The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century Read online

  “You’re not,” Lt. Schilling snapped, looking up from the cup of bitter chocolate she had just drawn from the urn. She was a short woman and lightly built, but she had the unerring instinct of a bully who is willing to make a scene for a victim who is not willing to be part of one. “You’re a farmer from Dunstan, what d’you care about Dutch miners, whatever these bleeding French do to them. But a lot of us do care, Danny, and if you had a little compassion—”

  “But Sal—” Pritchard repeated, only his right arm moving as he touched the blond girl’s shoulder.

  “Get your hands off me, Captain!” she shouted. “That’s over!” She shifted the mug of steaming chocolate in her hand. The voices in the orderly room stilled. Then, simultaneously, someone turned up the volume of the radios and at least three people began to talk loudly on unconnected subjects.

  Pritchard studied the back of his hand, turned it over to examine the calloused palm as well. He smiled. “Sorry, I’ll remember that,” he said in a normal voice. He turned and stepped back into the orderly room, a brown-haired man of 34 with a good set of muscles to cover his moderate frame and nothing at all to cover his heart. Those who knew Danny Pritchard slightly thought him a relaxed man, and he looked relaxed even now. But waiting around the electric grate were three troopers who knew Danny very well indeed: the crew of The Plow, Pritchard’s command tank.

  Kowie drove the beast, a rabbit-eyed man whose fingers now flipped cards in another game of privy solitaire. His deck was so dirty that only familiarity allowed him to read the pips. Kowie’s hands and eyes were just as quick at the controls of the tank, sliding its bulbous hundred and fifty metric tons through spaces that were only big enough to pass it. When he had to, he drove nervelessly through objects instead of going around. Kowie would never be more than a tank driver; but he was the best tank driver in the Regiment.

  Rob Jenne was big and as blond as Lt. Schilling. He grinned up at Pritchard, his expression changing from embarrassment to relief as he saw that his captain was able to smile also. Jenne had transferred from combat cars to tanks three years back, after the Slammers had pulled out of Squire’s World. He was sharp-eyed and calm in a crisis. Twice after his transfer Jenne had been offered a blower of his own to command if he would return to combat cars. He had refused both promotions, saying he would stay with tanks or buy back his contract, that there was no way he was going back to those open-topped coffins again. When a tank commander’s slot came open, Jenne got it; and Pritchard had made the blond sergeant his own blower chief when a directional mine had retired the previous man. Now Jenne straddled a chair backwards, his hands flexing a collapsible torsion device that kept his muscles as dense and hard as they had been the day he was recruited from a quarry on Burlage.

  Line tanks carry only a driver and the blower chief who directs the tank and its guns when they are not under the direct charge of the Regiment’s computer. In addition to those two and a captain, command tanks have a Communications Technician to handle the multiplex burden of radio traffic focused on the vehicle. Pritchard’s commo tech was Margritte DiManzo, a slender widow who cropped her lustrous hair short so that it would not interfere with the radio helmet she wore most of her waking hours. She was off duty now, but she had not removed the bulky headgear which linked her to the six radios in the tank parked outside. Their simultaneous sound would have been unintelligible babbling to most listeners. The black-haired woman’s training, both conscious and hypnotic, broke that babbling into a set of discrete conversations. When Pritchard reentered the room, Margritte was speaking to Jenne. She did not look up at her commander until Jenne’s brightening expression showed her it was safe to do so.

  Two commo people and a sergeant with Intelligence tabs were at consoles in the orderly room. They were from the Regiment’s HQ Battalion, assigned to Sector Two here on Kobold but in no sense a part of the sector’s combat companies: Capt. Riis’ S Company—infantry—and Pritchard’s own tanks.

  Riis was the senior captain and in charge of the sector, a matter which neither he nor Pritchard ever forgot. Sally Schilling led his first platoon. Her aide, a black-haired corporal, sat with his huge boots up, humming as he polished the pieces of his field-stripped powergun. Its barrel gleamed orange in the light of the electric grate. Electricity was more general on Kobold than on some wealthier worlds, since mining and copper smelting made fusion units a practical necessity. But though the copper in the transmission cable might well have been processed on Kobold, the wire had probably been drawn off-world and shipped back here. Aurore and Friesland had refused to allow even such simple manufactures here on their joint colony. They had kept Kobold a market and a supplier of raw materials, but never a rival.

