The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

The rest of the way was clear. Padova kept Fencing Master on the raised roadbed through the village, then dropped into the left-hand paddy at a slant to let the rest of the platoon fall in beside them. High-pressure air squirting from beneath the plenum chambers excavated furrows twice the width of the vehicles themselves, gouging out the young rice.

The crop could be replanted; the damaged buildings could be repaired. In a few years, people in Millhouse Crossing would no longer talk about the day Hammer’s Slammers roared through. Nothing really matters but life itself, and death.

The village was twelve kilometers from the mouth of the valley. According to the terrain display, the Masterton River dropped twenty meters in the next five hundred, boiling over a series of cataracts that closed it to navigation, and from there meandered another eight klicks to Hundred Hectare Lake.

In the geologic past the lake had been of twice its present area. When the water drained, the original shoreline remained as a limestone escarpment on the south and western margins. Though never more than a few meters high, it was sufficient to cover an artillery regiment against powerguns firing from the Masterton Valley.

Under other circumstances, Huber might’ve considered taking his combat cars in a balls-to-the-wall charge across the farmland south of the lake. The Firelords’ calliopes, emplaced on the escarpment and manned by professionals, made that notion suicide.

Another option—the one Huber would’ve picked—was to have halted well beyond the twenty-kilometer range of the Firelords’ bombardment rockets and let Battery Alpha clear the problem. Again the calliopes were the difficulty. Saturating the Firelords’ air defenses would require much of the ammunition the battery was carrying, and there wouldn’t be any resupply until after—and if— the Regiment captured Port Plattner.

Which left the third option, Flasher Six dealing with the Firelords in his own good time and fashion, while Task Force Huber took whatever was thrown at them. Maybe next time his troopers’d be dishing it out while somebody else drew fire….

The sensor display gave Huber the warning: not movement but a radio signal from the hills overlooking the broad pass to the north. A Solace lookout was signaling back to headquarters near the lakeside.

“Highball!” Huber called. He didn’t aim his own gun; he had other duties. “Tar—”

Deseau must’ve expected an outpost and set his AI to caret RF sources. Most civilians would be using land lines, but a mercenary unit would generally depend on its own communications system. While Huber was still speaking, Frenchie acted. A three-round ranging burst hiss/CRACKed from his tribarrel, vivid even in sunlight.

“—get at vector zero-seven degrees, radio trans—”

Nobody was good enough to hit a target ten kilometers away with his first shot. Deseau adjusted his aim, dialed up the magnification on his holographic sights, and engaged the gun’s stabilizer. Learoyd leaned over his own gun, importing the target information from Deseau’s weapon instead of duplicating the effort.

“—mitter. Fire at—”

Deseau and Learoyd fired together. Their tribarrels spat streams in near parallel, merging optically as they snapped through the sunlight ahead of the task force.

“—will!”

The distant slope winked—cyan from the impacting plasma, red and gushing gray steam where brush burned explosively. There was a burp of orange and the radio signal cut off.

“Got ’em!” Deseau shouted as he and Learoyd took their thumbs from their triggers. He wasn’t on intercom, but Huber could easily hear his excited voice. “Got the bastards!”

Fancy Pants and Three-eight ripped ropes of blue-green hellfire toward the pass. A stretch of hillside where the vegetation was dry began to burn with some enthusiasm. Another gun, this one from F-2 aiming past the X-Ray vehicles, joined in.

“Cease fire!” Huber ordered. “Six to Highball, cease fire! Save your gunbarrels, troopers, because we’re going to need them bad. Out!”

“Here it comes,” Deseau said, reading the flicker of saffron from beyond the mouth of the valley. “For what we are about to receive, the Lord make us thankful.”

The sensor suite analyzed the sound some ten seconds after Frenchie had correctly identified the exhaust flashes reflected from clouds of dust: rocket motors igniting, sixty of them rippling in groups of six every second. A Firelord battery had just launched half the rockets on its six trucks.

“Fox elements,” Huber said, “put all your guns, I repeat all your guns in air defense mode. Have your backup weapons ready to deal with ground threats.”

He pressed his hands against his armored chest to keep from balling them into fists till they cramped.

“Troopers,” he went on, “this is going to be hard but we’re going to do it. Hold station on Three-six, watch for problems on the ground, and let our gunnery computers do their job. They can handle it if anything can. Six out. Break.”