The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Malaveda aimed his sub-machine gun. The holographic sight picture stuttered around the man. “Come out with your hands up!” he shouted.

The man started to duck back inside. Vierziger blew his head off in a flash of saturated blue.

The quality of light reflected from a third-floor window above the doorway changed. Malaveda noted the event subliminally, but his brain hadn’t processed it into somebody just slid opaque blinds open behind the polarized pane in order to see me/shoot me when Vierziger fired again. The window shattered. The 2-cm round smacked a belt of powergun ammo slung around the man aiming a sub-machine gun. Hundreds of charged disks gang-fired, touched off by the 2-cm bolt. The blast must have cleared the room.

Soisson had made contact either with fifth columnists set up by the Front, or with a criminal gang that might as well be a government for the weapons in its arsenal. Either way, the snatch squad had walked right into a hornet’s nest.

Malaveda ripped out half his magazine with no better target than the whole rear of the building. He hadn’t expected things to blow up this way. It had spooked him.

Vierziger fired at another of the top range of windows. He must have seen something or he had the devil’s own luck, because there was a man behind the disintegrated pane. The fellow had been pointing a shoulder weapon.

He’d been wearing body armor too, but that didn’t help him against the energy a 2-cm bolt packed. The body hurtled backward, propelled by the shock of its colloid structure suddenly vaporizing. The victim’s sleeves were burning.

The sub-machine gun recoiled against Malaveda’s shoulder. That and the quivering gaps across his field of view, his visor blacking out the cyan dazzle to save his eyesight, combined to focus him on the job at hand. It’s not like this is my first firefight.

The back door was still ajar. The first victim’s feet stuck out of it. Malaveda sensed motion within the building. He aimed, squeezed. His three-round burst lighted the torso of a gunman. Vierziger center-punched the fellow with a bolt at the same instant, then fired again.

The second round was apparently to clear the magazine. The delicate-featured killer turned his weapon up with his left hand and stripped a fresh five-round clip through the loading gate. The gun’s iridium muzzle glowed from the amount of plasma energy it had been channeling downrange.

Malaveda’s commo helmet spluttered with clicks and hisses, sign of a lot of panicked activity that wasn’t addressed to him. The people at the front of the apartment building—the survivors of the snatch team—were calling for serious backup.

The hostiles inside must know that, and know besides that when a platoon of combat cars—or even tanks—arrived, it was all over for them. They had to break out fast, before the FDF came down with both boots.

When Malaveda was sure his partner had reloaded, he emptied the sub-machine gun into two windows chosen at random on the top floor. He thumbed the release button and reached down to his belt pouch for a fresh magazine.

Sirens and screams clawed what had been the night’s stillness, punctuated with the slapping discharges of powerguns. A blast too loud for a grenade shook the opposite side of the apartment. Windows facing the alley shattered. Shards of the panes snowed onto the sidewalk.

Vierziger—

Malaveda’s mind flashed with a montage of his partner in various stages of what had happened next.

First Vierziger’s left hand lifted his 2-cm weapon up toward his shoulder, the girlishly perfect fingers of his right hand curving to the grip. Then Vierziger faced the back of the alley, the shoulder weapon out to his side and the pistol, again the pistol, pointing.

Three shots, strobe-light quick, winking on the face of the man lifting the manhole cover from beneath. Cratering the flesh, rupturing the skull itself with the pressure of gasified nerve tissue. The eyes blanking, the sub-machine gun dropping back into the utility passage converted to an underground escape route; the cover clanking down, catching the dead man’s fingers for a moment before gravity tugged them loose.

Vierziger holstered the pistol. He bent, switched on the jeep’s drive fans, and hopped out beside the vehicle. “Come on!” he ordered. “Watch our back.”

“What?” Malaveda said. He jumped clear of the jeep. He felt as though he was partnered with a ticking bomb. He didn’t understand what was happening, but he was afraid not to obey the newbie absolutely.

Vierziger revved the fans to full lift and reached for the steering yoke. The bottom half-meter of a second-floor window across the street blew outward, shattered by the muzzle blast of a machine gun firing explosive bullets.