The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

Now at midday the threshold of the autochthons' cave complex was bathed in light, but that only emphasized the wall of darkness just within. The high-vaulted antechamber was ancient enough to be set with sconces for rushlights, though the battery-powered floods now secured in them to wash the ceiling were of an efficiency equal to anything on the planet. There was no need to match the brilliance outdoors, however, so it was only as their eyes adapted that the men took in the rich, vaguely purple ambience which white light stroked from polished granite.

The table in the center of the room was of thin, stamped metal which the cloth drapery did little to disguise.Ferad had offered a lustrous pelt of anautochthonal herbivore, but on reflection it had seemed to both that the feathery scales would prove an impossible surface on which to sign the treaty.

"We couldn't be more pleased with the way you broke the Molts in so short a time,my boy,"said Grigor Antonescuas the rocken closed the party.There were three semicircular doorways spaced about the inner face of the antechamber, barricaded now—not in a misguided attempt to keep the Molts hostage further within the cave system, but simply to prevent Oltenian soldiers from wandering into places where they might cause problems. "But there are some matters of judgment in which you are, in all deference to your abilities, too young to make the decisions."

He spoke, thought Alexander Radescu, as if the sharp exchange in the sunlight had not occurred. Deliu's interference was not to be allowed to affect the calm tenor of the tutorial the Chief Tribune had prepared to give his nephew.

Avoiding the real meat of the opening statement, Radescu replied, "I won a couple skirmishes against an unprepared enemy, Uncle. Scarcely a matter of breaking the Molts, or even the one theme primarily involved."

"There were sizable contingents from all across Oltenia," put in the eldest of the Tribunes, Constantin Wraslov, who even in Radescu's earliest recollection had looked too skeletal to be long for the world. His tone lacked the deliberate venom of Deliu's, but it had the querulousnes scommon to even the most neutral of Wraslov's pronouncements."We've seen the report on the examination of the corpses after the battle."

Radescu looked at the Tribune,surprised at the dispassion with which his mind pictured the old man as one of the victims being examined by the Intelligence Section: the body pulped by a sheet of rock giving way on top of it . . . flayed by microshrapnel from a dozen nearby bomblets . . . halved by a point-blank, chest-high burst from an armored car's gun . . . ."Yes,"the general said with the dynamic calm of a fine blade flexing under the pressure of a thrust, "all the themes had representatives here. That made it possible for Ferad to inflate what was really a minor occurrence into enough of an event to panic the other themes into making peace. Ferad himself knows better—as, of course, do I."

"The infants are their weak point,"said Tribune Deliu, adding with a grudging approval, "and you fingered that well enough, boy, I grant you." There was no affection in the look he gave Radescu, however; and when the gilt brim of the general's hat threw a band of light across Deliu's eyes, the Tribune's glare could have been that of a furious boar.

"Yes, you've shown us how to exterminate the autochthons," Wraslov agreed gleefully, rubbing his hands and looking around the big chamber with the enthusiasm of an archeologist who had just penetrated a tomb. "Before, we tried to clear areas so that they couldn't attack us, you know, because it seemed they could always escape."

From where he stood,Radescu could not see the aged Tribune's face.The Honor Guard had aligned itself as a short chord across the portion of the curving wall toward which Wraslov was turned. The worried looks that flashed across the bland expressions of the six red-clad officers were a suggestion of what those men thought they saw in the Tribune's eyes.

"Excellencies, we can't . . ." Radescu began, breaking off when he realized that he didn't know where to take the words from there. His body felt so dissociated from his mind that his knees started to tremble and he was not sure that he could continue to stand up.

He was not alone in feeling the tension in the chamber. Chief Tribune Antonescu, for all his outward calm, had an inner heat which might have been no more than a well-bred distaste for the scene which he saw developing.

In fact, the only men in the antechamber who did seem relaxed were the two Slammers, and theirs was the calm of soldiers carrying out a familiar task. Hawker and Bourne had their backs to the stone to one side of the entranceway, too close together for a Molt to attempt to teleport between them but still giving their gunhands adequate clearance. They scanned the room, their face shields transparent but already locked in place in case the lights went out and vision aids were required.