David Drake - Hammer's Slammers 07 - The Sharp End

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THE SHARP END
Copyright © 1993 by David Drake
e-book ver. 1.0
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 93-10739
ISBN:0-671-87632-5
DEDICATION
To our architect and builder Derwood Schrotberger
Writing a novel and moving to a new house are both stressful occupations. The fact that I was able to combine them is a
comment on Derwood's consummate skill, which reminds me that architect originally meant Master Builder.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Those of you who notice echoes of The Glass Key and Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett in this book are correct. Those
of you who don't should go off and read Hammett's splendid novels at your earliest convenience.
When I'm at a crux in my plotting, I tend to talk at those around me. When I did that this time on the way to the state fair
with friends, my wife, Jo, and Mark Van Name made suggestions which were precisely on point. I adopted both.
NIEUW FRIESLAND
The room housing the Officers Assignment Bureau was spacious enough to have three service cages and seats for
twenty around the walls of colored marble. Nobody was waiting when Major Matthew Coke entered, though a single
officer discussed alternative assignments with a specialist.
Coke stepped into an empty cage. A clerk rose from her desk in the administrative area across the divider and
switched on the electronics,
"Yes sir?" the clerk said pleasantly. "Is there a problem with your assignment?"
The Frisian Defense Forces reassigned scores of officers every week. Normally the operation was impersonal, a
data transfer to the officers present station directing him or her to report to a new posting, along with details of timing,
transport, and interim leave.
This office handled problems. President Hammer, in common with other leaders whose elevation owed more to
bullets than ballots, felt most comfortable with a large standing army under his direct control. Professional soldiers are
expensive, and unless they are used, they either rust, or find ways to employ themselves — generally to the detriment
of the established government.
Hammers answer to the problem was to hire out elements of the Frisian Defense Forces as mercenaries. This
provided training for the troops, as well as defraying the cost of their pay and equipment.
Sometimes the troops engaged were merely a few advisers or specialists. When somebody, a planetary government
or the rebels opposed to it, hired a large force, however, the OAB would be standing room only.
Officers on Nieuw Friesland knew that the only sure route to promotion was through combat experience. The
Frisian Defense Forces had sprung from Hammer's Slammers, a mercenary regiment with the reputation for doing
whatever it took to win . . . and a reputation for winning.
So long as Alois Hammer was President and the commanders of the Frisian Defense Forces were the officers who'd
bought him that position in decades of bloody war, bureaucratic 'warriors' weren't on the fast track to high rank. You
paid for your rank sometimes in blood, and sometimes with your life; but all that was as nothing without demonstrated
success at the sharp end, where they buried the guys in second place.
Not everybody was comfortable with Hammers terms of employment, but the Forces were volunteer only and the
volunteers came from all across the human universe; just as they had to Hammer's Slammers before. A certain number
of men, and a lower percentage of women, would rather fight than not. Alois Hammers troops had always been the
best there was at what they did: killing the other fellow, whoever he was.
A draft going out to a hot theater was a ticket to promotion. Officers would crowd the Assignment Bureau, begging
and threatening, offering bribes and trying to pull rank to get a slot. Mostly it didn't work.
The Table of Organization for a combat deployment was developed by the central data base itself. Changes had to
be approved by President Hammer, who was immune to any practical form of persuasion. The Assignments Bureaus
were open because people prefer to argue with human beings instead of electronic displays, but that was normally a
cosmetic rather than significant touch.
You could also appeal to Hammer personally. In that case, you were cashiered if you didn't convince him. Old-
timers in the Assignment Bureau said that the success rate was slightly under three percent, but every month or so
somebody else tried it.
There were no large-scale deployments under way at the moment, but there were always glitches, clerical or
personal, which had to be ironed out. The clerk smiled at Coke, expecting to leam that he'd been assigned to a slot
calling for a sergeant-major, or that he was wanted for murder on the planet to which he was being posted.
Coke's problem was rather different.
"I'm here to receive sealed orders," Coke said, offering the clerk his identification card with the embedded chip. He
smiled wryly.
The clerk blinked in surprise. There were various reasons why an officer's orders would be sealed within the data
base, requiring him or her to apply in person to the bureau to receive them. Coke didn't look like the sort to whom any
of the special reasons would apply. He looked — normal.
Matthew Coke was 34 standard years old — 29 dated on Ash, where he was born, 51 according to the shorter year
of Nieuw Friesland. He had brown hair, eyes that were green, blue, or gray depending on how much sunlight had been
bleaching them, and stood a meter seventy-eight in his stocking feet. He was thin but not frail, like a blade of good
steel.
Coke was in dress khakis with rank tabs and the blue edging to the epaulets that indicated his specialty was infantry.
He wore no medal or campaign ribbons whatever, but over his left breast pocket was a tiny lion rampant on a field of
red enamel.
