The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

"Via!" Des Grieux snarled."Utility Feed Two."He heard boots on H271's hull, but he ignored them because Screen #3 was abruptly live with what appeared to be a live-action view through the gunnery screen of another tank. The orange circle of the main-gun pipper steadied on a slab of rock kilometers away. There was no visible target—

Until the point of aim disintegrated in a gout of white-hot glass under the impact of the 20cm powergun of another tank. The ledge cracked from heat shock. Half of it slid away to the left in a single piece, while the remainder crumbled into gravel.

Iridium armor gleamed beneath the pipper. Des Grieux's boot trod reflexively on his foot-trip, but the safety interlock still disengaged his guns.

The real gunner, kilometers away, was only a fraction of a second slower. The image blurred with the recoil of the sending tank's main gun, and the target—a Legion tank destroyer—erupted at the heart of the cyan bolt.

"Sergeant Des Grieux?" said a voice from the open cupola hatch. "I'm just checking how all my people are—good Lord!"

Des Grieux looked up. Lieutenant Carbury, 3d Platoon's commanding officer and almost as new to the business of war as Des Grieux's driver, stared at the images of Screen #3.

"What on earth is that?" Carbury begged/demanded as he turned to scramble backward into the fighting compartment of H271. "Is it happening now?"

"More or less," the veteran replied, deliberately vague. He pretended to ignore the lieutenant's intrusion by concentrating on the screen.His AI had switched the image feed to that from a gun camera on a combat car. Mortar rounds flashed in a series of white pulses from behind the hillcrest a hundred meters away.

The images were not full-spectrum transmissions. Each vehicle's artificial intelligence broadcast its positional and sensory data to the command vehicle of the unit to which it was attached. Part of the command vehicle's communications suite was responsible for routing necessary information—including sensory data stripped to digital shorthand to the central data banks at the Slammers' rear-area logistical headquarters.