The trees in this stretch had thick trunks and wide-spread branches. That made the driving easier, especially now in deep darkness. Of course if a car hit one of them squarely, it wasn't going to be the tree that was smashed to bits.

A red bead pulsing twice in the center of Huber's faceshield gave him a minimal warning before Central crashed the task force net with, "Highball, this is Chaser Three-one. You will halt for an artillery fire mission in figures three-zero seconds. Mission data is being downloaded now. You will resume your march after firing a battery three. Chaser Three-one over."

The voice on the other end of the transmission was broken and attenuated to the verge of being inaudible. Central was bouncing the message in micropackets off cosmic ray ionization tracks, the Regiment's normal expedient on planets where security was the first priority or there weren't communications satellites. Even so—and despite interference from the foliage overhead, a screen if not a solid ceiling—the transmission would normally have been crisper than this.

What the hell was going on at Base Alpha?

But like the A Company sergeant said, it wasn't Arne Huber's job to worry about Base Alpha. Nor to ask questions when Central's orders were brusque because there was no time to give any other kind.

"Roger, Chaser Three-one," Huber said. "Highball Six out."

"Chaser Three-one out," the voice said, fading to nothingness in the middle of the final syllable.

"Highball, this is Six," Huber said. Deseau had turned to look at him. "Halt at Michael Foxtrot Four-one-six, Five-one-four. Fox elements will provide security while Rocker elements—"

The artillery.

"—carry out their fire mission. Break. Rocker One-six, I want to be moving again as soon as possible. Copy? Six over."

"Roger, Highball Six," Lieutenant Basingstoke replied crisply. He had more time in grade as well as more time in the Regiment than Huber. Huber suspected that Basingstoke thought he should've been task force commander in Huber's place, which was just another piece of evidence as to why a redleg lieutenant didn't have sufficient judgment to command a mobile force. "You don't want us to reload the gun vehicles before proceeding, then? Rocker One-six over."

"Negative!" Huber responded. He bit off the words, "You bloody fool!" but he suspected his tone implied them, which was just fine with him. "Rocker, I don't want to be halted in enemy-controlled territory an instant longer than we have to be, especially after we've been shooting artillery so they know exactly where we are. Six out."

Learoyd pulled Fencing Master into the halt location the AI had chosen for them. Huber looked up, frowning. The patches of sky overhead weren't sufficient for the Automatic Air Defense system to burst incoming shells a safe distance away. So long as the task force kept moving they were probably all right, but now, halted—

Well, Central knew the score; and anyway, the Regiment wasn't a democracy. Ours not to reason why . . .  

The Hogs swung into position, their turrets rotating and launch tubes rising while the vehicles were still in motion. The ammunition haulers pulled off to either side of the guns. The F-2 combat cars tried to keep outside the scattered trucks, but this wasn't a defensive position in any sense of the term. The Lord save Highball's souls if any Solace forces were close enough to take advantage of the situation.

"Lieutenant?" said Padova, leaning close to shout over the idling fans. "I didn't think we were going to hear anything from Central on this run. That we were on our own?"

Huber shrugged. His shoulders ached from the weight of his armor, but that was nothing new. "The operation was pretty spur of the moment, Rita," he said. "I guess they're flying it by the seat of their pants, just like we are."

The howitzers fired, rippling with a half second between discharges so that the shockwaves from the shells didn't interfere with other rounds in the salvo. The nearest gun was within ten meters of Fencing Master. Huber's helmet damped the blasts so they didn't break his eardrums, but the pressure of 200-mm shells tearing skyward squeezed his whole body like loads of sand.

The Hogs weighed forty tonnes apiece, and the steel skirts of their plenum chambers stabilized them better than conventional trails and recoil spades could do. Despite that the big vehicles jounced so hard when they fired that puffs of dirt and leaf litter spurted out of their fan intakes.

The rounds didn't reach terminal velocity for seven seconds, but the crack! of each going supersonic stabbed through the deeper, world-filling snarl of the rocket motors. Overhead, branches whipped and shredded leaves swirled in roaring eddies.

Huber'd wondered how the guns would fire through dense foliage, but that obviously wasn't a problem. The shells could course correct if they had to, but the disparity between the massive projectiles and the leaves made Huber grimace at the foolishness of his concern.

The first howitzer launched a second round immediately after Gun Six fired its first; the third followed three seconds later. As the launch tube sank back to its travel position, the Hog's driver began spinning up his fans: they'd been shut down while the gun was firing lest the blades whip into their housings and wreck the nacelle.

"Highball Six!" Lieutenant Basingstoke said, his voice crackling with the effort of Huber's commo helmet to make it audible over the thunderous conclusion of the fire mission. "Rocker elements are ready to move. Rock—"

Gun Six fired its third and final round. The shriek of the shells arching southward seemed like silence after the cacophony of the preceding seconds.

"—er One-six over."

"All Highball units," Huber said. The whole operation had taken less time than switching drivers; a minute at the outside. "Resume march order. Six out."

He grinned wryly. While he didn't suppose Lieutenant Basingstoke was going to become a bosom buddy, at least he knew his job.

And because he was thinking that, Huber said, "Rocker One-six, this Highball Six. It's a pleasure to serve with real professionals, Lieutenant. Please convey my congratulations to your troopers. Six over."

Foghorn slid out of sight among the trees. Learoyd brought Fencing Master up, following thirty meters behind the lead car. That was a greater interval than they'd maintain when the task force had reached a constant speed.

"Highball Six, this is Rocker One-six," Basingstoke said. "I've passed on your congratulations to my gunners." After a pause he added, "I'm glad we were able to perform to the standard the infantry and your combat car crews have demonstrated in order to get us this far. Rocker One-six out."

Huber looked up at branches whipping past against a dark sky. He grinned faintly. "Thank you, Rocker One-six," he said. "Six out."

He wondered how much farther Task Force Huber was going to get. Who knows? Maybe all the way.

And then what? Huber added to himself; but that was a problem for another day.

Huber awakened from a doze. He'd been hunched into the back corner of the fighting compartment, held upright by ammo boxes and a carton of rations. Fields of dark green soybeans rolled to either horizon beyond the iridium walls, punctuated by stretches of native vegetation.

According to the briefing cubes, Solace was several times as populous as all the Outer States put together. Those people were heavily concentrated in the center of the country around Bezant and Port Plattner, however, with the remainder of the country given over to the collective farms which produced food for the entire planet.

Huber frowned as he thought about the rations. He'd swallowed a tube of something a little after dawn as they negotiated the foothills of the Solace Highlands, but he'd had nothing since. He didn't feel hungry but supposed he ought to eat something.

It was an effort to get anything down because he was so fatigued by the constant vibration. Besides, the poppers made food taste like it'd been scraped from the bottom of a latrine. That wasn't much of a change from what ration tubes ordinarily tasted like, of course.

He jolted alert, suddenly aware of why he'd awakened. Padova'd been on duty with the C&C display while he rested. She was trained but she didn't have the sixth sense for what wasn't right that'd come with a year or two of combat operations.

"I've got the watch," Huber said. He took the controller from Padova's hand as he spoke, lurching upright. She jumped aside, startled and maybe a little snappish at the lack of ceremony. The reaction passed before it got to her tongue, which was just as well.

As Huber adjusted the display to make explicit what instinct already told him, he said, "Highball, we're going to have to adjust course to the left by thirty degrees. There's a monorail line eighteen klicks ahead, and if we continue as planned we'll be spotted by a train headed southward. We'll—"

He stopped because he'd caught the fine overtone to the sensor data, the descant he'd ignored for the moment while he focused on the electronic signature of a six-car train heading south at 120 kph. Task Force Huber could avoid observation from a train at ground level, but—

"Bloody Hell!" Huber snarled, interrupting himself. "This is going to take a moment, troopers. There's aircars scouting for the train and they'll spot us sure!"

"Six, this is Two-six," Lieutenant Messeman said on the command channel. "I suggest it's a troop train and the aircars are escorts. Over."

"Roger," said Huber, because it couldn't be anything else once Messeman had stated the obvious. He shook his head angrily. He must still be waking up. He couldn't afford to miss cues; he couldn't, and the troopers who were his responsibility couldn't afford him missing them either.

"Roger," Huber repeated, but with a note of decision. There was nothing wrong with his tactical appreciation once he got his mind in gear. "Highball, we can't avoid them so we'll engage and keep moving. Fox will attack on a company front—"

That was a bit of an overstatement, given that the Fox elements under Huber's command were two understrength platoons, but it'd do.

"—from point Echo Michael Four-two, Six-one. X-Ray elements continue in march order. Fox elements form to the right on Three-six in line abreast with five, I repeat five, meter intervals. Execute! Six out."

Padova looked at him wonderingly. It was too bad Learoyd wasn't on the right gun, but the newbie was going to have to get her feet wet some time. This was probably as safe a place to do it as any.

"Crew," Huber said, switching his helmet to intercom. Foghorn was moving up on their right with the other cars of F-3 slanted farther back as they drove through the soybeans to their stations. Lieutenant Messeman's platoon would take longer to join from the middle and rear of the column, but it'd be in line by the time it needed to be. "Frenchie, set our guns to take out the scouts when we're sure of getting them both."

The aircars were keeping station to either side of the track, five hundred meters up and a kilometer ahead of the train. They were looking for trouble on the line rather than scouting more generally, but even so from their altitude they were bound to notice the Slammers' vehicles.

Deseau keyed the command into the pad on his tribarrel's receiver. Instead of executing immediately he said, "You don't think it'll warn them, El-Tee?"

"It's a train," Huber snapped. "They're not going to turn around, they won't even be able to slow down."

Deseau grimaced and pushed execute. Fencing Master's tribarrels slewed to the right and elevated under the control of the gunnery computer.

"The C&C box'll divide our fire so that the whole train's covered," Huber continued, deliberately speaking to his whole crew over the intercom rather than embarrassing Padova by singling her out for the explanation. "We'll shoot it up on the fly, not because that'll damage the enemy but—"

Fencing Master's tribarrels fired, six-round bursts from the paired wing guns and about ten from Deseau's as it destroyed an aircar by itself. Padova jumped, instinct telling her that the gun'd gone off by accident. She blushed and scowled when she realized what had happened.

Above the horizon to the north, a cottony puff bloomed and threw out glittering sparks. The flash of the explosion had been lost in the distance, even to Huber who'd been looking for it.

"—because if we don't, we'll have whatever military force is aboard that train chasing us," Huber continued, giving no sign that he'd noticed Padova's mistake. "We're going to have enough to do worrying about what's in front without somebody catching us from behind."

The gunnery computer returned the tribarrels to their previous alignment. Huber and Deseau touched their grips, swiveling their weapons slightly to make sure that a circuitry glitch hadn't locked them; Padova quickly copied the veterans. Yeah, she'll do.

A column of black smoke twisted skyward near where the white puff had appeared in the sky. The second Solace scout hadn't blown up in the air, but its wreckage had ignited the brush when it hit the ground.

"Six, this is Two-six," Messeman said. "I'll take my Two-zero car out of central control to cut the rail in front of the train. All right? Over."

"Roger, Two-six," Huber said. He thought Messeman was being overcautious, but that still left seven combat cars to deal with a six-car train.

Sunlight gleamed on the elevated rail and the line of pylons supporting it across the dark green fields. The train itself wasn't in sight yet, but at their closing speed it wouldn't be long. Huber settled behind his gun, staring into the holographic sight picture.

Fencing Master came over a rise too slight to notice on a contour map but all the difference in the world when you were using line-of-sight weapons. The train, a jointed tube of plastic and light metal, shimmered into view, slung beneath the elevated track.

"Open fire," Huber said calmly. His thumbs squeezed the butterfly trigger.

Padova's bolts were high—meters high, well above even the rail—but Huber and Deseau were both dead on the final car from their first rounds. Huber traversed his gun clockwise from the back of the target forward. Frenchie simply let the train's own forward motion carry it through his three-second burst so that his bolts crossed with his lieutenant's in the middle of the target. By that time Padova corrected her aim by sawing her muzzles downward.

The car fell apart, metal frame and thermoplastic paneling alike blazing at the touch of fifty separate hits, each a torch of plasma. The Solace mercenaries on the train carried grenades and ammunition, but those sparkling secondary explosions did little to increase the destruction which the powerguns had caused directly.

The second car back had something more impressive in it, perhaps a pallet of anti-armor missiles. When it detonated, the shockwave destroyed the whole front half of the train in a red flash so vivid that even daylight blanched. The low pressure that followed the initial wave front sucked topsoil into a dense black mushroom through which the rear cars cascaded as blazing debris.

"Cease fire!" Huber ordered. "Don't waste ammo, troopers, we've worked ourselves out of a job."

He took a deep breath; his nose filters released now that the air was fit to breathe again. Plasma bolts burned oxygen to ozone, and the matrix holding the copper atoms in alignment broke down into unpleasant compounds when the energy was released. Huber's faceshield had blocked the direct intensity of the bolts to save his retinas, but enough cyan light had reflected into the corners of his eyes that shimmers of purple and orange filtered his vision.

"Reform in march order," Huber concluded hoarsely. "Six out."

"They didn't have a chance," Padova said. She sounded as though she was on the verge of collapse. "They couldn't shoot back, they were helpless!"

"It's better when they don't shoot back," Learoyd said from the front compartment. He'd buttoned up before they went into action; now the hatch opened and the driver's seat rose on its hydraulic jack, lifting his head back into the open. "They might've got lucky, even at this range."

"Some a' them caught us with our pants down when we landed here," Frenchie Deseau said harshly. "We weren't so fucking helpless! Ain't that so, El-Tee?"

Huber flipped up his faceshield and rubbed his eyes, remembering unwillingly the ratfuck when a Solace commando ambushed F-3 disembarking from the starship that had just brought them to Plattner's World. A buzzbomb trailing gray exhaust smoke as it curved for Arne Huber's head . . . 

And afterwards, the windrow of bodies scythed down by a touch of Huber's thumb to the close-in defense system.

"No," he said in a husky whisper. "We weren't helpless. We're Hammer's Slammers."

Task Force Huber continued to slice its way north, moving at an even hundred kph across the treeless fields.

"Highball Six, this is Flasher Six," the voice said faintly. The signal wobbled and was so attenuated that Huber could barely make out the words. "Do you copy, over?"

Ionization track transmissions could carry video under the proper circumstances, but communications between moving vehicles were another matter. Huber would've said it was impossible without a precise location for the recipient, but apparently that wasn't quite true.

"Flasher Six, this is Highball Six," he said, shutting his mind to the present circumstances though his eyes remained open. Deseau and Learoyd glanced over when he replied to the transmission, then returned to their guns with the extra alertness of men who know something unseen is likely to affect them. "Go ahead, over."

Huber had no idea of who Flasher Six was nor what he commanded. The AI could probably tell him, but right now Huber had too little brain to clutter it up with needless detail.

Fencing Master's sending unit had the reference signal from the original transmission to go on, so Huber could reasonably expect his reply to get through. It must have done so, because a moment later the much clearer voice responded, "Highball, you're in position to anchor a Solace artillery regiment. I need you to adjust your course to follow the Masterton River, a few degrees east of the original plot. I'm downloading the course data—"

A pause. An icon blinked in the lower left corner of Huber's faceshield, then became solid green when the AI determined that the transmission was complete and intelligible.

