The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Malaveda waited with a newbie who obviously thought he was hot stuff, even though he didn’t actually say so. Malaveda lifted his sub-machine gun to his shoulder, aimed it at the apartment building’s back door, and clocked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

He lowered the weapon and looked again at his driver. “I guess you think you’ve seen action, don’t you?” he said.

Vierziger turned, raised an eyebrow, and turned back. “I’ve seen action, yes,” he said softly.

“Well let me tell you how it is, buddy,” Malaveda said. “You haven’t seen anything till you’ve seen it with the FDF. Lieutenant Hartlepool, the Old Man? He was in the White Mice when Major Steuben commanded them. He was a friend of Major Steuben’s.”

Vierziger looked at him. “Joachim Steuben didn’t have any friends,” he said. His tone was as bleak as the space between stars.

Malaveda waited for the newbie to take his glacial eyes away before saying, “You know a lot—for a guy who enlisted three months ago!”

“I know too much,” Vierziger said, almost too quietly to be heard. “I know way too much. Now, let’s just watch and wait, like we’re supposed to. All right, Sergeant?”

As if a fucking newbie could tell a sergeant what to do! But Malaveda didn’t feel like saying anything more. He’d had a creepy feeling about Vierziger from when the bastard was assigned to the squad. Vierziger made everybody’s skin crawl. Being alone with him in a jeep was like, was like—

There was a sound in the alley behind them. Malaveda, keyed up, started to swing his sub-machine gun toward the noise. Vierziger—

Malaveda didn’t see the newbie move. There was the sound, and Vierziger was—

standing in the jeep—

facing backward—

his 2-cm weapon in his left hand, held at the balance, a hand’s breadth from his hip—

where it counter-weighted the pistol pointing in his right hand, a gleam of polished metals, the iridium barrel and gold and purple scrollwork on the receiver.

Malaveda hadn’t seen the fucker move!

Vierziger slipped the pistol back into a cut-away holster that rode high on his right hip. It wasn’t an issue rig, and it looked like it ought to be uncomfortable for driving; though he’d driven all right too.

He sat down again and smiled faintly at Malaveda. “Just a rat,” he said. “Jumping onto the manhole cover back there. Where you have humans, you have rats.”

Malaveda nodded in the direction of the pistol, now out of sight again. “Where the hell did you learn to do that?” he asked.

Vierziger shrugged. “Practice,” he said. His face was unlined. He looked like a choirboy in this soft illumination, street lights shimmering from the damp brick walls of the alley. “And I had a—talent for it, I suppose you’d say.”

“Bloody hell,” Malaveda said.

A slow-moving car went by, the first traffic since the MP jeep took its pre-dawn station in the alley. The vehicle’s windows were polarized opaque. They reflected the knife-edged whiteness of the hood-center headlight.

Malaveda didn’t want to speak, but he heard himself say, “Could you teach somebody to do that? To—draw that way?”

“It’s just practice, Sergeant,” Vierziger said.

He looked at his companion again. Malaveda couldn’t have explained what was different about the newbie’s expression, but this time it didn’t make him shiver to see it.

“It isn’t hard to shoot people, you know,” Vierziger said. “The hard part is knowing which ones. They don’t always come with labels.”

He smiled. Malaveda wasn’t sure if the statement was meant for a joke. He smiled back.

The artificial intelligence in Malaveda’s commo helmet projected a sudden emptiness through the earphones. The non-sound was the absence of the static which would otherwise have crackled when somebody opened the push but didn’t speak.

“We’re going in,” a radioed voice whispered; Lieutenant Hartlepool or the squad leader, Sergeant-Commander Brankins. You couldn’t tell in a brief spread-band transmission.

Malaveda threw the sub-machine gun to his shoulder again. Vierziger flicked him a side-glance and smiled faintly, but he didn’t otherwise move.

Malaveda hadn’t heard how they’d located Soisson. Chances were the tech boys had swept the low-rent district till they picked up the signature of the electronics in the powergun Soisson ran with. The deserter might have sold the weapon or traded it for something more concealable, but even so it was a link in the chain that would lead back to him.

Whoever had the sub-machine gun would be bent outta shape when a squad of armed men rousted him at this hour. Watching the back door wasn’t necessarily going to be a tea party, but Malaveda was just as glad not to be in the snatch team.

All hell broke loose.

The initial gunfire was from the front of the apartment building. Malaveda couldn’t see who was shooting, but the hisscrack! of powerguns and reflected cyan light quivered over and around the structure.

It didn’t sound like a raid, it sounded like war.

The back door opened halfway. A man peered through the crack.