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

Combat engineers had defoliated, then burned off, strips a hundred meters wide along either edge of the road. Ash flew out from beneath the jeep’s skirts. It merged with the yellow dust which the trains’ cleats raised from the gravel road surface. The breeze was slightly from the right, so for the moment the jeep was clear. Tijuca kept them ten meters out in the burned zone—comfortable, but by that amount the closest vehicle to the enemy if the guerrillas decided to start something.

“Take us back across between the second and first trucks,” Margulies said. “I don’t believe in giving anybody long enough to compute the lead on a full-deflection shot.”

“Your wish is my command,” Angel said. He goosed the fans, let the jeep settle into its new, higher speed, and angled the vehicle sideways across the line of heavy trucks. It was an expert job, as difficult as threading a needle blindfolded.

“My command is your command,” Margulies grumbled. Her commo helmet slapped nose filters in place automatically, but she tasted the chalky dust on her tongue.

She wished that a battery of Frisian howitzers rather than Brigantian artillery was providing call fire for the run. Brigantian artillery was reasonably accurate, but Margulies didn’t trust the indigs to react as fast as Frisian hogs would if anything blew.

The chance of an ambush was less than one in ten, but Margulies’ platoon had provided security on this run fourteen times already.

“You ought to come to Cantilucca, Missie,” Angel said, throttling back to 60 kph. “You’d love it. With a tract of top gage land—”

“Sarge,” Margulies said, “I’m a city girl, born right smack in the center of Batavia. I wouldn’t know which end of a hoe to use, and I don’t even like gage. Alcohol works just fine for me.”

When they crossed the road, Margulies hunched higher in the seat to view the left treeline over her driver’s head. Angel watched the potential danger area also, navigating with his peripheral vision. A sub-machine gun was clamped beside his seat. Though it was ready for use, it didn’t interfere with his driving the way a slung weapon would have done.

“Huh!” Angel said. “The only thing you can get from booze that you can’t from gage is a hangover. The good stuff—the pure stuff, we’re not talking about refinery tailings, sure—there’s no side effects at all. You just go to sleep when you come down. Why would anybody want booze over gage?”

“Because if something pops, I can deal with it if I’m hung over and I can’t if I’m in a gage coma,” Margulies said tartly. That was true enough, but it wasn’t the reason she relaxed with alcohol instead of stim cones of gage. It was all a matter of what you got used to—

Like everything else across the board. There was no question that a city was the most dangerous combat environment you could find: stone and concrete ate troops. Nonetheless, Margulies was always more comfortable patrolling or even fighting in a city than she was in the open air like this.

Not that it mattered. She was here to do a job.

This portion of the route was through lowlands. The soil was mucky, and there were frequent potholes where the treads of road trains had chewed through the gravel. The trees outside the cleared strip were five to ten meters tall. Their foliage was vaguely blue.

Margulies’ four combat cars flanked the convoy front and rear, fifty meters out from the road. Because of the size of the road trains, the convoy was more than half a kilometer long even when closed up properly. The tribarrels of the combat cars could still sweep the full length of it on straight stretches.

They were coming to one of the route’s few major curves, nicknamed Ambush Junction until the guerrillas hit what turned out to be a platoon of Frisian tanks instead of the Brigantian armor they’d expected. The route had been quiet as a grave since then.

Margulies keyed her commo helmet. “White Six to Rose One,” she said, calling the driver of the leading road train. She glanced up at the cab looming beside her. Because of the angle, she couldn’t see the Brigantian to whom she was speaking. “Can you crank up the speed a little? This isn’t a place I want to hang around. Over.”

A wash of hollow noise flooded Margulies’ helmet, racket echoing from within the driver’s compartment. The cab was lightly armored but not sound-proofed. A moment later the Brigantian said, “All right, we’ll see, but I don’t want to put this sucker in the bog either.”

The background noise shut off. It was as effective a close-transmission signal as more standard commo procedures would have been. Presumably the Brigantian notched his hand throttle forward, though change came very slowly for mechanical dinosaurs the size of the road trains.

The leading combat cars pulled farther ahead and swung a little closer to their respective sides of the cleared strip. Margulies hadn’t bothered to give her own people orders. They knew what the situation was and had been dealing with it for the better part of a month now.

There was new growth where Frisian tanks had blasted hundred-meter notches through the vegetation with their main guns. The flushes of new leaves were red and violet.

There wasn’t enough silica in the soil to glaze when struck by powerguns, but steam from the high water content exploded main-gun impacts into craters that could swallow the jeep. During file ambush, one of the panzers had swept out into the forest, deliberately scraping its steel skirts across the dirt to uncover the guerrillas’ spider holes. The arcing scar was still barren save for speckles of low growth.

Angel hung off the left front fender of the leading road train as the convoy squealed and rumbled into the long right-hand curve. He glanced at Margulies to remind her that this wasn’t the position he would choose for a plastic-bodied jeep, though whatever the lieutenant wanted …

“Yeah, ease back, let them pass us, and we’ll cross to the right side between the second and third trucks,” Margulies agreed. She was holding her 2-cm shoulder weapon at high port. Now her index finger pushed the lever at the front of the trigger guard forward, off safe.

She had a bad feeling about this spot. That was nothing new. She’d had a bad feeling about it every bloody time she crossed it.

Angel eased the fan nacelles closer to vertical, raising clearance beneath the skirt to slow the jeep as ordered. He kept the power up. The wasted charge was a cheap price to pay for greater agility in a crisis. Margulies rose in her seat to get a better view back along the convoy.

The lead road train’s quad automatic cannon was swung to starboard, aiming at the inside of the curve. That was fine, but the crew of the second vehicle was doing the same cursed thing instead of covering the left side of the route as each alternate crew should do.

Margulies swore and took her left hand from the powergun’s forestock to key her helmet—as a command-detonated mine went off under the third segment of the leading road train.

The charge buried beneath the gravel was huge, at least fifty kilos of high explosive. It lifted the segment, blew the track plates and several road wheels from the suspension, and dropped the 30-tonne mass on its right side.

The blast stunned the gun crew atop the middle segment and flung several of them out of the tub. The jeep flipped like a tiddlywink.

Margulies didn’t hear the explosion. The shockwave gripped like a fevered giant’s hand, crushing her in conditions of intense heat. She couldn’t see anything but white light. Both her shins broke against the dashboard as she and the jeep spun in different trajectories. There was no present pain, but she heard the bones go with tiny clicks like those of fingers on a data-entry keyboard.