The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3 (hammer's slammers)

by David Drake

  An instant after the big powerguns fired, the rocket howitzers of Battery Alpha cut loose with three rounds per tube from their position near Central Repair in the heart of Benjamin. Backblast reflected briefly orange from wispy clouds in mid-sky before the bright sparks of rocket exhaust pierced them and vanished in the direction of Simpliche.

  “Blue element,” Huber said, “the batteries in Jonesburg and Simpliche’ll be scratching our backs in about eighty seconds. You’ve all got the plan, you all know your jobs. In and out, shake ’em up but don’t stick around, then reform on at grid Yankee Tango Fourfour-three, Two-one-four where the Red element will be waiting.”

  Red element was Messeman with F-2 and the artillery. The guns couldn’t move till they’d fired the salvo that would rip the Solace units which threatened Simpliche.

  Besides the Slammers’ Battery Alpha, there were ten mercenary batteries in Benjamin. It would’ve been simpler to delegate the preparatory barrage to the others so that Battery Alpha could move instantly, but there was the risk the orders would be intercepted—or ignored.

  Central chose to add a minute and a half delay to the Red element rather than chance much worse problems. Huber’s combat cars would be delayed much longer than that while they shot up the firebase that anchored the Solace forces facing Benjamin.

  “On the word,” Huber said, “we’ll—”

  The sky to the east and west popped minusculely. If Huber had been looking in just the right direction, he might have seen tiny red flashes as bursting charges opened cargo shells several kilometers short of their targets. Calliopes, multi-barreled powerguns, began to raven from the Solace positions. They directed their cyan lightning toward the sub-munitions incoming from both Jonesburg and Simpliche.

  The initial shells were packed with jammers—chaff and active transmitters across the electro-optical spectrum. The second and third salvos burst much closer, spewing thousands of anti-personnel bomblets with contact fuzes and a time backup to explode duds three minutes after they left the cargo shell.

  “Blue element, execute!” Huber ordered, feeling Fencing Master lift beneath him as Padova anticipated the order by an eyelash.

  The six combat cars reversed out of the semi-circular berms protecting them from direct fire and advanced through the open woodland in line abreast. Solace troops weren’t in contact with the Benjamin defenses anywhere that the Slammers stiffened the line. Hostiles couldn’t conceal themselves from the Regiment’s sensors, and anybody who could be seen vanished in a fireball in the time it took a trooper to squeeze the thumb trigger of his tribarrel.

  Nevertheless Learoyd fired as Fencing Master rounded its fighting position, his blue-green bolts raking trees and leaf-litter forty meters from the car. Flames blazed yellow-orange from a shattered treetrunk. If anybody else had shot, Huber would’ve thought they were jumpy; Learoyd was as unlikely to be jumpy as he was to start lecturing on quantum mechanics.

  The artillery impact zone was out of Huber’s sight, but the sky flickered white with reflected hellfire. At least one round of the second salvo escaped the calliopes’ desperate attempt to sweep the cargo shells out of the sky before they opened. The calliopes stopped firing when the glass-fiber shrapnel scythed down the gunners who hadn’t thrown themselves under cover.

  As the crackling snarl of the single previous round reached Huber, all six shells of the third salvo burst over the target. The sky beyond the branches was bright as daylight, and the blast remained louder than the car’s intake howl for nearly a minute.

  The bomblets were anti-personnel, but several must have hit fuel or munitions. Secondary explosions, red and orange and once the cyan dazzle of ionized copper, punctuated the ongoing white glare.

  Huber swore softly. He knew he should’ve felt pleased. The firecracker rounds were landing on the enemy, clearing a path so that Task Force Huber had a chance of surviving the next ten minutes. Sometimes, though, Huber found it hard to forget that the hostiles were human beings also, soldiers very like his own troopers.

  And maybe Huber wasn’t alone in his reaction. Frenchie Deseau, nobody’s choice for Mr. Sensitive, pounded the coaming with the edge of his left hand. His right was still on the grip of his tribarrel, though.

