The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 1

THE IRRESISTIBLE FORCE

Lamartiere sat in the driver's compartment of the supertank Hoodoo, which he'd stolen from Hammer's Slammers as the mercenaries left Ambiorix for Beresford and another contract. The tank's 20cm main gun could smash mountains; the fully automatic 2cm tribarrel in the cupola defended her against incoming artillery as well as packing a sizable punch in its own right. She was the most powerful weapon within twenty light-years.

In theory, at least. Hoodoo's practical value to the sputtering remnants of the Mosite Rebellion would have to wait until Lamartiere and Dr. Clargue figured out how to transfer ammunition from the tank's storage magazines in the hull to the ready magazines in the turret.

"The reconnaissance drone has turned east," Clargue said over the intercom. "The AI predicts it's completed its search pattern, but I suppose we should wait a short time to be sure."

"Right," Lamartiere said, wondering if he'd fall asleep if he closed his eyes for a moment. "We'll wait."

Even with Hoodoo at rest in a narrow gorge, her internal systems and the hum of the idling drive fans made her noisy. It would have been difficult to shout directly through the narrow passage between the fighting compartment and the driver's position in the bow. The Slammers would have used commo helmets to cut off the ambient noise, but Lamartiere hadn't bothered with frills the night he drove Hoodoo out of the spaceport at Brione.

The Government of Ambiorix had decided the Mosite Rebellion was broken, so they'd terminated the mercenaries' contract to save the cost of paying for such sophisticated troops and equipment. Hoodoo was the last piece of Slammers' hardware on the planet. An electrical fault had held it and its two-man crew back when the rest of the regiment lifted for Beresford, 300 light-years away.

Those planning the operation on behalf of the Mosite Council in Goncourt had claimed that Hoodoo would win the war. With a single supertank the Council could force the Carcassone government to grant autonomy to the Western District where the Mosite faith predominated.

Lamartiere had been at the sharp end, infiltrating Brione as one of the mercenaries' Local Service Personnel—cheap local labor who did fetch and carry for the Slammers' skilled service technicians. He hadn't thought beyond completion of the operation, and even that only in the moments when he had enough leisure to think more than half a second ahead. If asked, though, he'd have said that Hoodoo's enormous power would restore military parity between Mosite forces and the government.

Maybe, just maybe, that would have been true—if he and Clargue could use Hoodoo's armament properly. As it was, with luck and fewer than a hundred rounds of 2cm ammunition gleaned from the local militia, they'd been able to smash a government mechanized battalion at the Lystra River.

It wouldn't work that way again, though. By now the government would have analyzed the wreckage of the previous battle and realized that Hoodoo's main gun wasn't working, though they might not guess why. A powerful force would attack Hoodoo again as soon as Carcassone learned where she had fled. This time Lamartiere's trickery wouldn't be enough to win.

In addition to the government, the tank's mercenary crew, Sergeant Heth and Trooper Stegner, had stayed on Ambiorix instead of rejoining the regiment. They might or might not be actively helping the government forces, but in any case they contributed to the aura of overhanging doom Lamartiere had felt ever since his triumph at stealing Hoodoo had worn off.

"The drone hasn't returned," Clargue said in his usual mild tone. The doctor was as tired and frustrated as Lamartiere, but you never heard that in his voice.

"Sorry," Lamartiere said. "I was daydreaming." Daydreaming in the middle of the night, with the stars above jewels in the desert air. It was thirty-six hours since Lamartiere had last slept.

He raised the drive fans from idle speed to full power, then broadened the angle of the blades so that they pushed the atmosphere instead of simply cutting it. Hoodoo rose on the bubble of air trapped within her steel-skirted plenum chamber, then slid out of the gully in which Lamartiere had hidden her when the government drone came over the horizon. With the nacelles tilted forward to retard the tank's rush down the slope, Hoodoo entered the Boukasset.

Most of Ambiorix' single large continent was organized in districts under administrators appointed by Carcassone. The sparsely settled Boukasset, the rocky wasteland in the rain shadow of the mountains forming the Western District, had always been ignored as a poor relation. Since the Western District had rebelled when the Synod of the Established Church attempted to put down what it described as the Mosite Heresy, the Boukasset's connection to Carcassone had become even more tenuous.

Hoodoo squirmed out of the mountains and into a broad river basin, dry now but a gushing, foaming torrent once every decade or so when cloudbursts drenched the Boukasset. The bottom was carpeted with vegetation that survived on groundwater dribbling beneath the sand. The coarse brush flattened beneath a 170-tonne tank with the power of a fusion bottle to drive it, then sprang up again to conceal all traces of Hoodoo's passage.

Lamartiere pulled his control yoke back, increasing speed gradually. The AI overlaid a recommended course on the terrain display and steered the tank along it as long as Lamartiere permitted it to do so.

Their intended destination was the Shrine of the Blessed Catherine. If Lamartiere fell asleep now, Hoodoo would roar past the site in three hours and forty-nine minutes according to the countdown clock at the top of the display.

Giggling and aware that he wasn't safe to drive, Lamartiere pulled the yoke back a hair farther. The Estimated Time of Arrival dropped to three hours and twenty-four minutes.

Nowhere on Ambiorix was safe for Lamartiere until he and Clargue got Hoodoo's guns working. He wouldn't be safe then either, but at least he could fight back.

Maury, the rebel commander in the Boukasset, dealt with off-planet smugglers who slipped down in small vessels. Hoodoo's tribarrel used the same ammunition as the 2cm shoulder weapons of the Slammers' infantry and others who could afford those smashingly effective weapons. Maury had some of the guns, so he could supply the tank if he chose to.

If. . . .

"What do you know about Maury, Doctor?" Lamartiere asked, partly to keep himself awake. "He seems to have held the government out of his region, which we couldn't do in the mountains."

Great trees overhung the riverbed. The pinlike leaves of their branches shivered as the tank slid past. The trees' taproots penetrated the buried aquifer, but their trunks were clear of the flash floods that periodically scoured the channel.

"There's nothing in the Boukasset that the government wanted badly enough to commit Hammer's mercenaries to get it," Clargue said. "Nomadic herdsmen and small-scale farmers using terraces and deep wells. Our mines in the Western District were Ambiorix' main source of foreign exchange before the rebellion."

Clargue was a small, precise man in his sixties; a doctor who'd left the most advanced hospital in Carcassone to serve the sick of his home village of Pamiers in the mountains. Because of his experience with medical computers as complex as the systems of this tank, the Council had chosen him to help Lamartiere make Hoodoo operational. He'd tried despite his distaste for the war that had wrecked his home and Ambiorix as a whole, but he hadn't been able to find a way to access the ammunition Lamartiere knew was stored in Hoodoo's hull.

"As for what I know of Maury," Clargue continued, "nothing to his credit. At the best of times leaders in the Boukasset have been one step removed from posturing thugs. 'Posturing thug' would be a kind description of Maury if half the rumors one hears are true."

"Beggars can't be choosers, I suppose," Lamartiere muttered. His yoke twitched in his hands as the AI guided Hoodoo.

He had a bad feeling about this, but he'd had a bad feeling about the operation almost from the beginning. He'd bloodied the government badly both when he escaped from Brione with the tank and at the Lystra River. But Pamiers had received a hammering by artillery and perhaps worse because Hoodoo had hidden there, and at Brione Lamartiere's sister Celine had died while driving a truckload of explosive into the main gate of the base.

So long as the war went on, everybody lost. If Hoodoo became fully operational, she could extend the war for years and maybe decades.

"Beggars have no power," Clargue said. He sniffed. "A man like Maury understands no language but that of power. The Council must be fools to send us into the Boukasset with that message."

Lamartiere sighed. "Yeah," he said. "But we already knew that, and we're here anyway. We'll see what we can work out."

The dry riverbed lost itself among the plains. The skirts began to ring on rocks, the heavy debris dumped here at the last spate and not yet covered by sand. Lamartiere edged Hoodoo northward to where the ground was smoother. The AI reconfigured the course slightly; the ETA changed again.

Hoodoo roared through the starlit night, heading at speed toward the next way-station on a road to nowhere.

It was an hour past dawn. The low sun deepened the color of the red cliffs and the red sand into which those cliffs decayed. By midday the sun would turn the sky brassy and bleach every hue to a ghost of itself.

The shrine was in the Boukasset where four generations ago Catherine had given birth to the child who became Bishop Moses, to whom God revealed the foundations of the Mosite faith. The site had been a pilgrimage center during peacetime, but Lamartiere hadn't been religious in that fashion.

Since Lamartiere learned what had happened to his sister Celine, he hadn't been religious in any way at all; but now there was no way out of the course he'd chosen in the days when he could believe in a future.

The first sign of habitation was the line of conical shelters, two or three abreast, which wound across the plain. Low hills lay in the distance to east and west, and a jagged sandstone slope rose immediately north of the site.

The shrine itself was a fortress walled in the russet stone of the overlooking cliff. It was built on a lower slope where the rise could be accommodated by a single terrace, but the gullied rock behind it rose at 1:2 or even 1:1.

The spire of a church showed above the enclosure's ten-meter sidewalls. A bell there rang when Hoodoo appeared out of the east, trailing a great plume of dust.

Lamartiere disengaged the AI and began slowing the tank by turning the fan nacelles vertical instead of tilting them to the rear. Hoodoo's enormous inertia meant control inputs had to be added well in advance.

"They grow lemon trees in those shelters," Dr Clargue said. He sounded puzzled at something. "The plantings are laid out over an underground aquifer, but without protection the wind would scour the leaves and even bark off the trees."

He paused, then added, "There weren't nearly as many trees when I came here twelve years ago. Only a handful of Brothers tended to the shrine then."

Lamartiere guided the tank past the cones straggling as they followed a seam in the bedrock. Overlying sand kept the water from evaporating. He knew that lemons from the Boukasset had a reputation for flavor, but because he'd never visited the region he hadn't wondered how terrain so barren could grow citrus fruit.

Hoodoo had slowed to a crawl when she was still a hundred meters from the high walls of the shrine. Lamartiere cut his fan speed but angled the nacelles sternward again. The tank slid the remainder of the way forward under perfect control.

