The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Hot spots—open flames and sparks the skirts plowed up from fires banked in the ashes—were white highlights in the faceshield. The AI coded cooler objects through the spectrum from violet to dark reds that verged on black, though little in this expanse was colored below green. A suited human would be visible in outline against the brighter background, but nobody expected to find Volunteers waiting here in ambush.

Fencing Master bumped and racketed across the landscape, scraping its skirts frequently and often hurling up gouts of fire. Deseau was being careful—too careful. He was trying to avoid every possible stump and cavity instead of taking a line and holding it till a major obstacle interposed. The combat car repeatedly sideswiped the skeletons of fallen trees, blasting them into sparks, or grounded when the skirts swayed over the edge of a pit left when a toppling giant had dragged its root ball out of the soil. Sergeant Tranter gripped the coaming to either side of his gun pintle with a set look on his face.

Huber touched Tranter’s shoulder to get his attention, then leaned close to shout into his ear instead of using the intercom circuit and including Deseau: “Don’t worry, Sarge—you and Frenchie will switch positions when we form up for the attack.”

Tranter nodded gratefully. He might or might not understand that Huber was even more interested in getting Deseau behind the forward tribarrel than he was to have Tranter’s expertise in the driver’s compartment. Horses for courses …

“Vandals!” Mauricia Orichos repeated as she stared across the flame-ravaged bleakness. Sparks whirled from the skirts and spun down again into the fan intakes, dusting those in the fighting compartment. Slammers’ uniforms were flame resistant, but Huber stuck his hands under the opposite armpits and wished he had gauntlets.

Did Orichos think that Colonel Hammer cared about trees when the lives of his troopers were at stake? And if there’d been a thousand civilians in the corridor before the incendiaries fell, that wouldn’t have changed the Colonel’s plan either.

This was war. If the government of the Point hadn’t known what it meant to hire the Slammers to do their fighting for them, then they were in the process of learning.

Fencing Master slowed, wobbled drunkenly, and finally came to rest on a south-facing backslope with her fans at idle. Deseau rotated the driver’s hatch open; Tranter was already climbing off the right side of the fighting compartment.

Huber raised his faceshield, then lifted the commo helmet for a moment to scratch his scalp. He grinned at Captain Orichos and said, “We’re getting ready for the final run-up, Captain. If there’s anything you need to do while we’re halted, do it now. We won’t stop again until the shooting’s over.”

He smiled more broadly and added, “At least over for us, I mean.”

Huber was keyed up, but it was in a good way. The drive had been physically and mentally fatiguing. It had blotted out the past and future, turning even his immediate surroundings into a gray blur. Now adrenaline coursed through him, bringing the fire-swept wasteland into bright focus and shuffling a series of possible outcomes through his mind.

Arne Huber was alive again. He might die in the next ten minutes, but a lot of people never really lived for even that short time.

“No, I’m ready,” Orichos said. She rubbed her hands together, then wiped her palms on the breast of her jumpsuit. If she was trying to clean the ash and grit off them, she failed. “What do you want me to do? In the battle, that is.”

Frenchie climbed into the fighting compartment past his tribarrel; Tranter was walking forward on the steel bulge of the plenum chamber. The thirty-degree slope was awkwardly steep for the exchange, but the relatively sparse vegetation here had left fewer smoldering remains than the flatter, better-watered stretches the task force had been crossing.

“Keep out of the way,” Huber said. “Keep your head down unless one of us buys it. If that happens, take over his gun and try not to shoot friendlies.”

He grinned, feeling a degree of genuine amusement to talk about his own death in such a matter-of-fact way. He’d chosen the line of work, of course.

Huber really would’ve preferred to get the Gendarmery officer off his combat car, but that wasn’t a practical solution in this landscape. Orichos was smart and quick both, so he could at least hope that she’d jump clear if he or a trooper needed one of the ammo boxes stacked behind her.

Frenchie slid behind his gun and spun the mechanism, ejecting the round from the loaded chamber in a spurt of liquid nitrogen. As he did so, Tranter spun the idling fans up one at a time so that he could listen to the note of each individually. Both men were veterans and experts; they didn’t trust their tools to be the way they’d left them until they’d made sure for themselves.