  Stray bomblets had lit scores of small fires outside the main impact area. That and the continuing roar had confused the troops in the ring of Solace bunkers outside the firebase berm. Huber’s faceshield alerted him for the oncoming target for thirty seconds before Fencing Master wheeled around a giant tree and got a clear view of a low log-covered bunker some sixty meters away. The defenders had cut three firing lanes through the undergrowth to give them several hundred meters of range along those axes, but Padova had split a pair of them and Foghorn to Fencing Master’s right had done the same.

  Huber aimed at the bunker’s firing slit. The car’s jouncing advance through the forest made perfect accuracy impossible but he didn’t need perfection, not with the amount of energy in a 2-cm bolt.

  Cyan flashes caved in the bunker’s thick face and shattered the collapsing roof despite the layers of sandbags overhead. Ammunition inside blew the wreckage into the air a moment later. The shock-wave shoved Huber hard against the side of the fighting compartment and slewed Fencing Master against a treebole.

  Padova recovered with a savage thrust of her fan nacelles. Fencing Master charged through the line of trees into the hundred-meter clearing around the Solace perimeter.

  There were bunkers built into the berm, but the troops within them still had their heads down when F-3 roared into the open. The bunker roofs were proof against the anti-personnel bomblets which had carpeted the firebase, but the thunder of multiple explosions was literally stunning. The main blast had ended, but duds continued to go off with occasional vicious cracks that were almost equally nerve-shattering.

  Huber’s helmet picked targets for him, coordinating its choices with the AIs of the platoon’s other gunners. Fencing Master was on the left of the line, so Huber raked a sandbagged watchtower several meters above the western curve of the berm. The wooden roof—a shelter, not ballistic protection—already smoldered where a bomblet had hit it. Huber’s burst was low, but his bolts blew apart two of the support posts. The structure twisted and collapsed under the weight of its armor, spilling sandbags, weapons, and several screaming soldiers.

  The night sizzled with the blue-green glare of tribarrels. Every gun in the platoon was firing as the combat cars charged the firebase. Huber switched his point of aim to a bunker and held his trigger down for three seconds. A red flash lifted the roof before dropping it back into the blast-scoured interior.

  Coils of barbed wire crisscrossed the cleared area. Fencing Master hit a post and slid over it, dragging the tangles of wire under the skirts. If Padova had gotten the wrong angle, the wire would’ve scraped up the bow slope and decapitated any gunner who hadn’t ducked quickly enough.

  The pressure of the air in the plenum chamber was enough to detonate anti-personnel mines even when the skirts didn’t touch the ground. Several went off in quick succession, Whang! Whang! Whang! like hammers striking the car’s underside. Huber jumped at each blast though his conscious mind knew the worst harm a few ounces of high explosive beneath Fencing Master could do was maybe fling stones into a fan blade.

  Padova canted the rear nacelles, swinging Fencing Master’s stern out to starboard without changing the car’s direction of movement. They bumped down into the shallow ditch where Solace engineers had scraped up dirt to raise the two-meter berm. The earth wasn’t compacted; it lay at the angle of repose, about forty-five degrees.

  Padova shoved the throttles to their gates, giving the fans as much power as they could take without overheating. Fencing Master mounted the berm at a slant, wallowing but never bogging. Soft dirt sprayed in all directions. She reversed the cant of her nacelles; the combat car roared down the other side and into the Solace firebase.

  A heavy electromagnetic slugthrower opened up just as the comb
at car tipped downslope. The gun was only thirty meters away, mounted on the cab of the tracked prime mover parked beside the nearest of the dug-in howitzers. Heavy-metal slugs spurted dirt to starboard, then clanged into Fencing Master’s skirts and hull as the gunner walked his burst onto them.

  Learoyd’s tribarrel tore apart the cab; the metal shutters on the windows flopped open a moment before the plastics and fabric of the interior gushed red flame. The vehicle’s light armor had shrugged off shrapnel, but it wasn’t meant for trading shots point blank with a combat car.

  There was a line of tents along the inside of the berm. Bomblets had torn and flattened many of them, but Huber raked his tribarrel across the row anyway. Treated canvas burst into ugly red flames with billows of smoke, a good way to confuse and disrupt the defenders. Midway through Huber’s burst, a crate of flares erupted in red, green and magnesium white sprays, setting alight tents that the tribarrel hadn’t reached yet.

