been squeezing the tribarrel's grips.
For that matter, the National Government might've proclaimed a general call-up overnight—if there was still a National Government.
"Buddy," snarled the senior non-com at the door of the communications center, "I can't help you. I don't care if you got authorization from God 'n his saints. I don't care if you are God 'n his saints!"
"I'm not that," the reporter said in a soft, raspy voice. Ozone and smoke had flayed his throat. "But I need to get through to Kohang—and it's your ass if I don't."
He flicked at his shirtfront. Some of what was stuck there came off.
Suilin's wrist and the back of his right hand were black where vaporized copper from the buzzbomb had recondensed. All the fine hairs were burned off, but the skin beneath hadn't blistered. His torso was badly bruised where the bullet-struck armor had punched into him.
The butt of the pistol he now carried in his belt prodded the bruise every time he moved.
"Well, I'm not God neither, buddy," the non-com said, his tone frustrated but suddenly less angry.
He waved toward his set-up and the two junior technicians struggling with earphones and throat mikes. "The land lines're down, the satellites're down, and there's jamming right across all the bands. If you think you can get something through, you just go ahead and try. But if you want my ass, you gotta stand in line."
The National side of Camp Progress had three commo centers. The main one was—had been—in the shielded basement of Headquarters. A few Consies were still holed up there after the rest of the fighting had died down. A Slammers' tank had managed to depress its main gun enough to finish the job.
The training detachment had a separate system, geared toward the needs of homesick draftees. It had survived, but Colonel Banyussuf—who'd also survived—had taken over the barracks in which it was housed as his temporary headquarters. Suilin hadn't bothered trying to get through the panicked crowd now surrounding the building.
The commo room of the permanent maintenance section at Camp Progress was installed in a three-meter metal transport container. It was unofficial—the result of scrounging over the years. Suilin hadn't ever tried to use it before; but in the current chaos, it was his only hope.
"What do you mean, the satellites are down?" he demanded.
He was too logy with reaction to be sure that what he'd heard the non-com say was as absurd as he thought it was. The microwave links were out? Not all of them, surely. . . .
"Out," the soldier repeated. "Gone. Blitzed. Out."
"Blood and martyrs," Suilin said.
The Consie guerrillas couldn't have taken down all the comsats. The Terran enclaves had to have become directly involved. That was a stunning escalation of the political situation—
And an escalation which was only conceivable as part of a planned deathblow to the National Government of Prosperity.
"I've got to call Kohang," said Dick Suilin, aloud but without reference to the other men nearby. All he could think of was his sister, in the hands of Consies determined to make an example of the governor's wife. "Suzi . . ."
"You can forget bloody Kohang," said one of the techs as he stripped off his headphones. He ran his fingers through his hair. The steel room was hot, despite the cool morning and the air conditioner throbbing on the roof. "It's been bloody overrun."
Suilin gripped the pistol in his belt. "What do you mean?" he snarled as he pushed past the soldier in the doorway.
"They said it was," the technician insisted. He looked as though he intended to get out of his chair, but the reporter was already looming over him.
"Somebody said it was," argued the other tech. "Look, we're still getting signals from Kohang, it's just the jamming chews the bugger outta it."
"There's fighting all the hell over the place," said the senior non-com, putting a gently restraining hand on Suilin's shoulder. " 'Cept maybe here. Look, buddy, nobody knows what the hell's going on anywhere just now."
"Maybe the mercs still got commo," the first tech said. "Yeah, I bet they do."
"Right," said the reporter. "Good thought."
He walked out of the transport container. He was thinking of what might be happening in Kohang.
He gripped his pistol very hard.
The chip recorder sitting on the cupola played a background of guitar music while a woman wailed in Tagalog, a language which Henk Ortnahme had never bothered to learn. The girls on Esperanza all spoke Spanish. And Dutch. And English. Enough of it.
The girls all spoke money, the same as everywhere in the universe he'd been since.
The warrant leader ran his multitool down the channel of the close-in defense system. The wire brush he'd fitted to the head whined in complaint, but it never quite stalled out.
It never quite got the channel clean, either. Pits in the steel were no particular problem—Herman's Whore wasn't being readied for a parade, after all. But crud in the holes for the bolts which both anchored the strips and passed the detonation signals . . . that was something else again.
Something blew up nearby with a hollow sound, like a grenade going off in a trash can. Ortnahme looked around quickly, but there didn't seem to be an immediate problem. Since dawn there'd been occasional shooting from the Yokel end of the camp, but there was no sign of living Consies around here.
