The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Pritchard quirked a smile. “I guess we’ll fit inside,” he said, stepping back into the command car and gesturing the others to follow. The roof hatch forward was open; from the inside, all Huber could see of Pritchard’s signals officer was the lower half of her body standing on the full-function seat now acting as a firing step. “Not for privacy, but the imagery’s going to be sharper if we use the car.”

Huber unlatched his body armor and shrugged it off before he climbed into the compartment. Mitzi wasn’t wearing hers any-way—she said she bumped often enough in a tank turret as it was. Lieutenant Myers saw Huber strip, started to follow suit, then froze for a moment with the expression of a bunny in the headlights. He was the last to enter, and even then only when Sangrela gestured him angrily forward.

The compartment was smaller than it looked from the outside because the sidewalls were fifteen centimeters thick with electronics. There were fold-down seats at the three touchplate consoles on each side, blandly neutral at this moment because nobody’d chosen the function they were to control.

“Right,” said Pritchard when they were all inside. “Officially the government of United Cities has hired the Regiment to support it in its tariff discussions with the government of Solace. Unofficially, everybody on the planet knows that the other five of the Outer States are helping the UC pay our hire.”

Huber suspected that not all the Slammers—and not even all the officers here in the S-3’s command car—knew or cared who was paying the Slammers. It wasn’t their job to know, and a lot of the troopers didn’t want to clutter up their minds with things that didn’t matter. It might get in the way of stuff that helped them stay alive….

“The government of the Point,” Pritchard continued, “that’s the state on the north of the continent—”

A map of the sole continent of Plattner’s World bloomed in front of Huber. Everyone in the compartment would see an identical image, no matter where they stood. Though an air-projected hologram, it was as sharp as if it had been carved from agate.

A pale beige overlay identified UC territory on the contour display; as Pritchard spoke, an elongated diamond of the map went greenish: a promontory in the north balanced by a southward-tapering wedge which ended at the central mass of Solace. The Point and the United Cities were directly across the continent from one another.

“—is fully supportive of the UC position. Melinda Riker Grayle, a politician who’s not in the government but who has a considerable following among the Moss rangers who collect the raw material for the anti-aging drug—”

The image of a stern-looking woman, well into middle age, replaced the map. She wouldn’t have been beautiful even thirty years before, but she was handsome in her way and she glared out at the world with a strength that was evident even in hologram.

“—opposes the government in this. She argues that supporting the Regiment lays the Point open to Solace attack, and that the Regiment couldn’t do anything to help the Point in such an event.”

Huber nodded. It seemed to him that the only thing protecting the “neutral” Outer States from Solace attack was the fact that Solace needed both the Moss they shipped to Solace for processing and the market they provided for Solace produce. For that matter, everybody knew that part of the Moss shipped from the neutral states came from the UC, and that food and manufactures from Solace found their way back to the UC by the same route.

Pritchard grinned. He had a pleasant face, but his expression now made Huber realize that Colonel Hammer’s operations officer had to be just as ruthless as Joachim Steuben in his different way.

“Task Force Sangrela’s going to prove Grayle’s wrong,” he said. “You’re going to run from here straight to the Point and be in the capital, Midway, before any civilians even know you’re coming.”

His grin tightened fractionally. “I wish I could say the same about the Solace military,” he added, “but their surveillance equipment’s better than that. We’re all leaving the satellites up because our employers need them. We can hope they won’t have time to mount a real counter to the move, though.”

“Blood and Martyrs!” Lieutenant Myers muttered.

“How’s my infantry supposed to keep up?” asked Captain Sangrela in a more reasoned version of what was probably the same concern. “That’s fourteen hundred kilometers by the shortest practical route—”

Either he’d cued his helmet AI with the question, or he was a better off-the-cuff estimator than Huber ever thought of being.

“—and we’re not going to do that in skimmers without taking breaks the cars ’n panzers won’t need.”

Slammers infantry could travel long distances on their skimmers, recharging their batteries on the move by hooking up to the fusion bottles of the armored fighting vehicles. What they couldn’t do was change off drivers the way their heavy brethren would.