The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

The main screen was set on a horizontally compressed 360° panorama. Sparrow was used to the distortion. He caught the puff of a buzzbomb launch before his electronics highlighted the threat.

A defensive charge blasted from aboveDeathdealer's skirts. It made the hull ring as none of the hostile fire had managed.

Sparrow's tribarrel raked shopfronts further down the Strip in a long burst.The bolts flashed at an increasing separation because the tank was accelerating.

Deathdealer's turret rotated counterclockwise, independently of the automatic weapon in the cupola. The left pipper, the point-of-aim indicator for the main gun, slid backward across the facade of one of the settlement's sturdier buildings.

The neon sign was unlighted, but Sparrow knew it well—a cat with a Cheshire grin, gesturing with a forepaw toward her lifted haunches.

That was where the buzzbomb had come from. Three more sparks spat in the darkness—light, lethal missiles, igniting in the whorehouse parlor—just as Sparrow's foot stroked the pedal trip for his 20cm cannon.

Deathdealer's screens blacked out the cyan flash. The displays were live again an instant later when dozens of ready missiles went off in a secondary explosion that blew the Pussycat's walls and roof into concrete confetti.

"Blue Three," the command channel was blatting, "move forward and—"

Albers broughtDeathdealerinto the settlement with gravity aiding his desperately accelerating fans. He was hugging the right side of the Strip, too close for a buzzbomb launched from that direction to harm. Anti-personnel mines banged harmlessly beneath them.

"—lay a clearing charge before anybody else proceeds!"

Across the roadway, shopfronts popped and sizzled under the fire of Sparrow's tribarrel and the more raking bolts of combat cars pausing just over the ridgeline as Tootsie Six had ordered.

Deathdealerbrushed the front of the first shop. The building collapsed like a bomb going off.

The tank accelerated to eighty kph. Albers used his mass and the edge of his skirts like a router blade, ripping down the line of flimsy shops. The fragments scattered in the draft of his fans.

A Consie took two steps from a darkened tavern, knelt, and aimed his buzz-bomb down the throat of the oncoming tank.