Lamartiere ruefully congratulated himself on his skill. He was probably the only person in the Boukasset who knew how difficult it was to drive a 170-tonne air-cushion vehicle.

He slid open his hatch. What looked from a distance like the shrine's entrance had been closed by sandstone blocks many years in the past. A woman leaned over the battlements. Beside her, a basket hung on a crane extending from the wall. A great geared wheel within raised and lowered it. The basket was apparently the only way in and out of the shrine.

"Tell your leader that we need help to spread the camouflage cover over this tank," Lamartiere called to the woman. "Otherwise we'll be spotted if the government overflies us."

Men and women were approaching from the lemon orchard, though the sprawled extent of the plantings meant it would be half an hour before the more distant folk reached the shrine. There were hundreds of people, far more than Lamartiere had expected.

"The Brothers have been sheltering refugees," Clargue realized aloud. He sat on the edge of his hatch, his legs dangling down the turret's smooth iridium armor.

Lamartiere looked up at his companion and hid a frown. The doctor had always seemed frail. Now he was skeletal, worn to the bone by strain and the frustration of not being able to find the command that would transfer ammunition and permit Hoodoo to use her devastating weaponry.

"Go away!" the woman shouted. Her left hand was bandaged. "Go back to the hell you came from and leave us alone!"

An old man in black robes and a pillbox hat appeared on the battlements beside her. He and the woman held a brief discussion while Lamartiere kept silent.

The woman unpinned the gearwheel, letting the basket wobble down. The man held his hat on with one hand as he bent forward. "Please," he said. "If you gentlemen will come up, it will be easier for us to discuss your presence."

Lamartiere looked at Clargue. "One of us should stay with . . ." he said.

The doctor smiled. "Yes, of course," he said, "but you should carry out the negotiations. I wouldn't know what to say to them."

"And you think I do?" Lamartiere said; but he knew Clargue was right. The doctor was smarter and older and better educated; but this was war, and Clargue was utterly a man of peace.

Denis Lamartiere was . . . not a man of peace. He and Clargue were operating in a world at war, now, however much both of them might hate it.

Lamartiere got into the basket. He let the sway of it ratcheting upward soothe his tension.

The basket was still several feet below the stone coping when the pulley touched the fiber cage connecting the rim to the draw rope. The old man helped Lamartiere onto the battlements. Normally Lamartiere would have scrambled over easily by himself, but his head was swaying with fatigue even though the basket was steady again.

The old man wore a clean white tunic with a red sash under the black robe. Though his beard was gray, not white, his face bore the lines of someone much older than Lamartiere would have guessed from a distance.

"Sorry, ah, Father?" Lamartiere said. "You're in charge of the shrine?"

"I'm Father Blenis," the old man said. "We try to work cooperatively here in the presence of the Blessed Catherine, but because of my age the others let me speak for us all."

"It's not your age!" the woman said. She'd pinned the ratchet, locking the wheel so that a breeze didn't send the basket hurtling down uncontrolled. She looked at Lamartiere and continued: "Father Blenis is a saint. He's taken us in after your kind would have let us all die—once you'd stolen everything we had."

"Marie," Father Blenis said. "This gentleman—"

He looked at Lamartiere and raised an eyebrow.

"Lamartiere, Denis Lamartiere," Lamartiere said. "Dr. Clargue and I won't stay any longer than we need to, ah, do some work on Hoodoo. On our tank."

Three of the people coming in from the field were nearing the base of the walls. A thin younger man was pushing ahead of a woman while a much larger fellow clumped along close behind.

"It's the job of whoever last comes up the walls to lift the next person," Marie said with a challenging glare at Lamartiere. He first guessed she was well into middle age, but she might be considerably younger. Hunger and hard use could have carved the lines in her face.

And anger. Anger was as damaging to a woman's appearance as a spray of acid.

"Yes, all right," Lamartiere said. He was a little steadier now. Just getting out of the tank and its omnipresent vibration had helped, though he knew he was both weak and desperately tired.

He removed the pin and lifted the ratchet pawl, controlling the basket with his other hand on the crank. "Don't you have any power equipment here?"

"You should ask!" Marie spat. Pus had seeped through the bandage on her left hand; it needed to be changed again. "When it's your kind who stole it!"

"Marie," Father Blenis murmured. He put his own frail hands on the crank beside Lamartiere's, silently rebuking the woman for her lack of charity.

"We'd ordered a winch and solar power unit for it, Mr. Lamartiere," he explained, "but it didn't arrive. In general the parties who rule the region allow us to trade unhindered so long as we pay taxes to them—"

"I'll handle it, Father," Marie said contritely. She patted both Blenis and Lamartiere away from the winch. The process of moving hundreds of people in and out of the fortress must be a very time-consuming one, though having each person lift the next one kept it from being an unbearable physical burden.

Blenis stepped aside, gesturing Lamartiere with him. Lamartiere would have protested, but he was suddenly so dizzy that he sat down in order not to fall.

"When we order something that looks particularly enticing, though," Blenis went on, "it may not arrive. By living simply here we avoid such problems for the most part."

He grinned. "Another example of how those who follow God's tenets avoid temporal concerns," he said. It took Lamartiere a moment to realize that he was joking.

There was angry shouting at the base of the walls. Concern wiped the smile from the Father's face. He leaned over to see what was happening.

"It's not taxes," Marie muttered to Lamartiere. "It's pure theft, and by both sides. But what can we do since you have the guns, eh?"

"Rasile, Louise," Father Blenis called. His voice had penetrating volume when he chose to use it. Living in this windswept wasteland would teach a man to speak with authority. "Let Pietro come up first, then he can lift both of you together. Let us leave struggle outside our community."

"I haven't robbed anybody," Lamartiere said. He'd killed. Some of those he'd killed had probably been civilians as innocent as the refugees here at the shrine, but even in his present exhausted state it made him angry to be accused of things he hadn't done.

He shook his head, trying to clear it of the hot white fuzz that clogged his thoughts. "You pay taxes to the government, then?" he said. "I didn't know Carcassone had officials in the Boukasset nowadays."

Marie grunted with the effort of hauling up the first of the civilians below. Before she could catch her breath to speak, Father Blenis said, "There aren't regular officials, or regular troops either. The government sent a group of former rebels, Ralliers, into the Boukasset under a Captain de Laburat."

He smiled again. The Father's consistent good humor was a shock to Lamartiere. For years most of the people he'd been around were soured by war and fury.

"I'm not sure whether the government was trying to impose its will or merely hoping to prevent Maury from having things all his own way." Blenis continued. "In any case, Maury's band and the Ralliers under de Laburat decided to cooperate rather than fight. A model for the whole planet, wouldn't you say?"

The heavyset man got out of the basket. Lamartiere had seen more obvious signs of intelligence on the faces of sheep. Marie stepped away from the crank.

"Pietro," Father Blenis said, "bring up Rasile and your sister, please."

To Lamartiere he went on, "Pietro's strength has been a great help to our community since he and Louise arrived last month."

Marie turned and sniffed. Her good hand played with the stained dressings of the other.

"Look, Father," Lamartiere said. He spoke toward his hands in his lap because he was too tired to raise his eyes as he knew he should. The rhythmic squeals of the winch were starting to put him to sleep. "I don't mean to disturb your peace, but we have to stay here until we get in touch with Maury."

He shook his head again. It didn't help him think. "Or with the Council in Goncourt if they've got a better idea," he said. "We're going to need food and water, and if you don't help us get Hoodoo under cover you're going to learn how much the government cares for your neutrality as soon as the first drone comes over."

With Pietro's strength on the crank, the basket had already reached the battlements. The slim man and the woman, Louise, got out on opposite sides with the tense hostility of rival dogs. They looked remarkably fit in contrast to Marie, but neither was a person Lamartiere would have chosen to know in peacetime. He supposed that pimps and hard-faced whores sometimes became refugees also.

"Carcassone doesn't fly anything over the Boukasset," Rasile said. Lamartiere blinked in surprise to hear so throaty and pleasant a voice coming from the rat-faced civilian. "If they do, Maury shoots them down. Or de Laburat does it himself."

Marie stepped forward. "Look, you don't belong here!" she said harshly to Lamartiere. "We'll give you water, and you can have food, too. I suppose you'll like the taste even better because you're snatching it out of the mouths of widows and orphans, won't you? But take your tank and your war away from us—or die, that would be fine. That would be even better!"

"Marie," Father Blenis said. His tone was sharper than Lamartiere had heard from him previously, though it was still mild after the rasping anger of the others who'd been speaking. "Mr. Lamartiere has come as a distressed traveler. You can see how tired he is. The Blessed Catherine has never turned such folk away in the past, as you well know."

"He's a soldier!" she said. "He came in a tank!"

"We won't let him bring weapons within the walls," Blenis replied. With the gentle humor Lamartiere was learning to recognize, he added, "Especially his tank. But he and his companion are welcome to the hospitality we offer to anyone passing by."

Houses two and three stories high were built around the interior of the shrine. The rooms had external staircases and windows opening onto the central courtyard where an herb garden grew. Lamartiere could see two well copings and, at the upper end of the courtyard, a stone trough into which water trickled from an ancient bronze pipe.

Several younger women holding infants stood in the doorways, watching the group around the winch. All of them had the same worn look that Lamartiere had noticed in Marie. A woman alone—and worse, a woman with small children—would have had a tough time crossing a wasteland ruled by rival gangs. There were, quite literally, fates worse than death, because the dead didn't wake from a screaming nightmare before every dawn.

The basket was tight against the pulley. Pietro still held the crank, possibly because nobody'd told him to do otherwise. Someone shouted from below. Pietro looked at Louise, who snapped, "Yes, yes, bring the next one up. For God's sake!"

"Louise?" Blenis said.

The woman grimaced. She might have been attractive once, but the glint of her eyes was a worse disfigurement than the old scar on her right cheek. "Sorry, Father," she said. "I'll watch my language."

Lamartiere tried to stand. He didn't belong in a place where people worried about taking the name of God in vain.