Dead ones, sure. A dozen of 'em were lined up outside the TOC, being checked for identification and anything else of intelligence value. When that was done—done in a pretty cursory fashion, the warrant leader expected, since Hammer didn't have a proper intelligence officer here at Camp Progress—the bodies would be hauled beyond the berm, covered with diesel, and barbecued like the bloody pigs they were.
Last night had been a bloody near thing.
Ortnahme wasn't going to send out a tank whose close-in defenses were doubtful. Not after he'd had personal experience of what that meant in action.
He bore down harder. The motor protested; bits of the brush tickled the faceshield of his helmet. He'd decided to wear his commo helmet this morning instead of his usual shop visor, because—
Via, why not admit it? Because he'd really wished he'd had the helmet the night before. He couldn't change the past, couldn't have all his gear handy back then when he needed it; but he could sure as hell have it on him now for a security blanket.
There was a 1cm pistol in Ortnahme's hip pocket as well. He'd never seen the face of the Consie who'd chased him with the bomb, but today the bastard leered at Ortnahme from every shadow in the camp.
The singer moaned something exceptionally dismal. Ortnahme backed off his multitool, now that he had a sufficient section of channel cleared. He reached for a meter-long strip charge.
Simkins, who should've been buffing the channels while the warrant leader bolted in charges, had disappeared minutes after they'd parked Herman's Whore back in her old slot against the berm. The kid'd done a bloody good job during the firefight—but that didn't mean he'd stopped being a bloody maintenance tech. Ortnahme was going to burn him a new asshole as soon as—
"Mr. Ortnahme?" Simkins said. "Look what I got!"
The warrant leader turned, already shouting. "Simkins, where in the name of all that's holy have—"
He paused. "Via, Simkins," he said. "Where did you get that?"
Simkins was carrying a tribarrel, still in its packing crate.
"Tommy Dill at Logistics, sir," the technician answered brightly. "Ah, Mr. Ortnahme? It's off the books, you know. We set a little charge on the warehouse roof, so Tommy can claim a mortar shell combat-lossed the gun."
Just like that was the only question Ortnahme wanted to ask.
Though it was sure-hell one of 'em, that was God's truth.
"Kid," the warrant leader said calmly, more or less. "What in the bloody hell do you think you're gonna do with that gun?"
From the way Simkins straightened, "more or less" wasn't as close to "calmly" as Ortnahme had thought.
"Sir!" the technician said. "I'm gonna mount it on the bow. So I got something to shoot, ah . . . you know, the next time."
The kid glanced up at the blaring recorder. He was holding the tribarrel with no sign of how much the thing weighed. He wouldn't have been able to do that before Warrant Leader Ortnahme started running his balls off to teach him his job.
Ortnahme opened his mouth. He didn't know which part of the stupid idea to savage first.
Before he figured out what to say, Simkins volunteered, "Mister Ortnahme? I figured we'd use a section of engineer stake for a mount and weld it to the skirt. Ah, so we don't have to chance a weld on the iridium, you know?"
Like a bloody puppy, standin' there waggling his tail—and how in bloody hell had he got Sergeant Dill to agree to take a tribarrel off manifest?
"Kid," he said at last, "put that down and start buffing this channel for me, all right?"
"Yes, Mister Ortnahme."
The klaxon blurted, then cut off.
Ortnahme and every other Slammer in the compound froze. Nothing further happened. The Yokels must've been testing the system now that they'd moved it.
The bloody cursed fools.
"Sir," the technician said with his face bent over the buzz of his own multitool. "Can I put on some different music?"
"I like what I got on," Ortnahme grunted, spinning home first one, then the other of the bolts that locked the strip of explosive and steel pellets into its channel.
"Why, sir?" Simkins prodded unexpectedly. "The music, I mean?"
Ortnahme stared at his subordinate. Simkins continued to buff his way forward, as though cleaning the channel were the only thing on his mind.
"Because," Ortnahme said. He grimaced and flipped up the faceshield of his helmet. "Because that was the kinda stuff they played in the bars on Esperanza, my first landfall with the regiment. Because it reminds me of when I was young and stupid, kid. Like you."
He slid another of the strip charges from its insulated packing, then paused. "Look," he said, "this ain't our tank, Simkins."
"It's our tank till they send a crew to pick it up," the technician said over the whine of his brush. "It's our tank tonight, Mister Ortnahme."
The warrant leader sighed and fitted the strip into place. It bound slightly, but that was from the way the skirt had been torqued, not the job Simkins was doing on the channel.
"All right," Ortnahme said, "but we'll mount it solid so you swing the bow to aim it, all right? I don't want you screwing around with the grips when you oughta be holding the controls."
