The Battle of the Hammer Worlds hw-2 Read online

  “Time to go,” Tabor ordered.

  Michael decided that the question of the missing APC could wait for another day. Tabor obviously had forgotten about it. He had turned and, in a half run, was making his way down to the river. Without hesitating, he plunged in and was across, climbing up to the road. He paused to make sure Michael was close behind.

  “One klick that way.” He pointed down the road. “Ravine to the right will get us off the road. Let’s go. Fast.”

  They took off. Michael knew that the surveillance drone would have gotten a contact report out even as it plunged to its death on the rock-strewn slopes below. That meant ground attack aircraft from Perkins Planetary Defense Base would be on their way any minute now.

  They had crossed the river and were on the road when proof that things did not always go the NRA’s way turned up. The missing DocSec APC, clearly in a hurry to catch up, came around the corner, bearing down on them almost before they were aware of it. Acting on instinct, Michael, with Tabor close behind, leaped for the safety of the shallow ditch even as the APC succumbed to a single missile launched by the downstream cut-off group. Michael flinched as the backblast from the explosion battered his ears. A second missile drove the APC off the road, the shattered wreck coming to a crunching halt against the rock wall. Michael offered up a quick prayer of thanks that someone in the ambush force was paying attention even as he cursed the ambush commander for not warning Tabor that there was one more APC on the way.

  Tabor waved Michael up and out of the ditch. “Come on, Michael. We’ve got people to meet.”

  Michael scrambled out of the ditch and onto the road. As he and Tabor ran past the smoking ruin of the APC, the rear doors banged open and a black-jumpsuited DocSec trooper half crawled, half fell out of the APC onto the road.

  Tabor did not hesitate. He reacted first, but Michael was only a half second behind, the two men pouring a hail of fire into the hapless trooper. Michael grunted in satisfaction at the sight of the bullet-riddled body sprawled awkwardly across the road.

  Tabor peered into the APC. Reaching in, he effortlessly dragged out a bulky DocSec officer, black woven rank badges on his combat jumpsuit marking him out as a major. Dumping him on the road, Tabor reached in and dragged out a second officer, this one a lieutenant.

  “Convoy commander,” Tabor grunted. “Must have gotten held up. Should have turned around and run, stupid man.” The major suddenly moaned, his eyes opening, glazed and unseeing.

  Tabor did not hesitate. He stepped back a meter and carefully put a single shot into the man’s forehead. “DocSec trash,” he hissed, leaning forward to spit with great care into the dead man’s face. He waved Michael forward. “Check the other one while I clean out this one’s pockets.”

  Michael did as he was told. The DocSec lieutenant was still alive. Michael did not hesitate. “That’s for Corporal Yazdi, you piece of DocSec filth,” he whispered viciously, his gun coming up to fire two shots in quick succession.

  “You’re learning,” Tabor muttered approvingly as he stood up. “Come on. We need to go.”

  Michael nodded. Two DocSec down, millions more to go, but it was a start.

  Tabor unclipped a grenade and casually underhanded it into the APC. By the time the grenade blew the inside of the vehicle apart, Michael and Tabor were safely down the road on their way to the safety of the scrub-filled ravine.

  After a lung-burning climb, Michael and Tabor cleared the ravine and were across the saddle on their way down the other side when the two ground attack aircraft belatedly arrived from Perkins. Michael and Tabor dived for cover as first one and then a second howled overhead before disappearing up the valley to begin their search.

  “That’s good”-Tabor struggled to refill oxygen-starved lungs-“235s with full loads. Klaxons, I think you Feds call them. They’ll beat the area up a bit and then piss off, hopefully well before DocSec can drop in a ground force to pin us down. If they even try, which I doubt.” Tabor had to fight to get the words out between gasps. “DocSec has no stomach for a fight. They’ll take their time; they’ll wait for PDF or marine armor to secure the road first. Gutless pigs.” Tabor spit, his contempt for DocSec obvious.