"Look, the hell with you," he said. He was furious because of frustration at his inability to accomplish anything he could feel good about. "We'll go, just get us water."

The world went white. Lamartiere was lying on the stone battlements. He didn't remember how he got there. "We'll leave you alone," he tried to whisper.

"Marie, make a bed for Mr. Lamartiere here," Father Blenis murmured through the buzzing white blur. "Later on we can consider the future."

Lamartiere awoke to see Father Blenis rearranging a slatted screen so that the lowering sun didn't fall on the sleeper's face. The rattle and flickering light had brought Lamartiere up from the depths to which exhaustion had plunged him. Near the winch a young woman nursed her infant while an older child played at her feet.

"Oh God, help me," Lamartiere groaned. There was nothing blasphemous in the words. His every muscle ached and his head throbbed in tune with his heartbeat, though the haloes of light framing objects settled back to normal vision after a few moments.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to wake you," Blenis said. "Can you drink something, or. . . ?"

"Please," Lamartiere said. He sat up, ignoring the pain because he had to get moving. He had no traumatic injury, just the cumulative effects of a day and a half spent as a component of a tank.

Hoodoo's metal, seals, and insulation became worn in the course of service. A bearing in Number 7 drive fan would be repacked if the vehicle were in Brione for depot maintenance, and the lip of the skirts needed recontouring if not replacement.

The crew needed downtime also, but they wouldn't have gotten it in the field any more than the tank itself would. Heth and Stegner would have gone on until the mission was accomplished or something irretrievably broke.

Lamartiere was in the same situation, except that by now he was quite certain his mission—defeat of the Carcassone government—could never be accomplished. The only question was whether he or Hoodoo fell to ruin first.

Father Blenis held out a gourd cup. Lamartiere took it from the old man and drank unaided. The contents were milk, not water; goat's milk, he supposed, since he'd seen goats scrambling about the hillsides nearby. It was hard to imagine that the Boukasset had enough vegetation even for goats. No doubt they, like the shrine's human residents, had simple tastes.

Lamartiere looked over the wall coping. The camouflage tarp was stretched between poles and hooks hammered into wall crevices, so from this angle only Hoodoo's bow was visible. The fabric provided a radar barrier and a sophisticated matrix which mimicked the thermal signature of the materials to either side. Aerial reconnaissance would show only a blotch of rock against the wall of the shrine.

Most of the residents were at work again in the orchard, either picking ripe lemons or building additional drystone shelters. The latter work was performed by gangs of refugees, but a black-robed Brother oversaw each group.

A few civilians sat or stood near Hoodoo's bow. Dr. Clargue was in the driver's hatch, draining the sore on a child's shin while the mother looked on. A slightly older girl stood on a headlight bracket and, with a self-important expression, held the exiguous medical kit Clargue had brought with him from Pamiers. The equipment would have slipped down the bow slope if the doctor had laid it directly on the armor.

"I've got to go down and spell Clargue," Lamartiere said. "Has he been awake all the time?"

"In a moment," Father Blenis said. He smiled. "Your companion has been a godsend. We've never had a doctor in residence here, and some of the distressed folk coming for shelter recently have needed help beyond what I and the other Brothers are trained to provide. Regrettably, medical supplies don't reach us here."

Lamartiere scowled. He got carefully to his feet by bracing himself on the stone. As he slept the residents had slid a blanket-wrapped mattress of springy brush beneath him. It was the best bed that Lamartiere had had since he thundered out of Brione in the stolen tank.

Lamartiere's discomfort came from being shaken for over a day in the strait confines of Hoodoo's driving compartment. Dr. Clargue understood the tank's software better than Lamartiere could ever hope to do, but driving a tank was a specialized skill that Clargue had never learned. They couldn't switch positions during the high-speed run into the Boukasset.

Lamartiere paused; he'd intended to climb into the basket, but his body wasn't quite ready. "You're in regular touch with the rest of Ambiorix, then?" he asked.

"A truck comes every week to pick up our lemons and bring us the things we've ordered with the proceeds," Blenis explained. "An aircraft would be better but as Rasile said, no one flies in the Boukasset. Maury and de Laburat both import very sophisticated weaponry, much of it by starship. Not medical supplies, though; at least not to share with us."

He shook his head. "I'm not complaining," he said. "God has poured Her bounty over us with great generosity. We give thanks daily that She allows us to help so many of Her afflicted."

"I'll go down now and send the doctor up," Lamartiere said. "He needs sleep at least as much as I did."

He stepped into the basket. The woman moved the slung infant to her right hip so that she could grip the crank.

"You know, all people really need is peace," Father Blenis said. "I regret that this isn't understood more widely. Ambiorix would be a better place."

Lamartiere walked to Hoodoo's bow, feeling stronger with each step. He wasn't looking forward to getting inside again, but perhaps he wouldn't have to if he stayed close to the hatch.

Dr. Clargue was rebandaging Marie's hand. "The dry air is an advantage," he said, pitching his voice to greet Lamartiere as well as speaking to his patient. "Germs don't find it any more attractive than I do. Though I'd prefer to have a greater supply of antibiotic cream as well."

Rasile, Louise, and the woman's dimwitted brother—if Pietro really was her brother—loitered near the tank. Unlike Marie, none of them had any obvious medical problems.

"You three," Lamartiere ordered harshly. Whatever they were doing, it wasn't together: Louise and Rasile liked each other as little as Lamartiere liked either one of them. "Get out of here. Either out in the orchard or inside the shrine, I don't care which."

Pietro was in a different category. You couldn't dislike him any more than you could dislike a rock, though a rock could be dangerous enough in the wrong circumstances.

"Who do you think you are, giving me orders?" Rasile said.

"The guy who's going to be testing Hoodoo's drive fans in a moment," Lamartiere said as he hopped onto the bow slope. "If you're within a hundred meters when I crank up, there won't be anything left of you but a smear by the time I shut down again. Just a friendly warning."

If trouble started, Lamartiere needed to be in the driver's seat. He wished Clargue weren't there now, but the doctor wouldn't have been able to work on his patients from the cupola.

The refugees drifted toward the orchard instead of pushing matters. Louise and Pietro walked together, while Rasile stayed twenty meters distant in space and a lot farther away in spirit.

Lamartiere supposed they'd been hoping to steal equipment. Tanks in the field were generally festooned with gear, but Heth and Stegner had stripped Hoodoo to be loaded on a starship before Lamartiere drove her out of the base. He and Clargue had only the clothes they stood in, but Lamartiere still didn't want the likes of those three rummaging around inside the tank.

Clargue got out of the compartment very stiffly. "I'm sorry, Denis," he said. "I should have been working on the software, but I found I was a doctor before I was a tank crewman."

"Go get a bath and some sleep, Doctor," Lamartiere said. "There's plenty of water here, for our purposes anyway."

He gripped Clargue's hand to permit him to negotiate the iridium slope under control. "You did just what you should've done. I wish I could say the same."

Clargue trudged toward the basket, carrying his medical kit. Marie still stood close to the tank. "I'll leave in a moment," she said. "I wanted to apologize for what I said when you arrived. Dr. Clargue is a good man, and he tells me that you are, too."

Lamartiere snorted. "Then he knows something I don't," he said. He squatted on the edge of the hatch instead of lowering his body inside. The driver's seat had almost infinite possible adjustments, but at the end of the long run there was no part of Lamartiere's body that hadn't been rubbed or pounded.

"Look," he said, "I'm sorry we're here. I'm sorry about a lot of things, though I know that doesn't make them any better. If Maury can get us ammo, then we'll go back across the mountains to where we can maybe do something about the war. Or whatever the Council decides it wants."

"Maury won't give you anything unless there's advantage in it for him," the woman said. "The last thing he wants is for the war to end. He and de Laburat are making too good a thing about being the only authorities in the Boukasset."

Despite Marie's initial comment, she didn't show any sign of wanting to leave. Lamartiere was glad of her company.

"They manufacture drugs, you know," Marie said. She glared at Lamartiere as though he was responsible for the situation. "Most of the output goes off planet, but I suppose there's enough left over for Ambiorix as well."

"I wasn't aware of that, no," Lamartiere said evenly. It made sense, though.

He should have wondered what Maury traded to the smugglers in exchange for his gang's weaponry. Goat-hair textiles or even the subtly flavored lemons of the Boukasset didn't buy many powerguns and antiaircraft missiles.

"I was at one of the factories for three months," Marie said. Her tone was harsh, but Lamartiere now saw the misery in her eyes. "Not as staff—they have off-planet technicians for that. As entertainment. Until they raided some other family of refugees and replaced me with someone who was in better shape. I came to the shrine instead of dying in the desert."

"I'm responsible for the things I've done," Lamartiere said. He deliberately met the woman's fierce glare. "I won't apologize for things other people have done. However much I may regret them."

Marie nodded. Her expression relaxed slightly. "I just wanted you to know the sort of people you'll be dealing with," she said. "And don't misunderstand me: de Laburat's gang ran the factory where I was held. But they're both the same. They and all their men are demons."

The sun was almost on the rim of the western hills. The shrine's residents were coming back from the lemon orchard, carrying their tools. Some of them were even singing.

Over the southern horizon roared a score of vehicles, both wheeled and air-cushion. They bristled with weapons. Dust mounted in a pall that turned blood red in the light of the lowering sun.

The rulers of the Boukasset were paying a call on Hoodoo.

Lamartiere slid into the driver's hatch. His body no longer ached. He switched on the fans and checked the readouts. All were within parameters except Number 7, and that bearing wasn't of immediate concern. He blipped the throttle once, then let the blades drop to a humming idle.

A blast of fine grit sprayed beneath the skirt at the pressure spike in the plenum chamber. It staggered Marie as she backed away from the vehicle. Lamartiere was sorry, but he didn't have a lot of time. Worse things were likely to happen soon anyway.

The vehicles approaching in line abreast were already within a klick of the shrine. Even without magnification Lamartiere could tell that they were overloaded, wallowing over irregularities in the desert's surface.

He brought up the gunnery controls on the lower of the compartment's two displays. It was impossible for one person to drive and handle Hoodoo's armament simultaneously, but though he was prepared to move the tank Lamartiere didn't expect to need to.

