The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 (103 page)

Several lift fans shut off; pressurized air from the remaining nacelles roared through the hole blown in the steel. The car grounded, rocked forward in a near somersault, and slammed to rest on its skirts.

The first impact smashed Ruthven’s thighs against the hatch coaming; pain was a sun-white blur filling his mind. When the car’s bow lifted, it tossed him onto the bales of rations and personal gear in the roof rack. Ruthven was only vaguely aware of the final shock hurling him off the crippled vehicle.

He opened his eyes. He was on his back with the landscape shimmering in and out of focus. He must’ve been unconscious, but he didn’t know how long. The car was downslope from him. One of its fans continued to scream, but the others were silent. Black smoke boiled out of the driver’s compartment.

He tried to stand up but his legs didn’t move. Have they been blown off? They couldn’t be, I’d have bled out. He’d lost his helmet, so the visor no longer protected his eyes from the sky-searing bolts of plasma being fired from the knoll above him. The afterimages of each track wobbled from orange to purple and back across his retinas.

Ruthven rolled over, still dazed. Pain yawned in a gaping cavern centered on his right leg. He must’ve screamed but he couldn’t hear the sound. When the jolt from the injured leg sucked inward and vanished, his throat felt raw.

“It’s the El-Tee!” somebody cried. “Cover me, I’m going to get him.”

Another buzzbomb detonated with a hollow Whoomp! on the right side of the command car. Momentarily, a pearly bubble swelled bigger than the vehicle itself. The jet penetrated the thin armor, crossed the compartment, and sprayed out the left side.

Ruthven started crawling, pushing himself with his left foot and dragging his right as though the leg were tied to his hip with a rope. He couldn’t feel it now except as a dull throbbing somewhere.

He wasn’t trying to get to safety: he knew his safest course would be to lie silently in a dip, hoping to go unobserved or pass for dead. He wasn’t thinking clearly, but his troopers were on the knoll so that’s where he was going.

A rebel ran out from behind the command car shouting, “Protect me, Lord!”

Ruthven glanced back. His sub-machine gun was in the vehicle, but he wore a pistol. He scrabbled for it but his equipment belt was twisted; he couldn’t find the holster.

The rebel thrust his automatic rifle out in both hands; the butt wasn’t anywhere near his shoulder. “Die, unbeliever!” he screamed. A 2-cm powergun bolt decapitated him. The rifle fired as he spasmed backward.

One bullet struck Ruthven in the small of the back. It didn’t penetrate his ceramic body armor, but the impact was like a sledgehammer. Bits of bullet jacket sprayed Ruthven’s right arm and cheek.

He pushed himself upward again, moaning deep in his throat. He thought he might be talking to himself. A skimmer snarled through the high grass and circled to a halt alongside, the bow facing uphill. Nozzles pressurized by the single fan sprayed grit across Ruthven’s bare face.

“El-Tee, grab on!” Rennie shouted, leaning from the flat platform to seize Ruthven’s belt. “Grab!”

Ruthven turned on his side and reached out. He got a tie-down in his left hand and the shoulder clamp of the sergeant’s armor in his right. Rennie was already slamming power to the lift fan, trying to throw his weight out to the right to balance the drag of Ruthven’s body.

The skimmer wasn’t meant to carry two, but it slowly accelerated despite the excess burden. Ruthven bounced through brush, sometimes hitting a rock. His left boot acted as a skid, but often enough his hip or the length of his leg scraped as the skimmer ambled uphill. A burst of sub-machine gun fire, a nervous flickering against the brighter, saturated flashes of 2-cm weapons, crackled close overhead, but Ruthven couldn’t see what the shooter was aiming at.

The skimmer jolted over a shrub whose roots had held the windswept soil in a lump higher than the ground to either side. Ruthven flew free and rolled. Every time his right leg hit the ground, a flash of pain cut out that fraction of the night.

A tribarrel chugged from behind, raking the slope up which they’d come. Ruthven was within the new perimeter. Half a dozen Royalists huddled nearby with terrified expressions, but E/1 itself had enough firepower to halt the rebels. They’d already been hammered, and now more shells screamed down like a regiment of flaming banshees.

Firebase Groening was northeast of Firebase Courage, so the hogs were overfiring E/1’s present perimeter to reach the rebels. Somebody . . . Sergeant Hassel? . . . must be calling in concentrations, relaying the messages through the command car. The vehicle was out of action, but its radios were still working.