The lion marked the men who'd served with Hammers Slammers before the regiment was subsumed into the Frisian
Defense Forces. Its lonely splendor against the khaki meant that, like most of the other Slammers veterans, Coke
figured that when you'd said you were in the Slammers, you'd said everything that mattered.
Considering that, the clerk realized that Major Coke might not be quite as normal as he looked.
"Face the lens, please, sir," the clerk said as she inserted the ID card into a slot on her side of the cage. Electronics
chittered, validating the card and comparing Coke's retinal patterns with those contained in the embedded chip.
A soft chime indicated approval. Coke eased from the stiff posture with which he had faced the comparator lens. He
continued to smile faintly, but the emotions the clerk read on his face were sadness and resignation,
"Just a moment," the clerk said. "The printer has to warm up, but —"
As she spoke, a sheet of hardcopy purred from the dispenser on Coke's side of the cage. Coke read the rigid film upside
down as it appeared instead of waiting for the print cycle to finish so that he could clip the document.
His face blanked; then he began to laugh. The captain at the next cage glanced at him, then away. The clerk waited,
hoping Coke would explain the situation but unwilling to press him.
Coke tapped the cutter, then tossed the sheet across the counter to the clerk. "It says my new assignment is Category Ten
Forty-seven," he said as the clerk scanned the document. "That's survey team, isn't it?"
The clerk nodded. "Yessir," she said. "You'll be assessing potential customers for field force deployments."
She didn't understand Major Coke's laughter. "Isn't this what you were expecting, sir?" she asked as she slid back the
hardcopy.
"What I was expecting . . ." Coke explained, ". . . after the way I screwed up my last assignment on Auerstadt . . ." He
was smiling like a skull, as broadly and with as little humor.
"... was that they'd fire my ass. But I guess the Assessment Board decided I couldn't get into much trouble on a
survey team."
He began to laugh again. Despite the obvious relief in Coke's voice, the sound of his laughter chilled the clerk.
Earlier: AUERSTROT
There was a party going on in the extensive quarters of General the Marquis Bradkopf, National Army commander of
Fortress Auerstadt. Next door in the Tactical Operations Center, Major Matthew Coke of the Frisian Defense Forces was
trying to do his job — and General Bradkopf's job — through a realtime link to the pair of combat cars in ambush position
thirty kilometers away.
The combat cars were named Mother Love and The Facts of Life. They and their crews were Frisians; and the sergeants
commanding them were, like Coke, former members of Hammer's Slammers, the mercenary regiment whose ruthless skill
had transformed Colonel Hammer into Alois Hammer, President of Nieuw Friesland.
"We're getting major movement into Hamlet Three, sir," said 4-4 — Sergeant-Commander Dubose in Mother Love,
stationed for the moment on a dike south of the three hamlets called Parcotch for administrative purposes. "Nearly a
hundred just from the direction of Auerstadt. Most of them are carrying weapons, too"
The three clerks in the TOC with Coke were National Army enlisted personnel, two women and a male who looked
fifteen years old. They were chattering in a corner of the open bullpen. One of the women had brought in a series of
holovision cubes of Deiting, the planetary capital, where she'd gone on leave with her boyfriend, a transport driver.
There was a National Army officer listed as Commander of the Watch, but whoever it was hadn't put in an
appearance this evening. In all likelihood, the fellow was at General Bradkopf's party.
That was fine with Coke. The best a National officer could do was to keep out of the way of the advisor hired from
the Frisian Defense Forces.
Though all the raw data was provided by the combat cars, processing by the base unit in the TOC added several
layers of enhancement to what the troops on the ground could see. Coke checked the statistical analysis in a sidebar of
his holographic display and said, "There's a hundred and seventeen up the Auerstadt Road. They're all armed, and
ninety percent of them are in spatter-camouflage uniforms."
"Bloody hell," said Sergeant-Commander Lennox from The Facts of Life. "We've got regulars from the Association
of Barons? Then it's really going to blow!"
"And Four-Two has spotted another eighty-four coming down from Hamlet One and points north," Coke continued,
watching his split-screen display. "The only thing I can imagine from an assembly this large is that they're planning to
attack the fortress itself in a night or two."
Two companies, even of fully equipped regulars, weren't a threat to a base the size of Fortress Auerstadt; but
Parcotch was only one village of the ninety or a hundred within comparable distance of the base.
The direct views from sensors in the combat cars filled the lower right and left quadrants of Coke's display. The top
half of the screen looked down at an apparent 30° on a panorama extrapolated from the separate inputs and combined
with map data.
Mother Love was a klick to the south and east of Hamlet 3. The Facts of Life was within 500 meters of the hamlets
west edge, and that was the problem. Lennox's vehicle was only 500 meters east of Hamlet 2 as well, where the
incoming troops had parked a launching trailer full of short-range guided weapons.