He hoped he wouldn't be shooting either, not when he had only seven 2cm rounds in the tribarrel's ready magazine and no ammunition at all for the main gun.

In the middle of the oncoming vehicles was a three-axle truck which flew a pennant of some sort. The windshield was covered with metal plates; the driver could only see through a slit in his armor. That was just barely better than driving blindfolded. If Lamartiere had been in either of the adjacent vehicles, he'd have given the truck at least fifty meters clearance to avoid a collision.

The truck's bed was armored with flat slabs of concrete, a makeshift that would stop small arms but not much more. Three launching tubes were bracketed to either side; Lamartiere couldn't tell whether they held antitank missiles or unguided bombardment rockets. On top was a turret that must have come from a light military vehicle: it mounted an automatic cannon and a coaxial machine gun, both of them electromotive weapons.

The remainder of the vehicles were similar though smaller: four- and six-wheeled trucks, massively overloaded with men, weapons, and armor, as well as half a dozen air-cushion vehicles of moderate capacity. The latter weren't armored or they wouldn't have been able to move. The wheeled vehicles' panoply of mild steel and concrete was next to valueless anyway.

Lamartiere had fought among the guerrillas of the Western District before the Council picked him to steal a tank for the rebellion. The rebels had tried to convert civilian trucks into armored fighting vehicles, but they'd immediately given up the practice as a suicidal waste. In combat against purpose-built military equipment, makeshifts were merely tombs for their crews. They were good for nothing but to threaten civilians and rival groups of undisciplined thugs.

Which was obviously what these were being used for.

Well, Denis Lamartiere was neither of those things. He rested his hands on the control yoke. His index finger was a centimeter away from the firing control on the screen in front of him. To his surprise, he was smiling.

The vehicles halted near the base of the shrine, disgorging men and a few women. Their clothing was a mixture of military uniforms, the loose robes of the Boukasset, and tawdry accents of Carcassone finery. A band of pirates, Lamartiere thought; about two hundred of them all told.

The residents still at a distance either stopped where they were or returned to the orchard which provided concealment if not shelter. Civilians who'd already reached the shrine squeezed against the walls, their eyes on the armed gang.

The basket was descending; Dr. Clargue was in it, doing what he saw as his duty. Lamartiere wished the doctor had stayed safe in the fortress, but there was no help for it now.

The big truck pulled up twenty meters from Hoodoo. Grit sprayed from beneath the tires, but the breeze carried it back away from the tank.

A man nearly two meters tall and broad in proportion got out of the door set in the concrete armor of the bed. He wore a blue and gold uniform—a military uniform, Lamartiere supposed, though he couldn't imagine what military force wore something so absurdly ornate. There was even a saber in a gilded sheath dangling from a shoulder belt.

"My name's Maury!" he called to Lamartiere. He put his hands on his hips. "I own everything in the Boukasset, so I guess I own you, too."

"No," said Lamartiere. He spoke through the conformal speakers in Hoodoo's hull. His voice boomed across the desert, echoing from the cliffs and tall stone walls of the shrine. "You don't own us."

Maury laughed cheerfully. Lamartiere's amplified voice had made some members of the gang flinch or even hit the ground, but their leader seemed unafraid. "I like a boy with spirit," he said. "Come down out of that thing and we'll talk about how we can all win this one."

"We can discuss anything we need just like we are," Lamartiere replied. "You might say I've gotten used to being in the driver's seat."

The big man chuckled again. He sauntered toward Hoodoo.

"I said we're fine like we are!" Lamartiere repeated. "I can hear anything you've got to say from where you're standing."

Maury had fair hair and the pale complexion that goes with it. His expression didn't change, but a flush climbed his cheeks like fluid in a thermometer on a hot day.

"I got a message from the Council that they'd like me to give you a hand, boy," he said. "I don't take orders from Goncourt but I'm willing to be neighborly. Thing is, the way you're acting don't put me in a very neighborly frame of mind."

The rest of the gang didn't know how to take what was going on. The thugs seemed more nervous than angry. A 170-tonne tank was impressive even if it were shut down. When purring and under the control of someone who sounded unfriendly, it was enough to frighten most people.

"I was told you might help me with supplies," Lamartiere said. He kept the emotion out of his voice, but the tank's speakers threw his words like the judgment of God. "Now that I'm here, I get the impression that any help you gave me would come at a price I wouldn't be willing to pay. Why don't you go back where you came from before there's an accident?"

Maury laughed again. His heart wasn't in it, but even as bravado it took courage. Most of his gang were festooned with weapons—there were at least a dozen 2cm powerguns whose ammo would have filled Hoodoo's ready magazine if Lamartiere had dared ask for it—but Maury himself wore only the saber.

"We haven't even talked price," the big man said, almost cajoling. "Believe me, you'll do fine with your share. The Boukasset may not look like much—"

He gestured broadly. The gold braid on his cuff glowed in the sun's last ruddy light.

"—but my friends don't lack for anything. Anything at all!"

There was a commotion near the wall of the shrine. Lamartiere risked a quick glance sideward. He could drop his seat into the driver's compartment and button the hatch up over himself, but that would give Maury the psychological edge.

One of Maury's men had backed a woman against the stone. She shouted and tried to move sideways. The man caught her arm and lifted it, drawing her closer to him.

"Let go of her!" Dr. Clargue said as he stepped toward the pair. The gangster shoved the woman violently toward Clargue, then stepped back and unslung a submachine gun.

"Freeze!" Lamartiere said. His shout made dust in the air quiver.

"Let her go, Schwitzer," Maury said. His bellow was dwarfed by the echoes of Lamartiere's amplified voice. "For now at least. This is just a neighborly visit."

He turned to Lamartiere again and continued, "But let's say for the sake of discussion that you did want to make something out of this, kid—just how did you plan to do that? Because I know from Goncourt that you don't have any ammo for those pretty guns of yours."

Cursing under his breath the idiots on the Council who'd given this man a hold over him, Lamartiere slid the targeting pipper onto Maury's face in the gunnery display. The turret whined, bringing the 20cm main gun squarely in line with the self-styled chief of the Boukasset.

"I can't swear on my sister's grave," Lamartiere said, "because she doesn't have one. But by her soul in the arms of God, I swear to you that Hoodoo carries ten thousand rounds for the tribarrel and two hundred for the main gun. Shall I demonstrate for the rest of your men?"

The main gun's barrel was a polished iridium tunnel. Maury was no coward, but what he saw staring at him was not merely death but annihilation. After a frozen moment's indecision he turned his back. He took off his stiff cap and slammed it into the ground.

"Mount up!" Maury snarled. "We're moving out!"

He stalked to the armored truck. His men obeyed with the disorganized certainty of pebbles rolling downhill. One of them scuttled over to retrieve the cap, then dropped it again and ran off when he made the mistake of looking up at the 20cm bore.

Maury halted at the door. Drivers were starting their engines: turbines, diesels, and even a pair of whining electrics. Maury pointed an arm the size of a bridge truss at Lamartiere and said, "Maybe you'll come to talk to me when you've thought about things. And maybe we'll come to you again first!"

He got in and his motley squadron started to pull away from the shrine. The air-cushion vehicles merely swapped ends, but those with wheels turned awkwardly or even backed and filled. The bolted-on armor interfered both with visibility and their turning circles.

Dr. Clargue walked over to the tank's bow. He looked wobbly. Lamartiere himself felt as though he'd been bathed in ice water. He was shivering with reaction and had to take his hands away from the controls to keep from accidentally doing something he'd regret.

The gang vehicles headed south in a ragged line, looking like survivors from a rout. The leaders continued to draw farther ahead of the others. Maury's own overloaded truck wobbled in the rear of the procession.

"Doctor," Lamartiere said. He'd switched off the speakers, so he had to raise his voice to be heard over Hoodoo's idling fans. "There's self-defense strips just above the skirts. They're supposed to blast pellets into incoming missiles, but I don't know if they're live. Can you check that for me?"

"Yes," Clargue said. "I'll do that now."

Lamartiere reached out a hand to help the doctor clamber up the bow slope. Before he got into the turret Clargue paused and said, "I worried when I stood watch alone, Denis, because I wasn't sure I'd be able to use a weapon. I was trained to save lives, as you know. But I think I can do that, too, if I must."

"I know what you mean," Lamartiere said. "Look, keep looking for the transfer command so we can use the ammo in the storage magazines if we have to. When we have to. Maury'll decide to call my bluff before long."

"Yes, I'll keep looking," the doctor said in a weary tone.

"I wish to God I was in a different place," Lamartiere whispered. "I wish to God I was in a different life."

The stars shone through the dry air in brilliant profusion. Hoodoo's displays careted movement, but Lamartiere had already heard the winch squeal. He focused the upper screen on the descending basket, using light enhancement at 40:1 magnification.

"It's Marie," he said to Clargue. "She's carrying a couple buckets on a pole across her shoulders."

"Ah," said the doctor without noticeable interest. The turret's yellow, low-intensity lighting was on as Clargue searched the database for the command that would turn Hoodoo from a vehicle into a fighting vehicle.

Lamartiere was letting the screens' own dim ambiance provide the only illumination for the driver's station. He could have slept beside the tank if he'd wanted to, setting an audible alarm to warn him of motion; but so long as Clargue was working, Lamartiere preferred to be alert also.

He got out of the hatch and slid to the ground. The smooth iridium hull reflected starlight well enough to show him in silhouette. Marie stepped from the basket and said, "I brought you some food and water. Bread and vegetable stew—we're vegetarians here. But it's fresh and hot."

Lamartiere took the pole from her. He'd eaten as much as he wanted earlier in the evening. The pounding drive had left him too run down to be really hungry, and it was even an effort to drink though he knew his body needed the fluids.

"Hot food, Doctor," he called. "Want to come out, or shall I bring it in to you?"

"Perhaps in a while, Denis," replied Clargue's voice with a hint of irritation. "I will run this sequence before I stop, if God and the world permit me."

Lamartiere set the buckets on the ground and squatted beside them; the tank's armor slanted too sharply to use it as a ledge. "Thanks," he said to Marie as he took one of the pair of bottles from the left-hand basket. The loaf in the other one smelled surprisingly good.

