The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

Powerguns punctuated the night with flashes so intense they remained for seconds as streaks across the reporter's retinas. His mind tried desperately to process the high-pitched chatter from the commo helmet—a mixture of orders, warnings, and shouted exclamations.

It was all meaningless garbage; and it was all terrifying.

The downslope to the left of the roadway was striped orange by the firelight and leaping with shadows thrown from outcrops anchored too firmly in the fabricof the planet to be uprooted when the Padma River flooded.Muzzle flashes pulsed there, shockingly close.

A bottle-shaped yellow glow swelled and shrank as the gunman triggered his burst. The gun wasn't firing tracers, but the corner of Suilin's eyes caught a flicker as glowing metal snapped from the muzzle.

Specks of light raked the car ahead of Blue Two. Red sparks flashed up the side armor.

On the commo helmet, someone screamedlord lord lord.

The tribarrel wouldn't swing fast enough. Dick Suilin was screaming also. He unslung his grenade launcher.

Blue Two's main gun lit the night. Rock and the damp soil beneath it geysered outward from the point of impact, a white track glowing down the slope for twenty meters.

Flamethrower's driver flinched away from the bolt, throwing the thirty-tonne car into a side-step as dainty as that of a nervous virgin.

Blue Two and the combat car both accelerated up the bridge approach. The tank's turret continued to rotate to bear on the cooling splotch which its first bolt had grazed. If it fired fromthatangle, the bolt would pass within ten meters of

Flame—

The tribarrel in Blue Two's cupola fired instead of the main gun.

Suilin straightened and fired a burst from his own tribarrel in the same general direction. He'd dropped the grenade launcher when he ducked in panic behind the hull armor. He was too rattled now to be embarrassed by his reaction—

And anyway, both the veterans sharing the fighting compartment had ducked also.

You couldn't be sure of not being embarrassed unless you were dead. The past night and day had been a gut-wrenching exposition of just what it meant to be dead. Dick Suilin would do anything at all to avoid

that.

Traces of barbed wire clung to the cast-in guardrail supports. Large sections of the rail had been shattered by gunfire or smashed at the touch of behemoths likeFlamethrower. Blue Two swung its turret forward again, releasing a portion of the fear that knotted Suilin's stomach, but only a portion.