  Everything was shouting and chaos. Fencing Master drove between gunpits, firing with all three tribarrels. Huber aimed down at a howitzer, hitting the recoil mechanism. Hydraulic fluid sprayed, then exploded as the car swept past.

  It was impossible to pick targets but there was no need to choose: every bolt served F-3’s purpose, to throw the Solace forces off-balance so that they’d be unable to react as the thin-skinned, highly vulnerable vehicles of Battery Alpha drove through the siege lines, blacked-out and at moderate speed. If Lieutenant Messeman’s escorting combat cars had to shoot, then the plan had failed. All F-3’s gunners had to worry about was not hitting friendly vehicles, and their helmet AIs kept them from doing that.

  Deseau’s tribarrel jammed. Instead of clearing the sludge of melted matrix material from the ejection port, he grabbed his backup 2-cm shoulder weapon and slammed aimed shots at men running in terror.

  “Blue section, withdraw!” Huber shouted, hosing a group of trailers around a latticework communications mast. Their light-metal sheathing burned when the plasma lashed it. “All units, withdraw!”

  An orange flash lit the base of the clouds. Huber ducked instinctively, but the shockwave followed only a heartbeat later. The blast shoved Fencing Master forward in a leap, then grounded them hard. The skirts plowed a broad ditch till the car stalled. The gunners bounced against the forward coaming, and the shock curtains in the driver’s compartment must’ve deployed around Padova.

  A red-hot ball shot skyward and had just started to curve back when it exploded as a coda to the greater blast that’d flung it into the heavens. Somebody’d hit an ammo truck or a dump of artillery shells offloaded for use.

  Huber hadn’t been trying to keep control of his platoon in the middle of a point-blank firefight, but now one of the five green dots along the top of his faceshield pulsed red. At the same instant a voice cried, “Somebody help us! This is Three-seven and our skirts are clean fucking gone! Get us out!”

  The man shouting on the emergency channel was Three-seven’s commander, Sergeant Bielsky—the retread with the limp—but he was squeaking his words an octave higher than Huber had heard from him in the past.

  “Fox, this is Three-five!” Sergeant Tranter said, his transmission stepping on Bielsky’s. “We’ve got them, we’re getting them out, but cover us!”

  Padova had lifted Fencing Master and started to turn clockwise to take them back over the berm where they’d entered: if they left the firebase by the opposite side, the north-facing bunkers might rip them as they crossed the cleared stretch. Now instead of continuing her turn, the driver straightened again and accelerated to where Three-seven lay disabled in the center of the compound. Huber fired short bursts into a line of shelters that the huge explosion had knocked down. Hostiles might be hiding in the piles of debris, clutching weapons that they’d use if they thought it was safe to.

  Another orange flash erupted, this time near the eastern edge of the compound. It wasn’t as loud, especially to senses numbed by the previous explosion, but two more blasts stuttered upward at intervals of a few seconds.

  Fencing Master rounded a line of wrecked trucks, several of them burning fitfully. Car Three-seven lay canted on its starboard side beyond. Bielsky hadn’t been exaggerating: the blast that shook Fencing Master had torn the port half of Three-seven’s plenum chamber wide open. The gunners were clambering aboard Tranter’s Fancy Pants as that car sawed the darkness. It was a wonder that they’d survived; they must’ve had enough warning to flatten themselves on the floor of the fighting compartment.

  Huber’s faceshield warned him of motion to his left rear. He pivoted the tribarrel. A pair of Solace soldiers knelt on a ramp slanting up from an underground bunker Huber hadn’t noticed until that moment. The muzzles of their sub-machine guns quivered with witchlight, light-metal driving bands ionized by the dense magnetic flux that accelerated slugs down the bore. Three-seven’s armor sparkled and one of the escaping crewmen flung his arms up with a cry.

  Huber blew the men apart with a dozen rounds before Fencing Master’s motion carried him beyond the bunker entrance. Something flew over Huber’s head and bounced down the ramp, then exploded: Frenchie’d emptied his powergun and was throwing grenades.

  “Three-five clear!” Tranter shouted as Fancy Pants shifted away from the wrecked vehicle, accelerating as fast as fans could push its thirty tonnes. Ropes of 2-cm bolts snapped past Fencing Master to either side, other cars keeping the defenders’ heads down.

