The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

Des Grieux's situation display showed the condition clearly. The visuals on his gunnery screen were the same as they'd been for the past minute and a half: unbroken hedgerows which would stop bolts from his powerguns as surely as thirty centimeters of iridium could.

A Hindi shotcrackedleft-to-right across the road, a tank's length behindGangbuster II.Somebody'd gotten a little previous with his gunswitch, but the tank that had fired was still backing one track to slew its weapon across the Slammers' vehicle.

Des Grieux traversed his main gun, panning the target, and rocked the foot-trip twice. Instinct and the situation display at the corner of his eye guided him: the orange circle on the gunnery screen showed only foliage.

The first bolt flash-fired the wall of hedge. The second jet of cyan plasma crashed through the gap and made a direct hit on the Hindi tank.

The roiling orange fireball rose a hundred meters. The column of smoke an instant later mounted ten times as high before flattening into an anvil shape which dribbled trash back onto the paddies. The compression wave of the explosion flattened an expanding circle of new-planted rice. Rarefaction following the initial shock jerked the seedlings upright again.

A tank on the north side of the causeway slammed a shot intoGangbuster II's bow. A hundred kilos of iridium armor and #2 fannacelle turned into white-hot vapor which seared leaves on which it cooled.

Pesco shouted and briefly lost control of his vehicle. The tank's enormous inertia resisted turning and kept the skirts on the road despite a nasty shimmy because of the drop in fan pressure forward.

Des Grieux tried to traverse his main gun to bear on the new danger, but the turret had seventy-five degrees to swing clockwise after its systems braked the momentum of the opposite rotation. He wasn't going to make it in the half-second before the next Hindi shot transfixedGangbuster II's relatively thin side armor—

But he didn't have to, because Captain Broglie's command tank nailed the Hindi vehicle. Plates of massive steel armor flew in all directions even though the bolt failed to detonate the target's munitions.

Score one for Broglie,the bastard; and if he'd brought the rest of the platoon along with Des Grieux, maybeGangbuster IIwouldn't be swinging in the breeze right now.

Hindi tanks were firing all along the line. They ignoredGangbuster IIbecause the tanks destroyed to the immediate north and south of the causeway blocked the aim of their fellows.