The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Malaveda made a stirrup of his hands. The dangling bandolier and sub-machine gun clattered on the cage floor. Bloody hell it could have gone off! But that was only a vagrant thought as he straightened his legs and boosted Vierziger through the narrow opening.

“Come on!” Vierziger said, thrusting a hand—his left hand— down toward Malaveda. “I need you to open the doors now!”

Instead of obeying instantly, Malaveda yanked open the latches of his ceramic body armor and shrugged the clamshell away. He probably wouldn’t fit through the emergency access with it on, and he was already dizzy from the heat and confinement of exercise while wearing the armor.

He didn’t try to explain what he was doing to Vierziger. Malaveda had to concentrate on what he was doing if he was going to achieve a fraction of what his partner expected….

Re-slinging the gun and ammunition, Malaveda rose and took Vierziger’s offered hand. He jumped and the little man pulled—like a derrick. Vierziger’s physical strength was as shocking as everything else about the deadly man with the features of a child. Malaveda’s right elbow scraped the edge of the opening and the sub-machine gun’s muzzle rapped on metal, but Vierziger’s tug was precise as well as effortless.

The sergeant knelt in the litter and lubricant sludge on top of the cage, then rose to his feet. A sagging cable brushed his shoulder. He had his second wind since he’d dropped the back-and-breast armor. A moment before, he hadn’t been sure he could go on.

“Switch,” said Vierziger, offering the 2-cm weapon. The elevator shaft was vaguely illuminated from above, but most of the light streamed up through the access port.

The little man was using Malaveda as a pack train; which was perfectly appropriate under the circumstances. Now that he was sure of the sergeant’s obedience, the edge that had earlier promised, “Do this thing, or I will kill you without hesitation,” was gone from Vierziger’s voice.

Vierziger nodded to the knife he’d already thrust into the juncture of the doors closing the elevator shaft from the first floor. He placed his boot along the edge, ready to thrust the door fully open as soon as Malaveda broke the seal. The top of the cage was eighty centimeters beneath floor level, not a serious problem.

The knife was a sturdy tool with a single edge on a thick, density-enhanced blade about twenty centimeters long. It could serve for a weapon, but it was obviously intended for more general purposes than killing. Here it made a functional prybar.

Malaveda gripped the knife with his left hand, crossed his left leg over the hilt to push the other door, and aimed his 2-cm weapon at the crack. Vierziger nodded approvingly.

The sergeant levered the knife with all his strength, using the thrust of his left boot as both anchor and supplement. The doors banged open to their stops. Vierziger was through the doorway like a lethal wraith, the sub-machine gun snarling. Malaveda heaved himself over the floor ledge, feeling like a hippo in comparison to his partner’s grace.

But he got there without stumbling. The torso of a startled man in a business suit vanished in the huge flash of a 2-cm bolt, though Malaveda wasn’t really conscious of pulling the trigger.

According to the plans and 3-D holograms with which the squad prepared for the raid, the apartment building’s foyer faced the street through a wall of clear vitril. No longer. Armored shutters with firing slits had slammed down moments after the shooting started.

Vitril now covered the floor like a field of diamonds. Powergun bolts had shattered the former expanse into bits ranging from pebbles to dust. It was rough, but it didn’t have dangerous edges.

A trooper in light-scattering Frisian battle dress lay under the crystalline debris. Malaveda couldn’t tell which of the squad it had been, because an explosive bullet had decapitated him/her.

Three men and a woman crouched by the slits, shooting outward or preparing to when the pair of Frisians appeared behind them. All four of them were dead by the time Malaveda stepped into the foyer. Vierziger had shot them in the back of the head. The purple-haired man on the left of the position was on the floor. His three companions were slumping in various stages of the same motion, like a slow-motion image of a single event.

The armored shield glowed in several places where it had absorbed plasma energy, but all those strikes had been on the outer face. Vierziger hadn’t wasted a bolt.

A dozen more people of both sexes tumbled out the stairwell door. Despite being in various stages of undress, they were slicker-looking types than the shooters had been. Malaveda had killed the first of them. The woman behind that victim was shrieking, “The basement’s full of gas!” when the 2-cm bolt sprayed her with the remains of her companion.

A tremendous blast shook the building. The shock wave down the stair tower projected the last would-be escapee into the foyer like the cork from a champagne bottle.