"—now. Central delegated control to me because they haven't been able to get through to you directly. Flasher over."

Task Force Huber was winding through slopes too steep and rocky to be easily cultivated. Shrubs and twisted trees with small leaves were the only vegetation they'd seen for ten kilometers. That was why they'd been routed this way, of course: the chance of somebody accurately reporting their location and course to Solace Command was very slight.

Huber was behind schedule, and the notion of further delay irritated him more than it might've done if he hadn't been so tired. He glared at the transmitted course he'd projected onto a terrain overlay and said, "Flasher, what is it that you want us to do? We're to attack an artillery regiment? Highball over."

"Negative, Highball, negative!" Flasher Six snapped. "These are the Firelords! There's an eight-gun battery of calliopes with each battalion and they'd cut you to pieces. Your revised course will take you through a town with a guardpost that'll alert Solace Command. That'll give the Firelords enough warning to block the head of the valley with their calliopes and take you under fire with their rockets. We'll handle it from there. Over."

Huber called up the Firelords from Fencing Master's data bank; his frown grew deeper. They were one of several regiments fielded from the Hackabe Cluster. Their truck-mounted bombardment rockets were relatively unsophisticated and short ranged but they could put down a huge volume of fire in a short time.

"Flasher," Huber said, switching his faceshield back to the course display, "the Firelords'll be able to saturate our defenses if they try hard enough. I'll have to put all my tribarrels on air defense, and even then it's going to be close. Are you sure about this? Over."

"Roger, Highball!" Flasher said in a tone of obvious irritation. "Your infantry component will have to handle local security. Are you able to comply, over?"

"Roger, Flasher," Huber said. It wasn't the first time he'd gotten orders he didn't like. It wouldn't be the last, either—if he survived this one. "Highball Six out."

He paused a moment to collect his mind. The AI was laying out courses and plotting fields of fire; doing its job, as happy as a machine could be. And Arne Huber was a soldier, so he'd do his job also. If it didn't make him happy, sometimes, he and all the other troopers in the Regiment had decided—if only by default—that it made them happier than other lines of work.

"Trouble, El-Tee?" Deseau asked without looking up from his sight picture. He'd been covering the left front while Huber was getting their orders.

"Hey, we're alive, Frenchie," Huber said. "That's something, right?"

He looked at the new plot on the C&C display, took a deep breath, and said over the briefing channel, "Highball, this is Six. There's been a change of plan. We're to proceed up the valley of the Masterton River, through a place called Millhouse Crossing. There's a Militia guardpost there."

In briefing mode, the unit commanders could respond directly and lower-ranking personnel could caret Huber's display for permission to speak. Nobody said anything for the moment.

He continued, "We'll shoot up the post on the move, but be aware that they may shoot back. We'll continue another fifteen klicks to where the road drops down into the plains around Hundred Hectare Lake. We'll halt short of there because an artillery regiment is set up beside the lake, the Firelords. We're to keep their attention while a friendly unit takes care of them. Any questions? Over."

"If they're so fucking friendly," Deseau said over Fencing Master's intercom, "then let them draw fire and we'll shoot up the redlegs. How about that?"

There was a pause as the rest of the task force stared at the transmitted map; at least the unit commanders would also check out the Firelords. The first response was from Lieutenant Basingstoke, saying, "Highball Six, this is Rocker One-six. The Firelords can launch nearly fifteen hundred fifteen-centimeter rockets within five seconds. You can't—the task force cannot, I believe—defend against a barrage like that. Over."

Huber sighed, though he supposed it was just as well that somebody'd raised the point directly. "One-six," he said, "I agree with your calculations, but we have our orders. We're going to do our best and hope that the Firelords don't think it's worth emptying their racks all in one go. Over."

Somebody swore softly. It could've been any of the platoon leaders. Blood and Martyrs, it could've been Huber himself muttering the words that were dancing through his mind.

"All right, troopers," Huber said to the fraught silence. "You've got your orders. We've all got our orders. Car Three-six leads from here till we're through this. Highball Six out."

Padova obediently increased speed by five kph, pulling around Foghorn as Sergeant Nagano's driver swung to the left in obedience to the directions from the C&C box. As soon as they were into the broader part of the valley, they'd form with the combat cars in line abreast by platoons at the front and rear of the task force. The X-Ray vehicles would crowd as tightly together between the cars as movement safety would allow.

Bombardment rockets had a wide footprint but they weren't individually accurate, so reducing the target made the tribarrels' task of defense easier. Not easy, but an old soldier was one who'd learned to take every advantage there was.

Padova took them up a swale cutting into the ridge to the right. Deseau looked at the landscape. By crossing the ridge, they'd enter a better-watered valley where the data bank said the locals grew crops on terraces.

"Ever want to be a farmer, Bert?" Deseau asked.

"No, Frenchie," Learoyd said.

Deseau shrugged. "Yeah, me neither," he said. "Besides, I like shooting people."

He laughed, but Huber wasn't sure he was joking.

Fencing Master nosed through the spike-leafed trees straggling along the crest. They were similar to giants Huber'd seen in the lowland forests, but here the tallest were only ten meters high and their leaves had a grayish cast.

Limestone scraped beneath Fencing Master's skirts as they started down the eastern slope. The landscape immediately became greener, and after less than a minute they'd snorted out of wasteland into a peanut field.

A man—no, a woman—was cultivating the far end of the field with a capacitor-powered tractor. The farmer saw Fencing Master and stood up on her seat. As Foghorn slid out of the scrub with the rest of the column following, she leaped into the field and began crawling away while the tractor continued its original course. The peanut bushes wobbled, marking her course. Deseau laughed.

"It's like a different planet," Padova said, taking them down the path to the next terrace, a meter lower. Fencing Master was wider than the farm machinery, so they jolted as their skirts plowed the retaining wall and upper terrace into a broader ramp. The valley opened into more fields interspersed with the roofs of houses and sheds. "All green and pretty."

An aircar heading south a kilometer away suddenly turned in the air and started back the way it'd come. Learoyd and Deseau fired. Half the vehicle including the rear fan disintegrated. The forward portion spun into the ground and erupted in flames.

"Just wait a bit, Rita," Frenchie said with a chuckle.

The Solace Militia used civilian vehicles with no markings that'd show at a quick glimpse through a gunsight. That aircar might've been a farm couple coming home with all their children, but Huber would've fired also if he hadn't been concentrating on other business. He had to cover the sensor readouts as well as the position of his task force.

Killing civilians—maybe civilians—wasn't a part of the work that Huber much cared for, but you'd go crazy if you let yourself worry about the things you couldn't change. Go crazy or shoot yourself.

In the interests of command, Fencing Master should've been farther back in the column with Foghorn or Fancy Pants leading . . . but Huber was making the choice, and he knew that afterwards the CO had less to explain to the survivors if he'd been leading from the front. He had less to explain to himself, too, if he was one of those survivors.

Padova increased speed, crossing the fields at forty kph and using the extra inertia to help break down the retaining walls before accelerating again. Huber frowned, but the rest of the column kept station. Since Fencing Master was widening the ramps, the following vehicles didn't have to slow as much to negotiate the terraces.

The valley's lower levels were planted in rice, a green much brighter than the leaves of the peanut bushes. The paddies were flooded; showers of spray, muck, and young plants erupted as the Slammers drove through. Upper fields began to drain as the column's passage opened the dikes.

Occasionally someone stepped out of a wood-framed dwelling or glanced up in a field to see what the noise was. Some continued to stare as the column howled by, perhaps thinking they were mercenaries under contract to the Solace government.

Twice an aircar appeared in the far distance. A tribarrel in air defense mode ripped each out of the sky.

The Masterton River here was twenty meters wide, too narrow to rate as a river back on Friesland. Even so, it carried more tumbling water than Huber'd have wanted to take his combat cars over without being sure of a ford.

No need to cross, of course. There was plenty of room on the broad bottom terrace to form on a platoon front. Foghorn came up on the right of Fencing Master, with Gabinus' Three-eight and Fancy Pants falling in alongside.

Funnel-mouthed fish weirs lined both banks. The small boys tipping them up to check the catch turned and to watch the passing armored vehicles. Fencing Master still set the pace. Padova continued to accelerate now that they were no longer descending the slope.

The town, Millhouse Crossing, was two rows of buildings which began as a straggle of shacks with board walls and roofs of corrugated plastic. Further on the houses were masonry and two or three stories high. The road was barely wide enough for the recovery vehicle, and even the combat cars would have to go through one at a time.

A black-and-yellow Solace flag flew over the cupola of a building in the center of town. All the F-3 vehicles fired as soon as the guardpost came in view, shattering the stuccoed limestone in dazzles of cyan and white.

Chickens were running in nervous circles in the street. A cart and small tractor stood forlorn beside a roofed marketplace on the inland side. The cart was half-loaded, but its owner and every other human in Millhouse Crossing was trying to hide.

"Highball, form on Three-six in line ahead," Huber said. "We'll go back to platoon front on the—"

As Fencing Master drew ahead again, Deseau decided he had a fair shot at the facade of the guardpost—and took it. He was more right than not, placing most of his ten-round burst in the ground floor of the government building, though a pair of 2-cm bolts blew in the arched entryway of the private house next door.

"—other side of town. Six out."

Huber swiveled his gun so that it covered building fronts a hundred meters ahead on his side. Padova brushed a pair of shacks that'd been built closer to the road than most of the row, knocking them to scrap. A sheet of plywood flipped outward and slapped down over a screened intake on Fencing Master's port side; it clung there, partially blocking the duct, till Padova deliberately swerved through another shack and swept the debris off. A brief snowstorm of chicken feathers sprayed from beneath the skirts.

They howled past a house painted pale green. In the corner of his eye Huber saw a white face staring from the interior. The spectator was no threat, and besides Huber's attention was focused on the magnified image of buildings well in the distance. A sniper directly alongside would be for Foghorn's gunners to deal with.

Learoyd's gun hammered, the bolts' intense cyan reflecting from the soft pastels of the building fronts. His burst fanned the interior of the government building which Deseau's gun had already set alight. As Fencing Master passed, orange flame whuffed! from the window openings, a gas stove adding its note to the ongoing destruction.

Fencing Master hit the cart in the roadway, flinging its contents into the air, and bunted the tractor through the lightly framed market stalls. Huber flinched reflexively as cans of meat bounced off the armor beside him. Civilians scrambled out of the wreckage running in circles much as the chickens had moments before.

The rest of the way was clear. Padova kept Fencing Master on the raised roadbed through the village, then dropped into the lefthand paddy at a slant to let the rest of the platoon fall in beside them. High-pressure air squirting from beneath the plenum chambers excavated furrows twice the width of the vehicles themselves, gouging out the young rice.

The crop could be replanted; the damaged buildings could be repaired. In a few years, people in Millhouse Crossing would no longer talk about the day Hammer's Slammers roared through. Nothing really matters but life itself, and death.

The village was twelve kilometers from the mouth of the valley. According to the terrain display, the Masterton River dropped twenty meters in the next five hundred, boiling over a series of cataracts that closed it to navigation, and from there meandered another eight klicks to Hundred Hectare Lake.

In the geologic past the lake had been of twice its present area. When the water drained, the original shoreline remained as a limestone escarpment on the south and western margins. Though never more than a few meters high, it was sufficient to cover an artillery regiment against powerguns firing from the Masterton Valley.

Under other circumstances, Huber might've considered taking his combat cars in a balls-to-the-wall charge across the farmland south of the lake. The Firelords' calliopes, emplaced on the escarpment and manned by professionals, made that notion suicide.

Another option—the one Huber would've picked—was to have halted well beyond the twenty-kilometer range of the Firelords' bombardment rockets and let Battery Alpha clear the problem. Again the calliopes were the difficulty. Saturating the Firelords' air defenses would require much of the ammunition the battery was carrying, and there wouldn't be any resupply until after—and if—the Regiment captured Port Plattner.

Which left the third option, Flasher Six dealing with the Firelords in his own good time and fashion, while Task Force Huber took whatever was thrown at them. Maybe next time his troopers'd be dishing it out while somebody else drew fire. . . . 

The sensor display gave Huber the warning: not movement but a radio signal from the hills overlooking the broad pass to the north. A Solace lookout was signaling back to headquarters near the lakeside.

"Highball!" Huber called. He didn't aim his own gun; he had other duties. "Tar—"

Deseau must've expected an outpost and set his AI to caret RF sources. Most civilians would be using land lines, but a mercenary unit would generally depend on its own communications system. While Huber was still speaking, Frenchie acted. A three-round ranging burst hiss/CRACKed from his tribarrel, vivid even in sunlight.

"—get at vector zero-seven degrees, radio trans—"

Nobody was good enough to hit a target ten kilometers away with his first shot. Deseau adjusted his aim, dialed up the magnification on his holographic sights, and engaged the gun's stabilizer. Learoyd leaned over his own gun, importing the target information from Deseau's weapon instead of duplicating the effort.

"—mitter. Fire at—"

Deseau and Learoyd fired together. Their tribarrels spat streams in near parallel, merging optically as they snapped through the sunlight ahead of the task force.

"—will!"

The distant slope winked—cyan from the impacting plasma, red and gushing gray steam where brush burned explosively. There was a burp of orange and the radio signal cut off.

"Got 'em!" Deseau shouted as he and Learoyd took their thumbs from their triggers. He wasn't on intercom, but Huber could easily hear his excited voice. "Got the bastards!"

Fancy Pants and Three-eight ripped ropes of blue-green hellfire toward the pass. A stretch of hillside where the vegetation was dry began to burn with some enthusiasm. Another gun, this one from F-2 aiming past the X-Ray vehicles, joined in.

"Cease fire!" Huber ordered. "Six to Highball, cease fire! Save your gunbarrels, troopers, because we're going to need them bad. Out!"

"Here it comes," Deseau said, reading the flicker of saffron from beyond the mouth of the valley. "For what we are about to receive, the Lord make us thankful."

The sensor suite analyzed the sound some ten seconds after Frenchie had correctly identified the exhaust flashes reflected from clouds of dust: rocket motors igniting, sixty of them rippling in groups of six every second. A Firelord battery had just launched half the rockets on its six trucks.

"Fox elements," Huber said, "put all your guns, I repeat all your guns in air defense mode. Have your backup weapons ready to deal with ground threats."

He pressed his hands against his armored chest to keep from balling them into fists till they cramped.

"Troopers," he went on, "this is going to be hard but we're going to do it. Hold station on Three-six, watch for problems on the ground, and let our gunnery computers do their job. They can handle it if anything can. Six out. Break."

The armored vehicles bucked through the muck of the paddies, throwing up curtains of spray to the rear and sides. The mid-afternoon sun struck it into rainbows, dazzlingly beautiful over the bright green rice plants.

"Padova," Huber continued, "keep picking up the pace as long as the rest of Highball can stay with us. Don't let 'em string out, but the Firelords may not have us under direct observation. I'd like to be somewhere other than they calculate. Out."

"Roger," the driver said. She sounded focused but not concerned. Huber couldn't tell without checking whether Fencing Master's speed increased, but he figured he'd delegated the decision to the person best able to make it.

Deseau set the tribarrels on air defense; the guns lifted their triple muzzles toward the northern sky like hounds casting for a distant scent. He took his 2-cm weapon out of the clip that held it to his gun's pintle; Learoyd held his sub-machine gun in his right hand as he snapped the loading tube out of the receiver, then in again to make sure it had locked home. Huber grinned tightly and drew his own 2-cm weapon from its muzzle-down nest between ammo boxes at the rear of the compartment.

