UNDER THE HAMMER

David Drake

“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 power plant 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 fi re 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 of 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 ship’s 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 fl irts!—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 fi eld,” 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 if it 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 infrared 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 runoff. 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 fl oor of the compartment.

“Leon?” Jake asked.

“Yeah. Lord, there musta been twenty kilos of explo sive 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 afterimage 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 torquing 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 singsonged. 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.

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