The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

And anyway,it didn't matter now.Tyl pressed forward to the pontoon-mounted stage and the stairs of steel grating leading up to the open hatch of the control room. Tyl's rank took him through his jostling men, but it was all he could do not to use his elbows and gun butt to force his way faster.

He had to remember that he was commanding a unit, not throwing his life away for no reason he could explain even to himself. He had to act as if there were military purpose to what he was about to do.

Only two men could stand abreast on the punched-steel stair treads, and that by pressing hard against the rails. The control room was almost as tight, space for ten men being filled by a dozen. Tyl squeezed his way in, pausing in the hatchway. When he turned to address his troops, he found the sergeant major just behind him.

It would have been nice to organize this better; but it would have been nicer yet for somebody else to be doing it. Or no one at all.

"Stop bloody pushing?" Tyl snapped on the unit frequency. Inside the control room, his signal would have been drunk by the meter-thick floor of the plaza. No wonder sound didn't get through.

Motion stopped, except for the gentle resilience of the barge's fenders against the closed floodgates.

"There's one door out into the plaza," Tyl said simply. "We'll deploy through it, spread out as much as possible. If it doesn't work out, try to withdraw toward the east or west stairs, maybe the calliopes can give us some cover. Do your jobs, boys, and we'll come through this all right."

Scratchard laid a hand on the captain's elbow, then keyed his own helmet and said,"Listen up.This is nothin' you don't know.There's a lot of people up there."

He pumped the muzzle of his submachine-gun toward the ceiling. "So long as there's one of 'em standing, none of us 're safe. Got that?"

Heads nodded, hands stroked the iridium barrels of powerguns. Some of the recruits exchanged glances.

"Then let's go," the sergeant major said simply. He hefted himself toward the hatchway.

Tyl blocked him. "I want you below, Jack," he said. "Last man out."

Scratchard grinned and shook his head. "I briefed Kekkonan for that," he said.

Tyl hesitated.

Scratchard's face sobered."Cap'n,"he said."This don't take good knees.What it takes, I got."

"All right, let's go," said Tyl very softly. "But I'm the first through the door."

He pushed his way to the door out onto the plaza, hearing the sergeant major wheezing a step behind.

Chapter Thirty