Simkins stopped what he was doing and turned. "Thank you, Mister Ortnahme!" he said, as though he'd just been offered the cherry of the most beautiful woman on the bloody planet.
"Yeah, sure," the warrant leader said with his face averted. "Believe me, you're gonna do the work while I sit on my butt 'n watch."
Ortnahme set a bolt, then a second. "Hey kid?" he said. "How the hell did you get Tommy to go along with this cop?"
"I told him it was you blasted the Consie with the satchel charge when Tommy opened his warehouse door."
Ortnahme blinked, "Huh?" he said. "Somebody did that? It sure wasn't me."
"Tommy's got a case of real French brandy for you, sir," the technician said. He turned and grinned. "And the tribarrel. Because I'm your driver, see? And he didn't want our asses swingin' in the breeze again like last night."
"Bloody hell," the warrant leader muttered. He placed another bolt and started to grin himself.
"We won't use engineer stakes," he said. "I know where there's a section of 10cm fuel-truck hose sheathing. We'll cut and bend that. . . ."
"Thank you, Mister Ortnahme."
"And I guess we could put a pin through the pivot," Ortnahme went on. "So you could unlock the curst thing if, you know, we got bogged down again."
"Thank you, Mister Ortnahme!"
Cursed little puppy. But a smart one.
Two blocks from the commo room, Dick Suilin passed the body of a man in loose black garments. The face of the corpse was twisted in a look of ugly surprise. An old scar trailed up his cheek and across an eyebrow, but there was no sign of the injury that had killed him here.
The Slammers' TOC was almost two kilometers away. Suilin was already so exhausted that his ears buzzed except when he tried to concentrate on something. He decided to head for the infantry-detachment motor pool and try to promote a ride to the north end of the camp.
It occurred to the reporter that he hadn't seen any vehicles moving in the camp since the combat cars reformed and howled back to their regular berths. As he formed the thought, a light truck drove past and stopped beside the body.
A lieutenant and two soldiers wearing gloves, all of them looking morose, got out. Before they could act, a group of screaming dependents, six women and at least as many children, swept around the end of one of the damage buildings. They pushed the soldiers away, then surrounded the corpse and began kicking it.
Suilin paused to watch. The enlisted men glanced at one another, then toward the lieutenant, who seemed frozen. One of the men said, "Hey, we're s'posed to take—"
A woman turned and spat in the soldier's face.
"Murdering Consie bastard! Murdering little Consie bastard!"
Two of the older children were stripping the trousers off the body. A six-year-old boy ran up repeatedly, lashed out with his bare foot, and ran back. He never quite made contact with the corpse.
"Murdering Consie Bastard!"
The officer drew his pistol and fired in the air. The screaming stopped. One woman flung herself to the ground, covering a child with her body. The group backed away, staring at the man with the gun.
The officer aimed at the guerrilla's body and fired. Dust puffed from the shoulder of the black jacket.
The officer fired twice more, then blasted out the remainder of his ten-round magazine. The hard ground sprayed grit in all directions; one bullet ricocheted and spanged into a doorjamb, missing a child by centimeters at most.
The group of dependents edged away. Bullets had disfigured still further the face of the corpse.
"Well, get on with it!" the lieutenant screamed to his men. His voice sounded tinny from the muzzle blasts of his weapon.
The soldiers grimaced and grasped the body awkwardly in their gloved hands. A glove slipped as they swung the guerrilla onto the tailgate of the truck. The body hung, about to fall back.
The lieutenant grabbed a handful of the Consie's hair and held it until the enlisted men could get better grips and finish their task.
Suilin resumed walking toward the motor pool. He was living in a nightmare, and his ears buzzed like wasps. . . .
"Now, to split the screen," said squat Joe Albers, Deathdealer's driver, "you gotta hold one control and switch the other one whatever way."
Hans Wager set his thumb on the left HOLD button and clicked the right-hand magnification control of the main screen to x4. The turret of the unnamed tank felt crowded with two men in it, although Wager himself was slim and Albers was stocky rather than big.
"Does it matter which control you hold?" asked Holman, peering down through the hatch.
"Naw, whichever you want," Albers said while Wager watched the magical transformations of his screen.
The left half of the main screen maintained its portion of a 360° panorama viewed by the light available in the human visual spectrum. Broad daylight, at the moment. The right portion of the screen had shrunk into a 90° arc whose field of view was only half its original height.
Wager twisted the control dial, rotating the magnified sector slowly around the tank's surroundings. Smoke still smoldered upward from a few places beyond the berm; here and there, sunlight glittered where the soil seared by powerguns had enough silicon to glaze.
