“Well, well,” Slater said. “Hadn’t heard that last part. Hell, Ace, we’re none of us getting any younger. And this is a good world, good in lots of ways.”
“Can’t fault the Spartans for their terms,” Barton said meditatively. Lateral transfer at their brevet ranks was the least of it; automatic Citizenship, landgrants . . . with their Royal Army pay and partial Legion pensions thrown in, they would be well-to-do men by local standards.
“Mmmm-hm. And,” Slater went on, “this place is one of the few I’ve seen whose government doesn’t make me want to pinch my nose and ‘holdeth aside the skirt of the garment.'”
Barton’s face went bleak. “Yeah. I like the people, too. Which is why I’ve started wanting to win even more than usual.” You always did; a matter of self-respect, the Code, and of course you lost fewer men that way.
“Agreed.” A shrug. “Of course, we’re getting a lesson in what Christian Johnny always said, remember? ‘Soldiers are the cleanup crew.'”
One of Falkenberg’s history lessons was on how seldom military men had much say in how their efforts were applied. Armed force was a blunt instrument in politics, liable to do more harm than good unless aimed with extreme precision. At best, it bought time and space for the political leaders to repair the political mistakes that had left no choice but violence in the first place.
The other man nodded and sipped at his brandy. Damned good, he thought.
“Well,” he said, “at least this time we aren’t hired by the ones who screwed up.” To bury the evidence under the bodies.
“Dad’s looking into another matter,” George Slater said. “Loyalties. It’s easy to see what holds the Spartans to their cause. The Helots are another matter. Whitlock’s working on political persuasion. We should too.”
“Sure,” Barton said. “How?”
“Oh, maybe remind them just what their leaders do. Left their troops and ran like hell at the Dales, saved their skins by sacrificing everyone else. Get that story across, and the first time they get a setback it’s every man for himself.” Slater tamped tobacco into a pipe. “It’s not as if the people they’re following are admirable. In any way.”
“Maybe their troops don’t know that—”
“I’m sure they don’t,” Slater said. “If they did, would they stick?”
“Maybe some would. Revolutionaries. I learned all about fanatics on Thurstone, hell, before you were born. But it’s something to think about.” He looked at his watch. “Another day’s work in Olynthos,” he said. Slater would be taking over there; it was the second-largest city on Sparta, center of the Middle and Upper Valleys of the Eurotas. “And then on to the wilds of the north for me. Should be interesting.”
* * *
“Are you all right, Margreta?” Melissa asked. She had to lean close and put her ear to the young soldier’s, given the noise level. “You’re pale as a sheet.”
“I’m fine,” Margreta shouted back. Her fingers were shaking slightly as she put on her helmet; the noise level dropped immediately, as the sonic sensors automatically filtered out the background. “It’s just . . . the news about Lieutenant Lefkowitz, you know? Everyone in the Legion is—” Mostly mad enough to rip out veins with their teeth, she thought. With me, it’s more personal. I’ve got to work with the animals who did that.
Melissa nodded and gave the younger woman’s shoulder a squeeze. Margreta smiled back. Be here. Be ready for possible extraction, were all the orders that had come from her clandestine Helot contact.
It had run through Fort Plataia like fire through standing grass, and the execution of the four Helots had done little to calm the anger. The CoDominium authorities had little alternative but to accept that as sufficient; the Legionnaires would not. The Brotherhoods seem to be almost as angry, Margreta thought. There had been a delegation of condolence, and a new rush of enlistments. Frightening to have the enemy’s nature driven home so thoroughly, but there was something in knowing you had a big family to protect you . . . or at least avenge you.
The new vehicle assembly bay was even louder than usual. Armored vehicles were moving down the conveyor, and the air was full of the ugly howling rasp of heavy-duty grinding machines, the ozone-smelling flash of electrowelders and the whine of pneumatic tools. Each light tank started the line as an open frame; as it passed down computer-controlled overhead cranes swung in, first with sections of hull-armor to be welded on, then with components and engines and transmissions. Lighter parts like the roadwheels and tracks ran on trolleys up to the sides of the line, and the last thing to be added was the turret with its basket, lowered onto the Cataphract. These particular models were SP guns, with 155mm gun-howitzers in big boxy turrets.
