The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

Daniels started the jeep. At least one drive fan badly needed balancing. "Hey, Sarge?" he said. "I never asked you—what was the fight about? The one that landed you here?"

"Some bastard called me a name," Des Grieux said. He braced himself against the tubular seat frame worn through the upholstery. The jeep lurched into motion.

Des Grieux's eyes were closed.His face looked like the blade of a hatchet."He called me 'Pops,'" Des Grieux said. Memory of the incident pitched his voice an octave higher than normal. "So I hit him."

Daniels looked at the tanker, then frowned and looked away.

"Thirty-two standard years don't make me an old man," Slick Des Grieux added in an icy whisper.

A starship tested its maneuvering jets on the landing pad beside the depot's perimeter defenses. The high screech was so loud that the air seemed to ripple. Though the lips of Warrant Leader Farrell, the depot superintendent, continued to move for several seconds, Des Grieux hadn't the faintest notion of what the man was saying.

Des Grieux didn't much care,either.There was only one tank among the depot's lesser vehicles and stacked shipping containers.He stepped past Farrell and tested the spring-loaded cover of a step with his fingertip. It gave stiffly.

"Right," said Farrell. He held Des Grieux's transfer orders and, on a separate flimsy, the instructions which Central had downloaded directly to the depot. "Ah, here's the, ah, the previous crew."

Two troopers stood beside the depot superintendent. Both were young, but the taller, dark-haired one had a wary look in his eyes. The other man was blond, pale, and soft-seeming despite the obvious muscle bulging his khaki uniform.

Des Grieux gave them a cursory glance, then returned his attention to the important item: the vehicle he was about to command.

The tank was straight out of the factory in Hamburg on Terra. Farrell's crew would have—should have done the initial checks, but the bearings would be stiff and the electronics weren't burned in yet.

The tank didn't have a name, just a skirt number in red paint: H271.

"Trooper Wartburg will move to driver," Farrell said. The dark-haired man acknowledged the statement by raising his chin a centimeter. "Trooper Flowers here was going to drive, but he'll go back to Logistics till we get another vehicle in."

Des Grieux climbed deliberately onto the deck of H271.The bustle rack behind the turret held personal gear in a pair of reused ammunition containers.