The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

The armored vehicles bucked through the muck of the paddies, throwing up curtains of spray to the rear and sides. The mid-afternoon sun struck it into rainbows, dazzlingly beautiful over the bright green rice plants.

“Padova,” Huber continued, “keep picking up the pace as long as the rest of Highball can stay with us. Don’t let ’em string out, but the Firelords may not have us under direct observation. I’d like to be somewhere other than where they calculate. Out.”

“Roger,” the driver said. She sounded focused but not concerned. Huber couldn’t tell without checking whether Fencing Master’s speed increased, but he figured he’d delegated the decision to the person best able to make it.

Deseau set the tribarrels on air defense; the guns lifted their triple muzzles toward the northern sky like hounds casting for a distant scent. He took his 2-cm weapon out of the clip that held it to his gun’s pintle; Learoyd held his sub-machine gun in his right hand as he snapped the loading tube out of the receiver, then in again to make sure it had locked home. Huber grinned tightly and drew his own 2-cm weapon from its muzzle-down nest between ammo boxes at the rear of the compartment.

All the tribarrels in the task force opened fire, their barrel clusters rotating as they slashed the northern sky. The Command and Control box coordinated the cars’ individual AIs so that all the incoming missiles were hit without duplication. Red flashes and soot-black smoke filled the air beyond the mouth of the valley. A rocket, gutted but not destroyed, spun in a vertical helix and plunged back the way it had come.

The guns fell silent; then Deseau’s weapon stuttered another four-round burst. A final rocket exploded, much closer than the smoky graveyard of its fellows. The tribarrel originally tasked with that target must have jammed before it finished the job, so Frenchie’s gun was covering.

“Hold for a jolt!” Padova called, her voice rising.

The sky ahead flashed yellow-gray again, silhouetting the hills. For a moment Huber, focused on the C&C display, thought the driver also meant the next inbound salvo.

Fencing Master’s bow lifted, spilling pressure. The combat car hurtled onward on inertia, its skirts skimming but not slamming straight into the cross dike which had just appeared at the end of the paddy.

Fencing Master came down like a dropped plate. The Lord’s Blood! but they hit. Padova’d executed the maneuver perfectly, but there was no way you could sail thirty tonnes of iridium into watery muck and the passengers have a good time. Huber had the coaming in his left hand and his tribarrel’s gunshield in his right; otherwise he’d have hurtled out of the compartment.

“Padova, slow down!” Huber bellowed, though the driver had already cut back on the car’s speed by bringing the fan nacelles closer to vertical. “Highball, watch for the fucking dike here! Six out!”

He glanced to the right to see how the other cars of the platoon had handled the obstruction. Three-eight’s driver had negotiated it flawlessly and was still parallel to Fencing Master. Sergeant Tranter must’ve seen the dike coming and warned his driver, because Fancy Pants had slowed to climb it in rulebook fashion and was now lurching down the other side.

Foghorn had tried to plow straight through. The dike was only a hand’s breadth above the water and some forty centimeters down to the floor of the paddy. It was a meter thick, though, and over the width of a combat car’s skirts even mud weighed several tonnes. The crew in the fighting compartment were all down, though the left wing gunner was trying to lift himself with a hand on the coaming. The car wallowed; the driver’d lost control when the shock curtains deployed automatically to save his life.

All the tribarrels fired again, those mounted on Foghorn along with the rest; the impact hadn’t affected the gunnery computer. That was a good thing, because this time the Firelords had launched 240 rounds, a battalion half-emptying its racks.

Plasma bolts stabbed home. Flame and dirty smoke spread across the sky in a solid mass, replacing the dispersing rags of the previous salvo.

“Sir, I didn’t see the wall!” Padova said. “Via, sir, I’m sorry!”

“Roger that,” Huber said. F-3 had gotten straightened out and was cautiously accelerating across the second paddy. Nagano and both his wing gunners were on their feet again, though Foghorn’s guns pecked the sky in short bursts regardless of what the crew was doing. The X-Ray element had reached the dike and was crossing in good order, in part because of the holes the combat cars had torn. “Drive on.”

The crackling roar of the first salvo’s destruction rolled over Task Force Huber as the second flashed and spurted a little nearer. The tribarrels continued to fire, switching from target to fresh target as the rockets curved downward. The math was easy—two hundred and forty incoming projectiles, twenty-four guns to sweep them out of the sky—

Or not.