The combat cars were in perfect position to do a number on the enemy concentration in Hamlet 3, but Coke wasn't
willing to put Lennox between two fires.
"Any chance the Nationals might send us some support?" Sergeant Dubose said wistfully.
"Any chance the tooth fairy is making a run by your car tonight?" Sergeant Lennox retorted tartly. She was a lanky
woman who shaved her head and was just as tough as she looked. "Sir," she continued, "let's do it. If we rip this one,
the locals'll get their heads out of the sand."
"Not in your present location, Four-Two," Coke said. "If they salvo the full load of missiles, there's no way you're
going to survive. Particularly with what-ever's happening in Three."
"Sir, look," Lennox said. "The personnel are going to be in Three with the others, getting a pep talk or whatever the
hell they're doing. The launchers no threat!"
"We don't —" Coke started to say.
A mortar fired just outside the TOC.
"Hold one!" Coke shouted, spinning from the console and grabbing the sub-machine gun he'd slung over the back o
f
his chair. The National Army clerks jumped up also. They'd been frightened by Coke's reaction rather than the
mortar's flash and hollow CHUG! through the TOC's doorway. The vacationer's glittering holoviews spilled onto the
floor.
Cheers and laughter from outside the TOC told Coke there was no danger. The shell popped thousands of meters in
the air, casting harsh magnesium light across Fortress Auerstadt. General the Marquis Bradkopf was using parachute
flares to provide fireworks for his party.
Which suggested a way out of Cokes immediate problem.
In theory, Coke's console was linked to the National Army net. Rather than go through the complicated handshake
procedures, however, Coke turned to the rack system at the adjacent bay.
He switched the unit from standby to operations and waited a moment for it to warm up. When the light went from
amber to green, Coke keyed the address of the heavy battery of the artillery battalion attached to the fortress defenses.
The clerk responsible for the communications bay watched Coke in concern from across the room, but she didn't
attempt to interfere.
Marquis Bradkopf began hectoring a subordinate outside the door of the TOC. Drink and anger slurred his words so
that Coke couldn't make them out, A woman's voice wove a descant around Bradkopf's.
"Battery Seven," a man said. "Yeah?"
"This is Fortress Command," Coke said crisply. "I have an immediate fire mission for you." As he spoke, his left
hand addressed a target information packet on the Frisian console. "This will require seeker shells, so I'm authorizing
you to release them from locked storage."
"What!" said the soldier on the other end of the line. "What? Look, I'll get Chief Edson."
Theoretically, the Frisians were in advisory capacity without direct control of National Army forces. As with other
large organizations, somebody who was willing to claim authority was more than likely to be granted it.
The mortar fired again, lofting a second flare into the night sky. There was static on the land line, masking a half-
audible conversation at the battery end.
National Army heavy equipment was generally of off-planet manufacture, ranging from good to very good in
design. The local personnel were of low quality, however, and virtually untrained. Coke didn't dare call an ordinary
fire mission to support units within half a klick of the intended.impact area. Battery 7's 200-mm guns were capable of
nail-driving accuracy at thirty kilometers, but the crews were as apt as not to drop their heavy shells directly on The
Facts of Life.
Technology could eliminate the problem. The battery was issued four Frisian-manufactured seeker rounds, one per
tube. These self-steering warheads were designed for use against ill-defined or moving targets, and combined with
satellite photos of Parcotch Hamlet 2 they would obviate the friendly-fire risk.
"Chief Edson," a businesslike voice said. "Who is this?"
"Major Matthew Coke," Coke said, "acting Fortress Command. Where's your battery commander?"
"Who the fuck knows?" said the chief, the battery's ranking enlisted man. "Look, Major, I don't care about your
authorization — I flat don't have the codes to open the special locker. Maybe Captain Wilcken does, maybe the
Marquis does — maybe nobody. Forget the seeker warheads, they're just for show."
"Prepare the battery," Coke snapped. "I'm on my way."
He dropped the handset onto its cradle and rose. More figures drifted through the shadows of the split screen.
Lennox and Dubose held their silence, as Coke had directed them at last transmission.
Coke settled his commo helmet, slung the sub-machine gun over his shoulder, and started for the door. General
Bradkopf and his entourage burst through from outside.
"Coke!" the Marquis roared. "Where's — there you are!" He pointed an index finger at Coke's face. "What's
happened to my tanksP'
Bradkopf was in his mid-fifties. His body was fleshy but powerful, since swimming and exercise machines
controlled the grosser results of the dissipation nonetheless evident on his face.
"Sir, you and I discussed using the combat cars for an ambush patrol," Coke half-lied. His mouth was dry, and his
palm was sweating on the grip of his sub-machine gun. This could get him reprimanded. If Bradkopf was angry
enough, he could even have Coke recalled to Friesland.
The group oozing into the TOC behind the Marquis included most of the higher male officers of Fortress
Auerstadt's complement. Among them was Captain Wilcken, a 20-year-old of excellent family and the titular
commander of Battery 7.
