The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

The shooting stopped. Arne Huber took his hands from the tribarrel grips and flexed them cautiously, afraid they’d cramp. He might need to use them if things got hot again. The underside of his chin was as stiff and painful as if it’d been flayed. The skin there’d caught some of the iridium vaporized when the bolt hit inside the fighting compartment.

“Cease fire!” said Captain Sangrela, but nobody was firing anymore.

“Blood and Martyrs!” Deseau wheezed, raising his faceshield. “I’m as dry as that rock out there!”

Huber’d had the same thought. In turning toward the cooler that still should have a few beers in it, he caught sight of Captain Orichos’ expression: she looked as though she’d just been told she was Master of the Universe.

It shouldn’t have disturbed Huber, but it did.

It’d been pouring rain. Now that the afternoon sun was out, the tents steamed and the clay had already started to bake to laterite. Ash lay as a slimy gray coating over ridges in the soil, but the sides of the rain-carved gullies were the color of rust. Dead treetrunks stood like tombstones for the forest that had once grown here.

“What a bloody fucking awful fucking place!” Deseau snarled, flipping up the front of his poncho without taking it off; the rain could resume any moment. “Learoyd, did you ever see such a bloody fucking awful fucking place?”

“Sure, Frenchie,” Learoyd said, frowning as he tried to puzzle sense out of the question. “Remember Passacaglia, where the dust got in everything and we kept burning out drive fans? And that swamp the place before that? And where was it everybody got skin fungus if they didn’t wear their gas suits all the time? Was that—”

“Yeah, well, this’s still a crummy place,” Deseau muttered. He saw Huber smiling and grimaced, turning his head away. Frenchie’d been around Learoyd long enough to know the trooper had too much trouble with the literal truth to make a good audience for a figure of speech—even a figure as simple as rhetorical exaggeration.

Looking eastward toward a dirigible unloading what seemed to be empty shipping containers, Deseau went on, “I wish to hell they’d let us go when the local cops arrived. They can handle anything that’s left, can’t they?”

Dirigibles full of Gendarmes and the supplies needed for an open-air prison had begun arriving within a few hours of the collapse of Volunteer resistance. Huber, and Captain Sangrela, and probably every other trooper in the task force, had thought Sierra would be released immediately. The optimists had even hoped they’d be sent back by way of Midway, with a few days of leave as a reward.

Surviving a major engagement like the one just completed made even level-headed troopers optimistic.

Central hadn’t felt that way. Sierra had stayed where it was for the three days it took for a column from Base Alpha to reach them.

“It won’t be long, Frenchie,” Huber said. He quirked a smile. “It shouldn’t be long, anyhow.”

There were worse places, just as Learoyd said, but this was bad enough in all truth. The Slammers had snagged tents from the loads brought in to house the prisoners, but they didn’t help much. You could keep the rain from falling on you, but the ditches the troopers dug around the tents hadn’t been enough to stop streams of ash-clogged water from finding their way in from below and soaking everything.

Huber looked over at the POW camp which lay between Task Force Sangrela’s defensive circle and the slopes of what had for a short time been Fort Freedom; it was now Mount Bulstrode again. The prisoners had it worse than the troopers did, of course. There wouldn’t have been enough tents to go around even if the Slammers hadn’t imposed their tax on defeat, but accommodations weren’t what was probably worrying the former Volunteers. The Slammers knew they’d be leaving within a few days, maybe even a few hours. The prisoners weren’t sure they’d be alive in a few hours.

“Sierra,” said Huber’s commo helmet in the voice of the signals officer of the approaching column, “this is Flamingo Six-three. We’ll be in sight in figures two, I say again, two, minutes. Don’t get anxious. Flamingo out.”

“Stupid bitch,” Deseau muttered. “The only thing I’m anxious about is getting away from this bloody place. And if they’d got the lead outa their pants, that could’ve happened yesterday.”

Huber’s opinion was similar enough that he didn’t bother telling Frenchie to cool it. You never get relieved as quickly as you want to be….

He wondered if Sierra would be allowed to pick its own route back through the unburned forest, or if in the interests of speed they’d have to return across the fire-swept wasteland. The downpour would’ve quenched the hotspots, but the filthy sludge the vehicles’d be kicking up in its place wouldn’t be much of an improvement.

Huber chuckled. Deseau gave him a sour look.

“Don’t mind me, Frenchie,” he said. “I’m just thinking that I went into the wrong line of work if I wanted luxury travel arrangements.”