The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 1

De Laburat chuckled. "You've met Maury," he said. "He has a strong back and about enough intellect to pull on his boots in the morning. Would you entrust the Shrine of the Blessed Catherine to him? And even if you did, one of his own men will shoot him in the back in a few weeks or months, as surely as the sun rises tomorrow."

"Go away," Lamartiere said. In sudden fury he repeated, "Go away, or by God I'll kill you now so that I can say there's one good deed to balance against all the harm I've done in this life!"

De Laburat nodded with stiff propriety. "Good day, Mr. Lamartiere," he said. "I hope you'll reconsider while there's still time."

Lamartiere watched the Rallier drive back across the desert the way he'd come. The jeep's headlights cut a wedge across the rocks and scrub, disappearing at last through a cleft in the low hills.

"What do we do now?" Dr. Clargue asked quietly.

"I wish I knew," Lamartiere said. "I wish to God I knew."

He slept curled up on the floor of the driver's compartment. He continued to hear the purr of Hoodoo's computers late into the night as Clargue worked on a problem that neither he nor Lamartiere now believed they would ever solve.

The warning chime awakened Lamartiere. After a moment of blurred confusion—he was too tired and uncomfortable for panic—he realized what the problem was.

"It's all right, Doctor," he said. "I left the audible alarm on, and it's registering the locals leaving to go to the orchard."

It wasn't dawn yet, but the sky over the eastern mountains was noticeably lighter than in the west. Two hundred kilometers into those mountains was Goncourt, where Lamartiere supposed shell bursts had been glaring all night

"Ah," said Clargue. They'd seen very little of one another despite having been no more that a meter or two apart during most of the past week. Crewing Hoodoo was like being imprisoned in adjacent cells.

"Go get a bath and some breakfast," Lamartiere said. He cleared his throat and added, "I think we may as well move out today, even if we don't hear anything from the Council. Otherwise we're going to bring something down on these people that they don't deserve."

"Yes," said Clargue. "I'm afraid you're right"

He didn't ask Lamartiere where he intended to go. The only possible answer was away. They needed to go some place where there wasn't anybody else around to be harmed by what Hoodoo attracted.

Residents were coming down by pairs in the basket. Even so the process would take at least an hour. The Shrine of the Blessed Catherine hadn't been intended for its present population, at least not in the years since the ground-level gate had been blocked. The walls were little defense against heavy weapons, but they protected the handful of Brothers from the small arms and banditry of the Boukasset during normal times.

Hoodoo could turn the shrine into a pile of rubble in a matter of seconds. Not that anyone would bother to do so . . . except, perhaps, as a whim along the lines of pulling the wings off flies.

Clargue slid clumsily down the bow and walked toward the basket. Civilians coming in the other direction murmured greetings to the doctor. Everyone here was glad of his presence.

Indeed, most of them probably thought of Hoodoo herself as protection for the shrine and themselves. They were wrong. Even if Lamartiere could have used the ammunition he knew was in the storage magazines, the tank was sure to summon increasing levels of violence until everything in its vicinity was shattered to dust and vapor.

Lamartiere supposed he was dozing in the hatch, though his eyes were open. He wasn't consciously aware of his surroundings until Dr. Clargue said, "I will watch now, Denis," and Lamartiere realized direct sunlight stabbed across the plain through the notch in the hills by which Hoodoo had entered.

"Right," Lamartiere said, trying to clear his brain. He crawled out of the hatch, bitterly aware that he was in terrible shape. He supposed it didn't matter. The best option he could see now was to drive Hoodoo fifty kilometers out into the desert, and the AI could handle that once he got her under way.

De Laburat had been right about one thing. Dr. Clargue might be able to return to helping the sick in a village lost in the mountains, but there was no longer any place on Ambiorix for Denis Lamartiere. Like Hoodoo herself, he was a valuable resource: a tank crewman, to be captured if possible but otherwise killed to prevent another faction from gaining his expertise.

He stepped into the basket as a mother and her twins got out. The woman nodded while the children whispered excitedly to one another. They'd been close enough to the soldier to touch him!

The basket jogged its way up the wall of the shrine. His shadow sprawled across the hard sandstone blocks.