David Drake - The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

Troopers in the combat cars watched the tanker, but they didn't interfere.

The gun jeep stopped. Its fans whirred at a deepening note as they lost power. Des Grieux heard boots hit the soil. He turned, but Colonel Hammer had already gripped a handrail to haul himself up onto the tank destroyer.

"Feeling proud of yourself, Des Grieux?" the colonel asked grimly.

Hammer wore a cap instead of a commo helmet. There was a line of Spray Seal across his forehead, just above the pepper-and-salt eyebrows, where a helmet would have cut him if it were struck hard. His eyes were bloodshot and very cold.

"Not particularly," Des Grieux said. He wasn't feeling anything at all.

The driver was just a driver, a Charlie Company infantryman. He'd unclipped his carbine from the dash and pointed it vaguely in Des Grieux's direction, but he wasn't one of Joachim Steuben's field police.

Des Grieux had left his grenade launcher behind in H271. He was unarmed.

"They're trying to find Colonel Broglie,"Hammer said."The Legion command council is, and I am."

"Then you're in luck," Des Grieux said.

He opened his left hand. Bones had burned to lime in the glare of the tank destroyer's ammunition, but teeth were more refractory. Des Grieux had found three of them when he sifted the ashes within the tank destroyer's hull through his fingers.

Hammer pursed his lips and stared at the tanker."You're sure?" he said.Then, "Yeah, you would be."

"Nobody else was that good, Colonel," Des Grieux said softly. His eyes were focused somewhere out beyond the moons' orbits.

Hammer refused to look down into Des Grieux's palm after the first brief glance. "You're out of here, you know," he snapped. "Out of the Slammers for good, and off-planet fast if you know what's good for you. I told Joachim I'd handle this my own way, but that's not the kind of instruction you can count on him obeying."

"Right," Des Grieux said without emotion. He closed his hand again and resumed rubbing the teeth against his palm. "I'll do that."

"I ought to let Joachim finish you, you know?" Hammer said. There was an edge in his voice, but also wonder at the tanker's flat affect."You're too dangerous to leave alive, but I guess I owe something to a twelve-year veteran."

"I won't be joining another outfit, Colonel,"Des Grieux said; a statement,not a plea for the mercy Hammer had already granted. "Not much point in it now."

Alois Hammer touched his tongue to his lips in order to have time to process what he had just heard. "You know, Des Grieux?" he said mildly. "I really don't know why I don't have you shot."

Des Grieux looked directly at his commanding officer again. "Because we're the same, Colonel," he said. "You and me. Because there's nothing but war for either of us."

Hammer's face went white,then flushed except for the pink splotch of Spray Seal on his forehead. "You're a bloody fool, Des Grieux," he rasped, "and a bloody liar. I wanted to end this—" he gestured at the blackened wreckage of vehicles staggering all the way to the bottom of the slope "—by a quiet capitulation, not a bloodbath. Not like this!"

"You've got your way, Colonel," Des Grieux said. "I've got mine. Had mine. But it's all the same in the end."

He smiled, but there was only the memory of emotion behind his straight, yellowed teeth. "You haven't learned that yet. Have fun. Because when it's over, there isn't anything left."

Colonel Hammer pressed the Spray Seal with the back of his left hand,not quite rubbing it. He slid from the iridium carapace of the tank destroyer. "Come on, Des Grieux," he said. "I'll see that you get aboard a ship alive. You'll have your pension and discharge bonus."

Des Grieux followed the shorter man. The tanker walked stiffly, as though he were an infant still learning gross motor skills.

At the jeep, Hammer turned and said savagely,"AndVia! Will you please throw those curst teeth away?"

Des Grieux slipped the calcined fragments into his breast pocket. "I need them," he said. "To remind me that I was the best.

"Some day," he added, "you'll know just what I mean, Colonel."

His smile was terrible to behold.

The locals had turned down the music from the sound truck while the bigwigs from the capital were talking to the crowd, but it was still playing. "I heard that song before," Trooper Lahti said, frowning. "But that was back on Icky Nose, two years ago. Three!"

"Right,"said Platoon Sergeant Buntz,wishing he'd checked the fit of his dress uniform before he put it on for this bloody rally. He'd gained weight during the month he'd been on medical profile for tearing up his leg. "You hear it a lot at this kinda deal. La Marseillaise . It goes all the way back to Earth."

This time it was just brass instruments, but Buntz' memory could fill in, " Arise, children of the fatherland! The day of glory has arrived . . . . " Though some places they changed the words a bit.

"Look at the heroes you'll be joining!" boomed the amplified voice of the blonde woman gesturing from the waist-high platform. She stood with other folks in uniform or dress clothes on what Buntz guessed in peacetime was the judges' stand at the county fair. "When you come back in a few months after crushing the rebels, the cowards who stayed behind will look at you the way you look at our allies, Hammer's Slammers!"

Buntz sucked in his gut by reflex, but he knew it didn't matter. For this recruitment rally he and his driver wore tailored uniforms with the seams edged in dark blue, but the yokels saw only the tank behind them. Herod , H42, was a veteran of three deployments and more firefights than Buntz could remember without checking the Fourth Platoon log.

The combat showed on Herod 's surface.The steel skirts enclosing her plenum chamber were not only scarred from brush-busting but patched in several places where projectiles or energy weapons had penetrated. A two-meter section had been replaced on Icononzo, the result of a fifty-kilo directional mine. Otherwise the steel was dull red except where the rust had worn off.

Herod 's hull and turret had taken even a worse beating; the iridium armor there turned all the colors of the spectrum when heated. A line of rainbow dimples along the rear compartment showed where a flééchette gun—also on Icononzo—had wasted ammo, but it was on Humboldt that a glancing 15-cm powergun bolt had flared a banner across the bow slope.

If the gunner from Greenwood's Archers had hit Herod squarely, the tank would've been for the salvage yard and Lahti's family back on Leminkainan would've been told that she'd been cremated and interred where she fell.

Actually Lahti'd have been in the salvage yard too,since there wouldn't be any way to separate what was left of the driver from the hull. You didn't tell families all the details. They wouldn't understand anyway.