The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Blood and Martyrs! This’s looking more and more like a ratfuck. Ruthven hadn’t been thrilled by the assignment from the start, but until E/1 got to Firebase Courage he hadn’t have guessed how bad things really were.

He’d expected the Royalist troops to be ill-trained and poorly equipped …because all Royalist field units were: the defense budget never percolated far from the gaudily dressed officers in the capital, Zaragoza. He hadn’t expected Fire Support Base Courage to be so ineptly constructed, though. It was a wonder that the Lord’s Army hadn’t rolled over the position long before.

The Headquarters complex was four aluminum trailers which’d been buried in the ground to the right of the gate. A tower in the middle of them carried satellite and short-wave antennas, making the identification obvious and coincidentally providing an aiming point to the Prophet’s gunners. The Lord’s Army had only small arms, but painting a big bull’s-eye on your Tactical Operations Center still isn’t a good plan.

An officer in a green dress uniform with gold crossbelts was coming up the steps from one of the trailers, steadying his bicorn hat. The three aides accompanying him were less gorgeously dressed; that, rather than the rank tabs on his epaulets, identified Lieutenant-Colonel Carrera.

Ruthven dropped into the compartment again. As soon as Melisant brought the car to a halt, he swung the rear hatch down into a ramp and stepped out to meet the Royalist officers.

Carrera stopped where he was and braced to attention. A rabbity aide with frayed cuffs scurried to Ruthven and said, “Sir, you are the commander? My colonel asks, what is your rank?”

Ruthven frowned. Instead of answering, he walked over to Carrera and said, “Colonel? I’m Lieutenant Henry Ruthven, in command of Platoon E/1 of Hammer’s Regiment. We’ve been sent to you as reinforcements.”

“A lieutenant?” the Royalist officer said in amazement. “One platoon only? And where are the rest of your tanks? This one thing …”

He flicked his swagger stick toward the command car.

“ …this is not enough, surely! We must have more tanks!”

What Major Pritchard, the Slammers Operations Officer, had actually said when he assigned Ruthven was, “to put some backbone into the garrison.” It wouldn’t have been polite or politic either one to have repeated the phrasing, but now Ruthven half-wished he had.

“We’re infantry, Colonel,” Ruthven said calmly, because it was his job …his duty …to be calm and polite. “We don’t have any tanks at all, but I think you’ll find we can handle things here. We’ve got sensors to give plenty of warning of enemy intentions. We’ve got our own powerguns, and we have direct communications to a battery of the Regiment’s hogs.”

“Oh, this is not right,” Carrera said, turning and walking back toward his trailer. “My cousin promised me, promised me, tanks and there is only this tank.”

“Sir?” said Ruthven. Sellars was bringing her squad in; the jeeps of Heavy Weapons followed closely. “Colonel! We need to make arrangements for the siting of my troops.”

“Take care of him, Mendes,” Carrera called over his shoulder. “I have been betrayed. It is out of my hands, now.”

Carrera’s aides had started to leave with him. A pudgy man in his forties, a captain if Ruthven had the collar insignia right, stopped and turned with a stricken look. The Royalists didn’t wear name tags, but he was presumably Mendes.

“Right, Captain,” Ruthven said with a breezy assertiveness that he figured was the best option. “I think under the circumstances we’ll be best served by retaining my troops as a concentrated reserve here in the center of the firebase. We’re highly mobile, you see. We’ll place sensors around the perimeter to give us warning of attack as early as troops there could do.”

That was true, but the real reason Ruthven’d decided to keep E/1 concentrated was so that his troopers could support one another. Self-preservation was starting to look like the primary goal for this operation. The Slammers’d been hired to fight and they would fight, but Hank Ruthven knew the Colonel hadn’t given him troopers in order to get them killed for nothing.

All elements of E/1 were now within the compound. Hassel’d put the troopers with 2-cm shoulder weapons on the wall aiming northeast, toward the ridge they’d just come from. Both the tribarrels covered the high ground also.

The ten troopers with sub-machine guns faced in, keeping an eye on Ruthven and the babbling crowd of Royalists. They weren’t threatening; just watchful. With their mirrored faceshields down they looked like Death’s Little Helpers, though, and they could become that in an eyeblink if anybody gave them reason.

“We’ll need the use of your digging equipment,” Ruthven continued. “The bulldozer and whatever else you have; a backhoe, perhaps?”

“We have nothing,” Mendes said.

Ruthven’s face hardened; he gestured with his left hand toward the dug-in trailers. His right, resting on the receiver of his slung sub-machine gun, slipped down to the grip.