The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

"Take the left gun!" shouted the trooper as he slapped the armor closed over his chest. He lowered his helmet visor and added in a muffled voice, "I got the right!"

Atrioof sharp,white blasts raked the National Army area.Something over flew the camp from south to north with an accelerating roar that dwarfed even the blasts of the tank gun. It was visible only as the dull glow of a heated surface.

Suilin picked himself up from the ice chest and stacked boxes which halved the space available within the fighting compartment. One man was already bent over the bow gun, ripping the night in short bursts. Suilin's guide seized the grips of the right-hand weapon and doubled the car's weight of fire.

Two of the guard towers were burning. Exploding flares and ammunition sent sparkles of color through the smoky orange flames. The fighting platforms were armored, but the towers were constructed of wood. Suilin had known that—but he hadn't considered until now what the construction technique would mean in a battle.

There wasn't supposed to

bea battle, here in the south.

Suilin bent close to the third tribarrel, hoping he could make some sense of it. He'd had militia training like every other male in the country over the age of sixteen, but Prosperity's National Army wasn't equipped with powerguns.

He took the double grips in his hands, that much was obvious. The weapon rotated easily, though the surprising mass of the barrels gave Suilin's tentative swings more inertia than he'd intended.

When his thumbs pressed the trigger button between the grips, nothing happened. The tribarrel had a switch or safety somewhere, and in the dark Suilin wasn't going to be able to overcome his ignorance.

The gun in a tank's cupola snapped a stream of cyan fire south at a flat angle. There was a huge flash and a separate flaring red streak in the sky above the National Army positions. Two other missiles detonated on the ground as three of the earlier salvo had done.

The mercenaries claimed they could shoot shells and missiles out of the air. Suilin hadn't believed that was more than advertising puffery, but he'd just seen it happen. The Slammers' vehicles couldn't protect the National Army positions, but missiles aimed high enough to threaten the mercenaries' own end of Camp Progress were being gutted by computer-aimed powerguns.