The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

Des Grieux latched the 2cm carbine back against his seat. The barrel, glowing from the half magazine the veteran had fired through it, softened the patch of cushion it touched. The stench intertwined with that oozing from the main gun empties on the floor of the turret basket.

Gangbuster IIwas now leading the Han advance instead of supporting it. Three Hindi soldiers got up and ran, left to right, across a dike two hundred meters west of the tank. All were bent over, their bodies tiger-striped by foliage. The trailing pair carried a long object between diem, a machine gun or rocket launcher.

Maybe the Hindis thought they were getting into a better position from which to fire atGangbuster II.Des Grieux's tribarrel,histribarrel again, sawed the men down in a tangle of flailing limbs and blue-white flashes.

Des Grieux didn't need to worry about indirect fire anymore,because the Hindi artillery wouldn't fire into friendly lines . . . and besides,Gangbuster IIwas moving too fast to be threatened by any but the most sophisticated terminally guided munitions. The locals didn't have anything of that quality in their arsenals.

Baffin's Legiondidhave tank-killing rounds that were up to the job. Still, the cargo shells which held two or three self-forging fragments—shaped by the very blasts that hurled them against the most vulnerable spots in a tank's armor—were expensive,even for mercenary units commanding Baffin's payscale,or Hammer's.

For the moment, the guns on both sides were flinging cheap rounds of HE Common at one another, knowing that counterfire would detonate the shells harmlessly in the air no matter what they were.

It'd take minutes—tens of seconds, at least—for Legion gunners to get terminally guided munitions up the spout. That would be plenty of time for the charge Des Grieux led to blast out the core of enemy resistance.

"Hang on!" Pesco cried as though Des Grieux couldn't see for himself thatGangbuster IIwas about to surge up onto the causeway.

A Hindi soldier stood transfixed, halfway out of a spider hole in the hedge on the other side of the road. His rifle was pointed forward, but he was too terrified to sight down it toward the tank's huge, terrible bow. Des Grieux cranked the tribarrel with his right joystick.