David Drake: The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Coke was in dress khakis with rank tabs and the blue edging to the epaulets that indicated his specialty was infantry. He wore no medal or campaign ribbons whatsoever, but over his left breast pocket was a tiny lion rampant on a field of red enamel.

The lion marked the men who’d served with Hammer’s Slammers before the regiment was subsumed into the Frisian Defense Forces. Its lonely splendor against the khaki meant that, like most of the other Slammers veterans, Coke figured that when you’d said you were in the Slammers, you’d said everything that mattered.

Considering that, the clerk realized that Major Coke might not be quite as normal as he looked.

“Face the lens, please, sir,” the clerk said as she inserted the ID card into a slot on her side of the cage. Electronics chittered, validating the card and comparing Coke’s retinal patterns with those contained in the embedded chip.

A soft chime indicated approval. Coke eased from the stiff posture with which he had faced the comparator lens. He continued to smile faintly, but the emotions the clerk read on his face were sadness and resignation.

“Just a moment,” the clerk said. “The printer has to warm up, but—”

As she spoke, a sheet of hardcopy purred from the dispenser on Coke’s side of the cage. Coke read the rigid film upside down as it appeared instead of waiting for the print cycle to finish so that he could clip the document.

His face blanked; then he began to laugh. The captain at the next cage glanced at him, then away. The clerk waited, hoping Coke would explain the situation but unwilling to press him.

Coke tapped the cutter, then tossed the sheet across the counter to the clerk. “It says my new assignment is Category Ten Forty-seven,” he said as the clerk scanned the document. “That’s survey team, isn’t it?”

The clerk nodded. “Yessir,” she said. “You’ll be assessing potential customers for field force deployments.”

She didn’t understand Major Coke’s laughter. “Isn’t this what you were expecting, sir?” she asked as she slid back the hardcopy.

“What I was expecting …” Coke explained, “ …after the way I screwed up my last assignment on Auerstadt …”

He was smiling like a skull, as broadly and with as little humor.

“ …was that they’d fire my ass. But I guess the Assessment Board decided I couldn’t get into much trouble on a survey team.”

He began to laugh again. Despite the obvious relief in Coke’s voice, the sound of his laughter chilled the clerk.

There was a party going on in the extensive quarters of General the Marquis Bradkopf, National Army commander of Fortress Auerstadt. Next door in the Tactical Operations Center, Major Matthew Coke of the Frisian Defense Forces was trying to do his job—and General Bradkopf’s job—through a real-time link to the pair of combat cars in ambush position thirty kilometers away.

The combat cars were named Mother Love and The Facts of Life. They and their crews were Frisians; and the sergeants commanding them were, like Coke, former members of Hammer’s Slammers, the mercenary regiment whose ruthless skill had transformed Colonel Hammer into Alois Hammer, President of Nieuw Friesland.

“We’re getting major movement into Hamlet 3, sir,” said Fourfour—Sergeant-Commander Dubose in Mother Love, stationed for the moment on a dike south of the three hamlets called Parcotch for administrative purposes. “Nearly a hundred just from the direction of Auerstadt. Most of them are carrying weapons, too.”

The three clerks in the TOC with Coke were National Army enlisted personnel, two women and a male who looked fifteen years old. They were chattering in a corner of the open bullpen. One of the women had brought in a series of holovision cubes of Deiting, the planetary capital, where she’d gone on leave with her boyfriend, a transport driver.

There was a National Army officer listed as Commander of the Watch, but whoever it was hadn’t put in an appearance this evening. In all likelihood, the fellow was at General Bradkopf’s party.

That was fine with Coke. The best a National officer could do was to keep out of the way of the advisor hired from the Frisian Defense Forces.

Though all the raw data was provided by the combat cars, processing by the base unit in the TOC added several layers of enhancement to what the troops on the ground could see. Coke checked the statistical analysis in a sidebar of his holographic display and said, “There’s a hundred and seventeen up the Auerstadt Road. They’re all armed, and ninety percent of them are in spatter-camouflage uniforms.”

“Bloody hell,” said Sergeant-Commander Lennox from The Facts of Life. “We’ve got regulars from the Association of Barons? Then it’s really going to blow!”

“And Four-Two has spotted another eighty-four coming down from Hamlet 1 and points north,” Coke continued, watching his split-screen display. “The only thing I can imagine from an assembly this large is that they’re planning to attack the fortress itself in a night or two.”

Two companies, even of fully equipped regulars, weren’t a threat to a base the size of Fortress Auerstadt; but Parcotch was only one village of the ninety or a hundred within comparable distance of the base.

The direct views from sensors in the combat cars filled the lower right and left quadrants of Coke’s display. The top half of the screen looked down at an apparent thirty degrees on a panorama extrapolated from the separate inputs and combined with map data.

Mother Love was a klick to the south and east of Hamlet 3. The Facts of Life was within 500 meters of the hamlet’s west edge, and that was the problem. Lennox’s vehicle was only 500 meters east of Hamlet 2 as well, where the incoming troops had parked a launching trailer full of short-range guided weapons.

The combat cars were in perfect position to do a number on the enemy concentration in Hamlet 3, but Coke wasn’t willing to put Lennox between two fires.

“Any chance the Nationals might send us some support?” Sergeant Dubose said wistfully.

“Any chance the tooth fairy is making a run by your car tonight?” Sergeant Lennox retorted tartly. She was a lanky woman who shaved her head and was just as tough as she looked. “Sir,” she continued, “let’s do it. If we rip this one, the locals’ll get their heads out of the sand.”

“Not in your present location, Four-Two,” Coke said. “If they salvo the full load of missiles, there’s no way you’re going to survive. Particularly with whatever’s happening in Three.”

“Sir, look,” Lennox said. “The personnel are going to be in Three with the others, getting a pep talk or whatever the hell they’re doing. The launcher’s no threat!”

“We don’t—” Coke started to say.

A mortar fired just outside the TOC.

“Hold one!” Coke shouted, spinning from the console and grabbing the sub-machine gun he’d slung over the back of his chair. The National Army clerks jumped up also. They’d been frightened by Coke’s reaction rather than the mortar’s flash and hollow CHUG! through the TOC’s doorway. The vacationer’s glittering holoviews spilled onto the floor.

Cheers and laughter from outside the TOC told Coke there was no danger. The shell popped thousands of meters in the air, casting harsh magnesium light across Fortress Auerstadt. General the Marquis Bradkopf was using parachute flares to provide fireworks for his party.

Which suggested a way out of Coke’s immediate problem.

In theory, Coke’s console was linked to the National Army net. Rather than go through the complicated handshake procedures, however, Coke turned to the rack system at the adjacent bay.