Each of the men had a woman in train. The redhead on the Marquis' arm was approximately a third of his age.
"You said you wanted to send out one of the tanks with a patrol," Bradkopf said, his memory unfortunately quite
accurate. "For communications."
For stiffening, actually, but the lie was a harmless one. When he'd gotten down to serious planning, he realized that
he didn't dare saddle Frisians — his troops — with any of the National Army units in the fortress. The locals lacked
noise discipline, fire discipline, and target identification skills. A Frisian combat car was the largest thing around and
therefore the most likely target for the National troops who did manage to shoot.
Furthermore, the locals lacked guts.
"I said I'd think about it," Bradkopf said, "and now I find you've stripped me of all my protection! Are you a
traitor?"
"No sir," Coke said, "I'm not a traitor. I —"
I screwed up badly, but Bradkopf wasn't the man to admit that to. Coke had taken the chance that the Marquis
wouldn't notice the two combat cars — not tanks — normally parked near his quarters were missing. If Bradkopf
hadn't decided to shoot off flares for his party, Coke would have gotten away with it.
If.
Coke couldn't quarrel with Bradkopfs assumption that the commander of an 8,000-troop base was unprotected if
two foreign combat vehicles left his presence. It was just that protecting this commander was in no sense a military
priority for Coke.
"Six, this is Four-Four," Sergeant Dubose reported tensely through Coke's commo helmet. "The troops are moving
out of Three in civilian trucks and wagons. Over."
"General Bradkopf!" Coke said. "Association forces are maneuvering to attack this base tonight."
Not in a few days: in a few hours.
Fear of a bad rating in his personnel file had turned Coke's skin hot and prickly. The prospect of imminent combat
washed him cool again. Major Matthew Coke was a professional and an employee; but first of all he was a soldier.
"What?" blurted the Marquis, sounding amazingly like the gunner on phone watch at Battery 7. "An attack where?
Have you gone mad?"
"Six, this is Four-Two" Sergeant Lennox reported. There was a lilt, almost a caress in her voice despite the
flattening of spread-band radio communication. "The rocket pod's moved out of Two. It's being pulled by a tractor,
now, I'd say it was time, boss. Over"
The partygoers gaped without understanding at the multidirectional byplay. Most of them were drunk or nearly
drunk. Captain Wilcken was white-faced but sober. The glance he exchanged with Colonel Jaffe, equally well-born
and head of the garrison's supply department, held more terror than confusion.
Coke keyed his helmet. "Six to Four elements" he said. "Take th—"
He didn't get the last word, 'them,' out of his mouth before the split display behind him ignited with gunfire and
explosions,
"I'm sounding the general alarm," Coke said calmly as he turned his back on the Marquis. He uncaged and pressed
one of the special-use switches at the side of his consoles keyboard. The artificial intelligence sent an alert signal to
every node on Fortress Auerstadts communications network. The siren on the roof of the TOC began to wind.
The holographic display shimmered with the cyan hell engulfing Parcotch.
A Frisian combat car mounted three tribarrels in its open fighting compartment. Each weapon fired 2-cm powergun
ammunition at a cyclic rate of about 500 rounds per minute. Because the barrels rotated through the firing position
and had time to cool between shots, a tribarrel could fire sustainedly for several minutes before burning out. In that
time, the powerful bolts of ionized copper atoms could peck halfway through the side of a mountain.
Nothing Mother Love and The Facts of Life faced at Parcotch had armor protection. The targets, unprepared
Association soldiers and the civilian helpers driving the vehicles, wilted like wax in a blowtorch.
The Facts of Life's two wing guns hit the trailer of anti-tank rockets and the tractor towing it. That was overkill — a
single tribarrel should have been sufficient — but the rocket pod was the only real danger to the Frisian vehicles, and
Lennox hadn't survived to become a veteran by taking needless risks.
Cyan bolts licked the pod. The solid rocket fuel burned in a huge yellow ball, technically not an explosion but
wholly destructive of everything within its 10-meter diameter.
At least one of the missile warheads did detonate. The white flash of 40 kilos of HE punctuated the saffron fireball.
The tractor-trailer combination blew apart. Blazing debris rained across the landscape, igniting the houses of Hamlet 2
and the heads of the ripe grain in the paddies.
On the other side of the display, Mother Love's three tribarrels clawed the infantry packed into the civilian vehicles.
Ammunition and grenades went off in secondary explosions, but the stabbing cyan plasma itself did most of the
damage. The Association troops were too crowded to fight or flee in the first instants of the ambush, and those
instants were all that remained to scores of them.
A stray bolt ruptured the fuel tank under a truck cab. Kerosine, superheated and atomized by the plasma, expanded
into an explosive mixture with the surrounding atmosphere —
And flash ignited, just as it would normally have done when injected into the cylinders of the truck's diesel engine.
