The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

If the two cars had broken cover together as Huber planned, Foghorn wouldn’t have looked like the lone target in a shooting gallery. Swearing desperately, he hosed the lip of the canal with his tribarrel. Deseau, Learoyd at Fencing Master’s right wing gun, and Foghorn’s three gunners fired also, but the other car sparkled like a short circuit as slugs struck her iridium armor.

In Huber’s holographic sight picture, dark-uniformed Militiamen turned with horrified looks as they tried to shift the heavy rocket guns they wore harnessed to their shoulders. They’d been so focused on Foghorn that the appearance of another combat car two hundred meters away took them completely by surprise.

Fencing Master’s forward motion and the angle of the canal helped Huber traverse the target simply by holding his thumbs on the tribarrel’s trigger. The two-centimeter weapon’s barrel cluster rotated as it sent copper ions blasting at the speed of light down each iridium bore in turn. The bolts burned metal, shattered concrete in flares of glass and white-hot quicklime, and blew humans apart in gushes of steam. An arm spun thirty meters into the air, trailing smoke from its burning sleeve.

One of the D Company tanks on overwatch to the west fired its main gun twice, not toward the canal but into the interior of the farm where anti-armor weapons were showing themselves to engage the combat cars. An orange flash blew out the sidewalls of a barn; three seconds later, the shock of that enormous secondary explosion made water dance in the irrigation canals.

The surviving Militiamen ducked to cover. Foghorn had stalled for a moment, but she was bucking forward again now. Huber cleared the terrain mask from his faceshield to let his eyes and the helmet AI concentrate on nearby motion, his potential targets. He didn’t worry about the heavier weapons that might be locking in on Fencing Master from long range; that was the business of the tanks—and of the Gods, if you believed in them, which right at the moment Huber couldn’t even pretend to do.

A slug penetrated the plenum chamber on the right side of the bow, struck a nacelle inside—the fan howled momentarily, then died; blue sparks sprayed from a portside intake duct and the hair on Huber’s arm stood up—and punched out from the left rear in a flash of burning steel. Costunna screamed, “Port three’s out!”

The air was sharp with ozone. Huber’s nose filters kept the ions from searing his lungs, but the skin of his throat and wrists prickled.

“Drive on!” Huber shouted.

You didn’t have to believe in Gods to believe in Hell.

Instead of a square grid, Northern Star’s canal system formed a honeycomb of hexagons three hundred meters across each flat. Fencing Master slid to where three canals joined and halted as planned. Costunna had adequate mechanical skills and took orders well enough, he just seemed to lack an instinct for what was important. Huber had a straight view down the length of the shallow trough slanting north-northeast from his side. Solace Militiamen—some of them dead, some of them hunching in terror; a few raising weapons to confront the howling monster that had driven down on them—were dark blurs against the white concrete and the trickle of sunbright water.

Huber fired, his bolts shredding targets and glancing from the canal walls in white gouts. Deseau was firing also, and from Fencing Master’s starboard wing Learoyd ripped the canal intersecting at a southeastern angle. Foghorn’s left gun was raking that canal in the opposite direction.

It was dangerous having two cars firing pretty much toward one another—if either of the gunners raised his muzzles too far, he’d blow divots out of the friendly vehicle—but this was a battle. If safety’d been the Slammers’ first concern, they’d all have stayed in bed this morning.

A bullet from the central complex ricocheted off Fencing Master’s bow slope, denting the armor and impact-heating it to a shimmering rainbow. Further rounds clipped cornstalks and spewed up little geysers of black dirt.

Sergeant Deseau shouted a curse and grabbed his right wrist momentarily, but he had his hands back on the tribarrel’s spade grips before Huber could ask if he was all right. The slug that hit the bow had probably sprayed him with bits of white-hot iridium; nothing serious.

The two automatic mortars accompanying the infantry chugged a salvo of white phosphorus from the swale where Fencing Master had waited among the knee-high corn. The Willy Pete lifted in ragged mushrooms above the courtyard building where the farm’s workforce ate and gathered for social events.