The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century

THE LIGHT IN the kitchen alcove glittered on Lt. Schilling’s blond curls; glittered also on the frost-spangled window beside her and from the armor of the tank parked outside. All the highlights looked cold to Capt. Danny Pritchard as he stepped closer to the infantry lieutenant.

“Sal—” Pritchard began. From the orderly room behind them came the babble of the radios ranked against one wall and, less muted, the laughter of soldiers waiting for action. “You can’t think like a Dutchman anymore. We’re Hammer’s Slammers, all of us. We’re mercs. Not Dutch, not Frisians—”

“You’re not,” Lt. Schilling snapped, looking up from the cup of bitter chocolate she had just drawn from the urn. She was a short woman and lightly built, but she had the unerring instinct of a bully who is willing to make a scene for a victim who is not willing to be part of one. “You’re a farmer from Dunstan, what d’you care about Dutch miners, whatever these bleeding French do to them. But a lot of us do care, Danny, and if you had a little compassion—”

“But Sal—” Pritchard repeated, only his right arm moving as he touched the blond girl’s shoulder.

“Get your hands off me, Captain!” she shouted. “That’s over!” She shifted the mug of steaming chocolate in her hand. The voices in the orderly room stilled. Then, simultaneously, someone turned up the volume of the radios and at least three people began to talk loudly on unconnected subjects.

Pritchard studied the back of his hand, turned it over to examine the calloused palm as well. He smiled. “Sorry, I’ll remember that,” he said in a normal voice. He turned and stepped back into the orderly room, a brown-haired man of 34 with a good set of muscles to cover his moderate frame and nothing at all to cover his heart. Those who knew Danny Pritchard slightly thought him a relaxed man, and he looked relaxed even now. But waiting around the electric grate were three troopers who knew Danny very well indeed: the crew of The Plow, Pritchard’s command tank.

Kowie drove the beast, a rabbit-eyed man whose fingers now flipped cards in another game of privy solitaire. His deck was so dirty that only familiarity allowed him to read the pips. Kowie’s hands and eyes were just as quick at the controls of the tank, sliding its bulbous hundred and fifty metric tons through spaces that were only big enough to pass it. When he had to, he drove nervelessly through objects instead of going around. Kowie would never be more than a tank driver; but he was the best tank driver in the Regiment.

Rob Jenne was big and as blond as Lt. Schilling. He grinned up at Pritchard, his expression changing from embarrassment to relief as he saw that his captain was able to smile also. Jenne had transferred from combat cars to tanks three years back, after the Slammers had pulled out of Squire’s World. He was sharp-eyed and calm in a crisis. Twice after his transfer Jenne had been offered a blower of his own to command if he would return to combat cars. He had refused both promotions, saying he would stay with tanks or buy back his contract, that there was no way he was going back to those open-topped coffins again. When a tank commander’s slot came open, Jenne got it; and Pritchard had made the blond sergeant his own blower chief when a directional mine had retired the previous man. Now Jenne straddled a chair backwards, his hands flexing a collapsible torsion device that kept his muscles as dense and hard as they had been the day he was recruited from a quarry on Burlage.

Line tanks carry only a driver and the blower chief who directs the tank and its guns when they are not under the direct charge of the Regiment’s computer. In addition to those two and a captain, command tanks have a Communications Technician to handle the multiplex burden of radio traffic focused on the vehicle. Pritchard’s commo tech was Margritte DiManzo, a slender widow who cropped her lustrous hair short so that it would not interfere with the radio helmet she wore most of her waking hours. She was off duty now, but she had not removed the bulky headgear which linked her to the six radios in the tank parked outside. Their simultaneous sound would have been unintelligible babbling to most listeners. The black-haired woman’s training, both conscious and hypnotic, broke that babbling into a set of discrete conversations. When Pritchard reentered the room, Margritte was speaking to Jenne. She did not look up at her commander until Jenne’s brightening expression showed her it was safe to do so.

Two commo people and a sergeant with Intelligence tabs were at consoles in the orderly room. They were from the Regiment’s HQ Battalion, assigned to Sector Two here on Kobold but in no sense a part of the sector’s combat companies: Capt. Riis’ S Company—infantry—and Pritchard’s own tanks.

Riis was the senior captain and in charge of the sector, a matter which neither he nor Pritchard ever forgot. Sally Schilling led his first platoon. Her aide, a black-haired corporal, sat with his huge boots up, humming as he polished the pieces of his field-stripped powergun. Its barrel gleamed orange in the light of the electric grate. Electricity was more general on Kobold than on some wealthier worlds, since mining and copper smelting made fusion units a practical necessity. But though the copper in the transmission cable might well have been processed on Kobold, the wire had probably been drawn off-world and shipped back here. Aurore and Friesland had refused to allow even such simple manufactures here on their joint colony. They had kept Kobold a market and a supplier of raw materials, but never a rival.

“Going to snow tonight?” Jenne asked.

“Umm, too cold,” Pritchard said, walking over to the grate. He pretended he did not hear Lt. Schilling stepping out of the alcove. “I figure—”

“Hold it,” said Margritte, her index finger curling out for a volume control before the duty man had time to react. One of the wall radios boomed loudly to the whole room. Prodding another switch, Margritte patched the signal separately through the link implanted in Pritchard’s right mastoid.

“—guns and looks like satchel charges. There’s only one man in each truck, but they’ve been on the horn too and we can figure on more Frenchies here any—”

“Red Alert,” Pritchard ordered, facing his commo tech so that she could read his lips. “Where is this?”

The headquarters radiomen stood nervously, afraid to interfere but unwilling to let an outsider run their equipment, however ably. “Red Alert,” Margritte was repeating over all bands. Then, through Pritchard’s implant, she said, “It’s Patrol Sigma three-nine, near Haacin. Dutch civilians’ve stopped three outbound provisions trucks from Barthe’s Company.”

“Scramble First Platoon,” Pritchard said, “but tell ’em to hold for us to arrive.” As Margritte coolly passed on the order, Pritchard picked up the commo helmet he had laid on his chair when he followed Lt. Schilling into the kitchen. The helmet gave him automatic switching and greater range than the bio-electric unit behind his ear.

The wall radio was saying, “—need some big friendlies fast or it’ll drop in the pot for sure.”

“Sigma three-niner,” Pritchard said, “this is Michael One.”

“Go ahead, Michael One,” replied the distant squad leader. Pritchard’s commo helmet added an airy boundlessness to his surroundings without really deadening the ambient noise.

“Hold what you’ve got, boys,” the tank captain said. “There’s help on the way.”

The door of the orderly room stood ajar the way Pritchard’s crewmen had left it. The captain slammed it shut as he too ran for his tank. Behind in the orderly room, Lt. Schilling was snapping out quick directions to her own platoon and to her awakened commander.

The Plow was already floating when Danny reached it. Ice crystals, spewed from beneath the skirts by the lift fans, made a blue-white dazzle in the vehicle’s running lights. Frost whitened the ladder up the high side of the tank’s plenum chamber and hull. Pritchard paused to pull on his gloves before mounting. Sgt. Jenne, anchoring himself with his left hand on the turret’s storage rack, reached down and lifted his captain aboard without noticeable effort. Side by side, the two men slid through the hatches to their battle stations.

“Ready,” Pritchard said over the intercom.

“Movin’ on,” replied Kowie, and with his words the tank slid forward over the frozen ground like grease on a hot griddle.

The command post had been a district road-maintenance center before all semblance of central government on Kobold had collapsed. The orderly room and officers’ quarters were in the supervisor’s house, a comfortable structure with shutters and mottoes embroidered in French on the walls. Some of the hangings had been defaced by short-range gunfire. The crew barracks across the road now served the troopers on headquarters duty. Many of the Slammers could read the Dutch periodicals abandoned there in the break-up. The equipment shed beside the barracks garaged the infantry skimmers because the battery-powered platforms could not shrug off the weather like the huge panzers of M Company. The shed doors were open, pluming the night with heated air as the duty platoon ran for its mounts. Some of the troopers had not yet donned their helmets and body armor. Jenne waved as the tank swept on by; then the road curved and the infantry was lost in the night.

Kobold was a joint colony of Aurore and Friesland. When eighty years of French oppression had driven the Dutch settlers to rebellion, their first act was to hire Hammer’s Slammers. The break between Hammer and Friesland had been sharp, but time has a way of blunting anger and letting old habits resume. The Regimental language was Dutch, and many of the Slammers’ officers were Frisians seconded from their own service. Friesland gained from the men’s experience when they returned home; Hammer gained company officers with excellent training from the Gröningen Academy.

To counter the Slammers, the settlers of Auroran descent had hired three Francophone regiments. If either group of colonists could have afforded to pay its mercenaries unaided, the fighting would have been immediate and brief. Kobold had been kept deliberately poor by its home worlds, however; so in their necessities the settlers turned to those home worlds for financial help.

And neither Aurore nor Friesland wanted a war on Kobold.

Friesland had let its settlers swing almost from the beginning, sloughing their interests for a half share of the copper produced and concessions elsewhere in its sphere of influence. The arrangement was still satisfactory to the Council of State, if Frisian public opinion could be mollified by apparent activity. Aurore was on the brink of war in the Zemla System. Her Parlement feared another proxy war which could in a moment explode full-fledged, even though Friesland had been weakened by a decade of severe internal troubles. So Aurore and Friesland reached a compromise. Then, under threat of abandonment, the warring parties were forced to transfer their mercenaries’ contracts to the home worlds. Finally, Aurore and Friesland mutually hired the four regiments: the Slammers; Compagnie de Barthe; the Alaudae; and Phenix Moirots. Mercs from either side were mixed and divided among eight sectors imposed on a map of inhabited Kobold. There the contract ordered them to keep peace between the factions; prevent the importation of modern weapons to either side; and—wait.

But Col. Barthe and the Auroran leaders had come to a further, secret agreement; and although Hammer had learned of it, he had informed only two men—Maj. Steuben, his aide and bodyguard; and Capt. Daniel Pritchard.

Pritchard scowled at the memory. Even without the details a traitor had sold Hammer, it would have been obvious that Barthe had his own plans. In the other sectors, Hammer’s men and their French counterparts ran joint patrols. Both sides scattered their camps throughout the sectors, just as the villages of either nationality were scattered. Barthe had split his sectors in halves, brusquely ordering the Slammers to keep to the west of the River Aillet because his own troops were mining the east of the basin heavily. Barthe’s Company was noted for its minefields. That skill was one of the reasons they had been hired by the French. Since most of Kobold was covered either by forests or by rugged hills, armor was limited to roads where well-placed mines could stack tanks like crushed boxes.

Hammer listened to Barthe’s pronouncement and laughed, despite the anger of most of his staff officers. Beside him, Joachim Steuben had grinned and traced the line of his cut-away holster. When Danny Pritchard was informed, he had only shivered a little and called a vehicle inspection for the next morning. That had been three months ago….

The night streamed by like smoke around the tank. Pritchard lowered his face shield, but he did not drop his seat into the belly of the tank. Vision blocks within gave a 360° view of the tank’s surroundings, but the farmer in Danny could not avoid the feeling of blindness within the impenetrable walls. Jenne sat beside his captain in a cupola fitted with a three-barrelled automatic weapon. He too rode with his head out of the hatch, but that was only for comradeship. The sergeant much preferred to be inside. He would button up at the first sign of hostile action. Jenne was in no sense a coward; it was just that he had quirks. Most combat veterans do.

Pritchard liked the whistle of the black wind past his helmet. Warm air from the tank’s resistance heaters jetted up through the hatch and kept his body quite comfortable. The vehicle’s huge mass required the power of a fusion plant to drive its lift motors, and the additional burden of climate control was inconsequential.

The tankers’ face shields automatically augmented the light of the moon, dim and red because the sun it reflected was dim and red as well. The boosted light level displayed the walls of forest, the boles snaking densely to either side of the road. At Kobold’s perihelion, the thin stems grew in days to their full six-meter height and spread a ceiling of red-brown leaves the size of blankets. Now, at aphelion, the chilled, sapless trees burned with almost explosive intensity. The wood was too dangerous to use for heating, even if electricity had not been common; but it fueled the gasogene engines of most vehicles on the planet.

Jenne gestured ahead. “Blowers,” he muttered on the intercom. His head rested on the gun switch though he knew the vehicles must be friendly. The Plow slowed.

Pritchard nodded agreement. “Michael First, this is Michael One,” he said. “Flash your running lights so we can be sure it’s you.”

“Roger,” replied the radio. Blue light flickered from the shapes hulking at the edge of the forest ahead. Kowie throttled the fans up to cruise, then chopped them and swung expertly into the midst of the four tanks of the outlying platoon.

“Michael One, this is Sigma One,” Capt. Riis’ angry voice demanded in the helmet.

“Go ahead.”

“Barthe’s sent a battalion across the river. I’m moving Lt. Schilling into position to block ’em and called Central for artillery support. You hold your first platoon at Haacin for reserve and any partisans up from Portela. I’ll take direct command of the rest of—”

“Negative, negative, Sigma One!” Pritchard snapped. The Plow was accelerating again, second in the line of five tanks. They were beasts of prey sliding across the landscape of snow and black trees at 80 kph and climbing. “Let the French through, Captain. There won’t be fighting, repeat, negative fighting.”