“Just shows what you can do if you have to,” Melissa said again, smiling and waving about at the vast extensions which had nearly doubled the area of von Alderheim Works #2. This time the Legion helmet delivered it in conversational tones. “After the war, we’ll have twice the capacity we did going in. Of course, most of it will be for tanks.”
They had become friendly, after meeting at the University’s software department. Melissa von Alderheim was more than the daughter of Sparta’s wealthiest industrialist and fiancee to Lysander Collins; she was the best CAD-CAM designer on the planet. That was a rare art, these days, when design changes were mostly a matter of styling and BuInt suppressed all real change. Much of the new output of war machines was her doing.
“Two fifty per month of the AFVs, and fifty of the SP howitzers?” she said.
Melissa nodded. “It’s the stabilization and optics that’s the bottleneck,” she said. “We’re getting the Friedlander stuff through now. And an inquiry about what we’re using it for.”
A natural worry; Daimlerwerk Friedland AG had lucrative markets for armored fighting vehicles all through this sector, and hiring out their panzer units was even more important to them. Vehicles were parked outside, several hectares of them waiting to be driven down to the plant’s docks on Constitution Bay, everything from jeeps and trucks to the self-propelled guns she had seen under construction inside. The landing platforms were busy, barges and steamboats and diesels unloading metals and forms, loading with vehicles and engines and general goods for transshipment upriver.
“This is going to cause the enemy hard trouble,” Margreta said. Then shivered. Why am I frightened? she thought. It was just a routine consulting trip . . . and Major Owensford said a hunch was your subconcious telling you something.
The main gate of the factory was on the other side of the complex, facing the main road into town; von Alderheim Works #2 had been built on a greenfield site, with plenty of room for expansion.
FAMP. Almost too loud to be an explosion, a pillar of flame reaching for the sky. Truck-bomb, she thought numbly. Lots of big articulated trucks driving up there all the time, although how they had got a bomb past the checkpoints and inspections . . . Of course. Use a legitimate load of explosives. And a suicide driver. Who would look for a bomb in a ten-kilo load of shell filler? Even this far away the blast was perceptible, and the two Royal Army troopers guarding them wheeled, their rifles coming up automatically.
God, please, God, Margreta prayed, an atheist’s desperate reflex as she cleared her pistol.
“Wait a minute,” she said to herself, crouching and looking around. Nothing, except the normal work of the docks grinding to a halt as everyone turned to look at the pillar of smoke. The explosion was spectacular, but not really damaging. No secondary blasts . . . “It’s a diversion!” she shouted. “Get—”
KRAK. A Peltast rifle; the massive 15mm round smashed through one soldier’s spine and out the front of his chest in a shower of bone and blood, ignoring his body armor as if it were tissue. Impact sledged him forward with his limbs flopping like a rag doll’s. Margreta drew and dove for cover; her armored torso struck Melissa at the same moment, sending the slight Spartan woman four steps back on her heels toward the shelter of an APC. The Legionnaire’s free hand was reaching up to drag the other woman down into safety and—
KRAK. The 15mm round, which would have punched through Melissa’s center of mass if Margreta had not moved her, struck and skimmed all along her arm from shoulder to fingertips instead, shattering bone and tearing muscle. She went down with limp finality, her head thudding into the tungsten-steel cleats of the personnel carrier’s treads. KRAK. Into the leg of the downed soldier, blasting it off at the shin.
“God damn!” Margreta shouted, pulling her communicator free and dropping the useless pistol from the other so that she could fumble a hypo from her belt and slap it against Melissa’s neck. Gray skin, rapid breathing, sweat . . . shock.