The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

The lead tank was almost between the rows of buildings. Ranson's visor caught and highlighted movement of the barred window of a popular knocking-shop across the street and near the far end of the strip. She switched her display to thermal.

Stolley swung his tribarrel toward the motion.

"No!" June Ranson shouted.

The wing gunner's short burst snapped through the air like a single streak of cyan,pastDeathdealerand into a white coruscance as the window's iron grillwork burned at the impacts.

A buzzbomb arced from the left and exploded in the middle of its trajectory as the tank's close-in defense system fired with a vicious crackling.

At least twenty automatic weapons volleyed orange tracers from Happy Days. The bullets ricocheted fromDeathdealerand clanged like hammer blows onWarmonger's hull and gunshields.

"All Tootsie elements!" Ranson shouted. Willens had chopped his throttles;Warmonger's skirts tapped the soil. "Bandits! Blue One—"

But it was too late to order Blue One to lay a mine-clearing charge down the road. The great tank accelerated toward Happy Days in a spray of dust and pebbles, tribarrel and main gun blasting ahead of it.

"Hey, snake?" said DJ Bell from the main screen as bolts from a powergun cracked past

Deathdealer. "Watch out for the Pussycat, okay?"

"Go 'way, DJ!" Birdie Sparrow shouted. "Albers! Goose it! Fast! Fast!"

The sound of bullets striking their thick armor was lost in the roar of the fans whose intakes suddenly tried to gulp more air than fluid flow would permit. The impacts quivered through Sparrow's boots on the floorplate like the ticks of a mechanical clock gone haywire.

Sparrow gripped a gunnery joystick in either hand. Most tankers used only one control, thumb-switching from main gun to tribarrel and back at need. He'd taught himself years ago to operate with both sticks live. You didn't get sniper's precision that way, but—

"Bandits!" cried the captain. "Blue One—"

Whatever she wanted would wait.

—when it was suppressing fire you needed, like now—

Whatever anybody else wanted could wait.

Using the trigger on the right joystick,Sparrow rapped a five-round burst from the tribarrel across a shop midway down the Strip on the left side. Sheet metal blew away from the wood beneath it, fluttering across the street as if trying to escape from the sudden blaze behind it.