Bodies and body parts flew up in the mushrooming flame, but most of the Association troops had already been killed
by gunfire.
"You wanted to know what?" Coke shouted over the wail of the siren. He gestured to the screen which glowed with
the light of the scenes it displayed. "That's what, General, and there's a lot more Association units out there tonight
than those."
An automatic cannon opened fire from a bunker on the perimeter of Fortress Auerstadt. The gunners probably didn't
have a real target. They were snooting at shadows or livestock.
That was the right response to the present circumstances. With the base fully alerted, any attack Association troops
made would be fragmentary instead of coordinated and overwhelming. In all likelihood there would be no attack. At
daybreak the National Army would be able to concentrate on scattered companies of their opponents.
"Why that's . . ." the Marquis said, staring at the console display. "That's a massacre!"
Coke was surprised that his nominal superior had enough military knowledge to make that perfectly accurate
assessment of what was happening in Parcotch.
As soon as the shooting started, the combat cars' drivers fed full power to the lift fans. Howling like banshees as the
fans sucked in vast quantities of air to pressurize the plenum chambers, spraying water and soupy mud in all
directions from beneath their skirts, the 50-tonne behemoths accelerated toward Parcotch Hamlet 3 from two
directions.
While her wing gunners destroyed the rocket launcher, Sergeant Lennox had opened fire on the community itself. Lennox
didn't have a line of sight to the vehicles leaving the hamlet eastward from The Facts of Life's starting position half a klick
distant. Instead she shot up the buildings.
The structures had thatch walls and roofs of corrugated plastic sheeting, supported by wood or plastic frames. All the
construction materials were flammable at the temperature of copper plasma. Houses, the school building, and the
community center all burst into flame, spreading panic and confusing the enemy.
Everything moving this night was a foe and a target. The Frisians' only chance was to hit hard and keep on hitting before
the enemy forces could organize their superior numbers. In the morning, every corpse in Hamlet 3 would be tagged as an
Association soldier or an Association supporter. Like other forms of history, after-action reports are written by the
survivors.
Mother Love bounced onto the Auerstadt Road from the dike which had concealed the vehicle in the darkness. The
gunners depressed their tribarrels, raking the troops who'd jumped into the fields to either side of the causeway. A gout of
steam flew up at each bolt, whether it hit a flooded paddy or superheated the fluids within a soldier's body.
The flames enveloping the hamlet rolled in redoubled fury, whipped by The Facts of Life's powerful drive fans. The
combat car bellied through the blaze at a walking pace, firing continuously from all three weapons. Cyan bolts cut down the
soldiers who had jumped from wagons and truck beds to run toward the fancied safety of the buildings.
Lennox made a point of destroying each of the stalled vehicles. Blazing fuel geysered over the paddies, igniting rice and
troops alike.
"Good Lord!" the Marquis said. He turned from the display to Coke and continued, "Get those tanks back here now,
you fool! How dared you leave me at risk at a time of such danger?"
"Yessir," Coke said. "They're on their way back now."
The Facts of Life bulldozed burning wreckage off the causeway, clearing the route by which to return to Fortress
Auerstadt. The driver was buttoned up within his compartment, using the curved bow slope to butt aside a truck
festooned with corpses.
The tribarrels continued to fire. The visors of Frisian commo helmets could be switched to either light enhancement
or thermal imaging modes. The latter could pick up bodies even through the shallow water of the paddies.
Captain Wilcken blurted something, clawed his personal sidearm out of a white patent leather holster, and pointed
the small-bore projectile pistol at General the Marquis Bradkopf. Colonel Jaffe was drawing his pistol also.
Part of Coke's mind reasoned:
Wilcken and Jaffe were supporters of the Association of Barons. They intended to assassinate Bradkopf in
conjunction with the attack, leaving Fortress Auerstadt leaderless at the moment of crisis. In panic, Wilcken has gone
ahead with the plan even though circumstances have obviously changed. . . .
That was with the conscious part of his mind. Reflex thumbed off the safety of Coke's sub-machine gun as his left
hand slapped the fore-grip and his finger took up the slack in the trigger.
The first bolt blew plaster from the wall above the TOC's doorway. The next four hit Wilcken in the chest and neck
at point-blank range, virtually decapitating him.
Officers and their gorgeously clad mistresses screamed and threw themselves down. Coke body-checked the
Marquis, knocking him to the side and clearing Coke for a shot at Colonel Jaffe. Jaffe's pistol was only half out of its
holster. To Cokes adrenaline-speeded reactions, the colonel didn't seem to be moving at all.
The air stank of burned flesh and vaporized blood. Wilcken toppled backward, his head dangling onto his chest by a
tag of skin. The pupils of the dead man's eyes had tilted up into the skull.
