The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

Y' know it's gonna happen, DJ had said in his dream. Birdie waited, ten seconds, twenty . . . .

The Consies popped up from cover, their figures slightly blurred by phosphor delays in the enhanced hologram. Birdie's foot pressed down the rest of the way. A drive motor whirred as the cupola tribarrel thumped out its five-round burst. Cyan impacts flung the targets to left and right as parts of their bodies vaporized explosively.

Death had waited; thirty seconds for that pair, years for other men. But Death didn't forget.

Birdie was safe. He was inside the heaviest piece of land-based armor in the human universe.

Three artillery rockets hit in the near distance. A fourth rumbled overhead, shakingDeathdealerand Birdie's vision of safety.Those were definitely big enough to hurt anything in their impact zone.

Even a tank.

The reflexes of five years' combat, including a year as platoon sergeant, took over. Birdie kept one eye on the panoramic main screen while his hands punched data out of his third display.

The other tanks in the encampment were powered up. The tribarrel couldn't override it without codes he didn't have. The third tank, an H Company repair job named

Herman's Whore, didn't respond when he pinged it, and a remote hookup indicated nobody was in the turret.

From his own command console, Birdie rotated theWhore's tribarrel to the south and slaved it to air defense. Until somebody overrode his command, the gun would engage any airborne targets her sensors offered her.

That left Birdie to get back to immediate business. An alarm pinged to warn him that a laser rangefinder paintedDeathdealer's armor. The gunnery computer was already rotating the turret, while a pulsing red highlight arrowed the source: an anti-tank missile launcher 1200 meters away, protected only by night and distance.

Which meant unprotected.

Deathdealer's close-in defense system would detonate the missile at a distance with a sleet of barrel-shaped steel pellets, but the Consies needed to learn that you didn't target Colonel Hammer's tanks.

Birdie Sparrow thumbed the gunswitch, preparing to teach the Consies a main-gun lesson.

Henk Ortnahme, panting as he mounted the turret ofHerman's Whore, didn't notice the cupola tribarrel was slewed until the bloody thing ripped out a bloody burst that almost blew his bloody head off.

The plasma discharge prickled his scalp and made the narrow fringe that was all the hair he had stand out like a ruff.