The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

The air above him sizzled with ozone and cyan light: two of the tribarrels in the car’s fighting compartment had opened up on the enemy. Somebody’d managed to board while Huber was putting the vehicle in motion. Fencing Master was a combat unit again.

There must’ve been about forty of the attackers all told, ten to each of the shipping containers. Half were now bunched near Foghorn or between that car and the starship’s ramp. Huber switched Fencing Master’s Automatic Defense System live, then used the manual override to trigger three segments.

The ADS was a groove around the car’s hull, just above the skirts. It was packed with plastic explosive and faced with barrel-shaped osmium pellets. When the system was engaged, sensors triggered segments of the explosive to send blasts of pellets out to meet and disrupt an incoming missile.

Fired manually, each segment acted as a huge shotgun. The clanging explosions chopped into cat food everyone who stood within ten meters of Fencing Master. Huber got a whiff of sweetly poisonous explosive residues as his nose filters closed again. The screaming fans sucked away the smoke before he could switch back to thermal imaging.

An attacker aboard Foghorn had seen the danger in time to duck into the fighting compartment; the pellets scarred the car’s armor but didn’t penetrate it. The attacker rose, pointing his slugthrower down at the hatch Huber hadn’t had time to close. A tribarrel from Fencing Master decapitated the hostile.

A powergun converted a few precisely aligned copper atoms into energy which it directed down the weapon’s mirror-polished iridium bore. Each light-swift bolt continued in a straight line to its target, however distant, and released its energy as heat in a cyan flash. A 2-cm round like those the tribarrels fired could turn a man’s torso into steam and fire; the 20-cm bolt from a tank’s main gun could split a mountain.

One of the shipping containers was still jammed halfway open. Soldiers were climbing out like worms squirming up the sides of a bait can. Two raised their weapons when they saw a tribarrel slewing in their direction. Ravening light slashed across them, flinging their maimed bodies into the air. The steel container flashed into white fireballs every time a bolt hit it.

Huber’s ears were numb. It looked like the fighting was over, but he was afraid to shut down Fencing Master’s fans just in case he was wrong; it was easier to keep the car up than it’d be to raise her again from a dead halt. He did back off the throttles slightly to bring the fans down out of the red zone, though. The bow skirt tapped and rose repeatedly, like a chicken drinking.

Flame Farter pulled into the freighter’s hatchway and dipped to slide down the ramp under full control. Platoon Sergeant Jellicoe was behind the central tribarrel. She’d commandeered the leading car when the shooting started rather than wait for her own Floosie to follow out of the hold.

Jellicoe fired at something out of sight beyond the shipping containers. Huber touched the menu, importing the view from Jellicoe’s gunsight and expanding it to a quarter of his screen.

Three attackers stood with their hands in the air; their weapons were on the gravel behind them. Jellicoe had plowed up the ground alongside to make sure they weren’t going to change their minds.

Mercenaries fought for money, not principle. The Slammers and their peers took prisoners as a matter of policy, encouraging their opponents toward the same professional ideal.

Enemies who killed captured Slammers could expect to be slaughtered man, woman and child; down to the last kitten that mewled in their burning homes.

“Bloody Hell …” Huber muttered. He raised the seat to look out at the shattered landscape with his own eyes, though the filters still muffled his nostrils.

Haze blurred the landing field. It was a mix of ozone from powergun bolts and the coils of the slug-throwers, burning paint and burning uniforms, and gases from superheated disks that had held the copper atoms in alignment: empties ejected from the tribarrels. Some of the victims were fat enough that their flesh burned also.

The dirigible that’d carried the attackers into position now fled north as fast as the dozen engines podded on outriggers could push it. That wasn’t very fast, even with the help of the breeze to swing the big vessel’s bow; they couldn’t possibly escape.

Huber wondered for a moment how he could contact the dirigible’s crew and order them to set down or be destroyed. Plattner’s World probably had emergency frequencies, but the data hadn’t been downloaded to F-3’s data banks yet.

Sergeant Jellicoe raked the dirigible’s cabin with her tribarrel. The light-metal structure went up like fireworks in the cyan bolts. An instant later all eight gunners in the platoon were firing, and the driver of Floosie was shooting a pistol with one hand as he steered his car down the ramp with the other.