“There damned well will be fighting, Michael One, if Barthe tries to shove a battalion into my sector!” Riis thundered back. “Remember, this isn’t your command or a joint command. I’m in charge here.”

“Margritte, patch me through to Battalion,” Pritchard hissed on intercom. The Plow’s turret was cocked 30° to the right. It covered the forest sweeping by to that side and anything which might be hiding there. Pritchard’s mind was on Sally Schilling, riding a skimmer through forest like that flanking the tanks, hurrying with her fifty men to try to stop a battalion’s hasty advance.

The commo helmet popped quietly to itself. Pritchard tensed, groping for the words he would need to convince Lt. Col. Miezierk. Miezierk, under whom command of Sectors One and Two was grouped, had been a Frisian regular until five years ago. He was supposed to think like a merc now, not like a Frisian; but….

The voice that suddenly rasped, “Override, override!” was not Miezierk’s. “Sigma One, Michael One, this is Regiment.”

“Go ahead,” Pritchard blurted. Capt. Riis, equally rattled, said, “Yes, sir!” on the three-way link.

“Sigma, your fire order is cancelled. Keep your troops on alert, but keep ’em the hell out of Barthe’s way.”

“But Col. Hammer—”

“Riis, you’re not going to start a war tonight. Michael One, can your panzers handle whatever’s going on at Haacin without violating the contract?”

“Yes, sir.” Pritchard flashed a map briefly on his face shield to check his position. “We’re almost there now.”

“If you can’t handle it, Captain, you’d better hope you’re killed in action,” Col. Hammer said bluntly. “I haven’t nursed this regiment for twenty-three years to lose it because somebody forgets what his job is.” Then, more softly—Pritchard could imagine the colonel flicking his eyes side to side to gauge bystanders’ reactions—he added, “There’s support if you need it, Captain—if they’re the ones who breach the contract.”

“Affirmative.”

“Keep the lid on, boy. Regiment out.”

The trees had drunk the whine of the fans. Now the road curved and the tanks banked greasily to join the main highway from Dimo to Portela. The tailings pile of the Haacin Mine loomed to the right and hurled the drive noise back redoubled at the vehicles. The steel skirts of the lead tank touched the road metal momentarily, showering the night with orange sparks. Beyond the mine were the now-empty wheat fields and then the village itself.

Haacin, the largest Dutch settlement in Sector Two, sprawled to either side of the highway. Its houses were two- and three-story lumps of cemented mine tailings. They were roofed with tile or plastic rather than shakes of native timber, because of the wood’s lethal flammability. The highway was straight and broad. It gave Pritchard a good view of the three cargo vehicles pulled to one side. Men in local dress swarmed about them. Across the road were ten of Hammer’s khaki-clad infantry, patrol S-39, whose ported weapons half-threatened, half-protected the trio of drivers in their midst. Occasionally a civilian turned to hurl a curse at Barthe’s men, but mostly the Dutch busied themselves with offloading cartons from the trucks.

Pritchard gave a brief series of commands. The four line tanks grounded in a hedgehog at the edge of the village. Their main guns and automatics faced outward in all directions. Kowie swung the command vehicle around the tank which had been leading it. He cut the fans’ angle of attack, slowing The Plow without losing the ability to accelerate quickly. The command vehicle eased past the squad of infantry, then grounded behind the rearmost truck. Pritchard felt the fans’ hum through the metal of the hull.

“Who’s in charge here?” the captain demanded, his voice booming through the command vehicle’s public address system.

The Dutch unloading the trucks halted silently. A squat man in a parka of feathery native fur stepped forward. Unlike many of the other civilians, he was not armed. He did not flinch when Pritchard pinned him with the spotlight of the tank. “I am Paul van Oosten,” the man announced in the heavy Dutch of Kobold. “I am Mayor of Haacin. But if you mean who leads us in what we are doing here, well…perhaps Justice herself does. Klaus, show them what these trucks were carrying to Portela.”

Another civilian stepped forward, ripping the top off the box he carried. Flat plastic wafers spilled from it, glittering in the cold light: powergun ammunition, intended for shoulder weapons like those the infantry carried.

“They were taking powerguns to the beasts of Portela to use against us,” van Oosten said. He used the slang term “skepsels” to name the Francophone settlers. The mayor’s shaven jaw was jutting out in anger.

“Captain!” called one of Barthe’s truck drivers, brushing forward through the ring of Hammer’s men. “Let me explain.”

One of the civilians growled and lifted his heavy musket. Rob Jenne rang his knuckles twice on the receiver of his tribarrel, calling attention to the muzzles as he swept them down across the crowd. The Dutchman froze. Jenne smiled without speaking.

“We were sent to pick up wheat the regiment had purchased,” Barthe’s man began. Pritchard was not familiar with Barthe’s insigniae, but from the merc’s age and bearing he was a senior sergeant. An unlikely choice to be driving a provisions truck. “One of the vehicles happened to be partly loaded. We didn’t take the time to empty it because we were in a hurry to finish the run and go off duty—there was enough room and lift to handle that little bit of gear and the grain besides.

“In any case—” and here the sergeant began pressing, because the tank captain had not cut him off at the first sentence as expected—“you do not, and these fools surely do not, have the right to stop Col. Barthe’s transport. If you have questions about the way we pick up wheat, that’s between your CO and ours, sir.”

Pritchard ran his gloved index finger back and forth below his right eyesocket. He was ice inside, bubbling ice that tore and chilled him and had nothing to do with the weather. He turned back to Mayor van Oosten. “Reload the trucks,” he said, hoping that his voice did not break.

“You can’t!” van Oosten cried. “These powerguns are the only chance my village, my people have to survive when you leave. You know that’ll happen, don’t you? Friesland and Aurore, they’ll come to an agreement, a trade-off, they’ll call it, and all the troops will leave. It’s our lives they’re trading! The beasts in Dimo, in Portela if you let these go through, they’ll have powerguns that their mercenaries gave them. And we—”

Pritchard whispered a prepared order into his helmet mike. The rearmost of the four tanks at the edge of the village fired a single round from its main gun. The night flared cyan as the 200 mm bolt struck the middle of the tailings pile a kilometer away. Stone, decomposed by the enormous energy of the shot, recombined in a huge gout of flame. Vapor, lava, and cinders spewed in every direction. After a moment, bits of high-flung rock began pattering down on the roofs of Haacin.

The bolt caused a double thunder-clap, that of the heated air followed by the explosive release of energy at the point of impact. When the reverberations died away there was utter silence in Haacin. On the distant jumble of rock, a dying red glow marked where the charge had hit. The shot had also ignited some saplings rooted among the stones. They had blazed as white torches for a few moments but they were already collapsing as cinders.

“The Slammers are playing this by the rules,” Pritchard said. Loudspeakers flung his quiet words about the village like the echoes of the shot; but he was really speaking for the recorder in the belly of the tank, preserving his words for a later Bonding Authority hearing. “There’ll be no powerguns in civilian hands. Load every bit of this gear back in the truck. Remember, there’s satellites up there—” Pritchard waved generally at the sky—“that see everything that happens on Kobold. If one powergun is fired by a civilian in this sector, I’ll come for him. I promise you.”

The mayor sagged within his furs. Turning to the crowd behind him, he said, “Put the guns back on the truck. So that the Portelans can kill us more easily.”

“Are you mad, van Oosten?” demanded the gunman who had earlier threatened Barthe’s sergeant.

“Are you mad, Kruse?” the mayor shouted back without trying to hide his fury. “D’ye doubt what those tanks would do to Haacin? And do you doubt this butcher—” his back was to Pritchard but there was no doubt as to whom the mayor meant—“would use them on us? Perhaps tomorrow we could have….”

There was motion at the far edge of the crowd, near the corner of a building. Margritte, watching the vision blocks within, called a warning. Pritchard reached for his panic bar—Rob Jenne was traversing the tribarrel. All three of them were too late. The muzzle flash was red and it expanded in Pritchard’s eyes as a hammer blow smashed him in the middle of the forehead.

The bullet’s impact heaved the tanker up and backwards. His shattered helmet flew off into the night. The unyielding hatch coaming caught him in the small of the back, arching his torso over it as if he were being broken on the wheel. Pritchard’s eyes flared with sheets of light. As reaction flung him forward again, he realized he was hearing the reports of Jenne’s powergun and that some of the hellish flashes were real.

If the tribarrel’s discharges were less brilliant than that of the main gun, then they were more than a hundred times as close to the civilians. The burst snapped within a meter of one bystander, an old man who stumbled backwards into a wall. His mouth and staring eyes were three circles of empty terror. Jenne fired seven rounds. Every charge but one struck the sniper or the building he sheltered against. Powdered concrete sprayed from the wall. The sniper’s body spun backwards, chest gobbled away by the bolts. His right arm still gripped the musket he had fired at Pritchard. The arm had been flung alone onto the snowy pavement. The electric bite of ozone hung in the air with the ghostly afterimages of the shots. The dead man’s clothes were burning, tiny orange flames that rippled into smoke an inch from their bases.

Jenne’s big left hand was wrapped in the fabric of Pritchard’s jacket, holding the dazed officer upright. “There’s another rule you play by,” the sergeant roared to the crowd. “You shoot at Hammer’s Slammers and you get your balls kicked between your ears. Sure as God, boys; sure as death.” Jenne’s right hand swung the muzzles of his weapon across the faces of the civilians. “Now, load the bleeding trucks like the captain said, heroes.”

For a brief moment, nothing moved but the threatening powergun. Then a civilian turned and hefted a heavy crate back aboard the truck from which he had just taken it. Empty-handed, the colonist began to sidle away from the vehicle—and from the deadly tribarrel. One by one the other villagers reloaded the hijacked cargo, the guns and ammunition they had hoped would save them in the cataclysm they awaited. One by one they took the blower chief’s unspoken leave to return to their houses. One who did not leave was sobbing out her grief over the mangled body of the sniper. None of her neighbors had gone to her side. They could all appreciate—now—what it would have meant if that first shot had led to a general firefight instead of Jenne’s selective response.

“Rob, help me get him inside,” Pritchard heard Margritte say.

Pritchard braced himself with both hands and leaned away from his sergeant’s supporting arm. “No, I’m all right,” he croaked. His vision was clear enough, but the landscape was flashing bright and dim with varicolored light.

The side hatch of the turret clanked. Margritte was beside her captain. She had stripped off her cold weather gear in the belly of the tank and wore only her khaki uniform. “Get back inside there,” Pritchard muttered. “It’s not safe.” He was afraid of falling if he raised a hand to fend her away. He felt an injector prick the swelling flesh over his cheekbones. The flashing colors died away though Pritchard’s ears began to ring.

“They carried some into the nearest building,” the non-com from Barthe’s Company was saying. He spoke in Dutch, having sleep-trained in the language during the transit to Kobold just as Hammer’s men had in French.

“Get it,” Jenne ordered the civilians still near the trucks. Three of them were already scurrying toward the house the merc had indicated. They were back in moments, carrying the last of the arms chests.

Pritchard surveyed the scene. The cargo had been reloaded, except for the few spilled rounds winking from the pavement. Van Oosten and the furious Kruse were the only villagers still in sight. “All right,” Pritchard said to the truck drivers, “get aboard and get moving. And come back by way of Bitzen, not here. I’ll arrange an escort for you.”

The French non-com winked, grinned, and shouted a quick order to his men. The infantrymen stepped aside silently to pass the truckers. The French mercenaries mounted their vehicles and kicked them to life. Their fans whined and the trucks lifted, sending snow crystals dancing. With gathering speed, they slid westward along the forest-rimmed highway.

Jenne shook his head at the departing trucks, then stiffened as his helmet spat a message. “Captain,” he said, “we got company coming.”

Pritchard grunted. His own radio helmet had been smashed by the bullet, and his implant would only relay messages on the band to which it had been verbally keyed most recently. “Margritte, start switching for me,” he said. His slender commo tech was already slipping back inside through the side hatch. Pritchard’s blood raced with the chemicals Margritte had shot into it. His eyes and mind worked perfectly, though all his thoughts seemed to have razor edges on them.

“Use mine,” Jenne said, trying to hand the captain his helmet.

“I’ve got the implant,” Pritchard said. He started to shake his head and regretted the motion instantly. “That and Margritte’s worth a helmet any day.”

“It’s a whole battalion,” Jenne explained quietly, his eyes scanning the Bever Road down which Command Central had warned that Barthe’s troops were coming. “All but the artillery—that’s back in Dimo, but it’ll range here easy enough. Brought in anti-tank battery and a couple calliopes, though.”

“Slide us up ahead of Michael First,” Pritchard ordered his driver. As The Plow shuddered, then spun on its axis, the captain dropped his seat into the turret to use the vision blocks. He heard Jenne’s seat whirr down beside him and the cupola hatch snick closed. In front of Pritchard’s knees, pale in the instrument lights, Margritte DiManzo sat still and open-eyed at her communications console.

“Little friendlies,” Pritchard called through his loudspeakers to the ten infantrymen, “find yourselves a quiet alley and hope nothing happens. The Lord help you if you fire a shot without me ordering it.” The Lord help us all, Pritchard thought to himself.

