The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

Nothing. Des Grieux would have to crawl forward and see what the hell was going on; but first he checked the condition of his tank.

Gangbuster IIwas fully operable. The tank was down one fan and had five fist-sized holes in her skirts. Des Grieux had no recollection of several of those hits. Both guns were all right, and sixty percent of the massively redundant sensor suite checked out as well.

The only problem was that, according to the echo-ranging apparatus, the tank was covered by several meters of variegated rubble: bricks, tiles, wooden beams, and the bodies of Hindi soldiers who'd been shooting from the temple roofs up to the momentGangbuster IIbrought the building's facade down on itself. All the visual displays were blank because the pickups were buried.

Of course,if the Slammers' vehicle hadn't been so completely concealed,Baffin's troops would have finished Des Grieux off by reflex. Veteran mercenaries were generally men who'd survived by never trusting a corpse until they'd put in a bayonet of their own.

A four-ship platoon of Baffin's tank destroyers slid eastward across the map of Morobad. They were air-cushion vehicles mounting 15cm power guns behind frontal armor almost as thick as that of the Slammers' tanks.The main guns were in centerline mountings like those of the Hindi tanks—turrets were relatively heavy, and an air-cushion vehicle could rotate easily in comparison to wheeled or track-laying armor.

Companies of infantry preceded and followed the tank destroyers in four air-cushion carriers apiece. Baffin carried his infantry in large, lightly armored vehicles; Hammer mounted his men on one-man skimmers with their heavy weapons on air-cushion jeeps. Either method worked well with good troops; and both oftheseunits were very good indeed.

Gangbuster IIshone brightly on Des Grieux's display as a cross-hatched blue symbol, but the Legion troops advancing through Morobad showed no sign of awareness. Their screens would be tuned to the Han/Slammers defenses kilometers to the east . . . if there were any Han troops left to thicken the line of cursing Slammers infantry and the survivors of 2nd Platoon.