The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 (91 page)

“Sir, I didn’t see the wall!” Padova said. “Via, sir, I’m sorry!”

“Roger that,” Huber said. F-3 had gotten straightened out and was cautiously accelerating across the second paddy. Nagano and both his wing gunners were on their feet again, though Foghorn’s guns pecked the sky in short bursts regardless of what the crew was doing. The X-Ray element had reached the dike and was crossing in good order, in part because of the holes the combat cars had torn. “Drive on.”

The crackling roar of the first salvo’s destruction rolled over Task Force Huber as the second flashed and spurted a little nearer. The tribarrels continued to fire, switching from target to fresh target as the rockets curved downward. The math was easy—two hundred and forty incoming projectiles, twenty-four guns to sweep them out of the sky—

Or not.

The left wing gun spun and stopped. It was properly Huber’s weapon, but Deseau was at it before Huber could react. Without even a pause to check the gun’s diagnostics, Deseau snatched open the feed trough and used his knifeblade to lever out the disk that’d kinked and jammed. Grinning at Huber, he charged the gun and stepped back as it resumed blasting cyan bolts through barrels already white hot.

Huber tensed, waiting for the third salvo; possibly more than a thousand rockets, launched against combat cars whose guns were dangerously hot from dealing with the previous hundreds of projectiles. Instead, cyan light flickered behind the hills. Moments later, rolling orange fireballs mushroomed in response.

“Highball, this is Flasher Six,” the unfamiliar voice called. The tone of crowing triumph was evident despite the compressed and tenuous transmission. “Thanks for your help, troopers. We’ve got it from now. Flasher out.”

“The hell he says!” Deseau snarled, turning a furious face toward Huber. “El-Tee, are you going to let them tankers have all the fun? We’re not, are we?”

Another volley of 20-cm bolts speared into the plains from higher ground somewhere to the northeast. Again whole truckloads of bombardment rockets exploded, the fuel and warheads going off in split seconds. Flasher Six commanded at least a company of tanks; their main guns were raking the Firelords, probably from beyond the distance an unaided human eye could see.

Tribarrels didn’t have that range . . . but the combat cars weren’t nearly that far away, either. Huber checked the terrain display and made an instant decision. Like Frenchie says, why should the tankers have all the fun?

“Highball, this is Six,” he said. He might get in trouble for this in the after-action debriefing, but that would be a long time coming— if he survived. “X-Ray elements will halt inside the valley at point Delta Michael Four-one, Three-seven. India elements will dismount to provide security. Fox elements will take hull-down positions in the valley mouth—”

The C&C display obligingly detailed firing positions west of the river for each of the eight combat cars.

“—and engage the enemy. Hit the calliopes first, troopers, and any vehicles that aren’t running—but my guess is that with the panzers shooting them up they’re going to have forgotten about us till we give ’em reason to remember. Six out.”

Padova tilted her fans for greater forward thrust. Lieutenant Messeman’s cars were passing through the X-Ray element, slewing from side to side in the wakes of the big vehicles. The terraces narrowed on the steeper slopes above the cataracts; the C&C box had set their course along the road in line ahead now that air defense was no longer the primary concern.

Huber hadn’t taken the guns out of air defense mode, though, because there was still a chance that the Firelords would try to carry their enemies with them to Hell. A slim chance. They were all mercenaries; their war was a business, not a holy crusade.

Sensor suites gave the task force few details of what to expect in the plains below. At this distance electronic and sonic signatures couldn’t pinpoint targets, and the cars didn’t have a line of sight.

Obviously Flasher had the enemy under direct observation, but the link between the tank unit and Highball was too marginal for complex data transmission.

There shouldn’t be a big problem. The artillerymen were so busy getting out of the frying pan that they weren’t going to worry about the fire.

Because of the angle, F-2’s cars were in position before Fencing Master tore through the stunted nut trees on the upper slope. Messeman’s gunners opened fire while Deseau screamed angry curses at Padova. She ignored him, swinging them with necessary caution around a spur of rock into the position the AI had chosen. Here they’d be sheltered from possible snipers higher up the hill.