Ahead of the command vehicle, the beetle shapes of First Platoon began to shift position. “Michael First,” Pritchard ordered sharply, “get back as you were. We’re not going to engage Barthe, we’re going to meet him.” Maybe.

Kowie slid them alongside, then a little forward of the point vehicle of the defensive lozenge. They set down. All of the tanks were buttoned up, save for the hatch over Pritchard’s head. The central vision block was a meter by 30 cm panel. It could be set for anything from a 360° view of the tank’s surroundings to a one-to-one image of an object a kilometer away. Pritchard focused and ran the gain to ten magnifications, then thirty. At the higher power, motion curling along the snow-smoothed grainfields between Haacin and its mine resolved into men. Barthe’s troops were clad in sooty-white coveralls and battle armor. The leading elements were hunched low on the meager platforms of their skimmers. Magnification and the augmented light made the skittering images grainy, but the tanker’s practiced eye caught the tubes of rocket launchers clipped to every one of the skimmers. The skirmish line swelled at two points where self-propelled guns were strung like beads on the cord of men: anti-tank weapons, 50 mm powerguns firing high-intensity charges. They were supposed to be able to burn through the heaviest armor. Barthe’s boys had come loaded for bear; oh yes. They thought they knew just what they were going up against. Well, the Slammers weren’t going to show them they were wrong. Tonight.

“Running lights, everybody,” Pritchard ordered. Then, taking a deep breath, he touched the lift on his seat and raised himself head and shoulders back into the chill night air. There was a hand light clipped to Pritchard’s jacket. He snapped it on, aiming the beam down onto the turret top so that the burnished metal splashed diffused radiance up over him. It bathed his torso and face plainly for the oncoming infantry. Through the open hatch, Pritchard could hear Rob cursing. Just possibly Margritte was mumbling a prayer.

“Batteries at Dimo and Harfleur in Sector One have received fire orders and are waiting for a signal to execute,” the implant grated. “If Barthe opens fire, Command Central will not, repeat, negative, use Michael First or Michael One to knock down the shells. Your guns will be clear for action, Michael One.”

Pritchard grinned starkly. His face would not have been pleasant even if livid bruises were not covering almost all of it. The Slammers’ central fire direction computer used radar and satellite reconnaissance to track shells in flight. Then the computer took control of any of the Regiment’s vehicle-mounted powerguns and swung them onto the target. Central’s message notified Pritchard that he would have full control of his weapons at all times, while guns tens or hundreds of kilometers away kept his force clear of artillery fire.

Margritte had blocked most of the commo traffic, Pritchard realized. She had let through only this message that was crucial to what they were about to do. A good commo tech; a very good person indeed.

The skirmish line grounded. The nearest infantrymen were within fifty meters of the tanks and their fellows spread off into the night like lethal wings. Barthe’s men rolled off their skimmers and lay prone. Pritchard began to relax when he noticed that their rocket launchers were still aboard the skimmers. The anti-tank weapons were in instant reach, but at least they were not being leveled for an immediate salvo. Barthe didn’t want to fight the Slammers. His targets were the Dutch civilians, just as Mayor van Oosten had suggested.

An air cushion jeep with a driver and two officers aboard drew close. It hissed slowly through the line of infantry, then stopped nearly touching the command vehicle’s bow armor. One of the officers dismounted. He was a tall man who was probably very thin when he was not wearing insulated coveralls and battle armor. He raised his face to Pritchard atop the high curve of the blower, sweeping up his reflective face shield as he did so. He was Lt. Col. Benoit, commander of the French mercenaries in Sector Two; a clean-shaven man with sharp features and a splash of gray hair displaced across his forehead by his helmet. Benoit grinned and waved at the muzzle of the 200 mm powergun pointed at him. Nobody had ever said Barthe’s chief subordinate was a coward.

Pritchard climbed out of the turret to the deck, then slid down the bow slope to the ground. Benoit was several inches taller than the tanker, with a force of personality which was daunting in a way that height alone could never be. It didn’t matter to Pritchard. He worked with tanks and with Col. Hammer; nothing else was going to face down a man who was accustomed to those.

“Sgt. Major Oberlie reported how well and…firmly you handled their little affair, Captain,” Benoit said, extending his hand to Pritchard. “I’ll admit that I was a little concerned that I would have to rescue my men myself.”

“Hammer’s Slammers can be depended on to keep their contracts,” the tanker replied, smiling with false warmth. “I told these squareheads that any civilian caught with a powergun was going to have to answer to me for it. Then we made sure nobody thinks we were kidding.”

Benoit chuckled. Little puffs of vapor spurted from his mouth with the sounds. “You’ve been sent to the Gröningen Academy, have you not, Capt. Pritchard?” the older man asked. “You understand that I take an interest in my opposite numbers in this sector.”

Pritchard nodded. “The Old Man picked me for the two year crash course on Friesland, yeah. Now and again he sends non-coms he wants to promote.”

“But you’re not a Frisian, though you have Frisian military training,” the other mercenary continued, nodding to himself. “As you know, Captain, promotion in some infantry regiments comes much faster than it does in the…Slammers. If you feel a desire to speak to Col. Barthe some time in the future, I assure you this evening’s business will not be forgotten.”

“Just doing my job, Colonel,” Pritchard simpered. Did Benoit think a job offer would make a traitor of him? Perhaps. Hammer had bought Barthe’s plans for very little, considering their military worth. “Enforcing the contract, just like you’d have done if things were the other way around.”

Benoit chuckled again and stepped back aboard his jeep. “Until we meet again, Capt. Pritchard,” he said. “For the moment, I think we’ll just proceed on into Portela. That’s permissible under the contract, of course.”

“Swing wide around Haacin, will you?” Pritchard called back. “The folks there’re pretty worked up. Nobody wants more trouble, do we?”

Benoit nodded. As his jeep lifted, he spoke into his helmet communicator. The skirmish company rose awkwardly and set off in a counterclockwise circuit of Haacin. Behind them, in a column re-formed from their support positions at the base of the tailings heap, came the truck-mounted men of the other three companies. Pritchard stood and watched until the last of them whined past.

Air stirred by the tank’s idling fans leaked out under the skirts. The jets formed tiny deltas of the snow which winked as Pritchard’s feet caused eddy currents. In their cold precision, the tanker recalled Col. Benoit’s grin.

“Command Central,” Pritchard said as he climbed his blower, “Michael One. Everything’s smooth here. Over.” Then, “Sigma One, this is Michael One. I’ll be back as quick as fans’ll move me, so if you have anything to say we can discuss it then.” Pritchard knew that Capt. Riis must have been burning the net up, trying to raise him for a report or to make demands. It wasn’t fair to make Margritte hold the bag now that Pritchard himself was free to respond to the sector chief; but neither did the Dunstan tanker have the energy to argue with Riis just at the moment. Already this night he’d faced death and Col. Benoit. Riis could wait another ten minutes.

THE PLOW’S ARMOR was a tight fit for its crew, the radios, and the central bulk of the main gun with its feed mechanism. The command vehicle rode glass-smooth over the frozen roadway, with none of the jouncing that a rougher surface might bring even through the air cushion. Margritte faced Pritchard over her console, her seat a meter lower than his so that she appeared a suppliant. Her short hair was the lustrous purple-black of a grackle’s throat in sunlight. Hidden illumination from the instruments brought her face to life.

“Gee, Captain,” Jenne was saying at Pritchard’s side, “I wish you’d a let me pick up that squarehead’s rifle. I know those groundpounders. They’re just as apt as not to claim the kill credit themselves, and if I can’t prove I stepped on the body they might get away with it. I remember on Paradise, me and Piet de Hagen—he was left wing gunner, I was right—both shot at a partisan. And then damned if Central didn’t decide the slope had blown herself up with a hand grenade after we’d wounded her. So neither of us got the credit. You’d think—”

“Lord’s blood, Sergeant,” Pritchard snarled, “are you so damned proud of killing one of the poor bastards who hired us to protect them?”

Jenne said nothing. Pritchard shrank up inside, realizing what he had said and unable to take the words back. “Oh, Lord, Rob,” he said without looking up, “I’m sorry. It…I’m shook, that’s all.”

After a brief silence, the blond sergeant laughed. “Never been shot in the head myself, Captain, but I can see it might shake a fellow, yeah.” Jenne let the whine of the fans stand for a moment as the only further comment while he decided whether he would go on. Then he said, “Captain, for a week after I first saw action I meant to get out of the Slammers, even if I had to sweep floors on Curwin for the rest of my life. Finally I decided I’d stick it. I didn’t like the…rules of the game, but I could learn to play by them.

“And I did. And one rule is that you get to be as good as you can at killing the people Col. Hammer wants killed. Yeah, I’m proud about that one just now. It was a tough snap shot and I made it. I don’t care why we’re on Kobold or who brought us here. But I know I’m supposed to kill anybody who shoots at us, and I will.”

“Well, I’m glad you did,” Pritchard said evenly as he looked the sergeant in the eyes. “You pretty well saved things from getting out of hand by the way you reacted.”

As if he had not heard his captain, Jenne went on, “I was afraid if I stayed in the Slammers I’d turn into an animal, like the dogs we trained back home to kill rats in the quarries. And I was right. But it’s the way I am now, so I don’t seem to mind.”

“You do care about those villagers, don’t you?” Margritte asked Pritchard unexpectedly.

The captain looked down and found her eyes on him. They were the rich powder-blue of chicory flowers. “You’re probably the only person in the Regiment who thinks that,” he said bitterly. “Except for me. And maybe Col. Hammer….”

Margritte smiled, a quick flash and as quickly gone. “There’re rule-book soldiers in the Slammers,” she said, “captains who’d never believe Barthe was passing arms to the Auroran settlements since he’d signed a contract that said he wouldn’t. You aren’t that kind. And the Lord knows Col. Hammer isn’t, and he’s backing you. I’ve been around you too long, Danny, to believe you like what you see the French doing.”

Pritchard shrugged. His whole face was stiff with bruises and the drugs Margritte had injected to control them. If he’d locked the helmet’s chin strap, the bullet’s impact would have broken his neck even though the lead itself did not penetrate. “No, I don’t like it,” the brown-haired captain said. “It reminds me too much of the way the Combine kept us so poor on Dunstan that a thousand of us signed on for birdseed to fight off-planet. Just because it was off-planet. And if Kobold only gets cop from the worlds who settled her, then the French skim the best of that…. Sure, I’ll tell the Lord I feel sorry for the Dutch here.”

Pritchard held the commo tech’s eyes with his own as he continued, “But it’s just like Rob said, Margritte: I’ll do my job, no matter who gets hurt. We can’t do a thing to Barthe or the French until they step over the line in a really obvious way. That’ll mean a lot of people get hurt too. But that’s what I’m waiting for.”

Margritte reached up and touched Pritchard’s hand where it rested on his knee. “You’ll do something when you can,” she said quietly.

He turned his palm up so that he could grasp the woman’s fingers. What if she knew he was planning an incident, not just waiting for one? “I’ll do something, yeah,” he said. “But it’s going to be too late for an awful lot of people.”

KOWIE KEPT THE Plow at cruising speed until they were actually in the yard of the command post. Then he cocked the fan shafts forward, lifting the bow and bringing the tank’s mass around in a curve that killed its velocity and blasted an arc of snow against the building. Someone inside had started to unlatch the door as they heard the vehicle approach. The air spilling from the tank’s skirts flung the panel against the inner wall and skidded the man within on his back.

The man was Capt. Riis, Pritchard noted without surprise. Well, the incident wouldn’t make the infantry captain any angrier than the rest of the evening had made him already.

Riis had regained his feet by the time Pritchard could jump from the deck of his blower to the fan-cleared ground in front of the building. The Frisian’s normally pale face was livid now with rage. He was of the same somatotype as Lt. Col. Benoit, his French counterpart in the sector: tall, thin, and proudly erect. Despite the fact that Riis was only 27, he was Pritchard’s senior in grade by two years. He had kept the rank he held in Friesland’s regular army when Col. Hammer recruited him. Many of the Slammers were like Riis, Frisian soldiers who had transferred for the action and pay of a fighting regiment in which their training would be appreciated.

“You cowardly filth!” the infantryman hissed as Pritchard approached. A squad in battle gear stood within the orderly room beyond Riis. He pursed his fine lips to spit.

“Hey Captain!” Rob Jenne called. Riis looked up. Pritchard turned, surprised that the big tank commander was not right on his heels. Jenne still smiled from The Plow’s cupola. He waved at the officers with his left hand. His right was on the butterfly trigger of the tribarrel.

The threat, unspoken as it was, made a professional of Riis again. “Come on into my office,” he muttered to the tank captain, turning his back on the armored vehicle as if it were only a part of the landscape.

The infantrymen inside parted to pass the captains. Sally Schilling was there. Her eyes were as hard as her porcelain armor as they raked over Pritchard. That didn’t matter, he lied to himself tiredly.

Riis’ office was at the top of the stairs, a narrow cubicle which had once been a child’s bedroom. The sloping roof pressed in on the occupants, though a dormer window brightened the room during daylight. One wall was decorated with a regimental battle flag—not Hammer’s rampant lion but a pattern of seven stars on a white field. It had probably come from the unit in which Riis had served on Friesland. Over the door hung another souvenir, a big-bore musket of local manufacture. Riis threw himself into the padded chair behind his desk. “Those bastards were carrying powerguns to Portela!” he snarled at Pritchard.

