Elemental (36 page)

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Authors: Steven Savile

BOOK: Elemental
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Buntz saluted the other deCastro. The poor lug tried to salute back, but his arm seemed to have an extra joint in it somewhere. Buntz managed not to laugh and even nodded in false approval. It was all part of the job, like he'd told Lahti; but the Lord's truth was that he'd be less uncomfortable in a firefight. These poor stupid bastards!
The newsreader had given the mike back to the county governor. It was funny to hear the crew from the capital go on about honor and patriotism while the local kept hitting the pay advance and free liquor. Buntz figured
he
knew his neighbors.
Though the blonde knew them too, or anyway she knew men. Instead of climbing back onto the platform, she was circulating through the crowd. As Buntz watched she corralled a tall, stooped fellow who looked pale—the locals were generally red-faced from exposure, though many women carried parasols for this event—and a stocky teenager who was already glassy-eyed. It wouldn't take much to drink in the truck to put him the rest of the way under.
The blonde led the sickly fellow by the hand and the young drunk by the shirt collar, but the drunk was really stumbling along quick as he could to grope her. She didn't seem to notice, though when she'd delivered him to the recorder, she raised the book to his lips with one hand
and used the other to straighten her blouse under a jumper that shone like polished silver.
They were starting to move, now, just like sheep in the chute to the slaughter yard. Buntz kept saluting, smiling, and saying things like, “Have a drink on me, soldier,” and, “Say, that's a lot of money they pay you fellows, isn't it?”
Which it was in a way, especially since the inflation war'd bring—war
always
brought—to the Placidan piaster hadn't hit yet except in the capital. There was three months' pay in the stack.
By tomorrow, though, most of the recruits would've lost the whole wad to the trained dice of somebody else in the barracks. They'd have to send home for money then; that or starve, unless the Placidan government fed its soldiers better than most of these boondock worlds did. Out in the field they could loot, of course, but right now they'd be kept behind razor ribbon so they didn't run off when they sobered up.
The clerks were trying to move them through as quick as they could, but the recruits themselves wanted to talk: to the recorder, to the paymaster, and especially to Buntz and Lahti. “Bless you, buddy!” Buntz said brightly to the nine-fingered man who wanted to tell him about the best way to start tomatoes. “Look, you have a drink for me in the refreshment car and I'll come back and catch you up with a couple more as soon as I've done with these other fellows.”
Holding the man's hand firmly in his left, Buntz patted him on the shoulders firmly enough to thrust him toward the clerk with the waiting stack of piasters. The advance was all in small bills to make it look like more. At the current exchange rate three months' pay would come to about seventeen Frisian thalers, but it wouldn't be half that in another couple weeks.
A pudgy little fellow with sad eyes joined the line. A woman followed him, shrieking, “Alberto, are you out of your mind? Alberto! Look at me!” She was no taller than the man but easily twice as broad.
The woman grabbed him by the arm with both hands. He kept his
face turned away, his mouth in a vague smile and his eyes full of anguish. “Alberto!”
The county governor was still talking about liquor and money, but all the capital delegation except an elderly, badly overweight union leader had gotten down from the platform and were moving through the crowd. The girlishly pretty army officer touched the screaming woman's shoulder and murmured something Buntz couldn't catch in the racket around him.
The woman glanced up with a black expression, her right hand rising with the fingers clawed. When she saw the handsome face so close to hers, though, she looked stunned and let the officer back her away.
Alberto kissed the book and scooted past the recorder without a look behind him. He almost went by the pay table, but the clerk caught him by the elbow and thrust the wad of piasters into his hand. He kept on going to the cattle truck: to Alberto, those steel slats were a fortress, not a prison.
A fight broke out in the crowd, two big men roaring as they flailed at each other. They were both blind drunk, and they didn't know how to fight anyway. In the morning they'd wake up with nothing worse than hangovers from the booze that was the reason they were fighting to begin with.
“I could take 'em both together,” Lahti muttered disdainfully. She fancied herself as an expert in some martial art or another.
“Right,” said Buntz. “And you could drive
Herod
through a nursery, too, but they'd both be a stupid waste of time unless you had to. Leave the posing for the amateurs, right?”
Buntz doubted he
could
handle the drunks barehanded, but of course he wouldn't try. There was a knife in his boot and a pistol in his right cargo pocket; the Slammers had been told not to wear their sidearms openly to this rally. Inside the turret hatch was a submachine gun, and by throwing a single switch he had control of
Herod'
s tribarrel and 20-cm main gun.
He grinned. If he said that to the recruits passing through the line, they'd think he was joking.
The grin faded. Pretty soon they were going to be facing the Brotherhood, who wouldn't be joking any more than Buntz was. The poor dumb bastards.
The county governor had talked himself out. He was drinking from a demijohn, resting the heavy earthenware on the cocked arm that held it to his lips.
His eyes looked haunted when they momentarily met those of Buntz. Buntz guessed the governor knew pretty well what he was sending his neighbors into. He was doing it anyway, probably because bucking the capital would've cost him his job and maybe more than that.
Buntz looked away. He had things on his conscience too; things that didn't go away when he took another drink, just blurred a little. He wouldn't want to be in the county governor's head after the war, though, especially at about three in the morning.
“
Against tyrants we are all soldiers,
” caroled the tune in the background.
“If our young heroes fall, the fatherland will raise new ones!”
The union leader was describing the way the army of the legitimate government would follow the Slammers to scour the continent north of the Spine clean of the patches of corruption and revolt now breeding there. Buntz didn't know what Colonel Hammer's strategy would be, but he didn't guess they'd be pushing into the forested highlands to fight a more numerous enemy. The Brotherhood'd hand 'em their heads if they tried.
On the broad plains here in the south, though … . Well,
Herod
's main gun was lethal for as far as her optics reached, and that could be hundreds of kilometers if you picked your location.
The delegation from the capital kept trying, but not even the blond newsreader was making headway now. They'd trolled up thirty or so recruits, maybe thirty-five. Not a bad haul.
“Haven't saluted so much since I joined,” Lahti grumbled, a backhanded
way of describing their success. “Well, like you say, Top, that's the job today.”
The boy kissing the book was maybe seventeen standard years old—or not quite that. Buntz hadn't been a lot older when he joined, but he'd had three cousins in the Regiment and he'd known he wasn't getting into more than he could handle. Maybe this kid was the same—the Army of Placidus wasn't going to work him like Hammer's Slammers—but Buntz doubted the boy was going to like however long it was he wore a uniform.
The last person in line was a woman: mid-30s, no taller than Lahti, and with a burn scar on the back of her left wrist. The recording clerk started to hand her the book, then recoiled when he took a look at her. “Madame!” he said.
“Hey, Hurtado!” a man said gleefully. “Look what your missus is doing!”
“Guess she don't get enough dick at home, is that it?” another man called from a liquor booth, his voice slurred.
“The proclamation said you were enlisting women too, didn't it?” the woman demanded. “Because of the emergency?”
“Sophia!” cried a man stumbling to his feet from a circle of dice players. He was almost bald, and his long, drooping moustaches were too black for the color to be natural. Then, with his voice rising, “Sophia, what are you doing?”
“Well, maybe in the capital,” the recorder said nervously. “I don't think—”
Hurtado grabbed the woman's arm. She shook him off without looking at him.
“What don't you think, my man?” said the newsreader, slipping through what'd become a circle of spectators. “You don't think you should obey the directives of the Emergency Committee in a time of war, is that what you think?”
The handsome officer was just behind her. He'd opened his mouth to speak, but he shut it again as he heard the blonde's tone.
“Well, no,” the clerk said. The paymaster watched with a grin, obviously glad that somebody else was making the call on this one. “I just—”
He swallowed whatever else he might've said and thrust the book into the woman's hands. She raised it; Hurtado grabbed her arm again and said, “Sophia, don't make a spectacle of yourself!”
The newsreader said, “Sir, you have no—”
Sophia bent to kiss the red cover, then turned and backhanded Hurtado across the mouth. He yelped and jumped back. Still holding the book down at her side, she advanced and slapped him again with a full swing of her free hand.
Buntz glanced at Lahti, just making sure she didn't take it into her head to get involved. She was relaxed, clearly enjoying the spectacle and unworried about where it was going to go next.
The Placidan officer stepped between the man and woman, looking uncomfortable. He probably felt pretty much the same as the recorder about women in the army, and maybe if the blonde hadn't been here he'd have said so. As it was, though—
“That will be enough, Señor Hurtado,” he said. “Every family must do its part to eradicate the cancer of rebellion, you know.”
Buntz grinned. The fellow ought to be glad that the blonde'd interfered, because otherwise there was a pretty fair chance that Lahti would've made the same points. Lahti wasn't one for words when she could
show
just how effective a woman could be in a fight.
“We about done here, Top?” she said, following Sophia with her eyes as she picked up her advance pay.
“We'll give it another fifteen minutes,” Buntz said. “But yeah, I figure we're done.”
“
Arise, children of the fatherland …
,” played the sound truck.
 
