The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 1

Great trees overhung the riverbed. The pinlike leaves of their branches shivered as the tank slid past. The trees' taproots penetrated the buried aquifer, but their trunks were clear of the flash floods that periodically scoured the channel.

"There's nothing in the Boukasset that the government wanted badly enough to commit Hammer's mercenaries to get it," Clargue said. "Nomadic herdsmen and small-scale farmers using terraces and deep wells. Our mines in the Western District were Ambiorix' main source of foreign exchange before the rebellion."

Clargue was a small, precise man in his sixties; a doctor who'd left the most advanced hospital in Carcassone to serve the sick of his home village of Pamiers in the mountains. Because of his experience with medical computers as complex as the systems of this tank, the Council had chosen him to help Lamartiere make Hoodoo operational. He'd tried despite his distaste for the war that had wrecked his home and Ambiorix as a whole, but he hadn't been able to find a way to access the ammunition Lamartiere knew was stored in Hoodoo's hull.

"As for what I know of Maury," Clargue continued, "nothing to his credit. At the best of times leaders in the Boukasset have been one step removed from posturing thugs. 'Posturing thug' would be a kind description of Maury if half the rumors one hears are true."

"Beggars can't be choosers, I suppose," Lamartiere muttered. His yoke twitched in his hands as the AI guided Hoodoo.

He had a bad feeling about this, but he'd had a bad feeling about the operation almost from the beginning. He'd bloodied the government badly both when he escaped from Brione with the tank and at the Lystra River. But Pamiers had received a hammering by artillery and perhaps worse because Hoodoo had hidden there, and at Brione Lamartiere's sister Celine had died while driving a truckload of explosive into the main gate of the base.

So long as the war went on, everybody lost. If Hoodoo became fully operational, she could extend the war for years and maybe decades.

"Beggars have no power," Clargue said. He sniffed. "A man like Maury understands no language but that of power. The Council must be fools to send us into the Boukasset with that message."

Lamartiere sighed. "Yeah," he said. "But we already knew that, and we're here anyway. We'll see what we can work out."

The dry riverbed lost itself among the plains. The skirts began to ring on rocks, the heavy debris dumped here at the last spate and not yet covered by sand. Lamartiere edged Hoodoo northward to where the ground was smoother. The AI reconfigured the course slightly; the ETA changed again.

Hoodoo roared through the starlit night, heading at speed toward the next way-station on a road to nowhere.

It was an hour past dawn. The low sun deepened the color of the red cliffs and the red sand into which those cliffs decayed. By midday the sun would turn the sky brassy and bleach every hue to a ghost of itself.

The shrine was in the Boukasset where four generations ago Catherine had given birth to the child who became Bishop Moses, to whom God revealed the foundations of the Mosite faith. The site had been a pilgrimage center during peacetime, but Lamartiere hadn't been religious in that fashion.

Since Lamartiere learned what had happened to his sister Celine, he hadn't been religious in any way at all; but now there was no way out of the course he'd chosen in the days when he could believe in a future.

The first sign of habitation was the line of conical shelters, two or three abreast, which wound across the plain. Low hills lay in the distance to east and west, and a jagged sandstone slope rose immediately north of the site.

The shrine itself was a fortress walled in the russet stone of the overlooking cliff. It was built on a lower slope where the rise could be accommodated by a single terrace, but the gullied rock behind it rose at 1:2 or even 1:1.

The spire of a church showed above the enclosure's ten-meter sidewalls. A bell there rang when Hoodoo appeared out of the east, trailing a great plume of dust.

Lamartiere disengaged the AI and began slowing the tank by turning the fan nacelles vertical instead of tilting them to the rear. Hoodoo's enormous inertia meant control inputs had to be added well in advance.

"They grow lemon trees in those shelters," Dr Clargue said. He sounded puzzled at something. "The plantings are laid out over an underground aquifer, but without protection the wind would scour the leaves and even bark off the trees."

He paused, then added, "There weren't nearly as many trees when I came here twelve years ago. Only a handful of Brothers tended to the shrine then."