The tanker nodded. He was leaning with his right shoulder against the door jamb. “That’s what the folks at Haacin thought,” he agreed. “If they’ll put in a complaint with the Bonding Authority, I’ll testify to what I saw.”

“Testify, testify!” Riis shouted. “We’re not lawyers, we’re soldiers! You should’ve seized the trucks right then and—”

“No I should not have, Captain!” Pritchard shouted back, holding up a mirror to Riis’ anger. “Because if I had, Barthe would’ve complained to the Authority himself, and we’d at least’ve been fined. At least! The contract says the Slammers’ll cooperate with the other three units in keeping peace on Kobold. Just because we suspect Barthe is violating the contract doesn’t give us a right to violate it ourselves. Especially in a way any simpleton can see is a violation.”

“If Barthe can get away with it, we can,” Riis insisted, but he settled back in his chair. He was physically bigger than Pritchard, but the tanker had spent half his life with the Slammers. Years like those mark men; death is never very far behind their eyes.

“I don’t think Barthe can get away with it,” Pritchard lied quietly, remembering Hammer’s advice on how to handle Riis and calm the Frisian without telling him the truth. Barthe’s officers had been in on his plans; and one of them had talked. Any regiment might have one traitor.

The tanker lifted down the musket on the wall behind him and began turning it in his fingers. “If the Dutch settlers can prove to the Authority that Barthe’s been passing out powerguns to the French,” the tanker mused aloud, “well, they’re responsible for half Barthe’s pay, remember. It’s about as bad a violation as you’ll find. The Authority’ll forfeit his whole bond and pay it over to whoever they decide the injured parties are. That’s about three years’ gross earnings for Barthe, I’d judge—he won’t be able to replace it. And without a bond posted, well, he may get jobs, but they’ll be the kind nobody else’d touch for the risk and the pay. His best troops’ll sign on with other people. In a year or so, Barthe won’t have a regiment anymore.”

“He’s willing to take the chance,” said Riis.

“Col. Hammer isn’t!” Pritchard blazed back.

“You don’t know that. It isn’t the sort of thing the colonel could say—”

“Say?” Pritchard shouted. He waved the musket at Riis. Its breech was triple-strapped to take the shock of the industrial explosive it used for propellant. Clumsy and large, it was the best that could be produced on a mining colony whose home worlds had forbidden local manufacturing. “Say? I bet my life against one of these tonight that the colonel wanted us to obey the contract. Do you have the guts to ask him flat out if he wants us to run guns to the Dutch?”

“I don’t think that would be proper, Captain,” said Riis coldly as he stood up again.

“Then try not to ‘think it proper’ to go do some bloody stupid stunt on your own—sir,” Pritchard retorted. So much for good intentions. Hammer—and Pritchard—had expected Riis’ support of the Dutch civilians. They had even planned on it. But the man seemed to have lost all his common sense. Pritchard laid the musket on the desk because his hands were trembling too badly to hang it back on the hooks.

“If it weren’t for you, Captain,” Riis said, “there’s not a Slammer in this sector who’d object to our helping the only decent people on this planet the way we ought to. You’ve made your decision, and it sickens me. But I’ve made decisions too.”

Pritchard went out without being dismissed. He blundered into the jamb, but he did not try to slam the door. That would have been petty, and there was nothing petty in the tanker’s rage.

Blank-faced, he clumped down the stairs. His bunk was in a parlor which had its own door to the outside. Pritchard’s crew was still in The Plow. There they had listened intently to his half of the argument with Riis, transmitted by the implant. If Pritchard had called for help, Kowie would have sent the command vehicle through the front wall buttoned up, with Jenne ready to shoot if he had to, to rescue his CO. A tank looks huge when seen close-up. It is all howling steel and iridium, with black muzzles ready to spew death across a planet. On a battlefield, when the sky is a thousand shrieking colors no god ever made and the earth beneath trembles and gouts in sudden mountains, a tank is a small world indeed for its crew. Their loyalties are to nearer things than an abstraction like “The Regiment.”

Besides, tankers and infantrymen have never gotten along well together.

No one was in the orderly room except two radiomen. They kept their backs to the stairs. Pritchard glanced at them, then unlatched his door. The room was dark, as he had left it, but there was a presence. Pritchard said, “Sal—” as he stepped within and the club knocked him forward into the arms of the man waiting to catch his body.

The first thing Pritchard thought as his mind slipped toward oblivion was that the cloth rubbing his face was homespun, not the hard synthetic from which uniforms were made. The last thing Pritchard thought was that there could have been no civilians within the headquarters perimeter unless the guards had allowed them; and that Lt. Schilling was officer of the guard tonight.

PRITCHARD COULD NOT be quite certain when he regained consciousness. A heavy felt rug covered and hid his trussed body on the floor of a clattering surface vehicle. He had no memory of being carried to the truck, though presumably it had been parked some distance from the command post. Riis and his confederates would not have been so open as to have civilians drive to the door to take a kidnapped officer, even if Pritchard’s crew could have been expected to ignore the breach of security.

Kidnapped. Not for later murder, or he would already be dead instead of smothering under the musty rug. Thick as it was, the rug was still inadequate to keep the cold from his shivering body. The only lights Pritchard could see were the washings of icy color from the night’s doubled shock to his skull.

That bone-deep ache reminded Pritchard of the transceiver implanted in his mastoid. He said in a husky whisper which he hoped would not penetrate the rug, “Michael One to any unit, any unit at all. Come in please, any Slammer.”

Nothing. Well, no surprise. The implant had an effective range of less than twenty meters, enough for relaying to and from a base unit, but unlikely to be useful in Kobold’s empty darkness. Of course, if the truck happened to be passing one of M Company’s night defensive positions…. “Michael One to any unit,” the tanker repeated more urgently.

A boot slammed him in the ribs. A voice in guttural Dutch snarled, “Shut up, you, or you get what you gave Henrik.”

So he’d been shopped to the Dutch, not that there had been much question about it. And not that he might not have been safer in French hands, the way everybody on this cursed planet thought he was a traitor to his real employers. Well, it wasn’t fair; but Danny Pritchard had grown up a farmer, and no farmer is ever tricked into believing that life is fair.

The truck finally jolted to a stop. Gloved hands jerked the cover from Pritchard’s eyes. He was not surprised to recognize the concrete angles of Haacin as men passed him hand to hand into a cellar. The attempt to hijack Barthe’s powerguns had been an accident, an opportunity seized; but the crew which had kidnapped Pritchard must have been in position before the call from S-39 had intervened.

“Is this wise?” Pritchard heard someone demand from the background. “If they begin searching, surely they’ll begin in Haacin.”

The two men at the bottom of the cellar stairs took Pritchard’s shoulders and ankles to carry him to a spring cot. It had no mattress. The man at his feet called, “There won’t be a search, they don’t have enough men. Besides, the beast’ll be blamed—as they should be for so many things. If Pauli won’t let us kill the turncoat, then we’ll all have to stand the extra risk of him living.”

“You talk too much,” Mayor van Oosten muttered as he dropped Pritchard’s shoulders on the bunk. Many civilians had followed the captive into the cellar. The last of them swung the door closed. It lay almost horizontal to the ground. When it slammed, dust sprang from the ceiling. Someone switched on a dim incandescent light. The scores of men and women in the storage room were as hard and fell as the bare walls. There were three windows at street level, high on the wall. Slotted shutters blocked most of their dusty glass.

“Get some heat in this hole or you may as well cut my throat,” Pritchard grumbled.

A woman with a musket cursed and spat in his face. The man behind her took her arm before the gunbutt could smear the spittle. Almost in apology, the man said to Pritchard, “It was her husband you killed.”

“You’re being kept out of the way,” said a husky man—Kruse, the hothead from the hijack scene. His facial hair was pale and long, merging indistinguishably with the silky fringe of his parka. Like most of the others in the cellar, he carried a musket. “Without your meddling, there’ll be a chance for us to…get ready to protect ourselves, after the tanks leave and the beasts come to finish us with their powerguns.”

“Does Riis think I won’t talk when this is over?” Pritchard asked.

“I told you—” one of the men shouted at van Oosten. The heavy-set mayor silenced him with a tap on the chest and a bellowed, “Quiet!” The rising babble hushed long enough for van Oosten to say, “Captain, you will be released in a very few days. If you—cause trouble, then, it will only be an embarrassment to yourself. Even if your colonel believes you were doing right, he won’t be the one to bring to light a violation which was committed with—so you will claim—the connivance of his own officers.”

The mayor paused to clear his throat and glower around the room. “Though in fact we had no help from any of your fellows, either in seizing you or in arming ourselves for our own protection.”

“Are you all blind?” Pritchard demanded. He struggled with his elbows and back to raise himself against the wall. “Do you think a few lies will cover it all up? The only ships that’ve touched on Kobold in three months are the ones supplying us and the other mercs. Barthe maybe’s smuggled in enough guns in cans of lube oil and the like to arm some civilians. He won’t be able to keep that a secret, but maybe he can keep the Authority from proving who’s responsible.

“That’s with three months and pre-planning. If Riis tries to do anything on his own, that many of his own men are going to be short sidearms—they’re all issued by serial number, Lord take it!—and a blind Mongoloid could get enough proof to sink the Regiment.”

“You think we don’t understand,” said Kruse in a quiet voice. He transferred his musket to his left hand, then slapped Pritchard across the side of the head. “We understand very well,” the civilian said. “All the mercenaries will leave in a few days or weeks. If the French have powerguns and we do not, they will kill us, our wives, our children…. There’s a hundred and fifty villages on Kobold like this one, Dutch, and as many French ones scattered between. It was bad before, with no one but the beasts allowed any real say in the government; but now if they win, there’ll be French villages and French mines—and slave pens. Forever.”

“You think a few guns’ll save you?” Pritchard asked. Kruse’s blow left no visible mark in the tanker’s livid flesh, though a better judge than Kruse might have noted that Pritchard’s eyes were as hard as his voice was mild.

“They’ll help us save ourselves when the time comes,” Kruse retorted.

“If you’d gotten powerguns from French civilians instead of the mercs directly, you might have been all right,” the captain said. He was coldly aware that the lie he was telling was more likely to be believed in this situation than it would have been in any setting he might deliberately have contrived. There had to be an incident, the French civilians had to think they were safe in using their illegal weapons…. “The Portelans, say, couldn’t admit to having guns to lose. But anything you take from mercs—us or Barthe, it doesn’t matter—we’ll take back the hard way. You don’t know what you’re buying into.”

Kruse’s face did not change, but his fist drew back for another blow. The mayor caught the younger man’s arm and snapped, “Franz, we’re here to show him that it’s not a few of us, it’s every family in the village behind…our holding him,” van Oosten nodded around the room. “More of us than your colonel could dream of trying to punish,” he added naively to Pritchard. Then he flashed back at Kruse, “If you act like a fool, he’ll want revenge anyway.”

“You may never believe this,” Pritchard interjected wearily, “but I just want to do my job. If you let me go now, it—may be easier in the long run.”

“Fool,” Kruse spat, and turned his back on the tanker.

A trap door opened in the ceiling, spilling more light into the cellar. “Pauli!” a woman shouted down the opening, “Hals is on the radio. There’s tanks coming down the road, just like before!”

“The Lord’s wounds!” van Oosten gasped. “We must—”

“They can’t know!” Kruse insisted. “But we’ve got to get everybody out of here and back to their own houses. Everybody but me and him”—a nod at Pritchard—“and this.” The musket lowered so that its round black eye pointed straight into the bound man’s face.

“No, by the side door!” van Oosten called to the press of conspirators clumping up toward the street. “Don’t run right out in front of them.” Cursing and jostling, the villagers climbed the ladder to the ground floor, there presumably to exit on an alley.

Able only to twist his head and legs, Pritchard watched Kruse and the trembling muzzle of his weapon. The village must have watchmen with radios at either approach through the forests. If Hals was atop the heap of mine tailings—where Pritchard would have placed his outpost if he were in charge, certainly—then he’d gotten a nasty surprise when the main gun splashed the rocks with Hell. The captain grinned at the thought. Kruse misunderstood and snarled, “If they are coming for you, you’re dead, you treacherous bastard!” To the backs of his departing fellows, the young Dutchman called, “Turn out the light here, but leave the trap door open. That won’t show on the street, but it’ll give me enough light to shoot by.”

The tanks weren’t coming for him, Pritchard knew, because they couldn’t have any idea where he was. Perhaps his disappearance had stirred up some patrolling, for want of more directed action; perhaps a platoon was just changing ground because of its commander’s whim. Pritchard had encouraged random motion. Tanks that freeze in one place are sitting targets, albeit hard ones. But whatever the reason tanks were approaching Haacin, if they whined by in the street outside they would be well within range of his implanted transmitter.

The big blowers were audible now, nearing with an arrogant lack of haste as if bears headed for a beehive. They were moving at about 30 kph, more slowly than Pritchard would have expected even for a contact patrol. From the sound there were four or more of them, smooth and gray and deadly.