All the tribarrels in the task force opened fire, their barrel clusters rotating as they slashed the northern sky. The Command and Control box coordinated the cars' individual AIs so that all the incoming missiles were hit without duplication. Red flashes and soot-black smoke filled the air beyond the mouth of the valley. A rocket, gutted but not destroyed, spun in a vertical helix and plunged back the way it had come.

The guns fell silent; then Deseau's weapon stuttered another four-round burst. A final rocket exploded, much closer than the smoky graveyard of its fellows. The tribarrel originally tasked with that target must have jammed before it finished the job, so Frenchie's gun was covering.

"Hold for a jolt!" Padova called, her voice rising.

The sky ahead flashed yellow-gray again, silhouetting the hills. For a moment Huber, focused on the C&C display, thought the driver also meant the next inbound salvo.

Fencing Master's bow lifted, spilling pressure. The combat car hurtled onward on inertia, its skirts skimming but not slamming straight into the cross dike which had just appeared at the end of the paddy.

Fencing Master came down like a dropped plate. The Lord's Blood! but they hit. Padova'd executed the maneuver perfectly, but there was no way you could sail thirty tonnes of iridium into watery muck and the passengers have a good time. Huber had the coaming in his left hand and his tribarrel's gunshield in his right; otherwise he'd have hurtled out of the compartment.

"Padova, slow down!" Huber bellowed, though the driver had already cut back on the car's speed by bringing the fan nacelles closer to vertical. "Highball, watch for the fucking dike here! Six out!"

He glanced to the right to see how the other cars of the platoon had handled the obstruction. Three-eight's driver had negotiated it flawlessly and was still parallel to Fencing Master. Sergeant Tranter must've seen the dike coming and warned his driver, because Fancy Pants had slowed to climb it in rulebook fashion and was now lurching down the other side.

Foghorn had tried to plow straight through. The dike was only a hand's breadth above the water and some forty centimeters down to the floor of the paddy. It was a meter thick, though, and over the width of a combat car's skirts even mud weighed several tonnes. The crew in the fighting compartment were all down, though the left wing gunner was trying to lift himself with a hand on the coaming. The car wallowed; the driver'd lost control when the shock curtains deployed automatically to save his life.

All the tribarrels fired again, those mounted on Foghorn along with the rest; the impact hadn't affected the gunnery computer. That was a good thing, because this time the Firelords had launched 240 rounds, a battalion half-emptying its racks.

Plasma bolts stabbed home. Flame and dirty smoke spread across the sky in a solid mass, replacing the dispersing rags of the previous salvo.

"Sir, I didn't see the wall!" Padova said. "Via, sir, I'm sorry!"

"Roger that," Huber said. F-3 had gotten straightened out and was cautiously accelerating across the second paddy. Nagano and both his wing gunners were on their feet again, though Foghorn's guns pecked the sky in short bursts regardless of what the crew was doing. The X-Ray element had reached the dike and was crossing in good order, in part because of the holes the combat cars had torn. "Drive on."

The crackling roar of the first salvo's destruction rolled over Task Force Huber as the second flashed and spurted a little nearer. The tribarrels continued to fire, switching from target to fresh target as the rockets curved downward. The math was easy—two hundred and forty incoming projectiles, twenty-four guns to sweep them out of the sky—

Or not.

The left wing gun spun and stopped. It was properly Huber's weapon, but Deseau was at it before Huber could react. Without even a pause to check the gun's diagnostics, Deseau snatched open the feed trough and used his knifeblade to lever out the disk that'd kinked and jammed. Grinning at Huber, he charged the gun and stepped back as it resumed blasting cyan bolts through barrels already white hot.

Huber tensed, waiting for the third salvo; possibly more than a thousand rockets, launched against combat cars whose guns were dangerously hot from dealing with the previous hundreds of projectiles. Instead, cyan light flickered behind the hills. Moments later, rolling orange fireballs mushroomed in response.

"Highball, this is Flasher Six," the unfamiliar voice called. The tone of crowing triumph was evident despite the compressed and tenuous transmission. "Thanks for your help, troopers. We've got it from now. Flasher out."

"The hell he says!" Deseau snarled, turning a furious face toward Huber. "El-Tee, are you going to let them tankers have all the fun? We're not, are we?"

Another volley of 20-cm bolts speared into the plains from higher ground somewhere to the northeast. Again whole truckloads of bombardment rockets exploded, the fuel and warheads going off in split seconds. Flasher Six commanded at least a company of tanks; their main guns were raking the Firelords, probably from beyond the distance an unaided human eye could see.

Tribarrels didn't have that range . . . but the combat cars weren't nearly that far away, either. Huber checked the terrain display and made an instant decision. Like Frenchie says, why should the tankers have all the fun? 

"Highball, this is Six," he said. He might get in trouble for this in the after-action debriefing, but that would be a long time coming—if he survived. "X-Ray elements will halt inside the valley at point Delta Michael Four-one, Three-seven. India elements will dismount to provide security. Fox elements will take hull-down positions in the valley mouth—"

The C&C display obligingly detailed firing positions west of the river for each of the eight combat cars.

"—and engage the enemy. Hit the calliopes first, troopers, and any vehicles that aren't running—but my guess is that with the panzers shooting them up they're going to have forgotten about us till we give 'em reason to remember. Six out."

Padova tilted her fans for greater forward thrust. Lieutenant Messeman's cars were passing through the X-Ray element, slewing from side to side in the wakes of the big vehicles. The terraces narrowed on the steeper slopes above the cataracts; the C&C box had set their course along the road in line ahead now that air defense was no longer the primary concern.

Huber hadn't taken the guns out of air defense mode, though, because there was still a chance that the Firelords would try to carry their enemies with them to Hell. A slim chance. They were all mercenaries; their war was a business, not a holy crusade.

Sensor suites gave the task force few details of what to expect in the plains below. At this distance electronic and sonic signatures couldn't pinpoint targets, and the cars didn't have a line of sight. Obviously Flasher had the enemy under direct observation, but the link between the tank unit and Highball was too marginal for complex data transmission.

There shouldn't be a big problem. The artillerymen were so busy getting out of the frying pan that they weren't going to worry about the fire.

Because of the angle, F-2's cars were in position before Fencing Master tore through the stunted nut trees on the upper slope. Messeman's gunners opened fire while Deseau screamed angry curses at Padova. She ignored him, swinging them with necessary caution around a spur of rock into the position the AI had chosen. Here they'd be sheltered from possible snipers higher up the hill.

The plains beyond were full of targets. After a volley into their rocket-laden trucks had put the Firelords off-balance, Flasher concentrated on the calliopes in firing positions on the lip of the escarpment. The multi-barreled 3-cm powerguns could be dangerous even to tanks at long range. Main gun bolts had blown all of the calliopes to shimmering vapor before the combat cars nosed over the rise, but there were enough other things to shoot at.

Huber swung his tribarrel onto a ten-wheeled truck trying to flee through a field of sorghum. He squeezed and watched his plasma snap in cyan brilliance across the bed loaded with bombardment rockets in five forward-slanting racks. Before the third bolt hit, the vehicle erupted into rolling orange fury, searing a black circle from the crops.

The Firelords had set up between the ridge and the lakeside, shielded from the task force. When the tanks began to rake them from the flank and rear, some of the hundreds of vehicles—not just rocket trucks but also the command, service, and transportation vehicles that an artillery regiment requires—tried to escape west along the lake's margin. Others—the truck Huber hit was one—had climbed out of the bowl and spread out across the fields.

Another volley of 20-cm bolts lashed the milling chaos, setting off further secondary explosions. The billowing flames and blast-flung debris curtained the survivors to some degree from the tanks fifty, eighty—maybe over a hundred kilometers distant, but the combat cars had good visibility.

Huber ripped a tank truck. It turned out to be a water purification vehicle, not a fuel tanker, but it gushed steam and began to burn anyway.

Three white flares burst over the center of the encampment. A man jumped onto the TOC, a cluster of sandbagged trailers, waving a towel—beige, but Huber understood—over his head. All around him was blazing wreckage, but apart from a few hits by 2-cm bolts the TOC had been spared. The Slammers had concentrated on targets that'd give the greatest value in terms of secondary explosions, and there was no lack of those in an artillery regiment.

"Enemy commander!" said a hoarse voice. Huber's AI noted that the fellow was broadcasting on several frequencies, desperately hoping that one would get through to the gunners shooting his troops like ducks in a barrel. "The Firelords surrender on standard terms. I repeat, we surrender on terms. Cease fire! Cease fire!"

"Highball, cease fire!" Huber repeated, and as he did so another volley of tank bolts lanced into the lakeside with fresh mushroomings of flame. Flasher couldn't pick up the radio signal—a truckload of exploding rockets had knocked down the transmitter masts—and the white flares could be easily overlooked in the general fiery destruction.

"Flasher Six!" Huber shouted, the AI switching his transmission to the ionization track system. "Cease fire! All Flasher units, cease fire! They're surrendering!"

Explosions continued to rumble in the plains below, but the ice-pick sharpness of plasma bolts no longer added to it. Even before they got Huber's warning, the Flasher gunners would've noticed that Highball had stopped firing. A blast had knocked the officer with the towel to his knees, but he kept his hand high and waving.

"Firelords, this is Slammers command," Huber said, responding on the highest of the frequencies the Firelords had used. He wasn't in command, of course, Flasher Six was, but the tanker couldn't communicate with the poor bastards down below. "We accept your parole. Hold in place until my superiors can make arrangements for your exchange. Ah, that may be several days. We will not, I repeat not, be halting at this location. Slammers over."

"Roger, Slammers," the enemy commander said, relief and weariness both evident in his voice. "We've got enough to occupy us here for longer than a few fucking days. Can you spare us medical personnel? Over."

"Negative, Firelords," Huber said. "I hope your next contract works out better for you. Slammers out."

He lifted off his commo helmet and closed his eyes, letting reaction wash over him. He was exhausted, not from physical exertion—though there'd been plenty of that, jolting around in the fighting compartment during the run—but from the adrenaline blazing in him as shells rained down and he could do nothing but watch and pray his equipment worked.

He settled the helmet back in place and said, "Booster," to activate the C&C box, "plot our course north from this location."

On the plains below, fuel and munitions continued to erupt. It didn't make Huber feel much better to realize that the destruction would've been just as bad if those rockets had landed on Task Force Huber instead of going off in their racks.

It was an hour short of full darkness, but stars showed around the eastern horizon; stars, and perhaps one or more of the planet's seven small moons. Sunset silhouetted the three grain elevators a kilometer to the west where monorail lines merged at a railhead. Timers had turned on the mercury vapor lights attached to the service catwalks as the task force arrived, but there was no sign of life in the huge structures or the houses at their base.

"Suppose we oughta do a little reconnaissance by fire, El-Tee?" Deseau said hopefully. He patted his tribarrel's receiver.

Padova and Learoyd slept on the ground beside Fencing Master. They hadn't strung the tarp, just spread it over the stubble as a ground cloth. The car's idling drive fans whispered a trooper's lullaby.

"Do I think you should use up another set of barrels just because you like to see things burn, Frenchie?" Huber said, smiling faintly. "No, I don't. We'll have plenty to shoot at for real in a few hours, don't worry."

A tribarrel across the perimeter snarled a short burst. Huber jerked his head around, following the line of fire to a flash in the distant sky.

"Highball, Fox Two-six," Lieutenant Messeman reported. "Air defense splashed an aircar, that's all. Out."

Probably civilians who hadn't gotten the word that a Slammers task force had driven into the heart of their country. Huber'd lost count of the number of aircars they'd shot down on this run; thirty-odd, he thought, but poppers always washed the past out of his mind. He needed the stimulant a lot more than he needed to remember what was over and done with, that was for sure.

The tracked excavator whined thunderously as it dug in the second of the six Hogs. The note of its cutting head dopplered up and down, its speed depending on the depth of the cut and the number of rocks in the soil.

The task force was carrying minimal supplies, so the excavator didn't have plasticizer to add to the earth it spewed in an arc forward of the cut. The berm would still stop small arms and shell fragments. If Battery Alpha needed more than that, the Colonel had lost his gamble and the troopers of Task Force Huber were probably dead meat.

Lieutenant Basingstoke, half a dozen of his people, and three techs from the recovery vehicle, stood beside the Hog whose starboard fans had cut out twice during the run. Sergeant Tranter had joined them. He wasn't in Maintenance any more, but neither was he a man to ignore a problem he could help with just because it'd stopped being his job.

Huber looked westward. Lights were on in the spaceport seven klicks away, backlighting the smooth hillcrest between it and Task Force Huber.

He could imagine the panic at Port Plattner, military and civilians reacting to the unexpected threat in as many ways as there were officials involved. They'd be trying to black out the facilities, not that it would make much difference to the Slammers' optics, but they hadn't yet succeeded. The port was designed to be illuminated for round-the-clock ship landings. Nobody'd planned for what to do when a hostile armored regiment drove a thousand kilometers to attack from all sides.

The sky continued to darken. Huber always felt particularly lonely at night; in daytime he could pretend almost any landscape was a part of Nieuw Friesland that he just hadn't seen before, but the stars were inescapably alien.

Grinning wryly at himself, he said, "Frenchie, hold the fort till I'm back. I'm going to talk to the redlegs."

Another thought struck him and he said, "Fox Two-six, this is Six. Join me and Rocker One-six. Out."

He lifted himself from the fighting compartment as Messeman responded with a laconic, "Roger."

The cutting head hummed to idle as the excavator backed up the ramp from the gun position it'd just dug. Waddling like a bulldog, it followed the sergeant from the engineer section as he walked backwards to guide it to the next pit. A Hog drove into the just-completed gun position and shut down its fans. The hull was below the original surface level, and the howitzer's barrel slanted up at twenty degreesto clear the berm.

Huber nodded to the munitions trucks loaded with 200-mm rockets. He said to Lieutenant Basingstoke, "I hope the engineers have time to dig those in too, Lieutenant. After watching what happened to the Firelords when their ammo started going off."

"If we begin firing at maximum rate . . ." Basingstoke said. He was a tall, hollow-cheeked man. His pale blond hair made him look older than he was, but Huber suspected he'd never really been young. "We'll expend all the ammunition we've carried in less than ten minutes. No doubt that will reduce the risk."

He smiled like a skull. Huber smiled back when he realized that the artillery officer had made a joke.

Lieutenant Messeman trotted over, looking back toward his cars and speaking into his commo helmet on the F-2 frequency. He turned and glared at Huber, not really angry but the sort of little man who generally sounded as though he was.

"Any word on when we'll be moving?" he demanded. "We are moving, aren't we? We're not going to have to nursemaid the artillery while the rest of the Regiment attacks?"

Basingstoke stiffened. Before he could speak—and they were all tired, but Blood and Martyrs, didn't Messeman have any sense at all?—Huber snapped, "We're going to leave the two combat cars which I determine to be sufficient for air defense, Lieutenant. That's one from each platoon. Personally, I expect to be thankful for all the artillery support we can get when we attack."

Messeman grimaced but shrugged. "Yeah, I'll leave Two-four. The patch we put on the plenum chamber after the breakout's starting to crack. They can use the time to weld it properly."