Cokes second burst winked cyan on Jaffe's corneas. The colonel's chest burst like a blood-filled sponge. The pistol
in his hand fired a single shot into the floor. The bullet moaned away in sparks and a spurt of powdered concrete.
"Traitors!" gasped the Marquis, half-sprawled where Coke had knocked him, supporting his torso on the spread
fingers of his right hand. "They were —uh!"
Coke was poised for a further threat, sweeping the bullpen over his sub-machine gun's holographic sights. The
iridium barrel glowed white from the nearly instantaneous bursts. Heat waves trembled through the haze of powergun
matrix and smoldering fabric.
Officers and their women hugged the littered floor, some of them with their hands crossed over their heads. The trio
of enlisted personnel huddled behind the overturned table at which they had been sitting.
No one else was touching a gun. Jaffe's disemboweled body thrashed, but he was as dead as the headless Captain
Wilcken. Everything was safe —
Except that General the Marquis Bradkopf vomited blood onto the concrete floor, then pitched facedown into the
bright pool.
The hilt of a narrow-bladed dagger projected from his back. Bradkopf's youthful mistress stared fixedly at the
weapon. There was blood on her little finger and the heel of her right hand. Her tongue dabbed at it.
"Bloody hell," Coke whispered. He didn't shoot the girl, the third of the assassins. At this point, it wouldn't do any
good.
"Four-Two to Six" Sergeant Lennox reported gleefully. "We've done all there is to do here, boss, so we're
heading back to the barn. Out!"
Bradkopf's sightless eyes stared toward the split display of the carnage achieved by the troops who, by his orders,
should have been guarding his own person. In that professionally significant aspect, Coke's gamble hadn't paid off
after all.
TANNAHILL
Limping slightly, Lieutenant Mary Margulies entered the orderly room for the first time in seven months.
"Hey, El-Tee," called Kerry, the 305th Military Police Detachments first sergeant. "Good to see you. You look like
you're getting around okay."
Margulies grimaced. "Twinges, that's all," she said, "but the bastard medics put me on a profile anyhow. I'm being
transferred out, Top. Stuck behind a desk, I suppose."
She was a stocky woman whose black hair was her only affectation. She'd removed padding from her commo
helmet so that she could coil a longer braid when she was on duty. As a platoon leader in a war zone, she had been on
duty virtually all the time, awake or sleeping, until a routine convoy escort went sour.
"Ah . . ." said Kerry. "You suppose? You got a copy of the actual orders, didn't you?"
"Oh, I got them all right," Margulies said with a wan smile. "Long enough to see I was being transferred back to
Camp Able. Then I threw the chip and reader right through the window. I don't belong on Nieuw Friesland. Curst if I
don't think I'll put in my resignation if that's what they want from me."
She nodded toward the detachment commanders door. "The Old Man in?"
"Ah . . ." Sergeant Kerry said. "No, Major Yates had an Orders Group at Tannahill Command this morning. Ah . . ."
Margulies smiled harshly. "Go on, Top, say it if that's what you're thinking. A crip like me shouldn't be in the field
where she could get good people killed because she's hobbling around."
"No sir," Sergeant Kerry said. "Hell no, sir. What I meant — and I know that nobody but the recipient reads
assignment orders until the recipient's signed off on them —"
Margulies laughed, this time with genuine good humor. "Top, you've got seventeen years in the FDF and the
Slammers before them. Lets take it as read that you knew my orders before I did, all right?"
Kerry grinned. "For the sake of argument . . ." he said.
His fingers touched keys on his desk; the integral printer hummed. "I guess there's no harm in me giving you a
hardcopy replacement of the assignment orders you lost, is there?" he said.
A flimsy spooled out of the printer slot. Kerry tore off the document and handed it to the lieutenant without looking
at the contents. "I think you'll find," he continued, "that Camp Able on Nieuw Friesland is just a transit stop, where
you'll join your new unit. You've been assigned as security to a survey team, El-Tee. You're not supposed to be in
combat; but if things were peaceful, a survey team wouldn't be there trolling for business."
"Well I'll be hanged," Margulies said, reading the data through for the first time. "I was so scared they were going to
stick me at a desk that I . . ."
Kerry affectionately scratched the corner molding of his desk as though the piece of furniture were a living creature.
"Different strokes, El-Tee," he murmured "Personally, I don't find I miss getting shot at in the least."
"Well, I'll be hanged," Margulies repeated with changed emphasis. "Do you know where this survey team —"
She blinked. "Oh," she said. "Oh, sure you know where we're going."
"Cantilucca," Kerry said, returning the smile. "I looked it up. West Bumfuck is more like."
His lips pursed in sudden concern. His fingers started to summon Margulies' personnel data, then realized doing so
now couldn't help the situation. "Ah — don't tell me you come from Cantilucca, El-Tee?" he added.
"Not me," said Margulies with a broad grin. "But I know somebody who does. . . ."
