The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

The artillery impact zone was out of Huber’s sight, but the sky flickered white with reflected hellfire. At least one round of the second salvo escaped the calliopes’ desperate attempt to sweep the cargo shells out of the sky before they opened. The calliopes stopped firing when the glass-fiber shrapnel scythed down the gunners who hadn’t thrown themselves under cover.

As the crackling snarl of the single previous round reached Huber, all six shells of the third salvo burst over the target. The sky beyond the branches was bright as daylight, and the blast remained louder than the car’s intake howl for nearly a minute.

The bomblets were anti-personnel, but several must have hit fuel or munitions. Secondary explosions, red and orange and once the cyan dazzle of ionized copper, punctuated the ongoing white glare.

Huber swore softly. He knew he should’ve felt pleased. The firecracker rounds were landing on the enemy, clearing a path so that Task Force Huber had a chance of surviving the next ten minutes. Sometimes, though, Huber found it hard to forget that the hostiles were human beings also, soldiers very like his own troopers.

And maybe Huber wasn’t alone in his reaction. Frenchie Deseau, nobody’s choice for Mr. Sensitive, pounded the coaming with the edge of his left hand. His right was still on the grip of his tribarrel, though.

Stray bomblets had lit scores of small fires outside the main impact area. That and the continuing roar had confused the troops in the ring of Solace bunkers outside the firebase berm. Huber’s faceshield alerted him for the oncoming target for thirty seconds before Fencing Master wheeled around a giant tree and got a clear view of a low log-covered bunker some sixty meters away. The defenders had cut three firing lanes through the undergrowth to give them several hundred meters of range along those axes, but Padova had split a pair of them and Foghorn to Fencing Master’s right had done the same.

Huber aimed at the bunker’s firing slit. The car’s jouncing advance through the forest made perfect accuracy impossible but he didn’t need perfection, not with the amount of energy in a 2-cm bolt.

Cyan flashes caved in the bunker’s thick face and shattered the collapsing roof despite the layers of sandbags overhead. Ammunition inside blew the wreckage into the air a moment later. The shock-wave shoved Huber hard against the side of the fighting compartment and slewed Fencing Master against a treebole.

Padova recovered with a savage thrust of her fan nacelles. Fencing Master charged through the line of trees into the hundred-meter clearing around the Solace perimeter.

There were bunkers built into the berm, but the troops within them still had their heads down when F-3 roared into the open. The bunker roofs were proof against the anti-personnel bomblets which had carpeted the firebase, but the thunder of multiple explosions was literally stunning. The main blast had ended, but duds continued to go off with occasional vicious cracks that were almost equally nerve-shattering.

Huber’s helmet picked targets for him, coordinating its choices with the AIs of the platoon’s other gunners. Fencing Master was on the left of the line, so Huber raked a sandbagged watchtower several meters above the western curve of the berm. The wooden roof—a shelter, not ballistic protection—already smoldered where a bomblet had hit it. Huber’s burst was low, but his bolts blew apart two of the support posts. The structure twisted and collapsed under the weight of its armor, spilling sandbags, weapons, and several screaming soldiers.

The night sizzled with the blue-green glare of tribarrels. Every gun in the platoon was firing as the combat cars charged the firebase. Huber switched his point of aim to a bunker and held his trigger down for three seconds. A red flash lifted the roof before dropping it back into the blast-scoured interior.

Coils of barbed wire crisscrossed the cleared area. Fencing Master hit a post and slid over it, dragging the tangles of wire under the skirts. If Padova had gotten the wrong angle, the wire would’ve scraped up the bow slope and decapitated any gunner who hadn’t ducked quickly enough.

The pressure of the air in the plenum chamber was enough to detonate anti-personnel mines even when the skirts didn’t touch the ground. Several went off in quick succession, Whang! Whang! Whang! like hammers striking the car’s underside. Huber jumped at each blast though his conscious mind knew the worst harm a few ounces of high explosive beneath Fencing Master could do was maybe fling stones into a fan blade.

Padova canted the rear nacelles, swinging Fencing Master’s stern out to starboard without changing the car’s direction of movement. They bumped down into the shallow ditch where Solace engineers had scraped up dirt to raise the two-meter berm. The earth wasn’t compacted; it lay at the angle of repose, about forty-five degrees.