  “Going to snow tonight?” Jenne asked.

  “Umm, too cold,” Pritchard said, walking over to the grate. He pretended he did not hear Lt. Schilling stepping out of the alcove. “I figure—”

  “Hold it,” said Margritte, her index finger curling out for a volume control before the duty man had time to react. One of the wall radios boomed loudly to the whole room. Prodding another switch, Margritte patched the signal separately through the link implanted in Pritchard’s right mastoid.

  “—guns and looks like satchel charges. There’s only one man in each truck, but they’ve been on the horn too and we can figure on more Frenchies here any—”

  “Red Alert,” Pritchard ordered, facing his commo tech so that she could read his lips. “Where is this?”

  The headquarters radiomen stood nervously, afraid to interfere but unwilling to let an outsider run their equipment, however ably. “Red Alert,” Margritte was repeating over all bands. Then, through Pritchard’s implant, she said, “It’s Patrol Sigma three-nine, near Haacin. Dutch civilians’ve stopped three outbound provisions trucks from Barthe’s Company.”

  “Scramble First Platoon,” Pritchard said, “but tell ’em to hold for us to arrive.” As Margritte coolly passed on the order, Pritchard picked up the commo helmet he had laid on his chair when he followed Lt. Schilling into the kitchen. The helmet gave him automatic switching and greater range than the bio-electric unit behind his ear.

  The wall radio was saying, “—need some big friendlies fast or it’ll drop in the pot for sure.”

  “Sigma three-niner,” Pritchard said, “this is Michael One.”

  “Go ahead, Michael One,” replied the distant squad leader. Pritchard’s commo helmet added an airy boundlessness to his surroundings without really deadening the ambient noise.

  “Hold what you’ve got, boys,” the tank captain said. “There’s help on the way.”

  The door of the orderly room stood ajar the way Pritchard’s crewmen had left it. The captain slammed it shut as he too ran for his tank. Behind in the orderly room, Lt. Schilling was snapping out quick directions to her own platoon and to her awakened commander.

  The Plow was already floating when Danny reached it. Ice crystals, spewed from beneath the skirts by the lift fans, made a blue-white dazzle in the vehicle’s running lights. Frost whitened the ladder up the high side of the tank’s plenum chamber and hull. Pritchard paused to pull on his gloves before mounting. Sgt. Jenne, anchoring himself with his left hand on the turret’s storage rack, reached down and lifted his captain aboard without noticeable effort. Side by side, the two men slid through the hatches to their battle stations.

  “Ready,” Pritchard said over the intercom.

  “Movin’ on,” replied Kowie, and with his words the tank slid forward over the frozen ground like grease on a hot griddle.

  The command post had been a district road-maintenance center before all semblance of central government on Kobold had collapsed. The orderly room and officers’ quarters were in the supervisor’s house, a comfortable structure with shutters and mottoes embroidered in French on the walls. Some of the hangings had been defaced by short-range gunfire. The crew barracks across the road now served the troopers on headquarters duty. Many of the Slammers could read the Dutch p
eriodicals abandoned there in the break-up. The equipment shed beside the barracks garaged the infantry skimmers because the battery-powered platforms could not shrug off the weather like the huge panzers of M Company. The shed doors were open, pluming the night with heated air as the duty platoon ran for its mounts. Some of the troopers had not yet donned their helmets and body armor. Jenne waved as the tank swept on by; then the road curved and the infantry was lost in the night.

  Kobold was a joint colony of Aurore and Friesland. When eighty years of French oppression had driven the Dutch settlers to rebellion, their first act was to hire Hammer’s Slammers. The break between Hammer and Friesland had been sharp, but time has a way of blunting anger and letting old habits resume. The Regimental language was Dutch, and many of the Slammers’ officers were Frisians seconded from their own service. Friesland gained from the men’s experience when they returned home; Hammer gained company officers with excellent training from the Gröningen Academy.