The berth on the right side of the tank was empty. The combat car assigned there had bought it in the clearing operation. Buzzbombs. The close-in defense system hadn't worked or hadn't worked well enough, same difference. Albers said a couple of the crew were okay. . . .
Wager's field of view rolled across the Yokel area. The barracks nearest the Slammers were in good shape still; but by focusing down one of the streets and rolling the magnification through x16 to x64, he could see that at least a dozen buildings in a row had burned.
A few bolts from a powergun and those frame structures went up like torches. . . .
The best protection you had in a combat car wasn't armor or even your speed: it was the volume of fire you put on the other bastard and anywhere the other bastard might be hiding.
Tough luck for the Yokels who'd been burned out. Tougher luck, much tougher, for the Consies who'd tried to engage Hammer's Slammers.
"For the driver," Albers said with a nod up toward Holman's intent face, "it's pretty much the same as a combat car."
"The weight's not the bloody same," Holman said.
"Sure, you gotta watch yer inertia," the veteran driver agreed, "but you do the same things. You get used to it."
He looked back over at Wager. The right half-screen was now projecting a magnified slice of what appeared at one-to-one on the left.
On the opposite side of the encampment, a couple of the permanent maintenance staff worked beside another tank. The junior tech looked on while his boss, a swag-bellied warrant three, settled a length of pipe in the jig of a laser saw.
"Turret side, though," Albers went on, "you gotta be careful. About half what you know from cars, that's the wrong thing in the turret of a panzer."
"I don't like not having two more pair of eyes watchin' my back," Wager muttered as his visuals swam around the circumference of the motionless tank.
"The screens'll watch for you," Albers said gently.
He touched a key without pressing it. "You lock one of 'em onto alert at all times. The AI in here, it's like a thousand helmet systems all at once. It's faster, it catches more, it's better at throwing out the garbage that just looks like it's a bandit."
The hatches of the Tactical Operations Center, a command car without drive fans, were open, but from this angle Wager couldn't see inside. The backs of two Slammers, peering within from the rear ramp, proved there was a full house—a troop meeting going on. What you'd expect after a contact like last night's.
"Not like having tribarrels pointing three ways, though," Holman said. Dead right, even though she'd never crewed a combat vehicle before.
Albers looked up at her. "If you want," he said, "you can slave either of the guns to the threat monitor. It'll swing 'em as soon as it pops the alert."
Deathdealer, Albers' own tank, was parked next to the TOC. A tarpaulin slanted from the top of the skirts to the ground, sheltering the man beneath. "Via," Wager muttered. "He's racked out now?"
Birdie Sparrow's right hand was visible beneath the edge of the tarp. It was twitching. Albers looked at the magnified screen, then laid his fingers over Wager's on the dial and rolled the image away.
"Birdie's all right," the veteran driver said. "He takes a little getting used to, is all. And the past couple months, you know, he's been a little, you know . . . loose."
"That's why they sent you back here with the blower instead of using some newbies for transit?" Holman asked.
Bent over this way, Holman had to keep brushing back the sandy brown curls that fell across her eyes. Her hair was longer than Wager had thought, and the strands appeared remarkably fine.
"Yeah, something like that, I guess," Albers admitted. "Look, Birdie's great when it drops in the pot like last night. Only . . . since his buddy DJ got zapped, he don't sleep good, is all."
"Newbies like us," Wager said bitterly. Not new to war, not him at least; but new to this kind of war.
"I can see this gear can do everything but tuck me goodnight. But I'm bloody sure that I won't remember what to do the first time I need to. And that's liable to be my ass." He glanced upward. "Our ass."
Holman flashed him a tight smile.
"Yeah, well," Albers agreed. "Simulators help, but on the job training's the only game there's ever gonna be for some things."
Albers rubbed his scalp, grimacing in no particular direction. "You know," he went on, "you can take care a' most stuff if you know what button to push. But some things, curst if I know where the button is."
It seemed to Hans Wager that Albers' eyes were searching for the spot on the main screen where his tank commander lay shivering beneath a sunlit tarp.
When Dick Suilin was twenty meters from the motor pool, a jeep exploded within the wire-fenced enclosure. The back of the vehicle lurched upward. The contents of its fuel tank sprayed in all directions, then whoomped into a fireball that rose on the heat of its own combustion.
No one was in the jeep when it blew up, but soldiers throughout the area scattered, bawling warnings.
A few men simply cowered and screamed. One of them continued screaming minutes after the explosion.
