Read Online The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 by David Drake - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: David Drake
Tags: Fiction, General, Science-Fiction, adventure, Science Fiction - General, Fiction - Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction And Fantasy, Science Fiction - Adventure, Science Fiction - Military
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that morning. It didn’t matter—to the job—if he got soaked, but rain dripping into an open box could only make a bad situation worse.
The messenger disappeared. Daun sighed and followed him. “I’ll catch the next one, Niko,” Anya called as Daun stepped out into the rain.
The flashlight strapped for the moment to Daun’s left wrist threw a fan of white light ahead of him. He could switch the beam to deep yellow which wouldn’t affect his night vision, but it didn’t matter if he became night-blind. He’d need normal light to do his work anyway: many of the components were color-coded. The markings would change hue or vanish if viewed under colored light.
Rain sparkled in the beam. Reflections made it difficult to tell what was mud and what was wet duckboard. The crates were likely to shift queasily underfoot anyway.
Three months more. How the locals stood it was beyond him.
Daun couldn’t blame the soldiers he tried to train for being apathetic. It was all very well to tell the troops that their safety depended on them servicing the sensors properly, but a threat to lives so wretched had little incentive value.
Daun and Anya complained, but professionalism and a sense of duty would carry the pair of them through no matter how bad things got. The vast majority of the Central States personnel were conscripts, and the conscripts with the least political influence in Jungfrau besides. Daun was sure that at least eighty percent of the outpost would have deserted by now, if there was any place to which they could desert.
Light through the walls of the tent turned the TOC into a vast russet mushroom, though the fabric looked dull brown by daylight. Daun could hear voices, some of them compressed by radio transmission.
It was conceivable that the problem was inside the TOC, either in the console or the connecting cables. Daun was tempted to check out those possibilities first, but he decided not to waste his time. The console was of Frisian manufacture and sealed against meddling by the locals.
The cables had been laid by the previous pair of FDF advisers. They’d done a first-class job; Daun had checked and approved every millimeter of the route the day he and Anya arrived. Unless somebody’d driven a piece of tracked construction equipment through the TOC, the conduits should be fine. The indigs were capable of doing something that bone-headed, but Daun would have heard it happening.
The thirty-meter mast was a triangular construct set in concrete and anchored to the trailer housing the battery commander. The unit telescoped in three sections. Daun could lower the mast to save most of the climb, but re-erecting it would require help to keep the guy wires from fouling. He didn’t trust the indigs to do that properly even during daylight.
He squelched to the base of the mast, hooked his safety belts, and began to climb the runglike braces which bound the three verticals together. The mast was formed from plastic extrusions, not metal, but the rungs still felt icy to Daun’s bare hands. They were also slick as glass.
The sensor wands’ removable recording cartridges provided extremely precise information on all movements within the coverage area. If a human passed within two or three meters of the wand, the retrieved cartridge could determine the state of health based on body temperature and pulse rate. Such data were remarkable but useful only as the raw material for a historical overview.
Base Bulwark collected coarse sensor readings in real-time, via coded frequency-hopping radio signals. As the messenger had implied, this was the second miserable night in a row that the ultra-high gain antenna atop the mast had failed.
Last night a matchhead-sized integrated circuit had blown: the sort of thing that happened only occasionally with Frisian hardware, but always at a bad time. Anya had unplugged the blown chip and replaced it with a good one.
Anya, simply glad to have the antenna working again, had
The messenger disappeared. Daun sighed and followed him. “I’ll catch the next one, Niko,” Anya called as Daun stepped out into the rain.
The flashlight strapped for the moment to Daun’s left wrist threw a fan of white light ahead of him. He could switch the beam to deep yellow which wouldn’t affect his night vision, but it didn’t matter if he became night-blind. He’d need normal light to do his work anyway: many of the components were color-coded. The markings would change hue or vanish if viewed under colored light.
Rain sparkled in the beam. Reflections made it difficult to tell what was mud and what was wet duckboard. The crates were likely to shift queasily underfoot anyway.
Three months more. How the locals stood it was beyond him.
Daun couldn’t blame the soldiers he tried to train for being apathetic. It was all very well to tell the troops that their safety depended on them servicing the sensors properly, but a threat to lives so wretched had little incentive value.
Daun and Anya complained, but professionalism and a sense of duty would carry the pair of them through no matter how bad things got. The vast majority of the Central States personnel were conscripts, and the conscripts with the least political influence in Jungfrau besides. Daun was sure that at least eighty percent of the outpost would have deserted by now, if there was any place to which they could desert.
Light through the walls of the tent turned the TOC into a vast russet mushroom, though the fabric looked dull brown by daylight. Daun could hear voices, some of them compressed by radio transmission.
It was conceivable that the problem was inside the TOC, either in the console or the connecting cables. Daun was tempted to check out those possibilities first, but he decided not to waste his time. The console was of Frisian manufacture and sealed against meddling by the locals.
The cables had been laid by the previous pair of FDF advisers. They’d done a first-class job; Daun had checked and approved every millimeter of the route the day he and Anya arrived. Unless somebody’d driven a piece of tracked construction equipment through the TOC, the conduits should be fine. The indigs were capable of doing something that bone-headed, but Daun would have heard it happening.
The thirty-meter mast was a triangular construct set in concrete and anchored to the trailer housing the battery commander. The unit telescoped in three sections. Daun could lower the mast to save most of the climb, but re-erecting it would require help to keep the guy wires from fouling. He didn’t trust the indigs to do that properly even during daylight.
He squelched to the base of the mast, hooked his safety belts, and began to climb the runglike braces which bound the three verticals together. The mast was formed from plastic extrusions, not metal, but the rungs still felt icy to Daun’s bare hands. They were also slick as glass.
The sensor wands’ removable recording cartridges provided extremely precise information on all movements within the coverage area. If a human passed within two or three meters of the wand, the retrieved cartridge could determine the state of health based on body temperature and pulse rate. Such data were remarkable but useful only as the raw material for a historical overview.
Base Bulwark collected coarse sensor readings in real-time, via coded frequency-hopping radio signals. As the messenger had implied, this was the second miserable night in a row that the ultra-high gain antenna atop the mast had failed.
Last night a matchhead-sized integrated circuit had blown: the sort of thing that happened only occasionally with Frisian hardware, but always at a bad time. Anya had unplugged the blown chip and replaced it with a good one.
Anya, simply glad to have the antenna working again, had
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