"Government radio says they're launching an attack on Goncourt," Marie said as she sat across from him. "I don't know whether that's true or not."

The bottle contained water with just enough lemon juice to give it flavor. Lamartiere drank, let his stomach settle, and drank more.

"The other is goat's milk," Marie said. "I've come to enjoy the taste."

"I didn't know about Goncourt," Lamartiere said as he lowered the bottle. "I didn't think to listen to the commercial bands. That would explain why nobody's contacted us the way they were supposed to. To tell us what the fuck we're supposed to do!"

"What are you going to do?" the woman asked quietly.

Lamartiere shrugged. He broke off a piece of bread and dipped it into the stew. "We won't stay here much longer," he said. He wished he had a real answer to the question, but he wished a lot of things.

"We have our own garden inside the walls," Marie said. "We buy the grain for the bread, though. It's the main thing we do buy."

"We're just making things worse," Lamartiere said. He was glad for someone to talk to, to talk at. "The government was wrong and stupid to say that unless you did what the Synod said you weren't a citizen, you were only a taxpayer. But this war has made things so much worse. Me stealing Hoodoo has . . . got a lot of people killed that didn't have to be. Including my sister."

Marie shrugged. "I don't know who's right," she said. "I never did. It's easier to see who's wrong, and in the Boukasset that's pretty much everybody with a gun. Pretty much."

She stood. "I'll take back the containers in the morning," she said. "People like you and me can't change anything."

To her back Lamartiere said, "I changed things when I stole this tank, Marie. I changed things when I drove it here and put you all in danger. I want to start changing things for the better!"

Hoodoo's warning chime sounded. Lamartiere was climbing the bow slope before he was really aware of his movement. Consciously he viewed the tank more as Purgatory than as shelter, but he'd dived into the driver's compartment so often recently that reflex sent him there at the first hint of danger.

He brought up the fans before he checked to see what movement the sensors had found; he brought up the gunnery screen also, even though the weapons were more easily controlled from the fighting compartment where Dr. Clargue was. Clargue was the rebellion's best hope to decipher Hoodoo's coded systems, but Denis Lamartiere was far the better choice to use the tank's weaponry.

An air-cushion jeep carrying a single person was coming out of the hills three kilometers west of the shrine. Its headlights were on.

So far as Lamartiere could tell, neither the vehicle nor the driver carried a weapon. He was using 100:1 magnification, as much as he trusted when coupled with light enhancement. Anything higher was a guess by the AI, and Lamartiere preferred his own instincts to machine intelligence when his life depended on it.

"What do you want me to do?" Clargue asked over the intercom.

"Close your hatch and warn me if anything happens," Lamartiere said. "This guy is too harmless to be out at night if he didn't have a hell of a lot lined up behind him."

"There's no one else in the direction he came from," Clargue reported. "I'll continue to monitor the sensors, but otherwise I'll not interfere with your business."

After a brief mental debate, Lamartiere raised his seat to await the visitor with his head out of the hatch. Clargue would warn him if Hoodoo's electronics showed a danger that unaided eyes would miss.

After hesitating again, he cut the drive fans back to their minimum speed. A normal idle sent ringing harmonics through the surrounding air. To talk over that level of background noise, the parties would have had to shout. Shouting triggered anger and hostility deep in people's subbrains, even if consciously they would have preferred to avoid it.

If there'd been two figures in the jeep, Lamartiere would have guessed they were Heth and Stegner, Hoodoo's original crew. He'd seen the mercenaries at the Lystra River, observing the battle from a similar vehicle. He supposed they were hoping to steal back their tank.

At this point he'd have rather that they'd driven Hoodoo aboard a starship and lifted for Beresford, 300 light-years distant, the way they'd planned to do. Then Lamartiere wouldn't have had to make decisions when all the alternatives seemed equally bad. It was too late to go back, though.

The jeep halted ten meters from Hoodoo's bow. The driver shut off his turbine and stood. "May I approach you, Mr. Lamartiere?" he asked. His voice was cultured but a little too high-pitched. "Or is it Dr. Clargue?"

"I'm Lamartiere," Lamartiere said. "And you can come closer, yeah."

The man walked to the tank, moving with an easy grace. Lamartiere heard the winch squeal once more, then stop. Marie must have reached the battlements, but he didn't look up to be sure.

"My name is Alexis de Laburat," the man said. He was a slim, pantherlike fellow with a strikingly handsome face. His left cheek bore a serpentine scar and there was a patch over that eye. "I've come alone and unarmed to offer you a business proposition."

"I've heard about your business," Lamartiere said, more harshly than he'd intended. He was remembering what Marie had told him. "No thanks. And I think you'd better go now."

"I was born a Mosite and fought in the rebellion," de Laburat said. "I rallied to the government and fought for it when I saw the rebellion was doomed to fail; so did the other men under my command. But what I'm offering now, Mr. Lamartiere, is peace."

De Laburat's fingers toyed with the tip of his neat moustache. "As well as enough money to keep you and the doctor comfortably on any world to which you choose to emigrate. Obviously you can't stay on Ambiorix unless you join me, which I don't suppose you'd care to do."

"I told you, we have no business with you!" Lamartiere said.

The Rallier shook his head. "Think clearly," he said. "I know you're a clever man or you'd never have gotten this far. The Council wouldn't be able to use this tank, even if you were able to get ammunition for it. The rebellion is over. Goncourt will fall within the week. Though the Council will probably relocate to some cave in the hills, they'll control nothing at all."

De Laburat smiled. "You're the cause of that, you know," he said. He was trying to be pleasant, but his voice scraped Lamartiere's nerves to hear. "The attack on Goncourt has been very expensive. The government probably wouldn't have had the courage to attempt it except that they were afraid to let the embers of the rebellion smolder on when the Mosites had this superweapon. As they thought."

"You're not part of this war," Lamartiere said. "You've made that clear, you and Maury both. I am. You came unarmed so I won't hurt you—but you'd better leave now or you'll have to walk back, because I'll have driven Hoodoo over your jeep."

"Listen to me!" de Laburat said. He had to look up because Lamartiere was in the vehicle. He still gave the impression of a panther, but a caged one.

"I'll protect the Boukasset," de Laburat said. "The government knows I'm no threat to it. They won't come here to chase me, and the Synod won't try to impose its definition of heresy here while I have this tank!"

"Protect the Boukasset under yourself," Lamartiere said.

De Laburat chuckled. "You've met Maury," he said. "He has a strong back and about enough intellect to pull on his boots in the morning. Would you entrust the Shrine of the Blessed Catherine to him? And even if you did, one of his own men will shoot him in the back in a few weeks or months, as surely as the sun rises tomorrow."

"Go away," Lamartiere said. In sudden fury he repeated, "Go away, or by God I'll kill you now so that I can say there's one good deed to balance against all the harm I've done in this life!"

De Laburat nodded with stiff propriety. "Good day, Mr. Lamartiere," he said. "I hope you'll reconsider while there's still time."

Lamartiere watched the Rallier drive back across the desert the way he'd come. The jeep's headlights cut a wedge across the rocks and scrub, disappearing at last through a cleft in the low hills.

"What do we do now?" Dr. Clargue asked quietly.

"I wish I knew," Lamartiere said. "I wish to God I knew."

He slept curled up on the floor of the driver's compartment. He continued to hear the purr of Hoodoo's computers late into the night as Clargue worked on a problem that neither he nor Lamartiere now believed they would ever solve.

The warning chime awakened Lamartiere. After a moment of blurred confusion—he was too tired and uncomfortable for panic—he realized what the problem was.

"It's all right, Doctor," he said. "I left the audible alarm on, and it's registering the locals leaving to go to the orchard."

It wasn't dawn yet, but the sky over the eastern mountains was noticeably lighter than in the west. Two hundred kilometers into those mountains was Goncourt, where Lamartiere supposed shell bursts had been glaring all night

"Ah," said Clargue. They'd seen very little of one another despite having been no more that a meter or two apart during most of the past week. Crewing Hoodoo was like being imprisoned in adjacent cells.

"Go get a bath and some breakfast," Lamartiere said. He cleared his throat and added, "I think we may as well move out today, even if we don't hear anything from the Council. Otherwise we're going to bring something down on these people that they don't deserve."

"Yes," said Clargue. "I'm afraid you're right"

He didn't ask Lamartiere where he intended to go. The only possible answer was away. They needed to go some place where there wasn't anybody else around to be harmed by what Hoodoo attracted.

Residents were coming down by pairs in the basket. Even so the process would take at least an hour. The Shrine of the Blessed Catherine hadn't been intended for its present population, at least not in the years since the ground-level gate had been blocked. The walls were little defense against heavy weapons, but they protected the handful of Brothers from the small arms and banditry of the Boukasset during normal times.

Hoodoo could turn the shrine into a pile of rubble in a matter of seconds. Not that anyone would bother to do so . . . except, perhaps, as a whim along the lines of pulling the wings off flies.

Clargue slid clumsily down the bow and walked toward the basket. Civilians coming in the other direction murmured greetings to the doctor. Everyone here was glad of his presence.

Indeed, most of them probably thought of Hoodoo herself as protection for the shrine and themselves. They were wrong. Even if Lamartiere could have used the ammunition he knew was in the storage magazines, the tank was sure to summon increasing levels of violence until everything in its vicinity was shattered to dust and vapor.

Lamartiere supposed he was dozing in the hatch, though his eyes were open. He wasn't consciously aware of his surroundings until Dr. Clargue said, "I will watch now, Denis," and Lamartiere realized direct sunlight stabbed across the plain through the notch in the hills by which Hoodoo had entered.

"Right," Lamartiere said, trying to clear his brain. He crawled out of the hatch, bitterly aware that he was in terrible shape. He supposed it didn't matter. The best option he could see now was to drive Hoodoo fifty kilometers out into the desert, and the AI could handle that once he got her under way.