“Kruse, I’m serious,” the Slammer captain said. Light from the trap door back-lit the civilian into a hulking beast with a musket. “If you—”

“Shut up!” Kruse snarled, prodding his prisoner’s bruised forehead with the gun muzzle. “One more word, any word, and—”

Kruse’s right hand was so tense and white that the musket might fire even without his deliberate intent.

The first of the tanks slid by outside. Its cushion of air was so dense that the ground trembled even though none of the blower’s 170 tonnes was in direct contact with it. Squeezed between the pavement and the steel curtain of the plenum chamber, the air spurted sideways and rattled the cellar windows. The rattling was inaudible against the howling of the fans themselves, but the trembling shutters chopped facets in the play of the tank’s running lights. Kruse’s face and the far wall flickered in blotched abstraction.

The tank moved on without pausing. Pritchard had not tried to summon it.

“That power,” Kruse was mumbling to himself, “that should be for us to use to sweep the beasts—” The rest of his words were lost in the growing wail of the second tank in the column.

Pritchard tensed within. Even if a passing tank picked up his implant’s transmission, its crew would probably ignore the message. Unless Pritchard identified himself, the tankers would assume it was babbling thrown by the ionosphere. And if he did identify himself, Kruse—

Kruse thrust his musket against Pritchard’s skull again, banging the tanker’s head back against the cellar wall. The Dutchman’s voice was lost in the blower’s howling, but his blue-lit lips clearly were repeating, “One word….”

The tank moved on down the highway toward Portela.

“…and maybe I’ll shoot you anyway,” Kruse was saying. “That’s the way to serve traitors, isn’t it? Mercenary!”

The third blower was approaching. Its note seemed slightly different, though that might be the aftereffect of the preceding vehicles’ echoing din. Pritchard was cold all the way to his heart, because in a moment he was going to call for help. He knew that Kruse would shoot him, knew also that he would rather die now than live after hope had come so near but passed on, passed on….

The third tank smashed through the wall of the house.

The Plow’s skirts were not a bulldozer blade, but they were thick steel and backed with the mass of a 150 tonne command tank. The slag wall repowdered at the impact. Ceiling joists buckled into pretzel shape and ripped the cellar open to the floor above. Kruse flung his musket up and fired through the cascading rubble. The boom and red flash were lost in the chaos, but the blue-green fire stabbing back across the cellar laid the Dutchman on his back with his parka aflame. Pritchard rolled to the floor at the first shock. He thrust himself with corded legs and arms back under the feeble protection of the bunk. When the sound of falling objects had died away, the captain slitted his eyelids against the rock dust and risked a look upward.

The collision had torn a gap ten feet long in the house wall, crushing it from street level to the beams supporting the second story. The tank blocked the hole with its gray bulk. Fresh scars brightened the patina of corrosion etched onto its skirts by the atmospheres of a dozen planets. Through the buckled flooring and the dust whipped into arabesques by the idling fans, Pritchard glimpsed a slight figure clinging lefthanded to the turret. Her right hand still threatened the wreckage with a submachinegun. Carpeting burned on the floor above, ignited by the burst that killed Kruse. Somewhere a woman was screaming in Dutch.

“Margritte!” Pritchard shouted. “Margritte! Down here!”

The helmeted woman swung up her face shield and tried to pierce the cellar gloom with her unaided eyes. The tank-battered opening had sufficed for the exchange of shots, but the tangle of structural members and splintered flooring was too tight to pass a man—or even a small woman. Sooty flames were beginning to shroud the gap. Margritte jumped to the ground and struggled for a moment before she was able to heave open the door. The Plow’s turret swung to cover her, though neither the main gun nor the tribarrel in the cupola could depress enough to rake the cellar. Margritte ran down the steps to Pritchard. Coughing in the rock dust, he rolled out over the rubble to meet her. Much of the smashed sidewall had collapsed onto the street when the tank backed after the initial impact. Still, the crumpled beams of the ground floor sagged further with the additional weight of the slag on them. Head-sized pieces had splanged on the cot above Pritchard.

Margritte switched the submachinegun to her left hand and began using a clasp knife on her captain’s bonds. The cord with which he was tied bit momentarily deeper at the blade’s pressure.

Pritchard winced, then began flexing his freed hands. “You know, Margi,” he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you with a gun before.”

The commo tech’s face hardened as if the polarized helmet shield had slipped down over it again. “You hadn’t,” she said. The ankle bindings parted and she stood, the dust graying her helmet and her foam-filled coveralls. “Captain, Kowie had to drive and we needed Rob in the cupola at the gun. That left me to—do anything else that had to be done. I did what had to be done.”

Pritchard tried to stand, using the technician as a post on which to draw himself upright. Margritte looked frail, but with her legs braced she stood like a rock. Her arm around Pritchard’s back was as firm as a man’s.

“You didn’t ask Capt. Riis for help, I guess,” Pritchard said, pain making his breath catch. The line tanks had two-man crews with no one to spare for outrider, of course.

“We didn’t report you missing,” Margritte said, “even to First Platoon. They just went along like before, thinking you were in The Plow giving orders.” Together, captain and technician shuffled across the floor to the stairs. As they passed Kruse’s body, Margritte muttered cryptically, “That’s four.”

Pritchard assumed the tremors beginning to shake the woman’s body were from physical strain. He took as much weight off her as he could and found his numbed feet were beginning to function reasonably well. He would never have been able to board The Plow without Sgt. Jenne’s grip on his arm, however.

The battered officer settled in the turret with a groan of comfort. The seat cradled his body with gentle firmness, and the warm air blown across him was just the near side of heaven.

“Captain,” Jenne said, “what d’we do about the slopes who grabbed you? Shall we call in an interrogation team and—”

“We don’t do anything,” Pritchard interrupted. “We just pretend none of this happened and head back to….” He paused. His flesh wavered both hot and cold as Margritte sprayed his ankles with some of the apparatus from the medical kit. “Say, how did you find me, anyway?”

“We shut off coverage when you—went into your room,” Jenne said, seeing that the commo tech herself did not intend to speak. He meant, Pritchard knew, they had shut off the sound when their captain had said, “Sal.” None of the three of them were looking either of the other two in the eyes. “After a bit, though, Margi noticed the carrier line from your implant had dropped off her oscilloscope. I checked your room, didn’t find you. Didn’t see much point talking it over with the remfs on duty, either.

“So we got satellite recce and found two trucks’d left the area since we got back. One was Riis’, and the other was a civvie junker before that. It’d been parked in the woods out of sight, half a kay up the road from the buildings. Both trucks unloaded in Haacin. We couldn’t tell which load was you, but Margi said if we got close, she’d home on your carrier even though you weren’t calling us on the implant. Some girl we got here, hey?”

Pritchard bent forward and squeezed the commo tech’s shoulder. She did not look up, but she smiled. “Yeah, always knew she was something,” he agreed, “but I don’t think I realized quite what a person she was until just now.”

Margritte lifted her smile. “Rob ordered First Platoon to fall in with us,” she said. “He set up the whole rescue.” Her fine-fingered hands caressed Pritchard’s calves.

But there was other business in Haacin, now. Riis had been quicker to act than Pritchard had hoped. He asked, “You say one of the infantry’s trucks took a load here a little bit ago?”

“Yeah, you want the off-print?” Jenne agreed, searching for the flimsy copy of the satellite picture. “What the hell would they be doing, anyhow?”

“I got a suspicion,” his captain said grimly, “and I suppose it’s one we’ve got to check out.”

“Michael First-Three to Michael One,” the radio broke in. “Vehicles approaching from the east on the hardball.”

“Michael One to Michael First,” Pritchard said, letting the search for contraband arms wait for this new development. “Reverse and form a line abreast beyond the village. Twenty meter intervals. The Plow’ll take the road.” More weapons from Riis? More of Barthe’s troops when half his sector command was already in Portela? Pritchard touched switches beneath the vision blocks as Kowie slid the tank into position. He split the screen between satellite coverage and a ground-level view at top magnification. Six vehicles, combat cars, coming fast. Pritchard swore. Friendly, because only the Slammers had armored vehicles on Kobold, not that cars were a threat to tanks anyway. But no combat cars were assigned to this sector; and the unexpected is always bad news to a company commander juggling too many variables already.

“Platoon nearing Tango Sigma four-two, three-two, please identify to Michael One,” Pritchard requested, giving Haacin’s map coordinates.

Margritte turned up the volume of the main radio while she continued to bandage the captain’s rope cuts. The set crackled, “Michael One, this is Alpha One and Alpha First. Stand by.”

“God’s bleeding cunt!” Rob Jenne swore under his breath. Pritchard was nodding in equal agitation. Alpha was the Regiment’s special duty company. Its four combat car platoons were Col. Hammer’s bodyguards and police. The troopers of A Company were nicknamed the White Mice, and they were viewed askance even by the Slammers of other companies—men who prided themselves on being harder than any other combat force in the galaxy. The White Mice in turn feared their commander, Maj. Joachim Steuben; and if that slightly-built killer feared anyone, it was the man who was probably traveling with him this night. Pritchard sighed and asked the question. “Alpha One, this is Michael One. Are you flying a pennant, sir?”

“Affirmative, Michael One.”

Well, he’d figured Col. Hammer was along as soon as he heard what the unit was. What the Old Man was doing here was another question, and one whose answer Pritchard did not look forward to learning.

The combat cars glided to a halt under the guns of their bigger brethren. The tremble of their fans gave the appearance of heat ripples despite the snow. From his higher vantage point, Pritchard watched the second car slide out of line and fall alongside The Plow. The men at the nose and right wing guns were both short, garbed in nondescript battle gear. They differed from the other troopers only in that their helmet shields were raised and that the faces visible beneath were older than those of most Slammers: Col. Alois Hammer and his hatchetman.

“No need for radio, Captain,” Hammer called in a husky voice. “What are you doing here?”

Pritchard’s tongue quivered between the truth and a lie. His crew had been covering for him, and he wasn’t about to leave them holding the bag. All the breaches of regulations they had committed were for their captain’s sake. “Sir, I brought First Platoon back to Haacin to check whether any of the powerguns they’d hijacked from Barthe were still in civvie hands.” Pritchard could feel eyes behind the cracked shutters of every east-facing window in the village.

“And have you completed your check?” the colonel pressed, his voice mild but his eyes as hard as those of Maj. Steuben beside him; as hard as the iridium plates of the gun shields.

Pritchard swallowed. He owed nothing to Capt. Riis, but the young fool was his superior—and at least he hadn’t wanted the Dutch to kill Pritchard. He wouldn’t put Riis’ ass in the bucket if there were neutral ways to explain the contraband. Besides, they were going to need Riis and his Dutch contacts for the rest of the plan. “Sir, when you approached I was about to search a building where I suspect some illegal weapons are stored.”

“And instead you’ll provide back-up for the major here,” said Hammer, the false humor gone from his face. His words rattled like shrapnel. “He’ll retrieve the twenty-four powerguns which Capt. Riis saw fit to turn over to civilians tonight. If Joachim hadn’t chanced, chanced onto that requisition….” Hammer’s left glove shuddered with the strength of his grip on the forward tribarrel. Then the colonel lowered his eyes and voice, adding, “The quartermaster who filled a requisition for twenty-four pistols from Central Supply is in the infantry again tonight. And Capt. Riis is no longer with the Regiment.”

Steuben tittered, loose despite the tension of everyone around him. The cold was bitter, but Joachim’s right hand was bare. With it he traced the baroque intaglios of his holstered pistol. “Mr. Riis is lucky to be alive,” the slight Newlander said pleasantly. “Luckier than some would have wished. But Colonel, I think we’d best go pick up the merchandise before anybody nerves themself to use it on us.”

Hammer nodded, calm again. “Interfile your blowers with ours, Captain,” he ordered. “Your panzers watch street level while the cars take care of upper floors and roofs.”

Pritchard saluted and slid down into the tank, relaying the order to the rest of his platoon. Kowie blipped The Plow’s throttles, swinging the turreted mass in its own length and sending it back into the village behind the lead combat car. The tank felt light as a dancer, despite the constricting sidestreet Kowie followed the car into. Pritchard scanned the full circuit of the vision blocks. Nothing save the wind and armored vehicles moved in Haacin. When Steuben had learned a line company was requisitioning two dozen extra sidearms, the major had made the same deductions as Pritchard had and had inspected the same satellite tape of a truck unloading. Either Riis was insane or he really thought Col. Hammer was willing to throw away his life’s work to arm a village—inadequately. Lord and Martyrs! Riis would have had to be insane to believe that!

Their objective was a nondescript two-story building separated from its neighbors by narrow alleys. Hammer directed the four rearmost blowers down a parallel street to block the rear. The searchlights of the vehicles chilled the flat concrete and glared back from the windows of the building. A battered surface truck was parked in the street outside. It was empty. Nothing stirred in the house.

Hammer and Steuben dismounted without haste. The major’s helmet was slaved to a loudspeaker in the car. The speaker boomed, “Everyone out of the building. You have thirty seconds. Anyone found inside after that’ll be shot. Thirty seconds!”