  “Blue element, withdraw!” Huber shouted as he raked the camp. “Go! Go! Go!”

  Padova fell in behind Fancy Pants; Deseau’d reloaded and was leaning out the back of the fighting compartment, punching the night dead astern. The tunnel mouth burped a red fireball. It hung in the air for measurable seconds before sucking in as the bunker collapsed.

  Fancy Pants drove through a waste of shelters destroyed when F-3 entered the camp; the car’s fans whirled smoldering canvas and scantlings into a sea of flame. Preceding vehicles had scraped the berm to a low hump for which Tranter’s driver didn’t bother to slow. Fancy Pants lifted, then vanished into the night with Fencing Master close behind her.

  Huber took his thumbs off the trigger as they crossed the berm. Shooting now would call attention to the escaping cars for any of the defenders who’d kept their composure.

  That wasn’t a serious danger. Huber took a last view of the firebase as Fencing Master returned to the forest’s concealment. Scores of fires within the compound silhouetted the furrowed berm. Another explosion flung sparks a hundred meters into the sky.

  Huber took a deep breath and almost choked. Struggling not to vomit in reaction to the adrenaline that had burned through his body for the past several minutes, he said, “Red element, this is Highball Six. Blue element will rendezvous as planned in—”

  His AI prompted him with a time display on the upper left quadrant of his faceshield.

  “—three, that’s figures three, minutes. Six out.”

  Deseau had his tribarrel’s receiver open to chip at the buildup of matrix material. It was a wonder that Huber’s gun hadn’t jammed also: its iridium barrels still glowed yellow. They’d been white hot when Fencing Master crossed the berm.

  Frenchie glanced back. “Not bad, El-Tee,” he said over the intercom. “About time we showed ’em who’s boss!”

  Another explosion rocked the night. Solace forces around Benjamin weren’t going to be worrying any time soon about the breakout from the city.

  But there was a long road still ahead, for the Slammers and especially for Task Force Huber….

  Sergeant Nagano in Foghorn led the column. Huber’d decided to run without a scouting element a kilometer in the lead. He was more afraid that Solace units would stumble onto Task Force Huber by accident than he was of driving into hostiles with their signatures masked against the Slammers’ sensors.

  Even with the drivers trying to keep minimum separations, the line of twenty-seven vehicles stretched nearly half a klick back through the forest. A single aircar flyin
g between Solace positions could see the column and end the secrecy that was their greatest protection.

  Deseau slept curled up on the floor of the fighting compartment. The surest mark of a veteran was that he could sleep any time, any place. On Estoril Huber had awakened one night only when the level of cold rainwater in his bunker had risen to his nose and he started to drown. Soldiering was a hell of a life, a Hell of a life, and Arne Huber and every other trooper in the Regiment was a volunteer.

  Learoyd braced his right boot on an ammo box to raise his crotch over the coaming of the fighting compartment, then emptied his bladder into the night. He stepped down again, sealing his fly, and said, “Is Frenchie going to take the next shift driving, El-Tee, or d’ye want me to do it?”

  He’d spoken directly instead of using the intercom that might’ve awakened Deseau. Fencing Master was driving between the massive trees at a steady, moderate pace, and experienced troopers could hear one another over the intake noise.

  Bert Learoyd sometimes made Huber think of a social insect: he seemed to have almost no intellectual capacity, but through rote learning alone he’d become capable of quite complex activities. It was bad to wake up your buddies unnecessarily, so Learoyd didn’t do that.

  “I’ll put Deseau in next,” Huber said aloud. Frenchie was too active to be a good driver; he kept overcorrecting, second-guessing himself. Learoyd didn’t have Padova’s genius for anticipating the terrain, but his stolid temperament was well suited to controlling a thirty-tonne vehicle in tight quarters. “He’ll be all right on this stretch; it’s pretty open.”

  Pretty open compared to much of the forest on Plattner’s World, but light amplification didn’t make driving a combat car at night through the woods a piece of cake. Huber’d been hoping to raise the column’s speed to forty kph, but that didn’t seem likely now that the whole task force was assembled. The combat cars might be able to make it, but the hogs’ high center of gravity made them dangerously unstable while running cross-country. As for the recovery vehicle, it was a full meter wider than the cars whose drivers were choosing the route.