The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

Control, the artificial intelligence/communications center, sat beside a wall that had been pierced for conduits to antennas on the roof. It was about a cubic meter of electronics packed into thirty-two resin-black modules, some of them redundant.

Control directed the battery in combat because no human reactions were fast enough to deal with hypersonic missiles—though the calliopes, pulsing with light-swift violence, could rip even those from the sky if their tubes were slewed in the right direction.

The disused fixtures were piled at one end of the room. Control's waste heat made the room a little warmer, a little drier; but the place still reminded Desoix of basements in too many bombed-out cities.

Major Borodin pulled shut the flap of the curtain which separated his office from the bunks on which the off-duty shift was relaxing or trying to sleep. In theory, the curtain's microprocessors formed adaptive ripples in the fabric and canceled sounds. In practice—

Well, it didn't work that badly. And if you're running an eighty-man unit in what now had to be considered combat conditions, you'd better figure your troops were going to learn what was going on no matter how you tried to conceal it.

"You should have called in at once!"the battery commander said,half furious, half disappointed, like a parent whose daughter has come home three hours later than expected.

"I needed you at that meeting," he added, the anger replaced by desperate memory. "I . . . you know, Charles, I never know what to say to them up there. We're supposed to be defending the air space here, not mixed up in riots."

"I got a good look at that this morning, Sergei," Desoix said quietly. He seated himself carefully on the collapsible desk and, by his example, urged Borodin into the only chair in the curtained-off corner. "I think we need to reposition Gun Three. It's too close to where—things are going on. Some of our people are going to get hurt."

Borodin shook his craggy head abruptly."We can't do that,"he said."Coverage."

"Now that Five's back on-planet—" Desoix began.

"You were with that woman, weren't you?" Borodin said, anger hardening his face as if it were concrete setting."That's really why you didn't come to me when I needed you. Isawher slip in just before you did."

Yes, Daddy, Desoix thought. But Borodin was a good man to work for—good enough to humor.