The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

For another moment, she thought those were part of the celebration, but people were sprawling away from the flashes. A second later, the popping sound of the grenades going off reached her vantage point.

Men were spilling out of the altar building. The bolts from their weapons hurt Anne's eyes, even shielded by distance and full dawn.

"Charles!" she cried, careless now of who might hear her in the gallery. "It's started! They're—"

The air near the seafront echoed with a crashing hiss like that of a dragon striking. Anne McGill had never heard anything like it before. She didn't know that it was a calliope firing—but she knew that it meant death.

Buildings hid her view of the impact zone at the west stair head of the plaza, but some of the debris flung a hundred meters in the air could still be identified as parts of human bodies.

Chapter Thirty-One

When the grenades burst, Scratchard jerked the metal door open again—a millisecond before a slow fuse detonated the last of their greeting cards. A scrap of glass-fiber shrapnel drew a line across the back of Tyl's left thumb.

He didn't notice it. He was already shooting from the hip at the first person he saw as he swung through the doorway, a baton-waving orderly whose face was almost as white as his robe except where blood spattered both of them.

Tyl's target was a meter and a half away from his gun muzzle. He missed. The red cape and shoulder of a woman beside the orderly exploded in a cyan flash.

The orderly swung his baton in desperation, but he was already dead. Jack Scratchard put a burst into his face before pointing his submachine-gun at the group on the altar above and behind them. Trimer flattened, carrying Thom Chastain with him, but blue-green fire flicked the chests of both gang bosses.

Tyl hadn't appreciated the noise. It beat on him, a pressure squeezing him into his armor and engulfing the usualthump!

of his bolts heating the air like miniature lightning. He butted his weapon firmly against his shoulder and fired three times to clear the area to his right.

The targets fell. Their eyes were still startled and blinking, though the 2cm bolts had scooped their chests into fire and a sludge of gore.

Tyl strode onward, making room for the troopers behind him as he'd planned, as he'd ordered in some distant other universe.