The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Aircars ranging from the big trucks that could haul twenty or more armed men to hoppers with one seat and room for a sack of groceries were mixed indiscriminately on the crater floor. The drivers had squeezed in wherever they’d seen a place to set down. The Volunteers had left Midway in a near panic; they probably hadn’t landed here in much better emotional condition.

There wasn’t room in the tunnels to conceal so many vehicles, so the calliopes had been the Volunteers’ only means of protecting their hope of escape if things went wrong—as they were certainly going wrong now. Those calliopes were molten ruin, but there was no need to waste shells on the aircars. They were perfect targets for Fencing Master’s tribarrels.

A few minutes ago there’d have been only a handful of Volunteers in the open. The maze of tunnels would’ve seemed safety until those inside realized that the Slammers would with certainty penetrate the outer defenses and so control the tunnel entrances. Now several of the armored doors had swung back; black-uniformed figures were running for vehicles. Huber’s view was like a child’s of a stirred-up anthill.

A Volunteer drew a holstered powergun and fired in the direction of Fencing Master as he ran. One of the bolts snapped only twenty meters overhead, but that was dumb luck: nobody was that good, not with a pistol. Learoyd’s short burst vaporized everything between the Volunteer’s neck and his knees without any need for luck. He was an expert using a stabilized weapon with holographic sights. Learoyd could’ve put a round into his target’s left nostril if he’d wanted to.

The accompanying infantry squads spaced out to either side of Fencing Master, taking firing positions along the ridge. Foghorn still labored a hundred meters down the slope. Huber didn’t have leisure to see how Jellicoe’s section was doing on the eastern edge of the cone where a deep gully complicated the approach, but he knew she’d get them into action as quick as anybody could.

An aircar lifted. Huber fired as he tracked it, his bolts splashing behind the accelerating vehicle for a moment before three flashes walked up the fuselage from the back. The car, a luxury model, flipped over and crashed under power. Ruptured fuel cells sprayed their contents over a dozen other vehicles, some of which also started to burn.

“Cue aircar motors!” Huber shouted, shifting his AI to mark the electromagnetic rhythms of fan motors spinning. “Gunners—”

Going to intercom.

“—hit the moving cars, not the men!”

Three more vehicles tried to take off. One didn’t have enough altitude and collided immediately with the truck parked ahead of it. As it tumbled, Learoyd’s burst chopped the car’s belly open.

The infantry were shooting at individual targets. Though their weapons were semi-automatic, a single 2-cm bolt was enough to disable an aircar—let alone kill the driver.

One and then both cars of Jellicoe’s section opened fire from the other side of the crater. Foghorn finally not only mounted the rim but started down the steeper inner slope, wreathed in the grit its steel skirts rasped from the soft rock. Solid cyan streams lashed from its guns.

Deseau either didn’t hear Huber’s order or ignored it, instead laying his sights onto an entrance. He squeezed his trigger till a blast within spurted a cloud of smoke and yellow flame into the sunlight; the tunnel collapsed.

Three Volunteers rose together behind the bed of a truck, aiming at Foghorn for the split second before Huber shot them down. One’s carbine fired skyward as his head exploded. Huber’d been swinging his gun onto the car behind the men; its driver leaped out and flattened on the ground. The empty vehicle started to loop before falling sideways and crashing.

Fuel fires and the foul black plumes of burning plastic rose from dozens of vehicles. Nobody was coming out of the tunnels anymore, and the Volunteers surviving on the crater floor either huddled beside cars—there was no “behind” to the crossfire from the rim— or raised their hands in surrender. Many of the latter had their eyes closed as if they were afraid they’d see death coming for them.

“Sierra, cease fire!” Captain Sangrela called. “The enemy’s radioed to surrender! Cease fire!”

A carbine fired. The whack of the electromagnetic coils might’ve gone unnoticed in the chaos, but the clang! of the slug ricocheting from Foghorn’s armor was unmistakable. Some Volunteer hadn’t gotten the word….

Huber hadn’t seen the shooter, but Deseau did: his tribarrel was one of five or six guns which spiked the closed cab of an aircar. That car and three more nearby erupted in fireballs. A body panel fluttered skyward, deforming in the heat of the blast that lifted it.

“Cease fire!” Sangrela repeated angrily. His jeep was so heavy with electronics that he hadn’t been able to reach the rim, so he didn’t know the reason for the additional gunfire. “Cease fire!”