Rennie spun the skimmer to a halt. “Made it!” he shouted. “We bloody well made it!”

Ruthven found his holster and managed to lift the flap. Beside him, Rennie hunched to remove his 2-cm weapon from the rail where he’d clamped it to free both hands for the rescue.

A buzzbomb skimmed the top of the knoll, missing the tribarrel at which it’d been aimed and striking Sergeant Rennie in the middle of the back. There was a white flash.

The shells from Firebase Groening landed like an earthquake on the rebels who’d overrun the Royalist camp and were now starting uphill toward E/1. In the light of the huge explosions, Ruthven saw Rennie’s head fly high in the air. The sergeant had lost his helmet, and his expression was as innocent as a child’s.

“Good afternoon, Lieutenant Ruthven,” Doctor Parvati said as he stepped into the room without knocking. “You are up? And packing already, I see. It is good that you should be optimistic, but let us take things one step at a time, shall we? Lie down on your bed, please, so that I can check you.”

Ruthven wondered if Parvati’d put a slight emphasis on the phrase “one step.” Probably not, and even if he had it’d been meant as a harmless joke. I have to watch myself. I’m pretty near the edge, and if I start overreacting, well. . . .

“Look, Doc,” he said, straightening but not moving away from the barracks bag he was filling from the locker he’d kept under the bed. “You saw the reading that Drayer took this noon, right? I’m kinda in a hurry.”

“I have gone over the noon readings, yes,” Parvati said calmly. He was a small, slight man with only a chaplet of hair remaining, though by his face he was in his early youth. “Now I would like to take more readings.”

When Ruthven still hesitated, Parvati added, “I do not tell you how to do your job, Lieutenant. Please grant me the same courtesy.”

“Right,” said Ruthven after a further moment. He pushed the locker to the side and paused. The garments were new, sent over from Quartermaster’s Stores. The gear on the command car’s rack had burned when they shot at rebs trying to get to the tribarrel. The utilities Ruthven worn during the firefight had been cut off him as soon as he arrived here.

He sat on the bed and carefully swung his legs up. He’d been afraid of another blinding jolt, but he felt nothing worse than a twinge in his back. Funny how it was his left hip rather than the smashed right femur where the pain hit him now. He’d scraped some on the left side, but he’d have said that was nothing to mention.

“So,” said Parvati, reading the diagnostic results with his hands crossed behind his back. The holographic display was merely a distortion in the air from where Ruthven lay looking at the doctor. “So.”

“I was talking to Sergeant Axbird this afternoon,” Ruthven said to keep from fidgeting. “She was my platoon sergeant, you know. I was wondering how she was coming along?”

Parvati looked at Ruthven through the display. After a moment he said, “Mistress Axbird’s physical recovery has gone as far as it can. How she does now depends on her own abilities and the degree to which she learns to use her new prosthetics. If you are her friend, you will encourage her to show more initiative in that regard.”

“Ah,” Ruthven said. “I see. I’m cleared for duty, though, Doctor. Right?”

He wondered if he ought to stand up again. Parvati always used the bed’s own display instead of downloading the information into a clipboard.

“Are you still feeling pain in your hip, Lieutenant?” the doctor asked, apparently oblivious of Ruthven’s question.

“No,” Ruthven lied. “Well, not really. You know, I get a little, you know, tickle from time to time. I guess that’ll go away pretty quick, right?”

It struck Ruthven that the diagnostic display would include blood pressure, heart rate, and all the other physical indicators of stress. He jumped up quickly. Pain exploded from his hip; he staggered forward. His mouth was open to gasp, but his paralyzed diaphragm couldn’t force the air out of his lungs.

“Lieutenant?” Parvati said, stepping forward.

“I’m all right!” said Ruthven. Sweat beaded his forehead. “I just tripped on the locker! Bloody thing!”

“I see,” said Parvati in a neutral tone. “Well, Lieutenant, your recovery seems to be proceeding most satisfactorily. I’d like you to remain here for a few days, however, so that some of my colleagues can check you over.”

“You mean Psych, don’t you?” Ruthven said. His hands clenched and unclenched. “Look, Doc, I don’t need that and I sure don’t want it. Just sign me out, got it?”