De Laburat had been right about one thing. Dr. Clargue might be able to return to helping the sick in a village lost in the mountains, but there was no longer any place on Ambiorix for Denis Lamartiere. Like Hoodoo herself, he was a valuable resource: a tank crewman, to be captured if possible but otherwise killed to prevent another faction from gaining his expertise.

He stepped into the basket as a mother and her twins got out. The woman nodded while the children whispered excitedly to one another. They'd been close enough to the soldier to touch him!

The basket jogged its way up the wall of the shrine. His shadow sprawled across the hard sandstone blocks.

Below Lamartiere, most of the residents were trudging toward the orchard. Parties of the healthiest refugees were loading two-man cradles with blocks crumbled from the cliff face. Ordinary wheelbarrows would be useless on this terrain of sand and irregular stone. Human beings were more adaptable than even the simplest of machines.

Rasile was on the winch, somewhat to Lamartiere's surprise, but Marie sat nearby. She was embellishing a piece of canvas with a Maltese cross in needlepoint, holding the frame against her thighs with her left wrist and using her good right hand to direct the needle. The pattern of tight, small stitches was flawless so far as Lamartiere could tell.

"Will you lower Mr. Rasile to the ground?" Marie said to Lamartiere. "Or are you still—"

"I'm healthy enough," Lamartiere said. "Tired, is all."

And so frustrated that he felt like kicking a hole in the battlements, but neither fact would prevent him from turning a crank.

Children played within the courtyard, their voices shrilly cheerful. Lamartiere saw a pair of them momentarily, chasing one another among the rows of pole beans. The shrine wasn't really the Garden of Eden; but it was closer to that, and to Paradise, than most of the refugees could have hoped to find.

"I'm not going down," Rasile said. "I have permission from Father Blenis to read my scriptures here today."

He reached into the knapsack at his feet and brought out a fabric-bound volume. It was probably the Revelations of Moses, though Lamartiere couldn't see the title. Despite the book in his hand, Rasile looked even more like a pimp—or a rat—than usual.

"What?" Marie said, both angry and amazed.

"I have permission!" Rasile said. "I'm not shirking. It's hard work to bring people up in the basket!"

"I wouldn't know that?" said the woman. "Father Blenis's so gentle he'd give you permission to carry off all the communion dishes, but we're not all of us such innocent saints here, Rasile!"

Lamartiere turned his head away as he would have done if he'd stumbled into someone else's family quarrel. Only then did he see the six-wheeled truck driving up from the south. It had an open cab and cargo of some sort in the bed under a reflective tarp, but there were no signs of weapons. The driver was alone.

"What's that?" Lamartiere said sharply. Marie and Rasile instantly stopped bickering to stare over the battlements. Fear made the woman look drawn and a decade older than she'd been a moment before; Rasile's expression was harder to judge, but fear was a large part of it also.

"It's just the provisions truck," Marie said. She sighed in relief. "It's a day early, but it seems . . ."

The driver parked near the wall and pulled the tarp back to uncover his cargo. He was carrying several hundred-kilo burlap grain sacks and a number of less-definable bags and boxes. It all looked perfectly innocent.

The residents who were still close to the shrine gathered around the truck. Others, including a pair of black-robed Brothers, were on their way back from the orchard.

Lamartiere noticed with approval that Dr. Clargue had closed the tank's hatches and was even aiming his tribarrel at the truck. Some of the shrine's residents sprawled away in panic when the weapon moved, but the driver didn't seem to care. If the fellow made this trip across the Boukasset regularly, he must be used to having guns pointed at him.

Rasile said, "Ah!" with a shudder. He'd dropped the book in his haste, but he'd grabbed the knapsack itself and was holding it in front of him. It was a sturdy piece of equipment and apparently quite new.

"I was hoping to wash up before we go," Lamartiere said quietly to the woman. "We'll be leaving soon. And I'd like to thank Father Blenis for his hospitality."

"He's usually in the chapel till midday," Marie said with a nod. "I'll get you some breakfast. You can draw the water yourself now, can't you?"

"Yes, I—" Lamartiere said.

Hoodoo's siren began to wind. Lamartiere looked down. The tank's turret gimbaled southward, pointing the guns at the line of vehicles racing toward the shrine.

Maury was returning.

"Let me down!" Lamartiere said. He stepped toward the basket, wondering if he could reach the tank before the armed band arrived.

Rasile backed away, fumbling inside his knapsack. His right hand came out holding a bell-mouthed mob gun. The weapon fired sheaves of aerofoils that spread enough to hit everyone in a normal-sized room with a single shot. As close as Lamartiere was to the muzzle, the charge would cut him in half.

"Don't either of you try to move!" Rasile screamed.

An oncoming vehicle fired its automatic cannon. Lamartiere suspected that the gunner had intended to shoot over the heads of the people streaming back from the orchard, but it was hard to aim accurately from a bouncing vehicle. Several shells exploded near the civilians. A woman remained standing after those around her had flung themselves to the ground. She finally toppled, her blood soaking the sand around her back.

The truck firing had dual rear wheels and an enclosure of steel plates welded onto the bed. The gun projected through a slot in the armor over the cab. Hoodoo's tribarrel hit the vehicle dead center. The bolts of cyan plasma turned the steel into white fire an instant before the truck's fuel tank boomed upward in an orange geyser.

One round would have been enough for the job. Dr. Clargue fired all seven, emptying the loading tube. Lamartiere supposed that was a waste, but he saw where the woman sprawled on a flag of her own blood and he couldn't feel too unhappy. At least the short-term result was good.

Maury's surviving vehicles bounced and wallowed toward the shrine. None of them shot at Hoodoo, demonstrating a level of discipline Lamartiere wouldn't have expected of the gang. Several of the band were firing in the air, though. Their muzzle flashes flickered in the sunlight.

"Don't move or I'll kill you!" Rasile said, squeaking two octaves up from his normal voice. He waggled the mob gun.

Maury's agent in the shrine was as high as a kite either from drugs he'd taken to nerve himself up, or from simple adrenaline. Lamartiere guessed there was a radio in Rasile's knapsack. He'd signaled his master when Lamartiere was out of the tank. Dr. Clargue was the better of the two men in Hoodoo's crew, but he wasn't a danger to Maury's plans.

Maury's vehicles pulled up in a ragged semicircle around the shrine's southern wall. Hoodoo and the provisions truck were within the arc, but the gang had cut most of the residents off from the structure.

If Lamartiere had been in Hoodoo, he'd have driven straight through one or more of the gang's vehicles: not even the heavy truck was a real barrier to a tank's weight and power. Clargue didn't think in those terms; and anyway, he couldn't drive the tank.

Most of the gangsters got out of their vehicles. Today Maury wore expensive battledress of chameleon fabric which took on the hues of its surroundings. He carried a submachine gun, but that was no more his real weapon than the saber of the previous day had been. Maury may have been a thug to begin with, but now he'd risen to a level that he ordered people killed instead of having to kill them himself.

"I'll be his chief man after this," Rasile said. A line of drool hung from the corner of his mouth. "I'll have all the women I want. Any woman at all."

Maury glanced up to make sure Lamartiere was out of the way. He waved the submachine gun cheerfully, then spoke to two henchmen. They grabbed an old man who'd been standing nearby. One gangster twisted the victim's hands behind his back while the other put a pistol to his temple.

The driver of the provisions truck got up from where he'd lain beside his vehicle while the shooting was going on. He also looked toward Lamartiere, lifting his cap in a casual salute.

The driver was Sergeant Heth, Hoodoo's commander until Lamartiere stole the tank from Brione.

"Come on out, Doctor!" Maury said in a voice loud enough for those on the battlements to hear. "We're going to start killing these people. We'll kill every one of them unless you give us the tank!"

Lamartiere opened his mouth but remained silent because he didn't know what advice to give Clargue. He didn't doubt that Maury would carry out his threat, and since the doctor couldn't drive Hoodoo—

The gangster fired. Ionized plasma from the projectile's driving skirt ignited a lock of the hair it blew from the victim's scalp. Hydrostatic shock fractured the cranial vault, deforming the skull into softer lines.

The shooter laughed. His partner flung the body down with a curse and wiped spattered blood from his face.

Hoodoo's hatches opened. Dr. Clargue climbed out of the cupola, bent and dejected. He might have been planning to surrender the tank anyway. Maury's men had acted before he'd really had a chance to make up his mind.

Rasile cackled in triumph. "Any woman—" he said.

Lamartiere caught a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye. An antitank missile hit the side of Maury's big armored truck. The warhead blew the slab of concrete into pebbles and a worm of reinforcing mesh twisted away.

The blast threw everyone within twenty meters to the ground. Dr. Clargue lost his grip and bounced down Hoodoo's flank. He lay still on the ground. Ammunition inside the stricken vehicle went off in a series of red secondary explosions like a string of firecrackers, reducing to blazing junk whatever the warhead had left .

Rasile stared disbelievingly at the destruction. Lamartiere twisted the mob gun's broad muzzle skyward, then punched the smaller man at the corner of the jaw.

Rasile toppled over the battlements. For a moment he kept his grip on the butt of the pistol whose barrel Lamartiere held. Marie leaned forward and jabbed her needle into the back of Rasile's hand. His screams as he fell were lost in the sudden ripping destruction below.

Two more missiles hit, each destroying its target with a blast intended to gut purpose-built armored vehicles. A shockwave flipped the provisions truck onto its back; Lamartiere didn't see what had happened to Sergeant Heth.

Even before the third warhead exploded, automatic cannons firing from the hills west of the shrine began to rake Maury's other vehicles. Three kilometers was well within their accurate range.

Maury's air-cushion vehicles disintegrated like tissue paper in a storm. The steel armor of some wheeled trucks wasn't thick enough to stop the shells, and the concrete slabs protecting the others fractured at the first impact. Following shells passed through unhindered, igniting cataclysms of fuel and stored ammunition.

"Let me down!" Lamartiere said as he jumped into the basket. He should have waited. Marie had to struggle with the locking pin because Lamartiere's weight was already on the winch, but she jerked it loose before he realized the problem. The basket wobbled downward.

Still shooting, the attacking vehicles drove out of the hills where they'd waited in ambush. There were three of them, air-cushion armored personnel carriers of the type used by government forces.