"Seven kilometers," Basingstoke said, glancing to the west. The crest showed up more sharply against the port lighting as the sky darkened. "That's closer to the target than I care to be, but—"

He gave the other officers another skull smile.

"—I've been glad to have the combat cars' company for as long as possible, and I realize that means following you to your attack positions."

Tranter crawled out of an access hatch in the Hog's plenum chamber. He was a big, red-haired man who moved so gracefully that you generally forgot that his right leg was a biomechanical replacement for the one severed when a tank fell off a jack.

"Got it, Lieutenant!" he called cheerfully to Basingstoke. "They pinched a cable when they replaced your Starboard Three, so when the nacelles're canted hard right you get a short. The wrenches'll have it rerouted in ten minutes."

"Three-eight'll be staying here with the Hogs, Sergeant," Huber said, looking over his shoulder. The combat cars faced outward around the artillery vehicles. The circuit was too open for defense against serious ground attack but admirably suited to stop incoming shells and possible Solace infiltrators. If the Waldheim Dragoons and the scattering of Militiamen and other mercenaries in Port Plattner mounted an attack before the Regiment was ready to strike, the cars' sensor suites would give Huber sufficient warning to change his dispositions.

"Roger," Tranter said, nodding. "Ah, El-Tee? Can I swap out Chisum on Three-eight for Stoddard on my car? Stoddard pukes every time he takes a popper, so he's pretty washed out after this run."

"Right, the cars here'll be in air defense mode unless a lot of wheels fall off," Huber said, frowning to hear that Stoddard couldn't take stimulants. That didn't handicap a trooper quite as badly as blindness would, but it wasn't something a platoon leader wanted to hear about a useful man. "Want me to . . . ?"

"I'll tell him," Tranter said, throwing Huber a brilliant smile again as he strode off to inform Chisum and Gabinus, Three-eight's commander. Tranter wore a slip-over shoe on his right foot to raise it to the height of the boot on his left, giving his leg movements an unbalanced look.

The excavator started on a fifth gun pit. Messeman watched a Hog slide into the one just completed with the delicacy required by tight quarters. He said, "Ah, Six? Will we be getting a view of the target before we go in?"

"What I've been told," Huber said, "is that they'll launch a commo and observation constellation just before we drop the hammer. They're estimating that the new satellites will survive two minutes, certainly no more than five. That's why they're saving it till everything's ready."

Messeman sighed. "Sure, makes sense," he said. "I like to tell my people what we're getting into, that's all."

"Tell them there's nobody on the planet as good as they are, Lieutenant," Huber said. His glance took in Lieutenant Basingstoke as well. "We proved that getting here. Tell them one more push and we'll be able to stand down."

Messeman and Basingstoke nodded agreement; Huber gave them a thumbs-up and headed back to Fencing Master.

It was true, as far as it went: one push and a stand-down.

If they survived.

And until the next time.

Automatic weapons had been firing from the port area at intervals ever since sunset three hours ago. Occasional tracers ricocheted high enough to be seen over the hills. Less often, a tribarrel flickered across the cloud bases like distant cyan lightning. That'd be another task force splashing an aircar or something equally insignificant . . . except for the poor bastards on the receiving end.

The alert signal at the upper left corner of Huber's faceshield was the first message he'd gotten from Central since the fire mission before they'd reached the Solace Highlands. He let out his breath in a gasp.

There might not have been a Central any more. Base Alpha might have fallen and the Solace forces begun mopping up the Slammers task force by task force, bringing to bear as much weight as they needed to crush each hard nut. Huber'd kept his fear below the surface of his mind, but it'd been there nonetheless.

"All units, prepare to receive orders and target information," said a voice as emotionless as the surf on a rocky shore. "Don't get ahead of your start times, and once you commit don't, I repeat do not, stop shooting until you're told to. Regiment One out."

The data dump started at once, progressing for thirty seconds instead of concluding instantaneously. Satellite reconnaissance was updating the information at the same time those satellites transmitted it to the Regiment's scattered elements. Port Plattner, an oval five kilometers by three, expanded on the Command and Control display. There'd been six warehouse complexes spaced about the perimeter when the satellites shut down thirty-six hours before; now there was a seventh beside the huge starship on northwest edge, twelve large temporary buildings with more under construction.

"Regiment One? That's Major Steuben," Deseau muttered, unusually worried for him. "Is he in fucking charge now?"

"Shut up, Frenchie," Huber snapped as he scrolled through the download. He was more irritated than he'd have been if a newbie like Padova had made the comment. Deseau should've known they didn't have enough data to guess what was going on. Steuben might be in command of Base Alpha because his White Mice were defending it, but that didn't mean the Colonel and Major Pritchard were casualties.

It didn't mean they weren't casualties, either.

"Right!" Huber muttered when he had the situation clear. At least it was clear enough that he knew staring at it longer wasn't going to change anything in a good way. "Red and Blue elements—"

F-2 and F-3 respectively, each with a squad of infantry in support.

"—will proceed to designated positions on the reverse slope—"

The download from Central set out the east side of the terminal building as the general objective for Highball's action elements, but Central hadn't known what strength Huber would have available for the attack. Huber's C&C box had broken the assignment into individual targets. Losing two cars and six infantry was probably better than Operations had calculated, though under normal circumstances twenty percent was a horrendous casualty rate.

"—and hold there till two-two-three-seven hours, when—"

Battery Alpha opened fire, loosing thunder and the long crackling lightning of sustainer motors as the missiles streaked west so low that they barely cleared the ridgeline. The Hogs rocked from the backblasts, slamming their skirts against the hard clay substrate.

"—we'll cross the crest and attack our objectives at forty kph. White element under Sergeant Marano—"

The remaining two combat cars and eleven infantry—some of whom were walking wounded only if they didn't have to walk very far.

"—remains here to provide security for the X-Ray element. Any questions? Over."

"Let's do it, El-Tee," Sergeant Nagano said. He raised his gauntleted left hand from Foghorn, the thumb up.

"Roger that," Huber said, after a ten-second pause to be sure that nobody had anything substantive to add. "Move out, troopers. Keep it slow till we're in position, and nobody crosses the start line till it's time. Six out."

Fencing Master started forward, barely ambling. The other cars—particularly Messeman's trio from the east arc of the circle—had farther to go to get into position. Padova wasn't letting eagerness make her screw up.

The bone-shaking roar of the rocket howitzers paused on a long snarl as the last of the six rounds in the ready magazines streaked westward. Another battery took up the bombardment as Basingstoke's Hogs cycled missiles from their storage magazines in the rear hull into their turrets to resume firing.

The Hogs were launching firecracker rounds, anti-personnel cargo shells designed to dump thousands of bomblets each. Powerguns from the port's air defenses stabbed the sky for several seconds, bursting all the incoming rounds before they could open over the target. Then one got through.

Huber knew what it was like on the ground—and what it would've been like for Task Force Huber if the Firelords had gotten lucky with their less-sophisticated equivalents. When the bomblets swept over the defenses as a sea of white fire, shrapnel would kill the crews and disable gun mechanisms. Then the next round—and the next twenty rounds—would get through.

The cars aligned themselves to the right of Fencing Master at twenty-meter intervals. The eighteen infantrymen were twenty meters behind, their skimmers bobbling in the wake of the cars. They looked hopelessly vulnerable to Huber, but he knew from conversations that most infantrymen regarded combat cars as big targets, and tanks as bigger targets yet. They'd come in handy for clearing the terminal building, if they got that far.

Padova raised her speed to ten kph but didn't accelerate further. Huber frowned with instinctive impatience, then understood. "Highball," he said, "we're timing—"

Padova was timing.

"—our approach so we'll reach our attack positions at exactly the time to go over the crest. That way we'll already have forward inertia instead of lifting from a halt. Six out, break."

His frown deepened as he continued, "Trooper Padova, using initiative is fine, but don't play games or you'll be playing them in another unit. Tell me what you're planning the next time, all right?"

"Sorry, sir," the driver said, sounding like she meant it. "I wasn't . . . sorry, it won't happen again."

The cars and skimmers passed to the south of the grain elevators and their clustered dwellings. Deseau looked back over his shoulder, his hand resting lightly on the butt of his 2-cm weapon. If a sniper or Solace artillery observer appeared among the buildings now, the forward tribarrel wouldn't bear on it.

Huber smiled wryly. Frenchie was an optimistic man, in his way.

A line of posts supported plastic netting and a top strand of barbed wire, fencing to keep pastured cattle from straying into the railhead. All six cars hit it within an eyeblink of one another, smashing the fence down with no more trouble than they took with the spiky bushes which dotted the cropped grassland on the other side. Huber had been ready to duck if the wire flew toward him, but instead it curled around the next post to the left.

Learoyd was singing, mostly under his breath so it didn't trip the intercom. Occasional phrases buzzed in Huber's ears: " . . . and best . . . lost sinners was slain. . . ."

Fencing Master accelerated smoothly despite the increasing slope. The fans were biting deeper, but their note didn't change because Padova matched her blade incidence flawlessly against the increased power she was dialing in. The cars were nearing the crest. On the other side, sparkling explosions backlit stubble and the thicket of brush which grew from exposed rocks where mowers couldn't reach.

A salvo from Battery Alpha shrieked overhead, so deafeningly close that Fencing Master shimmied. Huber's exposed skin prickled and he heard an abrasive snarl against his helmet. He didn't know whether he was feeling debris from the exhaust or grit swept up from the ground by the shells' passage. Deseau shouted in angry surprise, though there was no real harm done.

It would've been a bad time to cross the ridge ahead of orders, though. A really bad time.

"Highball . . ." Huber said, judging the time by Fencing Master's speed, not the clock he could call onto his faceshield if he wanted to.

"Execute!"

Battery Alpha's salvo of cargo shells opened just on the other side of the ridge. This close, the red flashes of the charges that expelled the contents were startlingly visible. The bomblets scattered on separate ballistic courses toward the terminal, detonating like so many thousand grenades just as the combat cars came over the rise. From where Huber watched, three kilometers away, the sea of glittering white radiance was beautiful.

His helmet gave him targets, first a calliope dug into the ground at the edge of the meters-thick concrete pad which supported starships as they landed and lifted off. Huber put a burst into it, his plasma glancing from the iridium gunbarrels but vaporizing the steel frame and trunnion. The gun was silent, its barrels already cooled to red heat: bomblets had killed its crew or driven it to cover.

Powerguns slashed the port's flat concrete expanse from all directions, tribarrels and the tanks' 20-cm main guns. Buildings, vehicles, and stacks of cargo on the immense concrete pad were burning.

There were over twenty starships on the pad. They weren't deliberate targets, but bolts splashed them with cyan highlights.

As Huber switched his aim to a wheeled vehicle racing away from the terminal, a last salvo struck the temporary buildings being erected next to the starship in the northwest. Nothing happened for a moment because instead of bomblets the rounds carried fuel-air warheads.

The delayed blast spilled air from Fencing Master's plenum chamber and slammed the car down hard. Huber shouted, instinctively afraid that he'd been flung out of the fighting compartment. He bashed his chest into the grips of his tribarrel. The clamshell armor saved his ribs, but he'd have bruises in the morning.

Padova got them under weigh again, straightening their course; the blast had slewed the car a quarter-turn clockwise while shock curtains deployed around the driver. A column of kinked black smoke rose from where the shells had landed.

The pad wasn't cratered: the explosive had spread in a thin smooth sheet before it went off, and concrete has great compression strength. The structures which had covered more than a thousand square meters of the pad were gone except for twisted fragments which had fallen back after the blast blew everything skyward. The starship, thick-hulled and weighing over 150,000 tonnes, appeared undamaged. The valves had been wrenched off the two open cargo hatches, however.

Huber found the truck he'd been aiming at; the shockwave had shoved it into the loading dock which extended from the back of the terminal building. He gave it a three-round burst from reflex, watching it burst into flames as his AI found him something more useful to shoot at.

Deseau and Learoyd were firing at gun positions on the roof of the terminal, though nothing moved there except the haze of smoke from the anti-personnel bomblets which had gone off seconds before. Instead of a nearby target, Huber's helmet targeted a line of vehicles on the northern edge of the pad. At least a company of the Waldheim Dragoons were using blast deflectors as breastworks against the Slammers attacking from that side. Tribarrels on the Waldheim APCs and 10-cm powerguns on their tanks stabbed the distant hills.

The walls now raised from the pad were meant to deflect a giant starship's full takeoff thrust skyward so it wouldn't knock down everything within a kilometer. The structures were sufficient to stop even a 20-cm bolt, but the cars approaching from southeast had a clear shot at the sheltering vehicles.

Huber set the target and brought up his sight's magnification. He was using light amplication rather than thermal viewing; the many fires dotting the port's flat expanse provided more than enough illumination. When his pipper centered on a tank's turret ring, he thumbed the trigger and let the stabilizer hold his bolts on target. The tank's own ammunition blew it up in a cyan flash.

Huber shifted to the next target over, an APC rocking in the shockwave of the tank's destruction. Before he could fire, a 20-cm bolt hit the lightly armored vehicle and sprayed molten blobs of it a hundred meters away.

Fencing Master continued to advance. The ten-story terminal building blocked Huber's line of sight to the Dragoons; his faceshield careted windows instead. He squeezed, slewing the tribarrel to help the car's forward motion draw his burst across the seventh floor from left to right. The rooms were dark till the bolts hit, but gulps of orange flame followed each cyan flash as plasma ignited the furnishings.

An equipment park on the southwest side of the pad had taken a pasting from incendiaries. Hundreds of vehicles were alight. Every so often one erupted with greater enthusiasm like a bubble rising in a caldera to scatter blazing rock high in the air. Eight combat cars skirted the park to the south, moving fast. Their tribarrels raked the back side of the terminal building.

At the beginning of the war, Solace had started building concrete-roofed dugouts at intervals around the perimeter of Port Plattner. The work had stopped when Solace command realized that the Outer States were barely capable of defense, and even those completed—three of them in the sector Central had assigned to Huber's troops—appeared to be unmanned.

Deseau and Learoyd had burned the firing slit of the southernmost to twice its original size. Now as Fencing Master swept around the squat structure, Learoyd depressed his tribarrel and fired a long burst down the entrance ramp at the back. The steel door gushed red sparks and ruptured inward, but there was no secondary explosion.

White flares popped from the roof of the terminal building. More flares followed from a dozen points across Port Plattner, including the northern perimeter where the Waldheim Dragoons had been fighting. "UC forces, we surrender!" a woman's voice cried. "Terminal control surrenders, by the Lord's mercy we surrender!"

She must have been using the port's starship communications system because her high-output transmission blanketed all frequencies. Every floor of the terminal building was ablaze, but those were merely administrative offices. The actual control room was in a sub-basement, armored against the chance of a starship crash.

Fencing Master turned left, away from the base of the terminal. Padova dropped the car twice onto the sodded lawn to scrub off inertia that wanted to carry them into the burning building. The other Highball cars were braking in roostertails of red sparks as their skirts skidded on concrete. The terminal was a tower of flame, lashing the ground with pulses of heat.

"Sir, what should I do!" Padova said. They were moving slowly south along the face of the building, crushing ornamental shrubs under their skirts. Foghorn and Fancy Pants followed, while Lieutenant Messeman's cars had halted on the other side of a wing-shaped entrance marquee which extended twenty meters from the front entrance.

