The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

Not all the Legion equipment in the square outside the collapsed temple was moving. Des Grieux's #1 display marked four of Baffin's 3cm twin guns, half the Legion's anti-artillery defenses, with neat orange symbols. The weapons were emplaced to either side of the thoroughfare.Support troops had hastily bulldozed the wreckage of the Hindi battery out of the way.

Ideally, artillery-defense guns should have a clear view to the horizon on all sides. In practice, crews preferred to set up in defilade where they were safe from hostile direct-fire weapons.Even so,the buildings surrounding the market square reduced the defended area to what seemed at first an unusually narrow cone.

Three command vehicles, armored air-cushion vans filled with communications gear, were parked back-to-back in a trefoil at the northwest corner of the square.Thatwas what the 3cm guns were protecting: Baffin in his advanced command post.

Des Grieux's muscles began to tremble with reaction. He no longer felt the pain in his ribs; fresh adrenaline smoothed the knotted veins flowing to his brain. Baffin himself, a hundred and fifty meters fromGangbuster II's main gun . . . .

"Pesco, you lazy bastard!" Des Grieux snarled, but he'd already given up on raising a response from his driver. He climbed out of his seat and slid between the hull and the frame of the turret basket.

Thick 20cm disks littered the deck, the empty matrixes that had aligned the copper atoms which the powerguns released as plasma. One disk blocked the small hatch separating the fighting compartment from the driver's compartment. Des Grieux tossed the empty angrily behind him. The polyurethane was hot and still tacky; it clung to his fingertips.

As soon as he opened the hatch, the smell told Des Grieux that his driver was dead. Pesco had voided his bowels when the fragment sliced off the upper half of his skull. The liters of blood his heart pumped before the autonomic nervous system shut down had already begun to rot in the warm compartment.

Des Grieux swore.The hatch—the part of it that hadn't decapitated Pesco—was jammed beyond opening by anything short of rear-echelon maintenance. He didn't know what thebloodyhell he was going to do with the driver's body.