The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

Most troopers kept their body armor near their bunks. Birdie didn't bother with that stuff anymore.

Despite the ringing alarm bell, there were people still standing around in the middle of the company area; but that was their problem, not Birdie Sparrow's.

He was diving feet-first through the hatch when the first mortar shell went off, hurling a figure away from its blast.

The body looked like DJ Bell waving goodbye.

When the third mortar shell went off, June Ranson rolled into a crouch and sprinted toward her combat car. The Consies used 100mm automatic mortars that fired from a three-round clip. It was a bloody good weapon—a lot like the mortars in Hammer's infantry platoons, and much more effective than the locally made tube the National Army used.

The automatic mortar fired three shots fast, but the weight of a fresh clip stretched the gap between rounds three and four out longer than it would have been from a manually loaded weapon.

Of course, if the Consies had a

pairof mortars targeted on Ranson's detachment area, she was right outa luck.

Guns were firing throughout the encampment now, and the Yokels had finally switched on their warning klaxon. A machine-gun sent a stream of bright-orange Consie tracers snapping through the air several meters above Ranson's head. One tracer hit a pebble in the earthen berm and ricocheted upward at a crazy angle.

A strip charge wheezed in the night,a nasty,intermittent sound like a cat throwing up. A drive rocket was uncoiling the charge through the wire and minefields on which the Yokels depended for protection.

The charge went off, hammering the ground and blasting a corridor through the defenses. It ignited the western sky with a momentary red flash like the sunset's afterthought.

Ranson caught the rear handhold of her combat car,Warmonger—Tootsie One-three—and swung herself into the fighting compartment. The fans were live, and both wing guns were firing.

Beside the vehicle were the scattered beginnings of an evening meal: a catalytic cooker, open ration packets, and three bottles of local beer spilled to stain the dust.Warmonger's crew had been together for better than two years. They did everything as a team, so Ranson could be nearly certain her command vehicle would be up to speed in an emergency.

Shewas odd man out: apart from necessary business, the crewmen hadn't addressed a dozen words to her in the month and a half since she took over the detachment.