"All Slammers units," a familiar voice growled. "This is Regiment Six, troopers. Cease fire unless you're fired on. Under no circumstances fire on the starships that'll start landing shortly. Hammer out."

Deseau tracked a man running across the pad to the left. He didn't shoot, but he was touching the trigger. Huber hooked a thumb to back him off, then said, "Highball, we'll laager a hundred meters back the way we came. Infantry in the center of the circle."

He looked at the plot the C&C box suggested, approved it, and concluded, "Six out."

That was far enough from the terminal building that they wouldn't broil, though Huber wanted to keep Highball reasonably close to its objective until somebody got around to ordering them to move. The Lord knew when that'd be, given what the Colonel and his staff had on their plate right now.

The eight vehicles crossing the pad from the west slowed as they approached the terminal. Huber's eyes narrowed: one was a command car, a high-sided box built on the chassis of a combat car to hold far more communications and display options than could be fitted into a C&C box. Mostly they were staff vehicles, though Huber knew a couple of line company commanders preferred them to combat cars.

The shooting had probably stopped, though it was hard to say because munitions continued to explode. That wouldn't end for days, not with the number of fires burning across the huge port. You could get killed just as dead when a truck blew up as you could by somebody aiming at you. . . . 

That reminded Huber of casualties. He checked the readout on his faceshield and saw to his pleased surprise that all the personnel were green—infantry included—except for a cross-hatched icon on Foghorn. "Three-one, what's your casualty?" he said.

"Six, the right gun blew back and burned Quincy both arms," Sergeant Nagano replied. "We got him sedated and covered in SpraySeal. He'll be all right, I guess, but he won't be much good in the field for a few months. Over."

"Highball Six," broke in another voice before Huber could reply, "this is Regiment Six. We're joining your laager but leaving you in local control. Out."

Huber felt a momentary jolt, but that was ingrained reflex; his conscious mind was far too exhausted to be concerned. "Roger, Six," he said. "Break. Highball, spread the laager to accommodate eight more cars. The command group's joining us. Highball Six out."

The eight vehicles with Colonel Hammer, five of them from K Company, idled toward Highball. The cars of Huber's original command reformed as the eastern half of circle instead of the complete circuit. Instead of steering Fencing Master straight to its new location and rotating the bow out, Padova drove the car sideways. She was bragging, but Huber was too wrung out to call her down for it.

"Guess they didn't have a walkover like we did," Deseau said as he gave the newcomers a professional once-over. Three of the combat cars had holes in their plenum chambers; one was shot up badly enough that its skirts dragged. It probably couldn't have kept up with the rest of the unit if they hadn't been crossing such a smooth, hard surface. "Nobody even shot at us that I saw."

"They shot at us, Frenchie," Learoyd said. He tapped the bulkhead beside him with the knife he was using to scrape his ejection port.

Huber leaned forward to look past the trooper. Three projectiles, each separated from the next by a hand's-breadth, had dimpled the iridium inward. The third was deep enough that the armor had started to crack.

"From the bunker when we got close," Learoyd explained; he sounded apologetic. "I guess I shouldn't've quit shooting when something blew up inside."

The impacts must've been audible in the next county, but Huber hadn't been aware of them, nor Deseau either it seemed. Aloud Huber said, "No harm done, Learoyd. Nobody'd guess their compartmentalization was that good, and it's not like there wasn't anything else needing attention."

The laager was complete with two meters between adjacent cars: tight, but giving them room to maneuver fast if something unexpected happened. The right wing gunner of the car next to Fencing Master raised his faceshield and shouted over the idling fans, "How's your leg, Lieutenant?"

"Sir!" Huber said. He'd expected Colonel Hammer to be in the command car. "Sir, my leg's fine, I guess, but I haven't been using it much except to stand on."

Huber's left leg ached like a wall was leaning on it, but the rest of his body wasn't much better. His skin itched and the slickness where his clamshell rubbed over his hipbones was either popped blisters or blood. In the morning, that might matter; right now, Arne Huber was alive and that was good enough.

Huber's AI pulsed a warning on his faceshield. The task force was still under combat conditions, and a pair of aircars were approaching from the northeast a thousand meters up. The cars' tribarrels weren't on air defense, and the AI thought maybe they ought to be.

"They got running lights on, El-Tee," Deseau said, swinging his gun onto the aircars manually. "They're not trying to sneak up on us, but maybe they're just too smart to try what wouldn't work."

"Put that gun on safe, trooper!" Colonel Hammer roared. Then he snapped his faceshield down and continued, "All Slammers units, do not shoot. Under no circumstances harm the incoming aircars. They're bringing Solace representatives to treat with us! Six out."

The aircars hovered a kilometer from the perimeter of Port Plattner. Hammer continued an animated conversation with someone on a push that didn't include Highball Six. After nearly a minute's discussion, the aircars mushed toward the laager together. The command car's rear door opened; Major Pritchard stepped out of the vehicle.

Colonel Hammer nodded approval and swung his legs over the coaming of his fighting compartment to stand on the plenum chamber. He looked at Huber, grinned, and said, "Come along with me, Lieutenant. We're going to take the surrender of the Republic of Solace.

The two squads of infantry tilted their skimmers on end and stacked them in groups of three between the combat cars of Highball section. Sergeant Tranter swung down a cooler from Fancy Pants since the infantry's supports were back with the Hogs.

The troopers looked more concerned with the Colonel and his operations officer in the center of the circle than they were with the crackling destruction that covered most of the near distance. They'd seen destruction more often than they'd been this close to the Colonel, after all.

The aircars hovered for a moment, then landed a hundred meters out from the laager. Hammer grimaced and snapped to Pritchard, "Get 'em in here, Major. Do they think we're going to walk over to them?"

Huber wasn't sure he could walk that far. His left leg had been numb till he dropped from the plenum chamber to the ground. That shock had seemed to drive a hot steel rod straight up from his heel to the hip joint. His knee didn't want to bend, and every time he moved the rod burned hotter.

Pritchard spoke into his commo helmet. He must have had a link to the aircars through his command vehicle, because after a moment they lifted and crawled toward the laager in ground effect. He smiled tightly to Hammer and Huber, saying, "The gentleman from Nonesuch was concerned that the terminal might fall in this direction. I assured him that the shell of a ferroconcrete building will remain standing after it's burned itself out."

His grin grew even harder. "I've got a lot of experience with that, of course. We all have."

"Right," said Hammer. "That's why they hire us." He glanced at Huber and added, "You've met Mister Lindeyar already, haven't you, Lieutenant?"

"Him?" said Huber, shocked out of his torpor. He wasn't sure he'd heard right; or if he had, that his brain hadn't taken a shock during the battle that was making him remember things that'd never happened. "There was a Lindeyar at Benjamin, but what's that got to do with Solace?"

A starship was dropping slowly. It was still at high altitude but the effort of supporting its mass in a controlled descent made it pulsingly noticeable. Hammer'd mentioned ships landing, so Huber supposed it part of the plan. Somebody's plan, and no concern for a line lieutenant.

"Sigmund Lindeyar is the Nonesuch representative for all of Plattner's World, not just to the United Cities," Major Pritchard said, sounding detached. "Quite an important man back home, I gather."

Hammer spat on the dirt at his feet. "Yeah," he said, releasing the catches on the right side of his clamshell. "And if you don't believe us, just ask Lindeyar himself."

The aircars landed again, this time a few meters short of the bows of the combat cars. The slick-finished limousines reflected the surging firelight like pools of oil; by contrast, Foghorn and Fancy Pants were hulking gray boulders, scarred by the ages.

The starship continued to drop, balanced on the repulsion of two self-generated electromagnetic fields. Violet corona discharges danced across the heavens, crackling and roaring. Huber glanced at it, then frowned as he looked higher in the sky. A second starship was descending, and he thought a third waited above the second.

"El-Tee, there's a couple more aircars coming up from the south," Deseau said over Fencing Master's intercom. "I don't guess there's a problem—they're responding with Regimental IFF—but I figured I'd mention it."

Huber nodded to Deseau. Learoyd had the receiver cover of the left wing tribarrel raised to adjust the feed mechanism. The crew of a CO's vehicle caught a lot of extra work, which bothered Huber. Neither Deseau nor Learoyd seemed to notice, let alone care.

And it wasn't like either one of them wanted to be platoon leader.

A group of military and civilian personnel were getting out of one of the aircars. Among them was an attractive—

Via! The attractive young woman was Daphne Priamedes, and the senior officer whom she'd bent to help to exit was her father, Colonel Apollonio Priamedes. Huber'd never expected to see either one of them again.

Lindeyar had arrived in the other vehicle, alone except for three bodyguards. Huber looked at him and smiled wryly. How many people have I killed in the last two days? And not one of them anybody I knew, let alone disliked.

"Colonel?" Huber said aloud. "There's two more aircars coming from the south. I guess you've already got that under control, but—"

"But you thought you'd make sure I had the information," Hammer said with an approving nod. "Right, I do."

He gestured to the southern sky. "That's the UC delegation," he said. "They're our principals on this contract so they need to be here."

The first starship settled onto the far end of the pad, close by the ship that had brought the Waldheim Dragoons. The new vessel was about the size of the one that had held an entire brigade of armored cavalry. Its sizzling discharge ceased, but the concrete continued to vibrate at a dense bass note.

Lindeyar straightened the fall of his jacket and strode into the laager past the combat cars. His bodyguards waited beyond the circle.

The civilians who'd arrived in the other vehicle huddled for a moment. The old man wearing a fur stole and cap of office directed a question at Colonel Priamedes with a peevish expression.

Priamedes snapped a reply and walked after Lindeyar, his daughter at his side. Daphne kept her face blank, but Huber could see from the way she held herself that she was ready to grab her father if his body failed him. Exchanging looks of indignation, the four civilians followed.

The two aircars coming from the south landed with a brusque lack of finesse; one even bounced. Huber leaned back slightly to get a better look between two vehicles of Lieutenant Messeman's platoon. He'd been right about what he thought he'd seen: the four civilians getting out of the aircars were members of the UC Senate whom he'd seen before when he was assigned to duties in Benjamin, but White Mice were driving and guarding them. Their battledress was as ragged as Huber's own, and one trooper's plastron had been seared down to the ceramic core.

The man in the fur cap glared at Hammer. "You sir!" he said. "I'm President Rihorta. Colonel Priamedes tells me you're the chief of these hirelings. May I ask why it's necessary to hold these discussions in such a, such a—"

At a loss for words, he waved a hand toward the chaos beyond. His sleeves were fur-trimmed also. As if on cue, a fuel tank in the vehicle park exploded, sending a bubble of orange fire skyward.

"—a place?"

"Well, Mr. President . . ." Hammer said, putting a hand under his breastplate to take some of its chafing weight off his shoulders. "If I needed a better reason than that I felt like it, I'd say because it'll convince you that you don't have any choice. I could burn all of Bezant down around your ears even easier than I took the spaceport that your survival depends on."

"Bezant is a civilian center, not a proper target of military operations," Colonel Priamedes said in a tight voice.

"Is it?" Hammer snapped at the Solace officer. "I could say the same about Benjamin, couldn't I?"

He waved his hand curtly. "But we're not here to discuss, gentlemen," he went on. "We already did all the discussing we needed to with those—"

He pointed to the bullet-gouged hull of the combat car he'd arrived in.

"—and with the Hogs. We're here to dictate the end of the war on such terms as seem good to our principals."

The UC senators walked between the combat cars with as much hesitation as the Solace delegation had shown. One of them was coughing. The air reeked of smoke and ozone, so familiar to Huber that he hadn't thought about it till he watched the civilians' grimaces and shallow breaths.

A woman of thirty wearing battledress of an unfamiliar pattern entered the laager with the UC civilians. She nodded to Hammer, then stood at Parade Rest and watched the by-play with eyes that were never still.

"Masters and mistresses," Hammer said. His tone was even, but Huber noticed he gripped his breastplate fiercely enough to mottle his knuckles. "You politicians probably know each other—"

The delegations exchanged wary glances, even faint nods. They had more in common with one another than they did with the soldiers and war material surrounding them.

"—and you know Mister Lindeyar—"

The Nonesuch official looked around the gathering, his face without expression.

"—but you may not know Mistress Dozier, who's the Bonding Authority representative with responsibilities for the contracts here on Plattner's World."

The woman in battledress said, "Good day. I'm here solely as an observer, of course. My organization has no interest in the negotiations between principals except to see that all parties adhere to the contracts which we oversee."

The second starship was in its final approach. Hammer raised his hand in bar. President Rihorta started speaking anyway, but the overwhelming CRACKLE CRACKLE CRACKLE penetrated even his self-absorption after a moment.

When the sound and dazzling corona died away, Sigmund Lindeyar said, "Rather than draw these proceedings out unnecessarily, I'm going to take charge now. Nonesuch has been subsidizing the mercenaries which the Outer States have hired for this conflict. In fact some eighty percent of the charges have come from our coffers—"

"What!" said President Rihorta. "But you've been insisting we raise port duties to upgrade the facilities!"

"You traitorous scum," Colonel Priamedes said in a quiet voice, stepping toward Lindeyar. Daphne tried to stop him. Huber placed himself in front of the Solace officer and held till weakness and Daphne's efforts forced Priamedes back.

His knees started to buckle. Huber caught him and shifted around to his right side, continuing to support Priamedes while Daphne held her father's other arm.

"I'm scarcely a traitor, Colonel," Lindeyar said with a chuckle. He fluffed the lapel of his jacket. "I've been quite successful in advancing the interests of my nation . . . which is Nonesuch, you will recall."

The UC delegates were whispering among themselves. Lindeyar fixed them with his cold eyes and said, "Now as for you gentlemen—"

The word was a sneer.

"—the first thing you need to know is that my government has withdrawn its financial support. I've already informed the Bonding Authority—"

Mistress Dozier nodded agreement.

"—that as of this moment, Nonesuch will no longer pay the wages of the mercenaries employed on Plattner's World. Therefore unless the UC and its local partners are capable of paying those charges by themselves, the war is over and all the mercenaries will go home immediately. Can you pay, gentlemen?"

The four UC senators gaped at Lindeyar. Senator Graciano said, "Good Lord, man, of course we can't. But why would we want to? We've won. This is what we've been hoping for all along!"

"Mister Lindeyar," Major Pritchard said, "there was discussion about transferring the contract of Hammer's Regiment to Nonesuch directly."

Lindeyar met the unspoken question with a wintry smile. "Was there?" he said. "Perhaps there was. In the event, however, my government has decided to depend on its national forces for defense of its new concession here on Plattner's World."

The third starship landed near the two which had arrived minutes before. Huber couldn't see the ships from where he stood, but while everyone waited for the roar to quiet he shifted the upper right quadrant of his faceshield to the view from an H Company tank on the north side of Port Plattner.

Hatches on the first ship began to open as soon as the third touched down. The crew had been waiting till that moment. As close as the vessels were to one another, there might have been danger if the first-landed had begun disembarking previously.

The first personnel out were ship's crewmen, adjusting the ramps with hydraulic jacks. Starship personnel were used to the agonizing disorientation of interstellar travel. They had the same splitting headaches, the same blurred vision, and the same nausea as those who travelled less often, but they'd learned to work through the pain.

The noise died away. As Huber cut his remote to return to Lindeyar's response, he saw huge tanks on caterpillar treads starting to roll out of the starship.