  To counter the Slammers, the settlers of Auroran descent had hired three Francophone regiments. If either group of colonists could have afforded to pay its mercenaries unaided, the fighting would have been immediate and brief. Kobold had been kept deliberately poor by its home worlds, however; so in their necessities the settlers turned to those home worlds for financial help.

  And neither Aurore nor Friesland wanted a war on Kobold.

  Friesland had let its settlers swing almost from the beginning, sloughing their interests for a half share of the copper produced and concessions elsewhere in its sphere of influence. The arrangement was still satisfactory to the Council of State, if Frisian public opinion could be mollified by apparent activity. Aurore was on the brink of war in the Zemla System. Her Parlement feared another proxy war which could in a moment explode full-fledged, even though Friesland had been weakened by a decade of severe internal troubles. So Aurore and Friesland reached a compromise. Then, under threat of abandonment, the warring parties were forced to transfer their mercenaries’ contracts to the home worlds. Finally, Aurore and Friesland mutually hired the four regiments: the Slammers; Compagnie de Barthe; the Alaudae; and Phenix Moirots. Mercs from either side were mixed and divided among eight sectors imposed on a map of inhabited Kobold. There the contract ordered them to keep peace between the factions; prevent the importation of modern weapons to either side; and—wait.

  But Col. Barthe and the Auroran leaders had come to a further, secret agreement; and although Hammer had learned of it, he had informed only two men—Maj. Steuben, his aide and bodyguard; and Capt. Daniel Pritchard.

  Pritchard scowled at the memory. Even without the details a traitor had sold Hammer, it would have been obvious that Barthe had his own plans. In the other sectors, Hammer’s men and their French counterparts ran joint patrols. Both sides scattered their camps throughout the sectors, just as the villages of either nationality were scattered. Barthe had split his sectors in halves, brusquely ordering the Slammers to keep to the west of the River Aillet because his own troops were mining the east of the basin heavily. Barthe’s Company was noted for its minefields. That skill was one of the reasons they had been hired by the French. Since most of Kobold was covered either by forests or by rugged hills, armor was limited to roads where well-placed mines could stack tanks like crushed boxes.

  Hammer listened to Barthe’s pronouncement and laughed, despite the anger of most of his staff officers. Beside him, Joachim Steuben had grinned and traced the line of his cut-away holster. When Danny Pritchard was informed, he had only shivered a little and called a vehicle inspection for the next morning. That had been three months ago….

  The night streamed by like smoke around the tank. Pritchard lowered his face shield, but he did not drop his seat into the belly of the tank. Vision blocks within gave a 360° view of the tank’s surroundings, but the farmer in Danny could not avoid the feeling of blindness within the impenetrable walls. Jenne sat beside his captain in a cupola fitted with a three-barrelled automatic weapon. He too rode with his head out of the hatch, but that was only for comradeship. The sergeant much preferred to be inside. He would button up at the first sign of hostile action. Jenne was in no sense a coward; it was just that he had quirks. Most combat veterans do.

  Pritchard liked the whistle of the black wind past his helmet. Warm air from the tank’s resistance heaters jetted up through the hatch and kept his body quite comfortable. The vehicle’s huge mass required the power of a fusion plant to drive its lift motors, and the additional burden of climate control was inconsequential.

  The tankers’ face shields automatically augmented the light of the moon, dim and red because the sun it reflected was dim and red as well. The boosted light level displayed the walls of forest, the boles snaking densely to either side of the road. At Kobold’s perihelion, the thin stems grew in days to their full six-meter height and spread a ceiling of red-brown leaves the size of blankets. Now, at aphelion, the chilled, sapless trees burned with almost explosive intensity. The wood was too dangerous to use for heating, even if electricity had not been common; but it fueled the gasogene engines of most vehicles on the planet.

  Jenne gestured ahead. “Blowers,” he muttered on the intercom. His head rested on the gun switch though he knew the vehicles must be friendly. The Plow slowed.

  Pritchard nodded agreement. “Michael First, this is Michael One,” he said. “Flash your running lights so we can be sure it’s you.”