  For a good forty-five minutes the Klaxons circled over the ambush site. Michael hoped that the sustained bursts of cannon fire and the dull thudding whump of fuel-air bombs going off were more in hope than in expectation. Twice, one of the Klaxons, obviously convinced it had located a cave full of heretics, climbed to 10,000 meters before dropping a bunker buster, the rocket-powered, case-hardened projectile going hypersonic before driving deep into the rock, the ultra-low-yield tacnuke warhead exploding deep underground with a sharp crack that made the earth shake. Michael shook his head; only the Hammers would use nukes on their home planet.

  “Those clowns will claim they’ve wiped out an entire heretic brigade by the time they’ve finished, I suppose?” Michael asked.

  Tabor nodded. “They will. If you believe Portillo, his ground attack fliers have wiped out more NRA soldiers than there are people living in McNair.” He spit dismissively.

  Tabor tipped his head to one side and listened intently for a moment. “Sounds to me like they’re moving east. Shit, I hope the team got away. Anyway, it’s good news for us. When I’m sure, we’ll move out.”

  “What about drones? Surely they’ll have those over the top of us.”

  “They will, but we’re going in the wrong direction. Safety for the NRA is that way”-Tabor pointed southeast-“and the Hammers know it, so that’s where the drones will go. We’re going that way,” he said, pointing northwest, “but we do need to get below the tree line as fast as we can. So keep your eyes open. Remember, if they come over the top of us, lie still, and I mean still. Let your chromaflage do the work.” He paused. “Right, I think they’ve gone.”

  With one last check that the Klaxons really were gone, Tabor was on his way, Michael in hot pursuit.

  Saturday, January 1, 2400, UD

  Branxton Ranges, Commitment

  Tabor shook Michael’s hand.

  “Good luck,” he whispered. “Your pickup team may take some time, so be patient. Getting here is not easy, even for you Feds and all your smart-ass technology. But don’t worry. They will be here.” Without another word, he vanished into the darkness.

  Michael lay under his chromaflage cover, stifling an unexpected urge to call Tabor back. All of a sudden he was absolutely terrified, his chest heaving as fear threatened to panic him into running after the man.

  A tenuous shred of self-control kept him together. Bit by bit his breathing slowed until he got himself together. He was still scared shitless, but the overwhelming urge to bolt had passed, thankfully.

  The hours dragged past, and despite still being scared shitless, Michael had begun to doze off when a rustle in the grass in front of him snapped him fully awake, his senses straining to work out what the noise meant. He tightened his grip on his assault carbine, slowly working it forward, ready to fire. Barely able to breathe, he looked intently out into the darkness from under his cape but saw only the dim outlines of starlit bushes and trees.

  “Helfort!” a voice hissed softly.

  The voice was so close and so unexpected that Michael jumped. He had not seen a damn thing. Before he could do anything, a hand had clamped itself onto his wrist and a whispered voice was in his ear.

  “Lance Corporal Jamal, FedWorld Marine Corps. Time to go, sir.”

  Heart racing, Michael put his head down onto the earth and lay there for a moment. This was going beyond a joke.

  He looked up to where the voice had come from.

  “Good to see you. I can’t tell you-” He choked on the words.

  “Later. We need to go. But first let’s get you properly dressed.”

  Jamal quickly stripped him of all his Hammer clothes, waiting patiently as Michael struggled into a marine-grade active chromaflage skinsuit complete with battle helmet and short-range laser tightbeam comms. With
quiet efficiency, Jamal checked that everything worked.

  “Good,” he said finally. “We’re ready. Now, follow me but not too close. Stay ten meters behind me. If anything happens, drop to the ground and stay there until I come back to get you. No heroics, and for God’s sake, use that damn carbine only as a last resort. Got all that?”

  “Yes,” Michael said meekly, his confidence growing by the minute in the face of Jamal’s quiet self-assurance.

  “Right. Let’s go.”