Though the residents had not shown themselves earlier, the way they boiled out of the doors proved they had expected the summons. All told, there were eleven of them. From the front door came a well-dressed man and woman with their three children: a sexless infant carried by its mother in a zippered cocoon; a girl of eight with her hood down and her hair coiled in braids about her forehead; and a twelve-year-old boy who looked nearly as husky as his father. Outside staircases disgorged an aged couple on the one hand and four tough-looking men on the other.

Pritchard looked at his blower chief. The sergeant’s right hand was near the gun switch and he mumbled an old ballad under his breath. Chest tightening, Pritchard climbed out of his hatch. He jumped to the ground and paced quietly over to Hammer and his aide.

“There’s twenty-four pistols in this building,” Joachim’s amplified voice roared, “or at least you people know where they are. I want somebody to save trouble and tell me.”

The civilians tensed. The mother half-turned to swing her body between her baby and the officers.

Joachim’s pistol was in his hand, though Pritchard had not seen him draw it. “Nobody to speak?” Joachim queried. He shot the eight-year-old in the right knee. The spray of blood was momentary as the flesh exploded. The girl’s mouth pursed as her buckling leg dropped her facedown in the street. The pain would come later. Her parents screamed, the father falling to his knees to snatch up the child as the mother pressed her forehead against the door jamb in blind panic.

Pritchard shouted, “You son of a bitch!” and clawed for his own sidearm. Steuben turned with the precision of a turret lathe. His pistol’s muzzle was a white-hot ring from its previous discharge. Pritchard knew only that and the fact that his own weapon was not clear of its holster. Then he realized that Col. Hammer was shouting, “No!” and that his open hand had rocked Joachim’s head back.

Joachim’s face went pale except for the handprint burning on his cheek. His eyes were empty. After a moment, he holstered his weapon and turned back to the civilians. “Now, who’ll tell us where the guns are?” he asked in a voice like breaking glassware.

The tear-blind woman, still holding her infant, gurgled, “Here! In the basement!” as she threw open the door. Two troopers followed her within at a nod from Hammer. The father was trying to close the girl’s wounded leg with his hands, but his palms were not broad enough.

Pritchard vomited on the snowy street.

Margritte was out of the tank with a medikit in her hand. She flicked the civilian’s hands aside and began freezing the wound with a spray. The front door banged open again. The two White Mice were back with their submachineguns slung under their arms and a heavy steel weapons-chest between them. Hammer nodded and walked to them.

“You could have brought in an interrogation team!” Pritchard shouted at the backs of his superiors. “You don’t shoot children!”

“Machine interrogation takes time, Captain,” Steuben said mildly. He did not turn to acknowledge the tanker. “This was just as effective.”

“That’s a little girl!” Pritchard insisted with his hand clenched. The child was beginning to cry, though the local anesthetic in the skin-sealer had probably blocked the physical pain. The psychic shock of a body that would soon end at the right knee would be worse, though. The child was old enough to know that no local doctor could save the limb. “This isn’t something that human beings do!”

“Captain,” Steuben said, “they’re lucky I haven’t shot all of them.”

Hammer closed the arms chest. “We’ve got what we came for,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Stealing guns from my colonel,” the Newlander continued as if Hammer had not spoken. The handprint had faded to a dull blotch. “I really ought to—”

“Joachim, shut it off!” Hammer shouted. “We’re going to talk about what happened tonight, you and I. I’d rather do it when we were alone—but I’ll tell you now if I have to. Or in front of a court martial.”

Steuben squeezed his forehead with the fingers of his left hand. He said nothing.

“Let’s go,” the colonel repeated.

Pritchard caught Hammer’s arm. “Take the kid back to Central’s medics,” he demanded.

Hammer blinked. “I should have thought of that,” he said simply. “Sometimes I lose track of…things that aren’t going to shoot at me. But we don’t need this sort of reputation.”

“I don’t care cop for public relations,” Pritchard snapped. “Just save that little girl’s leg.”

Steuben reached for the child, now lying limp. Margritte had used a shot of general anesthetic. The girl’s father went wild-eyed and swung at Joachim from his crouch. Margritte jabbed with the injector from behind the civilian. He gasped as the drug took hold, then sagged as if his bones had dissolved. Steuben picked up the girl.

Hammer vaulted aboard the combat car and took the child from his subordinate’s arms. Cutting himself into the loudspeaker system, the stocky colonel thundered to the street, “Listen you people. If you take guns from mercs—either Barthe’s men or my own—we’ll grind you to dust. Take ’em from civilians if you think you can. You may have a chance then. If you rob mercs, you just get a chance to die.”

Hammer nodded to the civilians, nodded again to the brooding buildings to either side. He gave an unheard command to his driver. The combat cars began to rev their fans.

Pritchard gave Margritte a hand up and followed her. “Michael One to Michael First,” he said. “Head back with Alpha First.”

PRITCHARD RODE INSIDE the turret after they left Haacin, glad for once of the armor and the cabin lights. In the writhing tree-limbs he had seen the Dutch mother’s face as the shot maimed her daughter.

Margritte passed only one call to her commander. It came shortly after the combat cars had separated to return to their base camp near Midi, the planetary capital. The colonel’s voice was as smooth as it ever got. It held no hint of the rage which had blazed out in Haacin. “Capt. Pritchard,” Hammer said, “I’ve transferred command of Sigma Company to the leader of its First Platoon. The sector, of course, is in your hands now. I expect you to carry out your duties with the ability you’ve already shown.”

“Michael One to Regiment,” Pritchard replied curtly. “Acknowledged.”

Kowie drew up in front of the command post without the furious caracole which had marked their most recent approach. Pritchard slid his hatch open. His crewmen did not move. “I’ve got to worry about being sector chief for a while,” he said, “but you three can rack out in the barracks now. You’ve put in a full tour in my book.”

“Think I’ll sleep here,” Rob said. He touched a stud, rotating his seat into a couch alongside the receiver and loading tube of the main gun.

Pritchard frowned. “Margritte?” he asked.

She shrugged. “No, I’ll stay by my set for a while.” Her eyes were blue and calm.

On the intercom, Kowie chimed in with, “Yeah, you worry about the sector, we’ll worry about ourselves. Say, don’t you think a tank platoon’d be better for base security than these pongoes?”

“Shut up, Kowie,” Jenne snapped. The blond Burlager glanced at his captain. “Everything’ll be fine, so long as we’re here,” he said from one elbow. He patted the breech of the 200 mm gun.

Pritchard shrugged and climbed out into the cold night. He heard the hatch grind shut behind him.

Until Pritchard walked in the door of the building, it had not occurred to him that Riis’ replacement was Sally Schilling. The words “First Platoon leader” had not been a name to the tanker, not in the midst of the furor of his mind. The little blonde glanced up at Pritchard from the map display she was studying. She spat cracklingly on the electric stove and faced around again. Her aide, the big corporal, blinked in some embarrassment. None of the headquarters staff spoke.

“I need the display console from my room,” Pritchard said to the corporal.

The infantryman nodded and got up. Before he had taken three steps, Lt. Schilling’s voice cracked like pressure-heaved ice, “Cpl. Webbert!”

“Sir?” The big man’s face went tight as he found himself a pawn in a game whose stakes went beyond his interest.

“Go get the display console for our new commander. It’s in his room.”

Licking his lips with relief, the corporal obeyed. He carried the heavy four-legged console back without effort.

Sally was making it easier for him, Pritchard thought. But how he wished that Riis hadn’t made so complete a fool of himself that he had to be removed. Using Riis to set up a double massacre would have been a lot easier to justify when Danny awoke in the middle of the night and found himself remembering….

Pritchard positioned the console so that he sat with his back to the heater. It separated him from Schilling. The top of the instrument was a slanted, 40 cm screen which glowed when Pritchard switched it on. “Sector Two display,” he directed. In response to his words the screen sharpened into a relief map. “Population centers,” he said. They flashed on as well, several dozen of them ranging from a few hundred souls to the several thousand of Haacin and Dimo. Portela, the largest Francophone settlement west of the Aillet, was about twenty kilometers west of Haacin.

And there were now French mercenaries on both sides of that division line. Sally had turned from her own console and stood up to see what Pritchard was doing. The tanker said, “All mercenary positions, confirmed and calculated.”

The board spangled itself with red and green symbols, each of them marked in small letters with a unit designation. The reconnaissance satellites gave unit strengths very accurately, and computer analysis of radio traffic could generally name the forces. In the eastern half of the sector, Lt. Col. Benoit had spread out one battalion in platoon-strength billets. The guardposts were close enough to most points to put down trouble immediately. A full company near Dimo guarded the headquarters and two batteries of rocket howitzers.

The remaining battalion in the sector, Benoit’s own, was concentrated in positions blasted into the rocky highlands ten kays west of Portela. It was not a deployment that would allow the mercs to effectively police the west half of the sector, but it was a very good defensive arrangement. The forest that covered the center of the sector was ideal for hit-and-run sniping by small units of infantry. The tree boles were too densely woven for tanks to plow through them. Because the forest was so flammable at this season, however, it would be equally dangerous to ambushers. Benoit was wise to concentrate in the barren high-ground.

Besides the highlands, the fields cleared around every settlement were the only safe locations for a modern firefight. The fields, and the broad swathes cleared for roads through the forest….

“Incoming traffic for Sector Chief,” announced a radioman. “It’s from the skepsel colonel, sir.” He threw his words into the air, afraid to direct them at either of the officers in the orderly room.

“Voice only, or is there visual?” Pritchard asked. Schilling held her silence.

“Visual component, sir.”

“Patch him through to my console,” the tanker decided. “And son—watch your language. Otherwise, you say ‘beast’ when you shouldn’t.”

The map blurred from the display screen and was replaced by the hawk features of Lt. Col. Benoit. A pick-up on the screen’s surface threw Pritchard’s own image onto Benoit’s similar console.

The Frenchman blinked. “Capt. Pritchard? I’m very pleased to see you, but my words must be with Capt. Riis directly. Could you wake him?”

“There’ve been some changes,” the tanker said. In the back of his mind, he wondered what had happened to Riis. Pulled back under arrest, probably. “I’m in charge of Sector Two now. Co-charge with you, that is.”

Benoit’s face steadied as he absorbed the information without betraying an opinion about it. Then he beamed like a feasting wolf and said, “Congratulations, Captain. Some day you and I will have to discuss the…events of the past few days. But what I was calling about is far less pleasant, I’m afraid.”

Benoit’s image wavered on the screen as he paused. Pritchard touched his tongue to the corner of his mouth. “Go ahead, Colonel,” he said. “I’ve gotten enough bad news today that a little more won’t signify.”

Benoit quirked his brow in what might or might not have been humor. “When we were proceeding to Portela,” he said, “some of my troops mistook the situation and set up passive tank interdiction points. Mines, all over the sector. They’re booby-trapped, of course. The only safe way to remove them is for the troops responsible to do it. They will of course be punished later.”

Pritchard chuckled. “How long do you estimate it’ll take to clear the roads, Colonel?” he asked.

The Frenchman spread his hands, palms up. “Weeks, perhaps. It’s much harder to clear mines safely than to lay them, of course.”

“But there wouldn’t be anything between here and Haacin, would there?” the tanker prodded. It was all happening just as Hammer’s informant had said Barthe planned it. First, hem the tanks in with nets of forest and minefields; then, break the most important Dutch stronghold while your mercs were still around to back you up…. “The spur road toour HQ here wasn’t on your route; and besides, we just drove tanks over it a few minutes ago.”

Behind Pritchard, Sally Schilling was cursing in a sharp, carrying voice. Benoit could probably hear her, but the colonel kept his voice as smooth as milk as he said, “Actually, I’m afraid there is a field—gas, shaped charges, and glass-shard antipersonnel mines—somewhere on that road, yes. Fortunately, the field was signal activated. It wasn’t primed until after you had passed through. I assure you, Capt. Pritchard, that all the roads west of the Aillet may be too dangerous to traverse until I have cleared them. I warn you both as a friend and so that we will not be charged with damage to any of your vehicles—and men. You have been fully warned of the danger; anything that happens now is your responsibility.”

Pritchard leaned back in the console’s integral seat, chuckling again. “You know, Colonel,” the tank captain said, “I’m not sure that the Bonding Authority wouldn’t find those mines were a hostile act justifying our retaliation.” Benoit stiffened, more an internal hardness than anything that showed in his muscles. Pritchard continued to speak through a smile. “We won’t, of course. Mistakes happen. But one thing, Col. Benoit—”

The Frenchman nodded, waiting for the edge to bite. He knew as well as Pritchard did that, at best, if there were an Authority investigation, Barthe would have to throw a scapegoat out. A high-ranking scapegoat.

“Mistakes happen,” Pritchard repeated, “but they can’t be allowed to happen twice. You’ve got my permission to send out a ten-man team by daylight—only by daylight—to clear the road from Portela to Bever. That’ll give you a route back to your side of the sector. If any other troops leave their present position, for any reason, I’ll treat it as an attack.”

“Captain, this demarcation within the sector was not part of the contract—”

“It was at the demand of Col. Barthe,” Pritchard snapped, “and agreed to by the demonstrable practice of both regiments over the past three months.” Hammer had briefed Pritchard very carefully on the words to use here, to be recorded for the benefit of the Bonding Authority. “You’ve heard the terms, Colonel. You can either take them or we’ll put the whole thing—the minefields and some other matters that’ve come up recently—before the Authority right now. Your choice.”