Suilin resumed walking toward the entrance.
The combined motor pool held well over three hundred trucks, from jeeps to articulated flat-beds for hauling heavy equipment. The only gate in and out of Camp Progress was visible a block away. A pair of bunkers, massive structures with three-meter walls of layered sandbags and steel planking, guarded the highway where it passed through the wire, minefields, and berm.
The sliding barrier was still in place across the road. When the Consies came over the berm, they took the bunkers from behind. Satchel charges through the open doors set off the munitions within, and the blasts lifted the roofs.
The bunkers had collapsed. The craters were still smoldering.
One of the long sheds within the motor pool had been hit by an artillery rocket. The blast folded back its metal roof in both directions. Grenades and automatic weapons had raked and ignited some of the trucks parked in neat rows, but there were still many undamaged vehicles.
A three-tonne truck blew up. The driver jumped out of the cab and collapsed. Diesel from the ruptured fuel tank gushed around him in an iridescent pool. Nobody moved to help, though other soldiers stared in dazed expectation.
Two officers were arguing at the entrance while a number of enlisted men looked on. A lieutenant wearing the green collar tabs of Maintenance & Supply said in a voice that wavered between reasonableness and frustration, "But Major Schaydin, it isn't safe to take any of the vehicles yet. The Consies have booby—"
"God curse you for a fool!" screamed the major. His Summer Dress uniform was in striking contrast to the lieutenant's fatigues, but a nearby explosion had ripped away most of the right trouser leg and blackened the rest. "You can't deny me! I'm the head of the Intelligence Staff! My orders supersede any you may have received. Any orders at all!"
Schaydin carried a pair of white gloves, thrust jauntily through his left epaulet. His hat hadn't survived the events of the evening.
"Sir," the lieutenant pleaded, "this isn't orders, it isn't safe. The Consies boobytrapped a bunch of the vehicles during the attack, time delays and pressure switches, and they—"
"You bastards!" Schaydin screamed. "D' you want to find yourselves playing pick-up-sticks with your butt cheeks?"
He stalked past the lieutenant, brushing elbows as though he really didn't see the other man.
A sergeant moved as though to block Schaydin. The lieutenant shook his head in angry frustration. He, his men, and Suilin watched the major jump into a jeep, start it, and drive past them in a spray of dust.
"I need a jeep and driver," Suilin said, enunciating carefully. "To carry me to the Slammers' TOC." He deliberately didn't identify himself.
The lieutenant didn't answer. He was staring after Major Schaydin.
Instead of following the road, the intelligence officer pulled hard left and drove toward the berm. The jeep's engine lugged for a moment before its torque converter caught up with the demand. The vehicle began to climb, spurning gravel behind it.
"He'd do better," said the lieutenant, "if he at least tried it at a slant."
"Does he figure just to drive through the minefields?" asked one of the enlisted men.
"The Consies blew paths all the cop through the mines," said a sergeant. "If he's lucky, he'll be okay."
The jeep lurched over the top of the berm to disappear in a rush and a snarl. There was no immediate explosion.
"Takes more 'n luck to get through the Consies themselfs," said the first soldier. "Wherever he thinks he's going. Bloody officers."
"I don't need an argument," said Dick Suilin quietly.
"Then take the bloody jeep!" snapped the lieutenant. He pointed to a row of vehicles. "Them we've checked, more or less, for pressure mines in the suspension housings and limpets on the gas tanks. They must've had half a dozen sappers working the place over while their buddies shot up the HQ."
"No guarantees what went into the tanks," offered the sergeant. "Nothin' for that but waiting—and I'd as soon not wait on it. You want to see the mercs so bad, why don't you walk?"
Suilin looked at him. "If it's time," the reporter said, "it's time."
The nearest vehicle was a light truck rather than a jeep. He sat in the driver's seat, feeling the springs sway beneath him. No explosion, no flame. Suilin felt as though he were manipulating a marionette the size and shape of the man he had been.
He pressed the starter tit on the dash panel. A flywheel whirred for a moment before the engine fired normally.
Suilin set the selector to Forward and pressed the throttle. No explosion, no flame.
As he drove out of the motor pool, Suilin heard the sergeant saying, ". . . no insignia and them eyes—he's from an Insertion Patrol Group. Just wish them and the Consies'd fight their war and leave us normal people alone. . . ."
"Here he is, Captain Ranson," said the hologram of the commo tech at Firebase Purple. The image shifted.
Major Danny Pritchard looked exhausted even in hologram, and he was still wearing body armor over his khaki fatigues. He rubbed his eyes. "What do you estimate the strength of the attack on Camp Progress, Junebug?" he asked.
