The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

Des Grieux twisted the left joystick.Metal screeched as the turret began to swing clockwise against its weight of rubble. Hot insulation tinged the atmosphere of the fighting compartment as the turret drive motors overloaded.

Des Grieux twisted the control in the opposite direction. The turret reversed a few centimeters. There was a squalling crash as the mass of overburden shifted and slid away fromGangbuster II's turret and deck. The tank bobbed like a diver surfacing through a sea of rubble.

The fan blades bit the air for which they had been starving. Uncontrolled,Gangbuster IIlurched backward at an accelerating pace.

Des Grieux shouted with glee as he rotated his turret and cupola controls again. Now he had a sight picture and targets.

Gangbuster IIhad hit the temple facade nose on. Now it backed through the hole it had torn in the wall, bucking over and plowing through tiles and masonry from the building's upper stories.

The Hindis were using the temple's forecourt as a field hospital for casualties from Des Grieux's initial attack.Medics and the wounded who could move under their own power ran or crawled fromGangbuster II's bellowing reappearance.

Des Grieux ignored them. The gap his tank had smashed in the courtyard wall showed a tone edge of his gunnery screen,and a pair of Legion3cm carriages were visible through it. The Legion guns were firing upward at a 40° angle, snapping incoming shells from the air as soon as they notched the horizon.

The tribarrel's solid sight indicator covered the Legion weapons an instant before the main gun swung on target. Brilliant cyan bolts raked the Legion crews and the receivers of their guns. A pannier of ammunition exploded with a flash like that of a miniature nova. It destroyed everything within a five-meter sphere, pavement included.

Gangbuster IIslewed across the courtyard in a scraping, sparking curve. The tank wasn't going to follow the track by which it had plunged in from the market square. The gap in the courtyard wall foreshortened into solidity as the damaged skirts slid the tank toward a point twenty meters west of its initial entry. The screams of wounded men in the vehicle's path were lost in the howl of steel on stone.

Des Grieux took his right hand from the joystick long enough to close the commo breaker. "Blue Three to Big Dog One-niner!" he shouted hoarsely to battalion fire control. "Get some arty on top of us! Get us—"