The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

Des Grieux spread his hands, closed his eyes, and rested his forehead against the cool surface of the main screen. Everything about H271 was smooth and cold. The tank functioned, but it didn't have a soul.

He shivered. He could remember when he had enough hair that it wasn't bare scalp that touched the hologram display when he leaned forward like this.

Tank H271 was the right vehicle for Slick Des Grieux.

In the gully beside H271,twenty or so Sincanmo troops sang around a campfire to the music of strings and a double flute. There'd been drums, too. Lieutenant Kuykendall threatened to send a tank through the group if the drummer didn't toss his instrument into the fireimmediately.

That was one order from the commander of Task Force Kuykendall that Des Grieux would have cheerfully obeyed. Not that he had anything against this particular group of indigs.

There were thirty or forty other campfires scattered among the gullies like opals on a multistrand necklace. With luck, the force's camouflage film concealed the firelight from the hostile outpost two kilometers away on the Notch. Silencing the drums, whose low-frequency beat carried forever in the cool desert air, was as much of a compromise as Kuykendall thought she could enforce.

The Sincanmos were a militia organized by extended families. Each family owned four to six vehicles which they armed with whatever the individuals fancied and could afford. Medium-powered lasers; post-mounted missile systems, both guided and hypervelocity; automatic weapons; even a few mortars, each of a different caliber . . . .

Logistics would have been a nightmare—if the Sincanmo Federation hadhada formal logistics system. On the credit side, each band was highly motivated, extremely mobile, and packed a tremendous amount of firepower for its size.

The families made decisions by conclave. They took orders from their own Federation rather more often than they ignored those orders; but as for an off-planet mercenary—and afemale—Kuykendall's authority depended on her own platoon of combat cars and the four H Company tanks attached to her for this operation.

Des Grieux chewed a ration bar in the cupola of his tank.The Sincanmos made their fire by soaking a bucket of sand in motor fuel and lighting it. The flames were low and red and quivered with frustrated anger, much like Des Grieux's thoughts. There was going to be a battle very soon. In days, maybe hours.