"Maybe a battalion," Ranson replied, wondering if her voice was drifting in and out of timbre the way her vision was. "They hit all sides, but it was mostly on the south end."
"Colonel Banyussuf claims it was a division," Pritchard said with a ghost of a smile. "He claims his men've killed over five thousand Consies already."
An inexperienced observer could have mistaken for transmission noise the ripping sounds that shook the hologram every ten or twenty seconds. Even over a satellite bounce, Ranson recognized the discharge of rocket howitzers. Hammer's headquarters was getting some action too.
Cooter laughed. "If the Yokels killed anybody, it was when one of 'em fell out a window and landed on 'im. We got maybe three hundred."
"Stepped on?" demanded the image of Hammer's executive officer—and some said, heir.
"Stepped on and gun camera, maybe two hundred," Ranson said. "But there's a lot of stuff won't show up till they start sifting the ashes. Cooter's right, maybe three. It was a line battalion, and it won't be bothering anybody else for a while."
The command car was crowded. Besides Ranson herself, it held a commo tech named Bestwick at the console, ready if the artificial intelligence monitoring the other bands needed a human decision; Cooter, second in command of the detachment; and Master Sergeant Wylde, who'd been a section leader before, and would be again as soon as his burns healed.
Wylde was lucky to be alive after the first buzzbomb hit his car. He shouldn't have been present now; but he'd insisted, and Ranson didn't have the energy to argue with him. Anyway, between pain and medications, Wylde was too logy to be a problem except for the room his bandaged form took up.
"Hey?" said Cooter. He lifted his commo helmet slightly with one hand so that he could knuckle the line of his sweat-darkened auburn hair. "Major? What the hell's happening, anyway? Is this all over?"
Danny Pritchard smiled a great deal; usually it was a pleasant expression.
Not this smile.
"They hit the three firebases and all but one of the line companies," the major said. "We told everybody hold what they got; and then the hogs—" Pritchard nodded; a howitzer slashed the sky again from beyond the field of view "—scratched everybody's back with firecracker rounds. Each unit swept its circuit before the dust settled from the shellbursts."
The smile hardened still further. "Kinda nice of them to concentrate that way for us."
Ranson nodded, visualizing the white flare of precisely-directed cluster bomblets going off. The interlocking fields of fire from Firebases Red, Blue, and Purple covered the entire Strip. Guerrillas rising in panic, to be hosed down by the tribarrels in the armored vehicles. . . .
"Yeah," said Sergeant Wylde in a husky whisper. The wounded man's face didn't move and his eyes weren't focused on the hologram. "But how about the Yokels? Or is this a private fight fer us 'n the Consies?"
"Right," said Pritchard with something more than agreement in his tone of voice. "Hold one, Junebug."
The sound cut off abruptly as somebody hit the muting switch of the console at HQ. Major Pritchard turned his head. Ranson could see Pritchard's lips moving in profile as he talked to someone out of the projection field. She was in a dream, watching the bust of a man who spoke silently. . . .
What's your present strength in vehicles and trained crews?
Junebug?
Captain Ranson?
Ranson snapped alert. Cooter had put his big arm around her shoulders to give her a shake.
"Right," she said, feeling the red prickly flush cover her, as though she'd just fainted and come around. She couldn't remember where she was, but in her dream somebody had been asking—
"We've got—" Cooter said.
"We're down a blower," Ranson said, facing Pritchard's worried expression calmly. "A combat car."
"Mine," said Wylde to his bandaged hands. Ranson wasn't sure whether or not the sergeant was within the hologram pick-up.
"My crews, two dead," Ranson continued. "Three out for seven days or more. Sergeant Wylde, my section leader, he's out."
"Oh-yew-tee," Wylde muttered. "Out."
"Can you pick anybody up from the Blue side?" Pritchard asked.
"There's the three panzers," Ranson said. "Only one's got a trained crew, but they came through like gangbusters last night."
She frowned, trying to concentrate. "Personnel, though . . . Look, you know, we're talking newbies and people who're rear echelon for a reason."
People even farther out of it than Captain June Ranson, who nodded off while debriefing to Central. . . .
"Look, sir," Cooter interjected. "We shot the cop outta the Consies. I don't know about no 'five thousand dead' cop, but if they'd had more available, they'd a used it last night. They bloody sure don't have enough left to try anytime soon."
"I believe you, Lieutenant," Pritchard said wearily. "But that's not the only problem." He rubbed the palms of his hands together firmly. "Hold one," he repeated as he got up from the console.