  While they walked, Jamal tightbeamed him the plan. Michael studied it carefully. The plan seemed pretty simple. Heading for Bretonville, they would work their way down through the forests that covered the flanks of the Branxton Ranges until they reached the main McNair-New Berlin motorway. They would cross the motorway south of Bretonville, using one of its many underpasses, and, once clear, would turn west to head for the fishing town of Piper. The pickup point was two kilometers outside Piper. When Michael asked how the pickup would work, Jamal refused to tell him. “You don’t need to know,” he said. “Trust me and do as you’re told.”

  Michael did the only thing he could. Head down, lungs burning, he followed the marine toward Bretonville, praying every step of the way that Lance Corporal Jamal knew what he was doing.

  The Federated Worlds ambassador to the Hammer of Kraa Worlds felt physically ill as he looked down at the emaciated body in the sick-bay cot. Michael Helfort was sleeping the sleep of the dead. The embassy doctor had commed him the results of his exhaustive medical. It made distressing reading.

  The ambassador shook his head again. Helfort’s body could be fixed-there was no doubt about that-but what about his mind?

  He left Michael to sleep. He commed Amos Bichel. He needed to know two things: How were they going to get Helfort home? And what were they going to do about the rest of the survivors of the Ishaq, who, despite the Hammers’ increasingly desperate efforts to recover them, were still at liberty somewhere deep in the trackless wastes of the Forest of Gwyr?

  The ambassador sighed. What a bloody mess. Since the Hammer was involved, it was a mess that could-no, definitely would-only get worse.

  Friday, January 7, 2400, UD

  Federated Worlds Embassy, city of McNair, Commitment

  Michael’s heart was hammering, his mouth bone-dry. He could not help himself. The prospect of leaving the safety and security of the FedWorld embassy compound absolutely terrified him. He took a deep breath to stiffen himself and stepped forward. He was about to climb into the secret compartment slung under the embassy people mover when the ambassador’s hand on his arm stopped him.

  “Good luck, Michael.”

  They shook hands. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Look after Marine Shinoda. The marines want her back in one piece.”

  “I’ll make sure they do, sir.” Michael tried hard not to think about Corporal Yazdi lying alone in a shallow grave on some godforsaken mountainside.

  Five minutes later, the people mover cleared the embassy compound and, with its DocSec escort falling in close behind, was on its way south.

  Later that morning, a young couple-poor country people to judge from their clothes-made their way into Bretonville Station. Tickets clutched in hand, they boarded the maglev express to McNair. A passing DocSec patrol did not bother to check them out. They were just another pair of country bumpkins going up to the big smoke, so why bother?

  An hour later, the couple stood in the impressively ornate lobby of the state lottery office, models of embarrassed indecision. Eventually, one of the staff deigned to notice their predicament and waved at them to go inside to the counter.

  A bored clerk looked up at them as they approached. “Yes?”

  Michael cleared his throat. He hoped that the vocalization reprogramming that had been dumped into his neuronics would work as advertised. If it had not given him the flat, crushed vowels of a native-born Hammer, he and Marine Shinoda would be in a lot of trouble.

  “Umm, yes. Er, we, we have a winning ticket in last night’s lottery and I, er. . I would like to collect that, please, if you could, um, help us, please,” Michael gibbered. Christ, he was nervous, which was probably a good thing. He did not have to work too hard to look like the hayseed his clothes and identity card declared him to be. And speaking of identity cards, he had been hugely impressed with Bichel’s technical team. He and Shinoda were now fully paid-up members of DocSec’s Section 4 Knowledge Base, something Michael never would have believed possible. Apparently it was. If that wasn’t impressive enough, Bichel’s team had hacked into the state lottery to give him a winning ticket. It was the simplest way to give them a sizable lump of untraceable local funds without creating a public profile, Bichel had said smugly.

  An elbow in the ribs from Shinoda brought him back to reality.

  “The ticket, husband. Give the man the ticket,” she whispered, a paragon of the wifely deference so prized by Hammer men.

  “Oh, yes. Hang on.” Michael fumbled in a pocket. “Here it is.”

  The clerk checked the ticket painstakingly before running it under a scanner. After a short pause, he nodded.