Benoit stared at Pritchard, apparently calm but tugging at his upper lip with thumb and forefinger. “I think you are unwise, Captain, in taking full responsibility for an area in which your tanks cannot move; but that is your affair, of course. I will obey your mandate. We should have the Portela-Haacin segment cleared by evening; tomorrow we’ll proceed to Bever. Good day.”

The screen segued back to the map display. Pritchard stood up. A spare helmet rested beside one of the radiomen. The tank captain donned it—he had forgotten to requisition a replacement from stores—and said, “Michael One to all Michael units.” He paused for the acknowledgment lights from his four platoons and the command vehicle. Then, “Hold your present position. Don’t attempt to move by road, any road, until further notice. The roads have been mined. There are probably safe areas, and we’ll get you a map of them as soon as Command Central works it up. For the time being, just stay where you are. Michael One, out.”

“Are you really going to take that?” Lt. Schilling demanded in a low, harsh voice.

“Pass the same orders to your troops, Sally,” Pritchard said. “I know they can move through the woods where my tanks can’t, but I don’t want any friendlies in the forest right now either.” To the intelligence sergeant on watch, Pritchard added, “Samuels, get Central to run a plot of all activity by any of Benoit’s men. That won’t tell us where they’ve laid mines, but it’ll let us know where they can’t have.”

“What happens if the bleeding skepsels ignore you?” Sally blazed. “You’ve bloody taught them to ignore you, haven’t you? Knuckling under every time somebody whispers ‘contract’? You can’t move a tank to stop them if they do leave their base, and I’ve got 198 effectives. A battalion’d laugh at me, laugh!”

Schilling’s arms were akimbo, her face as pale with rage as the snow outside. Speaking with deliberate calm, Pritchard said, “I’ll call in artillery if I need to. Benoit only brought two calliopes with him, and they can’t stop all the shells from three firebases at the same time. The road between his position and Portela’s just a snake-track cut between rocks. A couple firecracker rounds going off above infantry, strung out there—Via, it’ll be a butcher shop.”

Schilling’s eyes brightened. “Then for tonight, the sector’s just like it was before we came,” she thought out loud. “Well, I suppose you know best,” she added in false agreement, with false nonchalance. “I’m going back to the barracks. I’ll brief First Platoon in person and radio the others from there. Come along, Webbert.”

The corporal slammed the door behind himself and his lieutenant. The gust of air that licked about the walls was cold, but Pritchard was already shivering at what he had just done to a woman he loved.

It was daylight by now, and the frosted windows turned to flame in the ruddy sun. Speaking to no one but his console’s memory, Pritchard began to plot tracks from each tank platoon. He used a topographic display, ignoring the existence of the impenetrable forest which covered the ground.

Margritte’s resonant voice twanged in the implant, “Captain, would you come to the blower for half a sec?”

“On the way,” Pritchard said, shrugging into his coat. The orderly room staff glanced up at him.

Margritte poked her head out of the side hatch. Pritchard climbed onto the deck to avoid some of the generator whine. The skirts sang even when the fans were cut off completely. Rob Jenne, curious but at ease, was visible at his battle station beyond the commo tech. “Sir,” Margritte said, “we’ve been picking up signals from—there.” The blue-eyed woman thumbed briefly at the infantry barracks without letting her pupils follow the gesture.

Pritchard nodded. “Lt. Schilling’s passing on my orders to her company.”

“Danny, the transmission’s in code, and it’s not a code of ours.” Margritte hesitated, then touched the back of the officer’s gloved left hand. “There’s answering signals, too. I can’t triangulate without moving the blower, of course, but the source is in line with the tailings pile at Haacin.”

It was what he had planned, after all. Someone the villagers could trust had to get word of the situation to them. Otherwise they wouldn’t draw the Portelans and their mercenary backers into a fatal mistake. Hard luck for the villagers who were acting as bait, but very good for every other Dutchman on Kobold…. Pritchard had no reason to feel anything but relief that it had happened. He tried to relax the muscles which were crushing all the breath out of his lungs. Margritte’s fingers closed over his hand and squeezed it.

“Ignore the signals,” the captain said at last. “We’ve known all along they were talking to the civilians, haven’t we?” Neither of his crewmen spoke. Pritchard’s eyes closed tightly. He said, “We’ve known for months, Hammer and I, every damned thing that Barthe’s been plotting with the skepsels. They want a chance to break Haacin now, while they’re around to cover for the Portelans. We’ll give them their chance and ram it up their ass crosswise. The Old Man hasn’t spread the word for fear the story’d get out, the same way Barthe’s plans did. We’re all mercenaries, after all. But I want you three to know. And I’ll be glad when the only thing I have to worry about is the direction the shots are coming from.”

Abruptly, the captain dropped back to the ground. “Get some sleep,” he called. “I’ll be needing you sharp tonight.”

BACK AT HIS console, Pritchard resumed plotting courses and distances. After he figured each line, he called in a series of map coordinates to Command Central. He knew his radio traffic was being monitored and probably unscrambled by Barthe’s intelligence staff; knew also that even if he had read the coordinates out in clear, the French would have assumed it was a code. The locations made no sense unless one knew they were ground zero for incendiary shells.

As Pritchard worked, he kept close watch on the French battalions. Benoit’s own troops held their position, as Pritchard had ordered. They used the time to dig in. At first they had blasted slit trenches in the rock. Now they dug covered bunkers with the help of mining machinery tracked from Portela by civilians. Five of the six anti-tank guns were sited atop the eastern ridge of the position. They could rake the highway as it snaked and switched back among the foothills west of Portela.

Pritchard chuckled grimly again when Sgt. Samuels handed him high-magnification offprints from the satellites. Benoit’s two squat, bulky calliopes were sited in defilade behind the humps of the eastern ridge line. There the eight-barrelled powerguns were safe from the smashing fire of M Company’s tanks, but their ability to sweep artillery shells from the sky was degraded by the closer horizon. The Slammers did not bother with calliopes themselves. Their central fire director did a far better job by working through the hundreds of vehicle-mounted weapons. How much better, Benoit might learn very shortly.

The mine-sweeping team cleared the Portela-Haacin road, as directed. The men returned to Benoit’s encampment an hour before dusk. The French did not come within five kilometers of the Dutch village.

Pritchard watched the retiring mine sweepers, then snapped off the console. He stood. “I’m going out to my blower,” he said.

His crew had been watching for him. A hatch shot open, spouting condensate, as soon as Pritchard came out the door. The smooth bulk of the tank blew like a restive whale. On the horizon, the sun was so low that the treetops stood out in silhouette like a line of bayonets.

Wearily, the captain dropped through the hatch into his seat. Jenne and Margritte murmured greeting and waited, noticeably tense. “I’m going to get a couple hours’ sleep,” Pritchard said. He swung his seat out and up, so that he lay horizontal in the turret. His legs hid Margritte’s oval face from him. “Punch up coverage of the road west of Haacin, would you?” he asked. “I’m going to take a tab of Glirine. Slap me with the antidote when something moves there.”

“If something moves,” Jenne amended.

“When.” Pritchard sucked down the pill. “The squareheads think they’ve got one last chance to smack Portela and hijack the powerguns again. Thing is, the Portelans’ll have already distributed the guns and be waiting for the Dutch to come through. It’ll be a damn short fight, that one….” The drug took hold and Pritchard’s consciousness began to flow away like a sugar cube in water. “Damn short….”

AT FIRST PRITCHARD felt only the sting on the inside of his wrist. Then the narcotic haze ripped away and he was fully conscious again.

“There a line of trucks, looks like twenty, moving west out of Haacin, sir. They’re blacked out, but the satellite has ’em on infra-red.”

“Red alert,” Pritchard ordered. He locked his seat upright into its combat position. Margritte’s soft voice sounded the general alarm. Pritchard slipped on his radio helmet. “Michael One to all Michael units. Check off.” Five green lights flashed their silent acknowledgements across the top of the captain’s face-shield display. “Michael One to Sigma One,” Pritchard continued.

“Go ahead, Michael One.” Sally’s voice held a note of triumph.

“Sigma One, pull all your troops into large, clear areas—the fields around the towns are fine, but stay the hell away from Portela and Haacin. Get ready to slow down anybody coming this way from across the Aillet. Over.”

“Affirmative, Danny, affirmative!” Sally replied. Couldn’t she use the satellite reconnaissance herself and see the five blurred dots halfway between the villages? They were clearly the trucks which had brought the Portelans into their ambush positions. What would she say when she realized how she had set up the villagers she was trying to protect? Lambs to the slaughter….

The vision block showed the Dutch trucks more clearly than the camouflaged Portelans. The crushed stone of the roadway was dark on the screen, cooler than the surrounding trees and the vehicles upon it. Pritchard patted the breech of the main gun and looked across it to his blower chief. “We got a basic load for this aboard?” he asked.

“Do bears cop in the woods?” Jenne grinned. “We gonna get a chance to bust caps tonight, Captain?”

Pritchard nodded. “For three months we’ve been here, doing nothing but selling rope to the French. Tonight they’ve bought enough that we can hang ’em with it.” He looked at the vision block again. “You alive, Kowie?” he asked on intercom.

“Ready to slide any time you give me a course,” said the driver from his closed cockpit.

The vision block sizzled with bright streaks that seemed to hang on the screen though they had passed in microseconds. The leading blobs expanded and brightened as trucks blew up.

“Michael One to Fire Central,” Pritchard said.

“Go ahead, Michael One,” replied the machine voice.

“Prepare Fire Order Alpha.”

“Roger, Michael One.”

“Margritte, get me Benoit.”

“Go ahead, Captain.”

“Slammers to Benoit. Pritchard to Benoit. Come in please, Colonel.”

“Capt. Pritchard, Michel Benoit here.” The colonel’s voice was smooth but too hurried to disguise the concern underlying it. “I assure you that none of my men are involved in the present fighting. I have a company ready to go out and control the disturbance immediately, however.”

The tanker ignored him. The shooting had already stopped for lack of targets. “Colonel, I’ve got some artillery aimed to drop various places in the forest. It’s coming nowhere near your troops or any other human beings. If you interfere with this necessary shelling, the Slammer’ll treat it as an act of war. I speak with my colonel’s authority.”

“Captain, I don’t—”

Pritchard switched manually. “Michael One to Fire Central. Execute Fire Order Alpha.”

“On the way, Michael One.”

“Michael One to Michael First, Second, Fourth. Command Central has fed movement orders into your map displays. Incendiary clusters are going to burst over marked locations to ignite the forest. Use your own main guns to set the trees burning in front of your immediate positions. One round ought to do it. Button up and you can move through the fire—the trees just fall to pieces when they’ve burned.”

The turret whined as it slid under Rob’s control. “Michael Third, I’m attaching you to the infantry. More Frenchmen’re apt to be coming this way from the east. It’s up to you to see they don’t slam a door on us.”

The main gun fired, its discharge so sudden that the air rang like a solid thing. Seepage from the ejection system filled the hull with the reek of superheated polyurethane. The side vision blocks flashed cyan, then began to flood with the mounting white hell-light of the blazing trees. In the central block, still set on remote, all the Dutch trucks were burning, as were patches of forest which the ambush had ignited. The Portelans had left the concealment of the trees and swept across the road, mopping up the Dutch.

“Kowie, let’s move,” Jenne was saying on intercom, syncopated by the mild echo of his voice in the turret. Margritte’s face was calm, her lips moving subtly as she handled some traffic that she did not pass on to her captain. The tank slid forward like oil on a lake. From the far distance came the thumps of incendiary rounds scattering their hundreds of separate fireballs high over the trees.

Pritchard slapped the central vision block back on direct; the tank’s interior shone white with transmitted fire. The Plow’s bow slope sheared into a thicket of blazing trees. The wood tangled and sagged, then gave in a splash of fiery splinters whipped aloft by the blower’s fans. The tank was in hell on all sides, Kowie steering by instinct and his inertial compass. Even with his screens filtered all the way down, the driver would not be able to use his eyes effectively until more of the labyrinth had burned away.

Benoit’s calliopes had not tried to stop the shelling. Well, there were other ways to get the French mercs to take the first step over the line. For instance—

“Punch up Benoit again,” Pritchard ordered. Even through the dense iridium plating, the roar of the fire was a subaural presence in the tank.

“Go ahead,” Margritte said, flipping a switch on her console. She had somehow been holding the French officer in conversation all the time Pritchard was on other frequencies.

“Colonel,” Pritchard said, “we’ve got clear running through this fire. We’re going to chase down everybody who used a powergun tonight; then we’ll shoot them. We’ll shoot everybody in their families, everybody with them in this ambush, and we’ll blow up every house that anybody involved lived in. That’s likely to be every house in Portela, isn’t it?”

More than the heat and ions of the blazing forest distorted Benoit’s face. He shouted, “Are you mad? You can’t think of such a thing, Pritchard!”