The plains beyond were full of targets. After a volley into their rocket-laden trucks had put the Firelords off-balance, Flasher concentrated on the calliopes in firing positions on the lip of the escarpment. The multi-barreled 3-cm powerguns could be dangerous even to tanks at long range. Main gun bolts had blown all of the calliopes to shimmering vapor before the combat cars nosed over the rise, but there were enough other things to shoot at.

Huber swung his tribarrel onto a ten-wheeled truck trying to flee through a field of sorghum. He squeezed and watched his plasma snap in cyan brilliance across the bed loaded with bombardment rockets in five forward-slanting racks. Before the third bolt hit, the vehicle erupted into rolling orange fury, searing a black circle from the crops.

The Firelords had set up between the ridge and the lakeside, shielded from the task force. When the tanks began to rake them from the flank and rear, some of the hundreds of vehicles—not just rocket trucks but also the command, service, and transportation vehicles that an artillery regiment requires—tried to escape west along the lake’s margin. Others—the truck Huber hit was one—had climbed out of the bowl and spread out across the fields.

Another volley of 20-cm bolts lashed the milling chaos, setting off further secondary explosions. The billowing flames and blast-flung debris curtained the survivors to some degree from the tanks fifty, eighty—maybe over a hundred kilometers distant, but the combat cars had good visibility.

Huber ripped a tank truck. It turned out to be a water purification vehicle, not a fuel tanker, but it gushed steam and began to burn anyway.

Three white flares burst over the center of the encampment. A man jumped onto the TOC, a cluster of sandbagged trailers, waving a towel—beige, but Huber understood—over his head. All around him was blazing wreckage, but apart from a few hits by 2-cm bolts the TOC had been spared. The Slammers had concentrated on targets that’d give the greatest value in terms of secondary explosions, and there was no lack of those in an artillery regiment.

“Enemy commander!” said a hoarse voice. Huber’s AI noted that the fellow was broadcasting on several frequencies, desperately hoping that one would get through to the gunners shooting his troops like ducks in a barrel. “The Firelords surrender on standard terms. I repeat, we surrender on terms. Cease fire! Cease fire!”

“Highball, cease fire!” Huber repeated, and as he did so another volley of tank bolts lanced into the lakeside with fresh mushroomings of flame. Flasher couldn’t pick up the radio signal—a truckload of exploding rockets had knocked down the transmitter masts—and the white flares could be easily overlooked in the general fiery destruction.

“Flasher Six!” Huber shouted, the AI switching his transmission to the ionization track system. “Cease fire! All Flasher units, cease fire! They’re surrendering!”

Explosions continued to rumble in the plains below, but the ice-pick sharpness of plasma bolts no longer added to it. Even before they got Huber’s warning, the Flasher gunners would’ve noticed that Highball had stopped firing. A blast had knocked the officer with the towel to his knees, but he kept his hand high and waving.

“Firelords, this is Slammers command,” Huber said, responding on the highest of the frequencies the Firelords had used. He wasn’t in command, of course, Flasher Six was, but the tanker couldn’t communicate with the poor bastards down below. “We accept your parole. Hold in place until my superiors can make arrangements for your exchange. Ah, that may be several days. We will not, I repeat not, be halting at this location. Slammers over.”

“Roger, Slammers,” the enemy commander said, relief and weariness both evident in his voice. “We’ve got enough to occupy us here for longer than a few fucking days. Can you spare us medical personnel? Over.”

“Negative, Firelords,” Huber said. “I hope your next contract works out better for you. Slammers out.”

He lifted off his commo helmet and closed his eyes, letting reaction wash over him. He was exhausted, not from physical exertion—though there’d been plenty of that, jolting around in the fighting compartment during the run—but from the adrenaline blazing in him as shells rained down and he could do nothing but watch and pray his equipment worked.

He settled the helmet back in place and said, “Booster,” to activate the C&C box, “plot our course north from this location.”

On the plains below, fuel and munitions continued to erupt. It didn’t make Huber feel much better to realize that the destruction would’ve been just as bad if those rockets had landed on Task Force Huber instead of going off in their racks.

It was an hour short of full darkness, but stars showed around the eastern horizon; stars, and perhaps one or more of the planet’s seven small moons. Sunset silhouetted the three grain elevators a kilometer to the west where monorail lines merged at a railhead. Timers had turned on the mercury vapor lights attached to the service catwalks as the task force arrived, but there was no sign of life in the huge structures or the houses at their base.