Earlier: TANNAHILL
"Sarge . . ." Lieutenant Mary Margulies said as Angel Tijuca slid their two-seat air-cushion jeep between a pair of road
trains. The huge vehicles had accelerated slowly, but they were maintaining 50 kph now and there was just enough
clearance to spare the jeep's paint. "If you don't take it easy, you're not going to survive the last three days of your
enlistment."
Margulies didn't sound concerned. Her eyes continued to search the roadsides instead of glaring at her driver.
Angel laughed infectiously "Now, Missie Mary," he said. "Don't get your bowels in an uproar. And anyway, it's not three
days, its two and a wake-up."
In public Sergeant Tijuca was never less than deferential to his superior officer, but he and Margulies had gone through a
lot in the year he'd been driving her. Angel was ending his enlistment in the Frisian Defense Forces, and Margulies was
curst sorry to see him go.
"Only if you survive," Margulies remarked, but she wasn't serious. Angel's willingness to take chances was just as
important a reason for her keeping him as her permanent driver as his skill at the joystick was.
Angel accelerated to 60 kph. The jeep passed along the right side of the road trains at an increment that was slightly faste
r
than a man could walk.
The convoy consisted of ten articulated road trains, each of which had three track-laying segments with a driver in the
lead cab. There was a gun tub crewed by Brigantian troops on the center segment of each individual train, but the
convoy's real security was provided by the four combat cars manned by Frisian military police under Lieutenant
Margulies' command.
The war was over, but the fighting might not stop for years. Brigantian regiments, spearheaded by armored
companies of Frisian mercenaries, had swept across Tannahill's Beta Continent. The armies of the continents local
population, mostly Muslims of South Indian descent, had been smashed if they stood and run down if they retreated.
The guerrillas, supported by the local communities even when they weren't actually members of those communities,
were a more difficult problem. They were controllable, at least for as long as the Brigantians of Alpha Continent
could afford to pay their Frisian mercenaries, but Margulies suspected it would be decades if not generations before
the locals accepted Brigantian domination.
That was somebody else's worry. Margulies had a convoy to take through 80 klicks of — literally — Indian
Country.
"Yes sir," Angel said, "Inside a week and a half, I figure, I'll be back on Cantilucca with a forty-hectare gage farm
of my own. Three more days here. Three days objective to Delos, that's the cluster's port of entry. Maybe a day to get
transport from there to Cantilucca, another days transit, and bam! I'm home, with a discharge bonus in my pocket.
How long can it take then to buy some land, hey?"
Tijuca began to whistle a flamenco tune. Margulies smiled at his enthusiasm. She noticed that despite the sergeants
air of heedless relaxation, every time they overhauled a road train his eyes flicked left. He was checking through the
gaps between vehicles to see what was happening along the far treeline.
Combat engineers had defoliated, then burned off, strips a hundred meters wide along either edge of the road. Ash
flew out from beneath the jeep's skirts. It merged with the yellow dust which the trains' cleats raised from the gravel
road surface. The breeze was slightly from the right, so for the moment the jeep was clear. Tijuca kept them ten
meters out in the burned zone — comfortable, but by that amount the closest vehicle to the enemy if the guerrillas
decided to start something.
"Take us back across between the second and first trucks," Margulies said. "I don't believe in giving anybody long
enough to compute the lead on a full-deflection shot."
"Your wish is my command," Angel said. He goosed the fans, let the jeep settle into its new, higher speed, and
angled the vehicle sideways across the line of heavy trucks. It was an expert job, as difficult as threading a needle
blindfolded.
"My command is your command," Margulies grumbled. Her commo helmet slapped nose filters in place
automatically, but she tasted the chalky dust on her tongue.
She wished that a battery of Frisian howitzers rather than Brigantian artillery was providing call fire for the run.
Brigantian artillery was reasonably accurate, but Margulies didn't trust the indigs to react as fast as Frisian hogs would
if anything blew.
The chance of an ambush was less than one in ten, but Margulies1 platoon had provided security on this run fourteen
times already.
"You ought to come to Cantilucca, Missie," Angel said, throttling back to 60 kph. "You'd love it. With a tract of top
gage land —"
"Sarge," Margulies said, "I'm a city girl, born right smack in the center of Batavia, I wouldn't know which end of a
hoe to use, and I don't even like gage. Alcohol works just fine for me."
When they crossed the road, Margulies hunched higher in the seat to view the left treeline over her driver's head.
Angel watched the potential danger area also, navigating with his peripheral vision. A submachine gun was clamped
beside his seat. Though it was ready for use, it didn't interfere with his driving the way a slung weapon would have
done.
"Huh!" Angel said. "The only thing you can get from booze that you can't from gage is a hangover. The good stuff
— the pure stuff, we're not talking about refinery tailings, sure — there's no side effects at all. You just go to sleep
when you come down. Why would anybody want booze over gage?"