“Lieutenant Ruthven, you were seriously injured,” the doctor said calmly. “I would be derelict in my duties if I didn’t consider the possibility that the damage I was able to see had not caused additional damage beyond my purview. I wish to refer you to specialists in psychological trauma, yes.”

“Do you?” Ruthven said. His voice was rising, but he couldn’t help it. “Well, you let me worry about that, all right? You’re a nice guy, Doc, but you said it: my psychology is none of your business! Now, you clear me back to my unit, or I’ll take it over your head. You can explain to Colonel Hammer why you’re dicking around a platoon leader whose troops need him in the field!”

“I see,” said the doctor without any inflection. “I do not have the authority to hold you against your will, Lieutenant, but for your own sake I wish you would reconsider.”

“You said that,” Ruthven said. He bent and picked up his barracks bag. “Now, you do your job and let me get back to mine.”

Parvati made a slight bow. “As you wish,” he said. He touched the controller in his hand; the hologram vanished like cobwebs in a storm. “I will have an orderly come to take your bag.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Ruthven said harshly. “I can get it over to the transient barracks myself. They’ll find me a bunk there if there isn’t a way to get to E/1 still tonight. I just want to be out of this place ASAP.”

He didn’t know where the platoon was or who was commanding in his absence. Hassel, he hoped; it’d be awkward if Central’d brought in another officer already. He wondered how many replacements they’d gotten after the ratfuck at Firebase Courage.

“As you wish,” Parvati repeated, opening the door and stepping back for Ruthven to lead. “Ah? By the water pitcher, Lieutenant? The file is yours, I believe?”

Ruthven didn’t look over his shoulder. “No, not mine,” he said. “I was thinking about, you know, transferring out, but I couldn’t leave my platoon. E/1 really needs me, you know.”

He walked into the corridor, as tight as a compressed spring. Even before Axbird had come to see him, he’d been thinking of night and darkness and the faceless horror of living among people who didn’t know what it was like. Who’d never know what it was like.

The troopers of Platoon E/1 did need Henry Ruthven, he was sure.

But not as much as I need them, in the night and the unending darkness.

JIM

The Hammer series exists because Jim Baen first bought individual stories, then the books themselves.

These three volumes of The Complete Hammer’s Slammers are therefore the right place to print my obituary to my friend Jim.

Jim Baen called me on the afternoon of June 11, 2006. He generally phoned on weekends, and we’d usually talk a couple more times in the course of a week; but this was the last time.

In the course of the conversation he said, “You’ve got to write my obituary, you know.” I laughed (I’ll get to that) and said, “Sure, if I’m around—but remember, I’m the one who rides the motorcycle.”

So I’m writing this. Part of it’s adapted from the profile I did in 2000 for the program book of the Chicago Worldcon at which Jim was Editor Guest of Honor. They cut my original title, which Jim loved: The God of Baendom. I guess they thought it was undignified and whimsical.

The title was undignified and whimsical. So was Jim.

James Patrick Baen was born October 22, 1943, on the Pennsylvania-New York border, a long way by road or in culture from New York City. He was introduced to SF early through the magazines in a step-uncle’s attic, including the November, 1957, issue of Astounding with “The Gentle Earth” by Christopher Anvil.

The two books Jim most remembered as being formative influences were Fire-Hunter by Jim Kjelgaard and Against the Fall of Night by Arthur C. Clarke. The theme of both short novels is that a youth from a decaying culture escapes the trap of accepted wisdom and saves his people despite themselves. This is a fair description of Jim’s life in SF: he was always his own man, always a maverick, and very often brilliantly successful because he didn’t listen to what other people thought.

For example, the traditional model of electronic publishing required that the works be encrypted. Jim thought that just made it hard for people to read books, the worst mistake a publisher could make. His e-texts were DRM-free and in a variety of common formats.

While e-publishing has been a costly waste of effort for others, Baen Books quickly began earning more from electronic sales than it did from book sales in Canada ($6,000/month). By the time of Jim’s death, the figure had risen to ten times that.

Jim didn’t forget his friends. In later years he arranged for the expansion of Fire-Hunter so that he could republish it (as The Hunter Returns, originally the title of the Charles R. Knight painting Jim put on the cover).

Though Clarke didn’t need help to keep his books in print the way Kjelgaard did, Jim didn’t forget him either. Jim called me for help a week before his stroke, because Amazon.com had asked him to list the ten SF novels that everyone needed to read to understand the field. Against the Fall of Night was one of the titles that we settled on.