The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

A company of ten Nonesuch APCs had left the pad and was driving toward the ridge at the best speed turbine engines could move their caterpillar tracks. Their side armor, though thinner than that of the combat cars, was iridium, but hatches on the roofs of their troop compartments were thrown back so that the infantry in back could use their personal weapons.

Huber depressed his tribarrel and raked the hatches. Nonesuch troops carried powerguns; the blue-green flash of their stored ammunition melted the APC’s frame from the inside so that the bow tilted upward. Fuel cells on the underside blew a circle of orange flames around the glowing wreckage.

Tanks and combat cars were firing all along the ridgeline. Though Huber couldn’t have seen most of the Slammers’ vehicles even if he’d taken the time to look to his side, streams of cyan plasma from their tribarrels and the tanks’ stunning, world-searing flashes stabbed downward into easily visible targets.

The tanks were in hull-down positions where the firecracker rounds had scraped and sculpted the ground in erasing the Nonesuch picket. They shot as quickly as their gunners could work the foot-trips of their main guns, aiming at the company of Nonesuch tanks below. A 20-cm bolt hit massive frontal armor, rocking the target back on its treads in blinding coruscance.

To Huber’s half-conscious horror, the centerline 25-cm gun shot back despite the Slammer’s direct hit. The bolt gouged the hillside at least fifty meters from the nearest target, but the fact the tank fired at all was amazing.

A second bolt from the same Slammers tank struck where the armor glowed pulsingly white from the first. This time the glacis failed. The 25-cm magazine detonated, scooping the hull empty. The thick shell remained as a white-hot monument.

Huber swung his gun onto a company of buttoned-up APCs moving slantwise left to right in two echelons. They were several kilometers away, still on the concrete, when Huber hit the nearest vehicle in the lead row. Its side armor blew inward under the hammer of his 2-cm bolts. As the rest of the line drew ahead, Huber shifted his aim slightly onto the next APC and slashed it open the same way.

Huber steadied on the third APC, but as he did so the four second echelon vehicles opened fire on Fencing Master with their cupola tribarrels. One of them walked his burst up the sod, then splashed two bolts on Fencing Master’s bow slope and a third into the armor of the fighting compartment.

The combat car rocked at each impact. Huber’s helmet deadened the clangs, but the jolts transmitted through the floor of the compartment buckled his knees. Before the Nonesuch gunner could finish the job, Deseau raked the APCs’ cupolas, dismounting their tribarrels in rainbow brilliance.

Huber’s third target exploded in a mushroom of crimson flame. As he hammered through the cab of the fourth and last, he saw Deseau’s and Learoyd’s guns crossing his burst to slaughter the soldiers bailing out of the vehicles Frenchie had disarmed.

The infantry weren’t much of a threat now even if they got clear, but Huber shifted his own fire onto a car that his troopers hadn’t hit yet. Body parts flew up at his lash before a secondary explosion finished the job in a saffron fireball.

Despite the filters over Huber’s nostrils, Fencing Master stank of ozone and the vile slickness of burned metal. Vaporized iridium had burned the side of his neck, and his seared left sleeve stuck to his elbow. Blood and Martyrs, that was close!

Fencing Master jumped again. We’re hit! but it wasn’t incoming: a strip of the automatic defense array at the top of the skirts had gone off, sending a load of small osmium slugs out toward the left front. They met the anti-tank missile homing on the combat car.

The warhead detonated partially in a red flash. Bits of the debris sprayed Fencing Master. The concussion staggered Huber and a chunk of the rocket motor whanged the hull, but that was a cheap price. If the round’d hit squarely, the jet from its shaped charge would’ve gutted Fencing Master like a trout.

A 25-cm bolt hit close by, vaporizing a combat car forward of the rear bulkhead. A cloud of glowing iridium shimmered through all the colors of the spectrum, turning the ridgeline as bright as noon in Hell.

“Shall I back up? Shall I back us up?” Padova shouted into the intercom. Fencing Master lifted, quivering on plenum chamber pressure instead of resting its skirts firmly on the ground.

“Set us down!” Huber shouted, swinging his gun onto the pair of Nonesuch tanks sheltering at the side of a starship like tortoises in the lee of a high cliff. His tribarrel floated on a frictionless magnetic bearing, but inertia made slewing it a deliberate business. “Give us a solid—”