Each thirty-tonne APC could carry a platoon of troops behind armor thick enough to stop small-arms projectiles. The small turret near the bow carried a light electromotive cannon as well as a launching rail on the left side for an antitank missile. The hatches on the APCs' back decks opened. Troops leaned out, aiming rifles and submachine guns.

The men in the APCs wore government uniforms, though with cut-off sleeves and flourishes of metal and bright fabrics. Maury had played his card; now de Laburat's Ralliers were trumping the hand.

The gangs' alliance of convenience had broken down under the weight of loot that couldn't be shared and which gave the party owning it an overwhelming advantage over the other. In this at least, Hoodoo's presence had benefited the other inhabitants of the Boukasset.

Most of Maury's men had thrown themselves to the ground or were running toward the rocks behind the shrine, the only available cover. Their leader stood and emptied his submachine gun at the oncoming vehicles.

The APCs' turrets were stabilized to fire accurately on the move. Two of the automatic cannon shot back simultaneously. Maury's head and torso disintegrated in white flashes. An arm flew skyward; the legs below the knees remained upright for an instant before toppling onto the sand.

Lamartiere was halfway to the ground when a Rallier noticed the mob gun and took him for one of Maury's gang. Chips of sandstone flew from the wall close enough to cut Lamartiere's arm: the shooter was either lucky or better than any man had a right to be when firing from a moving platform.

Lamartiere saw a cannon tracking toward him. The ground was still five meters below but there was no choice. Cradling the mob gun to his belly and hoping it wouldn't go off when he hit, he jumped. A burst of shells devoured the basket as he left it, stinging his back with fragments of casing and stone.

He knew to flex his knees as he hit, but his feet flew backward and he slapped the ground hard enough to knock his breath out and bloody his chin. He'd dropped the mob gun. He snatched it up again, then staggered toward Hoodoo with knife-blade pains jetting from two lower ribs.

The APCs closed to within thirty meters of the burning vehicles and flared broadside to a halt. The Ralliers wanted to stay beyond range of a hand-thrown bomb as they finished off the survivors of Maury's band. Bullets sparkled on the APCs' sides; a Rallier sprawled, bleeding down the sloping armor. Gunfire from the vehicles was twenty to one compared to what they received.

Lamartiere grabbed a headlight bracket with his left hand. Behind him a woman's voice shrilled, "Stop him, Pietro!" through the roar of gunfire.

Lamartiere swung his right leg up. Pietro closed a hand like a bear trap on his ankle and jerked him back. With the muzzle of the mob gun tight against the giant's body, Lamartiere pulled the trigger.

Recoil bashed the gun butt hard against Lamartiere's ribs. He doubled up. Pietro stepped back with a look of blank incomprehension on his face. There was a hole two centimeters in diameter just above his navel. His tunic was smoldering.

Pietro pivoted and fell on his face. The cavity in his back was bigger than a man's head. Sections of purple-veined intestine squirmed out of the general red mass.

Louise stood behind her brother's body. "You bastard!" she cried and drew a small pistol from the bosom of her blouse.

Lamartiere hesitated a heartbeat, but there was no choice. Louise and her brother were combatants, agents working for de Laburat just as Rasile had worked for Maury—and she was about to kill him.

He pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Excessive chamber pressure when he'd fired with the muzzle against Pietro's chest had ruptured the cartridge case. The mob gun was jammed.

Sergeant Heth grabbed the woman's wrist from behind, spun her, and broke her elbow neatly over his knee. The mercenary had lost the loose robe he'd worn for a disguise, and his left arm and shoulder were black with oil or soot.

"You drive, kid!" he shouted. He used Hoodoo's toolbox as a handhold and a patch welded on the side skirt for a step to lift himself up the tank's side. "I'll take care of the rest!"

Lamartiere climbed the bow slope and dropped into the driver's compartment. He switched the fans on and closed the hatch above him.

De Laburat must have ordered his troops not to fire at the tank since its capture undamaged was the whole purpose of the attack, but now a dozen shells exploded against the side of the turret. They were as harmless as so many raindrops.

Fan speed built smoothly; only the ragged line of Number 7's readout reminded Lamartiere that there was a problem. Hoodoo's systems were coming alive all around him. There were hums and purrs and the demanding whine of a hydraulic accumulator building pressure.

Some of the sounds were unfamiliar. With a sudden leap of his heart, Lamartiere realized that the rhythmic shoop-shoop-shoop from deep in the hull must be ammunition rising from the storage magazines.

Out of nervousness he coarsened blade pitch too fast. The fans threatened to bog, but Lamartiere rolled back on the adjustment in time. Adding power with his right handgrip and pitch with the left, he brought Hoodoo to hover in place.

The driver's compartment felt more comfortable to him without a gunnery display in the center of the lower screen. He'd regularly driven tanks during the months he'd worked as one of the Slammers' Local Service Personnel, but he'd never seen a gunnery display until Dr. Clargue went over Hoodoo's systems in Pamiers.

Dozens of Ralliers were blazing away at Hoodoo with rifles and submachine guns, a dangerous waste of ammunition. Somebody with a better notion of utility jumped down from his APC and ran forward, swinging a satchel charge for a side-armed throw. A bullet ricocheting from the tank tore his face away as he released the satchel.

The bomb flew toward Hoodoo in a high arc. A section of self-defense strip fired, making the tank ring. Tungsten pellets shredded the satchel into tatters of cloth and explosive, flinging it back the way it had come. It didn't detonate.

Lamartiere eased his control yoke forward and twisted left to move the tank away from the shrine. There were too many civilians nearby. Shots that couldn't damage Hoodoo would kill and maim people who'd only looked for peace.

The APCs were driving away. Ralliers who'd gotten out to finish off Maury's men on foot ran along behind the vehicles, shouting and waving their arms. One of the gunners depressed his cannon as his APC turned, intending to rake Hoodoo's skirts. If the plenum chamber was holed badly enough, the tank's fans couldn't build enough pressure to lift her off the ground.

Blue-green light sparkled on the APCs turret as a dozen bolts from Hoodoo's 2cm weapon hit it. The tribarrel's rotation was an additional whirr in the symphony of the tank at work. In the driver's compartment, the plasma discharges were scarcely louder than peanuts cracking.

The turret flew apart like steam puffed into a stiff breeze. The APC's armor was a sandwich of ceramic within high-maraging steel: the steel burned white while glassy knives of the core ripped in all directions. The torso of a Rallier trying to climb back aboard the vehicle vanished in bloody spray.

Lamartiere crawled through the chaos. The ground in front of the shrine was littered with bodies and debris. Residents who'd been caught in the fighting lay intermixed with Maury's gang. Some of them might still be alive.

Above Lamartiere the tribarrel spat short bursts. Sergeant Heth was picking off dismounted Ralliers instead of firing at the fleeing vehicles. Some of de Laburat's men turned to run for shelter in the rocks when they saw the APCs weren't going to stop for them. None of them made it, and the ones who threw themselves down to feign death didn't survive either.

It was easy to tell dead Ralliers from those shamming. At short range a 2cm bolt tore a human body apart. When several hit the same target, the result was indistinguishable from a bomb blast.

Lamartiere drove over the wreckage of a truck that had been hit by an antitank missile. Lubricant and the synthetic rubber tires burned with low, smoky flames. Hoodoo's skirt plowed a path through the skeletal frame, whipping the blaze higher with the downdraft from the plenum chamber.

The main gun fired.

The tribarrel had so little effect inside the tank that Lamartiere was merely aware that Heth was shooting. The 20cm weapon's discharge rocked Hoodoo backward despite the inertia of her 170 tonnes. Air clapped to fill the vacuum which the jolt of plasma had burned through its heart. Lamartiere shouted in surprise.

The leading APC, by now nearly a kilometer distant, burst as though a volcano had erupted beneath it. The bolt transferred its megajoules of energy to the vehicle, vaporizing even the ceramic armor. A fireball forty meters in diameter bloomed where the APC had been; bits of solid matter sprayed out of it, none of them bigger than a man's thumbnail.

The gun cycled, ejecting the spent round into the fighting compartment. Heat and stinking fumes flooded Hoodoo's interior even though the ventilation fans switched to high speed. Lamartiere's eyes were watering and the back of his throat burned.

"Thought I'd wait till we were clear of the civilians," Sergeant Heth explained over the intercom in a conversational voice. "Sidescatter from the big gun can blister bare skin if you're anywhere nearby."

He fired the 20cm weapon again. This time the clang and the way the tank bucked weren't a surprise to Lamartiere, though his head wobbled back and forth in response to the hull's motion.

The second APC was making a skidding turn to avoid running through the flaming ruin that had exploded before it. The cyan bolt hit the vehicle at a slant, perfectly centered, and devoured it as completely as its fellow. The fire-ball dimmed to a ghost of its initial fury, but brush ignited by debris ignited hundreds of meters away.

The last Rallier vehicle fled at over 100 kph despite the broken terrain. It was drawing away because Hoodoo's mass took so long to accelerate despite the tank's higher top speed. Lamartiere concentrated on driving, avoiding knobs of rock too heavy to smash through and crevices that would spill air from the plenum chamber and ground Hoodoo shriekingly.

He heard the turret gimbal onto its target. A Rallier stood on the deck of the APC and jumped. The man hit the ground and bounced high, limbs fl ailing in rubbery curves. He'd broken every bone in his body and was obviously dead.

But then, so were his fellows.

The main gun slammed. The third APC vanished in a smear of fire across the desert floor. The sun was high enough to pale the flames, but the pall of black smoke drifted west with the breeze.

"Go back to the fort, kid," Heth ordered. "Stegner's heading there in our jeep."

The mercenary chuckled, then started coughing. The ozone and matrix residue from the main gun burned his throat also. "We planned that Steg'd set off some fireworks on the hills. While everybody was looking that way I'd hop into Hoodoo. The locals made a better job of fireworks than we ever thought of, didn't they? Bloody near did for me, I'll tell the world!"

Lamartiere braked the tank with the caution its mass demanded. Unlike the driver of a wheeled vehicle, he didn't have the friction of tires against the ground to slow him unless he dumped air from the plenum chamber and deliberately skidded the skirt.

