The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 by David Drake Read Free Book Online

ahead,” he croaked.
    He couldn’t see anything. Existence was a white throb shattered by jagged bands of darkness.
    “Cap’n, it’s Filkerson,” a man said, his voice pitched high and staccato. “That load of local-manufacture pyrotechnics that arrived today, I can hear the crates, they’re chirping, and I don’t like it a bit!”
    Shards of light spun. They reformed suddenly into present surroundings and the past life leading up to them:
    He was Captain Sten Moden, Base Supply Officer serving the regimental field force of Frisian troops on Trinity. He was in semi-detached quarters, three rooms and a bath connected by a dogtrot to the Base Intelligence Officer’s suite.
    The earthen berm surrounding Trinity Base’s ammo dump was 400 meters to the west of the officers’ lines. Filkerson was sergeant of the dump’s guard detachment tonight, which meant this was a real problem.
    “Right,” Moden said. “Alert the emergency team. Start dousing the crates now, don’t take any chances. Are they in a bunker?”
    Spasms wracked his muscles, but the aftereffects of the gage would pass shortly. It was like being dropped into ice water while soundly asleep. Why in hell did a crisis have to blow up the one night out of a hundred that he overdid it on stim cones?
    “Blow up” wasn’t the most fortunate thought just now.
    “No sir, there wasn’t time!” Filkerson said with an accusatory tone in his voice. “This is the batch that came in after hours, and you told us to accept it anyway!”
    “I know what I did,” Moden said flatly. He’d donned his trousers and tunic while talking. Now he pulled on his boots and sealed their seams. He didn’t bother with the strap-and-buckle failsafe closure. “Handle your end, Sergeant. I’ll be with you as soon as I make a call. Out.”
    He broke the contact by lifting his commo helmet from the base unit. He settled the helmet on his head with one hand as he switched the base to local and keyed a pre-set.
    As he waited for the connection, Moden shook himself to rid his muscles of the last of the gage tremors. He was coldly furious, with Loie Leonard and more particularly with himself because of what he’d let Loie talk him into doing.
    “Yes, what is it?” a woman said. She sounded irritated—as anybody would be, awakened two hours before dawn—but also guarded, because very few people had this number.
    “Loie,” Moden said, “it’s Sten. I need you here at the base soonest with manufacturing records for everything in that load of flares and marking grenades you just sent us. There’s a problem, and part of it’s your problem.”
    He squeezed the desk support hard so that the rage wouldn’t come out in his voice. Tendons rippled over the bones of his hands. Moden was a big man, so tall that almost anybody else would have claimed the finger’s breadth he lacked of two meters. He had difficulty finding boots to fit him, though now that he was in logistics, it was a lot easier than it had been with a line command.
    “Sten, I’m at home in bed,” Loie said in irritation. “I don’t have any records here, and I don’t see what there is that couldn’t wait for dayli—”
    “Soonest, Loie!” Moden said. “Soonest, and I mean it!”
    He switched off the base unit so violently that the stand overset. He ignored the mess and started for the door.
    Sten Moden had held his present position for thirteen standard months. Most of the field force’s munitions were shipped from Nieuw Friesland. The expense was considerable, but powergun ammunition and self-guided shells for the regiment’s rocket howitzers had to be manufactured to the closest tolerances if they were to function properly.
    Supplies of other material were available cheaper and at satisfactory quality on Trinity. Because the local government had hired the Frisians at a monthly flat rate, cost cutting had a direct, one-toone effect on President Hammer’s profit margin. Sten Moden was responsible for