The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

Sparrow's foot twitched on the firing pedal. The main gun crashed out a bolt that turned a tailor's shop across the road into a fireball with a plasma core. The blast was twenty meters from the rocketeer, but the Consie flung away his weapon in surprise and tried to run.

A combat car nailed him, half a pace short of the doorway that would have provided concealment if not protection.

Sparrow had begun firing with his tribarrel at a ten o'clock angle. AsDeath-dealer

raced toward the far end of the settlement, he panned the weapon counterclockwise and stuttered bursts low into shopfronts. Instants after the tribarrel raked a facade, his main gun converted the entire building into a self-devouring inferno.

Two controls, two pippers sliding across a compressed screen at varying rates. The few bullets that still spattered the hull were lost in the continuous rending impact of Albers' 170-tonne wrecking ball.

Choking gases from the cannon breech, garbled orders and warnings from the radio.

No sweat, none of it. Birdie Sparrow was in control, and they couldn't none of 'em touch him.

Another whorehouse flew apart at the touch of

Deathdealer's skirt. A meter by three-meter strip of metal enameled with a hundred and fifty bright Lion Beer logos curled outward and slapped itself over the intake of #1 Starboard fan.

The sudden loss of flow dipped the skirt to the soil and slewedDeathdealer

's bow before plenum-chamber pressure could balance the mass it carried. The stern swung outward, into theclang-clangimpact of bolts from a combat car's tribarrel. Fist-sized chunks vaporized from iridium armor that had ignored Consie bullets.

Sparrow rocked in his turret's stinking haze, clinging grimly to the joysticks and bracing his legs as well. The standard way to clear a blocked duct was to reverse the fan. That'd groundDeathdealer

for a moment, and with the inertia of their present speed behindthattouchdown—

Albers may have chopped his #1S throttle but he didn't reverse it—or try to straightenDeathdealer's course out of the hook into which contact had canted it. They hit the next building in line, bow-on at seventy kph—shattering panels of pre-stressed concrete and sweeping the fan duct clear in the avalanche of heavy debris.