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

No one else was touching a gun. Jaffe’s disemboweled body thrashed, but he was as dead as the headless Captain Wilcken. Everything was safe—

Except that General the Marquis Bradkopf vomited blood onto the concrete floor, then pitched facedown into the bright pool.

The hilt of a narrow-bladed dagger projected from his back. Bradkopf’s youthful mistress stared fixedly at the weapon. There was blood on her little finger and the heel of her right hand. Her tongue dabbed at it.

“Bloody hell,” Coke whispered. He didn’t shoot the girl, the third of the assassins. At this point, it wouldn’t do any good.

“Four-Two to Six,” Sergeant Lennox reported gleefully. “We’ve done all there is to do here, boss, so we’re heading back to the barn. Out!”

Bradkopf’s sightless eyes stared toward the split display of the carnage achieved by the troops who, by his orders, should have been guarding his own person. In that professionally significant aspect, Coke’s gamble hadn’t paid off after all.

Limping slightly, Lieutenant Mary Margulies entered the orderly room for the first time in seven months.

“Hey, El-Tee,” called Kerry, the 305th Military Police Detachment’s first sergeant. “Good to see you. You look like you’re getting around okay.”

Margulies grimaced. “Twinges, that’s all,” she said, “but the bastard medics put me on a profile anyhow. I’m being transferred out, Top. Stuck behind a desk, I suppose.”

She was a stocky woman whose black hair was her only affectation. She’d removed padding from her commo helmet so that she could coil a longer braid when she was on duty. As a platoon leader in a war zone, she had been on duty virtually all the time, awake or sleeping, until a routine convoy escort went sour.

“Ah …” said Kerry. “You suppose? You got a copy of the actual orders, didn’t you?”

“Oh, I got them all right,” Margulies said with a wan smile. “Long enough to see I was being transferred back to Camp Able. Then I threw the chip and reader right through the window. I don’t belong on Nieuw Friesland. Curst if I don’t think I’ll put in my resignation if that’s what they want from me.”

She nodded toward the detachment commander’s door. “The Old Man in?”

“Ah …” Sergeant Kerry said. “No, Major Yates had an Orders Group at Tannahill Command this morning. Ah …”

Margulies smiled harshly. “Go on, Top, say it if that’s what you’re thinking. A crip like me shouldn’t be in the field where she could get good people killed because she’s hobbling around.”

“No sir,” Sergeant Kerry said. “Hell no, sir. What I meant—and I know that nobody but the recipient reads assignment orders until the recipient’s signed off on them—”

Margulies laughed, this time with genuine good humor. “Top, you’ve got seventeen years in the FDF and the Slammers before them. Let’s take it as read that you knew my orders before I did, all right?”

Kerry grinned. “For the sake of argument …” he said.

His fingers touched keys on his desk; the integral printer hummed. “I guess there’s no harm in me giving you a hardcopy replacement of the assignment orders you lost, is there?” he said.

A flimsy spooled out of the printer slot. Kerry tore off the document and handed it to the lieutenant without looking at the contents. “I think you’ll find,” he continued, “that Camp Able on Nieuw Friesland is just a transit stop, where you’ll join your new unit. You’ve been assigned as security to a survey team, El-Tee. You’re not supposed to be in combat; but if things were peaceful, a survey team wouldn’t be there trolling for business.”

“Well I’ll be hanged,” Margulies said, reading the data through for the first time. “I was so scared they were going to stick me at a desk that I …”

Kerry affectionately scratched the corner molding of his desk as though the piece of furniture were a living creature. “Different strokes, El-Tee,” he murmured. “Personally, I don’t find I miss getting shot at in the least.”

“Well, I’ll be hanged,” Margulies repeated with changed emphasis. “Do you know where this survey team—”

She blinked. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, sure you know where we’re going.”

“Cantilucca,” Kerry said, returning the smile. “I looked it up. West Bumfuck is more like.”

His lips pursed in sudden concern. His fingers started to summon Margulies’ personnel data, then realized doing so now couldn’t help the situation. “Ah—don’t tell me you come from Cantilucca, El-Tee?” he added.

“Not me,” said Margulies with a broad grin. “But I know somebody who does ….”

“Sarge …” Lieutenant Mary Margulies said as Angel Tijuca slid their two-seat air-cushion jeep between a pair of road trains. The huge vehicles had accelerated slowly, but they were maintaining 50 kph now and there was just enough clearance to spare the jeep’s paint. “If you don’t take it easy, you’re not going to survive the last three days of your enlistment.”

Margulies didn’t sound concerned. Her eyes continued to search the roadsides instead of glaring at her driver.

Angel laughed infectiously. “Now, Missie Mary,” he said. “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar. And anyway, it’s not three days, it’s two and a wake-up.”

In public Sergeant Tijuca was never less than deferential to his superior officer, but he and Margulies had gone through a lot in the year he’d been driving her. Angel was ending his enlistment in the Frisian Defense Forces, and Margulies was curst sorry to see him go.

“Only if you survive,” Margulies remarked, but she wasn’t serious. Angel’s willingness to take chances was just as important a reason for her keeping him as her permanent driver as his skill at the joystick was.

Angel accelerated to 60 kph. The jeep passed along the right side of the road trains at an increment that was slightly faster than a man could walk.

The convoy consisted of ten articulated road trains, each of which had three track-laying segments with a driver in the lead cab. There was a gun tub crewed by Brigantian troops on the center segment of each individual train, but the convoy’s real security was provided by the four combat cars manned by Frisian military police under Lieutenant Margulies’ command.

The war was over, but the fighting might not stop for years. Brigantian regiments, spearheaded by armored companies of Frisian mercenaries, had swept across Tannahill’s Beta Continent. The armies of the continent’s local population, mostly Muslims of South Indian descent, had been smashed if they stood and run down if they retreated.

The guerrillas, supported by the local communities even when they weren’t actually members of those communities, were a more difficult problem. They were controllable, at least for as long as the Brigantians of Alpha Continent could afford to pay their Frisian mercenaries, but Margulies suspected it would be decades if not generations before the locals accepted Brigantian domination.

That was somebody else’s worry. Margulies had a convoy to take through eighty klicks of—literally—Indian Country.

“Yes sir,” Angel said. “Inside a week and a half, I figure, I’ll be back on Cantilucca with a forty-hectare gage farm of my own. Three more days here. Three days objective to Delos, that’s the cluster’s port of entry. Maybe a day to get transport from there to Cantilucca, another day’s transit, and bam! I’m home, with a discharge bonus in my pocket. How long can it take then to buy some land, hey?”

Tijuca began to whistle a flamenco tune. Margulies smiled at his enthusiasm. She noticed that despite the sergeant’s air of heedless relaxation, every time they overhauled a road train his eyes flicked left. He was checking through the gaps between vehicles to see what was happening along the far treeline.