Colonel Alois Hammer sat down in Pritchard's place.
The hologram was as clear as if Hammer were in the TOC with Ranson. The Colonel was madder than hell; so mad that his hand kept stabbing upward to brush away the tic at the corner of his left eye.
"Captain . . ." Hammer said. He fumbled with the latches of his clamshell armor to give himself time to form words—or at least to delay the point at which he had to speak them.
He glared at June Ranson. "We kicked the Consies up one side and down the other. The National Army had problems."
"That's why they hired us, sir," Ranson said. She was very calm. Thick glass was beginning to form between her and the image of the regimental commander.
"Yeah, that's why they did, all right," Hammer said. He ground at his left eye.
He lowered his hand. "Captain, you saw what happened to the structure of Camp Progress during the attack?"
"What structure?" Cooter muttered bitterly.
Ranson shivered. The glass wall shivered also, falling away as shards of color that coalesced into Hammer's face.
"Sir, the Consies were only a battalion," Ranson said. "They could've done a lot of damage—they did. But it was just a spoiling attack, they couldn't 've captured the base in the strength they were."
"They can capture Kohang, Captain," Hammer said. "And if they capture a district capital, the National Government is gone. The people who pay us."
Ranson blinked, trying to assimilate the information.
It didn't make any sense. The Consies were beat—beaten good. Multiply what her teams had done at Camp Progress by the full weight of the Regiment—with artillery and perfect artillery targets for a change—and the Conservative Action Movement on Prosperity didn't have enough living members to bury its dead. . . .
"Nobody was expecting it, Captain Ranson," Hammer said. The whiskers on his chin and jowls were white, though the close-cropped hair on the colonel's head was still a sandy brown. "The National Government wasn't, we weren't. It'd been so quiet the past three months that we—"
His eye twitched. "Via!" he cursed. "I thought, and if anybody'd told me different I'd 've laughed at them. I thought the Consies were about to pack it in. And instead they were getting ready for the biggest attack of the war."
"But Colonel," Cooter said. His voice sounded desperate. "They lost. They got their butts kicked."
"Tell that to a bunch of civilians," Hammer said bitterly. "Tell that to your Colonel Banyussuf—the bloody fool!"
Somebody at Central must have spoken to Hammer from out of pick-up range, because the colonel half-turned and snarled, "Then deal with it! Shoot 'em all in the neck if you want!"
He faced around again. For an instant, Ranson stared into eyes as bleak and merciless as the scarp of a glacier. Then Hammer blinked, and the expression was gone; replaced with one of anger and concern. Human emotions, not forces of nature.
"Captain Ranson," he resumed with a formality that would have been frightening to the junior officer were she not drifting again into glassy isolation. "In a week, it'll all be over for the Consies. They'll have to make their peace on any terms they can get—even if that means surrendering for internment by the National Government. But if a district capital falls, there won't be a National Government in a week. All they see—"
Hammer's left hand reached for his eye and clenched into a fist instead. "All they see," he repeated in a voice that trembled between a whisper and a snarl, "is what's been lost, what's been destroyed, what's been disrupted. You and I—"
His hand brushed out in a slighting gesture. "We've expended some ammo, we've lost some equipment. We've lost some people. Objectives cost. Winning costs."
Sergeant Wylde nodded. Blood was seeping from cracks in the Sprayseal which replaced the skin burned from his left shoulder.
"But the politicians and—and what passes for an army, here, they're in a panic. One more push and they'll fold. The people who pay us will fold."
One more push. . . . Ranson thought/said; she wasn't sure whether the words floated from her tongue or across her mind.
"Captain Ranson," Hammer continued, "I don't like the orders I'm about to give you, but I'm going to give them anyway. Kohang has to be relieved soonest, and you're the only troops in position to do the job."
June Ranson was sealed in crystal, a tiny bead that glittered as it spun aimlessly through the universe. "Sir," said the voice from her mouth, "there's the 4th Armored at Camp Victory. A brigade. There's the Yokel 12th and 23rd Infantry closer than we are."
Her voice was enunciating very clearly. "Sir, I've got eight blowers."
"Elements of the 4th Armored are attempting to enter Kohang from the south," Hammer said. "They're making no progress."
"How hard are they trying?" shouted Cooter. "How hard are they bloody trying?"
"It doesn't matter," Ranson thought/said.
"Lieutenant, that doesn't matter," said Hammer, momentarily the man who'd snarled at an off-screen aide. "They're not doing the job. We're going to. That's what we're paid to do."
"Cooter," said Ranson, "shut up."