  “It’s for 250,000 k-dollars,” he said, “and no publicity.” The clerk, elevating bored disinterest to an art form, did not even ask for Michael’s identity card before handing over an anonymous stored value card loaded with their winnings. Michael held the small plastic card tightly and marveled at the inconsistency of it all. On the one hand, the Hammer was the most tightly controlled society in human history. On the other hand, they still used anonymous stored value cards; Bichel had told him there was no limit to the amount they could carry. Michael suspected he knew why. Corruption on the massive scale that infected Hammer society could flourish only if huge amounts of money could move untraced, hence the anonymous stored value card clamped in his hand.

  Five minutes later, his confidence rising by the minute, Michael and Shinoda were on their way to get exit visas for Scobie’s World from the downtown DocSec visa office. That, too, happened without any fuss. The visa clerk, openly impressed by their lottery win and surprisingly unresentful, downloaded the visas they needed into their identity cards in a fraction of the time Bichel had warned it might take. They made two more stops-to buy tickets on the first starliner for Scobie’s World and to find new clothes-before they were finally on their way to McNair spaceport, a pair of exuberant, blow-it-all lottery winners.

  For Michael, the tension was finally easing. He had one last DocSec check to get through, and then he would be off this goddamned planet, never to return, he hoped. No, that was not right; he would happily come back as long as he was piloting a FedWorld assault lander. His newfound belief in Bichel’s technical team was growing to a point where he was beginning to enjoy the whole business even though the suicide pill he had asked for-which, somewhat to his surprise, he had been given-was a constant reminder not to get too confident.

  Things that could go wrong often did.

  Not this time.

  With mounting excitement, Michael, his hand tightly locked in Shinoda’s, stood at the floor-to-ceiling plate of armored plasglass that formed an entire wall of the first-class lounge. He was watching something he had not dared dream about: the planet Commitment receding slowly away from them as the liner Councillor Vladimir Spassky began its slow acceleration out-system. He gave in to a sudden wave of impulsive happiness and picked Shinoda up, folding her into a bear hug of an embrace, the relief swamping his body madly intoxicating.

  “Watch it, sailor,” she whispered into his ear as he swung her around. “We may be Mr. and Mrs. Benoit to those shitsucking Hammers, but. .”

  Michael laughed out loud as he put her down. “Sorry,” he whispered back. “It’s been a tough few months.”

  “I know,” Shinoda said.

  Afterward, Michael realized that he should not have been surprised at what had happened. Nature had its own ways of helping broken minds mend. Falling into bed with Marine Shinoda a day out from Commitment, ov
erwhelmed by a wave of physical desire that he was not going to argue with, was probably one of them.

  Try as hard as he might, he did not feel the slightest bit guilty at betraying the promises he had made to Anna.

  That was then. This was now. Against all the odds, he was alive. He was battered, he was bruised, he had injuries he would carry for the rest of his life, but he was alive.

  “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We have docked, and you may now disembark. We trust you had a good trip. We look forward to seeing you all again on board soon.”

  Not a chance, pal, Michael said to himself, not a chance in hell.

  He and Shinoda hung back. Around them, excited Hammers, voices raised at the prospect of shaking off the petty repressions inflicted on them back home, poured off the Councillor Vladimir Spassky straight into the milling line piling up at immigration control. But even there they were not out of the Hammer’s reach. Officially, Scobie’s World was an independent, sovereign system, a fiction cruelly exposed by the DocSec trooper sitting behind the clerks processing the new arrivals.

  Michael shivered at the sight of the hated black uniform. He knew as well as anyone that it took a delicate balancing act to maintain Scobie’s independence. On the one hand, Scobie’s World tried extremely hard not to upset the Hammer. On the other hand, it tried equally hard not to be classed as a Hammer vassal system with all the economic restrictions that would bring. But in the end, most of what Scobie’s World did was on the Hammer’s terms, and one of those terms was ceding de facto control to DocSec over everyone arriving on or leaving the place. That was not surprising. The Hammer was well aware that many of its citizens would never return home given the chance.