"That's right, you've won, gentlemen," Lindeyar said with dripping disdain. "Go home and tell your people about your victory. Celebrate!"

He swung his blond, handsome head about the circle like a wolf surveying the henhouse he's just entered. "As for you, Mister President and your fellows, our terms are simple: Port Plattner is now an extraterritorial division of the Polity of Nonesuch. Port controls and fees are no longer your concern. If you choose to argue the matter, then we'll take over the administration of all Solace."

He pointed his left arm to the north, fingers outstretched, though he didn't turn his head away from the Solace delegation. "There's a division of the Nonesuch National Guard on the ground already. We can bring more troops in if we have to, but given the condition of your forces that obviously won't be necessary. And if you're thinking of mercenaries—I'm afraid you've overextended your off-planet credit already. Now that you no longer hold Port Plattner, Solace is bankrupt. The money you've placed with the Bonding Authority will just cover repatriation of the units already contracted to you, and the Authority won't approve any further hires."

All eyes turned to Mistress Dozier. She shrugged and said without emphasis, "The Authority isn't in the business of making moral judgments. We're employed—"

Her face hardened.

"—by all parties, let me remind you, to enforce contracts, nothing more. Mister Lindeyar has correctly stated the situation insofar as the Bonding Authority is concerned."

Colonel Priamedes' head lolled on Huber's shoulder. "Papa?" Daphne whispered urgently.

Huber touched the colonel's throat with an index and middle finger; his pulse was strong. Priamedes hadn't recovered from the knocks he'd taken at Northern Star Farms, and the present events were simply more than his system could handle without shutting down.

Huber's leg didn't hurt any more; the adrenaline surging through him was the best medicine for pain. He didn't know how long he could keep this up, but for the time being he could do his job—whatever that job turned out to be. He eyed Sigmund Lindeyar without expression.

"I don't have to explain this to Colonel Hammer," Lindeyar said, "but for the rest of you I'll point out that any mercenary unit which works without a paid contract becomes an outlaw in the eyes of the Bonding Authority. Civilization can't survive with bands of mad dogs roving from planet to planet without rules."

Hammer began to laugh so hard that his loose breastplate flapped back and forth. He said, "Oh, what a principled gentleman you are, Master Lindeyar!" and then bent over again in another spasm of mirth.

"On behalf of the Colonel," Major Pritchard said as the delegates of both sides stared at Hammer in disbelief, "I can assure you that Hammer's Regiment is scrupulously careful to operate within the constraints of the Bonding Authority. We aren't vigilantes who imagine that it's our duty to impose justice. . . ."

Pritchard swept the politicians with a gaze as contemptuous as that of Lindeyar a few moments earlier. He went on, "And if we were, we'd be hard put to find an employer who could meet our standards, wouldn't we?"

Lindeyar seemed more disconcerted by Hammer's laughter than he might have been by anger. He looked at the bodyguards standing by the aircar he'd arrived in: all three had their hands in plain sight. When he followed their gaze back, he saw Deseau's tribarrel aimed at them. Frenchie grinned down and pointed his right index finger at Lindeyar's face like a pistol.

In a careful voice, Lindeyar said, "Of course, Colonel Hammer, your troops' performance on Plattner's World won't go unnoticed, particularly the brilliant stroke by which you captured the port here. I'm sure you'll have no difficulty finding employment in the near future."

Hammer straightened. The laughter was gone; he gave Lindeyar a look of cold appraisal.

"I worry about a lot of things, Mr. Lindeyar," he said. "It's my job to worry; I'm in charge. But I've never had to worry about somebody hiring us. My Slammers are the best there is, and the whole universe knew it before we came here to Plattner's World."

Lindeyar nodded, licking his lips. "Yes, of course," he said. He cleared his throat before going on, "Since there's no need to conclude the formalities at this moment, I'll be off to other matters which require my attention. President Rihorta, I'll be in touch with you regarding the wording of your government's concession of Port Plattner."

He backed away from the circle, smiling fitfully each time his eyes met those of one of the Slammers. His hip bumped Foghorn's skirt; he turned with a shocked expression, then walked at an increasing pace to his aircar.

Colonel Priamedes was able to support his own weight again. Huber released him and stepped aside, though Daphne kept hold of her father's other arm.

"I guess you people have things you'd better be about as well," Hammer said, surveying the delegations. All the civilians seemed to be on the verge of collapse; Priamedes, whose difficulties were merely physical, had gotten his color back and now stood straight. "Go on and do them."

He focused on Senator Graciano. "You and I'll talk regarding financial arrangements tomorrow. Mistress Dozier, you'll be present?"

"Yes, of course," the Bonding Authority representative said.

Lindeyar's aircar lifted and curved toward the ships disgorging a Nonesuch armored division. Huber'd left his 2-cm weapon in Fencing Master, so all he had was the pistol on his equipment belt. He'd never been much good with a pistol; but if he fired in the direction of the aircar, Frenchie would swat it out of the air in blazing fragments.

That'd be a violation of the contract, of course. The Colonel would have him executed immediately as the only way to prevent the Regiment from being outlawed and disbanded.

We're not in the business of dispensing justice. . . .  

The delegations started moving away toward their own vehicles. Daphne Priamedes said, "It's over for us, now—Solace and the Outer States as well now that Nonesuch has the port. 'Woe to the conquered.' That's how it's always been."

Arne Huber thought about Sergeant Jellicoe, about Flame Farter's two crewmen and all the other troopers he'd lost here on Plattner's World. He watched the aircar landing among the disembarking Nonesuch soldiers and said aloud, "Yeah, I suppose. But it's not just to the conquered, sometimes."

* * *Γ Γ Γ

Arne Huber stood on the berm against which Fencing Master nestled bow-on, surveying the landscape. It'd been a field of spring wheat before the engineers gouged Firebase One out of it two days ago and moved a third of the Regiment's combat elements into it.

Huber hadn't been a farmer; he'd seen no magic in the original flat expanse of green shoots stretching to the hills ten kilometers away. He was willing to grant that it'd been more attractive than this scraped yellow wasteland, though.

Deseau crawled carefully out of the plenum chamber. He was a small man, but battle and the hard run had left him stiff. You could hurt yourself on sharp, rusty metal when your muscles don't work the way you expect them to. He stepped away from the access port before he dusted his trousers with his hands; Padova followed him out. He grinned at Huber and said, "Funny to be on Plattner's World and not be skating in mud, ain't it, El-Tee?"

A dirigible slinging three pallets of howitzer ammunition was crawling upwind to the cargo pad. The big airships didn't overfly the firebase: they dropped their loads outside the berm, from where trucks with troopers driving hauled the material the short remainder of the way.

"Hadn't really thought about it, Frenchie," Huber said. His eyes were on the dirigible, but he wasn't really thinking about that either. "I can't say I like the dust here in the highlands a lot better."

"Hey, Learoyd?" Deseau called to the trooper in the fighting compartment. "Slide into the front, will you, and run up Port Two?"

Learoyd didn't work in the plenum chamber unless he had to. He was too big for the hatches even when he was fit, and now his right arm was in a surface cast to keep him from rubbing off the medication that the Medicomp had applied when things settled down enough for the support equipment and personnel to arrive from Base Alpha. A fresh set of barrels for the 2-cm automatics had arrived, so Learoyd was working on the tribarrels while the other crewmen realigned the nacelle that'd taken a knock from the dense rootball of a tree Fencing Master had driven over.

"I'll do it," said Padova, mounting the bow with a hop and a grab for the first handhold on the hull proper. Rita'd settled in during the run and the three days of quiet following Port Plattner; now she was a member of Fencing Master's crew, not just a skilled driver.

"Any word about when we might be moving out, El-Tee?" Deseau asked, shielding his eyes with his hand as he looked up at Huber. "I mean, we're off the clock, right? Paying for our own time."

A dotted line of dirigibles stretched to the southern horizon: Huber could see at least a dozen airships at once. There'd been a solid stream of airships transferring supplies and material from the UC ever since the Regiment pulled twenty kilometers back and set up three firebases equidistant from Port Plattner. They'd leave in a single giant transport from Port Plattner rather than in dribs and drabs from makeshift starports in the UC, so Huber supposed it made sense. Not that anybody cared what he thought.

"So far as anybody's told me, Frenchie," he said, "we're going to stay here till we've all grown long white beards. I don't expect that's what'll happen, but your guess is as good as mine."

Padova switched on the portside fans and ran them up together. Huber cocked his head, listening with a critical ear for any imbalance in the harmonics. So far as he could tell, the nacelles were tuned as sweetly as if they'd just been blueprinted in the factory.

"El-Tee?" called Learoyd. He pointed to Fencing Master's port wing gun, slewing incrementally under the control of gunnery computer. "There's something coming."

Huber looked south again, noticing this time that two enclosed aircars were approaching fast below the dirigibles. His eyes narrowed: the cars' IFF must have been responding correctly or else the tribarrels on air defense would've shot them out of the sky a minute ago, but the drivers were taking a chance anyway. Even with the war over . . . 

"Hey, what d'ye have?" Deseau said. He couldn't see what was happening from ground level, but he'd noticed Learoyd's and Huber's interest. Instead of immediately jumping onto the plenum chamber to see for himself, he first latched the access port closed so that Fencing Master would be able to maneuver again.

The aircars came over the berm twenty meters up, braking to a hover with a slickness that showed the drivers were expert. They set down in front of the TOC, between two of Battery Alpha's dug-in howitzers; dust skittered, dancing away to the west.

Huber jumped from the berm to the plenum chamber, his boots clanging. He climbed into the fighting compartment just as Deseau did; both men reflexively checked their tribarrels. Learoyd locked down the third barrel on his gun and slipped the adjustment wrench into its pouch on his belt.

"What d'ye think, El-Tee?" Deseau asked. "Did that bastard Lindeyar have second thoughts about terminating our contract?"

"None of them are Lindeyar," Learoyd said. "They're the other politicians' cars."

Fencing Master's tribarrels couldn't bear on the aircars because they were straight behind them, and anyway you didn't point a gun across a firebase unless you wanted to lose your rank. Frenchie was holding his 2-cm weapon in the crook of his arm, and Learoyd unclipped his sub-machine gun from the bracket on the inside of the armor.

The limousines' doors opened. Huber recognized Senator Graciano and his three colleagues, and the woman in battledress getting out of the front was Mistress Dozier. From the other aircar came President Rihorta and another member of the Solace delegation. The man accompanying those two was a stranger.

Aloud Huber said, "I don't know who the tall guy is. He's off-planet, that's for sure. I've never seen a hat like that—"

It was more of a turban; the stranger donned and adjusted it carefully before proceeding with the others toward the ramp down to the TOC.

"—on Plattner's World before."

"That's the Colonel waiting in the entrance for 'em," Deseau said. "I swear it is!"

"What do we do now, El-Tee?" Learoyd said. He knew the situation'd changed. He wasn't worried, just looking for direction from somebody smarter than he was.

"We wait for orders, trooper," Huber said. He pursed his lips, then added, "And while we're waiting, I think we've got room here to stow another case of tribarrel ammo. Let's see if the quartermaster can help us out."

Huber's mind registered motion—a streak of light across the purple-black sky. He opened his mouth to shout a warning over the squadron net, then realized it was a shooting star rather than incoming artillery.

Padova stood on the plenum chamber where she could quickly slide down the driver's hatch. She looked into the fighting compartment and shook her head. "How can Frenchie sleep?" she muttered.

"I'm on watch, Rita," Learoyd said. "Why shouldn't he sleep? The El-Tee's awake too."

He blinked. "And you."

"Frenchie's been here a lot of times, Rita," Huber said, using that formation instead of, "Frenchie's a veteran," which the driver might find insulting. "As soon as there's a reason, he'll be up and doing his job."

He grinned with a kind of affection he felt only because he and Deseau were part of the same family. "Besides, if the job's killing, Frenchie could do that without waking up."

Padova'd seen the elephant by now, that was for sure; but there was a difference between one hard run punctuated by firefights and the bone-deep awareness that this might be the last chance to sleep for days or longer. Frenchie's body understood that sleeping curled up on the floor of the fighting compartment was best present use of his time.

"You think it's going to be fighting again, don't you?" Padova said angrily. "But who? The only people who could hire us is Nonesuch, and who would they need us to fight? They've got a fucking division on the ground, we saw them land it!"

"We're going to fight Nonesuch, Rita," Learoyd said calmly. He withdrew the loading tube from his back-up sub-machine gun, wiped it with an oily cloth, and clicked it home in the receiver again. "We're going to take the port back."

"And who the bloody hell is paying us to attack Nonesuch!" the driver snarled, balling her fists in frustration. "Are we going outlaw, is that what you mean?"

"I don't know who's paying us," Learoyd said, bending to check the bearing in the pintle supporting his tribarrel. "But there's nobody else to fight here, so we're fighting Nonesuch."

He shrugged. "The El-Tee knows we're getting ready to fight, we all know that. So it has to be Nonesuch."

Huber looked at Learoyd's round, placid face; as calm as a custard, reddened as usual by sun and wind. None of them understood how the Regiment could be going into battle again on Plattner's World. Learoyd was the only one who wasn't bothered by ignorance: he didn't expect to understand things.

"Yeah, Bert's right," Huber said. "Curst if I know how or why, but I can't say I'm sorry. I didn't like Lindeyar when I first met him, and he hasn't improved with time."

Padova hugged herself in frustration. "If we're really going to fight," she said, looking in the direction of the TOC, "why hasn't Central signaled us to stand to?"

"Do you see anybody in the base who isn't at his action station?" Huber said. "An alert might warn other people. Everybody's waiting for it, even Frenchie. Especially Frenchie."

He brought up the F-3 stats again on the C&C display. They were still at four cars. Sergeant Bielsky was bringing a repaired vehicle up from Benjamin, but he wouldn't arrive for thirty hours. The four cars of the present complement had shaken down during the run and attack, even Gabinus' Three-eight—which now had Flamingo Girl painted in fluorescent blue on both sides of the fighting compartment. All the guns had been rebarreled, all the fans were running within seventy percent of optimum, and each car had a full crew.

He glanced at Learoyd, his right arm in a stiff bend though the hand was free to grip with. Replacements had flown up from the UC in aircars, but there was no way in hell that Deseau—the car commander—or Huber wanted to go into battle with a trooper they didn't know in place of Learoyd with one arm. There were a couple more wounded crewmen in F-3 for the same reason; it wasn't ideal, but . . . 

Huber chuckled.

"Sir?" Padova said, frowning at what she didn't understand.

"Kind of an old joke," he said. "If everything was ideal, nobody'd be hiring mercenaries, would they?"

He chuckled again; and as he did so, the alert signal pulsed red. Sergeant Deseau was on his feet, reaching for his tribarrel's grips before his eyes could focus.

Colonel Hammer's voice rasped in their commo helmets, "Troopers, the United Cities and Republic of Solace in combination have hired us to wrest control of Port Plattner from the foreign invaders now holding it. Normally I don't discuss the financial details of the Regiment's contracts, but in this particular case I'll mention that our payment is guaranteed by a consortium of planets which in the past have purchased about half the Thalderol base produced on Plattner's World. They seem to feel it wouldn't be to their benefit if Nonesuch controlled access to the product."

Deseau whooped and clapped his hands. Padova had already dropped into the driver's compartment. Huber switched the C&C box to display the download that would shortly arrive from Central.