The tanker’s lips parted like a wolf’s. He could think of mass murder, and there were plenty of men in the Slammers who would really be willing to carry out the threat. But Pritchard wouldn’t have to, because Benoit was like Riis and Schilling: too much of a nationalist to remember his first duty as a merc…. “Col. Benoit, the contract demands wekeep the peace and stay impartial. The record shows how we treated people in Haacin for having powerguns. For what the Portelans did tonight—don’t worry, we’ll be impartial. And they’ll never break the peace again.”

“Captain, I will not allow you to massacre French civilians,” Benoit stated flatly.

“Move a man out of your present positions and I’ll shoot him dead,” Pritchard said. “It’s your choice, Colonel. Over and out.”

The Plow bucked and rolled as it pulverized fire-shattered trucks, but the vehicle was meeting nothing solid enough to slam it to a halt. Pritchard used a side block on remote to examine Benoit’s encampment. The satellite’s enhanced infra-red showed a stream of sparks flowing from the defensive positions toward the Portela road: infantry on skimmers. The pair of larger, more diffuse blobs were probably anti-tank guns. Benoit wasn’t moving his whole battalion, only a reinforced company in a show of force to make Pritchard back off.

The fool. Nobody was going to back off now.

“Michael One to all Michael and Sigma units,” Pritchard said in a voice as clear as the white flames around his tank. “We’re now in a state of war with Barthe’s Company and its civilian auxiliaries. Michael First, Second, and Fourth, we’ll rendezvous at the ambush site as plotted on your displays. Anybody between there and Portela is fair game. If we take any fire from Portela, we go down the main drag in line and blow the cop out of it. If any of Barthe’s people are in the way, we keep on sliding west. Sigma One, mount a fluid defense, don’t push, and wait for help. It’s coming. If this works, it’s Barthe against Hammer—and that’s wheat against the scythe. Acknowledged?”

As Pritchard’s call board lit green, a raspy new voice broke into the sector frequency. “Wish I was with you, panzers. We’ll cover your butts and the other sectors—if anybody’s dumb enough to move. Good hunting!”

“I wish you were here and not me, Colonel,” Pritchard whispered, but that was to himself…and perhaps it was not true even in his heart. Danny’s guts were very cold, and his face was as cold as death.

To Pritchard’s left, a lighted display segregated the area of operations. It was a computer analog, not direct satellite coverage. Doubtful images were brightened and labeled—green for the Slammers, red for Barthe; blue for civilians unless they were fighting on one side or the other. The green dot of The Plow converged on the ambush site at the same time as the columns of First and Fourth Platoons. Second was a minute or two farther off. Pritchard’s breath caught. A sheaf of narrow red lines was streaking across the display toward his tanks. Barthe had ordered his Company’s artillery to support Benoit’s threatened battalion.

The salvo frayed and vanished more suddenly than it had appeared. Other Slammers’ vehicles had ripped the threat from the sky. Green lines darted from Hammer’s own three firebases, offscreen at the analog’s present scale. The fighting was no longer limited to Sector Two. If Pritchard and Hammer had played their hand right, though, it would stay limited to only the Slammers and Compagnie de Barthe. The other Francophone regiments would fear to join an unexpected battle which certainly resulted from someone’s contract violation. If the breach were Hammer’s, the Dutch would not be allowed to profit by the fighting. If the breach were Barthe’s, anybody who joined him was apt to be punished as sternly by the Bonding Authority.

So violent was the forest’s combustion that the flames were already dying down into sparks and black ashes. The command tank growled out into the broad avenue of the road west of Haacin. Dutch trucks were still burning—fabric, lubricants, and the very paint of their frames had been ignited by the powerguns. Many of the bodies sprawled beside the vehicles were smouldering also. Some corpses still clutched their useless muskets. The dead were victims of six centuries of progress which had come to Kobold pre-packaged, just in time to kill them. Barthe had given the Portelans only shoulder weapons, but even that meant the world here. The powerguns were repeaters with awesome destruction in every bolt. Without answering fire to rattle them, even untrained gunmen could be effective with weapons which shot line-straight and had no recoil. Certainly the Portelans had been effective.

Throwing ash and fire like sharks in the surf, the four behemoths of First Platoon slewed onto the road from the south. Almost simultaneously, Fourth joined through the dying hellstorm to the other side. The right of way was fifty meters wide and there was no reason to keep to the center of it. The forest, ablaze or glowing embers, held no ambushes anymore.

The Plow lurched as Kowie guided it through the bodies. Some of them were still moving. Pritchard wondered if any of the Dutch had lived through the night, but that was with the back of his mind. The Slammers were at war, and nothing else really mattered. “Triple line ahead,” he ordered. “First to the left, Fourth to the right; The Plow’ll take the center alone till Second joins. Second, wick up when you hit the hardball and fall in behind us. If it moves, shoot it.”

At 100 kph, the leading tanks caught the Portelans three kilometers east of their village. The settlers were in the trucks that had been hidden in the forest fringe until the fires had been started. The ambushers may not have known they were being pursued until the rearmost truck exploded. Rob Jenne had shredded it with his tribarrel at five kilometers’ distance. The cyan flicker and its answering orange blast signalled the flanking tanks to fire. They had just enough parallax to be able to rake the four remaining trucks without being blocked by the one which had blown up. A few snapping discharges proved that some Portelans survived to use their new powerguns on tougher meat than before. Hits streaked ashes on the tanks’ armor. No one inside noticed.

From Portela’s eastern windows, children watched their parents burn.

A hose of cyan light played from a distant roof top. It touched the command tank as Kowie slewed to avoid a Portelan truck. The burst was perfectly aimed, an automatic weapon served by professionals. Professionals should have known how useless it would be against heavy armor. A vision block dulled as a few receptors fused. Jenne cursed and trod the foot-switch of the main gun. A building leaped into dazzling prominence in the microsecond flash. Then it and most of the block behind collapsed into internal fires, burying the machinegun and everything else in the neighborhood. A moment later, a salvo of Hammer’s high explosive got through the calliopes’ inadequate screen. The village began to spew skyward in white flashes.

The Portelans had wanted to play soldier, Pritchard thought. He had dammed up all pity for the villagers of Haacin; he would not spend it now on these folk.

“Line ahead—First, Fourth, and Second,” Pritchard ordered. The triple column slowed and re-formed, with The Plow the second vehicle in the new line. The shelling lifted from Portela as the tanks plunged into the village. Green trails on the analog terminated over the road crowded with Benoit’s men and over the main French position, despite anything the calliopes could do. The sky over Benoit’s bunkers rippled and flared as firecracker rounds sleeted down their thousands of individual bomblets. The defensive fire cut off entirely. Pritchard could imagine the carnage among the unprotected calliope crews when the shrapnel whirred through them.

The tanks were firing into the houses on either side, using tribarrels and occasional wallops from their main guns. The blue-green flashes were so intense they colored even the flames they lit among the wreckage. At 50 kph the thirteen tanks swept through the center of town, hindered only by the rubble of houses spilled across the street. Barthe’s men were skittering white shadows who burst when powerguns hit them point blank.

The copper mine was just west of the village and three hundred meters north of the highway. As the lead tank bellowed out around the last houses, a dozen infantrymen rose from where they had sheltered in the pit head and loosed a salvo of buzzbombs. The tank’s automatic defense system was live. White fire rippled from just above the skirts as the charges there flailed pellets outward to intersect the rockets. Most of the buzzbombs exploded ten meters distant against the steel hail. One missile soared harmlessly over its target, its motor a tiny flare against the flickering sky. Only one of the shaped charges burst alongside the turret, forming a bell of light momentarily bigger than the tank. Even that was only a near miss. It gouged the iridium armor like a misthrust rapier which tears skin but does not pierce the skull.

Main guns and tribarrels answered the rockets instantly. Men dropped, some dead, some reloading. “Second Platoon, go put some HE down the shaft and rejoin,” Pritchard ordered. The lead tank now had expended half its defensive charges. “Michael First-Three, fall in behind First-One. Michael One leads,” he went on.

Kowie grunted acknowledgement. The Plow revved up to full honk. Benoit’s men were on the road, those who had not reached Portela when the shooting started or who had fled when the artillery churned the houses to froth. The infantry skimmers were trapped between sheer rocks and sheer drop-offs, between their own slow speed and the onrushing frontal slope of The Plow. There were trees where the rocks had given them purchase. Scattered incendiaries had made them blazing cressets lighting a charnel procession.

Jenne’s tribarrel scythed through body armor and dismembered men in short bursts. One of the anti-tank guns—was the other buried in Portela?—lay skewed against a rock wall, its driver killed by a shell fragment. Rob put a round from the main gun into it. So did each of the next two tanks. At the third shot, the ammunition ignited in a blinding secondary explosion.

The anti-tank guns still emplaced on the ridge line had not fired, though they swept several stretches of the road. Perhaps the crews had been rattled by the shelling, perhaps Benoit had held his fire for fear of hitting his own men. A narrow defile notched the final ridge. The Plow heaved itself up the rise, and at the top three bolts slapped it from different angles.

Because the bow was lifted, two of the shots vaporized portions of the skirt and the front fans. The tank nosed down and sprayed sparks with half its length. The third bolt grazed the left top of the turret, making the iridium ring as it expanded. The interior of the armor streaked white though it was not pierced. The temperature inside the tank rose 30°. Even as The Plow skidded, Sgt. Jenne was laying his main gun on the hot spot that was the barrel of the leftmost anti-tank weapon. The Plow’s shot did what heavy top cover had prevented Hammer’s rocket howitzers from accomplishing with shrapnel. The anti-tank gun blew up in a distance-muffled flash. One of its crewmen was silhouetted high in the air by the vaporizing metal of his gun.

Then the two remaining weapons ripped the night and the command blower with their charges.

The bolt that touched the right side of the turret spewed droplets of iridium across the interior of the hull. Air pistoned Pritchard’s eardrums. Rob Jenne lurched in his harness, right arm burned away by the shot. His left hand blackened where it touched bare metal that sparked and sang as circuits shorted. Margritte’s radios were exploding one by one under the overloads. The vision blocks worked and the turret hummed placidly as Pritchard rotated it to the right with his duplicate controls.

“Cut the power! Rob’s burning!” Margritte was shrieking. She had torn off her helmet. Her thick hair stood out like tendrils of bread mold in the gathering charge. Then Pritchard had the main gun bearing and it lit the ridge line with another secondary explosion.

“Danny, our ammunition! It’ll—”

Benoit’s remaining gun blew the tribarrel and the cupola away deafeningly. The automatic’s loading tube began to gang-fire down into the bowels of the tank. It reached a bright tendril up into the sky. But the turret still rolled.

Electricity crackled around Pritchard’s boot and the foot trip as he fired again. The bolt stabbed the night. There was no answering blast. Pritchard held down the switch, his nostrils thick with ozone and superheated plastic and the sizzling flesh of his friend. There was still no explosion from the target bunker. The rock turned white between the cyan flashes. It cracked and flowed away like sun-melted snow, and the anti-tank gun never fired again.

The loading tube emptied. Pritchard slapped the main switch and cut off the current. The interior light and the dancing arcs died, leaving only the dying glow of the bolt-heated iridium. Tank after tank edged by the silent command vehicle and roared on toward the ridge. Benoit’s demoralized men were already beginning to throw down their weapons and surrender.

Pritchard manually unlatched Jenne’s harness and swung it horizontal. The blower chief was breathing but unconscious. Pritchard switched on a battery-powered handlight. He held it steady as Margritte began to spray sealant on the burns. Occasionally she paused to separate clothing from flesh with a stylus.

“It had to be done,” Pritchard whispered. By sacrificing Haacin, he had mousetrapped Benoit into starting a war the infantry could not win. Hammer was now crushing Barthe’s Company, one on one, in an iridium vise. Friesland’s Council of State would not have let Hammer act had they known his intentions, but in the face of a stunning victory they simply could not avoid dictating terms to the French.

“It had to be done. But I look at what I did—” Pritchard swung his right hand in a gesture that would have included both the fuming wreck of Portela and the raiders from Haacin, dead on the road beyond. He struck the breech of the main gun instead. Clenching his fist, he slammed it again into the metal in self-punishment. Margritte cried out and blocked his arm with her own.

“Margi,” Pritchard repeated in anguish, “it isn’t something that human beings do to each other.”

But soldiers do.

And hangmen.

David Drake

David Drake’s multivolume series of novels and short fiction featuring Hammer’s Slammers (Hammer’s Slammers, Cross the Stars, At Any Price, Counting the Cost, Rolling Hot, The Warrior, The Sharp End), a team of interstellar mercenaries, has helped to establish him as one of the leading exponents of modern military science fiction. With Bill Fawcett, he coedited the six-book shared world Fleet series of future war fiction, as well as both volumes of its sequel, the Battlestation series. Other anthology credits include Space Gladiators, Space Dreadnoughts, Space Infantry, and two volumes in tribute to Rudyard Kipling and his influence on science fiction, Heads to the Storm and A Separate Star. Ancient Rome serves as a setting for some of Drake’s most inventive science fiction and fantasy, in the time travel tale Birds of Prey, the alien contact story Ranks of Bronze, and the fantasy collection Vettius and His Friends. His many other books include the Arthurian fantasy The Dragon Lord and an outstanding collection of horror, fantasy, and science fiction short stories, From the Heart of Darkness, many of which have war-based themes.