"Because if something pops, I can deal with it if I'm hung over and I can't if I'm in a gage coma," Margulies said
tartly. That was true enough, but it wasn't the reason she relaxed with alcohol instead of stim cones of gage. It was all
a matter of what you got used to —
Like everything else across the board. There was no question that a city was the most dangerous combat
environment you could find: stone and concrete ate troops. Nonetheless, Margulies was always more comfortable
patrolling or even fighting in a city than she was in the open air like this.
Not that it mattered She was here to do a job.
This portion of the route was through lowlands. The soil was mucky, and there were frequent potholes where the
treads of road trains had chewed through the gravel. The trees outside the cleared strip were five to ten meters tall.
Their foliage was vaguely blue.
Margulies' four combat cars flanked the convoy front and rear, fifty meters out from the road. Because of the size of
the road trains, the convoy was more than half a kilometer long even when closed up properly. The tribarrels of the
combat cars could still sweep the full length of it on straight stretches.
They were coming to one of the route's few major curves, nicknamed Ambush Junction until the guerrillas hit what
turned out to be a platoon of Frisian tanks instead of the Brigantian armor they'd expected. The route had been quiet as
a grave since then.
Margulies keyed her commo helmet. "White Six to Rose One," she said, calling the driver of the leading road train.
She glanced up at the cab looming beside her. Because of the angle, she couldn't see the Brigantian to whom she was
speaking. "Can you crank up the speed a little? This isn't a place I want to hang around. Over."
A wash of hollow noise flooded Margulies' helmet, racket echoing from within the driver's compartment. The cab
was lightly armored but not sound-proofed. A moment later the Brigantian said, "All right, we'll see, but I don't want
to put this sucker in the bog either."
The background noise shut off. It was as effective a close-transmission signal as more standard commo procedures
would have been. Presumably the Brigantian notched his hand throttle forward, though change came very slowly for
mechanical dinosaurs the size of the road trains.
The leading combat cars pulled farther ahead and swung a little closer to their respective sides of the cleared strip.
Margulies hadn't bothered to give her own people orders. They knew what the situation was and had been dealing
with it for the better part of a month now.
There was new growth where Frisian tanks had blasted hundred-meter notches through the vegetation with their
main guns. The flushes of new leaves were red and violet.
There wasn't enough silica in the soil to glaze when struck by powerguns, but steam from the high water content
exploded main-gun impacts into craters that could swallow the jeep. During the ambush, one of the panzers had swept
out into the forest, deliberately scraping its steel skirts across the dirt to uncover the guerrillas' spider holes. The
arcing scar was still barren save for speckles of low growth.
Angel hung off the left front fender of the leading road train as the convoy squealed and rumbled into the
gripped like a fevered giants hand, crushing her in conditions of intense heat. She couldn't see anything but white
light. Both her shins broke against the long right-hand curve. He glanced at Margulies to remind her that this wasn't
the position he would choose for a plastic-bodied jeep, though whatever the Lieutenant wanted . . .
"Yeah, ease back, let them pass us, and we'll cross to the right side between the second and third trucks," Margulies
agreed. She was holding her 2-cm shoulder weapon at high port. Now her index finger pushed the lever at the front of
the trigger guard forward, off safe.
She had a bad feeling about this spot. That was nothing new. She'd had a bad feeling about it every bloody time she
crossed it.
Angel eased the fan nacelles closer to vertical, raising clearance beneath the skirt to slow the jeep as ordered. He
kept the power up. The wasted charge was a cheap price to pay for greater agility in a crisis. Margulies rose in her seat
to get a better view back along the convoy.
The lead road trains quad automatic cannon was swung to starboard, aiming at the inside of the curve. That was
fine, but the crew of the second vehicle was doing the same cursed thing instead of covering the left side of the route
as each alternate crew should do.
Margulies swore and took her left hand from the powerguns forestock to key her helmet — as a command-
detonated mine went off under the third segment of the leading road train.
The charge buried beneath the gravel was huge, at least fifty kilos of high explosive. It lifted the segment, blew the
track plates and several road wheels from the suspension, and dropped the 30-tonne mass on its right side.
The blast stunned the gun crew atop the middle segment and flung several of them out of the tub. The jeep flipped
like a tiddlywink.
Margulies didn't hear the explosion. The shockwave dashboard as she and the jeep spun in different trajectories.
There was no present pain, but she heard the bones go with tiny clicks like those of fingers on a data-entry keyboard.
摘要：

THESHARPENDCopyright©1993byDavidDrakee-bookver.1.0LibraryofCongressCatalogNumber:93-10739ISBN:0-671-87632-5DEDICATIONToourarchitectandbuilderDerwoodSchrotbergerWritinganovelandmovingtoanewhousearebothstressfuloccupations.ThefactthatIwasabletocombinethemisacommentonDerwood'sconsummateskill,whichremin...

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