"Your assignments are on the way," Hammer continued. "Artillery prep will begin in three minutes, and the action elements will begin moving out of the firebases at the same time. Don't get overeager—we want plenty of time for the shells to soften 'em up. For this operation we won't enable the lockout on our guns. I'd rather take the risk of being shot by a friendly than having a software glitch keep me from nailing a hostile because there's a friendly on the other side of him. But remember, the terrain is dead flat and your gun'll shoot any bloody thing that you aim at."

The Hogs of Battery Alpha elevated their launch tubes. They faced outward in a clock pattern centered on the TOC; now their turrets rotated so that the whole battery was aligned to the northwest, the direction of Port Plattner.

"I don't want any of you to think this'll be easy," Hammer continued. "They've got a hundred and fifty tanks and their other vehicles mount tribarrels too. It doesn't matter how slow and clumsy they are, because they aren't coming to us—we have to go to them. But troopers—we've faced worse. Get out there now and help me show people what happens when you try to cheat the Slammers! Six out."

The satellites were up again; some satellites, anyhow. The download had full real-time coverage of the port. Approaches, lines of sight, threats and targets—the initial targets being the threats, of course—shimmered onto the holographic display in standard color overlays, as familiar to Huber as the grips of his tribarrel.

Four Nonesuch tanks moved in echelon to join the twelve parked in front of the smoldering terminal building. Each was built around a centerline 25-cm powergun. Though the big weapons could only be adjusted a few degrees in azimuth, their bolts were powerful enough to penetrate even the thick plating of a starship.

A line of dun-colored space-frame tents, sandbagged to the concrete, stood beside the vehicles. More tents—thousands of them—dotted the edges of the pad, most of them serving the infantry riding APCs. The latter, tracked like the tanks, had iridium armor and mounted a tribarrel in a one-man cupola.

Nonesuch fatigue parties worked on the perimeter bunkers without heavy equipment. Soldiers were mixing concrete in hand troughs. Huber wondered whether Lindeyar and his cronies had tried to buy construction mixers from Solace and been refused, or if this was merely a stopgap until dedicated support units arrived aboard later vessels.

Three ships, even such large ones, were barely enough to carry a division; the Nonesuch planners had concentrated wholly on combat personnel and equipment, accepting discomfort and inefficiency in order to frighten their possible opponents into quiescence. So far as the Solace Militia went, that may have been a good plan. . . . 

"Fox, this is Fox Six," Captain Gillig said. Her voice had a pleasant alto lilt even when she was giving battle orders. "Fox Three will trail on the approach, but we'll attack with all platoons in line. There's a tank company in our sector, but the panzers'll deal with it while we hit targets of opportunity. With a division to choose from, there shouldn't be any lack of those."

Deseau turned to Huber and said, "Hey, El-Tee? I couldn't believe that bastard Lindeyar was going to get away with shafting us. Could you?"

Huber thought for a moment. Given the delays in star travel, this coalition must have taken weeks or even months to put together. Hammer must have started planning it almost as soon as the Regiment arrived on Plattner's World.

"I did believe it, Frenchie," he said. "But that's all right—I'm just a line lieutenant. So long as I do my job, I can leave the rest to the Colonel."

The Hogs lit the night with flaring backblasts, beginning to shower 200-mm missiles on the enemy. The roar shook the ground. Moving as smoothly as water swirling down a drain, 1^st Squadron's tanks and combat cars slid from the firebase, advancing toward Port Plattner twenty klicks away.

"Target!" said a machine voice in Huber's ear as Fencing Master led the rest of F-3 out of the angled passage through the berm. His faceshield gave him a vector.

So far as Huber could tell, the careted point on the crest ten kilometers distant was a few meters of brush and low trees, no different from everything for a klick to either side, but you didn't argue when Central told you to shoot. He laid his tribarrel on, careful not to overcorrect as the stabilizer fought with the combat car's motion, and dialed up magnification as the sight picture slewed toward the target. Huber was using a false-color infrared display, so the caret was a black wedge thrusting down from the top of the image.

He actually saw them in the instant his thumbs squeezed: three soldiers wearing drapes that almost erased their thermal signature, pointing a passive observation device toward Firebase One. They'd remained hidden till now, so they must have just attempted to send information back to Port Plattner.

Huber grinned with fierce pride that the hiss/CRACK! of his tribarrel's first round preceded the sound of Fencing Master's other two guns by a fraction of a second. He didn't often beat Frenchie and Learoyd to the punch, and neither did anybody else.

The eleven tanks of D Company—two more, deadlined for repairs but able to shoot, remained behind in the firebase for defense—had been first through the berm and were deploying across the wheat in line abreast. Colonel Hammer's combat car and that of the S-3—Huber wondered whether Major Pritchard was in it, as he certainly would choose to be, or if he'd been forced to remain in the TOC to coordinate the attack—followed, taking the right of the tanks along with two five-car platoons of G Company; the remaining platoon and the command cars of Regimental HQ Section remained behind as base defense. Captain Gillig and the sergeant major were next out, followed by F-1, F-2, and finally F-3.

The engineers had sited the firebase on a low rise, so Fencing Master in the entrance was slightly above the vehicles already spreading out to the northwest. Central tasked Huber and his crew because they had the best line on the target. Huber'd chafed to wait for everybody else to get under weigh before his cars did, but it'd worked out after all.

There's a lot of chance in life and especially in battle. Arne Huber just happened to be in the right place at the right time to send a burst of plasma bolts snapping straight as a plumb line into what till that instant was three enemy soldiers. His faceshield blocked their cyan core, but dazzle reflecting from the landscape quivered across his retinas.

Huber's first round hit the observation device, probably a high-resolution thermal imager. It contained enough metal to erupt into a blaze of white and green sparks. After that it was hard to say who hit what, because the three tribarrels put ten or a dozen rounds apiece into the target.

Huber switched his gunsight back to its normal seven-point-five-degree field. The freshly-lit fire on the ridgeline was only a quiver at this distance. In the magnified image Huber had seen an arm fly from an exploding torso and white-hot fragments blasted from the granite outcrop behind the scouts.

His gunbarrels shimmered, sinking back from yellow heat. The cluster continued to spin, pulling air through the open breeches to cool the bores.

Padova followed the course Captain Gillig's C&C box had programed. She didn't ask about the shooting. Huber supposed she was scared—as the good Lord knew he was himself—but she'd shaken down just fine. She'd be driving Fencing Master until she got a promotion, which at the rate she was going wouldn't be long.

F-3 followed two hundred meters behind the first and second platoons on the left flank, a reserve not only for Fox Company but for the whole squadron. Despite satellite coverage and the Regiment's sensor suites, there was always risk of an attack from some direction other than straight ahead. Huber's cars stayed back to deal with it.

"Good to burn in our guns like that," Deseau said as his cluster stopped rotating. "A few rounds to make sure the barrels're seated and there's no cracks in the castings."

Cyan bolts streaked up from the northwest horizon, ending in yellow flashes made ragged by the smoke of the explosions. Despite the decoy missiles of the first salvos, the Nonesuch defenses—over eight hundred tribarrels on the APCs and tanks—were shooting down the firecracker rounds that followed. The Nonesuch command hadn't been caught napping, more's the pity. . . . 

The lead combat cars began firing. Flashes and the sparkling detonations of sub-munitions bloomed on the other side of the high ground separating 1^st Squadron from the port. At least one Nonesuch artillery battery was firing on the attackers, a much faster response than Huber had expected from planetary forces which probably had no experience of real warfare. The shells didn't get through, but if the Nonesuch tankers were as good as their artillerymen this was going to be a very long night for the Slammers.

A long night, or a short one.

Much brighter cyan flashes lit the night: the tanks of Dog Company punched the ridgeline five klicks away with their main guns. Their thunder echoed across the fields.

Huber checked the C&C display, then said, "Fox Three, there was a Nonesuch infantry company picketed on the reverse slope. They moved into position and the panzers are taking care of them. Three-six out."

One of the eight Nonesuch APCs opened fire before it had reached the crest. The bolts of its tribarrels streaked five hundred meters over the Slammers in a rising slant. When the APC advanced high enough that its gun might have been able to bear on the attackers, the tank which had been waiting for a target fired. A brilliant secondary explosion lifted skyward a divot of soil and wood-chips.

Moments later, a bum! bum! bum! directly overhead made Huber twist to look up. Cargo shells from Battery Alpha had opened at low altitude, sending fingers of smoke toward the ridgeline. Their thousands of anti-personnel bomblets hit to carpet the target with lingering white flashes, scouring the hasty positions of Nonesuch infantry who'd dismounted before their APCs tried to engage.

Dirty smoke hung over half a kilometer of the hilltop. Huber could penetrate it with thermal imaging, but there was nothing to see except bare rock and the pulped remnants of the trees and shrubs that had grown there moments before. The enemy troops and their equipment had vanished except for the continuing sizzle of a battery pack shorting through commo gear, forming a hotspot on the image.

"Nothing for us there," Deseau said cheerfully. He patted his tribarrel's receiver. "Well, we'll have our chance yet tonight, I figure."

"Fox Three, this is Fox Six," Captain Gillig ordered. "Move up on the left flank of Fox One, keeping ten meter intervals between vehicles. We'll take firing positions below the crest. Six out."

Huber tensed as his faceshield flashed warnings. Chuckling, he relaxed. The squadron had torn through the fence separating the wheatfield from the pasture on the rougher terrain to the north. Wire flew up in springy coils around the vehicles, and the tug jerked the posts out of the ground in front of F-3. The motion was the same quick flicker men would make leaping to cover.

The northern sky quivered as with heat lightning. "Hoo-boy!" Deseau said. "Some a' them firecracker rounds are landing where they ought to. I tell you, with a division of 'em down there, I don't mind a bit a' help from the cannon cockers."

"We get paid the same if we get shot at or if we don't, Frenchie," Padova said. Her voice sounded artificially bright, but Fencing Master slid as if on rails to where it belonged on the left flank of the Squadron. "I'd just as soon get easy money."

Deseau laughed. Huber glanced at him, then looked away. Frenchie wasn't suicidal: he figured the risks that came with the job were plenty bad enough without doing crazy stuff. But when Frenchie had a chance to kill, the fact he might die didn't concern him.

Fencing Master started up the final rise, tearing through three-meter shrubs with as little difficulty as it'd had with the wheat. Huber glanced back. Plenum chamber pressures compressed and deformed the loose earth of the plowed fields. Each of the vehicles had left a trench the full width of its skirts with a mound of soil and young shoots to either side.

Huber kept most of his attention on the Command and Control display. His cars were in the same condition as when they left the firebase, fully ready for battle if not for a rear-area inspection. The rest of the squadron was in similar shape, though a Golf Company car had lost a pair of fans and lagged behind on the slope. Sometimes bad luck was the only kind of luck there was; but if the car had been in Huber's platoon, tomorrow its sergeant/commander would be proving the problem wasn't because of a maintenance failure.

If the sergeant/commander survived, of course. And if Huber did.

Three shells from the Nonesuch battery burst several klicks back, sending spouts of black earth into the sky. Air defense hadn't bothered with them since they were no more danger to the Slammers than they were to the guns which'd fired them.

"Fox Three, this is Three-six," Huber said, glad to have good news to point out to his troopers a few seconds before they jumped into a tough one. "The hostiles are shooting where we used to be, so they don't have us under direct observation. When we reach our firing positions, we're going to get the first shot. If we can't kick their asses then, Via! we don't belong in this line of work! Six—"

Because of the way the ridge curved, Fencing Master pushed through the brush into a clear view of Port Plattner a heartbeat before the rest of the squadron did. Huber already had his tribarrel aimed at a predicted location even before his faceshield gave him real targets.

He squeezed the butterfly trigger as he shouted, "—out!" to his platoon.

A company of ten Nonesuch APCs had left the pad and was driving toward the ridge at the best speed turbine engines could move their caterpillar tracks. Their side armor, though thinner than that of the combat cars, was iridium, but hatches on the roofs of their troop compartments were thrown back so that the infantry in back could use their personal weapons.

Huber depressed his tribarrel and raked the hatches. Nonesuch troops carried powerguns; the blue-green flash of their stored ammunition melted the APC's frame from the inside so that the bow tilted upward. Fuel cells on the underside blew a circle of orange flames around the glowing wreckage.

Tanks and combat cars were firing all along the ridgeline. Though Huber couldn't have seen most of the Slammers' vehicles even if he'd taken the time to look to his side, streams of cyan plasma from their tribarrels and the tanks' stunning, world-searing flashes stabbed downward into easily visible targets.

The tanks were in hull-down positions where the firecracker rounds had scraped and sculpted the ground in erasing the Nonesuch picket. They shot as quickly as their gunners could work the foot-trips of their main guns, aiming at the company of Nonesuch tanks below. A 20-cm bolt hit massive frontal armor, rocking the target back on its treads in blinding coruscance.

To Huber's half-conscious horror, the centerline 25-cm gun shot back despite the Slammer's direct hit. The bolt gouged the hillside at least fifty meters from the nearest target, but the fact the tank fired at all was amazing.

A second bolt from the same Slammers tank struck where the armor glowed pulsingly white from the first. This time the glacis failed. The 25-cm magazine detonated, scooping the hull empty. The thick shell remained as a white-hot monument.

Huber swung his gun onto a company of buttoned-up APCs moving slantwise left to right in two echelons. They were several kilometers away, still on the concrete, when Huber hit the nearest vehicle in the lead row. Its side armor blew inward under the hammer of his 2-cm bolts. As the rest of the line drew ahead, Huber shifted his aim slightly onto the next APC and slashed it open the same way.

Huber steadied on the third APC, but as he did so the four second echelon vehicles opened fire on Fencing Master with their cupola tribarrels. One of them walked his burst up the sod, then splashed two bolts on Fencing Master's bow slope and a third into the armor of the fighting compartment.

The combat car rocked at each impact. Huber's helmet deadened the clangs, but the jolts transmitted through the floor of the compartment buckled his knees. Before the Nonesuch gunner could finish the job, Deseau raked the APCs' cupolas, dismounting their tribarrels in rainbow brilliance.

Huber's third target exploded in a mushroom of crimson flame. As he hammered through the cab of the fourth and last, he saw Deseau's and Learoyd's guns crossing his burst to slaughter the soldiers bailing out of the vehicles Frenchie had disarmed.

The infantry weren't much of a threat now even if they got clear, but Huber shifted his own fire onto a car that his troopers hadn't hit yet. Body parts flew up at his lash before a secondary explosion finished the job in a saffron fireball.

Despite the filters over Huber's nostrils, Fencing Master stank of ozone and the vile slickness of burned metal. Vaporized iridium had burned the side of his neck, and his seared left sleeve stuck to his elbow. Blood and Martyrs, that was close! 

Fencing Master jumped again. We're hit! but it wasn't incoming: a strip of the automatic defense array at the top of the skirts had gone off, sending a load of small osmium slugs out toward the left front. They met the anti-tank missile homing on the combat car.

The warhead detonated partially in a red flash. Bits of the debris sprayed Fencing Master. The concussion staggered Huber and a chunk of the rocket motor whanged the hull, but that was a cheap price. If the round'd hit squarely, the jet from its shaped charge would've gutted Fencing Master like a trout.

A 25-cm bolt hit close by, vaporizing a combat car forward of the rear bulkhead. A cloud of glowing iridium shimmered through all the colors of the spectrum, turning the ridgeline as bright as noon in Hell.