 
“It's gonna be a hot one,” Lahti said to the sky above
Herod
. The tank waited as silent as a great gray boulder where Lahti'd nestled it into a
gully on the reverse slope of a hill. They weren't overlooked from any point on the surface of Placidus—particularly from the higher ground to the north which was in rebel hands. Everything but the fusion bottle was shut down, and thick iridium armor shielded that.
“It'll be hot for somebody,” Buntz agreed. He sat on the turret hatch; Lahti was below him at the top of the bow slope. They could talk in normal voices this way instead of using their commo helmets. Only the most sophisticated devices could've picked up the low-power intercom channel, but he and Lahti didn't need it.
He and Lahti didn't need to talk at all. They just had to wait, them and the crew of
Hole Card
, Tank H47, fifty meters to the north in a parallel gully.
The plan wouldn't have worked against satellites, but the Holy Brotherhood had swept those out of the sky the day they landed at New Carthage on the north coast, the Federation capital. The Brotherhood commanders must've figured that a mutual lack of strategic reconnaissance gave the advantage to their speed and numbers … and maybe they were right, but there were ways and ways.
Buntz grinned. And trust Colonel Hammer to find them.
“Hey Top?” Lahti said. “How long do we wait? If the Brotherhood doesn't bite, I mean.”
“We switch on the radios at local noon,” Buntz said. “Likely they'll recall us then, but I'm just here to take orders.”
That was a gentle reminder to Lahti, not that she was out of line asking. With
Herod
shut down, she had nothing to see but the sky—white rather than really blue—and the sides of the gully.
Buntz had a 270° sweep of landscape centered with the Government firebase thirty klicks to the west. His external pickup was pinned to a tree on the ridge between
Herod
and
Hole Card,
feeding the helmet displays of both tank commanders through fiber optic cables.
There were sensors that could
maybe
spot the pickup, but it wouldn't be easy and even then they'd have to be searching in this direction. The Brotherhood wasn't likely to be doing that when they had the Government
battalion and five Slammers combat cars to hold their attention on the rolling grasslands below.

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