There was no need now for haste. Lamartiere wasn't in a hurry to face what came next.

He opened his hatch, thinking the draft would clear fumes from the tanks interior faster than the filtered ventilation system. The hatch rolled shut again an instant later; Sergeant Heth had used the commander's override.

"Not just yet, kid," he said. "The guy in charge of this lot, de Laburat . . . Did you ever meet him?"

"Yes," Lamartiere said. "I'd sooner trust a weasel."

"Yeah, that's the guy," the mercenary said. "But he's a smart sonuvabitch. He saw the way things were going before any of his people did. He bailed out and ran into the rocks right away. I didn't have the ready magazines charged yet, so I couldn't do anything about it."

"You mean de Laburat got away?" Lamartiere said in horror.

The main gun fired. The unexpected CLANG/jerk! whipsawed Lamartiere's head again. Fumes seeped through the narrow passage from the fighting compartment, but both hatches opened before he had time to sneeze. The wind of Hoodoo's forward motion scoured Lamartiere's station.

This time the bolt had struck at the base of the cliff a hundred meters west of the shrine. Rock shattered in a blue-green flash.

The slope bulged, then slid downward with a roar. A plume of pulverized rock settled slowly, displaying an enormous cavity in the cliff. Below the crater was a pile of irregular blocks which in some cases were larger than a man. The mass was still shifting internally, giving it the look of organic life.

Civilians who'd been returning from the orchard, some of them running to check on loved ones, flattened again to the ground. They had no way of telling what had just happened.

"He got away for a while," Heth said with satisfaction."But then he stuck his head up outa the crevice where he was hiding to see what was going on. He didn't get a very long view, did he?"

Heth's laughter changed again to coughing, though with a cheerful undercurrent. Because the fumes escaped via the cupola, the turret took longer to clear than the driver's compartment.

Father Blenis was on the battlements, standing as straight in his robes as age would permit him. He was alone. He hadn't flinched when the 20cm gun fired, even though he was closer to the bolt's crashing impact than any of the other civilians.

A jeep was racing across the desert from the foothills to the east, trailing a pennant of ruddy dust. Lamartiere wondered if Heth was armed. Probably not. The gangs searched the provisions truck, so one or the other of them would have confiscated any weapon the mercenary had tried to bring with him.

It didn't matter. Lamartiere had run as far as he was going to. The tank he'd stolen with such high hopes had brought disaster to everyone around him.

Hoodoo was nearing Maury's vehicles. Black smoke still poured out of the carcasses. Lamartiere swung his fan nacelles vertical, lifting the tank for an instant to spill air from the plenum chamber. Hoodoo pogoed, touching several times as she slowed. The impacts were too gentle to damage the skirts.

They nosed through the gap they'd plowed in pursuit of the Ralliers. Lamartiere drove carefully; there were civilians moving behind the smoke. He didn't see anyone holding a weapon, though there were plenty of guns strewn across the ground. Dr. Clargue squatted near the walls, bandaging a child's leg.

"Sir?" Lamartiere asked.

"I'm no fucking officer, kid," Heth said, at least half-serious. "Anyway, 'Sarge' was good enough when you were an LSP at the base, wasn't it?"

"That was a long time ago, Sarge," Lamartiere said. Five calendar days, and a lifetime. "Anyway, I was wondering what the command was to transfer ammo to the ready magazines. Dr. Clargue's searched the data banks up, down, and crosswise and he can't find it. Couldn't find it."

Heth laughed himself into another fit of coughing. "Oh, blood and martyrs, was that the problem? Steg and me knew there must be something going on why you didn't use the main gun, but we couldn't on our lives figure out what it was!"

Lamartiere nestled the tank against the shrine. He shut down the fans. The jeep with Trooper Stegner was still a minute or two distant. "Well, what was it then?" he said sharply. There were worse things happening than Heth laughing at him, but it was still irritating.

The sergeant had cocked the turret to the side; the 20cm barrel was no longer glowing, but heat waves still distorted the air above the iridium. He climbed out of the cupola and slid down beside the driver's hatch. Lamartiere raised his seat, but for the moment he was too exhausted to get out of the vehicle.

"Hey, simmer down," Heth said. "I'm just laughing because of how lucky we were. Not that I'm not going to have some explaining to do about why Hoodoo's late joining the regiment on Beresford, but at least you didn't turn Carcassone inside out with the main gun."

The jeep wound between a pair of truck chassis. The open flames had died down, though the wreckage still smoldered. Stegner, a tall man with wispy hair and a face like a rabbit's, waved to them.

"Transfer isn't a software process," Heth went on. "It's hardwired. There's a thumb switch on the firing lever. To recharge the ready magazines you roll it up for the tribarrel and down for the main gun."

"Oh," Lamartiere said. "Yeah, that explains why the doctor couldn't find the command."

He put a boot on the seat and lifted himself out of the compartment. Heth steadied him till he'd settled on the open hatch.

"Kid," the sergeant said. "There's maybe three million parts in one of these suckers. How were you supposed to know what every one of them is, and you not even through proper training?"

He patted Hoodoo with an affectionate hand. "You did plenty good enough with what you had. I watched you chew up that mechanized battalion at the Lystra, remember? I'll tell the world!"

The sergeant's torso was badly scraped besides being half-covered in oil, but apart from occasionally rubbing his elbow he showed no signs of discomfort. Lamartiere's chest hurt badly, particularly where the mob gun had recoiled into his ribs when he fired, but he thought the damage was probably limited to bruising.

"Did you see the holes in the skirt, Sarge?" Stegner called as he stood scowling at Hoodoo's flank. "Must be about a hundred of 'em. Nothing very big but I don't want to drive back to Brione with her mushing like a pig."

"She sagged left," Lamartiere said. "I had to tilt the nacelles to keep her straight, but it wasn't as bad as the damage we took at the Lystra."

"Probably the warhead that flipped my truck over on me," Heth said judiciously. "Well, we can use the truck's bed for patching. Do they have a welder here, kid?"

Half the residents had returned to the shrine. They were crying in amazement and horror at the carnage. Many others still hid among the stone shelters of the orchard, waiting to be sure that it was safe to show themselves. Lamartiere couldn't blame them for their fear.

"I doubt it," he said. He thought for a moment. "There's mastic, though. I saw some where they're tiling the chapel entryway. It'll work for a patch on the inside of the skirts, since air pressure tightens the seal."

"Yeah, that'll work," said Stegner approvingly. He walked to the overturned truck and kicked it, judging the thickness of the body metal by the sound.

"Sergeant Heth," Lamartiere said, looking at the stone wall of the shrine. "Are you going to hand me over to the government, or . . .?"

He turned and gestured toward the body of the old man Maury's thugs had shot as a warning to Dr. Clargue—a few moments before they and all their fellows died also.

"Hey, we don't work for the government of Ambiorix anymore, kid," Heth said. "The only reason Steg and me are still on the planet is we really didn't want to explain to Colonel Hammer how we managed to lose one of his tanks. Do you have any idea what one of these costs?"

He patted Hoodoo again.

Marie's body lay at the foot of the wall. Her upturned face was peaceful and unmarked, but there was a splotch of blood on her upper chest. Lamartiere supposed a stray bullet had hit her. There'd been enough of them flying around.

"I know what it costs," he said. "I know what it cost these people."

"Yeah, that's so," Heth agreed. "And I'm not arguing with you. But you might remind yourself that things may be a little better for the folks here now that the gangs are out of the way. I don't say it will, mind you; but it may be."

He spat accurately onto the corpse of one of Maury's men; the one who'd held the hostage for his partner to shoot, Lamartiere thought.

"I don't work for the government, like I told you," Heth said quietly. "But sometimes I do things on my own personal account. War isn't a business where there's a lot of obvious good guys, but sometimes the bad guys are pretty easy to spot."

Lamartiere put a hand on Heth's shoulder so that the mercenary would look him straight in the eye. "Sergeant," Lamartiere said, "am I free to go? Is that what you're telling me?"

Heth shrugged. "Sure, if you want to," he said. "But Steg and me was hoping you might like to join the Slammers. The colonel's always looking for recruits."

Stegner morosely rubbed a dimple in the hull surrounded by a halo of bright radial scratches. A high-explosive shell had burst there against the armor. "If we bring you along," he said, "maybe we can get a few of these extra dings passed off as training accidents, you know?"

"And you might like to be someplace there wasn't a price on your head," Heth said, rubbing the armor with his thumb. "Nobody at the port's going to think twice if there's three of us boarding a ship for Beresford along with Hoodoo, here."

Lamartiere looked toward the battlements. Father Blenis knelt in prayer. A pair of young women, one of them holding an infant, were with him. At the base of the wall three laymen and a Brother worked with focused desperation to jury-rig a platform in place of the shattered basket.

"I guess I don't have a choice," Lamartiere said.

Trooper Stegner looked up from the side of the tank. "Sure you got a choice," he said in a hard, angry voice. Lamartiere had thought of the trooper as a little slow, but invariably good-humored. "There's always a choice. I coulda stayed on Spruill sniping at Macauleys till one of the Macauleys nailed me!"

"For me," said Sergeant Heth, "the problem was her father and brothers. I decided that joining the Slammers was better than the rest of my life married to Anna Carausio."

He smiled faintly in reminiscence. "I still think I was right, but who knows, hey?"

Lamartiere nodded. "Yeah, who knows?" he said.

He looked at Marie's silent body. Maybe she was in the arms of God; maybe Celine was there, too, and all the others who'd died since Denis Lamartiere stole a tank. It would be nice to believe that.

Lamartiere didn't believe in much of anything nowadays; certainly not in the Mosite Rebellion as a cause to get other people killed in. But one thing he did believe.

"Ambiorix'll be a better place if I'm off-planet," he said to the mercenaries. "And just maybe I'll be better off, too. I'll join if you'll have me."

Heth stuck out his hand for Lamartiere to shake. "Welcome aboard, kid," he said.

Stegner kicked Hoodoo's skirt. "Now let's get this poor bitch patched up so we get the hell out of here, shall we?"