The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

“Cease fire!” Huber shouted, not that it was going to make the Devil’s bit of difference. “Unit, cease fire now!”

The dirigible was too big for the powerguns to destroy instantly, but the bolts had stripped away swathes of the outer shell and ruptured the ballonets within. Deseau had guessed right: the dirigible got its lift from hydrogen, the lightest gas and cheap enough to dump and replace after every voyage so that the ballonets didn’t fill with condensed water over time.

The downside was the way it burned.

Flames as pale and blue as a drowned woman’s flesh licked from the ballonets, engulfing the middle of the great vessel. The motors continued to drive forward, but the stern started to swing down as fire sawed the airship in half. The skeleton of open girders showed momentarily, then burned away.

“Oh bloody buggering Hell!” Huber said. He idled Fencing Master’s fans and stood up on the seat. “Hell!”

“What’s the matter, sir?” Learoyd asked. He’d lost his helmet, but he and Sergeant Deseau both were at their combat stations. The tribarrels spun in use, rotating a fresh bore up to fire while the other two cooled. Even so the barrels still glowed yellow from their long bursts. “They were hostiles too, the good Lord knows.”

“They were,” Huber said grimly. “But the folks living around here are the ones who’ve hired us.”

The remaining ballonets in the dirigible’s bow exploded simultaneously, flinging blobs of burning metal hundreds of meters away. Fires sprang up from the treetops, crackling and spewing further showers of sparks.

Huber heard a siren wind from somewhere deep in the forest community. It wasn’t going to do a lot of good.

The dirigible’s stern, roaring like a blast furnace, struck the terminal building. Some of those inside ran out; they were probably screaming, but Huber couldn’t hear them over the sound of the inferno. One fellow had actually gotten twenty meters from the door when the mass of airship and building exploded, engulfing him in flames. He was a carbonized husk when they sucked back an instant later.

Huber sighed. That pretty well put a cap on the day, he figured.

Base Alpha—regimental headquarters on every world that hired the Slammers was Base Alpha—was a raw wasteland bulldozed from several hectares of forest. The clay was deep red when freshly turned, russet when it dried by itself to a form of porous rock, and oddly purple when mixed with plasticizer to form the roadways and building foundations of the camp.

The aircar and driver that’d brought Huber from Rhodesville to Base Alpha were both local, though the woman driving had a cap with a red ball insignia and the words:

Logistics Section Hammer’s Regiment

marking her as a Slammers’ contract employee. Colonel Hammer brought his own combat personnel and equipment to each deployment, but much of the Regiment’s logistics tail was procured for the operation. Supplies and the infrastructure to transport them usually came from what the hiring state had available.

Huber stopped in front of the building marked PROVOST MARSHAL and straightened his equipment belt. The guards, one of them in a gun jeep mounting a tribarrel, watched him in the anonymity of mirrored faceshields. The tribarrel remained centered on Huber’s midriff as he approached.

The orders recalling Lieutenant Arne Huber from F-3 directed him to report to the Provost Marshal’s office on arrival at Base Alpha. Huber had left his gear with the clerk at the Transient Barracks—he wasn’t going to report to the Regiment’s hatchetman with a dufflebag and two footlockers—but he hadn’t taken time to be assigned a billet. There was a good chance—fifty-fifty, Huber guessed—that he wouldn’t be a member of the Slammers when the present interview concluded.

He felt cold inside. He’d known the possibilities the instant he saw the first bolts rake the dirigible, but the terse recall message that followed his report had still made his guts churn.

Nothing to be done about it now. Nothing to be done about it since Sergeant Jellicoe shifted her aim to the dirigible and thumbed her butterfly trigger.

“Lieutenant Huber reporting to the Provost Marshal, as ordered,” he said to the sergeant commanding the squad of guards.

“You’re on the list,” the sergeant said without inflexion. He and the rest of his squad were from A Company; they were the Regiment’s police, wearing a stylized gorget as their collar flash. In some mercenary outfits the field police were called Chain Dogs from the gorget; in the Slammers they were the White Mice. “You can leave your weapons with me and go on in.”

“Right,” said Huber, though the order surprised him. He unslung his belt with the holstered pistol, then handed over the powerknife clipped to a trouser pocket as well.

“He’s clean,” said a guard standing at the readout from a detection frame. The sergeant nodded Huber forward.