"David Drake - Hammer's Slammers - Counting the Cost" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

Hammer's Slammers

By David Drake

Counting the Cost

CHAPTER ONE

They'd told Tyl Koopman that Bamberg City's starport was on an island across the channel from the city proper, so he hadn't expected much of a skyline when the freighter's hatches opened.

Neither had he expected a curtain of steam boiling up so furiously that the sun was only a bright patch in mid-sky.

Tyl stepped back with a yelp. The crewman at the controls of the giant cargo doors laughed and said, "Well, you were in such a hurry, soldier...."

The Slammers-issue pack Tyl carried was all the luggage he'd brought from six month's furlough on Miesel. Strapped to the bottom of the pack was a case of home-made jalapeno jelly that his aunt was sure - correctly - was better than any he could get elsewhere in the galaxy.

But altogether, the weight of Tyl's gear was much less than he was used to carrying in weapons, rations, and armor when he led a company of Alois Hammer's infantry. He turned easily and looked at the crewman with mild sadness - the visage of a dog that's been unexpectedly kicked... and maybe just enough else beneath the sadness to be disquieting.

The crewman looked down at his controls, then again to the mercenary waiting to disembark. The squealing stopped when the triple hatches locked open. "Ah," called the crewman, "it'll clear up in a minute er two. It's always like this on Bamberg the first couple ships down after a high tide. The port floods, y'see, and it always looks like half the bloody ocean's waiting in the hollows t' burn off."

The steam - the hot mist; it'd never been dangerous, Tyl realized how - was thinning quickly. From the hatchway he could see the concrete pad and, in the near distance, the bulk of the freighter that must have landed just before theirs. The flecks beyond the concrete were the inevitable froth speckling moving water, the channel or the ocean itself - and the water looked cursed close to somebody who'd just spent six months on a place as dry as Miesel.

"Where do they put the warehouses?" Tyl asked. "Don't they flood?"

"Every three months or so they would," the crewman agreed. "That's why they're on the mainland, in Bamberg City, where there's ten meters of cliff and seawall t' keep 'em dry. But out here's flat, and I guess they figured they'd sooner the landing point be on the island in case somebody, you know, landed a mite hard."

The crewman grinned tightly. Tyl grinned back. They were both professionals in fields that involved risks. People who couldn't joke about the risks of the jobs they'd chosen tended to find other lines of work in a hurry.

The ones who survived.

"Well, I guess it's clear," Tyl said with enough question in his tone to expect a warning if he were wrong. "There'll be ground transport coming?"

"Yeah, hovercraft from Bamberg real soon," the crewman agreed. "But look, there's a shelter on the other side a' that bucket there. You might want to get over to it right quick. There's some others in orbit after us, and it can be pretty interesting t' be out on the field when it's this wet and there's more ships landing."

Tyl nodded to the man and strode down the ramp that had been the lower third of the hatch door. He was nervous, but it'd all be fine soon. He'd be back with his unit and not alone, the way he'd been on the ship -

And for the whole six months he'd spent with his family and a planet full of civilians who understood his words but not his language.

The mainland shore, a kilometer across Nevis Channel, was a comiche. The harsh cliffs were notched by the mouth of the wide river which was responsible for Bamberg City's location and the fact it was the only real city on the planet. Tyi hadn't gotten the normal briefing because the regiment shifted employers while he was on furlough, but the civilian sources available on Miesel when he got his movement orders were about all he needed anyway.

Captain Tyl Koopman wasn't coming to the planet Bamberia; he was returning to Hammer's Slammers. After five years in the regiment and six months back with his family, he had to agree with the veterans who'd warned him before he went on furlough that he wasn't going home.

He had left home, because the Slammers were the only home he'd got.

The shelter was a low archway, translucent green from the outside and so unobtrusive that Tyl might have overlooked it if there had been any other structure on the island. He circled to one end, apprehensive of the rumbling he heard in the sky - and more than a little nervous about the pair of star freighters already grounded in the port.

The ships were quiescent. They steamed and gave off pings of differential cooling, but for the next few days they weren't going to move any more than would buildings of the same size. Nevertheless, learned reflex told Tyl that big metal objects were tanks... and no infantryman lived very long around tanks without developing a healthy respect for them.

The door opened automatically as Tyl reached for it, wondering where the latch was. Dim shadows swirled inside the shelter, behind a second panel that rotated aside only when the outside door had closed again.