She shouldn't say that with other people around. Screw it. She focused on the hologram. "Sir," she said, "what's the enemy strength?"
"We've picked up the callsigns of twenty-seven Consie units in and around Kohang, company-size or battalion," Hammer said, in a tone of fractured calm. "The data's been downloaded to you already."
Bestwick glanced up from the console behind the projected image and nodded; Ranson continued to watch her commanding officer.
"Maybe three thousand bandits," Ranson said.
"Maybe twice that," Hammer said, nodding as Ranson was nodding. "Concentrated on the south side and around Camp Victory."
"There's two hundred thousand people in Kohang," Ranson said. "There's three thousand police in the city."
"The Governmental Compound is under siege," Hammer said coldly. "Some elements of the security forces appeared to be acting in support of the Consies." He paused and rubbed his eye.
"A battalion of the 4th Armored left Camp Victory without orders yesterday afternoon," he continued. "About an hour before the first rocket attack. Those troops aren't responding to messages from their brigade commander."
"Blood and martyrs," somebody in the TOC said. Maybe they all said it.
"Sir," said Ranson, "we can't, we can't by ourself—"
"Shoot your way into the compound," Hammer said before she could finish. "Reinforce what's there, put some backbone into 'em. They got enough bloody troops to do the job themselves, Captain . . . they just don't believe it."
He grimaced. "Even a couple blowers. That'll do the trick until G and H companies arrive. Just a couple blowers."
"Cop," muttered Wylde through his bandages.
"Bloody hell," muttered Cooter with the back of his hand tightly against his mouth.
"May the Lord have mercy on our souls," said/thought June Ranson.
"Speed's essential," Hammer resumed. "You have authorization to combat-loss vehicles rather than slow down. The victory bonus'll cover the cost of replacement."
"I'll be combat-lossing crews, Colonel," Ranson's voice said. "But they're replaceable too. . . ."
Cooter gasped. Wylde grunted something that might have been either laughter or pain.
Hammer opened his mouth, then closed it with an audible clop. He opened it again and spoke with a lack of emotion as complete as the white, colorless fury of a sun's heart. "You are not to take any unnecessary risks, Captain Ranson. It is necessary that you achieve your objective. You will accept such losses as are required to achieve your objective. Is that understood?"
"Yes sir," said Ranson without inflection. "Oh, yes sir."
Hammer turned his head. The viewers at Camp Progress thought their commander was about to call orders or directions to someone on his staff. Instead, nothing happened while the hologram pick-ups stared at the back of Alois Hammer's head.
"All right," Hammer said at last, beginning to speak before he'd completely faced around again. His eyes were bright, his face hard. "The Consies' night vision equipment isn't as good as ours for the most part, so you're to leave as soon as it's dark. That gives you enough time to prepare and get some rest."
"Rest," Wylde murmured.
"The World Gov satellites'll tell the Consies where we are to the millimeter," Ranson said. "We'll have ambush teams crawling over us like flies on a turd, all the way to Kohang."
Or however far.
"Junebug," said Hammer, "I'm not hanging you out to dry. Thirty seconds before you start your move, all the WG satellites are going to go down, recce and commo both. They'll stay down for however long it suits me that they do."
Ranson blinked, "Sir," she said hesitantly, "if you do that . . . I mean, that means—"
"It means that our commo and reconnaissance is probably going to go out shortly thereafter, Captain," Hammer said. "So you'll be on your own. But you don't have to worry about tank killers being vectored into your axis of advance."
"Sir, if you hit their satellites—" Ranson began.
"They'll take it and smile, Captain," Hammer said. "Because if they don't, there won't be any Terran World Government enclaves here on Prosperity to worry about. I guarantee it. They may think they can cause me trouble on Earth, but they know what I'll do to them here!"
"Yessir," June Ranson said. "I'll check the status of my assets and plot a route, then get back to you."
"Captain," Hammer said softly, "if I didn't think it could be done, I wouldn't order it. No matter how much it counted. Good luck to you and your team."
The hologram dissolved into a swirl of phosphorescent mites, impingement points of the carrier wave itself after the signal ceased. Bestwick shut down the projector.
"Cooter," Ranson said, "get the guard detachment ready. I'll take care of the tanks myself."
Cooter nodded over his shoulder. The big man was already on the way to his blower. It was going to be tricky, juggling crews and newbies to fill the slots that last night's firefight had opened. . . .
If Hammer took on the World Government, he was going to lose. Not here, but in the main arena of politics and economics on Earth.
That bothered June Ranson a lot.
But not nearly as much as the fact that the orders she'd just received put her neck on the block, sure as Death itself.