“Suppose we oughta do a little reconnaissance by fire, El-Tee?” Deseau said hopefully. He patted his tribarrel’s receiver.

Padova and Learoyd slept on the ground beside Fencing Master. They hadn’t strung the tarp, just spread it over the stubble as a ground cloth. The car’s idling drive fans whispered a trooper’s lullaby.

“Do I think you should use up another set of barrels just because you like to see things burn, Frenchie?” Huber said, smiling faintly. “No, I don’t. We’ll have plenty to shoot at for real in a few hours, don’t worry.”

A tribarrel across the perimeter snarled a short burst. Huber jerked his head around, following the line of fire to a flash in the distant sky.

“Highball, Fox Two-six,” Lieutenant Messeman reported. “Air defense splashed an aircar, that’s all. Out.”

Probably civilians who hadn’t gotten the word that a Slammers task force had driven into the heart of their country. Huber’d lost count of the number of aircars they’d shot down on this run; thirty-odd, he thought, but poppers always washed the past out of his mind. He needed the stimulant a lot more than he needed to remember what was over and done with, that was for sure.

The tracked excavator whined thunderously as it dug in the second of the six hogs. The note of its cutting head dopplered up and down, its speed depending on the depth of the cut and the number of rocks in the soil.

The task force was carrying minimal supplies, so the excavator didn’t have plasticizer to add to the earth it spewed in an arc forward of the cut. The berm would still stop small arms and shell fragments. If Battery Alpha needed more than that, the Colonel had lost his gamble and the troopers of Task Force Huber were probably dead meat.

Lieutenant Basingstoke, half a dozen of his people, and three techs from the recovery vehicle, stood beside the hog whose starboard fans had cut out twice during the run. Sergeant Tranter had joined them. He wasn’t in Maintenance anymore, but neither was he a man to ignore a problem he could help with just because it’d stopped being his job.

Huber looked westward. Lights were on in the spaceport seven klicks away, backlighting the smooth hillcrest between it and Task Force Huber.

He could imagine the panic at Port Plattner, military and civilians reacting to the unexpected threat in as many ways as there were officials involved. They’d be trying to black out the facilities, not that it would make much difference to the Slammers’ optics, but they hadn’t yet succeeded. The port was designed to be illuminated for round-the-clock ship landings. Nobody’d planned for what to do when a hostile armored regiment drove a thousand kilometers to attack from all sides.

The sky continued to darken. Huber always felt particularly lonely at night; in daytime he could pretend almost any landscape was a part of Nieuw Friesland that he just hadn’t seen before, but the stars were inescapably alien.

Grinning wryly at himself, he said, “Frenchie, hold the fort till I’m back. I’m going to talk to the redlegs.”

Another thought struck him and he said, “Fox Two-six, this is Six. Join me and Rocker One-six. Out.”

He lifted himself from the fighting compartment as Messeman responded with a laconic, “Roger.”

The cutting head hummed to idle as the excavator backed up the ramp from the gun position it’d just dug. Waddling like a bulldog, it followed the sergeant from the engineer section as he walked backward to guide it to the next pit. A hog drove into the just-completed gun position and shut down its fans. The hull was below the original surface level, and the howitzer’s barrel slanted up at twenty degrees to clear the berm.

Huber nodded to the munitions trucks loaded with 200-mm rockets. He said to Lieutenant Basingstoke, “I hope the engineers have time to dig those in too, Lieutenant. After watching what happened to the Firelords when their ammo started going off.”

“If we begin firing at maximum rate . . .” Basingstoke said. He was a tall, hollow-cheeked man. His pale blond hair made him look older than he was, but Huber suspected he’d never really been young. “We’ll expend all the ammunition we’ve carried in less than ten minutes. No doubt that will reduce the risk.”

He smiled like a skull. Huber smiled back when he realized that the artillery officer had made a joke.

Lieutenant Messeman trotted over, looking back toward his cars and speaking into his commo helmet on the F-2 frequency. He turned and glared at Huber, not really angry but the sort of little man who generally sounded as though he was.