The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Coke frowned at his display. Eight Heliodoran vehicles were moving away from the terminal building. Twelve more were in the final stages of loading soldiers from an early landed transport. A battalion headed toward Potosi to reinforce the patrol engaged there. The squad of infantry he’d left in a blocking position could at best slow them with a hit-and-run ambush, and that would be extremely risky.

On the southern perimeter, three of the combat cars and their associated infantry were short of where he’d wanted them to be able to enfilade the westernmost of the Heliodoran transports. Coke gave the order anyway: “All Team elements. Move into final attack positions.”

Johann Vierziger eased Cutting Edge forward. His seat was raised so that he looked out of the hatch in the bow slope instead of through the vision displays within the driver’s compartment.

“Wait for my command to fire,” Coke continued, “unless the enemy engages you first. In the latter case, fire at will. Mortars, when the shooting starts, drop your rounds on concentrations shielded from direct fire. Team One out.”

Some troopers felt claustrophobic when they were buttoned up in a vehicle. Coke was pretty sure that Vierziger just wanted to be able to add his own increment to the skein of fire which would shortly enwrap the Heliodorus Regiment.

The bow of Cutting Edge nosed up to the perimeter fence. Beside the vehicle, an infantryman was slicing a hole in the fence so that the wire didn’t obstruct his line of fire.

The nearest starship—a freighter in the gage trade—was 200 meters away, northward and to the right. The terminal buildings were almost 800 meters distant.

The column of Heliodoran transport, lightly armored ten-wheeled trucks, drove toward the gate and Potosi beyond. Soldiers leaned on the waist-height panels of the cargo boxes, looking like sightseers rather than combat troops.

“Barbour says we’ve been seen!” Margulies shouted.

“Fire at will!” Coke ordered. He squeezed his thumb trigger as three red flares lifted from the terminal building.

Coke aimed at a detail of soldiers horsing crates from the cargo bay of a Heliodoran transport. The figures went down like bowling pins. A case ruptured, spewing out multicolored smoke from the marking grenades within.

Sten Moden launched one, then the other, of his missiles from the starboard wing of the fighting compartment toward targets far to the left. The backblast cleared swathes of empty scrub.

Coke needn’t have worried about the most distant transports. A missile detonated on the boarding ramp of each.

Coke shifted his point of aim to the cargo hold of his chosen freighter. The inertia of the spinning iridium barrels fought the weapon’s powered traverse, giving the motion a greasy dynamism.

The open hatch was a foreshortened trapezoid in his sight picture. Coke squeezed the butterfly again. The stream of 2-cm bolts reflected within the starship’s dark interior like the pulses of a short circuit.

Ammunition detonated in a series of quivering yellow puffs. The orange flash that followed ripped the vessel apart, blowing the middle third across the port as jagged shrapnel.

The blast hurled Coke back from his tribarrel. The concussion set off stacked munitions previously unloaded from other ships. The shock wave skidded the eight Heliodoran trucks, already racked and burning from the eastern element’s gunfire, into a single piled inferno.

Coke got up. He’d lost his helmet. Pilar, white and as stiff-featured as a skull, handed it to him.

A black mushroom mounted a thousand meters from the crater where the center of the starship had been. The two ends of the vessel lay crumpled, thirty meters from where they rested before the explosion.

Gunfire ceased for an instant. The shock had flattened potential targets as well as stunned the FDF gunners.

The initial eight-round salvo of mortar shells landed amidst the unloaded cargo. The white flashes and blasts would have seemed devastating had they not just followed a cataclysm.

Loudspeakers throughout the terminal buildings blared, “Invading forces, you have been surrounded by soldiers of the Marvelan Confederacy. Throw down your arms and surrender. You are surrounded by troops of the Marvelan Confederacy. There is no escape but surrender!”

Bob Barbour again, using the patches into the PA system he’d prepared weeks earlier. Coke had never doubted the value of intelligence and electronic warfare, but Barbour would make a believer of the most hardened grunt.

A Heliodoran crew-served weapon raked the southern perimeter from a position far enough to the west to have been shielded from the exploding starship. They were using a coil gun, a scaled-up version of the Heliodorans’ personal weapons. The gun managed to cough out a dozen half-kg shells. One round lifted a Frisian infantryman twenty meters in the air, shedding limbs as he tumbled.