The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

“Only if you survive,” Margulies remarked, but she wasn’t serious. Angel’s willingness to take chances was just as important a reason for her keeping him as her permanent driver as his skill at the joystick was.

Angel accelerated to 60 kph. The jeep passed along the right side of the road trains at an increment that was slightly faster than a man could walk.

The convoy consisted of ten articulated road trains, each of which had three track-laying segments with a driver in the lead cab. There was a gun tub crewed by Brigantian troops on the center segment of each individual train, but the convoy’s real security was provided by the four combat cars manned by Frisian military police under Lieutenant Margulies’ command.

The war was over, but the fighting might not stop for years. Brigantian regiments, spearheaded by armored companies of Frisian mercenaries, had swept across Tannahill’s Beta Continent. The armies of the continent’s local population, mostly Muslims of South Indian descent, had been smashed if they stood and run down if they retreated.

The guerrillas, supported by the local communities even when they weren’t actually members of those communities, were a more difficult problem. They were controllable, at least for as long as the Brigantians of Alpha Continent could afford to pay their Frisian mercenaries, but Margulies suspected it would be decades if not generations before the locals accepted Brigantian domination.

That was somebody else’s worry. Margulies had a convoy to take through eighty klicks of—literally—Indian Country.

“Yes sir,” Angel said. “Inside a week and a half, I figure, I’ll be back on Cantilucca with a forty-hectare gage farm of my own. Three more days here. Three days objective to Delos, that’s the cluster’s port of entry. Maybe a day to get transport from there to Cantilucca, another day’s transit, and bam! I’m home, with a discharge bonus in my pocket. How long can it take then to buy some land, hey?”

Tijuca began to whistle a flamenco tune. Margulies smiled at his enthusiasm. She noticed that despite the sergeant’s air of heedless relaxation, every time they overhauled a road train his eyes flicked left. He was checking through the gaps between vehicles to see what was happening along the far treeline.

Combat engineers had defoliated, then burned off, strips a hundred meters wide along either edge of the road. Ash flew out from beneath the jeep’s skirts. It merged with the yellow dust which the trains’ cleats raised from the gravel road surface. The breeze was slightly from the right, so for the moment the jeep was clear. Tijuca kept them ten meters out in the burned zone—comfortable, but by that amount the closest vehicle to the enemy if the guerrillas decided to start something.

“Take us back across between the second and first trucks,” Margulies said. “I don’t believe in giving anybody long enough to compute the lead on a full-deflection shot.”

“Your wish is my command,” Angel said. He goosed the fans, let the jeep settle into its new, higher speed, and angled the vehicle sideways across the line of heavy trucks. It was an expert job, as difficult as threading a needle blindfolded.

“My command is your command,” Margulies grumbled. Her commo helmet slapped nose filters in place automatically, but she tasted the chalky dust on her tongue.

She wished that a battery of Frisian howitzers rather than Brigantian artillery was providing call fire for the run. Brigantian artillery was reasonably accurate, but Margulies didn’t trust the indigs to react as fast as Frisian hogs would if anything blew.

The chance of an ambush was less than one in ten, but Margulies’ platoon had provided security on this run fourteen times already.

“You ought to come to Cantilucca, Missie,” Angel said, throttling back to 60 kph. “You’d love it. With a tract of top gage land—”

“Sarge,” Margulies said, “I’m a city girl, born right smack in the center of Batavia. I wouldn’t know which end of a hoe to use, and I don’t even like gage. Alcohol works just fine for me.”

When they crossed the road, Margulies hunched higher in the seat to view the left treeline over her driver’s head. Angel watched the potential danger area also, navigating with his peripheral vision. A sub-machine gun was clamped beside his seat. Though it was ready for use, it didn’t interfere with his driving the way a slung weapon would have done.

“Huh!” Angel said. “The only thing you can get from booze that you can’t from gage is a hangover. The good stuff—the pure stuff, we’re not talking about refinery tailings, sure—there’s no side effects at all. You just go to sleep when you come down. Why would anybody want booze over gage?”

“Because if something pops, I can deal with it if I’m hung over and I can’t if I’m in a gage coma,” Margulies said tartly. That was true enough, but it wasn’t the reason she relaxed with alcohol instead of stim cones of gage. It was all a matter of what you got used to—