The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

Carbury stiffened and touched the frequency key on the side of his commo helmet. "Clam Six to Six," he said. "Yes sir, all ready. Over."

Instead of giving the order, Kuykendall turned to look at Des Grieux. She raised the polarized shield of her visor. "Goodbye, Slick," she called across the curtain of disturbed air. "I don't guess I'll be seeing you again."

Des Grieux stared at the woman who had been his driver a decade before. They were twenty meters apart, but she still flinched minutely at his expression.

Des Grieux smiled. "Don't count on that, Lieutenant-sir," he said.

Kuykendall slapped her visor down and spoke a curt order. Fan notes changed, the more lightly loaded rotors of the combat cars rising in pitch faster than those of the tanks.

Moving in unison with a tank in the lead, the Slammers of Task Force Kuykendall howled off into the night. Their powerguns, main guns as well as tribarrels, lashed the Notch in an unmistakable farewell gesture. The sharpcrackof the bolts and the dazzling actinics reflected back and forth between the Escarpment and the sheer face of the mesa.

For Des Grieux, the huge vehicles had a beauty like that of nothing else in existence. They skated lightly over the soil, gathering speed in imperceptible increments. Occasionally a skirt touched down and sparked, steel against shards of quartz. Then they were gone around the mesa, leaving the sharpness of ozone and the ghost-track of ionized air dissipating where a main gun had fired at the Hashemites.

Des Grieux felt a sudden emptiness; but it was too late now to change, and anyway, it didn't matter. He slid down into H271 and tried his gunnery controls again. Added weight resisted the turret motors briefly, but this time it was only gravel and smaller particles which could rearrange themselves easily.

The sight picture on H271's main screen rotated: off the blank wall of the butte and across open desert, to the Notch that marred the otherwise smooth profile of the Knifeblade Escarpment. Des Grieux raised the magnification. Plus twenty; plus forty, and he could see movement as Hashemites crawled forward, over rocks split and glazed by blue-white bolts, to see why the punishing fire had ceased; plus eighty—

A Hashemite wearing a turban and a dark blue jellaba swept the night with the image-intensifying sight of his back-pack missile.