"Shall I back up? Shall I back us up?" Padova shouted into the intercom. Fencing Master lifted, quivering on plenum chamber pressure instead of resting its skirts firmly on the ground.

"Set us down!" Huber shouted, swinging his gun onto the pair of Nonesuch tanks sheltering at the side of a starship like tortoises in the lee of a high cliff. His tribarrel floated on a frictionless magnetic bearing, but inertia made slewing it a deliberate business. "Give us a solid—"

He had his target, not the glacis that could resist a tank's main gun nor the treads which a tribarrel could weld, immobilizing the huge vehicle without affecting its firepower. Huber aimed at the bore of the main gun, the 25-cm tunnel glowing from the bolt with which it had turned a combat car and its crew into fiery gases.

"—platform!"

Fencing Master thudded back to the ground as Huber's thumbs squeezed, but the stabilizer was locked on. His stream of blue-green bolts flared and sparkled against the tank's muzzle, its gun tube, and the mantle which covered the glacis opening.

A 25-cm bolt put such stresses on the bore that the guns' rate of fire was necessarily low, no more than two rounds per minute. Huber'd laid his tribarrel on the first tank nonetheless because that gunner'd proved he had the Slammers' elevation. Even the centerline gun's limited traverse would be sufficient to sweep six or eight vehicles to either side of the one it'd destroyed.

It was a calculated gamble, though, because the other tank was able to fire now. When a vivid cyan flash enveloped it, instinct told Huber this was a bolt which might blast Fencing Master and its crew to dissociated atoms.

The Nonesuch tank hadn't fired. A pair of 20-cm bolts had hit it simultaneously, lighting the concrete field with a rainbow bubble similar to what the combat car had become a moment before. Huber's faceshield blacked out almost totally. He kept his thumbs on the trigger, burning out his bores as he slashed his own massive target.

His faceshield cleared except for the streams from Fencing Master's three tribarrels and the smudge of reflection where they hammered together into the Nonesuch tank. Then the tank and the world vanished again.

The protective black curtain cleared seconds later as the shockwave reached the ridgeline. The roof of the tank's fighting compartment toppled back toward the chassis which had been cleaned of its contents like a raccoon-licked clamshell. The tank's gunner had chambered another round. 2-cm bolts glancing down the bore from Fencing Master had detonated it before the breech was fully locked.

Focused on his gunsight, Huber hadn't heard the freight-train roar of 200-mm rockets passing low overhead, nor the plop plop plop of small charges ejecting sub-munitions from the carrier shells. The Nonesuch air defenses had been able to stop most of the incoming while it was simply them against the Hogs, but when the Slammers' vehicles appeared on the ridgeline the Nonesuch tribarrels were switched to direct fire. There was nothing to stop salvos from the batteries surrounding Port Plattner.

Each shell's twelve sub-munitions went off between twenty and forty meters above the ground, a yellow flash and a rag of smoke as the explosive charge forged a plate of uranium into a white-hot spike and drove it downward toward the Nonesuch vehicle its sensors had chosen. The Hogs were firing anti-tank shells, not firecracker rounds that barely scratched the paint of armored vehicles.

The self-forging fragments shattered the Nonesuch defenses already bruised by powerguns firing from the high ground surrounding the port. They punched through roof plating, relatively thin even on the tanks. Inside, the friction-heated uranium turned into balls of flame enveloping everything in the penetrated compartment. Hundreds of Nonesuch vehicles vanished into simultaneous blow-torch flames: fuel, flesh and munitions, all pulverized, all burning at the temperature of a star's surface.

Two more salvos popped in the air and raged on the ground. The thunderclaps of detonations died away, though some of the burning vehicles screamed as they lit the night with jets of fire.

Huber's gun had jammed, but nobody in 1^st Squadron was shooting any more. There were cyan flickers on the pad's northern perimeter, but that might have been guns continuing to fire as they melted into the vehicles on which they were mounted.

"Cease fire!" Colonel Hammer rasped. "All Slammers units, cease fire! Nonesuch representatives on the starships have offered their surrender. Cease fire, troopers, it's over!"

Huber took his hands from the grips of his weapon. The barrel cluster continued to spin, a white blur that made the air throb as it threw off heat. Huber had a multi-tool in his belt pouch, but when he reached for it to clear the jam he realized that his fingers didn't want to close properly.

Deseau's tribarrel had jammed also. He held his backup 2-cm weapon, but he wasn't shooting into the thousands of helpless human targets sprawling and staggering on the concrete below. The hell-strewn carnage was enough even for Frenchie.

Learoyd took off his commo helmet to rub his bald scalp with his left hand. The skin of his chin and throat below the faceshield's protection was black where iridium vaporized from his gun bores had redeposited itself. He looked older than Huber had ever seen him before.

"Fox Three-six to Fox Three," Huber said in a voice that caught at every syllable. "Good work, troopers. Nobody ever commanded a better unit than I did tonight."

He swallowed and added the words that almost hadn't gotten past his swollen throat. "Three-six out."

Then, because his head throbbed and any constriction was an agony he couldn't bear for the moment, Huber took off his helmet. He regretted the decision immediately with the first breath he took of the unfiltered atmosphere.

He turned and vomited over the side of the fighting compartment. No matter how often he encountered it, the smell of burned human flesh always turned Arne Huber's stomach.

"Hey El-Tee!" said Deseau, standing with Padova on the plenum chamber to brace the replacement plate while Learoyd applied the cold weld. "That black-haired piece you met the first time the wogs threw in the towel? She's coming to see you."

"He's not an el-tee any more, Frenchie," Learoyd said, laying his bead along the seam as evenly as the fully-mechanized factory operation which put Fencing Master together to begin with. "He's a captain now."

Huber looked over his shoulder in the direction of Frenchie's gaze. He wasn't sure how Daphne Priamedes would take to being called a "black-haired piece," but it was accurate given Deseau's frame of reference. The other part, though . . . 

Huber got up from the empty ten-liter coolant drum he was using as a seat while he worked at the Command and Control box. He wiped his hands on his utility blouse—newly-issued three days before and still clean enough—and said quietly, "I met her in Benjamin, Frenchie, back when I was in Operations."

"Captain Huber?" Daphne called from the ground. "I hope you don't mind my coming to offer you lunch. The orderly said that you have an office but that you usually worked in your combat car."

Huber shut down the display. "Glad to see you, Daphne," he said as he swung himself, left leg first, over the side of the fighting compartment. "I could use a break, but I don't know about lunch. Maybe . . ."

He paused as he slid to the ground, careful to take the shock on his right boot. He'd been going to say, " . . .  the canteen," but the facilities here at Base Beta consisted of a plastic prefab with extruded furniture and dispensers for a basic range of products. Bezant was only twelve klicks away, so there was no need for the Regiment itself to provide off-duty troops with anything impressive.

Daphne flashed a smile of cool triumph. "I thought you might say that," she said, "so I've brought a cooler in the car. I thought we'd fly to a grove where we could find some quiet."

Huber looked down at his uniform. He hadn't been doing much manual labor—well, much—but he'd have wanted to change before an interview with Hammer; or with Joachim Steuben, now that he thought about it.

Daphne repeated the cool smile. "Come along, Arne," she said. "The trees won't care any more than I do. I left my aircar by the TOC."

She crooked her elbow for him to take and started off. Base Beta was an expansion of Firebase One, no prettier than it'd been before Engineer Section trebled its area to hold all three squadrons. As he passed Fancy Pants, Huber saw Tranter looking out of an access port and said, "Hold the fort for an hour, Sarge. If anybody really needs me, I've got my commo helmet."

"Roger that, sir," Tranter said cheerfully. He was holding a multi-tool and a pair of pliers, doing technician's work and pleased at the chance.

"Hey El-Tee?" Deseau shouted from Fencing Master, loudly enough that half the camp could hear him. "If there's any left that you don't need, remember me'n Learoyd."

Daphne appeared not to notice the comment, unless the faint smile was her response.

Huber cleared his throat, taking stock of the situation. Daphne was wearing a pants suit, simply cut and of sturdy—but probably expensive—material. It would've been proper garb if Huber'd decided to put on his dress uniform and take her to one of the top restaurants in Bezant, but it wasn't out of place in a firebase either.

Well, he'd never doubted that she was smart.

A starship lifted, its corona shiveringly bright even in broad daylight. The rumble of shoving such a mass skyward trembled through Huber's bootsoles, though the airborne sound was distance-muted and slow to arrive.

Huber nodded toward the rising vessel and said, "This time they're repatriating the other mercenary units before they terminate our contract. It'll probably take a while to find so much shipping."

"Yes, but the amount of trade Port Plattner carried before the war is simplifying the problem," Daphne said. They'd reached her car, parked on the concertina-wired pad under the guns of an A Company combat car. The Colonel and the staff he'd brought with him on the run north were sharing space in the trailers with the squadron commanders. That must've been tight, though Huber had his own problems. Tents beside the buried trailers provided overflow for activities that nobody would care about if the shooting started again.

"As for continuing to pay your hire until all the other forces are off-planet . . ." Daphne continued in a wry, possibly amused, tone. "That was a condition Colonel Hammer set on agreeing to allow us to employ the Slammers. Though I think that after seeing the mistake Nonesuch made, we would have decided to find the money whether or not it was a contract term."

The sergeant in charge of the White Mice at the aircar pad spoke to one of her troopers, who swung open the bar wrapped in razor ribbon. Huber noticed the sergeant's arm was in a surface cast, then recognized her as the commander of the resupply aircars. He nodded and said, "I'm glad you came through all right, Sergeant."

"Same to you, Captain," she said, surprised and obviously pleased at his notice. "And congratulations on your promotion."

They stepped into the fenced area. Daphne's limousine was as much of a contrast to the battered utility vehicles as she herself was to the several contract drivers resting in what shade they could find.

"I haven't congratulated you on your promotion, Arne," she said. She opened the door, then bent to touch the switch which slid the hardtop in three sections down into the seatback. "I'm very glad things worked out for you."

Does she know what she's saying? Huber wondered; but maybe she did. Various things Daphne'd said showed that she was far enough up in the government of Solace that she could probably learn anything she wanted to.

"Yeah," he said, getting into the front passenger seat. "The Colonel offered me an infantry company before we headed north, but I wouldn't have known what I was doing. I'm glad I waited."

Waited for a 25-cm bolt to turn Captain Gillig, a good officer and a first-rate bridge player, into a cloud of dissociated atoms. A bolt that could just as easily have hit fifty meters south and done the same thing to Lieutenant Arne Huber and his crew. There were religious people—some of them troopers—who believed everything happened by plan, and maybe they were right. Huber himself, though, couldn't imagine a plan that balanced details so minute and decided that tonight a particular lieutenant would be promoted instead of being ionized. . . . 

Daphne ran her fans up to speed, then adjusted blade angle to lift the car off the ground in a jackrabbit start. Huber remembered that on pavement she'd been more sedate; she was outrunning the cloud of dust her fans raised from the scraped, sun-burned, clay.

"To be honest," she said, her attention apparently focused on her instruments and the eastern horizon, "I thought you might already have looked me up now that the war's over."

Huber didn't speak for a moment. He had thought about it. He'd decided that she wouldn't be interested; that she wouldn't have time; and that anyway, he flat didn't have the energy to get involved in anything more than a business transaction which cost about three Frisian thalers at the going rate of exchange.

Aloud he said, "Daphne, I just got promoted to command of Fox Company. I'm trying to integrate new personnel and equipment as well as repair what we can."

What remained of Captain Gillig's Fantom Lady would stand, probably forever, on the crest where it'd been hit. The eight fan nacelles hadn't been damaged, so Maintenance had stripped them off the hulk.

Relatives of the crew would be told their loved ones were buried on Plattner's World. That was mostly true, except for the atoms that other 1^st Squadron troopers had inhaled.

Huber laughed. "No rest for the wicked, you know."

Daphne looked at him with unexpected sharpness. "Don't say that," she said. "You're not wicked. You saved our planet. Saved us from ourselves, if you want to know the truth!"

Did you have friends working in the terminal building when I shot it up, honey? Did you have a cousin paying his vehicle taxes when we blasted the police post at Millhouse Crossing? Other people did! 

"Ma'am," said Huber, speaking very slowly and distinctly because this mattered to him. "I appreciate what you're saying, but don't kid yourself. If there's such a thing as wicked, then some of what I do qualifies. Some of what I've done on Plattner's World."

"I don't think you appreciate how true that is of other people too, Arne," Daphne said. She looked at him steadily, then put a hand on his thigh and squeezed before returning her attention to the horizon and steering yoke.

Well, that answered a question which, despite Deseau's certainty, had remained open in Huber's mind. Frenchie didn't have much to do with women like Daphne Priamedes.

He grinned. Neither did Arne Huber, if it came to that.

"The alliance of nations on Plattner's World which hired your Regiment," Daphne said, switching subjects with the grace of a mirror trick, "will continue to operate the port as a common facility rather than a part of Solace. We'll be raising the price of Moss and of Thalderol base to pay for port renovations."

She looked at Huber and grinned coldly.

"Which will be extensive, as you might imagine."

"Yeah," Huber said, "I can."

Just clearing wrecked equipment would be a bitch of a job: the melted hull of a two-hundred-tonne tank wasn't going to move easily, and thousands of plasma bolts had not only scarred the surface but also shattered the concrete deep into the pad's interior. The terminal building was gone, and the guidance pods which humped at regular intervals across the pad were scarred by shrapnel from the firecracker rounds if they hadn't been blasted by stray powergun bolts.

"Your backers are agreeing to the price rise?" Huber said. "The planets who funded us the second time, I mean."

"Their rates will go up ten percent," Daphne said primly. "They're quite comfortable with that. The rate to Nonesuch will go up thirty percent."

She looked at Huber and added, "I suppose you're surprised that we don't refuse to sell Thalderol base to Nonesuch regardless of the price?"

"No ma'am," Huber said, fighting to control his grin. What a question to ask a mercenary soldier! "I'm not surprised. I'd say it was a good plan to keep Nonesuch from getting so desperate that they'd try a rematch despite all."

Daphne smiled wryly. "Yes," she said, "I suppose it is at that, though I don't believe anyone was thinking in those terms when we came to the decision. We just wanted to set the rate at the maximum we thought they'd pay. We need the money rather badly, you see."

They both laughed; the tension of moments before was gone and nothing was hiding in the background so far as Huber could tell. Well, no conflict, anyway.

The aircar was five hundred meters above the ground, mushing along at about eighty kph. They'd flown beyond the wheat fields; below was pasture in which large roan cattle wandered in loose herds. Brush and small trees grew in swales, green against the rusty color of the grass at this season. Fencelines occasionally glinted from one horizon to the other, but there were kilometers between tracts.

Huber took off his commo helmet and set it in the compartment behind him. He probably wasn't going to be back in the hour he'd told Tranter, and that was all right too.

"A nice day," he said, stretching in his seat before he put an arm over Daphne's shoulders.

"Yes," she said, setting the aircar's autopilot as she leaned toward Huber. "A nice day for normal things instead of with guns and destruction."

They kissed, wriggling closer in their bucket seats.

In his mind, Port Plattner blazed with plasma bolts and the rich, red light of burning tents. But for me, Huber thought as he raised his hand to her breast, guns and destruction are what's normal.