  “Roger,” replied the radio. Blue light flickered from the shapes hulking at the edge of the forest ahead. Kowie throttled the fans up to cruise, then chopped them and swung expertly into the midst of the four tanks of the outlying platoon.

  “Michael One, this is Sigma One,” Capt. Riis’ angry voice demanded in the helmet.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Barthe’s sent a battalion across the river. I’m moving Lt. Schilling into position to block ’em and called Central for artillery support. You hold your first platoon at Haacin for reserve and any partisans up from Portela. I’ll take direct command of the rest of—”

  “Negative, negative, Sigma One!” Pritchard snapped. The Plow was accelerating again, second in the line of five tanks. They were beasts of prey sliding across the landscape of snow and black trees at 80 kph and climbing. “Let the French through, Captain. There won’t be fighting, repeat, negative fighting.”

  “There damned well will be fighting, Michael One, if Barthe tries to shove a battalion into my sector!” Riis thundered back. “Remember, this isn’t your command or a joint command. I’m in charge here.”

  “Margritte, patch me through to Battalion,” Pritchard hissed on intercom. The Plow’s turret was cocked 30° to the right. It covered the forest sweeping by to that side and anything which might be hiding there. Pritchard’s mind was on Sally Schilling, riding a skimmer through forest like that flanking the tanks, hurrying with her fifty men to try to stop a battalion’s hasty advance.

  The commo helmet popped quietly to itself. Pritchard tensed, groping for the words he would need to convince Lt. Col. Miezierk. Miezierk, under whom command of Sectors One and Two was grouped, had been a Frisian regular until five years ago. He was supposed to think like a merc now, not like a Frisian; but….

  The voice that suddenly rasped, “Override, override!” was not Miezierk’s. “Sigma One, Michael One, this is Regiment.”

  “Go ahead,” Pritchard blurted. Capt. Riis, equally rattled, said, “Yes, sir!” on the three-way link.

  “Sigma, your fire order is cancelled. Keep your troops on alert, but keep ’em the hell out of Barthe’s way.”

  “But Col. Hammer—”

  “Riis, you’re not going to start a war tonight. Michael One, can your panzers handle whatever’s going on at Haacin without violating the contract?”

  “Yes, sir.” Pritchard flashed a map briefly on his face shield to check his position. “We’re almost there now.”

  “If you can’t handle it, Captain, you’d better hope you’re killed in act
ion,” Col. Hammer said bluntly. “I haven’t nursed this regiment for twenty-three years to lose it because somebody forgets what his job is.” Then, more softly—Pritchard could imagine the colonel flicking his eyes side to side to gauge bystanders’ reactions—he added, “There’s support if you need it, Captain—if they’re the ones who breach the contract.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Keep the lid on, boy. Regiment out.”

  The trees had drunk the whine of the fans. Now the road curved and the tanks banked greasily to join the main highway from Dimo to Portela. The tailings pile of the Haacin Mine loomed to the right and hurled the drive noise back redoubled at the vehicles. The steel skirts of the lead tank touched the road metal momentarily, showering the night with orange sparks. Beyond the mine were the now-empty wheat fields and then the village itself.

  Haacin, the largest Dutch settlement in Sector Two, sprawled to either side of the highway. Its houses were two- and three-story lumps of cemented mine tailings. They were roofed with tile or plastic rather than shakes of native timber, because of the wood’s lethal flammability. The highway was straight and broad. It gave Pritchard a good view of the three cargo vehicles pulled to one side. Men in local dress swarmed about them. Across the road were ten of Hammer’s khaki-clad infantry, patrol S-39, whose ported weapons half-threatened, half-protected the trio of drivers in their midst. Occasionally a civilian turned to hurl a curse at Barthe’s men, but mostly the Dutch busied themselves with offloading cartons from the trucks.

  Pritchard gave a brief series of commands. The four line tanks grounded in a hedgehog at the edge of the village. Their main guns and automatics faced outward in all directions. Kowie swung the command vehicle around the tank which had been leading it. He cut the fans’ angle of attack, slowing The Plow without losing the ability to accelerate quickly. The command vehicle eased past the squad of infantry, then grounded behind the rearmost truck. Pritchard felt the fans’ hum through the metal of the hull.