The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Vierziger was already up the stairs. Malaveda followed. He could no more have made that pair of shots during a training exercise than he could have ripped the door loose with his bare hands.

In the newbie’s company, Malaveda was operating at well above what he would have guessed his best day could be. He didn’t know whether the cause was emulation or a justifiable concern for what Vierziger might do to him if he screwed up.

The steps were slippery with body fluids. Malaveda grabbed the left rail; the 2-cm bandolier clanged against the tubing.

Vierziger tossed a grenade left-handed ahead of him. It was an assault bomb with a contact fuze. The blast was instantaneous, but the glass shrapnel was safe beyond a two-meter radius. Vierziger was through the haze-veiled doorway while the echoes still sounded.

The sub-machine gun snarled out four separate bursts with only a heartbeat between them. Malaveda caromed off the transom as he followed his partner. He wasn’t in shape for this. His body armor felt as though he were wearing a well-stoked oven.

Nobody was in shape for this except Johann Vierziger, who wasn’t human.

“Feed—” Vierziger said.

Malaveda snatched the sub-machine gun away and replaced it with the 2-cm weapon. He tried to say, “Only three in the magazine!” but his voice was a croak, and he didn’t imagine the devil who led him didn’t have the information already.

The room was an unfinished basement, open except for concrete support pillars. It held stacks of cased weapons and ammunition, as well as crates Malaveda couldn’t identify at first glance.

Three bodies, two of them women in nightclothes, lay between the tunnel door and an elevator at the opposite end of the basement. Single-person lift and dropshafts couldn’t have serviced the heavy goods stored here. A woman’s legs wedged the cage doors.

The grenade had pretty well devoured a man holding a bell-muzzled mob gun near the doorway. Vierziger’s powergun bolts had lifted off the back of his head anyway.

Malaveda didn’t see a fourth corpse, but he knew there must be one. Vierziger had fired four times, after all.

Vierziger ran to the elevator. Malaveda reloaded the sub-machine gun as he followed. The barrel was badly burned by use. He’d have changed it for a new one if he’d been sure there was time. He wasn’t sure of anything at all.

He saw something to his left, down a cross-aisle among the goods stored on pallets. He pointed the sub-machine gun but it was a corpse lying on its back, the face blasted away by a tight quartet of powergun bolts.

Vierziger drew his pistol and fired twice to his right, down another aisle. Cyan bolts chewed the ceiling above him as he shot, blasting gravel and a spray of calcium burned from the cast concrete.

The man in ambush had clamped his sub-machine gun’s trigger as he arched backward in death. Vierziger had seen, drawn, and killed before the victim could react to the appearance of the target he’d heard running toward him.

Beside the elevator was a firedoor of mesh-reinforced vitril, displaying a concrete staircase which led to the upper floors. No one was on the stairs. Vierziger tested the door to be sure that it opened from outside the smoke tower. It did. He tugged another grenade from his pocket, armed it, and tossed it up the stairs. He slammed the door shut.

Malaveda hunched aside. Vierziger grinned horribly at him. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s gas.”

The grenade bubbled open in waves of black haze that quickly filled the volume beyond the vitril. The doorseal, intended to prevent smoke from entering the stair tower, acted equally well to keep the contents of the grenade inside.

It was gas all right—KD nerve gas, which would oxidize harmless within two hours of use in an Earth-type atmosphere …and would paralyze the diaphragm muscles of anyone who breathed it or had skin contact before that time. Malaveda would have suffocated slowly and inexorably if a bullet had hit his partner’s grenade during the firefight.

Vierziger ejected the nearly empty magazine from his pistol. To reload, he had to pluck a fresh clip from a belt pouch with the thumb and index finger of the left hand which still gripped the 2-cm weapon.

The woman jamming the doors had been very beautiful. Her filmy pajamas were of a natural fabric that had flashed like guncotton when the bolts struck her, leaving only a net of ash on the body.

Malaveda faced about to guard their backtrail. He felt as if he were in a bubble, he and Vierziger together; cut off from everything he’d for twenty-six years thought was the real world.

The 2-cm gun firing spun him around again. Vierziger had blasted the lock from the emergency hatch in the elevator’s ceiling.

“Feed me!” he ordered crisply. Then, as Malaveda traded submachine gun for 2-cm weapon, Vierziger added, “Give me a leg up.”